Tinkers, Tailors, Sellers, Spies

The case for cautious optimism about the Internet.

Jesse Walker from the December 2000 issue

The Internet is not the first innovation to provoke both fear and ecstasy. Rarely, however, have commentators moved with such ease from one posture to the other. Not since Stalin has a god so frequently failed.

Consider the case of Douglas Rushkoff, the much-cited author of Cyberia and Coercion. In 1994 he opined that, "as computer-networking technology gets into the hands of more cyberians, historical power centers are challenged....The hypnotic spell of years of television and its intense public relations is broken." These days he's somewhat less enthusiastic. "I don't use the web," he told the conspiracy zine Steamshovel Press earlier this year. "I don't like what's there. I know that almost every website you go to is working to push you towards the buy button somewhere. ...It's like walking through the mall."

In other words, Rushkoff has shifted from an overstated stance to a blind one. The Web I surf is filled with public diaries, private jokes, amateur movies, home-mixed music, eccentric zines, contentious forums, and other independent efforts. In territories like these, buy buttons are scarce. I quote Rushkoff not because his views are cogent, but because they're common: Where he goes, others are sure to follow. Or rather, given the man's talent for trend chasing: Where he goes, others are sure to have arrived.

Rushkoff's turn as a digital Whittaker Chambers may be genuine, but if so he's a rarity. Scratch a born-again Net skeptic, and chances are you'll find someone who never was that enthusiastic about the online world. More likely, his conversion is a convenient pose, adding the right touch of resigned realism to whatever it is he would have said about the Internet anyway.

For example: "Five years ago, there was tremendous enthusiasm for the emerging World Wide Web," the prominent media critic Norman Solomon wrote in his syndicated column last January. "Talk about the 'information superhighway' evoked images of freewheeling, wide-ranging exploration. The phrase suggested that the Web was primarily a resource for learning and communication. Today, according to the prevalent spin, the Web is best understood as a way to make and spend money." This, he explained, is part of the "steady commercialization of cyberspace." And not just commercialization, but consolidation: "Almost all of the Web's largest-volume sites are now owned by huge conglomerates. Even search-engine results are increasingly skewed, with priority placements greased by behind-the-scenes fees."

So half a decade ago, Solomon must have been agog at the Net's potential, right? Not quite. "It's pleasant to believe that the Internet will provide a free flow of information and opinion," he wrote in 1996. "The rhetoric makes plenty of egalitarian claims-but the emerging reality is something else." And what was that emerging reality? "From radio to television to modem, each new gizmo has arrived with inspiring potential-undermined by extreme disparities in people's access to economic resources and political clout. Now, billionaire Bill Gates and his collaborators are smiling as they pour big investments into the Internet and tie those projects to other mass-media endeavors."

So Solomon never was a Net booster, despite the impression his more recent column gives. Sharp readers could have picked this up from the column itself, with its odd notion that information superhighway was some sort of populist slogan. The highway metaphor was popular in corporate and government circles, but the cyberpunks of the day resented it fiercely. It was a sign, we were told, that the freewheeling days of the Net were over: What once was an organic, grassroots medium was now to be as monotonous as the Interstate.

This complaint, in fact, is one of the most consistent rhetorical themes in the history of the Net. Digital jackboots, statist or corporate, have always been lurking around the corner; the good times have always been almost over. So, for instance, when AOL and CompuServe took off, the cry went up that the days of online freedom were ending; we would soon be purely passive consumers, trapped in tightly controlled corporate environments. Yet AOL and CompuServe did not supplant the larger Net. They found that they had to provide access to it, and in some ways emulate it, or else lose their customers.

In 1995, when the U.S. privatized its portion of the Net backbone, lawyer-pundit Andrew Shapiro warned in The Nation that cyberspace might consequently lose its "vibrant public spaces," the online equivalents of parks and town squares, where "bothersome, in-your-face expression flourishes and is heard." To stave off that prospect, Shapiro called for "Congress and state and local governments to establish forums in cyberspace dedicated explicitly to public discourse." Mixing crises, he added: "More and more, travelers in cyberspace are using commercial on-line services such as America Online and CompuServe, which...have their own codes of decency and monitors who enforce them. Even those who prefer the more anarchic Usenet discussion groups are subject to regulation by self-appointed system operators and moderators." Thus, "We're either paying to publish in mass-circulation periodicals where editors are free to censor us or we're writing pamphlets no one knows about because there's no public space in which to distribute them."

Needless to say, the retreat of the public sector did not erode the public sphere, as anyone who subscribes to an e-mail list can report. Nor have digital pamphleteers been unable to distribute their work to wide audiences. But Shapiro's poor prognostication has not prompted him to revise his views. Indeed, in his bland tome The Control Revolution-a recent paean to "balancing" online options, with the balancing to be done not by individual users but by intellectuals like Shapiro-he trots out the same worries, attached to a different villain: "total filtering," a "new level of personal control over experience" that we might "mishandle" to "our own personal disadvantage." Thus: "What may be most distressing about total filtering, then, is the way it could solidify a trend toward the elimination of spaces where citizens can confront and engage one another." If AOL isn't destroying our public spaces, why, we'll just destroy them ourselves.

I, on the other hand, have revised my views-for I too was once a Net skeptic. In the early '90s, I thought cybertopia was an attractive prospect but a dubious one: While Rushkoff, George Gilder, John Perry Barlow, and others were predicting limitless possibility, I, like Solomon, recalled the similar promises that had initially been attached to radio and to cable TV, and how easily they had been swept aside once the media giants figured out ways the government could regulate the new industry in their favor.

Now I've evolved into an optimist. Each year seems to bring more warnings that cyberspace is selling out, that the disorderly, decentralized, eccentric Net is falling under consolidated corporate control. And each year brings more evidence that, despite the naysayers, the online world is more of a free-for-all than ever before. There are, of course, genuine threats to this happy anarchy, from the feds' wary regulation of private encryption to copyright law's encroachments over speech once protected by the fair use doctrine. But there is a substantial difference between a threat and a defeat. And some alleged threats-like the e-commerce that frightens Rushkoff-aren't actually that threatening at all.

The planet is indeed filled with corporations who'd love to "control" the Internet. That is, there are lots of e-businesses out there that would like to dominate their industry, would like that industry to have a strong online presence, and would like their customers to swallow their prepackaged content rather than navigate the Net on their own. Thus far, most such companies have either failed or been forced to revise their business models, revamping themselves to deal in tools for active customers as well as packages for passive ones. (The best example of this, of course, is AOL.)

Furthermore, Net users have been more than willing to create such tools on their own, before any established company starts providing them-even if that means breaking or bending the law. Witness Napster and its many imitators, which provide online means of exchanging music and other media products without regard for the packaging and the distribution channels set up by the culture industry. (Already, the declinists are scrambling to take these programs into account. "Napster is truly a creature of its electronic moment," one wrote in Inside.com last June. "It may be the last pure Net play-the last time a small bunch of bright, fuzzily idealistic young people was able to blindside an entire industry with a clever new idea.")

There are many species of born-again cyberpessimism, from a puritanical distaste for any sort of e-commerce to a simple predisposition toward gloom. Some of the oldest digerati may also be distressed that cyberspace no longer seems to revolve around them-that many people would rather send e-mail to their grandchildren or download Garth Brooks songs than whisper darkly about smart drugs, spies, and temporary autonomous zones. As anarchy spreads, it starts to lose its romantic edge.

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