Digital technologies and the Internet are playing an ever larger role in all aspects of people’s lives. South Africa is no different.

Technology can enable human flourishing but it can also be used as a means of control and domination.

South Africa needs to have a digital rights organisation like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) — not to be confused with South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters.

There are many bodies focussed on the rights of South Africans, but none of them focus on digital technologies. South Africa needs an organisation that looks out for the rights of its citizens that are particularly impacted by the peculiar capabilities of digital technologies. So for example before the arrival of the Internet it was not possible for everybody to be a publisher. Similarly it was not possible for the state or companies to have access to all your personal photos or your address book.

This organisation needs to make common cause with similar rights organisations across the world — like EFF. The Internet and many of the services on it is international, and many of these digital issues are best addressed internationally. At the same time this organisation needs to be rooted and particular to South Africa’s social context.

Since South Africa is a developing African country and one the most unequal countries in the world, its emphasis should be different from that of the US based EFF. And although EFF has done important and pioneering work in this field, it is heavily influenced by American political ideals, and what Richard Barbrook has called The Californian Ideology. EFF is overly dismissive of the role of the state in society, too trusting of the role of the market. It has a strong libertarian bent.

If nothing else a South African EFF needs a different name. Firstly to avoid confusion with Julius Malema’s political party but also because of the use of the word ‘frontier’. As Barbrook has pointed out the ‘frontier’ US technologists reference approvingly was also the scene of colonialism.

“…interpreted generously, this retro-futurism could be a vision of a cybernetic frontier where hi-tech artisans discover their individual self-fulfillment in either the electronic agora or the electronic marketplace. However, as the zeitgeist of the ‘virtual class’, the Californian Ideology is at the same time an exclusive faith. If only some people have access to the new information technologies, ‘Jeffersonian democracy’ can become a hi-tech version of the plantation economy of the Old South.”

Yet there’s much we can learn and borrow from EFF. And EFF has been adept at reaching out across ideological divisions. Its most successful campaigns —SOPA for example— has often been when it reached for support across the fractious US political divide. In a country like South Africa, reaching out across political affiliations would be important too.

EFF concentrates on defending and promoting rights in the following broad areas: Freedom of expression, fair use, privacy, innovation, transparency. Under these broad categories we can place specific issues they focus on: Censorship and online abuse, state and private surveillance, copyright and patents, net neutrality, open data and open government.

All of these areas and issues would also be important in the South African context if perhaps having different emphasis. But a South African digital rights body should also focus heavily on access and universal service. All South Africans should be able to benefit from having Internet access in a meaningful way.

If interested in helping to set up such a body please contact us at this form.