My frame of reference: an internet society

-- By GillianWhite - 15 Oct 2012

My confusion

Writing this post—at least version one—has proven to be more difficult than my other assignments.

I have been feeling rather stupid. To briefly psychoanalyze,

Neither the split infinitive nor the imprecise use of "psychoanalyze" seems to be a good reason for the sentence. Why you should begin by expressing confusion, rather than the idea that thinking has brought you out of the confusion, I'm not sure. It doesn't help to give your reader a reason to keep reading. But if you do need to begin by expressing the confusion, why not put it briefly and then move directly to the announcement of the essay's real subject.

I think that the source of this unedifying emotion is that the course is making me feel even more confused about what—as a lawyer, a policy maker, a citizen—I should think about “the internet”.

My confused, but interested, brain has thought the following over the past few weeks.

Are you sure it's your brain that does all the thinking? Why does metonymizing the mind as the brain serve your purpose here? It feels to me, as a reader, like a distancing maneuver: this isn't my mind talking, it's just my brain.

What if I support much of what Professor Moglen says about the downfall (and corruption) of intellectual property law, but also believe that actual writers and artists of our time should have an independent source of revenue that isn’t tied to the vagaries of philanthropy or being enough of a marketer that you can find some other non-copyright-derived-way for people to pay for your work directly?

Then you are hoping that coercive distribution, "you can't have this unless you pay," will continue to work in global society built on an infrastructure that makes sharing culture quick and frictionless. So you have three different forms of question to investigate: (1) factual and technical, (2) moral, (3) historical. As to (1), can sharing be prevented in the global net, or is coercive distribution no longer possible? As to (2), is it appropriate to sacrifice the interests of the billions of people who are too poor to learn and to benefit from culture, if it is coercively distributed to those who can pay, to the mechanics of your preferred mode for remunerating producers of knowledge and art? As to (3), were the forms of cultural production available before the brief period of coercive distribution post Edison inadequate? How many of the forms of art and knowledge production that are personally valuable to you achieved their maturity before the onset of the Edisonian technologies?

What if I’m worried about the collection and dissemination of private information by Google, Facebook and the others, but feel that a large number of increasingly cynical consumers have already made the ‘trade-off’ between privacy and these products’ utility? Won’t these consumers continue to find free software and encrypted email something that will never be packaged in a way that changes their minds about the trade-off?

Those questions don't seem analytically well-formed. One says, hasn't the problem already become serious? The other asks, will people be willing to change their practices in order to avoid the destruction of their children's privacy? Assume the answer to the first question is positive. Why is the answer to the second question therefore negative? Or, if they are independent, what is the purpose of the first question? What sort of evidence would you need, and what sort of technology would you be evaluating—without yet prejudicing the question of the knowledge you would need in order to perform the evaluation—in order to answer it?

And, the core of it, what if I can’t (for normative and/or pragmatic) reasons believe that a revolution towards true internet freedom is likely to occur? Yet, at the same time, support much of the underlying call of that movement: that the internet should not be used as a tool of repression by government or corporate interests; indeed it should be a source and inspirer of freedom.

This appears to be a merely semantic inquiry about the meaning of "true revolution." If you know what you believe is and is not politically possible (for whatever class of reasons you call "normative" and pragmatic—are inquiries about what can happen normative?), why don't you explain? As someone who has been thinking about this for decades, and is trying to make things happen that will be good for the human race, I would be very much interested in knowing what can and what cannot be accomplished.

Besides confusion, these questions are making me very glad to be thinking! I suspect that I am not alone in feeling that without technical expertise or freedom ‘politics’ in my blood, these thoughts are genuinely hard work.

Breaking through the confusion

To break through this confusion, I decided that I needed to clarify my own framework for analysis: what does the internet society mean to me?

For me, it doesn’t really matter whether you conceive of the internet as a microcosm of society, or society itself. It is, however, very important that it is conceived of as a society and not simply a market. As Karl Polanyi wrote in ‘The Great Transformation’, it is a fallacy of many economists that society is or should be run as an ‘adjunct to the market’. This is not say that the market economy should not operate within a society; but I think that it should be seen as one form of interaction within a much broader phenomenon. Just like I don’t believe that the market was the means or end in 19th or 20th century life, so too I think it is incorrect to conceive of the internet society with this narrow paradigm of purpose and effect.

As a matter of description we know that the internet society is not simply a market because of history and practice. We have already learnt in this course that the birth of this microcosm was the birth of a collaborative, communitarian effort to share information and knowledge. I also know from my own experiences that there are many ways that we interact online which are not about the profit motive and are versions of social and socializing behaviors that we exhibit in other aspects of our lives.

Normatively, I believe that the strength and possibility of the internet society is when it is conceived as a global commons where ideas, information and goods are exchanged in a variety of non-market and market ways. In other words, the internet should not be defined ‘for the convenience of [anyone’s] business model’ (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v Grokster, amicus brief, Eben Moglen), but instead with much broader objectives in mind.

I am also influenced by another of Polanyi’s ideas about the evolution of 19th century market society. That is, that the history of the market economy is a history of society protecting itself against the perils of an unregulated market.

The use of "The Great Transformation" as the pivot here seems to me to raise more questions than it answers. What it answers, not very succinctly, is that the network is not just an institution of the market. This is an inexpensive conclusion dearly acquired. The endo-skeletal nervous system inside each human being is not just for buying and selling, anymore than it is just for playing baseball, cricket, or soccer, for dancing, lovemaking or painting. Why would anyone suppose that the rapidly-evolving exo-skeletal nervous system inside the human race is so differently confined?

On the other hand, Polanyi's particular version of human history comes with significant additional baggage, for which in this context allowance cannot be simply made. Polanyi offers a theory of historical uniqueness: he explains, if his explanation is accepted, why something happens once, and exactly once, in the development of human societies. Perhaps what is happening now can only happen once, but if so, it is not his Great Transformation, but a different one, which—precisely in proportion to the extent we think him right—will require an explanation different from his own.

Next (baby) steps

With this framework as my starting point, I feel a bit closer to a way of thinking about questions that I raised above. It leads me to two broad propositions which I want to use to guide my thinking in the rest of the course.

First, that the internet should not be one gigantic business model in action. Like any commons, there can be markets and trade within the society; but there should also be room and encouragement for myriad human interactions that are not simply code for advertising revenue.

Must or must not are indeed normative statements. But would it not be desirable to understand what can and what cannot happen before reaching "conclusions" about whether the impossible is good?

Secondly, I don’t believe that the market aspect of this society can always be left to regulate itself. This market has an invidious way of swamping other interactions. The challenge is that many purveyors seek to use regulation as a tool to protect their existing markets. It is always easier to identify the problems with a suggested solution than to construct a solution. But the existence of problems with a suggested solution does not entail that the opposite of that solution is preferable. When both non-regulation and regulation are problematic, it’s easy for supporters of one just to point to the flaws in the other. The best answer is likely to be more nuanced.

This is a generic statement of technocratic dogma. Standing by itself it doesn't mean anything. Who is or is not supposed to regulate? What are they regulating? Are we supposed to think of telecommunications regulation in one country? The nature, vel non, of free speech protections and their limitations in every country? Of copyright enforcement? Of patent prosecution? Of secret police actions to prevent secrecy and anonymity somewhere? What model of the "preferable" is being implicitly referenced? How is it arrived at and by whom? Of whom are your conclusions mindful? Are the slum-dweller in Kolkata or Nairobi who wants to learn but cannot afford books, the censorship bureaucracy of the Chinese Communist Party, movie executives in Los Angeles with a fetish for young flesh and Mercedes convertibles, and the counterterrorism architects of the United States Government supposed to be capable of consensus? If not, do you not agree that force, evident or covert, is actually the arbiter of events?

This second proposition—that regulation is needed—is why I say I am only a bit closer to a way of thinking about the internet society. I need to keep learning and thinking about what I actually mean when I say we need regulation. The dangers of unintended consequences and of undermining the freedom and diversity that is the essence of the society, require pause for thought. To give myself some credit, however, perhaps this is always going to be a complex discussion. When and what regulation may be needed may always need messy, case-by-case solutions. I will try to tackle one of these messy issues in my next post.

If this is the predicate analysis, we're not quite ready. Let's try to improve this a little before moving on. If Polanyi was helpful, despite his limitations, why not appeal from the monkey to the organ-grinder? The dotCommunist Manifesto was my effort to undertake that project for you; wherever you wind up, it seems likely that you benefit from taking advantage of others' labor.

The center of the problem, it seems to me, is that there's no vision of the personal or of the political here, only of the bullshit regulatory "middle ground" beloved of bureaucrats and professors without imagination. Having observed that the net is not a market, you don't evolve a "framework" for stating what else it is to people. You do not give acknowledgment, let alone theoretical significance, to the previous permanence and current preventability of ignorance. You do not speak of, let alone explain, why people in India who cannot afford three meals a day or the purchase of clean drinking water pay for and cherish their mobile phones. You don't therefore compose the two, and explain that the most significant force holding such a person in ignorance, and therefore in poverty, regardless of her intelligence and determination, is the rules against sharing.

From here, you would be compelled to face issues that are political, about the distribution of power, not bureaucratic, about its administration after its appropriation and before its protection against challenge. Whether normative (Can you present a convincing ethical case for imposing ignorance on the poor? If not, is this a rhetorical exercise, an audition for work as an apologist for injustice?) or practical (How will societies resist the agitation of billions of brains that want to learn? Why would billions of people accept the rule of the few if it implied the deliberate starvation of their brains?) those issues are the ones absent from the preparations you've made so far.