Cloud Culture: the future of global cultural relations Read online

Charles Leadbeater

 

  Foreword

  I am delighted to contribute a short foreword to this assessment of how the web is re-shaping global cultural relations.

  Charles Leadbeater offers a stimulating overview of the debate between optimists and pessimists about the cultural implications of ubiquitously available, if not ubiquitously affordable, web access. As a realistic optimist he concludes that an open source approach to cultural relations will help us to build communities of collaboration around shared interests and ideas on a scale previously unimaginable. He takes examples from science and public diplomacy to illustrate the potential but warns that we must also work against the risks posed to this vision by economic inequality and the wrong kind of corporate and political ambition. He calls for a new approach to leadership, based on partnership, in what he calls ‘the world of with’.

  It is strikingly appropriate that this essay should have been commissioned by Counterpoint, the British Council’s think tank. The British Council is an organisation which has been building partnerships in cultural relations for half a century longer than people have been using the term public diplomacy and for six decades before the internet era. The UK Foreign Office’s financial support for the Council, like its support for the editorially independent BBC World Service, recognises that governments have an important role in facilitating cultural dialogue and disseminating news and knowledge, but that they must beware of the instinct to coerce and control.

  In a world of cloud culture, politicians need not only to show restraint, they also need to be creative and to take more risks. In diplomacy, some of our work continues to involve high-stakes bargaining between states; but there is scarcely an issue which is not also subject to shaping by movements of citizens acting collaboratively, organised through digital channels. Today there is very little that happens wholly in private. Look at the Copenhagen climate negotiation or the G20’s work on economic recovery. We inhabit, in Eric Raymond’s phrase, the political architecture of the bazaar, not that of the cathedral.

  But if this digital information space is to develop as an open and trusted place where liberal values flourish, prosperity grows and interests can be negotiated, minority voices must continue to be heard and corporate interests transparently held to account.

  The politics of cloud culture is more demanding than the politics of systems held in the grip of elites, but also more exciting. In practice, politicians subject to democratic mandate have no choice whether to accept and embrace these new digital realities. The politics of cloud culture is politics of the people, by the people; the implications for government are far reaching.