It seems both ironic and appropriate to write this post today. Because today as the election results come in it is becoming abundantly clear that South Africa has given the ruling ANC party a two-thirds majority. That is essentially a rubber-stamp to change any law, including the constitution, any way they want to – unilaterally and without any need to consult any other parties. Why am I thinking that presidential term limits will be among the first clauses to get… altered ?

This is fitting as the goal of this post is to make an attempt at predicting what the South African online and internet society will be like in ten years time. Such extrapolations can never be fully accurate but with a bit of logic and reference to history, can certainly get a few things right.

Now the first thing to realize is that South Africa, and ergo it’s online society does not exist in isolation, and I don’t see us having a great firewall of of our own anytime soon like China does (our potential dictator has long since learned that the media doesn’t actually matter to his success). So we need to look at the context of the state of the world a bit first.
What is that context ? I believe we are watching the final and unstoppable collapse of capitalism. It was never a stable system. It should have been destroyed in 1932 with the great depression. It didn’t – because of World War 2. The big war created a massive market for weaponry, and with that a market for weapons research. Funding for research being so available, it ended up giving us many of our great inventions from the computer to silly putty.

So why didn’t it collapse after World War 2 ? Because the communist threat in Russia was too strong, the competition between them created a new source of continuous military expense and research funding. Iraq can’t prop up capitalism now though – the wars around are just not big enough. China has flooded the capitalist world with cheaply made goods by virtue of being a communist state that doesn’t care about labour-laws and has a billion people to exploit. In short… capitalism is fucked.

What will we have in ten years ? A radically different world from now that’s for sure. I’m hedging my bets on the free-market socialist democracies to be the global economic leaders in a decade’s time – they alone are not collapsing now, didn’t collapse in 1932, and in fact, have had stable economies for centuries. I for one welcome our new Swedish, Danish and Swiss economic overlords.

I’m sort of assuming you understand the difference between free-market and capitalist here, else go read up on it. It’s too far a digression.

So what about the other countries ? One of two things will happen: economic destitution, or a shift toward socialist free-market economics. South African and the US are highly likely to be in that line, since South Africa already has a socialist free-market economic policy and Obama clearly wants to import many of it’s principles there. Neither however will be strong economies of the kind – it takes a long time to become that and we’re both way too new at this way of doing things.
South Africa’s online community then will greatly benefit from an ever stronger line in society in favor of the values that the internet was built on: sharing and cooperation. Unfortunately I also predict that the third great internet value will be greatly eroded in South Africa in our day-to-day lives – which will greatly impact on our online lives: freedom of expression.

The ANC once claimed in a television ad that we had the worlds most liberal constitution. Be that as it may, we certainly don’t have a very liberal culture, our culture largely remains conservative and controlling and oppressive. That culture is propped up, and props up in turn, government policies that greatly denigrate on what is meant to be our essential civil liberties. Furthermore, when we decentralized the government we made the huge mistake of actually allowing the local governments to make laws more strict in their regions than the national (the inverse makes sense: where a law is a problem let the people get rid of it – but making it stronger…). For example, there is no trading hour limitations on the sale of alcohol at the legislature level in South Africa, but in Cape Town all liquor stores must close at 5pm on a Saturday until Monday morning – because of a provincial bylaw.

A liberal constitution is meaningless if we don’t have liberal legislation to enforce it. Perhaps the biggest problem we face here – and one I predict will only get much worse – is that there is still an essential misunderstanding among us of what it means to be a republic. We expect the government to protect our sensibilities and values: rather than (as is their only proper function in a free society) protect our right not to comply with those values.

The constitutional court has consistently acted well, and it is here that our activism must focus, it’s our single greatest weapon for defending everyone’s civil liberties, both offline and online. I predict that the growth of social networks and connectivity will have more and more people participating in their governmental processes however, this by itself is good, it would be even better if we could tip the economic balance so the vast majority of those able to are not the very conservatives that would use their freedom of expression to try and deny other people theirs.

So the optimistic view is that liberalism will win because there are always too many misfits -and misfits love the internet, it’s the only place to find like minded friends. Misfits suddenly having friends, teaming up – that’s our new weapon. That’s what’s going to change society, we can no longer reject all who don’t quite fit in because they are suddenly strong, there’s suddenly a lot of them.
I am looking to the goths and the punks and the geeks and the metalheads and the bikers and the gays and the street corner puppeteers to save us – and to the internet to enable them to do so. One thing is for sure, the jocks and the cheerleaders have only ever caused us grief.

But I do believe we can win. We’re in a war with vested interests in the old capitalist exploitation, and a lot of our own people who still don’t realize that capitalism is just as exploitative as communism, a war not fought with guns but with words. A war for the right to be true to ourselves. The internet is the single greatest empowerment tool we’ve ever had, and we have to defend it. From media conglomerates who will happily destroy it’s power to maintain an ailing business model, from conservatives who have no purpose in life other than assimilate all others into their borg-like conformism, from telecoms monopolies who will never have our best interests at heart.

Ultimately, South Africa’s online community is getting stronger and stronger, our voices are mattering a little more every day and I see us living in a country a decade from now where we will matter too much to ignore. Is there a price to pay for this world ? Of course, it’s not perfect. The price is that the next goatse guy or tubgirl may well be South African… well, I still think the goatse guy would make a better president than any of the politicians in this country. Not because I am in favor of how he lives his life – but because I know that he will never tell me how to live mine.