Interview with Mary Joyce
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"In the Global South,
the reality is cell phones"

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(Ben Heine © Cartoons)

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Mary Joyce is an American researcher and consultant living in Boston, USA. In June 2005, she founded Demologue.com, an online network for worldwide digital activists. This site is not active anymore but Mary now runs a new Blog, Zapboom.com which is about "digital activism from a global perspective". Mary Joyce can be contacted through her blog.

“When we in the North think "digital" we think "computer"
but this is not the reality in the global south. The
reality is cell phones. Millions of people have them.
Millions of people are using them to organize, send
messages, take video and pictures.” (Mary Joyce)

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Ben Heine: How was Demologue.com founded? How did the first members of the network meet? Which role did you play in its creation?

Mary Joyce: I founded it in June of 2005, but there were never any other members. I collaborated with different individuals on isolated projects, as you can see here, but I was the only real member of Demologue.com.

BH: Which audience does Demologue.com target?

MJ: The goal was to target the whole world. That is why I published it in 4 languages (English, French, Spanish, Arabic), but I never promoted the website, so no one ever found it. Certainly no community ever formed around it.
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BH: Is the word « demosphere » comparable to the words « cyber democracy » or « e-democracy»? Could you explain?

MJ: According to the Demosphere Manifesto, which I wrote with Paramendra Bhagat, "The demosphere is an international digital democracy network. It is a digital ecosystem of web sites, blogs, and digital citizens who would like to support democracy movements around the world." I would say that it could be a part of cyber democracy or e-democracy in that it is a network that spreads cyber/e-democracy practices

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BH: Is Demologue.com totally independent? How does it evolve financially speaking?

MJ: Actually, the financial side of Demologue.com is something I'm really proud of and something that had an impact on my later work. Basically, Demologue.com is almost free and completely self-financed by me. It costs me $20 a month for the live software hook-up that allows me to edit the site (the service is through www.homestead.com). I designed and created the site myself using Homestead's tools. All the projects I did were free because I and the collaborators volunteered their time. I also never did any fundraising for Demologue. That is the cool thing about the internet now. You can do a lot of cool things for free or almost free meaning that political activism over the internet is accessible to more and more people.

BH: One of the main goals of Demologue.com is to bring global democracy through a network of worldwide digital activists controlling their own government. Do you think this is achievable in the short term? If not, why?

MJ: Well, I think activists connecting themselves digitally is very important, but worldwide, very few people have access to the internet, thus the need for bridge activists. I do think that the internet can help spread activist practices and strengthen individual citizen campaigns, but if national transformation is going to occur, a lot of activity will occur offline.

BH: Your proposition to reach activists in the Global South, who sometimes live under autocratic governments, is to connect them with "bridge activists". How do you build and train this needed community of "bridge activists"?

MJ: Ha ha - yeah... I didn't really have a plan for training bridge activists. My idea was that some people in each country are internet savvy and that they would just step into the role of bridge activist. I don't know if this has happened or not, but I certainly can take no credit for it.

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BH: Demologue.com is growing every day, how do you recruit "bridge activists" (and hopefully local activists as well)?

MJ: I don't recruit them and Demologue.com isn't growing. Actually, it's dead.

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BH: Blogging about politics is a good way of taking part into the world's affairs, which other advantages do you find in running a personal Blog?

MJ: Blogging helps me to develop my ideas by writing them down. It forces me to think about my concerns on a daily basis. Also, it gives me an opportunity to share my concerns with the public.

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BH: What are the benefits for the demosphere community in having a Wiki site?

MJ: Wikis are a good way for a disconnected group to create something collaboratively because group members can contribute to the wiki on their own schedule.

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BH: Although some analysts say they are mainly places for entertainment, do you think that the cyber cafés (and the other public centres where a low cost Internet connection is available) are a good weapon against the digital divide in poorer countries?

MJ: Cyber cafés are incredibly important in increasing the number of people who can get online. I would guess that the vast majority of people who use the web worldwide use a shared public computer to get online, rather than having their own. Although most kids in cyber cafés do use the internet for entertainment, the possibilities for activism are there.

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BH: Don't you think that the Northern political rhetoric about the digital divide is a kind of political slogan which purpose is to force the countries of the Global South to conform their economic system to the Northern one, for example, by inciting them to buy the same Northern softwares and hardwares?

MJ: Um, that's an interesting interpretation that I've never heard before. While I do believe that the digital divide is real, I think the global south will conquer it in their own way, not the way the North did. People in India aren't going to be buying thousand-dollar desktop computers. They're going to be accessing the internet from their cell phones.

BH: We have recently heard about very cheap « generic » laptops being sold in Africa and in India. Do you think that the individual access to these computers and their potential Internet connection might be better to bridge the gap than collective access in public centres? Wouldn't it be easier for peace activists in poorer countries to work individually with these cheap laptops rather than in public centres where they often sit next to people who have no specific militant mood.

MJ: When we in the North think "digital" we think "computer" but this is not the reality in the global south. The reality is cell phones. Millions of people have them. Millions of people are using them to organize, send messages, take video and pictures. (See my "Prospects for e-Advocacy" report, which talks more about the importance of cell phones). We in the North love laptops, so we want to give them to the South, but the South is creating their own solutions. We need to follow there lead and help them do something that is sustainable and makes sense for them.

BH: My last question : How would you define the ideal digital society in a few words?

MJ: Equality of communication. Equality of information. Environmentally sustainable design. Low cost and high quality. Technology guided by the needs of people and not by trade and governments. Finally education technologies should be accessible to all.

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(Interview and portraits by Ben Heine)

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Why Marx is Man of the Moment

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(Ben Heine © Cartoons)

He had globalization sussed 150 years ago by Francis Wheen (*) A penniless asylum seeker in London was vilified across two pages of the Daily Mail last week. No surprises there, perhaps - except that the villain in question has been dead since 1883. 'Marx the Monster' was the Mail's furious reaction to the news that thousands of Radio 4 listeners had chosen Karl Marx as their favorite thinker. 'His genocidal disciples include Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot - and even Mugabe. So why has Karl Marx just been voted the greatest philosopher ever?' The puzzlement is understandable. Fifteen years ago, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, there appeared to be a general assumption that Marx was now an ex-parrot. He had kicked the bucket, shuffled off his mortal coil and been buried forever under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. No one need think about him - still less read him - ever again. 'What we are witnessing,' Francis Fukuyama proclaimed at the end of the Cold War, 'is not just the ... passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution.' But history soon returned with a vengeance. By August 1998, economic meltdown in Russia, currency collapses in Asia and market panic around the world prompted the Financial Times to wonder if we had moved 'from the triumph of global capitalism to its crisis in barely a decade'. The article was headlined 'Das Kapital Revisited'. Even those who gained most from the system began to question its viability. The billionaire speculator George Soros now warns that the herd instinct of capital-owners such as himself must be controlled before they trample everyone else underfoot. 'Marx and Engels gave a very good analysis of the capitalist system 150 years ago, better in some ways, I must say, than the equilibrium theory of classical economics,' he writes. 'The main reason why their dire predictions did not come true was because of countervailing political interventions in democratic countries. Unfortunately we are once again in danger of drawing the wrong conclusions from the lessons of history. This time the danger comes not from communism but from market fundamentalism.' In October 1997 the business correspondent of the New Yorker, John Cassidy, reported a conversation with an investment banker. 'The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right,' the financier said. 'I am absolutely convinced that Marx's approach is the best way to look at capitalism.' His curiosity aroused, Cassidy read Marx for the first time. He found 'riveting passages about globalization, inequality, political corruption, monopolization, technical progress, the decline of high culture, and the enervating nature of modern existence - issues that economists are now confronting anew, sometimes without realizing that they are walking in Marx's footsteps'. Quoting the famous slogan coined by James Carville for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992 ('It's the economy, stupid'), Cassidy pointed out that 'Marx's own term for this theory was "the materialist conception of history", and it is now so widely accepted that analysts of all political views use it, like Carville, without any attribution.' Like Molière's bourgeois gentleman who discovered to his amazement that for more than 40 years he had been speaking prose without knowing it, much of the Western bourgeoisie absorbed Marx's ideas without ever noticing. It was a belated reading of Marx in the 1990s that inspired the financial journalist James Buchan to write his brilliant study Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money (1997). 'Everybody I know now believes that their attitudes are to an extent a creation of their material circumstances,' he wrote, 'and that changes in the ways things are produced profoundly affect the affairs of humanity even outside the workshop or factory. It is largely through Marx, rather than political economy, that those notions have come down to us.' Even the Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, eager cheerleaders for turbo-capitalism, acknowledge the debt. 'As a prophet of socialism Marx may be kaput,' they wrote in A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization (2000), 'but as a prophet of the "universal interdependence of nations" as he called globalization, he can still seem startlingly relevant.' Their greatest fear was that 'the more successful globalization becomes the more it seems to whip up its own backlash' - or, as Marx himself said, that modern industry produces its own gravediggers. The bourgeoisie has not died. But nor has Marx: his errors or unfulfilled prophecies about capitalism are eclipsed and transcended by the piercing accuracy with which he revealed the nature of the beast. 'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones,' he wrote in The Communist Manifesto. Until quite recently most people in this country seemed to stay in the same job or institution throughout their working lives - but who does so now? As Marx put it: 'All that is solid melts into air.' In his other great masterpiece, Das Kapital, he showed how all that is truly human becomes congealed into inanimate objects - commodities - which then acquire tremendous power and vigor, tyrannizing the people who produce them. The result of this week's BBC poll suggests that Marx's portrayal of the forces that govern our lives - and of the instability, alienation and exploitation they produce - still resonates, and can still bring the world into focus. Far from being buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, he may only now be emerging in his true significance. For all the anguished, uncomprehending howls from the right-wing press, Karl Marx could yet become the most influential thinker of the 21st century. ------------------------------------------------------------ (*) Francis Wheen is a journalist and author of several books, including a highly acclaimed biography of Karl Marx. His collected journalism, Hoo-Hahs and Passing Frenzies, won the George Orwell prize in 2003. Francis Wheen's new book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions, is published by Fourth Estate. Buy How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World at Amazon.co.uk --> Francis Wheen's top 10 modern delusions (Excellent) --> Source : Commondreams.org (July 2005)