Geert Lovink:

How can we raise, and organize a new generation of technology-aware research that have the guts, and the creativity, to design a comprehensive field of critical concepts that can be implemented into code? We have to stop understanding the Internet, and start to shape it.

Geert Lovink has written a stimulating review of Jonathan Zittrain’s book on the Future of the Internet, which I have excerpted here. The first part of that critique argues that the open internet of the golden age is a foundational myth, as before 1993, it was pretty much closed to non-academics.

In the second part he goes deeper. First, by deploring the lack of attention for the mobile space, used by a larger majority of people, and hitherto almost completely closed.

Then in the third part, he concludes that the absense of that discussion in the book, is expressive of a certain optimistic techno-libertarianism, which always draws back from a direct critique of corporate enclosures.

1. Geert Lovink on Closed Cellspace:

“The mobile phone sphere needs to be opened up, literary hacked, un très grand projet compared to the Internet with its free software, in a state of public neglect. What we need is a broad movement that demands (and realizes) Open Access to Cellspace. However, it is the question if hackers and geeks, even if they would start a coordinated effort, would be able to open up cellspace in the way that they achieved to define the rules for cyberspace. Once, at the CCC Hackers conference in Berlin, in December 2005, I attended a lecture of a guy who attempted to hack the hardware/software of an ordinary Samsung mobile phone. I was deeply impressed about his knowledge. But he did not get anywhere. The closed, proprietary nature of just about anything inside that phone was impressive, as was the temporary nature of all components. All these phone types change their hard and soft component every few weeks (if not more often). This extreme instability is one of the reasons why it is so useless, in a way, to open up a model, as in no time there will be another (sub)version of that same device on the market with slightly different components. I would have expected Jonathan Zittrian to address these issues, and somehow transcend the very US obsession with Apple products. Who cares about iPhone and whether it can and cannot guarantee full access to the Internet? Apple has always had its proprietary strategies and is not known for it commitment to freedom in the Richard Stallman style.”

2. Geert Lovink on the limitations of the conservative techno-libertarian perspective:

“From a conservative techno-libertarian perspective mates of Joanthan Zittrain have criticized his proposal to start a ‘Manhattan Project’ to save the open Internet as being too centralized (see Adam Thierer). Like most Berkman scholars, Zittrian misses the ability for self-examination and has to operate within the rhetorical limits of American professional optimism (required for scholars that speak at Google headquarters like Zittrain). Within the code of these techno-libertarians is out of the question to criticize US-American companies, in particular when they are ‘cool’ (such as Google and all Web 2.0 firms). It is of course much easier, and in line with the White House, to criticize Iran and China. There is a structural unwillingness to take on the corporate world and this partial blindness results in Zittrain making somewhat naive propositions (even though I share a lot of his concerns). I do not believe in Thierer’s ‘hybridity’ proposal in which the consumer decides what devices and application he or she uses will be open or rather closed. In a way. this market-driven techno-realism already exists. Concerning new ideas Zittrain offers surprisingly little for a professor in Internet Governance. It is in fact amazing that he doesn’t mention ICANN and the domain name drama at all. Not that he needed to go into this rather large and complex field, but the least he could have done is list his own conclusions from the decade-long effort that is precisely trying to do what he demands (but then on the domain name level).

It would be worthwhile to deconstruct Zittrain’s good intentions, not from an evil-conspiratorial level but from the perspective of the NGO critique of organized good intentions and their disastrous consequences. The problem of a radical critique of the Berkman Center policies is that there is hardly any fundamental other position to start from. Even the most subversive, progressive hackers that I know, in the end, subscribe to the Berkman ideology, and are part of the larger liberal-libertarian current. In the end, everyone is against Internet censorship and favors open systems, no? It is hard to break this consensus culture, also from a social perspective, if one doesn’t go for total isolation and retreat into a hopeless maverick status.

The larger problematic here is the lack of counter-hegemonic projects that could function as an alternative to the quasi monopoly of Berkman. It’s unlikely to come from Latin-America. Europe or Asia then? The EU programs in this direction are all technocratic in nature and fail to understand the ideological-discursive importance that drives the development of Internet applications. As so often happens these days,there is no more (head)space for pure, negative criticism. The beginnings of a critique that is formulated here bounces back on the author, posing the question what is to be done on this side of the Atlantic in the form of concrete alternatives. The lack of a comprehensive analysis of techno-libertarianism as the default Internet ideology that rules from San Jose to Berlin, Nairobi and Bangalore is deeply felt here. The main reason why this research project has so far not taken off is the widely felt relunctance amongst (humanities) scholars and public intellectuals in general to take on the Internet as their project. Funding bodies worldwide, categorically refuse to fund fundamental humanities research that, like Zittrain, dares to look into the future. What we are left with are piles of PhDs that are condemned to remain unread as they merely map the impact the Internet on society–projects that are doomed to become history writing. How can we raise, and organize a new generation of technology-aware research that have the guts, and the creativity, to design a comprehensive field of critical concepts that can be implemented into code? We have to stop understanding the Internet, and start to shape it. That’s the real Zittrain challenge.”