Pursuing Technological Closure: Symbolic Politics, Legitimacy, and Internet Filtering

Abstract

The institutional power of the Internet for US foreign policy cannot function in the absence of a supporting ideological construction which legitimizes a specific form of the technology. The norms and values of technological institutions must be continually reproduced (Sims and Henke 2012) — the momentum of a technological institution relies on precisely these forms of reproduction. Symbolic politics are central to this process (Althusser 2008 [1971]). This chapter and the following will outline how US government discourse attempts to secure an Internet with values that reflect its interest in the promotion of liberal capitalist democracy globally. We will see that US foreign policy officials use a variety of discursive strategies and construct a number of interrelated narratives to assert that the Internet must be a medium for the ‘free flow of information’. Drawing upon dominant norms in international society the US government asserts that the free flow of information guarantees the right to freedom of speech and promotes open democratic government. In the process, the US government casts alternative arrangements — those which would interrupt the free flow of information due to social, cultural, or political concerns — as illegitimate.

Please note this is an updated and revised version of McCarthy (2011a).