Notes EM

Tim Wu on my book: 

Too much assault and battery creates a more serious problem: wrongful appropriation, as Morozov tends to borrow heavily, without attribution, from those he attacks. His critique of Google and other firms engaged in “algorithmic gatekeeping”is basically taken from Lessig’s first book, “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” in which Lessig argued that technology is necessarily ideological and that choices embodied in code, unlike law, are dangerously insulated from political debate. Morozov presents these ideas as his own and, instead of crediting Lessig, bludgeons him repeatedly. Similarly, Morozov warns readers of the dangers of excessively perfect technologies as if Jonathan Zittrain hadn’t been saying the same thing for the past 10 years. His failure to credit his targets gives the misimpression that Morozov figured it all out himself and that everyone else is an idiot.

What my book actually says: 

Alas, Internet-centrism prevents us from grasping many of these issues as clearly as we must. To their credit, Larry Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain have written extensively about digital preemption (and Lessig even touched on the future of civil disobedience). However, both of them, enthralled with the epochalist proclamations of Internet-centrism, seem to operate under the false assumption that digital preemption is mostly a new phenomenon that owes its existence to “the Internet,” e-books, and MP3 files. Code is law—but so are turnstiles. Lessig does note that buildings and architecture can and do regulate, but he makes little effort to explain whether the possible shift to code-based regulation is the product of unique contemporary circumstances or merely the continuation of various long-term trends in criminological thinking. 

As Daniel Rosenthal notes in discussing the work of both Lessig and Zittrain, “Academics have sometimes portrayed digital preemption as an unfamiliar and novel prospect… In truth, digital preemption is less of a revolution than an extension of existing regulatory techniques.” In Zittrain’s case, his fascination with “the Internet” and its values of “openness” and “generativity,” as well as his belief that “the Internet” has important lessons to teach us, generates the kind of totalizing discourse that refuses to see that some attempts to work in the technological register might indeed be legitimate and do not necessarily lead to moral depravity.

Oh I completely forgot that my book had an even more damning section on Tim Wu than the one I posted a few hours ago. So here it is for your amusement: 

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Openness and Its Messiahs

Perhaps some of the worst problems of information reductionism could be avoided if only the solutionists’ transparency vocabulary didn’t brim with ambiguous terms. Appeals for “transparency” no longer look problematic once solutionists start to talk about “openness.” It’s bad enough that our cultural and intellectual heritage makes us view those concepts as worth pursuing in their own right. Solutionists—especially those of the geek persuasion—regularly develop and consume their own myths about how “openness” contributes to progress and success, which only adds to the confusion.

It might be tempting to view this openness fetish as originating in communities promoting open-source software. But according to Chris Kelty, the UCLA anthropologist who studies geek cultures, there is not much agreement about the value of openness—about whether it’s worth pursuing as its own end or only instrumental to some higher goods—even in geek circles. As Kelty points out, “Open tends toward obfuscation. Everyone claims to be open, everyone has something to share, everyone agrees that being open is the obvious thing to do—after all, openness is the other half of ‘open source’—but for all its obviousness, being ‘open’ is perhaps the most complex component of Free Software.” Thus, as we have already noticed with the transparency rhetoric, it is never quite clear whether being open is a means or an end.  

As a result, notes Kelty, there is no geek consensus on the merits of openness at all. “Is openness good in itself, or is openness a means to achieve something else—and if so what? Who wants to achieve openness, and for what purpose? Is openness a goal? Or is it a means by which a different goal—say, ‘interoperability’ or ‘integration’—is achieved? Whose goals are these, and who sets them? Are the goals of corporations different from or at odds with the goals of university researchers or government officials?” So, if Kelty is to be believed, the community that has done the most to infuse technology debates with respect for “openness” is itself torn about its merits and meanings.

Our Internet debates, in contrast, tend to be dominated by a form of openness fundamentalism, whereby “openness” is seen as a fail-safe solution to virtually any problem. Instead of debating how openness may be fostering or harming innovation, promoting or demoting justice, facilitating or complicating deliberation—the kinds of debates we are likely to have about the uses of openness in the messy world that we live in—“openness” in networks and technological systems is presumed to be always good and its opposite—it’s quite telling that we can’t quite define what that is—always bad.

This Manichean tendency to view every technological issue in open-versus-closed terms leads to almost religious celebration of companies that embrace openness for tactical purposes and use it to their own advantage. The tactic here is once again very similar to what Elizabeth Eisenstein did with attributing qualities like fixity to “print culture.” Openness is presumed to be an “Internet” value, so whenever it can be read into the actions of “Internet ambassadors”—the Googles and Facebooks of this world—it’s invoked to explain their success. Then, this success is itself invoked to prove that “openness” is indeed an Internet value. This explains why our Internet theorists are never wrong.

Take Tim Wu, who celebrates Google, an arch-open company in his view, as if it were a divine creature. In The Master Switch, Wu writes that Google’s birth was “audacious” and its ideas are “vaguely messianic.” Its founders—perhaps like Jesus?—“style themselves the challengers to the existing order, to the most basic assumptions about the proper organization of information, the nature of property, the duties of the American corporation, and even the purpose of life.” Google represents nothing less than the “utopia of openness,” which aims to “plant the flag of openness deep in the heart of the telephone territory” and never dares to “resist or subdue the Internet’s essential structure” (remember: resistance is futile; the network, with its “essential structure” and “architecture,” is not going away). It is “the greatest corporate champion of openness,” the leader of the “openness movement,” and “the incarnation of the Internet gospel of openness.” Wu’s Google is also one of the “apostles of openness”—very much unlike Steve Jobs, the “apostle of perfectibility”; former FCC chairman Reed Hundt, who is a “competition apostle”; and former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin, who is “an apostle par excellence of [the] control model.”

Gospel, messiah, apostle, incarnation—Wu writes as if he had some kind of spiritual awakening while visiting Google’s temple in the holy city of Mountain View. Oddly enough, he never mentions that he himself has been an (unpaid) adviser for Google and helped greatly to shape its early strategy on, well, “openness.” (In 2007 Chris Sacca, then head of special initiatives at Google, told Businessweek, “Tim helped us catalyze a strategy… He’s a singular force in this space. You’re just seeing the start of what he’s going to accomplish.”) Such disclosures make it difficult at times to tell whether Wu is praising Google’s genius or his own.

Wu’s effervescent analysis portrays Google’s predilection for openness as natural and inevitable; its executives simply saw the structure of the network and couldn’t resist it. It’s the print debate all over again, with Google’s “openness” being just a by-product of “the Internet’s essential structure,” much like fixity, in Elizabeth Eisenstein’s account, was just a manifestation of some eternal quality of print. That Google may have played a role in shaping or maintaining this very structure of “the Internet,” positioning it as “essential” rather than “contingent,” that it might have spent a lot of marketing and think tank money to be seen as an “evangelist of openness,” that it surrounded itself with an army of “openness” evangelists—none of this enters Wu’s analysis (but then, he’s one of the evangelists in question).

Compare Wu’s messianic pronouncements with a very different kind of empirical analysis that makes no a priori assumptions about Google’s divine status in the pantheon of openness gods and instead tries to explain what that status does for Google and how it has been achieved. Kimberley Spreeuwenberg and Thomas Poell, two Dutch academics, conducted a detailed study of how Google has created, managed, and positioned the work done within the Open Handset Alliance—a consortium of eighty-four companies that develop software and hardware for Google’s Android platform. Google and its executives never miss a chance to brag that their approach to mobile platforms, unlike that of Apple, is dominated by “openness.”

Yet, as the Dutch study points out, “open” in Open Handset Alliance might be something of a misnomer, for “it is highly questionable whether Android, in the light of the ideals of open source, can in fact be characterized as an ‘open source project.’” Thus, the authors note, “while Android was publicly introduced as a project aimed at preventing any ‘industry player to restrict or control the innovations of any other,’ within the Android ecology Google clearly has control over the other involved actors.”

This control is achieved through tricky software licenses and restrictive technological specifications for how software and hardware should be designed, all of them wrapped in the stale language of “compatibility.” Furthermore, leaked communication between Google and one of the hardware partners in the Open Handset Alliance illustrated that Google can exercise control over its partners in a nominally “open” ecosystem by tinkering with various carrots and sticks, for instance, by allowing well-behaving partners to acquire certain features ahead of the competition or threatening to disable certain features for partners that do not behave.

Likewise, since Google’s interest in expanding into mobile handsets is partly driven by its desire to remain a powerful player in advertising, the company has no strategic interest in following the “open-source” playbook down to the last rule. Instead, it picks the rules it wants to follow based on its own corporate strategy (e.g., it won’t let independent developers code the operating system itself, as this might weaken its control over development and, indirectly, its utility for harvesting user data—which would make achieving its advertising goals much harder).

This is not unexpected, but instead of celebrating what Google does for openness, it’s important to investigate what openness does for Google. As one perceptive observer noted of Google, “‘Openness’ and ‘connectedness’ are not the principles on which it is organized so much as the products that it sells.” Why this market for openness and connectedness exists, how it relates to other tenets of Internet-centrism, and how this market is manipulated: all of these are not the kinds of questions one is likely to ask when the occurrence of “openness” on “the Internet” is presumed to be natural and unproblematic. To use the dreadful language of social theory, ideas like “openness” and “the Internet” are constructed—and mutually co-constructed at that—and they do not drop down on us from the sky. Unless we are prepared to trace how such construction happens, not only will we write bad history of technology, but we will end up with extremely confused policy making that treats contingent and fluid phenomena (which, of course, might be worth defending) as permanent and natural fixtures of the environment.

Thus, while Internet-centrists assume that Google is “open” by default, their opponents—let’s call them Internet realists—assume that Google does a lot of work to look “open” and investigate what that work involves. While Internet-centrists tend to be populist and unempirical, Internet realists start with no assumptions about the intrinsic values of “openness” and “transparency”—let alone their inherent presence in digital networks—and pay particular attention to how these notions are involved and manifested in particular debates and technologies. While Internet-centrists believe that “openness” is good in itself, Internet realists investigate what the rhetoric of “openness” does for governments and companies—and what they do for it.

As a follow-up to the previous post - on Tim Wu - I’ve also decided to post another long section from the book - this time on Kevin Kelly. (Wu’s own thoughts on Kelly are here; my even longer review of Kelly’s “What Technology Wants” can be found here). See just what an “ambitious work of tech philosophy” - as Wu calls it in his review -  Kelly’s book is!

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Against Technological Defeatism

Viewed in the abstract, it may seem that the tides of digital preemption, situational crime prevention, and reputation-based controls are unstoppable and irreversible. Information is everywhere, and it’s getting cheaper. All of us are carrying mobile phones. Technology seems to be moving in accordance with its own law—Moore’s law—and we, the humans, can only conform and tinker with our laws to meet technology’s demands.

This sentiment pervades our public debate about technology. Thus, the Wall Street Journal ’s Gordon Crovitz writes that “whatever the mix of good and bad, technology only advances and cannot be put back.” The New York Times’s Nick Bilton, writing of multitasking, notes that “whether it’s good for society or bad … is somewhat irrelevant at this point.” Parag and Ayesha Khanna argue in Hybrid Reality that “the flow of technology is at most slowed by reluctant governments, but it is more accurate to say that technology simply evades or ignores them in search of willing receivers.” All these commentators adopt the stance of what I call “digital defeatism,” which—by arguing that this amorphous and autonomous creature called “Technology” with a capital T has its own agenda—tends to acknowledge implicitly or explicitly that there’s little we humans can do about it.

This view of technology as an autonomous force has its own rather long intellectual pedigree; in 1978 Langdon Winner offered perhaps the best summary in his Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of- Control as a Theme in Political Thought. This view has been debunked hundreds of times as a lazy, unempirical approach to studying technological change, and yet it has never really left the popular discourse about technology. It has recently made a forceful appearance in Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, and Kelly’s thought is not a bad place to observe technological defeatism up close, if only because he is a Silicon Valley maven and the first executive editor of Wired. Besides, very diverse thinkers about “the Internet”—from Tim Wu to Steven Johnson—cite Kelly’s What Technology Wants as an influence. Thus, it won’t be such a great stretch to say that Kelly’s theories do provide the intellectual grounds on which Internet-centrism grows and flourishes.

The defining feature of Kelly’s thought is its explicit denial of its own defeatism. Kelly, using a fancy word, “technium,” as a stand-in for “Technology” with a capital T, reassures his readers that “the technium wants what we design it to want and what we try to direct it to do.” This sounds like a rather uplifting, humanist message—but the very next sentence shatters it: “But in addition to those drives, the technium has its own wants. It wants to sort itself out, to self-assemble into hierarchical levels, just as most large, deeply interconnected systems do. The technium also wants what every living system wants: to perpetuate itself, to keep itself going. And as it grows, those inherent wants are gaining in complexity and force.”

Kelly offers the best of all possible worlds: technology is both what we make it of it and an autonomous force with its own wants and desires and largely independent of humans. Kelly’s thought is full of such doublespeak, by which we are simultaneously promised control over technology and assured that we need no such control because it’s too late. Thus, he can write that “our concern should not be about whether to embrace [technology]. We are beyond embrace; we are already symbiotic with it,” only to follow with “and most of the time, after we’ve weighed downsides and upsides in the balance of our experience, we find that technology offers a greater benefit, but not by much. In other words, we freely choose to embrace it—and pay the price.” So we get both mysticism—we are symbiotic with technology; we’ve already embraced it!—and radical empowerment—whenever we embrace technology, it’s because we want to!—which is a rather odd combination.  

But, promises Kelly, none of this actually matters, because technology wants the same things as evolution, for technology is just evolution by other means. Thus, he notes that “with minor differences, the evolution of the technium—the organism of ideas—mimics the evolution of genetic organisms.” Technology is nature, and nature is technology; resistance is futile—who would want to challenge nature? With this simple insight, Kelly develops a whole theory that can explain literally every development—from malware like Stuxnet to Google glasses—by claiming that this is just what technology wants.

All we have to do is to develop the right listening tools—and the rest will follow. Hence, notes Kelly, “only by listening to technology’s story, divining its tendencies and biases, and tracing its current direction can we hope to solve our personal puzzles.” Elsewhere, he writes, “We can choose to modify our legal and political and economic assumptions to meet the ordained [technological] trajectories ahead. But we cannot escape from them.” So, what he is saying here is this: technology has a story to tell; we should listen to it and modify our political and economic assumptions accordingly.

But why, one might ask, should we modify our political and economic assumptions if we can instead shape those trajectories? What if they are not ordained? Why alter our conception of privacy if we can regulate Facebook and Google? Why accept the proliferation of measures inspired by situational crime prevention and digital preemption everywhere if we can instead limit them only to instances in which they do not undermine dissent and deliberation? And how far should we go in modifying our assumptions? What if the voice of technology that Kelly pretends to hear is actually the marketing speak of Silicon Valley’s public relations departments? Kelly doesn’t bother with such questions; instead, he succumbs to the pro-innovation bias and declares that no meme should ever go to waste: “The first response to a new idea should be to immediately try it out. And to keep trying it out, and testing it, as long as it exists.” Do you hear that, the land mine?

Concerns over distribution never appear in Kelly’s analysis. Instead of discussing who should get to play the proverbial Aristotelian flute—the rich? the talented? the random?—Kelly imagines that technology will simply produce enough flutes so that questions of distribution will themselves become obsolete. Like Peter Diamandis, Kelly depicts a world in which technology will guarantee abundance, and abundance will make conflicts over resources unnecessary. This seems a rather shallow reading of human nature, for when everyone has a flute, some people will certainly want two, if only to stand out from their neighbors. Abundance in the absence of robust political institutions means little.

What’s most disturbing about Kelly’s ideas—and here he’s quite representative of many other technology pundits—is that he thinks beyond local communities and even nation-states. His playing field is the whole of humanity, the entire cosmos. It’s a philosophy best described as macroscopism: everything is analyzed based on how well it fulfills the needs of humanity as a whole. Thus, local communities that choose to restrict certain technologies or prohibit them outright are portrayed as essentially stealing something from humanity. By the same logic, Europeans are holding back possibilities for all of us because they regulate genetically modified food or have tougher environmental standards. It’s one of those cases in which the vacuity of rhetoric surrounding global justice empties existing local practices of any meaning and space for maneuver.

This is most pronounced in Kelly’s discussion of the Amish and their notoriously limited—some might say well-thought-out—use of technology. What bothers Kelly about the Amish is that, by refusing to use certain technologies, they are actually slowing down innovation everywhere: “By constraining the suite of acceptable occupations and narrowing education, the Amish are holding back possibilities not just for their children but indirectly for all.” The idea never occurs to Kelly that political communities might be entitled to self-determination and that, as long as they arrive at some restrictions on technology in a democratic fashion—alas, this is not always the case with the Amish—it might actually be good for humanity. Instead of criticizing the undemocratic means, he is only concerned with the ends.

Likewise, when discussing restrictions on technology, Kelly views all of them as ineffective, even harmful. “If we take a global view of technology, prohibition seems very ephemeral. While an item may be banned in one place, it will thrive in another.” He continues, “In a global marketplace, nothing is eliminated. Where a technology is banned locally, it slips away to pool somewhere else on the globe.” But why should we take a global view of technology when we live in a world where technology is regulated by local communities? A certain technology might disappear in one place but appear in another because, in the former case, the community deemed it unacceptable and was powerful enough to enforce the ban, while in the latter case, the community either embraced the technology of its own will or was simply to weak or corrupt to resist the marketing talk of whoever came pitching.

The problem with Kelly’s thought is that, while nominally about technology, it’s actually deeply political; what’s worse, it traffics in rather obnoxious politics. No one liked the idea that technology is just an extension of nature more than the Nazis (well, at least before the possibility of defeat forced them into a more pragmatic mode). Here is Kelly on nature and technology: “Technology’s dominance ultimately stems … from its origin in the same self-organization that brought galaxies, planets, life, and minds into existence.” Or consider this passage: “We tend to isolate manufactured technology from nature, even to the point of thinking of it as anti-nature, only because it has grown to rival the impact and power of its home. But in its origins and fundamentals, a tool is as natural as our life.” Now compare Kelly’s proclamations with philosophizing by the Nazi technology functionary Fritz Todt: “It would be paradoxical if the works of technology stood in contradiction to nature in their outward expression since the real essence of technology is a consequence of the laws of nature… The works of technology must be erected in harmony with nature; they may not be permitted to come into conflict with nature as thoughtless, egotistical measures.” The Nazis heard the voice of technology: it informed them about gas chambers.

Likewise, the laissez-faire part of Kelly’s thought comes directly from Ayn Rand, even though he doesn’t acknowledge the connection.

Rand’s name rarely comes up in the context of technology theory, but she did write one essay, “The New Anti-Industrial Revolution,” that addressed the subject of technology regulation head-on. The crux of Rand’s argument can be boiled down to one pithy saying: “A ‘restricted’ technology is the equivalent of a censored mind.” Thus, Rand writes, in the best tradition of macroscopism, that “restrictions [on technology] mean the attempt to regulate the unknown, to limit the unborn, to set rules for the undiscovered.” Because we never know what new innovation a technology regulation might thwart, we should never attempt it in the first place. “Who can predict when, where or how a given bit of information will strike an active mind and what it will produce?” wonders Rand before warning that the “ecological crusade” would rid us of our toothbrushes, and “computers programmed by a bunch of hippies” (she actually wrote that—in 1971!) would retard human progress. By this logic, societies should not restrict the use of biological weapons or asbestos because we don’t know what good might come of them.

To support the idea that technologies—and now “the Internet”—develop in accordance with their own rules, Kelly and other pundits usually invoke Moore’s law. For Kelly, “the curve [behind Moore’s law] is one way the technium speaks to us.” The idea that Moore’s law is akin to a natural law is widespread in Silicon Valley—it’s one of the original myths of Ray Kurzweil’s singularity movement—and it has long spread beyond the technology industry, frequently invoked to justify some course of action.

There are few empirically rigorous studies of Moore’s law, but Finnish innovation scholar Ilkka Tuomi has done perhaps the most impressive work, digging up industry data, calculating actual growth rates, and tracking various expressions and references to Moore’s law in the media. Tuomi’s conclusion? “Strictly speaking there is no such Law. Most discussions that quote Moore’s Law are historically inaccurate and extend its scope far beyond available empirical evidence,” he writes. Furthermore, notes Tuomi, “sociologically Moore’s Law is a fascinating case of how myths are manufactured in the modern society and how such myths rapidly propagate into scientific articles, speeches of leading industrialists, and government policy reports around the world.”

In its original 1965 formulation by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, the law stated that the number of components on chips with the smallest manufacturing costs per component would double roughly every twelve months. Ten years later Moore significantly revised his estimates, updating the growth rate to twenty-four months. But he also changed what was being measured. Thus, writes Tuomi, while still counting the number of components on semiconductor chips, Moore now no longer focused on optimal-cost circuits but rather mapped the evolution of the maximum complexity of existing chips. In 1979 he revised the law yet again. The industry, in the meantime, took his law to mean whatever it wanted, even embracing a different time estimate of eighteen months. As most media reports will attest, many still believe that eighteen months is what Moore said—even Intel’s site used to claim this—but Moore never said any such thing, and he is usually the first to point it out (“I never said eighteen months. I said one year and then two years.”).

By analyzing the actual growth rates, Tuomi found that while the semiconductor industry was experiencing significant growth, it was anything but neat and exponential. The growth in the 1970s exhibited different patterns from that in the 1980s; growth patterns in the 1990s differed again. There was even more diversity across individual microprocessors. To question Moore’s law, then, is not to deny that important changes have happened over the last five decades but only to see how well those changes fit a singular pattern that a “law” predicts. As Tuomi points out, Moore’s law has always been about the future, not about the past; historical accuracy has never really bothered the semiconductor industry.

One intriguing interpretation of Tuomi’s work is that the semiconductor industry greatly benefited from the rhetoric surrounding Moore’s law, for it promised ever-cheaper semiconductors and helped ease concerns about where they would actually be used, thus boosting the initially weak demand for the industry’s products. In retrospect, this may have been for the better. “The industry has been continuously falling forward, hoping that Moore’s Law will hold, economically save the day, and justify the belief in technical progress,” notes Tuomi. “Instead of filling a market need, the semiconductor industry has actively and aggressively created markets.” But we shouldn’t mistake the clever marketing and rhetorical tricks of the semiconductor and computer industries for divine laws that inform us about the future.

A concept like Moore’s law doesn’t just fall from the sky; nor does it stay around for so long simply because of its accuracy (which, at any rate, isn’t great). Instead of postulating that technology speaks to us through Moore’s law, why not study who else—perhaps Intel?—might be doing the talking. That this “what technology wants” kind of discourse allows technology companies to present their business strategies as a natural unfolding of history is not something we should treat lightly. Technology wants nothing—and neither does “the Internet.”

Following Tim Wu’s review of my book in The Washington Post, I thought it would be fun to post the long section from the book where I’m critiquing Wu. No wonder he sounds so annoyed: the empire of bullshit that is “the Internet” is slowly beginning to crumble. The section is called “Recycle the Cycle” (a reference to Wu’s “cycle” theory - which, surprisingly, I don’t find very convincing). 

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Recycle the Cycle

If Eisenstein’s print culture is an example of how clumsily history can be appropriated to frame the present debate about “the Internet,” the traffic occasionally goes in the other direction as well—as in when our Internet commentators start with contemporary anxieties and travel back in history to show how many of the modern debates associated with “the Internet” are themselves just a subset of much greater, longer debates about networks, information, and technology. There is nothing wrong with their mission per se—some might even argue that this is what history is for—but most such accounts are peculiar in that, in their quest to tell a certain story about “the Internet,” they misrepresent and badly mangle the past, leaving us with an impoverished reading of history and a confused game plan for the future.

This should make us pause to ponder if Internet-centrism—whatever its own origins in bad history—might be nudging us to rewrite the history of other, pre-Internet periods with one simple purpose: to establish a coherent teleological account of how all other technologies paved the way for “the Internet” and how their own governance failed to embrace “Internet values” and may have delayed the arrival of this “network of all networks.” This is the ideology of Internet-centrism at its purest: it suggests what kinds of questions we could and should be asking of the past. As an ideology, it has no need to dictate the answers, for we already know what we need to find in order to complete the grand narrative of “the Internet” itself.

A troubling example of what Internet-centrism does to history—in terms of both mangling the content and giving a second life to arcane, long-forgotten methodologies—can be found in Tim Wu’s much-acclaimed The Master Switch. Wu, a legal scholar who coined the term “net neutrality,” is a leading contributor to unfolding debates about “the Internet”; The Master Switch is his attempt to explore the history of other technologies—the telegraph, telephone, radio, cinema, television—and illuminate what those technologies can tell us about our current predicaments. This sounds like a noble mission, but anyone undertaking it should be aware of the immense difficulty of engaging with the past on its own terms. At worst, an attempt to illuminate the present by studying the past can turn into a fishing expedition, where the past becomes just a giant toxic aquarium, storing enough factoids and exotic characters to buttress any interpretation of virtually any contemporary trend or phenomenon.

Wu’s argument in The Master Switch goes like this: There’s something peculiar about information industries, for they tend to be dominated (and intellectually ravaged) by “information emperors”—Steve Jobs–like personalities who strive for absolute control. The dictatorial rule of such emperors and several structural qualities of their information empires usually lead to what Wu calls “the Cycle,” which is the inevitable closing of the once open and innovative industries. It happens either because the information emperors are clever but ruthless businessmen or because they co-opt the government into giving them protection from competition. This is how we got Hollywood’s studio system, which exercised unprecedented control over what films to make and what issues to censor; a closed telephone network, where AT&T banned users from plugging in their own devices, thereby potentially delaying the advent of “the Internet”; and, more recently, Apple’s world of apps, in which a politburo sitting somewhere in Cupertino reviews and approves the apps it likes and deletes those it doesn’t.

Wu’s proposed solution to this problem is to prevent companies in the information business from integrating vertically—that is, to prohibit companies that create information from owning or creating infrastructure for its dissemination and vice versa. But the government’s involvement would end there: Wu’s reading of history suggests that government involvement has been mostly detrimental to the growth of information industries. His ideal is to keep both big government and big business out of the information industries; this, according to Wu, is how all successful information industries have developed, including “the Internet,” and this is how it should be in the future. Amen.

This might seem like an appealing and elegant argument, but in reality it’s just an attempt to come up with one of those “theories of everything.” In this instance, “everything” is to be explained by a fixed set of concerns—in Wu’s case, concerns over openness and innovation—that have come to dominate our thinking about “the Internet.” First of all, Wu conveniently leaves aside those information industries—like book publishing—in which no dominant information emperor has emerged. The Cycle doesn’t go there; it’s too crowded. Curiously, one such emperor might emerge very soon—his name is Jeff Bezos, and he runs a small start-up called Amazon—but Wu himself seems to be enamored of Amazon and the price efficiencies it brings. Second, by limiting his history only to America—and why would “the Cycle,” if it were real, unfold in America only?—he misses many foreign cases in which information emperors have done much good.

Wasn’t André Malraux, France’s powerful minister of cultural affairs under Charles de Gaulle and the godfather of New Wave cinema, one such emperor, albeit perhaps of a public-service variety? Zooming in on Malraux’s career would reveal that the success of the French film industry in the 1960s was the direct consequence of the government’s eagerness to subsidize risky low-budget films and support maisons de la culture, where such films could be shown. It’s not a story of market-led innovation; quite the opposite. Information emperors don’t have to be seen as evil (perhaps they don’t have to be seen at all; Internet-centrism, in Wu’s hands, has miraculously resuscitated the much discredited “great-man-of-history” style of narrating the past). Likewise, governments, despite the many conspiratorial suspicions that geeks harbor about them, can be powerful and benevolent players in the information industry.

One doesn’t have to travel to France to see that; in fact, a more comprehensive look at the history of information empires in America reveals as much. As Paul Starr has shown in his devastating review of The Master Switch in the American Prospect, even a cursory look at the history of the post office—a communications network created by the government to foster free expression—is enough to disprove many of Wu’s theories. The post office was conceived of as a monopoly, and it’s been extremely successful in its mission. According to Starr, “The government didn’t invite rival postal firms to compete; in fact, it created a monopoly. That monopoly, however, was conducive to free expression because of the policies Congress adopted, which subsidized the circulation of newspapers irrespective of their viewpoint and spread postal service throughout the country.” But on “the Internet,” no one likes monopolies—they smack of Microsoft and IBM—so this chapter of telecommunications history simply gets thrown overboard. Internet-centrism tolerates no competing hypotheses.

As Starr points out, had the US government followed Wu’s dictum that “government’s only proper role is as a check on private power, never as an aid to it,” it “would not have created the Post Office or fostered the rapid development of newspapers, and American democracy would have suffered. More recently, the United States would not have developed the Internet or public broadcasting”—both of which required massive public financing. Such strong antigovernment sentiment—that it’s always a parasite on innovation—is a recurring feature of the geek mentality, which is partly responsible for the disgust many geeks feel toward politics. As Starr notes, “Government policy, in Wu’s distorted recounting, is mostly a record of regulatory capture and craven mistakes that Americans should be ashamed of—even though, strangely enough, the United States has for much of its history been a leader in communications, partly because of the constructive role government has played.” Is it really that surprising, then, that a recent column on the technology site Info World was titled “Why Politicians Should Never Make Laws about Technology”? If geeks learn their history from Tim Wu, this sentiment follows quite naturally.

Methodologically, Wu’s treatment of information industries is very close to Eisenstein’s treatment of print culture: he starts by simply projecting the qualities he associates with “the Internet” back into the past and assuming that the industries and technologies he studies have a nature, a fixed set of qualities and propensities, then proceeds to celebrate selectively those examples that support those qualities and discard those that don’t. So Wu starts with the hunch that the openness of “the Internet” is under threat, travels back in history to find trends that suggest all information industries have experienced similar pressures, and returns to the present to announce that history reveals that openness is indeed under threat on “the Internet.”

That this is the very premise on which he starts his intellectual journey doesn’t much matter in the end because such history has a very clear activist bend; the goal is not to understand the history of technology but to find enough historical arguments in order to—just like in Jonathan Zittrain’s case—make “the Internet” live forever. Such Internet-centrism would be bad in itself, but it is also exerting a very unhealthy influence on technology and media history, where everything that transpired before “the Internet” is now reexamined according to its benchmarks. Historical accounts inspired by Internet-centrism are simply bad history, even if they occasionally make for effective policy advocacy on issues like net neutrality. That Internet-centrism makes us blind to this reality is a reason to worry, not celebrate.

Let’s give credit where it is due: Google is not hiding its revolutionary ambitions. As its co-founder Larry Page put it in 2004, eventually its search function “will be included in people’s brains” so that “when you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information”.

Science fiction? The implant is a rhetorical flourish but Mr Page’s utopian project is not a distant dream. In reality, the implant does not have be connected to our brains. We carry it in our pockets – it’s called a smartphone.

So long as Google can interpret – and predict – our intentions, Mr Page’s vision of a continuous and frictionless information supply could be fulfilled. However, to realise this vision, Google needs a wealth of data about us. Knowing what we search for helps – but so does knowing about our movements, our surroundings, our daily routines and our favourite cat videos.

Some of this information has been collected through our browsers but in a messy, disaggregated form. Back in 1996, Google didn’t set out with a strategy for world domination. Its acquisition of services such as YouTube was driven by tactics more than strategy. While it was collecting a lot of data from its many services, from email to calendar, such data were kept in separate databases – which made the implant scenario hard to accomplish.

Thus, when last year Google announced its privacy policy, which would bring the data collected through its more than 60 online services under one roof, that move made sense. The obvious reason for doing so is to make individual user profiles even more appealing to advertisers: when Google tracks you it can predict what ads to serve you much better than when it tracks you only across one such service.

But there is another reason, of course – and it has to do with the Grand Implant Agenda: the more Google knows about us, the easier it can make predictions about what we want – or will want in the near future. Google Now, the company’s latest offering, is meant to do just that: by tracking our every email, appointment and social networking activity, it can predict where we need to be, when, and with whom. Perhaps, it might even order a car to drive us there – the whole point is to relieve us of active decision-making. The implant future is already here – it’s just not evenly resisted.

This week, data protection authorities from six European countries showed some such resistance when they announced an effort to investigate if Google’s policy violates their national privacy laws. This announcement follows several months of consultation – preceded by a letter that EU data regulators sent to Mr Page in October – which yielded little response from Google. The letter urged the company to disclose how it processes personal data in each service and to clarify why and how it combines data that come from its multiple services.

Google believes it has met all the formal requirements on announcing the policy back in 2012. Under the current legal regime, Google, even if fined, doesn’t stand to lose much from these investigations. However, if the recent proposal to create a new single EU data regulator that can fine companies up to 2 per cent of their global turnover goes through, it might present Google with a bill as high as $1bn, if any breaches were found. Even if their investigations fail, European regulators must be applauded for embarking on a mission that their colleagues across the Atlantic wouldn’t even dare contemplate.

Europe, with its unflinching defence of privacy as a fundamental human value, cannot afford to act disjointedly – not at a time when the most powerful company in Silicon Valley is amassing a fleet of self-driving cars and releasing Google Glass, a line of smart glasses that some privacy advocates rightfully compare to stylish CCTV cameras that, for reasons unknown, we have accepted to wear on our heads.

Google’s intrusion into the physical world means that, were its privacy policy to stay in place and cover self-driving cars and Google Glass, our internet searches might be linked to our driving routes, while our favourite cat videos might be linked to the actual cats we see in the streets. It also means that everything that Google already knows about us based on our search, email and calendar would enable it to serve us ads linked to the actual physical products and establishments we encounter via Google Glass.

For many this may be a very enticing future. We can have it, but we must also find a way to know – in great detail, not just in summary form – what happens to our data once we share it with Google, and to retain some control over what it can track and for how long.

It would also help if one could drive through the neighbourhood in one of Google’s autonomous vehicles without having to log into Google Plus, the company’s social network, or any other Google service.

The European regulators are not planning to thwart Google’s agenda or nip innovation in the bud. This is an unflattering portrayal that might benefit Google’s lobbying efforts but has no bearing in reality. Quite the opposite: it is only by taking full stock of the revolutionary nature of Google’s agenda that we can get the company to act more responsibly towards its users.

Engineering, as the tech historian Ken Alder once put it, “operates on a simple, but radical assumption: that the present is nothing more than the raw material from which to construct a better future”. This might well be the case but not all raw materials are alike; if European history teaches us anything, it’s that some raw materials – and privacy is certainly among them – are worth cherishing and preserving in their own right, even if it means that the much-anticipated future will take somewhat more effort and energy to construct. A revolutionary future built on shaky foundations: to that, we must say a resounding No.

The writer is author of ‘To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism’

THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE IS HERE

I found this in the Letters section of the latest issue of The Times Literary Supplement (dated March 15, 2013). It doesn’t seem to be online: 

Binder families

Sir, - In David Winters’s review of The Demon of Writing by Ben Kafka he mentions a clerk who saved the actors of the Comédie-Française during the Terror, by soaking their death warrants in a tub and throwing the balls of pulp out of the window (February 15). In the 1960s I worked as a welfare case worker, along with several hundred others, in a vast office in downtown Chicago. Each of the families of my 300 clients existed, bureaucratically speaking, as a large binder filled with forms and written notes. When the families had been on welfare for several generations, the binders were equivalent to two or three large telephone books.

Overwhelmed with an avalanche of forms, telephone calls, clients waiting for hours downstairs to see me, home visits to the high-rise housing projects in which they lived, I was taught by the veteran case workers to simply go into the huge library where the binders were stored, alphabetically on endless shelves, and “accidentally” file binders out of place. Then I could innocently plead that I was unable to take any action on the case because I could not find the binder. Without the binder nothing in the status of the clients could change, their cheques would continue to arrive, and I could “miraculously” locate their binder if I needed to. Sadly, we were on the verge of the computer age, the information was beginning to appear on IBM punch cards, and the binders were soon to become obsolete, signalling the beginning of a far more ruthless era in which no clerk could make inconvenient facts disappear.

MICHAEL LIPSEY 75 San Marino Drive, San Rafael, California 94901.

I’m in the early stages of another book project and I need some help with basic research. (See this for a similar call about my previous book, “To Save Everything, Click Here.”  That call has worked out fine - the names of my four research assistants did make it into my Acknowledgements section!) 

Basically, you’ll be a good fit if 

* You can spare 10 hours a week or so on creating various “research dossiers” - those would mostly consist of all relevant articles (mostly published in the popular press/tech blogs) on a given subject. In the first week or two, you’d also spend a lot of time on Twitter compiling various user lists (will explain more once you start). 

* Occasionally, you’d also need to spend time hunting down academic articles and book reviews - ideally, I expect you to have access to things like JSTOR, Ebsco, etc but we can talk about it if you don’t. Ideally, you’d also have access to the archives of NYRB, LRB, New Yorker and a few other similar publications. 

I expect that most of the work will be done in April, May and June. July might be downtime and we might need to do some extra research work in August/September. Basically, we’ll know more as we progress, so you need to have some flexibility. Also, some weeks might require more work than others (e.g. 15 hours one week versus 5 another week). 

I’ll pay per hour. 

What I want from you when you apply is a) one-two page resume b) one paragraph summarizing your research experience and research interests. 

I hope to receive everything by March 25th and make up by mind by April 1st. I might want to chat to you on the phone or Skype before committing. (I’m looking for one-two people this time). Send your stuff to evgenymore@gmail.com

Henry Boettinger, vice-president of Michigan Bell, addressing a group of bankers in 1960:

“It is one of the clichés of our literature that automation is accounting for the phenomenon known as the second Industrial Revolution.”

Spotted in Cybernetics, Management Science, and Technology Policy: The Emergence of “Information Technology” as a Keyword, 1948-1985

Here goes: 

FEEDBACK: An unpoetic inexpressive word that shrieks for replacement. Correct use of the term would refer to eating your own vomit. ‘Positive feedback’ and ‘negative feedback’ would signify whether you like the vomit or not.

Found in “Cybernetics of Cybernetics“ 

Steven Johnson has flagged a few sentences in my review of his book, claiming that I misrepresent his views. Below you can see what he actually writes in the book - along with the exact language that I used to summarize his positions. I’ll grant it to Johnson: he’s inserted enough hedges into his text to claim that his arguments are not at all what these quotes purport to say. Fine - but I’m not sure that inconsistency is a quality to be prized in a serious thinker. So below is a breakdown of all of his complaints. 

***

Johnson in his own words: 

“To be a peer progressive, then, is to live with the conviction that Wikipedia is just the beginning, that we can learn from its success to build new systems that solve problems in education, governance, health, local communities, and countless other regions of human experience. This is why we are optimistic: because we know it can be done.”

My summary that prompted Johnson’s complaint:

“Projects such as Wikipedia are just another reminder that Internet logic is the correct way to run the world.” 

***

Johnson in his own words: 

“The Internet and the Web were built, and are maintained, by peer networks: dense, diverse, and distributed networks of open collaboration and exchange. And while it is certainly possible to use the Internet to strengthen your hierarchical organization, the Internet seems to have a bias toward peer networks, if only because it makes it so much easier to assemble them. We didn’t have Kickstarter or Wikipedia before the Web came along because the organizational costs of connecting all those people were prohibitive.”

My summary that prompted Johnson’s complaint: 

“Now that the costs have fallen, there are no good reasons for hierarchies to exist.” (where the “hierarchies” are projects like Britannica and the National Endowment for the Arts). 

***

My summary: 

“The same criticism applies to his treatment of the Internet. Had Johnson chosen to look closer at any of the projects he is celebrating, he would find plenty of centralization efforts at work.”

Johnson countering this with this line from the book: 

“Facebook is a private corporation; the social graph that Zuckerberg celebrates is a proprietary technology, an asset owned by the shareholders of Facebook itself. And as far as corporations go, Facebook is astonishingly top-heavy: the S-1 revealed that Zuckerberg personally controls 57 percent of Facebook’s voting stock, giving him control over the company’s destiny that far exceeds anything Bill Gates or Steve Jobs ever had. The cognitive dissonance could drown out a Sonic Youth concert: Facebook believes in peer-to-peer networks for the world, but within its own walls, the company prefers top-down control centralized in a charismatic leader.” 

my comment on the above quote: How Facebook is run is peripheral to arguments about “Internet logic” - the paragraph he quotes in defense refers explicitly to Facebook’s corporate structure, not its products.  

***

Johnson in his own words: 

“I was not alone in sensing a meaningful connection between the Seattle protesters and the decentralized peer networks of the digital age. Writing in The Nation at the time, Naomi Klein had observed, “What emerged on the streets of Seattle and Washington was an activist model that mirrors the organic, interlinked pathways of the Internet.” It seemed clear to some of us at that early stage that the model of information sharing that the Internet had popularized was too potent and protean not to spawn offline organizational structures that emulated its core qualities. Seattle seemed just a preview of coming attractions; as the Internet grew to become the dominant communications medium of our age, social movements would increasingly look like the Internet, even when they were chanting slogans in the middle of a city park.” 

My summary: 

“But even assuming that Johnson is right and the idea of the Internet does indeed inform how social movements form and operate these days, it is not immediately obvious why this is a model worth pursuing. Not everyone believes that Occupy Wall Street was a runaway success.”

***

Johnson in his own words: 

“The number of individuals and groups that are actively building new peer-progressive organizations is still small, but the values associated with the movement are shared much more widely throughout the population. Yet because the parties are institutions stuck in older ways of organizing the world, the electorate has to distort the square peg of its true political worldview to fit the round holes of the two parties…The parties have failed to adapt to emerging attitudes and beliefs within their constituencies…that is ultimately what being a peer progressive is all about: the belief that new institutions and new social architectures are now available to us in a way that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago, and that our continued progress as a society will come from our adopting those institutions in as many facets of modern life as possible.” 

my summary: 

” This anti-institutional bias is most visible in Johnson’s discussion of American politics. He sincerely believes that one way to improve it is to get rid of the hassle that comes with political parties, leaders, and other mediating institutions… Johnson believes that the old party system is bad simply because it is Internet-incompatible. “ 

***

As for the points about 311 and political philosophy, I address them in my TNR exchange with Johnson. Had he included these points into his TNR response, I’d have gladly addressed them there but, for some odd reason, he chose to publish them on this blog the day before our TNR exchange went up.