In The Gutenberg Galaxy, published in 1962, three decades before the inception of the World Wide Web, Marshall McLuhan wrote that "the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village."

The global village was an idea that caught the imagination of 60s radicals - a dream of a better future, where the sharing of global media would shrink cultural and material differences and bring the world together in a common purpose for the betterment of all, a theme that was at the heart of projects such as the Whole Earth Catalog, which was a brilliant evocation of what could be achieved with pooled resources.

The World Wide Web can be seen as a projection of this ideal, an instant medium and a global village where we can speak and share our vision with our fellow citizens on the opposite side of the globe, without the interference of spokesmen or intermediaries. The Internet is a democratising force breaking down the cultural, racial and religious boundaries that divide us all. The evolution of Free Software and of Linux is an eloquent illustration of the possibilities, software created by citizens of each and every nation, creed and colour, across the Internet with a community of purpose. This remains the ideal, that the Internet should be a medium for free and open exchange of ideas around the world.

As such, the Internet reflects a benevolent aspect of globalisation. Globalisation also has many vocal and articulate critics, as illustrated by the demonstrations in Seattle, Genoa, Gleneagles and other places where the leaders of the G8 and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) have congregated, and the intellectual opposition represented by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Greg Palast and Naomi Klein. Media, financial and military power has increasingly been concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Multinational conglomerates, increasingly beyond the control of national governments, elected or otherwise, switch their assets without interference, often beyond taxation, buying influence and control, and subverting the natural order where it suits.

The apologists for globalisation would have us believe that the purpose of the International Monetary Fund or the WTO is to encourage economic efficiency and free trade, through treaties, which in Richard Stallman's words "are really designed to give business power over laws and policies. They're not really about free trade. They're about a transfer of power: removing the power to decide laws from the citizens of any country who might conceivably consider their own interests and giving that power to businesses who will not consider the interests of those citizens." Stallman's views on this subject can be found in the 'Copyright and Globalization' section of his book: 'Free Software, Free Society', distributed by the Gnu Press.

In a world where 51 of the richest 100 economic entities are corporations rather than national governments, representative democracies often have little power to influence events in their own countries. A twitch in Wall Street can have more effect on your well-being than all your parliamentary representative's best endeavours. The poorer countries have even less influence over events. Guy Debord, the French Situationist and author of The Society of the Spectacle, said of McLuhan: "The Sage of Toronto spent several decades marvelling at the numerous freedoms created by a 'global village' instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle's present vulgarity."

This matters to us, as proponents of Free Software and the free exchange of ideas, because the central organisations of the globalisation movement are dedicated to "harmonising" international patent and copyright law under the liberal interpretation understood by the USPTO, as can be observed in Europe. And there are any number of inter-governmental organisations dedicated to restricting the flow of information across the Net.

The World Wide Web is a confusing place, at the one extreme the pages of the Web are awash with ugliness and terror - disturbing images of the disjointed world which we inhabit. At the other extreme, the Web has become a modern equivalent of the ancient Royal Library of Alexandria, an unparalleled repository for information, accurate and inaccurate, about everything and anything, that can be accessed instantly and at will, an encyclopedia at our fingertips. And if the information we access can't always be trusted, hasn't it ever been so, that, to extend our knowledge, we first have to doubt and question?

The library at Alexandria was where "Archimedes invented the screw-shaped water pump that is still in use today, where Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the Earth, where Euclid discovered the rules of geometry, and Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, which was the most influential scientific book about the nature of the Universe for 1500 years."

Who is to say that an untrammelled Web, the realisation of McLuhan's "Global Village", will not be the source and conductor, respository and facilitator, for the Great Works of the future, if only because so much knowledge and information is just a keyboard and a click away? We cannot know. But the mere fact that the Web enables us to speak and share our vision with our fellow citizens on the opposite side of the globe, without the interference of spokesmen or intermediaries, can only be a good thing...

Richard Hillesley