Our Utopian Dystopia
Back in a previous life, under this graphic, we would post an occasional item about the utopian silliness of Wired magazine. Our favorite entry ran like this:
“You think Java is important — wait until we have a similar language for storytelling.” —Nicholas Negroponte, Wired, July 1996
FUNCTION Serpent(Gen_3:5) {
IF (AdamRib == EatFruit) {
EyeState = Open;
KnowledgeState = GoodEvil;
MortalState = SurelyDie;} ELSE {
MortalState = LiveForever;
}
}DO SERPENT
Since we posted this to, y’know, a website, it wasn’t like we had a Luddite antagonism to the Internet. It wasn’t even like we weren’t then — and remain now — something of a digital utopian ourself, especially when it comes to the democratizing of mass communication.
But the nature of Wired’s utopian vision was just flat-out hilarious, seeing as it had no grounding in human nature. From the perspective of the Nineties, it was clear that the Internet would accomplish — or, more precisely, allow — Great Things. It wouldn’t, however, turn human beings into something else. Wherever you go in cyberspace, there you are.
It was a mistake then — and also remains a mistake now — to accept Wired’s wacky utopian vision of the Internet as definitive, when it was instead the Nineties intellectual equivalent of Eighties fashion, right down to big hair and padded shoulders. Yet that is precisely what Evgeny Morozov goes about doing in his new essay for Prospect magazine:
Perhaps the mismatch between digital ideals and reality can be ascribed to the naivety of the technology pundits. But the real problem was that the internet’s early visionaries never translated their aspirations for a shared cyberspace into a set of concrete principles on which online regulation could be constructed. It’s as if they wanted to build an exemplary city on the hill, but never bothered to spell out how to keep it exemplary once it started growing.
Morozov doesn’t make the comparison, but what he seeks in Wired and finds lacking is an Internet equivalent of the Federalist Papers, which took a utopian vision of democratic self-governance and grounded it in the messy reality of human avarice. Since we’re greedy beasts at heart, the Papers writers argued for a form of government that accounts for our base nature by decentralizing the centralized power it would wield. It was designed to be the Committee from Hell, since that’s the only way it would work — work, that is, to prevent the very tyranny it was intended to escape.
Instead, Morozov pulls a Wired himself, choosing to employ a misleading metaphor in pursuit of his argument:
What the internet badly needed in its first two decades of existence, and what it needs still, is a book akin to Jane Jacob’s 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities which attacked the practices and attitudes of 1950s US urban planners and proved hugely influential. The structure of online space requires a similar critique.
What makes this as equally hilarious as Wired’s utopian vision is that it’s a wacky dystopian vision, starting with the notion that there’s any “online space” to structure, much less critique. The Internet is a blooming, buzzing confusion — just like its participants! — and bears no relation to an unavoidable double-decker highway that destroys the waterfront. Google and Facebook are monoliths only insofar as they accomplish their functions better than their predecessors, and could easily be superseded in turn.
Remember MySpace? Friendster? GeoCities? AltaVista? HotBot? Yahoo? AOL? When an Internet edifice disappears, it’s not like we’re stuck dealing with an ugly husk. Instead, we just go somewhere else.
Or, to take a specific example that Morozov addresses: Spam isn’t an unintended consequence of the utopian vision of the creators of email. At the time of email’s codification in 1977 — and even the time of our original participation in 1991 — the Internet was still substantially a closed system, limited to those working on campuses and interested corporations. “Trust” was presumed, because there was no reason not to — even in 1991, the idea of a universally accessible public Internet was something of a stretch. We were still living pre-Jetsons.
Nor is spam even original to email, or digital communication in general. Anyone living before answering machines, or even cordless phones, knew the absolute fucking annoyance of getting a phone call at dinner, only to learn it was some idiot selling insurance. And nobody accused Ma Bell of utopian pretensions.
But we agree that the Internet is not the utopian paradise the Wired crew envisoned, in part because we didn’t buy it at the time. We also agree that any problem you can name — spam, malware, the loss of privacy — really is a problem. But whatever dystopian picture you can paint with the facts at hand, you’re still missing the point.
Because we wrote this, and posted it online, and wherever you are in the world, you’re reading it. If that ain’t utopia, we don’t know what is.
7:17 am • Monday • July 18, 2011
Didn’t the hilarious fiasco of the “self” regulated economy of Second Life give the protolibertardians pause?
I’ve been using the internet about as long as you Nojo. Some 20 years… holy shit… 20 years… whuh?
The intertubes wasn’t porn free then either. I was getting porn in my email within a week of getting my email account activated… Nope, I never sent any, but I had friends who loved to send .gifs for amusement and shock.