Internet Liberation: Alive or Dead (or Just Resting Its Eyes)?

The new issue of Cato Unbound features a debate over the Internet's liberatory potential that's pretty damn fascinating. Some background:

As the Internet burgeoned and blossomed through the early to mid-nineties, visionary manifestos about its transformative social, political, and economic potential clogged VAX accounts the world over. After a solid decade of intense commercial development, much go-go nineties prophesying now seems a triumph of Utopian hope over hard reality. Does hope of Internet liberation yet remain? Or has the bright promise of the Internet been dimmed by corporate influence and government regulation? Are ideas like virtual citizenship beyond the nation-state, untraceable electronic currency, and the consciousness expanding powers of radical interconnectivity defunct? Is there untapped revolutionary power waiting to be unleashed?

Virtual reality visionary Jaron Lanier will kick off the discussion with a mind-bending lead essay. Commentators John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, open source software guru Eric S. Raymond, Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, and Yale computer scientist David Gelernter will grapple with Lanier's vision, and offer their own wisdom on what the Internet still has to offer for the future of freedom.

Go here to check it all out.

Comments

[keith]

I was wondering what ever happend to Jaron Lanier after the whole virtual reality revolution didn't quite take off the way he and Billy Idol thought it would.

-Keith

[Jason Ligon]

The VR revolution will be here when I never have to look at settings on my graphics card, which is to say a loong time from now.

[Michael A. Clem]

The mere fact that so much information and communication is available on the internet is transfroming our society, as Reason pundits should know, given this very blog and the various articles on the blogosphere.
However, any truly radical changes still require humans figuring out how to use the internet to its best advantages.

[mediageek]

Virtual reality is only useful insofar as the added dimensional complexity is able to simplify the presentation of the information.

[Eric the .5b]

In other words, the user interface has to be useful. VR is a bad design for most applications. Do I need an immersive, interactive environment to try to find the cheapest airline tickets to Boston?

[Deus ex Machina]

Eric hit the nail on the head. While a 3D operating system looks cool on Johnny Mnemonic and the Matrix, can you really picture your boss strapping on a set of VR goggles and gloves to write up an email?

[Qbryzan]

It may not be useful for email, but a VR teleconference would be much better than one on flat-screen monitors.

[ChrisO]

It may not be useful for email, but a VR teleconference would be much better than one on flat-screen monitors.

Oh yeah, I can just see a bunch of Armani-clad executives putting on the VR gear to have a conference...

[R C Dean]

Why is that, Qbryzan? What information would a VR teleconference let me have that I couldn't get over a video teleconference or even a Web-enabled teleconference?

[Qbryzan]

Oh yeah, I can just see a bunch of Armani-clad executives putting on the VR gear to have a conference...

But that's part of the beauty of it, you wouldn't have to actually wear Armani, you could stay at home in your underwear, but everyone else would see you in Virtual Armani.

[Qbryzan]

What information would a VR teleconference let me have that I couldn't get over a video teleconference or even a Web-enabled teleconference?

I'm not sure it would necessarily let you have more information, but if we are talking about it being useful, a VR teleconference could come closer to approximating being in the same room.

Is it necessary? Probably not, but I like the idea.

[keith]

I'm not sure it would necessarily let you have more information, but if we are talking about it being useful, a VR teleconference could come closer to approximating being in the same room.

I'm on board so long as it eliminates the 75% of every teleconference meeting in which I'm involved that is devoted to people yelling into speaker phones, "Can you hear me? I can't hear you. OK, now I can. Wait, no, I didn't get that last part."

Ahh, remember when the virtual reality Demi Moore attacked the virtual reality Michael Douglas? Those were good days for business.

[Michael A. Clem]

Er, I didn't think this was focused exclusively on virtual reality. It does say 'internet libertation', doesn't it?

[ChrisO]

The mere fact that so much information and communication is available on the internet is transfroming our society, as Reason pundits should know, given this very blog and the various articles on the blogosphere.

You've hit it on the head. The Internet HAS radically transformed the world. We have a hard time seeing it because we're right in the middle of it.

However, any truly radical changes still require humans figuring out how to use the internet to its best advantages.

To me, the only thing that the Internet really does is make physical distance irrelevant. The Internet has not created any of the information it holds, it simply permits me to retrieve it without having to physically travel far and wide to obtain it.

This principle is very important for the Internet as a commercial platform. It succeeds in providing access to goods that are not readily available locally, or to providing buyers with price competition and sellers with a large pool of buyers, even if the good/service in question could be had locally. The Internet retailers that failed were mostly the ones who were trying to sell stuff like socks and pet food, where the elimination of physical distance was a nonfactor and the 'pooling' aspect not important.

I have a hard time recalling what some of the other, more utopian ideas for using the Internet were, but I recall that most of 'em seemed pretty half-assed even at the time. The notion that real-world governments would become obsolete or that national boundaries would cease to be relevant always seemed far-fetched to me, and as a libertarian I'm hardly a die-hard 'governmentalist'.

[Happy Jack]

RC Dean- you wouldn't get any more information, but in a VR teleconference, when someone says something mind-numbingly stupid, you could throw them out of the window or something.

[Stevo Darkly]

What the hell ever happened to e-cash?

[nostradumbass]

Happy Jack-

I like your idea, but it would be even better if you could combine teleconferencing with something like Quake. That way, when someone says something mind-numbingly stupid you could blow their head off. "Ack, you've bloodied my Virtual Armani!"

[abraham]

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