Net
Ideologies:
From Cyber-liberalism to Cyber-realism
Abstract
This
paper analyses the over-optimistic ideology propagated by Wired magazine
and the various oppositions to it, regarding the role of Internet in shaping
our future. By exposing why the cyber-libertarians ideals will not happen
and a five-year market hype period is coming to an end, this essay concludes
with a more realist perspective of what this revolution is about.
Ideologies,
in the outer and inner space
Ideologues, visionaries, or digerati(1)
Never in the human history have so many people laid down their views on
what the future will be like. And never were these views, prognostics,
or ideologies changed, and proven to be wrong, at such fast pace. Until
recently, the common interpretation of the term ideology was somehow related
to a long lasting belief. Capitalism vs. Communism, Left vs. Right, Libertarians
vs. Conservatives and so on
Most of these dichotomies have lasted
for centuries and there is no sign and no need for them to completely
converge in the future.
On
20 July 1969, Neil Alden Armstrong, as commander of the Apollo 11
lunar mission, became the first person to set foot on the moon. Over the
following decades both the United States and the former Soviet Union invested
billions of dollars in space research having as ultimate goal the protection
and promotion of their ideologies. It was - many thought - just a matter
of time until the day when the human race would have a secondary address:
sidereal space. And the question was whether it would be communist or
capitalist.
The
year 2001 seemed like a good date for the move. The date was too far away
for anyone to contest (mainly in the late sixties, when the Apollo
project was at its full power and with outstanding results) and the turn
of the millennium had its natural symbolic meanings. On top of that, Stanley
Kubricks 1968 masterpiece - 2001: A Space Odyssey - was in
everyones mind.
But
where we are "moving" to - at the end this century - is a much
less obvious "place": cyberspace(2).
The fall of the Berlin Wall, on 9 November 1991, not only unified the
former East and West Germany, but also symbolised the end of the cold
war. Capitalism defeated communism and USSRs ideology slowly fainted.
Except for a few scientists and researchers, no one really cared what
human life in outer space could be like. It was no longer a political
issue! But predictions about the future lifestyle in cyberspace have skyrocketed!
Ideologies in the so-called electronic frontier did not concern nations
at the same intensity as in the past, but this time, private companies
and some individuals (the self acclaimed digerati) propagated our
future. No wonder cyberspace was soon known by many as the "electronic
marketplace"
It
is beyond ones mind how much has been said about the changes a few
thousands of computers, connected by high speed wires, will provoke. MITs
Media Lab director, Nicholas Negroponte, predicts that one billion people
will be "netcitizens" by the year 2000 (3),
the Speaker of US House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, believes that
making Congressional data available on the Net will turn America into
a better democracy and Americans into better citizens (4),
Bill Gates dreams about an Internet based friction-free market, and as
for his friend, Esther Dyson cyberspace will "suck power away from
governments, mass media and big business" (5).
The list could go on and we would easily be led to believe that a web
browser and an e-mail account would solve most of humankinds problems.
In this scenario, everything would fit in perfectly and harmoniously.
Even the traditional form of representative government would be proven
unnecessary.
The English perspective
In
1995, a critical essay written by Richard Barbrook and Andrew Cameron
(co-founders of the Hypermedia Research Centre in London), vexingly named
"The Californian Ideology", pinpointed many contradictions in
the widespread hype. The paper is developed around a profound analysis
of the unusual merge of the 60s New Left movement and the New Right
libertarian ideals, only made possible by the potential of the new information
technologies. Barbrook and Cameron not only highlighted the not so positive
aspects of West Coasts lifestyle, such as racism, poverty and environmental
degradation, while enumerating the factors responsible for the creation
of the "virtual class" in the Bay Area, but they also attacked
the so promoted new "Jeffersonian democracy" by reminding us
that the third US president personally owned 200 human beings as slaves,
as he spread free market ideals.
It
is not hard to predict the feedback. Published in a handful of websites
and translated into a half dozen languages, "The Californian Ideology"
was hostilely responded to by many of who envisioned an optimistic cyber-based
future, including one of the cyber-libertarians main spokesperson: Wired
Magazines former editor-in-chief, Louis Rossetto.
The
"Californian Ideology" was an important step towards a reality
shock in what this "revolution" is all about. "Only by
giving a name we were able to ridicule them. Now people say: Oh,
those are Californian ideologues
"(6),
said Barbrook in a recent seminar at the Hypermedia Research Centre (HRC).
Yes, in this case the Net really overcomes geographical distances: the
Californian ideologues are all over and the few examples mentioned above
are as dispersed as in Massachusetts (Negroponte), Georgia (Gingrich),
Washington State(Gates) and New York (Dyson). Anyone slightly net-aware
these days knows about the hype, some are still firm believers, but a
critical mass is already mocking at it. For many the Wired era is coming
to an end.
Another
response to "The Californian Ideology" came from former Wall
Street analyst and current president of the New York New Media Association,
Mark Stahlman, in an even more provocative title: "The
English Ideology and Wired Magazine". Although also promoting
a more sceptical view of the future, in a partial convergence with Barbrook
and Camerons work, Stahlman invested an enormous effort in linking
the Californian ideology to all kinds of English philosophers and writers:
from Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626) to H.G. Wells,
who was born in 1866 (the most recent he managed to find). His article
insists that the San Francisco-based Wired magazine "represents yet
another [English] attempt to invade American culture and to undermine
American political and economic initiative"(7).
Okay, one could buy it half century ago (actually when Wells was alive)
but today Stahlmans analysis can only be seen as a distant and unrelated
analogy. As Marx said, "history repeats itself, first as a tragedy,
second as a farce"(8).
Although
Stahlman managed to link the Greek-born Negroponte to the English culture
(by revealing his secret dream: an AI-spawned robotic English butler)
he overlooked Esther Dysons background (who like Mark Stahlman
also lives in New York, was a financial analyst and, currently,
is one of the so-called digerati). Her father is Freeman Dyson,
British-born internationally renowned physicist. At least it would be
a living example.
"Cigar Aficionado"
But Dysons case is peculiar: she belongs to a class
of "cyberprophets" who are slowly getting down to Earth again.
By following her weekly articles one can easily identify a change of tone,
explicitly admitted in her 1997 book Release 2.0. "My first
vision of cyberspace in Release 1.0 [a IT newsletter for executives]
was optimistic and perhaps a bit naïve", Dyson says, "this new
vision is better informed by experience, and wiser but I have no
illusions that there wont be need for Release 2.1, [
]
and ultimately a Release 3.0 somewhere down the road" (9).
Analogously, many of the critics have completely lost interest in the
quest of proving how mislead the Wired troupe is. Anyone who listens to
David Hudsons appeal "Lets Get Sober!" in his book-critique
to net-optimism, "Rewired", knows that the hype is fading.
And it is not only the professional writers and academic researches who
say so. The amateur and one person-driven web site called "Whats
Newt", that during the last four years criticised Newt Gingrichs
ideas and proposals has simply not been updated since last August. If
you check out the sites homepage, the webmaster and software developer,
Dan Schueler, simply says: "Sorry for the delays in updating What's
Newt. I completely lost interest in Newt and whatever he might be
saying or doing for the past several months."(10)
"Beyond the Californian Ideology". That was
the theme of the seventh edition of Cyber.Salon - a monthly gathering
of London-based digital artisans and intellectuals in a Bloomsbury cybercafe
- promoted by the HRC and the Austrian online magazine Telepolis. One
of the guest speakers on the 20th May 1998 meeting, Peter Lunenfeld (from
the Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, California), clearly stated:
"The closer you get to San Francisco, the less serious you take Wireds
ideas". And he continues: "Wired needed new celebrities to promote
their view of the coming information era, so they created their own. It
is like the Cigar Aficionado magazine, which covers displays healthy
top models smoking cigars"(11).
Parallax
Wired
was launched in January 1993, in a market inundated only by technical
periodicals, such as Byte and PC World, with perhaps the exception of
Mondo 2000. For most of techies used to the market status quo of
computer related publications, Wireds glowing pages and predictions
seem more attractive than porn magazines and its appealing design
gave the magazine nothing less than 18 awards from 1993 to 1997, including
the three prizes conferred by the prestigious American Society of Magazine
Editors (ASME).
But
Mercedes-Benz and Tag Heuer adverts mixed with 8,000 word articles on
how the "information superhighway" would bring power and knowledge
to the poorest African country was something beyond comprehension! Looking
back today, even 5-year-old articles are still so "updated",
i.e. the predictions simply havent happened, or are they still to
happen? In the magazines July 1993 issue, Mitchell Kapor, co-founder
of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), wrote an extensive article
named "Where is the Digital Highway Really Heading?", in which
he states: "Life in cyberspace [
] is more egalitarian than
elitist, and more decentralised than hierarchical. It serves individuals
and communities, not mass audiences". But the point, in this case,
is: how do we get to live in this cyberspace/dreamland? Easy if you are
a middle-class citizen of a First World nation, with your basic needs
fulfilled, access to a phone line and a thousand-dollar computer. But
how the "digital highway" will give food to Ethiopians before
they can even think about having a phone is still to be discovered. Actually,
with the help of Barbrook/Cameron, David Hudson, as well as the promoters
of the recent "technorealism" movement, it is now easy to figure
out the answer. It simply wont!
Not
much more than 2% of the world population have online access. To reach
the one billion Net users Nicolas Negroponte promotes, maybe we should
think about the infrastructure first (and also make a deliberate effort
to forget about "meaningless" issues, such as housing, literacy,
and starvation). As David Kline exposed in his column "Market Forces"
for HotWired, "currently there are only about 750 million to 800
million telephones lines worldwide. Even in Asia, where phone usage is
growing the fastest, experts are predicting the installation of only 15
million to 20 million new lines annually over the next six years. But
what the heck, let's just take a leap of faith and agree that maybe the
world will have a billion phones in use by the year 2000. Does that give
us a billion Net surfers? Even in the United States, with perhaps 160
million telephones, there are only 16 million to 20 million people on
the Net. And the vast majority of these, as you no doubt are aware, come
from affluent households (though significantly, less than half of all
owners of computers with modems even choose to go online)"
(12). It is not
hard to understand why Klines column was discontinued shortly after
that, by Wired Ventures.
Anyone
just a bit net-savvy these days knows the power of the search engines,
such as Altavista, Lycos and Excite as well as how hard it is to get the
right information on the first run. Usually thousands of URLs match our
search criteria and the result is an end-of-millennium symptom: information
overload. Yes, the Internet made it possible for the top 2%
of the population to access information like never before in human
history. But how are we going to deal with it, digest it, and interpret
it? Above all, how are we going to survive the anxiety and other psychological
consequences of this new era? The motto "information wants to be
free" is on everybodys lips, but how much freedom will information
actually bring us? Or it will just make us more confused and lost? As
David Shenk puts it, we are heading towards a "data smog". When
Newt Gingrich, announced "Thomas", a web site making publicly
available all US Congressional documents, Shenk was right on the spot
in identifying the political concealment within the act.
"If
every citizen had access to the information that the Washington lobbyists
have, we would have changed the balance of power in America towards the
citizens and out of the Beltway", announced Gingrich in the National
Public Radio on the morning of the 26th January 1995. But for
Shenk, a veteran journalist who covered Washington D.C. politics in the
early ages of a teleprinter link provided by the Federal News Service
(that inundated his room at the speed of 2 pages a minute with all the
key political transcripts), it was clear the consequences of that single
deed. "Gingrich is smart enough to understand that opening the floodgates
of information doesnt automatically turn Americans into better citizens",
unmasks Shenk, "to the contrary, while some political specialists
have benefited from the comprehensive disclosure, the average citizen
has been more apt than before to get lost in the flood. Its focus
that brings knowledge and power, not diffusion" (13).
A short retrospective
To
clarify the analysis, it would be pertinent to split down in a few distinctive
periods the recent history of information technology and the individual
empowerment process brought by the personal computers. Here is what can
be proposed:
DIY
culture and pure nerdism (1976 1984)
At
this early stage, personal computing was a hobby for most. Enthusiasts
assembled their own machines, programmed their own code and exchanged
their experiences with their peers at the homebrew computer
clubs. It was also when the first companies in the PC industry started,
such as Altair, Apple and Microsoft; but with products focused to the
niche market of nerds and techies.
Real-life
applications and machines (1984 1990)
With
the launch of the Apple Mac in 1984, non-techies found their way into
the benefits of the information technology. Graphical user interfaces
(GUI) and applications such as word processors and spreadsheets initiated
a swift from an exclusively nerdy culture to a results-oriented use of
the personal computer. Even the text-based and harder to use IBM PC platform
got its adepts in the office marketplace.
Windows
embracing the "rest of us" (1990 1993)
In
1990 the first working version of Microsoft Windows was released, emulating
the success of the Mac GUI six years previously. Although Apple created
"the computer for the rest of us" motto, in 1984, it was Microsoft
who profited the most. Through a series of strategic mistakes (proprietary
technology, no licence agreements, higher prices than competition and
a strict bundling policy of hardware and operational system), Apple lost
its enormous PC market share of the early days of the Apple IIs. It was
Microsoft, with its strategy of "embracing and extend", who
actually took over "the rest of us", in a time when hardware
prices dropped to acceptable levels for most middle-class households in
developed countries. It was the foundations of its actual 94.1% of the
Graphical OS market share and the domination of 85% of the office applications
industry (14).
Nonetheless
those were the golden years when the personal computing industry formed
a critical mass of users. Allied to the convergence of telecommunications
and media industries, this epoch built the foundations of the techno-utopians
ideals.
Net
Utopia and cyber-liberalism: the Wired era (1993 1998)
And
suddenly, by giving away to the private sector the public Internet backbone
- a result of over 30 years of investment with US tax-payers funds
the American government turns an academic and military network
into the "information marketplace": the new business frontier
for any Republican post-industrialist CEO. For a half decade we have been
listening to Wireds libertarian campaign against state control in
cyberspace, featuring Gilder, Tofflers and alike. But, as the saying goes:
"you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people
some of the time, but you cant fool all of the people all of the
time".
Technorealism
(1998 - )
And
some people soon realised it. Early this year, a small group of intellectuals
led by Andrew Shapiro, David Shenk and Steven Johnson initialised a movement
called "technorealism". With an eight-point manifesto subscribed
by thousands in their website (15),
one finds it hard to contest the obvious and clear conclusions. Many see
it as the natural antidote to the cyber-liberalism age. As Andrew Shapiro
puts it, "we want to criticise technology with the view of improving
it. Im not anti-technology by any means, but I find myself at odds
with the boosterism of Silicon Valley and, well, Wired magazine."
(16)
Reality
Shock
Technologies
are not neutral.
The
Internet is revolutionary, but not Utopian.
Government
has an important role to play on the electronic frontier.
Information
is not knowledge.
Wiring
the schools will not save them.
Information
wants to be protected.
The
public owns the airwaves; the public should benefit from their use.
Understanding
technology should be an essential component of global citizenship.
The
above principles of technorealism were not created overnight and a visit
to www.technorealism.org
will give a further explanation on each of them. One of the reasons
for Barbrook and Camerons "The Californian Ideology" wide
acceptance was that many others were already thinking about it, under
one perspective or another. Then, when a profound analysis is presented
the public identification is immediate. The same has happened with the
technorealism movement in one way or another prior to the term being coined.
Even
before Wired existed, Time magazine published in its "Letters to
the editor" section a complaint from an irate parent who decided
to buy a modem so his 12 year old son could get connected to the Internet.
His action was based on a very favourable article, published in a preceding
issue of the magazine, where all the educational potential of the web
and all the resources available were outlined. The reason for the readers
anger was that just a few days after getting "wired", the kid
managed to find a way to exchange some pornographic pictures and was spending
most of his time on it. "How can you induce us to give our children
access to the web, if all this immoral stuff is also out there?"
was the question posed to the journalist responsible for the article.
The reply came straight after: "the Internet is by no means different
than the real world. All the good and bad things your children can find
in the streets will be found in cyberspace. Youll have to teach
them how to be careful in the same way you do in real life". Six
years later this could be a classical example of the technorealists
principle number 2. "For every empowering or enlightening aspect
of the wired life, there will also be dimensions that are malicious, perverse,
or rather ordinary", is partly how they explain why the Internet
is not utopian.
By
the sum of experiences over those early years of broader Internet access
and by keeping a balanced critical position between the techno-utopians
and the neo-Luddites it was possible to formulate a few common sense pillars.
It
is completely unnecessary to exemplify all the principles of technorealism,
and most of them speak for themselves, but one (principle 3), in particular,
brings to light one of the biggest aberrations of the liberals quest:
free market with no government intervention. There is no single company
in the computer industry that is not concerned about Microsofts
monopolistic tactics. From small to large corporations, Microsoft is a
threat to market diversity and innovation. Nowadays, the dream of any
start-up company is to be bought by Microsoft, since they know that, in
the current scenario, if Microsoft decides to move into their business
they will be out of the game. The irony in this is that everyone is hoping
to have a chance in the free market economy (as propagated by the Liberals)
with fair competition but, in order to get there, Microsoft has to be
broken up or, at least, regulated. Who is going to do it? The market itself?
Left alone to market forces, Microsoft already defeated most of the leading
companies in the IT business, including Borland (development tools), Corel
(application suites), Novell (networking) and Apple (operational systems/platform),
either by sweeping them out of the market or to a distant second place.
Everyones hope now is exclusively on a lawsuit moved by the US Governments
Department of Justice (DoJ). Yes, the very same government to whom Wired
and the cyber-libertarians say "hands off".
A dark
future?
In
Rewired, David Hudson dedicates almost one hundred pages to a section
entitled "One Dark Future", compromising not less than 10 of
the books 35 chapters. What we can easily be led to think now is
that if all the optimist view and hype on how the Net would give humankind
a spectacular future is disappearing, the only path ahead is a dark future.
Not
necessarily! The Internet will indeed bring a number of great things to
humankind and a number of new problems as well. Although it will expand
our access to information, it will not automatically give us a better
education; it might give us more freedom of speech, but will not turn
each of us into a publisher neither jeopardise the media titans; and it
will also shorten the distance between citizens and government, but will
not substitute a representative congress or an elected head of government.
The
Internet will certainly create a number of problems that are only now
beginning to appear, ranging from privacy issues to information anxiety
and cyber-crimes. Should we then step back and cut down the Internet?
Some people are proposing it, such as Paul Treanor in an extensive paper
published on the Web called "Internet as Hyper-Liberalism" (17),
but that is just another extremism and goes blindly into the other side
of the spectrum. Just like any revolution the Internet will bring many
expectations and fears and only time will allow things to settle down.
When, in 1906, Alberto Santos Dumont flew with his 14 Bis, the
worlds first aircraft to take off and land by its own means, great
expectations were also created and many of the problems could not be foreseen
at the time. Dumont himself did not accept the fact that the aeroplane,
an invention with the purpose of bringing people together, soon ended
up being used during the First World War to kill other human beings.
A
more recent example comes from David Sarnoff, founder of NBC and president
of RCA, the man who unveiled the first colour television in 1939. Like
many in that time, Sarnoff saw the new invention as a force for truth,
refined culture and national edification. In 1940 he declared confidently
that television was "destined to provide greater knowledge to larger
numbers of people, truer perception of the meaning of current events,
more accurate appraisal of men in public life, and a broader understanding
of the needs and aspirations of our fellow human beings." (18)
It
is not hard to see the similarities between Sarnoffs perception
of the television role in our society and what has been said about the
Net. Although enriching and cultural programs do exist, most of the broadcasting
time is now devoted to consumerism, political apathy, social isolation
and cultural imperialism. Far from a modern Agora, electronic media has
become one of the best examples of savage capitalism. But that does not
invalidate its importance and, when properly produced and diffused, television
programs can partially achieve some of Sarnoffs ideals.
Richard
Barbrooks defined so well: "The Net is nothing but an inert
mass of metal, plastic and sand. We are the only living beings in cyberspace."
Yes, like almost every technological achievement in history, the Internet
will change human society irreversibly, but at the end it is just another
tool. Will the changes be good or bad? The answer is both.
Epilogue
In
May 1998, after failing twice in attempts to offer its stock on the public
market, Wired Ventures sold its magazine to Conde Nast Publications Inc.
for more than $75 million. The deal not only symbolised Wireds financial
failure (the money was used to pay Wired Ventures short-term debts
and to fund its online counterparts HotWired, Wired News and the HotBot
search engine) but also how the magazine should be perceived in the future.
The acquirer, apart from being an investor in the publication since January
1994, is also the publisher of lifestyle periodicals such as Vogue,
GQ, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. In other words,
it is now clear why Armani Jeans and BMW adverts fit so well on the magazines
pages. Wired may very well have a long life, but it will be nothing more
than a cyber-fashion magazine for the top 2% wealthiest Internet users.
The
rest of us will just wear unbranded jeans, take the tube to work and face
all the joys and problems of everyday life. Both inside and outside cyberspace.
References
(1)
The term first appeared in a January 1992 article by Times reporter
John Markoff. It was formed by a blend of the words "digital"
and "literati" (Italian for the Latin litterati). Today,
Markoff states, digerati is a stand-in for "the digital elite"
the powerful engineers, the Third Wave intellectuals, and power
brokers of the wired world. (back to
the text)
(2)
The information space. The place in computer servers, geographically dispersed,
and linked by wavelengths. The term was coined by William Gibson in his
1984 novel Neuromancer as "consensual hallucination experienced
daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children
being taught mathematical concepts
A graphical representation of
data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.
Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind,
clusters and constellation of data. Like city lights, receding
"(back
to the text)
(3)
Negroponte, Nicholas. Who Will the Next Billion Users Be?. Wired
4.06, June 1996.(back to the text)
(4)
Newt Gingrichs speech to Republican National Committee on 20 January
1995. http://dolphin.gulf.net/Gingrich/1.20.95.I
. (back
to the text)
(5)
Dyson, Esther. Release 2.0 A design for living in the Digital Age.
Viking, London, 1997. Page 6. (back
to the text)
(6)
authors notes. (back to the text)
(7)
Stahlman, Mark. The English Ideology and Wired Magazine Part
One. Rewired website. http://www.rewired.com/96/fall/1118.html.
(back
to the text)
(8)
Paraphrase of the opening sentences of Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte (1852; repr. in Karl Marx: Selected Works,
vol. 2, 1942). The actual words were: "Hegel remarks somewhere that
all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice.
He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."
(back to the text)
(9)
ibid. page 5 (back to the text)
(10)
http://www.wolfenet.com/~danfs/newt.html.
(back
to the text)
(11)
authors notes (back to the text)
(12)
http://www.hotwired.com/market/96/23/index1a.html.
(back to the text)
(13)
Shenk, David. Data Smog: surviving the information glut. HarperCollins,
New York, 1997. Pages 173-174. (back
to the text)
(14)
For an in-depth analysis of Microsofts monopoly strategies, refer
to
Millarch, Francisco. Monopolies x Open Standards: An Abridged History
of the Personal Computer Industry and its influence on the Cyberspace.
1998.
http://www.millarch.org/francisco/papers/monopolies.htm. (back
to the text)
(15)
For more information, see www.technorealism.org.
(back to the text)
(16)
Christe, Ian. Digital Dream Team Calls for Technorealism.
Wired News. 12 March 1998. http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/10872.html.
(back to the text)
(17)
http://www.inter.nl.net/Paul.Treanor/net.hyperliberal.html.
(back
to the text)
(18)
Sarnoff, David, Foreword to Lenox R. Lohr. Television Broadcasting.
New York. MacGrawHill. 1940. in Shenk, David. Data Smog: surviving
the information glut. (back to
the text)
|