Internet Politics in an Information economy
Jon Marshall
University of Technology, Sydney
Introduction
The Internet, and information technology generally, is not separate
from the social world in which it is embedded, neither does it fully
determine that world. It may, however, allow modifications, intensifications
or even subversions to occur. This paper will discuss some of the
problems and paradoxes of the "Information economy" and
its regimes of property; issues around the so-called hacker ethic
and open source software; and some of the expectations which have
been held for the Internet's role in fostering democratic politics.
It is possible the idea of the "information economy" itself
has a negative effect by suggesting a whole new range of property
to be appropriated and kept from common use. The term "information"
is not a concept which links things together because they are similar
in the same way. It is an open and magical term, which may hide
as much as it reveals. Its popularity may even suggest it serves
some kind of existing social agenda. Even if the equally vague term
"knowledge workers" does prove useful in analysis within
this kind of framework, such people are not in a strong position
relative to expanding corporate power, especially given problems
with the volume and inaccuracy of data available to them. The Internet,
though providing pathways for contact between subgroups, may not
provide ideal pathways for discussion or organisation. [1]
It is suggested that property is a contested imaginary, growing
out of systems of power and exchange. Initially the Internet seems
to have run largely as a prestation economy, in which the exchange
of "gifts" in return for recognition was a governing factor.
Richard Barbrook (1999) argues that this implies a virtual democratic
communism in actual practice – something which is unlikely. This
prestation economy seems vulnerable to capitalist definitions of
property operating within the model of an "information economy"
in which the most important aspect of property is that it can be
charged for. This capitalist property is created by fencing off
information through extension of copyright and patent laws, or by
concealment. Parts of the "hacker economy" still exist,
and the struggle between the supporters of open and free software
illustrates the way that information capitalism operates to diminish
free exchange.
Hackers, or more generally "knowledge workers", are often
considered to be a vital part of the new economy. Himanen (2001a),
for example, with the approval of Manuel Castells (2001), suggests
that Hackers are to the new Information Age and freedom what Max
Weber's Protestants were to the Capitalist Age. This argument can
be supported only by ignoring many features of the current period.
Furthermore, in an information society, information may not be valued
according to its accuracy, but according to its role in a pre-existent
set of politicised, or marketing, biases. In which case certainty
will drive out accuracy. Finally, there is nothing inherent in the
use of the Internet for political discourse which guarantees a democratic
or egalitarian result. The emerging structures of the "Information
Age" may be largely anti-democratic, tending to what has been
called 'Information Feudalism' reinforcing inequalities, with control
of both media and content in the hands of a small minority. Control
of information in the information society, is the equivalent of
control of land in feudalism, with no State support for the relatively
powerless (Drahos and Braithwaite, 2002). If so, then the Internet
may be embedded within these tendencies rather than inherently opposed
to them.
Instead of the upcoming triumph of a new economy, it is possible
to see the forcible return of the old. To quote Steven Best and
Douglas Kellner:
Though ballooned out of proportion by the financial industries,
the Internet boom represented a new economy lead by a young vanguard.
The Bush II regime can be seen in many ways as a return to the
old guard, the old extraction-based economy that sees economic
advancement as a win-loss game best advanced through imperialist
expansion. (2003)
Lawrence Lessig also warns that those who benefited under the "old
regimes" are fighting to retain control over the new environment,
and are likely winning (Lessig, 2001). There is no reason to assume
the old order has lost or will lose – even if it may be slightly
transformed.
It might even be possible to suggest that Information Technology
enables the intensification of trends of classical capitalism as
analysed by Marx, such as: globalisation of a particular culture;
destruction of national industries; inflation of the size of particular
cities; increasing inequality; increasing monopolisation; making
labour an appendage to the machine; freeing capital from local regulation;
turning the State into a managing agent for the benefit of corporations;
increasing the spread of directives and the control of land and
people; turning all values into property or monetary exchange, and
so on (Marshall, 2000). This resurgence of capitalism, and the extension
of the corporate model into previously immune aspects of life, will
be taken as the background social trend in what follows.
Information Economy
Nick Dyer-Witheford remarks that:
On the eve of the twenty-first century the only revolution spoken
of in advanced capitalism is the information revolution …
Along with a number of synonymous or associated terms – "postindustrialism",
superindustrialism", "the technotronic society",
"the wired society", "the control revolution",
"high technology society", "the second industrial
divide", "post-Fordism", "the globalization
of technology"… [it] has come to define contemporary
hopes and anxieties about the future. (1999: 16)
To theses terms we might add Castells' use of 'Network Society'
and his preference for the term 'informational society' (Castells,
1996: 21). Castells defines the network society as 'a social structure
made of information networks powered by information technologies
characteristic of the informationalist paradigm' (Castells, 2001:
166). He is clearly discussing similar ideas.
The concept of the knowledge or information economy was probably
introduced into general use by Peter Drucker or Alvin Toffler in
the early '60s. [2] Most
of the earlier scenarios were optimistic. Toffler's first book,
The Culture Consumers (1964), suggested that we would primarily
live by creating "culture", as we would all have so much
leisure, and he was not alone in this hope of a regime of free creativity.
Something else obviously happened.
The general idea first gained academic respectability in Daniel
Bell's formulation of the 'Post-Industrial Society', dependent upon,
and organised around, technical knowledge and knowledge workers
– the 'major class'. Knowledge workers were said to act as an intermediary
between the owners of capital and the workers, and acted to improve
the standards of living for workers through the application of knowledge
and planning within capitalism (Daniel Bell, 1976: 14-33, 374).
Bell was later to drop the idea of the importance of government
planning in line with the use of the "new information age"
rhetoric to deregulate capitalism.
The idea of the knowledge or information worker is an important
part of most information society formulations. Alvin Gouldner (1979)
developed this idea into the 'New Class', a combination of intellectuals
and technical intelligentsia, which often inhabited bureaucracies
but were not simply bureaucrats and were functionally independent
of capitalism. Views of the role of these knowledge workers varied.
Gouldner, and Drucker tended to see them as potentially powerful
(even as controlling capital) whereas Toffler saw them as fragmented,
with few obvious common interests providing any organising points
(Drucker, 1968: 276; Gouldner, 1979; Toffler, 1984: 38, 84, 114).
Both views seem accurate. A very few managerial workers control
large amounts of capital – although they must do so in the perceived
interests of the shareholders – but most knowledge workers do not
exert much power or cross industry organisation. In reality, only
particular kinds of knowledge and connections count (Angell, 2000:
53ff). Later theorists such as Himanen and McKenzie Wark, tend to
correlate knowledge workers with "hackers" and shall be
discussed later.
According to Dyer-Witheford the first American book with the words
information society in its title was published in 1978, although
the US Government office of Telecommunication had published Mark
Porat's The Information Economy the year before (1999: 20-1). In
the eighties and nineties information society theory largely became
entangled with deregulated capitalism (Drahos and Braithwaite, 2002).
Some of the same theorists who supported deregulation also tended
to predict social breakdown if deregulation was resisted. At best
those who resisted were luddites and would be superseded. [3]
It seems that the general theoretical boundaries
of the analysis were established by the late 1980s and we can roughly
summarise them as follows:
Main Points:
1. Knowledge or information is central to the "new economy"
both to its organisation and to the production of wealth. Information
is the society's raw material. Facticity is important.
2. The use of Information Technology is changing society – it
is a shift at least comparable to that from Agrarian Society to
Industrial Society. There is often a technologically determinist
ring to the argument.
3. Knowledge workers, are central to this change – either as
creative innovators or manipulators of symbols. They are forming
an increasing percentage of the work force.
Subsidiary Points:
4. The local, or national, becomes opposed to, or challenged by,
the Global. Ethnic and Religious identities can become more or less
important.
5. Speed becomes of increasing importance, both in terms of production
and distribution. The implication is that the system is responsive,
flexible and able to reconfigure. People's experience of Time/Space
is changing.
6. Capitalism is largely being "improved" (or as suggested
above, intensified) by this change.
7. There are lengthening chains of interdependence, linkages through
virtual networks not dependent upon place, class, time or identity,
that are all facilitated by IT.
8. The transformation is generally positive with increases in democracy
and freedom. Government and corporations are decentralised, and
hierarchy diminishes.
9 .There is a shift from an economy based on exchange of goods to
an economy based in speculation. [4]
Problems with the term "information"
There are well known problems with the term "information".
One is that it is used for many different things with very different
applications. It not only has a specialised meaning in mathematics,
but is applied to useful instructions, data about anything, novels,
plans, scientific research, financial projections, design specs
for a product, PR spin, painting, sports trivia and so on. It might
be argued that in contemporary society these things are considered
equivalent – partly because they can all be transmuted into digital
format, but also because of the move to evaluate everything by how
much people or organisations are prepared to pay for them. This
turns information into "product" which is valued by "appeal"
rather than by accuracy.
As Jacques Vallee points out, data does not become information,
or become useful, outside of a purpose, and it is the purpose that
creates value (1982: 46). Socially valued purpose may be determined
by already instituted power ratios and may be bent towards control.
If the overriding value is corporate profit, then information contrary
or apparently irrelevant, to profit will be devalued or perhaps
even suppressed.
Information also marks a problem for classical economics, as perfect
information is postulated in a functioning market. However, information
itself provides direction in the market and thus becomes valuable
and no longer evenly distributed. Prices don't simply reflect supply
and demand but give messages about them. A declining share price
gives the message the market is abandoning a company and the value
of the company is thereby affected (See Drucker, 1993: 183ff.; Soros,
1994). Businessman Mark Porat argues that 'merchants live off imperfect
information' (Burstein and Kline, 1995: 419). Concealment and special
knowledge is part of the game, not openness.
Toffler argued that information was a difficult concept for capitalist
economic theory because information is a potentially unlimited resource
unlike labour, capital or land. A person's stock of information
is not reduced by another possessing it and information is not consumed
and destroyed but can generate more (1984: 21-2). Many others have
said likewise. Wark, for example, argues that 'information need
not be subject to the laws of scarcity at all. My possession of
some information does not deprive you of it' (Christopher, 2002).
This constitutes a zone of friction.
Property, Distribution and Knowledge Workers
As "information" can supposedly be generated without
limit, and without any obvious connection to "things",
it becomes plausible to reintroduce the theory of eighteenth century
British philosopher David Hume that Imagination creates property
and value.
Property is established through Imagination firstly though its
imaginal connection with other values such as pleasure, freedom
or survival (Hume, 1888: 314), and secondly through the action of
social laws (494) which depend upon the functions of the imagination
for whatever appeal they have (505-13) and which 'vanish ... upon
a more accurate inspection into the subject' (527). Government and
law exist to make or to justify the 'distinction of property and
... the different ranks of men' (1888: 402). Hume also argues that
the value of goods is not dependent upon labour, but on the valuation
and imagination of the powerful. [5]
Imagination is made real through custom and
ritual. So any investigation of property has to look at modes of
appropriation and reward and the ways that these are ritualised.
The legitimacy of information, in an information society, is guaranteed
by the rituals of its (corporate) source, by their name and sigils,
and their ability to use other names. Wealth, power, ritual and
presence transform signals into Information and value.
Appropriation is affected by the politics of distribution as is
shown in economists Robert Frank and Philip Cook's model of 'The
Winner Take All Economy'. In this economy, due to the ease of replication,
only the skills of a very few people are actually needed. Their
recurrent example is that only the very best opera singers will
have their cds bought in numbers. Publishing companies will remove
their focus from middle selling authors to promote their best selling.
This leads to a situation in which only a few people become really
wealthy or successful. Frank and Cook assert that information technology
is 'increasing leverage for the talents of those who occupy top
positions, and correspondingly less room for others to find a lucrative
niche' (1995: viii). The same is true of "star programmers"
as opposed to "Microserfs" (Lessard and Baldwin, 2000).
The rest of us get progressively devalued.
One criticism of Frank and Cook's model might be that they adhere
too strongly to the idea that the successful is always "the
best" – that is clearly not always the case. What succeeds
is what succeeds, not what might be preferable. That cane toads
wipe out native fauna is not an improvement. CEOs, despite the ideology,
are often rewarded despite failure. As production heads for the
intangible, it becomes more important for a company to give the
right signals to its customers (often the shareholders, not the
purchasers of its "goods"), and the salary paid to the
CEO becomes a signal of their competence; it reassures shareholders
that everything is being done. Celebration of success becomes a
way of legitimating differential extractions.
As it is often alleged any human can make information then, in
modern information capitalism, it is implied that those without
money are immoral and unenlightened. Money makes human. The poor,
by these lights, are sub-human. The best get more and are defined
as the best by having more. As Kellner writes:
those who celebrate the coming information society tend not to
focus on what kind of society produces an information highway
and multi-media cornucopia for its privileged denizens while denying
others the basic necessities of life. (1994)
With the possibility of increasing inequality of wealth and control
suggested by this factor alone (and the evidence is that inequality
of wealth is increasing) there may also be a greater loss of political
equality. [6] The
wealthy can fund political parties, pay others to campaign in their
interest, propagate messages more widely and so on. They are more
noticed, and their words are heeded.
Knowledge workers not in this fortunate position have further problems.
There are considerable demands upon the worker's time – they can
be on demand via phone and email at all times and expected to respond
to any "emergency" whatever the demands of their non work
life – they are never truly away from work. The costs of administration
have been shifted on to the worker, who has to fill in all the bureaucratic
demands of the organisation, and this takes time away from dealing
with a workload which has not diminished. The person is expected
continually to retrain himself or herself for work, diminishing
their time for interests in the wider world. These workers are insecure
as work tends towards contracts and perpetual dismissal. Total flexibility
is demanded from them to accommodate to the wishes of the employer
and the system. Communication systems mean that they have to compete
against the whole world to work, in what is often thought as a downward
spiral of wages. This is also some evidence that knowledge work
is being continually deskilled by the movement of industrial methods
into the office, which also means that the competition for work
and the lowering of wages is more pronounced. The often praised
"flattening" of organisations can increase centralised
control by removing the buffering middle layer, which allowed flexibility
of response and provided intermediate jobs: one is either an owner
or a slave.
Mark Poster has suggested that increased surveillance mechanisms
allow workers to survey management equally, but he gives no evidence
for this rather unlikely bi-structuring (Poster, 2002). The Law
in Australia and the US seems to allow employers to read and ban
workers for the content of their emails (Lowe, 2003: 1). ISPs may
be held responsible for the contents of Web sites which a corporation
considers defamatory, thus not encouraging the distribution of criticism.
Existent and external power is not irrelevant in politics. [7]
If information is important, then uncovering hidden information
(not just plans, or replications of a product but also information
about people) becomes even more economically important. Commercially
sponsored hacker raids on other corporations are part of net folklore
(cf Ruskoff ,1994: 31-2). This almost certainly diminishes the freedom
of "knowledge workers", or of the supposed "creators".
Any knowledgeable employee has the potential to cost a corporation
huge amounts of money, either through carelessness, though going
public, or through selling information to a competitor. Therefore,
internal surveillance increases the more internal openness might
occur. Frequently, knowledge workers have written into their contracts
that after leaving their current employment they cannot work in
a similar field. This has the potential to render their knowledge/experience
of less benefit to them and render them more vulnerable to market
fluctuations and the increasingly temporary nature of employment.
None of these features would automatically increase democratisation.
At best they leave the worker harried, rushed and exhausted. This
forces focus on competitive survival, not on creative, or participatory,
politics and free exchange.
The rulers of industrial economies, which may have been threatened
with Revolution, saw that the provision of wages which enabled people
to purchase consumer goods, and the participation of people in the
State, enabled the continuance of their own power and prosperity.
The information economy seems to remove the necessity of practical
common ground between the controllers of capital and the majority
of the population.
Creation of Property
As costs of replication decrease, the current dominant corporations
have moved to protect the prices charged and their profit margin,
by creating information scarcity, or by hindering information exchange
or reproduction via patenting or copyright. Lester Thurow writes
that: 'the days of the low-cost sharing of private knowledge are
over' and that:
The Industrial Revolution began with an enclosure movement that
abolished common land in England. The world now needs a socially
managed enclosure movement for intellectual property rights or
it will witness a scramble among the powerful to grab valuable
pieces of intellectual property, just as the powerful grabbed
the common lands of England three centuries ago. (Schiller, 1999:
77)
Microsoft, for example, through its subsidiary Corbis has 'effectively
acquired the rights to the photographic record of history' (Hallacy,
2000). British Telecom recently attempted to claim ownership of
the idea of "web links" and demanded tribute. They lost
in law, but in theory Xerox, as the probable originator, could make
the same demand legally.
The public domain, in all forms, is continually encroached upon:
Patents are increasingly stretched out to cover "ideas"
that twenty years ago all scholars would have agreed were unpatentable:
the so-called business method patents, which cover such "inventions"
as auctions or accounting methods, are an obvious example. Most
troubling of all are the attempts to introduce intellectual property
rights over mere compilations of facts … stretched interpretations
of novelty and nonobviousness allow intellectual property rights
to move closer and closer to the underlying datalayer. (Boyle,
2002: 16)
In the information economy "creativity" has become a
magical term used to carve out property from social and collaborative
(or mixed) processes so as to justify ownership although it is usually
not the creator who owns but their employer, replicating the capitalist
appropriation of labour generally. Corporations may require workers
to generate patents, but those patents do not belong to the inventors.
James Boyle writes:
[I]nformation presents special [social and conceptual] problems
and the discourse of authorship seems to solve its problems ...
The author stands between the public and private realms, giving
new ideas to the society at large and being granted in return
a limited right of private property in the artefact he or she
has created. (Boyle, 1996: xii)
A constructed Corporate Author became legitimated as a point of
origin, almost at the moment that theory pronounced the death of
the author. The claim suppresses both the claims of sources, groupwork,
and audience. It could be suggested that assertions that web pages
are inherently without authors because they are hypertext (Poster,
2002) act in favour of corporate ownership and the diminishment
of writer's rights.
This extension of copyright clashes with the ethos of free exchange
which developed via the Internet when there were large sections
of traffic outside corporate influence. It particularly clashes
with the easy exchange of solutions to technical problems which
allowed the Net's construction (Lessig, 2001; King et al., 1997:
26ff; Schiller, 1999: 10). The Net and the Web may only be able
to work through the ease of making copies at various storage points
and transmission nodes – memory replication is at the heart of computer
functioning. It is conceivable that a stringent application of copyright
could interfere with this transmission. As we shall see, many original
denizens of the Internet objected strongly, although without much
effect, to commercial incursion, and continue to champion "open
source" software as part of this tradition of free exchange.
Such an extension of copyright also clashes with creativity in general
as "information products" are often based on fragments
of other information products (Boyle, 2002: 19). For example, Shakespeare's
plays are based on earlier sources, earlier forms, and often use
earlier phrases. Any information product is embedded in some kind
of history and system of other products and schemas.
As most products are part of a system, companies fight over standards,
partly to keep people who purchase part of a system, locked within
that system, and partly to gain a time lead over their competition,
and to be able to charge royalties to those who decide to use, or
add to, their established system (Toffler, 1990: 130). The volume
of the adoption of a system makes that system more attractive as
more products are made for it. Thus, given that the Windows market
is at least 10 times the Apple Mac market, a company writing Windows
software has only to get 10% of the Windows market to sell as many
items as if they cornered the whole of the Mac market. Under the
requirements of capitalism, people have more profit incentive to
write for Windows and variation is diminished. This trend to monopoly
can also extend to companies, and so the number of organisations
making computers or writing software diminishes (Philipson, 2001).
When standards are not set by market power, they are set by a relatively
few individuals, in committees, trading benefits to their company
or organisation, and building in resistances to certain types of
change.
This uniformity in software intensifies replication issues. People
(particularly in poorer countries) find that the cost of purchasing
the goods they need is prohibitive compared to the cost of replicating
them. As a result the US has threatened trade wars against Asian
countries such as Thailand. While accepting human rights violations
in China, the US threatened to revoke Chinese trade privileges over
copyright (Toffler, 1990: 329-30, 469). It appears corporations
still need States to enforce the laws that make their operations
possible. That States appear not to use this leverage to gain concessions
from corporations is interesting.
In this set up, even natural phenomena get turned into property
– although this is not new. Europeans have turned land into exclusive
property for a long time. Courts say that if genes were not patentable
then there would be no research. They assume appropriation drives
knowledge, and so Courts have granted copyright to the discoverers,
or first users, of naturally occurring genes and viruses. In a case
in Australia in 1996, the company whose researchers discovered the
Hepatitis C virus and which produces tests for that virus went to
court to prevent another company from releasing cheaper and different
tests for the same virus on the grounds that they have copyright
on the virus. Despite the human genome project being publicly funded,
various companies have claimed patents on various strips of the
DNA. One company, Genetic Technologies, claims to own 95% of all
the DNA of every creature on the planet and requires researchers
to pay a license fee to research its property (Smith, 2003: 4).
However, information is only one of many types of property. The
old economy has not disappeared and shapes the "new".
Although George Gilder and Newt Gingrich proclaimed the 'overthrow
of matter' (Dyson et al., 1992), they still wanted the material
substrata of the information age, and the power it supposedly no
longer brings, to belong firmly in corporate, not public, hands.
Indeed, control of wires and air waves seems to be a vital part
of corporate strategy for the future. This could reasonably be supposed
to fit in with increased possibility of corporate control of content
and to affect possibilities of use (Marshall, 2001: 82-6).
Factuality in an Information Economy
The problem of 'data smog', or information overload (Shenk, 1977)
affects facticity. Peter Varian and Hal Lyman estimate that in 2002
five exabytes of information were created. This is 'equivalent in
size to the information contained in half a million new libraries
the size of the Library of Congress print collections' (Lyman and
Varian, 2003). Even the amount of email, knowledge workers have
to deal with and filter, in addition to existing work, has been
found to add to stress (AAP, 2003: 5; Wright, 2003: 6). Finding
all relevant data amidst this volume is probably impossible – selecting
the relevant information is extremely hard. Pre-existent bias creeps
in. Even if search engines are not configured to bring up sponsoring
organisations and suppress critical organisations, issues of authority,
of being noticed or selected are not simply overcome. Major organisations
tend to have the authority of their brand, a lone writer has to
do far more work to have their views noticed and relayed beyond
a small group, however accurate their thought.
In a situation of informational profusion, marketing may be more
important than accuracy, in disseminating information. The leading
strategies become dominant over the means of dissemination, convincing
people that certain types of information are preferable, building
a reputation in the market for good information, and provision of
an attractive market for information.
Academic and artistic discourse seems to be marginalised when not
supporting the dominant order, illustrated by, for example, the
apparent effort to remove post-colonialist theory from US universities
as "anti-American" (Subcommittee on Select Education).
The same may be true of science as shown by the exclusion of warnings
of global warming from official reports (Campbell, 2003: 19).
The more that information becomes a commodity, then the less accurate
it may become. There are several complementary reasons for this:
1. Information as commodity is defined by its appeal to a market,
whether that market be readers or disseminators, which means that
accuracy is not its primary characteristic.
2. As the market value of information depends on scarcity, information
providers will have incentive for hiding what they know, or restricting
access, by issuing inaccurate, or covering, information (assuming
people cannot be prevented from using that information otherwise).
This result may be limited by growing distrust of a disseminator,
but it is not clear how great an impedance this will be if all major
information sources act in the same way.
3. Information refers to other information. For example share prices
give messages about the value and functionality of a company as
well as act as measures of that value. Thus there is further imperative
to hide deleterious information or produce spurious information
in order to gain market advantage. One may be the first to know
the "real" relation between a company and its value or
make a company valuable by giving out selective information.
4. Value is largely subjective in the first place. Hence there
is more interest in creating a subjective sense of value, or lack
of value, amongst "those who matter", than there is in
any impartial reckoning – assuming impartiality was possible.
5. As gross inequality increases, so does the pressure towards
violence or distortion of reality. In which case, there is a large
degree of "social utility" in maintaining inaccuracy.
Propagating a more accurate view of reality might be exceedingly
difficult and acting on it might encounter all kinds of resistances.
There is no reason that a society should not collapse under the
weight of its own "self deception" or inaccuracies, if
the forces reinforcing the inaccuracies are more influential than
the forces leading towards embrace of accuracy. The Soviet Union
might be an example.
Dissemination of this kind of falsity can be blamed on increasing
corporate control of the media, decreasing numbers of media owners,
cronyism between corporate controllers and political figures, decreasing
security of employment for reporters, fear of bringing bad news
to superiors. [8] Or,
if you are right wing, on a "liberal intelligentsia" occupying
positions of power in the media (e.g. Kohn, 2003; Goldberg, 2003).
[9] Such
factors may be part of a temporary structure of media personnel,
however it more probably is related to the kinds of pressure, mentioned
above, which lead to trading in inaccuracy and more particularly
in expressions of absolute certainty. People only rarely seem to
read books with politics different to their own – preferring to
stay with their own certainties.
It might be that in an environment of near instantaneous transmission
it becomes near impossible to allow time for the suspensions of
certainty which allow creative explorations of options. Indeed,
whether it was in the interests of those with certainty or not (and
human beings often seem convinced by certainty and repetition),
certainty will tend to drive out creativity because it is easier
to replicate – it tends to be shorter with less prevarication. The
culture of the TV sound bite is well known, as are the complaints
about it from "print journalists". Instead of complexity
we are delivered a summary certainty. If certainty is easier to
replicate, then it will also be easier to find. And thus it might
tend to veil problems with a particular political position, reinforcing
that position and thus allowing developments, and propagation, from
that false certainty.
Right wing commentators in the US frequently argued that the Clinton
Administration was bedevilled with "spin". With the arrival
of Bush Jr. such allegations have not ceased, with assertions that
this US administration relies on lies and deceit from the "theft"
of an election, to the aims of its economic policies, to war on
Iraq (see Kellner, 2002; Corn, 2003; Conason, 2003). It is well
known that the current Prime Minister of Australia is likewise given
to "not being told" of "facts" which contradict
his inclinations.
With the war on Iraq, which seems to have been under consideration
from the days after September 11, the time could have been used
for careful planning of the aftermath, but was instead used in reiterating
certainties about how easy it would be to impose democracy and how
all Iraqis would welcome a US presence. It seems the resistance
took the proposers of the war by surprise. Similarly, if the presence
of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" was known as a lie to
the Bush Administration, then we could have expected that they would
make the lie good, by planting such weapons. Instead it appears
they were surprised by the Weapon's absence. Certainty had driven
out accuracy. In which case, we can propose that certainty and inaccuracy
are not just propaganda, but enmesh the operations of the modern
State and its political system, and that this may have to do with
the mode of information itself.
In an information economy, at a certain level, bad information
which fits in with previous biases, or the needs of PR, drives out
good information which challenges them. This is in keeping with
the argument that an information economy tends to be targeted at
marketing, or controlling and keeping the customer, rather than
"real utility".
This suggests that a democracy based on accuracy of information
as a determination of action would be unlikely. It is more likely
that fragmentation into particular uncommunicative certainties would
result. Something which largely seems to be the case in actual Internet
based discussions of politics.
Prestation Economy
If, as is implied by Hume, conceptions of property and ownership
are arbitrary and can vary between societies, then it is useful
to consider other forms of economy such as "prestation",
or gift economies – especially as the traditional behaviours of
Internet users have frequently been compared to such economies (Barbrook,
1998, 1999; Raymond, 1999). In such economies, people give gifts
to others, which are evaluated by others, and which usually carry
some level of obligation to give gifts or recognition in return.
This translates into status but not into exclusive fixed ownership
or accumulation. Status must be constantly recycled or re-earned.
It is fairly unstable. Capitalism usually destroys prestation economies,
as recycling profit back to relatives or others prevents the accumulation
of capital.
It needs to be emphasised, against writers like Barbrook, that
a prestation economy is not necessarily harmonious or self sustaining
– potlatch is hostile exchange which became out of control and destructive
of the societies it emerged within. [10]
Prestation economies can also link people
who have never met and never will meet in vast cycles or networks
of exchange which can be disrupted at many points. It is not obvious
why academics should have a romantic view of the gift economy. Nowadays
their prestations are compulsory if they want to keep their jobs
or gain promotion (ability to teach can be irrelevant). Papers can
be fiercely rejected by others, the demands to present can mean
that papers get given before they are ready. The person who can
write fast has an advantage over those who prefer to be more considered.
Academics may act to support their own friends and followers and
reduce prestations by enemies or strangers and so on. Prestations
are embedded within fields of power and contestation, and are not
independent of them. Such economies can be both competitive and
unstable, or even act counter to some of the needs of people, and
are thus vulnerable to certain types of collapse. Both features
are the case with prestation economies on the Internet.
Prestation economies can recognise intertwined ownership. Thus
when Malinowski describes the case of ownership for canoes in the
Trobriand Islands prestation economy, although he specifically states
that a canoe will have an owner, ownership of a canoe is complex
as are the claims that people may have to use a particular canoe.
Ownership ... is defined by the manner in which the object is
made, used and regarded by the group of men who produced it and
enjoy its possession... in using the craft every joint owner has
a right to a certain place in it and to certain duties, privileges
and benefits associated with it ... it is the sum of duties, privileges
and mutualities which bind the joint owners to the object and
to each other. (Malinowski, 1926: 19-20)
Likewise, in an email list, mails are public prestations, they
are given freely, they are not "for sale", there is no
fixed value which calls for immediate return, the author's stack
of gifts is not diminished by someone else using them, nor is any
status amidst the group which was gained by the prestation lost
if another uses them elsewhere. Indeed, to some extent the reverse
might happen. It is also exceedingly difficult to maintain, or accumulate
anything, which we might call Capital and equally difficult to dissipate
any accumulation.
In much email parts of the "property" of others is overtly
embedded within the "property" of the current writer and
contributes to making its final form or even its existence. A form
of group ownership is constructed through almost every mail which
makes the exchange. We might say, that like the Trobriand canoe,
these mails only existent because of a web of connections and contributions.
If Internet societies originally held that, or behave in such a
way as to function as if, information was a matter of prestation
then attempts to model information as "property for sale or
to be owned" destroys these models and the society changes,
as surely as tribal or prestation based societies changed under
capitalism. Intertwined mail, forwards and accounts of other writings,
even references to web sites, become subject to the demands of ownership
and copyright. A person on the Internet discussion list that I study
wrote:
Some one has suggested that I copyright that thing that wrote
itself last night, and this reopens an old thought-box. We discussed
this, here, a long time ago, and it was my opinion that if I posted
something to the List, it was a 'gift' (something like that....).
Well, somebody seems to be thinking $$, here, and suddenly I ain't
so pure and generous any more. How does one copyright something
retroactively? I mean – it would burn my butt if somebody *else*
made money from my sweat without my permission ..... ;). (Rose
Mulvale, 1996; ellipses in original)
It has also been the case that over the time between 1994 and the
present day (late 2003) that members of this list have become far
more concerned about the "ownership" of the words they
submit to the list, often on the grounds that they make their living
through their words. The idea that a mailing list is a public domain
seems to be becoming less common than it was. Therefore the model
of the information society/economy with its emphasis on confined
intellectual property, may in itself be hostile to these traditions
of free exchange, in that it changes the ways people who use this
model can behave, from the "inside" as it were.
It changes messages from prestation to property.
The prestation economy can also be co-opted by the use of gifts
which bind people to a system – an example being the ubiquitous
cds which give access to the Internet through a particular company
only.
This kind of economy resembles that of the construction of the
original Internet software, as people did not appropriate it for
themselves, but gave it freely in exchange for the recognition of
a peer group. It became what Lessig (2001) has called a creative
commons, and the effect of this can be seen in the rapidity with
which the Internet was developed and in the rapid adaptation of
technically proficient hacks.
Free Software and Open Source
As is customary in Internet discussions there is a great deal of
heat about the difference between these two types of software licences.
In both cases a main idea is that the source code of software should
be available, and users should be able to modify or improve that
software.
Richard Stallman is usually considered to be the guru of the free
software movement. He makes plain he is not talking about 'free'
in terms of 'free product' but in terms of 'freely modifiable',
'freely usable' and 'freely transferable'. Source code should not
be secret, and these conditions should be passed on to all subsequent
users of the software (Gnu 1). People could still retain copyright
over their code to stop others making it propriety software, and
must not use patents (Gnu 2). It appears that the default under
US law is not that something is public domain, but that it is privately
owned. His model is essentially that of western science – the open
distribution and criticism of work. Stallman argues that:
The US Constitution says that copyright exists "to promote
the progress of science". When copyright impedes the progress
of science, science must push copyright out of the way. (Richard
Stallman, 2001)
Open source supporters, such as Bruce Parens and Eric Raymond,
seem to be a lot less insistent on the lack of secrecy or the transmission
of "freedoms". All that they require is that the source
code be made available – you are not forced to pass on the rights
you had. In some cases, under an open source licence the modifications
made to the program can become the exclusive property of the vendor
of the program. In other words, open source allows appropriation
of common work and some companies may only make a part of their
software open source.
Raymond argues that open source and post-industrial capitalism
are natural allies, and that making something open source increases
the detection of errors and promotes reliability – however efficiency
under capitalism is not the same as openness, as has been argued
above. Raymond's ease would seem to depend on the assumption that
our society will always choose the survival, and possibly the maximal
happiness, option. There is no necessity for this.
Raymond then argues that a prestation economy can only function
when people are free of the constraints of survival (1999). This
is not exactly true as many prestation economies function to distribute
goods necessary for survival in fairly harsh conditions, but it
probably is true that capitalism tends to prevent prestation economies
acting as the major mechanism of survival. The prestation economies
of the Internet depend on people being able to survive externally
of the exchange. The more that people working in universities, for
example, come to depend upon corporate support, and the more they
have to earn funds (survival) by selling ideas or the products of
ideas, the less this will be the case. To a large extent the prestation
economy of the Internet came into being only because of State support
– of the technical corporate sector and the universities. The more
the State is rolled back from this kind of support the less it will
be able to function that way.
Whatever the case, the open source license with less insistence
on "freedom" (other than getting free labour on your product),
is certainly more successful with business, as it allows appropriation
of work in the public domain and retains capitalist property rights.
Open source proponents often accuse Stallman of being too idealistic
and point out that their techniques have been much more successful
in selling the idea to the corporate world. IBM, for example, now
actively promotes the open source operating system Linux. Others
accuse Stallman, who does appear to hold left wing political positions,
of being communist – something he repeatedly denies, but it shows
the vehemence with which the possibilities of changing the role
of intellectual property can be denounced. Stallman himself alleges
that discussions of ethics and freedom make people uncomfortable
and is not acceptable to business (Stallman, 2000). As Lessig writes:
Microsoft has waged a war against the GPL [[General Public Licence]],
warning whoever will listen that the GPL is a "dangerous"
license. The dangers it names, however, are largely illusory.
Others object to the "coercion" in GPL's insistence
that modified versions are also free. But a condition is not coercion.
If it is not coercion for Microsoft to refuse to permit users
to distribute modified versions of its product Office without
paying it (presumably) millions, then it is not coercion when
the GPL insists that modified versions of free software be free
too. (Lessig, 2002)
Certain types of compulsion can be promoted as the freedoms of
free enterprise – the flexibility demanded of workers is not
applied to corporate property, which fits in with the general capitalist
view of extending the grip on property. We have seen recently in
the free trade negotiations with the US that extension of copyright
was not seen as a restriction of trade but health regulations were
(Cochrane, 2003: 1). Furthermore, it seems from SCO's recent attempts
to sue IBM for 3 billion dollars over allegations that IBM's version
of Linux includes propriety code that a war is on over this issue
(Philipson, 2003).
Hacker Ethic
As already mentioned, the public domain of the Internet, outside
the widespread and already existing commercial networks, was constructed
largely through the sharing of information between programmers,
often without much regard for secrecy or the conventions of capitalist
property. The method of calling for Request for Comments (RFCs)
encapsulated this kind of informal organisation based on technical
prowess and socially evaluated solutions to problems. This openness
was also true of the software, browser and application, which led
to the World Wide Web (Berners-Lee, 1999). Raymond suggests that
most software (95%) is essentially not written for sale and is in
house and open to programmers within the company (1999). In other
words, some kind of openness and support is behind most programming.
Such an approach to software might be called part of the "hacker
ethic".
This could be seen as extended to almost all workers in the "information
economy". For example, Wark says 'I think everyone who actually
creates "intellectual property" could consider themselves
part of the same class – the hacker class – and as having
convergent interests' (Christopher, 2002). Wark does recognise the
potential conflict of interest between such workers and corporate
ownership of their product. He calls the corporate sector the vectoralist
class – but it is unclear what this adds to anything other than
veiling – after all the vectoralist class and the corporate
class are very much the same people. Perhaps Wark uses "Capitalist"
to mean "Industrial Capitalist"? Wark praises "hackers"
as the new class:
Hacker knowledge implies, in its practice, a politics of free
information, free learning, the gift of the result to a network
of peers. Hacker knowledge also implies an ethics of knowledge
subject to the claims of public interest and free from subordination
to commodity production. Hacker knowledge is knowledge that expresses
the virtuality of nature, by adding to it, fully aware of the
bounty and danger. (Wark, Hacker Manifesto 2.0)
In a recent book Himanen has attempted to rewrite Max Weber's Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism for the Information Age (1958),
and suggest that, as the "Protestant ethic" was important
for the development of capitalism so the "hacker ethic"
will determine the new age to come. The hacker ethic is described
as being self-consciously about passionate, freely organised work,
and the cooperation of individuals in free ways to produce new goods
(Himanen, 2001a: vii, 3-7). The hacker ethic is also held to be egalitarian
and in favour of free communication and privacy (54, 99). This new
conglomeration of ideals is supposed to produce a new society expressing
those kinds of features.
There seem several problems with such a set of propositions. Firstly,
it seems to totally misread Weber. Secondly, Himanen can only make
his argument by asserting that many features of the information
society have nothing to do with the world hackers live in.
To deal with the first point first. Weber never argued that Protestants
believed in hard work and therefore produced capitalism. Weber's
argument, to simplify it, was that capitalism was helped to develop
its particular forms through the unintended consequences of certain
Protestant ideals, which drove people in directions they might not
have otherwise gone. It is the unintended consequences that have
effect, not the conscious ones (Weber, 1958). So to analyse the
effect of hackers we must look at their actual behaviours and driving
values, and consider what kinds of unintended consequences they
might have.
For example, somewhat oddly, in the debate about the book on Slashdot.org
(which, if anywhere, is the home of those who wish to be the programming
elite), there was great preoccupation with the meaning of the word
"hacker". There was continuing indignation that "others"
could not understand that "hacker" meant 'nifty programmer'
or the equivalent, not 'person who breaks into computers' (Slashdot
1, Slashdot 2).
However, if a word is taken by everyone else to mean something
then, if you actually want to communicate, why not use another word?
What is wrong with the "programmer ethic", or the "nerd
ethic"? Levy's Hackers, which slashdotters frequently claim
to be a good book, shows the ambiguity of the word was there from
the start. Levy writes that "hack" 'may have been suggested
by ancient MIT lingo – the word "hack" had long been used
to describe the elaborate college pranks that MIT students would
regularly devise' (1994: 23ff). In normal speech, to "hack
something apart" is to demolish something crudely, to "hack
something together" is to assemble something ingeniously but
crudely. The OED gives "hacked" as contemporary US slang
meaning 'annoyed or frustrated (ie "hacked off")'. Then
the OED quotes Byte magazine as deriving the term from a Yiddish
expression meaning someone who makes furniture with an axe – this
bit of folk etymology seems unlikely, but it still maintains the
edgy violence of the word.
The inability of large numbers of slashdotter's to accept the current
normal meaning of the word, suggests that hackers are either often
fairly inflexible, or have a tendency to disregard the uses of those
who are not also hackers.
Hence, there has to be some suspicion of the egalitarianism of
the hacker ethic. As a technical egalitarianism, it may only encourage
the equality of "those who know what they are doing",
and this might be a fairly limited subset of human activities: programming,
fighting (in abstract), gaming, doing hard science, writing SF or
fantasy perhaps. The rest of the world can go hang, while this particular
elite gets on with the job.
Illustrating these different perceptions Hardy (1996) sees the
initial ARPANET community as village-like and informal in its customs,
but Vallee, who had contact with it, writes it was:
guarded by the puffery of high priests, the sanctity of passwords
and confidential phone numbers, the ARPA Network thinks of itself
as the very exclusive province of a few geniuses. (Vallee, 1982:
116)
Perhaps both reactions are possible and compatible. It has one
appearance when viewed internally and another when viewed externally.
In an interview in alphabetstreet, Himanen stresses the
difference between the hacker ethic and the Protestant ethic in
respect to work:
The Protestant work ethic teaches us that no matter what your
work consists of you should see it as your most important duty
in life ... In opposition to that, hackers devote their lives
to doing something that is their passion, i.e., something that
they find intrinsically interesting, exciting and joyous. They
do something in which they can be creative, realize themselves,
and constantly grow. This is totally different from the Protestant
ethic (2001a).
In other words, Himanen sees devoting your life to work while being
miserable as the Protestant ethic, while devoting your life to work
and enjoying it as the hacker ethic. In both cases the vocation
and the obsession are there. Both could fit with the features of
the information society that we have discussed. We might argue that
the Protestant Ethic at least suggests that there are things outside
work (even holy and special things), whereas this seems beyond the
hacker ethic entirely, you work whenever you can. No rest, no leisure,
no contemplation. Life is a Regime of Total Work. In his book, Himanen
tries to distinguish information age total work from hacker work,
but he can only do this by ignoring the conditions that most knowledge
workers live in (see Lessard and Baldwin). No one denies the elite
have freedoms.
The hacker attitude to power is also quite strange. Apart from
denying they are interested in power, while insisting that everyone
else use their tools and their words, they seem unlikely to be able
to recognise power, or resist power that is not of the type that
they use. Levy reports that the supposedly free wheeling Hackers,
who resisted locked doors, accepted security when faced with the
anti-war protests which might disrupt their work (1994: 130-33).
Similarly some of the Hacker "Community" seem to have
rushed to help the FBI and CIA find ways of spying upon the general
populace after September 11 (Ryle, 2003: 25-30).
In the light of this, it is not strange that Himanen, in the same
interview, can argue that the Internet 'was not built by corporations
and governments but by some passionate individuals who shared their
creations freely with others'(2001b). This is a remarkable omission. The
Internet was a result of a complex series of interactions between
governments, academic bodies, the military, corporations, technicians
and programmers. All of these groups had different objectives and
interests. Remove one of them and things might have been considerably
different, but no one of them was completely determinate of the
outcome. The fact that hackers can proclaim they built the Internet
all by themselves, emphasises the ease with which they can overlook
the rest of society, which perhaps does not indicate a democratic
attitude.
Himanen considers that the copyrighting of everything is a problem,
but seems to think that because this is inefficient it will eventually
fall down.
If you make some great technological innovation, you must open
it enough to get others join in within six months or otherwise
you are left alone with outdated technology. So even if you just
want to win the competition, the best strategy for your greedy
goals is not closedness but openness. (2001b)
This has not been the case for Microsoft, but Himanen is suggesting
political action is never necessary, leave it to the market (which
simply means leave it to the powerful). But what if the copyright
holders don't care, or do not see that openness is good for them
(as when the patenting of natural phenomena is allowed because without
it there would be no investment, or little profit), and everything
collapses because no one can innovate?
Similarly the demands of the market may shape the long term behaviour
of Hackers rather than the other way round. As Himanen points out
Bill Gates was once a hacker, and so was Steve Jobs (2001a: 56).
The Winner Take All model suggests that it is only an elite few
hackers who will have the freedom and creative power that he celebrates,
the rest will work with increasing demands on time, increasing surveillance,
and increasing Taylorisation.
It is not clear how hacker concerns for freedom of information
and privacy actually mesh up. Perhaps again it translates into privacy
for those who know how, and openness for everyone else. I've heard
programmers express total incomprehension about privacy fears, because
we can all easily use PGP if it worries us. Here the "hacker"
that they don't wish to know about surfaces again – the person who
"liberates" information about you, without your consent.
Again a fairly steep divide is suggested in practice between those
who are programmers or those who can afford programmers, and everyone
else. Is the "hacker ethic", then, a potential slaveowner's
ethic? 'Others can do the other work we need to survive, ours is
the work of citizens'.
In contrast to Himanen's arguments about freedom of information
and the hacker ethic, we have argued that the birth of the information
age is connected with the reestablishment of restrictions on the
flow of information in science and in art through copyright, and
the introduction of the copyrighting of naturally occurring phenomena
like genes.
As we all know, universities and research institutes, which have
previously been the home of this kind of free exchange of ideas
are being remodelled on corporate lines, and becoming more dependent
on corporations. Ideas which are generated in universities frequently
become the property of the corporations who contribute some sponsorship
to the projects, and they can no longer be freely circulated or
even, in some cases, divulged. A monolithic ideology of corporatism,
in which corporate business procedures are the only ways of organising,
can be seen to be replacing any idea, or practice, that perhaps
different kinds of organisation need different types of organising.
It is also not the case that the sharing of information between
hackers is the same as providing information for everyone else.
Often elites share things while unintentionally (at best) keeping
them secret from others.
The Internet and Politics
The Internet has frequently been seen as potential transformer
of politics. Often it has been seen as an anarchy. However, as any
human group will seek order and convention in order to resolve communicative
ambiguity, any anarchy is potentially an order evolving through
conflict, rhetoric and action. In that sense, and in the sense that
online communities do not often intersect with prevention of offline
survival, Internet societies are largely free of permanent imposition.
However this may not scale up to offline politics as is often
argued – orders of magnitude with the involvement of location and
survival may change things.
In the faceless world of pure text (or "pure mind"),
it has been often held that an argument would stand or fall by its
own virtues rather than by the social markers of those who enunciated
it. Similarly, many have argued that Totalitarian States could not
survive the coming of the Internet as information would be freely
available and censorship (of the "truth") would not be
viable. In other words the Internet has often been seen as a democratising
force providing good information.
More subtly, Poster suggests that the Internet is 'underdetermined'
because it is open, does 'not direct agents into clear paths', and
encourages 'social construction and cultural creation'. It is 'overdetermined
in the sense of being structured through multiple contradictory
practices but is also underdetermined in the sense that it remains
an invitation to a new imaginary' (Poster, 2001: 18). The Internet
is transgressive because it enables instantaneous many to many communications,
dislocates communication from the space of the nation, and accelerates
'postmodern' subjectivities (16).
However, Best and Kellner (2003) suggest that the experience of
postmodern themes (entropy, chaos, indeterminacy, contingency, simulation,
and hyperreality) could be a product of a society not in formation
but in disintegration. It might also seem that this position is
easily co-opted by the Corporate Right – no need to make any social
change, or work for a fairer distribution of the proceeds of groupwork,
let's just provide everyone with a computer.
More seriously, the idea that the Internet might encourage multiplicity
might be inaccurate, more a way to sell postmodernism than a description
of what happens. My own research of online subjectivity suggested
that people were far more concerned about determining the real authenticity
of the other, or uncovering their "truth", than they were
in allowing them to play with multiple identities. Any observed
multiplicity was regarded as an addition to a person's real nature,
not real in itself – it was often regarded as automatically deceitful
in some sense. Thus people quested for bodily information (particularly
"correct gender"), and assumed that a person's words had
one real meaning, which was easy to obtain, and that people could
be inserted into fairly straightforward categories such as 'male'
or 'female', 'Democrat' or 'Republican' etc.
Poster adds that there is 'the possibility of developing a level
of global interconnectedness that is outside the aegis of both the
nation-state and the transnational corporation' (Poster, 2001: 118).
Leaving aside the issue of whether this actually gives any potential
for further democracy as opposed to warring extremisms, the corporate
or State sectors may have more power to regulate imaginings and
interconnectedness than he assumes. It may be that the configuration
allowed by the Internet is not that beneficial either, as revealed
in actual usage. We cannot assume that interconnectedness produces
dialogue. Communication is difficult and fraught with danger. Not
all communication is good communication or particularly beneficial
(Marshall, 2002).
Even a limited experience of Internet discussion groups shows that
when political issues are invoked, groups tend to polarise, erupt
into flame and abuse, and break apart with the loss of those who
feel in the minority position. In addition, discussions evoking
controversy can result in an inhibition of the issues in order to
preserve peace and to avoid flooding the group "space"
with a volume of messages greater than members can handle. It is
rare to get discussion moving towards a position informed by all
sides – it is much more common to see existing positions move further
apart. Partly this problem arises from the ease of separation (no
one has to cooperate), and partly it arises because the issue of
who says something is important to how the message is interpreted.
Communication is always ambiguous, always a matter of interpretation,
being resolved by the ways the message is given context, and this
context involves identifying the participants. Online, when the
only identity markers are widespread clichés or generalisations,
and exceptions to the clichés can be unperceived, these markers
may take on a strength even greater than they have offline, irrespective
of their relevance to the discussion. In effect, the markers of
class, social position, race, gender and political ideology become
ways of providing context for interpretation, as are, perhaps in
different ways, the effects of education, personal style and amount
of time that a person has free to participate. Even if it is proposed
that online people's presentation of their race/ethnicity or gender
can be fluid, this does not imply the categories themselves are
fluid. It may be that the common denial of the effects of these
markers tends to give them more influence. If you argue that you
are disadvantaged by such a marker, it tends to produce strident
denials by those on the more favourable side of the divide, and
the deniers become even less likely to listen to the person's arguments.
I have witnessed this on many occasions, particularly around the
effects of gender and race, even in places where you might expect
people to hold leftish political views. [11]
Furthermore, the power basis of a society is not circumvented,
as power still legitimates arguments, has greater possibility of
physical retaliation, and allows greater spread and repetition of
messages. Besides, Internet groups are not without power hierarchies.
A power base can provide income for people to spread propaganda
and to organise others to respond. Thus, corporations can sue dissenting
websites or their ISPs, or plant messages disguised as discussion
or recommendation. They can also start up discussion groups and
pay people to both propagandise and entertain, and remove those
who object too strongly. Groups can organise to protest against
media who they feel distort their position, and the more power those
groups have offline, the more this power will translate into suppression
of discussion.
Message boards run by media organisations to facilitate political
debate, can tend to ban topics or arguments they consider unsuitable
as happened with the New York Times in the days after Sept 11 2001
(Bressers, 2003: 16). The more that maintaining the return rate
of posters, or the 'community', is important, the more debate may
tend to be suppressed – either voluntarily or by fiat.
We might define power ratios in terms of the ease of activation
of particular pathways of response. In which case the established
order will always tend to be dominant unless new pathways can be
established (particularly if outside of the ken of the dominant
order) or if older pathways become less stable, less efficient,
or disrupted. In the case of the Internet it looks, at this moment,
as if the Internet is strengthening the proclivities of corporate
dominance faster than it might increase possible alternatives. Perhaps
the only resistance, however disastrous, might be in fundamentalisms,
which give an even stronger sense of group identity.
Conclusion
Partly the idea that the Internet increases democracy is supported
by the idea that information is a good thing, but information is
only "good" when it is as accurate as it can be, easy
to recognise and easy to find. As I have argued, this is not the
case. Validation often depends on some kind of existent authority,
which depends on the power system. People with one set of views
tend to accept reports supporting those views and be less concerned
about the validity of these sources than they would be of opposing
views – partly because they fit in with presuppositions, but partly
because repetition counts as truth. The polarisation occurring in
Internet debate is likely to heighten this acceptance and dismissal.
Again the ultimate tendency would be to support the existing powers.
Most cases in which these existing powers have been affected tend
to be in those issues concerning engineering and technical competency
in which a decisive and limited market has objected strenuously
to a particular technical failing (such as the inaccurate arithmetic
in one Intel processor) or support the spread of Linux. This effect
does not seem to have translated, at this moment, into more widespread
politics.
Although the Internet has been used with some effect to organise
the movement for social justice and the anti-war movement in the
US, it has not been able to compensate for either the type, or lack,
of publicity given to its actions in the wider media. Those who
know are those who already know. The easily organised mass protests
against the War in Iraq did not stop people apparently supporting
their governments and the war, when it formally began.
To some extent the lack of democratising effect with the Internet
is to be expected as we live in a society of increasing inequality
in power and wealth, in which the basis of that wealth is threatened
by economic and social collapse, terrorism and ecological catastrophe.
The response of the modern State has been to become more stringent
in its regulations of lower classes, and less inclusive of them.
This represents a change from the historic patterns of increasing
inclusion, moving to attempt to compensate for power differences.
It is to be expected that the Internet would be largely immersed
in this culture. This does not mean that it cannot become something
other merely that it has many obstacles to overcome and is not inherently,
of itself, radical. These obstacles include the political weakness
of knowledge workers in the work place; the expansion of corporate
power through extension of property regimes; the vulnerability of
creative commons and free exchange to this expansion; the profusion
of inaccurate data; and the ineffectiveness of the current ways
of organising communication on the net to produce discussion.
Author's Biography
Jon Marshall is a research fellow at UTS investigating the constructions
and effects of online gender. Previous work has included a PhD ethnography
of the Internet mailing list Cybermind, and an MA on the history
of alchemy in the UK. His most recent publication is in The Australian
Journal of Anthropology and called "The Sexual Lives of
Cyber-Savants". <jmarshal@ol.com.au>
<Jonathan.Marshall@uts.edu.au>
Notes
[1] This essay is grows out of my ethnography of
an Internet mailing list and, what might be called, practical day
to day politics.
[back]
[2] Drucker attributes the term 'knowledge industry'
to Fritz Machlup in 1962 (Drucker 1968: 263). It might be possible
to suggest that business, or management, oriented writers have found
the information society idea, extremely attractive – much more so
than most academic ideas.
[back]
[3] For example, Angell (2001), Dale Davidson,
David and Rees-Mogg, William (1993, 1997). The number of business
books saying the future is in the information economy is almost
endless. The same kind of view seems to be taken by Castells who
treats deregulation favourably (2001: 168, 172-3).
[back]
[4] Summary based on Dyer-Witheford (1999: 22-6),
Castells (1996: 61-2, 135, 154-5, 164, 217, 268). Nearly all of
these points were made by Toffler in (1980).
[back]
[5] In his explicitly economic essays Hume portrays
the value of commodities as a complex interaction between 1) the
quantity and type of the medium of exchange, 2) the labour "stored"
in the product, and 3) the valuation of that labour by those dominant
in that society. See 'Of Commerce', 'Of Money', 'Of Interest', 'Of
Refinement in the Arts', in Hume (1987).
[back]
[6] Much has been written about this, but for an
interesting attempt to relate inequalities to geography and power
within and between countries, see Beaverstock et al who write: 'These
figures lead to the staggering conclusion that the top 0.25% of
the world's population owns as much wealth as the other 99.75%'.
[back]
[7] Poster himself quotes Scot on VOODOO, an automatic
email monitor, which 'even discouraged irony and sarcasm', and Miller
on Yahoo's attempt to regulate users.
[back]
[8] Bagdikian (2000) and Alger (2000) argue that
the media is now largely controlled by 10-12 international media
corporations and this restricts the type of comment available. The
same columns get run in different newspapers. However Compaine,
and Gomery (2000) argue there is more diversity and niche marketing.
[back]
[9] The rightist commentators mentioned above,
tend to focus on specific incidents and never ask how reports which
might favour a more leftist, or critical, position might also not
appear or be relegated to minor status.
[back]
[10] The anthropological data and analysis of
prestation economies is extensive. See Marshall (2000: chapter 9)
for some analysis in the context of the Internet – especially in
terms of existential issues.
[back]
[11] See the discussions of Internet politics
in action in Marshall (2000) especially chapters 10 and 11.
[back]
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