There's a lot of talk of the Internet being a force that sweeps the globe, eradicating national and ideological boundaries. Talk of the thrill of accessing other cultures, other people. The hope that piles of social ills - racism, sexism, homophobia - could be eradicated if we could all just talk to each other, without any of those physical markers like gender or race, online.

About 1% of the world is online. That 1% is concentrated among the economically privileged in "first-world" countries, especially the U.S.

So when we start talking about sharing with other cultures, we need to be very, very careful. We, the digital elite, need to take particular care when attempting to represent otherness. Because while Internet denizens may be talking about sharing ideas and eradicating boundaries, what we get in practice, for the most part, are caricatures, misrepresentations and dis-realities.

About 1% of the world is online.

This issue of Brillo has a lot to do with where the body of the other - any group that is put on the boundaries of society, slightly outside of the normative power structure - fits into cyberspace. We're taking the word body pretty metaphorically here: the physical body, bodies of knowledge, linguistic and symbolic bodies. We've expressed some profound suspicions about the roles that the bodies and the knowledge of women and men of color tend to play in cyberspace. Despite the growing number of grrl-powered 'zines online, despite the rising voice of African-Americans and other "ethic minorities" in new communications technology, we commonly get cyber-pornography and the Jive Function, not sharing across cultural boundaries. Instead of real conversation, we get women's bodies as commodity and African-American vernacular as ground for sarcasm.

I've been following the debate on cyber-libertarianism recently. Basically, the argument goes like this. One side (the Wired guys and other factions of the self-proclaimed digerati) says that the Internet should be utterly free of government regulation, thus guaranteeing continued free exchange of ideas in cyberspace and the opportunity for the digital elite to make loads and loads of money off it without fear of government intervention. The other side argues for the necessity of some government intervention: to ensure subsidized access for all who are interested, to protect the environment from over-zealous chip manufacturers and to make sure that fascist groups aren't allowed to organize on the 'Net. Free exchange of ideas, after all, can't be realized if the Internet continues to be controlled by a small, wealthy elite, or if the social spaces therein are characterized by raving bigotry, racism and sexism (for more on this, see Brillo's interview with DeeDee Halleck or Daria Ilunga in Issue #1.)

The fatal flaw in the digerati's argument is their insistence that their goals are, or should be, the goals of the populace (of the country, if not the world) at large. In her seminal "Virtual Corporeality: A Feminist View," Zoe Sofia warns of what she calls the 'tyranny of synecdoche'. She says,

The pleasure of synecdoche is that it lets you master the part while ignoring the complexities of the whole. Synecdoche is what allows the disembodied, alienated, objective rationality of a certain gender, class, ethnicity, and historical epoch to be vaunted as universal.

There are complexities here that the cyber-libertarians fail to grasp, allowing them to assume that technophilia can be a solution to the world's ills. One such complexity is the assumption that every culture in the world wants our damn technology. Or trusts it. I can imagine that many of the world's indigenous cultures look at emerging technology with the steady suspicion of the Native Americans a century ago as they accepted blankets (later discovered to be smallpox-infested) from the U.S. Military.

When folks talk about bringing the Internet into the supposed third-world, it sometimes makes me think of a guy I knew while I was studying in England who justified England's colonization of India by saying, "Somebody had to pave their roads." What are we paving over when we lay the information super highway? Is it communication or colonization? It may, yet, be too early to tell.

What are we paving over when we lay the information super highway?

Where does that leave us, the hooligans, the ghosts and goblins, the other in cyberspace? Sandy Stone suggests that the best we can hope to do is terrify, to work a little magic in the boundaries. Suck had some problems with Brillo's first issue. Their major criticism was of a quote from our interview with the Barbie Liberation Organization, where the BLO said, "Represent yourself in ways that are beneficial to your story...Acknowledge your multiple positions in society and utilize those when best suited to the fight that you're involved in." Suck replied, "Talk about using the master's tools - Brillo is political activism for the disinformation age." Interesting criticism, coming from the owners and fabricators of those tools. Suck is, after all, merely a subsidiary of the techno-cheerleaders at Wired. Multiple positions are often all we have to work with, and as that, must become a powerful resource. Refusing to be categorized, commodified or satirized is a strong form of resistance. The trickster -- that melding of the cultures of the colonized and the colonizer -- is a powerful force.

Voodoo is one such amalgamation. It mixes the deities of Catholicism with West African religious traditions. Another such union was gospel music in the antebellum South. Gospel was a mix of the songs and stories of Christianity, the religion of the oppressor, and traditional African rhythms. It served several distinct, equally revolutionary purposes. It kept African musical traditions alive in the only way possible - the drum was banned because it was thought to inspire violence. It gave the slaves a narrative of rebellion - they're all about getting free of Pharaoh, they're songs of freedom (for example, Wade in the Water, which is about crossing the boundary between enslavement and freedom, using the metaphor of Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt). And more concretely, many of the songs were what's called "map songs," aural descriptions of how to get off the plantation or how to get to the underground railroad (for instance, All God's Children Got Shoes). Now don't get me wrong. I'm not likening minorities' position in cyberspace to slavery. What I am saying is that these kinds of appropriations of the master's language and tools have historical precedent, and can prove to be very powerful strategies in any fight for voice and the continuation of cultural tradition in a hostile environment.

The boundaries, while often not politically expedient, can be powerful places, offering unique insight into both, or all, worlds. My own position, straddling the fences between the telecommunication industry, grassroots activism and teaching, has taught me that maybe we're all sleeping with the devil...but sometimes it's hard to tell who's screwing whom.