Companies Trump Countries in First Virtual World War

The primary vehicles of warfare in the past few centuries have variably been nations, empires, city-states, religions or tribes, among others. Corporations and other amalgamations of resources have, until now, played vital but always only supporting roles.

What Microsoft's and other major Internet companies' responses to Google's factious "free speech" China row makes clear is that companies will play the leading roles, with countries relegated to the supportive roles they once held, in the first virtual war.

"We appreciate that different companies may make different decisions based on their own experiences and views," claims a Microsoft spokesman. "We have done business in China for more than 20 years and we intend to continue our business there." Yahoo!, MySpace, GoDaddy and other major Internet players are likely to follow in Microsoft's footsteps, not Google's. Where does your allegiance lie?

A week before the China row started, Google announced the launch of the Breaking Borders Awards to honor web projects displaying courage in support of freedom of expression, making it difficult to hold that the China row was an unexpected, isolated event and strongly suggesting that the row with China is part of a wider public relations campaign. Regardless, restrictions on freedom of expression may not be as scary as current abuses, misuses and over-uses of it where there are no such restrictions.

To the old saying, "walls have ears," must today be added "doors have mouths."  The Big Brother metaphor in George Orwell's 1984 now applies less to an invasive force outside of us as individuals and groups, than a hitherto untapped impulse within us which social media has unleashed.  Horror stories from Eastern Europe and Asia in communist times, like recent wiretapping and library borrowing surveillance in the U.S. under the Patriot Act and whatever China is actually up to, are starting to pale in comparison to what people are proving so willing to divulge about themselves online. The new era touted as openness and connectivity is also an auto-invasion of privacy epidemic that makes the world vulnerable to a virtual war the likes of which have not even been imagined by most of us.

On the surface, the possibility of virtual warfare becoming an actuality seems like a smart alternative to conventional warfare. No deaths, for one; less destruction of property, another. Violence in a virtual world does not mean representations of real-world violence like we already have in video games and movies, but genuinely virtual violence on its own terms seems hard to conceptualize, let alone enact, viruses and other e-bugs aside. For starters, try imagining two search engines, say Bing and Yahoo, going at each other's throats somehow, even to their death, presumably meaning irreparable dysfunction.  Or imagine armies of open source fundamentalists executing an e-coup against monopoly software makers that supply enemy corporations or governments. Their banners may be company logos rather than country flags. Considering the auto-invasion of privacy epidemic, we may all be considered part of information suicide attacks, digital kamikazes.

What all these scenarios propose is that the zeros and ones upon which the digital age is based can be likened to the wind power that drove empires around the globe, and the nuclear power that put the threat of total annihilation at the push of a button. And we are providing that fuel so willingly that we cannot imagine a world without it. The old Marxist proposition that systems of production and consumption determine political systems is, paradoxically, proven wrong and right. If the basis of an economy is information, who produces and controls that information is king, with a competitive advantage come wartime, virtual or not. And that's why companies trump countries in the first virtual world war in the making, and our online lives are cannon fodder.

Photo credit: fdecomite