Tinkers, Tailors, Sellers, Spies

The case for cautious optimism about the Internet.

Jesse Walker from the December 2000 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

And then there's the mistake made by Solomon and me: the assumption that history was bound to repeat itself. In Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communications Politics in Dubious Times, historian Robert McChesney falls into this trap, mistaking cyberspace for radio and the end of the century for the end of the 1920s. "In the 1990s a new argument has emerged," he writes, "the effect of which is to suggest that we have no reason to be concerned about concentrated corporate control and hypercommercialization of media. This is the notion that the Internet, or, more broadly, digital communication networks, will set us free. This is hardly an unprecedented argument; every major new electronic media technology this century, from film, AM radio, shortwave radio, and facsimile broadcasting to FM radio, terrestrial television broadcasting, cable TV, and satellite broadcasting, has spawned similar utopian notions."

Not, mind you, that McChesney thinks the Internet is identical to its predecessors. It is, he concedes, "a quite remarkable and complex phenomenon that cannot be categorized by any previous medium's experience." Nonetheless, "The current communication revolution...corresponds most closely to the situation in the 1920s," when there "was little sense of how radio could be made a profitable enterprise and much discussion of how liberating and democratic it could be."

It's no surprise that McChesney would use the early history of broadcasting to decipher the early history of the Net. There are a lot of parallels, and besides, McChesney just happens to have written several articles, his Ph.D. thesis, and his first book (1993's Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy) on the political economy of radio in the '20s and early '30s. But those parallels-and, perhaps, some ideological blinders-have kept McChesney from seeing some important ways the two timelines diverge.

The history of radio begins with the tinkers, some of them extraordinarily young, who made a hobby of building and using transmitters, trading tips and modifying each other's designs. The early amateur radio enthusiasts negotiated complicated covenants to divvy up the airwaves and formed self-regulating bodies to enforce the rules. Some also played hacker-style pranks on commercial and military radiomen, and even the nonpranksters often displayed a healthy disrespect for their purported betters. (Once, Susan Douglas reports in 1987's Inventing American Broadcasting, a naval operator in Boston told a ham operator to "butt out." The amateur replied, "Say, you Navy people think you own the ether. Who ever heard of the Navy anyway? Beat it, you, beat it.")

Business soon discovered that the amateurs knew their craft better than many professionals did, and began hiring accordingly. "Do you suppose I could get a commercial operator to operate a radio telephone set?" wrote Robert Gowen, chief engineer for the De Forest Company, in Radio Broadcast magazine. "I found they knew absolutely nothing about it and in every case I had to get a 'ham,' simply because the former was a man who knew only how to press the key and read code while the latter was a technician who had trained himself in the fundamentals of radio and knew how to analyze the circuit and keep it functioning properly in addition to his knowledge of key pressing. Likewise, every man I had in my laboratory was an amateur, not because I was one but purely because they were the only ones obtainable who could tackle the problems placed before them." In World War I, the military made the same discovery.

Business also absorbed another amateur invention: broadcasting. Amateur broadcast stations were outlawed in 1921, just as commercial stations were starting to appear, but that didn't mean radio was completely commercialized. A wave of nonprofit stations emerged, run by churches, theaters, cabarets, colleges, and other civic and artistic institutions. The commercial stations, meanwhile, ran little that we'd recognize today as ads; you can hear more sales pitches on NPR in 2000 than you would have on a business station in 1925. (Which, incidentally, is where McChesney joins the story-the amateurs don't really figure in either of his books.)

It wasn't market forces that killed off the nonprofit stations. It was government regulation, which deliberately favored one kind of radio over the others. Much of McChesney's first book is dedicated to that story. Much of the rest describes what he calls the "broadcast reform movement," a loose collection of activists who wished the government would regulate the airwaves in the "public interest"-even as the feds were using the same slogan to excuse their interventions on behalf of the commercial networks.

In McChesney's view, cyberspace is now at the same point radio had reached when the broadcast reform movement emerged. The fight now is for civic activists to get the hearing that those reformers didn't get, because "the structural basis of the communication system should be decided after the social aims are determined. The key factor is to exercise public participation before an unplanned commercial system becomes entrenched." (The emphasis is his, but I'm happy to reinforce it.) As an example of such public participation, McChesney cites the path Canada followed as U.S. radio took the commercial road: a three-year "period of active debate" including "public hearings in twenty-five cities in all nine provinces."

But I think something much more interesting than that is happening, something that represents a radical break with the radio timeline. Rather than move toward the political debates of the early '30s-either the relatively open forums held in Canada or the relatively closed ones in the U.S.-we've let the tinkers back in. With the Net, "public participation" hasn't meant debates among politicians charged with representing the public. It has meant actual members of the public carving out space for themselves online, and forging tools to protect that autonomy.

Privacy advocates, for example, worry about government and commercial services tracking Web surfers' buying patterns. But cheap yet powerful encryption-a tool the intelligence community has tried, with relatively little success, to suppress-has dealt a blow to the government spies, while programs like Anonymizer allow the privacy-conscious to explore the Web without being tracked by a database company.

The greatest threat to online liberty right now may be the culture industry's push for more restrictive copyrights, restraining our right to use pieces of pre-existing works in new projects of our own. (See "Copy Catfight," March.) The rise of peer-to-peer file sharing-Napster, Gnutella, and the rest-has put the copyright owners back on the defensive.

And remember Norman Solomon's warning that "search-engine results are increasingly skewed, with priority placements greased by behind-the-scenes fees"? Now upstart programs like Gnutella and FreeNet, with their radically different model for online searches, might render all the AltaVistas and HotBots obsolete, replacing their centralized systems with methods that are both more distributed and more thorough.

Nor must you be a programmer to make a difference: Consumers can still vote with their feet-or, more precisely, with the buttons on their mice. A few years ago, venture capital was pouring into "push" technology, services that would shove selected information (and ads) toward customers rather than letting us "pull" it from the Web ourselves. The media hyped this model as the future of the Internet, and the usual fears were expressed that the Open Net of Old would soon die. Customers, however, rejected the idea in droves, and the highest-profile push company, PointCast, died an unlamented death earlier this year. Part of the problem was bad software (PointCast clogged up the data pipelines), and more limited push services persist. But no one expects them to be anything but a voluntary supplement to the Net.

I've already noted the similar story of how AOL and CompuServe learned to provide access to the rest of the Net or risk losing customers. Much the same has happened within the Web: Almost all of the most useful, and therefore most visited, sites provide lots of links to other parts of the Web. Solomon's claim that the "largest-volume sites are now owned by huge conglomerates" is therefore beside the point.

It's beside the point for a more important reason too: The Web's largest-volume sites still receive only a small fraction of the stops surfers make online. Solomon is discussing the Web as though it were television, with a handful of channels dominating the medium and every smaller player striving for a mass audience. In fact, the Web is a collection of overlapping niches, where the most popular destinations include tools for going elsewhere.