nettime:*The Soros Network, Horvath - The Diigo Meta page

• 07 Dec 08
  

  Zee ----------

  hen trying to navigate through the myriad foundations and organizations supported by Soros, it's quite easy to get lost. At present, the keyword which all of them have in common is open society. Accessing the Soros homepage on the ÊWeb , you immediately come across the conceptual framework by which Soros operates his open society activities: "The concept of [the] open society is based on the recognition that people act on imperfect knowledge and nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth." (see also George Soros The Open Society Reconsidered ) Sounds quite impressive. What is equally impressive are all the reports from the different parts of the world about what the various Soros foundations are doing. They all contain the same components, though worded differently and presented according to the political environment they operate in. The bulk of Soros' activities are centered around education,

  soros

  • Soros remarked that the Internet is vital to help build an open society. This is an ironic statement coming from a man who is not a direct user of the Internet himself.
  • educational mobility
  • When talking about Soros' "open society", it is often this openness that appears to be missing. A lot of what has been done is mere words. Good intentions have not always translated themselves to successful change. Some professing to be committed to an open society appear to be merely jumping on the bandwagon, hoping to extract what is available in terms of grant money. In many cases, those working for Soros organizations are economic migrants from western countries, mostly the US. Because the entry level for white collar jobs are almost non-existent in America, many have decided to gain experience first or work abroad and wait until the situation improves back home. Very few Soros employees share their top boss' philanthropy. Indeed, when you hear them talk about their love for humanity, they expect to be paid for it.
  • personal connections takes  precedence over ability.
  • The main focus of the "open society" appears to be the media, especially visual media and media art
  • But the situation looks to be far more complex than this. Rather than promote an "open society", Soros seems to have recreated the status quo on a different scale. The same type of bureaucracy that had existed under communism appears to be in control of foundation activities. Ironically, this is the very antithesis of the "open society" concept. As one "netizen" observed: "they just want to get their toys back and they skillfully use [the] market now to do the job. Electronic media are just one of the most obvious example - this is a clear attempt to establish a monopoly on information."
  • "Soros is interested in connecting slow and official NGO bureaucracies, leaving the rest of the population to the market." Hence, there seems to be a contradiction between Soros' desire to establish a socially-oriented telecommunications infrastructure and Internet culture on the one hand, and commercial interests on the other.
  • , the Soros Foundation was shown to be instrumental in the election of the president of the Ukraine.
  • The most likely use of the ISF, however, would seem to be as a means for shrewd market penetration in an economically prostrate region. By concentrating on the media and telecommunications infrastructure development, to what extent is the ISF building a Soros-controlled telecommunications empire that spans from the Pacific to Central Europe? Cook poses the question more elaborately:  "[what would happen] if, as part of the next stage, [the] ISF puts similar backbones in Russia's 10 or 15 largest cities and connects each city together by satellite or terrestrial links? If Soros under the rubric of telecommunications infrastructure for scientists creates such a network he will have effectively created an alternative [not] only to Relcom, but will operate and control what may be the best telecommunications infrastructure in the entire Russian nation. Is his goal then to create and control a Russian equivalent of AT&T?"
  • Indeed, the use of philanthropic organizations as a cover for economic and, ultimately, political and social exploitation already has a precedent. In their exhaustively researched book, "Thy Will be Done - The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil" (Harper Collins), authors Gerard Colby and Chalotte Dennett documented the process by which Nelson Rockefeller was able to conquer the Amazon and other South American regions for US corporations with the help of religion and philanthropy. This was done by encroaching into coveted territory by selling American agricultural products to South American farmers through supposedly philanthropic organizations. Eventually, the farmers were forcefully removed from their land. A comparison with Soros is frighteningly similar: the difference between them is Rockefeller went south, Soros east; Rockefeller's objective was oil, Soros telecommunications.
  • One possible solution to this problem can be found in Bernard de Mandeville's 1714 essay, "The Fable of the Bees: Private Vice, Publick Virtue." Accordingly, the purpose of an "open society" is to "liberate" daily life by making it an endless stream of satisfactions of infantile desire, while the overall "environment" (i.e. all the important issues facing society) would be rigidly controlled from the top down. This mirrors what Stahlman describes as the "English Ideology", that is, libertarianism in the form of an "anything-goes" small-scale private life combined with rigidly defined, large-scale constraints that are controlled by a technocratic elite.  While such a scenario may seem "fantastic", the Internet has actually brought it that much closer to reality. Individuals are escaping into virtual worlds by "surfing the net" and the use of interactive games (and other programs). Meanwhile, political leaders are planning and praising the rapid steps that are being taken toward the establishment of a global economy.
  • Consequently, the "open society" has become a very sophisticated imperial approach that is using people against themselves.

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