Original article
Wolfgang Sassin,
Dr-Ing, Independent researcher, formerly Senior Scientist of International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and Lecturer of Technical University Vienna, Austria
Address: Jochberg 5, 6335 Thiersee, Austria
E-mail: w.sassin@aon.at
Article ID: 010510201
Published online: 1 April 2020
HANDLE: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12656/thebeacon.3.010510201
DOI: https://doi.org/10.55269/thebeacon.3.010510201
Quoting (Chicago style): Sassin, Wolfgang. 2020. “Globalisierung und Digitalisierung - Die exponentielle Ausbreitung ansteckender Information und deren mögliche Eindämmung.” Beacon J Stud Ideol Ment Dimens 3, 010510201. https://doi.org/10.55269/thebeacon.3.010510201
Language: German
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Russian (Introduction)
The beginning of the discussion written earlier and published in another journal: Sassin, Wolfgang. 2018. "Legal Spaces and their Missing Digital Boundaries." Ideas and Ideals 10, no. 4, part 1: 11–25.
There is a fundamental difference between the human migration movements of the past and those of the beginning of the 21st century. The latter impose the need for a cultural assimilation of the migrants which they cannot master within one generation. This cultural transformation includes the necessity to adapt to the compression of humans into a new living space, into technology-based megapolises, which altogether represent the equivalent of an artificial planet. This new planet does not provide new resources nor additional free spaces for an overall growth of material wealth. On the contrary, it asks for a drastic reduction of individual freedoms. The stability, even the survival of these mega centres, is at stake without consistent subdivisions of an overall shrinking of spaces needed for all kinds of movements and of a consistent restriction of the exploding communicative interference within and between these mega centres. This essay aims at a first-hand analysis of a possible introduction of digital borders without which adequate legal spaces appear infeasible as the constituting framework of “our“ artificial new planet. Key words: humanity, legal space, digital ideological restriction, technological dominance, mega centre, individual freedom diminishing, migration, digital boundary, infection, infectious disease, COVID-19 social implications, coronavirus containment, globalisatoin, digitalisation, information, social immunity
The current spread of a new Coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic, just as any other pandemic, demonstrates that we have an utmost need in establishing boundaries in otherwise truly global society. All of the measures recommended by governments and health organisations are not really suitable to prevent a pandemic, i.e. a global spread of a disease with potentially fatal consequences for parts of the population. At best, they can slow down the rate at which the pandemic spreads. In my work, I outline the basic principles of constructing a new possible ideology of digital limits that may prevent uncontrolled societal communication and, therefore, slow down or even forestall the spread of infection in the world with almost eight billion people.
The implicit assumption that the existing, very different cultures, their special values and their objectively considered archaic legal systems could and should become part of a globally uniform legal area, not only questions all previous legal concepts. It exposes the underlying principles of interpersonal behaviour. "Western values" arose from the rebellion of the weak, who not only tried to disempower their top performers but to enslave them. After the experiences of the French Revolution and the attempt to subjugate an entire continent under Napoleon, the renewed striving for freedom presupposes free spaces. It includes the right to independence as well as to being free from the chains of inadequate and dragging along social chains. They served the alimentation of a self-proclaimed elite or the bottom of a society. The separation of the New England States from Britain (1776) and the establishment of the American Constitution (1788) cannot be understood otherwise. The fact that America was a model for exploring new spaces in the 19th century, but not a blueprint for such an activity in the 21st century, simply follows from the fact that we have no second New World available to us today.
Humanity understood as a whole, as a union organised globally, would inevitably lead to a closed social system. In such a system, there can be no different speeds in the adjustment of performance standards and no "markets" which allow a balance between supply and demand via price mechanisms. Furthermore, such a closed social system does would not show any appreciable tolerance towards highly different habits, i.e. what is taken for granted as personal freedoms, including cultural and religious freedoms. Digital borders are not only an urgently needed means of limiting expropriated migration, they are also essential to maintain the technical and scientific basis for existence, especially from the perspective of the “weaker”.
I describe ten conditions necessary for the smooth transition from different natural living spaces to the universal life conditions upon new global technically-shaped Earth. Then I introduce the suggestion how to create and maintain digital borders without physical borders. If implemented consistently, this proposal would provide, among other things, an effective means of limiting uncontrolled cross-border migration – which is a symptom, not a cause of global society problems – and the related legal violations. In an electronically networked world, securing the rule of law is a not easy task. The advantage of such a measure would be to make physical border fortifications and their physical surveillance and defense largely superfluous and to be able to transfer their tasks to electronic "guards.” This ideological measure is closely connected with reconsidering what we call digital freedom and digital identification in the global network.
The elementary civilisational experiences of millennia urgently need be projected onto the electronic age and used to tame globalisation. Without such measures, the terms “state order” and “security to be guaranteed by the state”, after the “privatisation” of almost all communication infrastructures in the past decades, are otherwise just empty phrases.
© 2020 Wolfgang Sassin. Licensee The Beacon: Journal for Studying Ideologies and Mental Dimensions.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) that permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
