Imagining an “Alter-Net”: UNESCO, Data Sovereignty, and the Making of an Anticolonial Cybernetics, 1975–85

Fiber-optic glass revolutionized global communications in the 1970s and ‘80s. These pliable tendrils had an almost miraculous conductive capacity, allowing the zeroes and ones of computerized communication to speed through coaxial cables at almost 100,000 miles per second. These technological innovations came hand-in-hand with a rhapsodic vision of the “free flow of information”—what the (mostly Anglo-American) press styled as the unimpeded transmission of media and communications across borders, and the obsolescence of the nation-state itself as an arbiter, or barrier, to the universal flow of information.

But not everyone in the global community participated in the rhapsody. For many state officials, engineers, and media professionals across the decolonizing and developing world, the advent of transborder data flows threatened to become a capstone to rampant media and telecommunications inequality on a North/South axis. In contrast to the “free flow of information,” members of the Non-Aligned Movement and other “Third World” states called for the “free and balanced flow of information.” This balance, they insisted, could only be achieved if and when decolonizing states had equal access to telecommunications infrastructures: fiber optic cable networks, computers, data banks, and data processing centers.

This paper analyzes how the Non-Aligned campaign for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) worked within UNESCO to imagine alternatives to what became the Internet. There, postcolonial officials, technocrats, academics, and media professionals designed plans to increase the developing world’s access to data, and to build new kinds of data exchange facilitated by UNESCO itself—an anticolonial cybernetics designed to secure communications sovereignty across the developing world. Using UNESCO records, as well as the papers of American think tanks and corporations that opposed these efforts, the paper explains how and why these alternative Internet visions failed, leading to what we now often call the “digital divide.”