Dale Carrico (excerpt):
““The Internet is antithetical to commerce.”
With this declaration, science fiction novelist and technology writer Cory Doctorow began an editorial essay for the O’Reilly Network (the online home of the key publisher of technical computer books and manuals as well as an organizer of important conferences on media and technology issues) in December, 2001. His next sentence was an epic exhalation of pent up frustration and nervousness: “There, I said it.”
I can well understand his exasperation, as well as his palpable relief at finally pronouncing his verdict.
Contemporary especially American technocultural, technofuturist, technophiliac rhetorics sometimes seem fantastically fixated with markets. I have already described an anarcho-capitalist libertarian viewpoint for which market relations are imagined to be uniquely expressive of a competitive, acquisitively maximizing “human nature,” for which the sum of these relations is imagined to constitute the space of freedom figured as a “spontaneous order,” and for which the principal emancipatory demand that compels the just is for the elimination of state regulations that are uniquely imagined to restrain this order from its otherwise inevitable crystallization. This deregulatory demand is typically figured as a radical privatization of the institutions of civic life hitherto associated with the public sphere.
The key contribution of technophiliac free-marketeers to this libertarian discourse would appear to be the regularly reiterated proposal that some particularly disruptive emerging technology or other –- it might be digital networks, or encryption technologies, or surveillance devices, or virtual reality systems, or intelligence-enhancing or virtue-enhancing neuroceuticals, or molecular manufacturing tirelessly replicating cheap goods at the nanoscale, or space elevators, you name it –- is about to arrive on the scene, whereupon the sudden ubiquity of this disruptive superlative technology will either unleash of its own accord the creative energies that will constitute the emergence there and then of the spontaneous market order the libertarians crave, or will at any rate introduce a profound destabilization that will break the crust of convention, bypass the intractable knot of pluralist stakeholder politics, overcome the regulatory impasse and thereby facilitate the emergence of this market order in due course.
In 1996, in an essay that has been widely (but possibly not exactly rightly) taken as an example of such libertarian technophilia, John Perry Barlow notoriously addressed himself in one of the founding political documents of internet technoculture to the “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel.” To them he declared, “I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
The proximate inspiration for Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” was in fact the sudden and overbearing intrusion of government “decency” censors and opportunistic regulators into a vibrant online culture about which they had taken no time to gain any sense of its customs, institutions, values, or technical capacities. “You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation… You do not know our culture, our ethics… Our world is different.”
In Cory Doctorow’s essay, “The Carpterbaggers Go Home,” a comparable claim is directed from a self-appointed (there is of course no other kind as yet) representative of a network technoculture to an unwelcome interloper. But where Barlow addresses his attention to representatives of the State, Doctorow addresses himself instead to representatives of Business. Arriving after a decade of network-hype conjoined to fervent market enthusiasm, such a shift in itself felt in reading it for the first time rather like a watershed.
For Barlow, “Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.” This apparent disavowal of the material basis for digital media and the ongoing imbrication of digital technocultures and their prosthetic practices in bodily life and material culture provoked for a time, and naturally enough, a whole cottage industry of criticism of Barlow’s piece.
Doctorow’s internet, in contrast, is swarming with bodies doing stuff on the streets where they live. “The spare-time economy” he writes of mobs of underemployed techies and geeks unleashed onto the world by the sudden collapse of the 90s internet boom, “has yielded a bountiful harvest of weblogs, Photoshop tennis matches, homebrew Web services and dangerously Seattlean levels of garage-band activity.” He goes on to vividly evoke “untethered forced-leisure gangs… committing random acts of senseless wirelessness, armed with cheap-like-borscht 802.11b cards and antennae made from washers, hot glue, and Pringles cans.”
But in a precisely analogous move to Barlow’s own, Doctorow ascribes to this swarming mess of shifting practices, protocols, and devices an essential nature that he contends is deeply antithetical to a particular kind of practice he disdains. While Barlow proposes that digitality conceived as a kind of ineffable spirit is invulnerable to the material coercions of worldly States, Doctorow proposes that internet practices are inherently improvisatory and unreliable in ways that will only rarely provide sustainable occasions for commercial profitabiltity.
“The Internet is loose and wobbly from the bottom up,” writes Doctorow. “TCP/IP is all about non-deterministic routing: Packet A and Packet A-prime may take completely different routes (over transports as varied as twisted pair, co-ax, fiber, sat, and RF) to reach the same destination… Internet… traffic… is positively Brownian, fuzzy and random and bunchy and uncoordinated as a swarm of ants randomwalking through your kitchen.” Here, Doctorow fatally reads the end-to-end principle through the discourse of negative liberty (a move that will return later in the term “Net Neutrality” among other places) and then treats this negative libertarian formulation as an ethos that defines the cyberspatial sprawl across its many layers: “Fuzzy at the bottom: TCP/IP. Fuzzy in the middle: message-passing protocols. Fuzzy on top: services.”
According to Doctorow this indeterminacy of the internet is deeply “antithetical to all our traditional notions about success in branding and business.” This is because “[b]usiness is built around reliability, offering a predictable quality of service from transaction to transaction. Even the messiest, one-off businesses are based on reliability; for example, estate auctioneers are predictable — indeed, they provide the only touchstone of predictability in one-off sales, through the authorship of dependably consistent auction catalogs.”
But despite this presumed antitheticality, Doctorow ends up talking an inordinate amount about commerce after all: “[I]t’s time to leave behind the idea of traditional reliability as value-proposition. The technical reality of the Internet doesn’t care about the successful business strategies of yesteryear. The businesses that succeed in the unreliable world will find new ways of providing reliability.” And: “The businesses that succeed [will]… exploit the new reality rather than denying it.”
Given this mild collapse into corporate futurological speak, it comes as a more than mildly incongruous surprise when Doctorow stirringly concludes in the tonalities of a manifesto: “The close-enough-for-rock-n-roll revolution is a-comin’ — to the streets, comrades!”
The problem is that although his language mobilizes (even if I don’t doubt that Doctorow’s tongue was firmly planted in his cheek when he penned his revolutionary coda) the discursive paraphernalia and emotional excitement of radical political emancipation here, the piece is really one with no sense of the political in it in the least. One has to assume that the marvelous experimental, collaborative, playful prosthetic practices Doctorow highlights in his piece are valuable enough to protect and defend rather than simply to celebrate as they are unfolding. But to the extent that this is true, then it offers little comfort or protective cover to suggest that conventional commerce cannot finally profit from digital networks (a claim I wouldn’t bet the mortgage on in any case, let alone my life) if it happens that in their quixotic pursuit of such profits conventionally commercial interests are moved nonetheless to exploit, oppress, or undermine these practices he celebrates.
When Doctorow chuckles at the strategy of corporations to commercialize the Internet by “carv[ing] out pockets of sanity in the anarchy” there is an ominous sense in which “anarchy” is being treated as substantial here in a way that would presumably generate some kind of automatically and inherently efficacious resistance to onerous intervention. This is a very familiar trope for technocentric libertarians indifferent to or disdainful of the political as such, and to the demands of democratic politics in particular, except to the extent that one can find a trace of democracy in the duressed contracts, exchanges, and elite-orchestrated consumption practices available under market-fundamentlist construals of capitalism.
In an editorial entitled “Tech Bloom in Full Flower,” written nearly two years later for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in November 2003, Alex Steffen offered up an argument that reproduces the contours of Doctorow’s case, in ways that inspired the very same enthusiasm as well as the very same worries for me. Together with Jamais Cascio, Steffen is the creator and primary producer of the highly influential and simply incomparable WorldChanging Blog, which conjoins discussions of digital networked information and communication technologies with discussions of environmental sustainability, social justice and global development issues, and the provision of practical suggestions for the collaborative address of social problems.
“The conventional wisdom, during the Tech Boom, was that what drove innovation was the lure of giant piles of cash,” writes Steffen, framing his argument with the familiar trauma of the high-tech crash that ended the century. But “[t]hat idea now rubs shoulders with the Berlin Wall.” (Notice, once again, that the language here has mobilized the imagery of political emancipation.) “What makes creative people tingle are interesting problems, the chance to impress their friends and caffeine. Freed from the pursuit of paper millions, geeks are doing what geeks, by nature, really want to be doing: making cool stuff.” Against the drear banality of bourgeois profitability, Steffen reminds us that creativity is driven as often as not by the pursuit of pleasure and, as you will remember Clay Shirky pointing out already in a related context, a desire for attention.
And so: “In basements, garages and the empty warehouses that once held the Next Big Thing, tech-savvy folks are huddled over their laptops, working together online to give away the future. The result? We’re seeing a surge of technological creativity that easily trumps anything we dreamed of with the dot-com PR guys crooning in our ears.”
Steffen then surveys a scene with which the reader will now be quite familiar, and provides a useful summary of the varieties of social software to which I devote no small amount of my own hopeful attentions:
There’s the software, such as Linux, where teams of coders are working collaboratively in every corner of the globe to perfect what’s rapidly becoming the world’s most important operating system. “Peer-to-peer” programs, Napster’s cousins, are busily creating networks of millions of users all giving each other software, movies, music, books — nearly anything that can be digitized, whether they own it or not. “Distributed computing” projects use the idle power of volunteers’ home PCs to tackle massive tasks such as mapping genes and scanning the stars for intelligent life.
There’s the hardware. “WiFi” aficionados are manically building free, ubiquitous, high-speed wireless Internet coverage for entire cities. GeekCorps is off wiring the world’s poor. Others are hacking together “Freekboxes” from free software and recycled parts and shipping them to developing world human rights activists.
There’s even the content. Slashdot, spinning the planet’s best “news for nerds” out of little more than the enthusiasm of its users, and Wikipedia, compiling the world’s first collaboratively built encyclopedia. Or the countless Web logs, travel guides, online libraries and college classes (like MIT’s OpenCourseWare). Or Craigslist and Tribe.Net and the thousand other new free ways to find a date, a roommate or an honest mechanic. There’s even a new form of copyright, the Creative Commons license, to help you give stuff away while protecting it from theft — a legal system for sharing, a “copyleft.”
Taken together, Steffen describes these prosthetic practices as “The Tech Bloom” (in contrast to the commercial “Tech Boom” of the 1990s), an overabundant proliferation of free creative expression, collaboration, and quite a lot of making-do.
While I find it nearly as difficult to restrain my enthusiasm for the practices that exercise the imaginations of Doctorow and Steffen as I find it to restrain my distaste for the practices that exercise the imaginations of some market libertarians, what I want to register here, yet again, is my worry that there is a disavowal of the substance of the political in this discourse even while it depends on a figural conjuration of the political to express its ambitions and communicate its joys. In this it is the possible continuities rather than the conspicuous differences that I would want to highlight between the market libertarians and these, call them, “progressive experimentalists” here.
Steffen concludes his piece with a vivid tableau that would concretize the distinction between the two: “If the Tech Boom had a graven image, it was the bull on Wall Street. The Tech Bloom is more likely to be found dancing around the desert at Burning Man, the annual festival where money is taboo, everything’s a gift and creative participation is synonymous with cool.”
But the trouble with “The Tech Bloom” is that it can too easily degenerate as a discourse into another variation on “spontaneous order,” say, Spontaneous Order with a Human Face.
Steffen’s ambitions, like Doctorow’s, seem to me to be profoundly worldly ones, but the problem is that it is only politics and its interminable reconciliation of contending aspirations that gives you a world.
Burning Man isn’t the world, it’s a festival.
And festivals don’t scale globally.
This is not an expression of curmudgeonly hostility for the festive as such, nor is it an expression of resignation that should mobilize the can-do spirit of various technophilianarchic troopers of the temperamental left or the temperamental right.
Festivals are festivals to an important extent precisely because they are not the world. It is not a matter of indifference to me that whenever they hanker after the status of polis festivals soon enough will decline into sewers (and this tends to be true literally as well as figuratively).
Festivals want a world, even as they take their momentary measure of distance from the world on which they depend. It is never only those who join up or join in to public practices who constitute the stakeholders in those practices. It is never true that even the best most beneficent efforts fail to exact their costs and impose their risks. It does not denigrate pleasure to note that pleasure is not the same thing as political legitimacy and that political legitimacy is indispensable to freedom. It does not denigrate voluntary participation to note that voluntary participation is not the same thing as democracy and that democracy has come to be indispensable to freedom. It does not denigrate collaboration to note that neither is collaboration yet the same thing as sharing the world with peers who differ ineradicably from us in their capacities, their knowledges, and their ends.
Collaboration, contestation, consent are public scenes that depend on a ritual artifice invigorated, consolidated, and transformed through our own recourse to it, articulated through moral and ethical norms, laws backed by legitimate force, contingent protocols for the exchange of information, services, and goods, and any number of architectural constraints. There is nothing “natural” or “spontaneous” about politics, and certainly not democratic politics. Technology will not deliver us a more perfect union: For democracies, the formation, ordination, and establishment of that more perfect unoin is a lot that falls inescapably and interminably to “we the people,” ourselves.”