The Internet forums for the postcolonial diasporas and peoples of the Pacific Islands of
Tonga, Samoa, American Samoa, and welcome guests, offer some empirical and theoretical
ripostes to such queries. They show the inner and outer tensions of everyday “tactical
operations” vis-à-vis the strategic manoeuvrings of techno-economically enhanced structural
power. In so doing they demystify (their own communities’) intra- and intercultural
reifications of inter/subjectivity that rest on nailing what are inherently mobile axes of
sex/gender, race/ethnicity, class/status inter alia to the floor. Pacific Island websites
(including those devoted to religious themes or those discussions that are less
accommodating to difference) along with other postcolonial or diasporic online communities
(the online and offline polarizations of a post-9/11 world being taken as read) underscore
that practices of everyday life are just as cogent to radical democratic praxis. The
“antagonisms” that may emerge are, as Laclau and Mouffe cogently argue, intrinsic - not
anathema - to democracy in the fullest, inclusive sense of the term. There are contending
politics of representation at work, contending exchanges of meanings and imagings which
intersect with and overlap online-offline struggles for ownership and control of the spaces
and rights to speak, and be in cyberspace. First, because their tenacity, innovativeness,
cumulative textual content and formal features confront both Radical Left and Postcolonial
voices (many of which reside in western, internetted academe in both cases) with the need
to get online and “get downstream”. The de-essentializing work that both these endeavours
have achieved in traditional theoretical terms now need to fully engage with the cyber-terms
and cyber-generations of the day.
Postcolonial, non-western (re)articulations of everyday (cyber)spatial practices are also
indispensable to equitable - democratic - ICT/Internet future designs. So, second, this
requires some deeper rethinking of how “technology” is conceptualised and researched;
from the ground up. Not doing so is empirically counter-productive (the Internet is here, has
been for a while and “we” all are beholden to its variegated functions) but also politically
short-sighted. Exchanging technologically determinist imagings of ICTs for critical
constructivist ones does not mean the relinquishing of one’s critical faculties though.
Circumspection about the latest Hi-Tech gadgets, commercial claims, security alarms, or the
gender-power quotient of Internet access and content, requires the bird’s eye-view of the
broader techno-political economy at stake. Nevertheless, unrelenting pessimism or dismissal
of all things Internet - as with all things everyday - can overlook the democratic potential,
the gaps that quiver and shimmer between ordinary people’s ICT uses and interfaces and
those that constitute the “glocal” strategies of ownership and control more familiar to Left
critiques of latter-day ICT and Media mega-corporations. There are multiple Internets
already in operation. Despite the tendency (and ability) of political-commercial vested
interests to hog the limelight, ordinary and non-western Internet practitioners have a
formative part to play in how, for, and by whom Internets - with the plural form staking its
own claim here- are (to be) put in place.
Third, these (re)articulations require radical democratic projects and like-minded
postcolonial critiques of hyperliberal- Internet venture-capitalism to reconstitute the Internet
as not only fixed technology but also as fluid social relations. Not just for what sorts of
countermanding, radical alternatives (and subversions) that may be operating there but also
in order to demystify the self-fulfilling prophecies contained in all forms of technological and
cultural determinism, epistemological “apriorisms”. That said, there is little time to lose;
hyper-liberal and neoconservative political power brokers and corporations (whose
trademarks I won’t advertise) have turned their significant economic and meaning-making
resources to moulding Internet technologies after their own image; in “strategic alliances”
with some pretty autocratic political regimes or through lucrative contracts with some hell-
bent western governments and administrations closer to company headquarters. This
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Convention