_1984_ Foreword: Pynchon & the Internet

[pynchonoid]

Internet is dying - Prof. Lessig
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 15/05/2003 at 21:33 GMT

The Internet is dying, says Lawrence Lessig, a law
professor with a cult following amongst technophiles. 

Lessig is mobilizing against the FCC's relaxation of
media controls which will leave most of the United
States' professional media outlets in the hands of a
tiny number of owners. In FCC chairman Michael
Powell's vision, Old Man Potter can own every
newspaper, radio station and TV channel in
Pottersville. 

The move, which has even been criticized by former FOX
and Vivendi executive Barry Diller, would return the
mass media to a state even turn of the century robber
barons couldn't have wished for. 

But drawing an important parallel, Lessig argues that
the relaxation of media controls for the latter-day
robber barons bodes ill for open computer
communications. 

"The Internet is dying," he writes, launching a
torpedo at the heart of techno-utopian mysticism by
questioning the belief that all will be for the best
in all possible worlds. 

Writing an introduction to the centenary edition of
Orwell's 1984, Thomas Pynchon describes The Internet
as "a development that promises social control on a
scale those quaint old 20th-century tyrants with their
goofy moustaches could only dream about". 

Lessig is more subtle, but points us the same way. 

"When the content layer, the logical layer, and the
physical layer are all effectively owned by a handful
of companies, free of any requirements of neutrality
or openness, what will you ask then?" 

The vandals stole the handles 

The Internet is dying in ways that Lessig doesn't
enumerate, too. You only have to step outside
tech-savvy circles to see what a massive
disappointment the modern tech experience is for most
people: many of whom are your friends and relatives. 

What does the Internet mean to these folks, now? 

It represents a perfect tragedy of the commons. Email
is all but unusable because of spam. Even if our
Bayesian filters win the arms race against the
spammers, in terms of quantity as well as quality of
communications, email has been a disaster. 

(An architect friend tells me that email has become
the biggest productivity drain in his organization:
not just the quantity of attachments, but the mindless
round-robin communications, requesting comments that
get ignored. Email has become a corporate displacement
activity.) 

Google has its own spam problems: a tiny number of
webloggers and list-makers whose mindless hyperlinks
degrade the value of its search results, and create
the Web equivalent of TV static. 

Basic web surfing means navigating through web sites
whose inspiration for their baroque overdesign seems
to have been Donald Trump's wedding cake, all the
while requiring the user to close down dozens of
unrequested pop-up advertisements. (Yes, we know the
tools to turn off pop-ups, but the vast majority of IE
users don't have that luxury, and their patience has
already been tested to the limit.) 

And most of all, The Internet means sitting at noisy
and unreliable machines that would land any
self-respecting consumer manufacturer with a class
action suit. 

What's dying here isn't The Internet - it remains as
open as ever to new software and new ideas.
Remarkably, the consensus that upholds the technical
infrastructure survives, in the form of the IETF,
despite self-interested parties trying to overturn it.
What's dying is the idea that the Internet would be a
tool of universal liberation, and the argument that
"freedom" in itself is a justification for this
information pollution. It's probably reached a tipping
point: the signal to noise ratio is now too low. 

Users are not stupid. The 42 per cent of US citizens
who Pew Research tells us have no interest in logging
on and "blowing their minds" are simply making a
sensible choice. 

Free to do what? 

Lessig seems to have completed half the journey from
promising Republican lawyer to mature political
economist - but the last part of the journey will be
the hardest. It involves unwiring some stubborn
philosophical assumptions. 

"'Won't unlicensed spectrum guarantee our freedom?'"
asks Lessig's interlocutor, appropriately enough, one
'Dr.Pangloss'. 

Well, we suppose he means that's "freedom" in the
sense of push-button buzzword, where "freedom" is an
end in itself. 

There's a slight problem with this. Freedom isn't an
absolute: it's whatever we decide it to be. Deny
absolute freedom to a small number of people to set
employment conditions, and you can give the vast
majority of people a three day weekend. Result:
happiness. (Maybe) And 'freedom' as a justification
for deregulation - which gave us the Internet - hardly
inspires confidence for the future wireless in the
United States. 

An exercise for the reader: trace how the same
buzzwords that propelled the last irrational bubble -
"freedom", "choice" - are the same buzzwords behind
the wireless bubble. But such concepts are complex,
possibly eternal social mediations and involve more
than pushing a few buttons. But hey, no one said it
would be easy. 

The most popular technology in the world - thanks to
its low cost and high communications value - is the
cellphone. This is derided by the 'freedom' lobby
because it's regulated spectrum (boo!), and not an
'open' network (hiss!), and yet it delivers a
tremendous social utility. The latest generation of
phones impresses me not because they can run irc or
ssh, which they do splendidly, but because I can send
a photo to relatives with three clicks on a device
costing less than $100. A small parcel of happiness,
there. 

Now contrast that with the tragedy of the commons we
described above. 

Back to Lessig, answering 'Pangloss'. Only a small
chunk of spectrum will be "freed", notes Lessig, but,
"to the same companies, no doubt". 

So long as the United States' techno-utopians seem to
be obsessed with infrastructure plumbing as the
British are obsessed with toilets, with means rather
than ends, Lessig faces an uphill battle. Guiding US
policy to create an infrastructure that provides
utility to the people, rather than a handful of
ideologues, is going to be Lessig's greatest
challenge. ® 

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30733.html>

A response to Lessig's article:
<http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/05/16/1610222.shtml?tid=126&tid=95&tid=103&tid=99>

also see:

Lessig's web site at Stanford:
<http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/>

<http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/08/15/lessig.html>
Free Culture
Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002 



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