etopia

This page looks at the 'etopia' - benign, beautiful or barmy - heralded by prophets of the digital millennium.

It covers -

• introduction
• a new millennium?
• digital delirium
• add bandwidth and stir
• bring in the clones

Context is provided by the brief note on utopias here.

     introduction

Advent of the net has echoed the arrival of electricity, the telegraph, railway and radio in leading to forecasts of -

• the imminent death of the state (or merely the 'autocratic state')
• government that is more responsive
• the end of 'big business' (or merely 'finance capital')
• rebirth of education ("new ways of learning" that "fuel a worldwide explosion of intellectual activity, leading to new ways of expression, new art forms")
• invigoration of 'citizen politics' and democracy
• the end of poverty and disease
• the end of the business cycle or merely the liberation of workers
• the demise of big or established media, with revival of culture
• rediscovery of god or the end of sectarianism
• better manners

It is essentially a blank canvas on which people paint their aspirations and preconceptions, looking forward to change and ignoring continuities, contingency and complication.

     a new millennium?

In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan brought the tablets down from the mountain - at that stage analogue only - and proclaimed the coming death of the state, big business and big government.

They would be overthrown by the innately democratic effects of new technology. Technological progress would automatically turn fashionably nonconformist libertarian principles into fact. Converging media, computing and telecommunications would necessarily result in economic plenty, creativity without intellectual property and an electronic democracy free from surveillance and censorship. That vision was packaged in the 1964 Cybernetics Conference Manifesto of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution.

Thirty years later the famous Being Digital (New York: Knopf 1995) by guru Nicholas Negroponte in his role as cheerleader for the emerging "global infospace" - a sort of one-man National Office for the Information Economy - similarly offered utopian vision without analysis, slogans without detail. Most people just can't help being analogue, but the book is useful for focussing attention on -

• 'bits rather than atoms'
• the importance of charisma in propagation of ideas.

Negroponte is less zany than other gurus. Start off by savouring John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (DIC), an echo of the 1964 Manifesto and replete with Ayn Rand-style announcements

... Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind ... I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

That is an amusing rhetorical flourish - and an echo of McLuhan's 1964 proclamation in Understanding Media that the computer would bring "a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity" - but we have not been able to find the Cyberspace Consulate to get our visas stamped (digitally, of course) for a trip to e-topia.

Views of 'death of the state', cyber-induced or otherwise, are examined later in this guide and in the Economy and Governance guides. Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: The Penguin Press 2008) exults in a romantic digital anarchism; Cluetrain guru David Weinberger offers The Hyperlinked Metaphysics of the Web here.

In an earlier declaration Barlow gushed that

we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back further.

That was echoed by Tim O'Reilly in 2008

It's the most profound change since the advent of literacy. And it's bigger than the industrial revolution. We are on the front of a new renaissance.

Cybergrace: The Search for God in the Digital World (New York: Crown 1998) by Jennifer Cobb suggests that cyberspace will somehow liberate us from 'materialism' (apparently an artefact of 'modernity') and through 'creativity' partake of the 'divine'. If you are a fan of Teilhard de Chardin or into Heidegger-lite you will appreciate Cobb's spin through the noosphere; for us it was unconvincing. Cobb has been less influential than Stewart Brand, discussed in Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 2006).

Esther Dyson, interim chair of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN) and the thinking person's Don Tapscott, is famous for her ode to cyberspace Release 2.1: A Design for Living in the Digital Age (London: Penguin 1998).

It is provocative but perhaps best read in conjunction with some of the less polemical studies and with books such as resisting The Virtual Life: The Culture & Politics of Information (San Francisco: City Lights 1995) edited by James Brook & Iain Boal. Dyson, like the upbeat Rhonda Hauben - whose visions of online community are discussed elsewhere on this site - considers that being online will make us brighter and better, with the net for example as a mechanism to

bring back new [sic] respect for people, for personal attention, for service, and for human interaction.

Among sociological and cultural theory studies we recommend Harmeet Sawhney & Seungwhan Lee's paper Arenas of Innovation: Fringe Groups & the Discovery of New Liberties Of Action, The World Wide Web & Contemporary Cultural Theory: Magic, Metaphor, Power (London: Routledge 2000) edited by Andrew Herman & Thomas Swiss and Digital Mythologies: The Hidden Complexities of the Internet (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press 2000) by Thomas Valovic.

There is a broader perspective in William Akin's Technocracy & the American Dream (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1977) and Howard Segal's Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1985). The latter is particularly recommended for fans of Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future (London: Profile 2002) or The Great Disruption (New York: Simon & Schuster 1999), questioned in Robert Kagan's dour The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Knopf 2008).

Fukuyama is most famous for the glibly triumphalist tract The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press 1992), proclaiming

What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

We can not help recalling Alexander Herzen's more perceptive comment, in response to an earlier teleology, that

History has no culmination ... There is no libretto. We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us.

or Chekhov's comment in Three Sisters that

Well, maybe we'll fly in balloons, the cut of jackets will be different, we'll have discovered a sixth sense, maybe even developed it - I don't know. But life will be the same - difficult, full of unknowns, and happy. In a thousand years, just like today, people will sigh and say, oh, how hard it is to be alive. They'll still be scared of death, and won't want to die.

Cold War Triumphalism: Exposing the Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism (New York: New Press 2004) edited by Ellen Schrecker offers more bite.

     delirium

Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth & Alvin Toffler collaborated on the 1994 manifesto Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age.

It is another digital manifesto built around notions of the Third Wave - part Robert Heinlein, part misunderstood Daniel Bell, a dash of Henry Ford and some spice from Porat, Machlup and Weber - in which technology drives an information society free from traditional economic, political and cultural constraints. People, it seems, like information, "just want to be free", a freedom that appears to embody the lifestyle of a white male heterosexual pundit living in one of the funkier parts of San Francisco or Colorado without the distraction of anything as mundane as taxes.

We suggest instead Christine Borgman's First Monday article on The Premise & Promise of A Global Information Infrastructure, drawn from her From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access To Information in the Networked World (Cambridge: MIT Press 2000), and The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 2000) by John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid.

Kevin Kelly's New Rules For The New Economy (New York: Viking 1998) applies the Third Wave mantras to the 'new economy', something explored in our Economy guide. It builds on his Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines (London: Fourth Estate 1994) and Michael Rothschild's Bionomics: Economy As Ecosystem (New York: Holt 1995), which explore biological models for the information economy and networks.

Morley Winograd & Dudley Buffa in Taking Control: Politics in the Information Age (New York: Holt 1996) forecast the end of income tax, demise of the party system (replaced by a "electronic participation") and "a computer based programmed method of instruction tailored to the needs and interests of each individual".

Guy Chapman noted the intellectual poverty of the cybertopians, commenting that

For too many of the young and middle-aged men now directing the "new economy," history started with the invention of the microchip. Or at least it "rebooted." This is the sterile utopia of the high-tech elite today: that the remainder of history will be merely an uninterrupted pageant of technological upgrades, and, because of this, government should simply be a handmaiden to this happy prospect.

In this vision, no grander or higher calling awaits us or our children than to be a frenzied mass of faxers, e-mailers, Web surfers, meeting-takers, viewgraph makers, commuters, shoppers and couch potatoes. Contemplating such a future, it's difficult to remember that we're talking about the same country that produced Lincoln, FDR, Eisenhower, LBJ and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Bionomics was entertainingly, if a tad ungenerously, eviscerated by Paulina Borsook in Cyberselfish. There is a similar critique in Michael Surmin's ISOC paper on Wired Words: Utopia, Revolution & the History of Electronic Highways and Thomas Streeter's paper That Deep Romantic Chasm": Libertarianism, Neoliberalism, and the Computer Culture, questioning the myth of "escape from history into the computer screen". Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs 2007) by Brian Doherty highlights zaniness on the right and left.

Instead try Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 1999) by Hal Varian & Carl Shapiro, an excellent introduction to the 'new' economy, or Geoffrey Mulgan's Communication & Control: Networks and the New Economies of Communication (New York: Guilford Press 1991).

     add bandwidth and stir

George Gilder's Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionise Our World (New York: Free Press 2000) is arguably the high point of techno-delirium, redolent of the dotcom and telco bubbles that collapsed during that year and of volkish anxieties about big bad cities, corporations and government.

Got a problem? Just add more bandwidth and stir. Kids don't learn? Get them online. Government doesn't deliver? Information technology and privatisation to the rescue. TV puts you to sleep? Job's boring? Worried about the mortgage? Do not worry, Gilder has the answer in the wacky Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media & American Life (New York: Norton 1994) and Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics & Technology (New York: Simon & Schuster 1989).

Similar snake oil was peddled in the 1880s when the first electric power networks spread. Turn instead to Jock Given's lucid The Death of Broadcasting: Media's Digital Future (Sydney: Uni of NSW Press 1998), Bruce Wasserstein's Big Deal (New York: Warner 1998) and Bruce Owen's The Internet Challenge To Television (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1999).

Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (London: Secker & Warburg 1994) and Virtual Reality (New York: Summit 1991), pushes the digital democracy barrow: out there on the frontier a sort of digital jeffersonian democracy of hardy yeomen will emerge, free from big government and big business (and without, it seems, those pesky injuns).

That theme has had wide but largely uncritical acceptance, with peers recycling statements such as

With this new medium of the Internet, a free press is no longer reserved for those rich enough to own one. A vast number of average people, no longer sitting passively in front of their television sets, no longer spoon-fed mass American culture, can now interact with people around the world, and even become publishers themselves without the high cost of purchasing or leasing a printing press or chopping down a forest.

For us there is more value in High Noon On The Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues In Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press 1996) and Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias (Cambridge: MIT Press 1999) edited by Peter Ludlow. Richard Barbrook's Media Freedom: The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity (London: Pluto Press 1995) is unfortunately confined to France but serves to challenge the optimism of Rheingold and de Sola Pool.

Back in Washington Peter Huber argues that regulation is irrelevant in the best of all possible digital worlds, one fit for dotcom heroes. He is perhaps best known for his 288 page love letter to the US Federal Communications Commission - Law & Disorder In Cyberspace: Abolish The FCC & Let Common Law Rule The Telecosm (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1997). The evil FCC, it appears, has

protected monopolies, obstructed efficient use of the airwaves, corrupted common carriage, mispriced services, curtailed free speech, weakened copyright and undermined privacy. Large bureaucratic entities like the FCC can never adjust quickly enough to such rapidly changing technologies

Our advice to clients is not to hold their breath waiting for the FCC, and its local counterparts such as ACMA, to disappear.

     bring in the clones

Far far below the digital stratosphere other new economy enthusiasts have been busy. The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity (New York: Perseus 1999) by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden & Joel Hyatt offers a vision of the coming golden age with the suspension of the business cycle and atrophy of traditional states, in contrast to the equally zany The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso 1994) by Giovanni Arrighi.

If you want more, turn to The New Renaissance: Computers & the Next Level of Civilisation (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1998) by Douglas Robertson: with a chip or two you will be a Leonardo in your own lunchtime.

Albert Borgmann's Holding On To Reality: The Nature of Information At The Turn Of The Millennium (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1999), Fukuyama's The End Of History and Virginia Postrel's hayekian tract The Future & Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise & Progress (New York: Free Press 1998) are other works in the same vein. 

In contrast, Manuel Castell's elegantly neomarxist three volume The Information Society (Oxford: Blackwell 1999) tries, with some success, to tease out the antecedents and consequences of living in that world. John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton 2001) is a spirited corrective to Fukuyama.



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