Our last excerpt from Steve Talbott’s new and strongly recommended book.

There is nothing in the online world that can stand in for place.

When, a couple of years ago, a Florida man was arrested for routing children to pornography sites on a large scale, a U.S. attorney said, “Few of us could imagine there was someone out there in cyberspace, essentially reaching out by hand to take children to the seediest corners of the Internet.” On the contrary, this is exactly what was imagined by every Net commentator worth his sociology degree in the early 90s – except that no one framed it in terms of children and seedy corners. Rather, they kept it at a clean, safe, abstract level: “the entire world at your and my fingertips.” But, of course, that meant children’s fingertips, too. How reluctant we were to connect the dots!

Real places with their social institutions allow the embodiment of endlessly varying values in different contexts – and do so in a way that encourages people to take up their position along these “value gradients” wherever they feel most comfortable. Yet all these different places can
coexist as part of a larger society – a coexistence that begins with the underlying fact that the land itself is, in the end, one land, and that attempts to compromise this integrity lead to ecological calamity. Issues such as deforestation and global warming unite Amazonian Indian and Arctic Inuit in a single community of interest, even as the different character of the land also calls forth radically different local cultures.

In a real landscape, friction must be overcome in getting from here to there. This helps to explain how “here” can preserve its own character, different from “there.” Because exchange between the two places requires work and a certain dissipation of energy, the one place cannot so easily overwhelm the other.

Real places become safe and healthy by virtue of an infinite material complexity of the right sort. On the Internet, by contrast, we are forced to protect children through clever technical devices whereby we may indeed contrive “streets” and “homes” and “parks.” But within this technical sphere, every clever device functions primarily to call forth a cleverer
counter-device. Whereas real streets, neighbors, and watchful eyes do not disappear when a few bits are twiddled, Internet real estate is instantly movable facade.

(Abridged from “The Internet: Reflections on Our Present Discontents”, chapter 21 in Devices of the Soul by Steve Talbott.)