Michiko Kakutani has a very interesting essay in the New York Times entitled, “Texts Without Contexts,” which does a nice job running through the differences between Internet optimists and pessimists, a topic I’ve spent a great deal of time writing about here. (See: “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.”) She surveys many of the books I’ve reviewed and discussed here before by authors such as Neil Postman, Nick Carr, Cass Sunstein, Andrew Keen, Mark Helprin, Jaron Lanier, and others. She notes:
These new books share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.
At the same time it’s clear that technology and the mechanisms of the Web have been accelerating certain trends already percolating through our culture — including the blurring of news and entertainment, a growing polarization in national politics, a deconstructionist view of literature (which emphasizes a critic’s or reader’s interpretation of a text, rather than the text’s actual content), the prominence of postmodernism in the form of mash-ups and bricolage, and a growing cultural relativism that has been advanced on the left by multiculturalists and radical feminists, who argue that history is an adjunct of identity politics, and on the right by creationists and climate-change denialists, who suggest that science is an instrument of leftist ideologues.
It’s a great debate, but a very controversial one, of course. Anyway, go read her entire essay.
So, do I need to remind everyone of my ongoing rants about Jonathan Zittrain’s misguided theory about the death of digital generativity because of the supposed rise of “sterile, tethered” devices? I hope not, because even I am getting sick of hearing myself talk about it. But here again anyway is the obligatory listing of all my tirades: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 + video and my 2-part debate with Lessig and him last year.
You will recall that the central villain in Zittrain’s drama The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It is big bad Steve Jobs and his wicked little iPhone. And then, more recently, Jonathan has fretted over those supposed fiends at Facebook. Zittrain’s worries that “we can get locked into these platforms” and that “markets [will] coalesce [around] these tamer gated communities,” making it easier for both corporations and governments to control us. More generally, Zittrain just doesn’t seem to like that some people don’t always opt for the same wide open general purpose PC experience that he exalts as the ideal. As I noted in my original review of his book, Jonathan doesn’t seem to appreciate that it may be perfectly rational for some people to seek stability and security in digital devices and their networking experiences—even if they find those solutions in the form of “tethered appliances” or “sterile” networks, to use his parlance.
Every once and awhile I find a sharp piece by someone out there who is willing to admit that they see nothing wrong with such “closed” platforms or devices, or they even argue that those approaches can be superior to the more “open” devices and platforms out there. That’s the case with this Harry McCracken rant over at Technologizer today with the entertaining title, “The Verizon Droid is a Loaf of Day-Old Bread.” McCracken goes really hard on the Droid — which hurts because I own one! — and I’m not sure I entirely agree with his complaint about it, but what’s striking is how it represents the antithesis of Zittrainianism: Continue reading →
Over at “Convergences,” I write on the origins of the idea of a “public option” for health insurance. In part, I note:
At a superficial level, the “public option” for health care is both appealing and puzzling. From a competition policy standpoint, the entry into the market of a subsidized competitor offering a wide array of benefits certainly might put downward pressure on prices as well as easing humanitarian concerns about access. Equally obvious, though, are objections. What mechanism of accountability would exist to ensure that this subsidized entity is well run? It cannot be allowed to go bankrupt; nor is it likely that unhappy customers would have much leeway in suing it. How would it avoid driving private insurers out of the market for low-end service entirely? How much of a subsidy would it get, and how is this to be funded?
Since the party and administration that sponsored this proposal are associated with the intelligentsia, however, people hoping to improve the health care system probably felt entitled to trust that these questions had good answers. Somewhere, someone deep in the bowels of the brain trust had considered these issues. Curious about this, I found myself reading one of the more serious works to address the public option, a paper by Randall D. Cebul, James B. Rebitzer, Lowell J. Taylor and Mark E. Votruba entitled, “Unhealthy Insurance Markets: Search Frictions and the Cost and Quality of Health Insurance,” identified as NBER Working Paper No. 14455, from October 2008.
Read my whole piece, here.
Ryan Radia brought to my attention this excellent Slate piece by Vaughan Bell entitled, “Don’t Touch That Dial! A History of Media Technology Scares, from the Printing Press to Facebook.” It touches on many of the themes I’ve discussed here in my essays on techno-panics, fears about information overload, and the broader optimists v. pessimist battle throughout history regarding the impact of new technologies on culture, life and learning. “These concerns stretch back to the birth of literacy itself,” Bell rightly notes:
Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label.
Quite right. And Bell’s essay reminds us of this gem from the great Douglas Adams about how bad we humans are at putting technological change in perspective:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
So true, and I wish I would have remembered it before I wrapped up my discussion about “adventure windows” in the review of Jaron Lanier’s new book, You Are Not a Gadget, which I published last night. As I noted in that essay:
Our willingness to try new things and experiment with new forms of culture—our “adventure window”—fades rapidly after certain key points in life, as we gradually get set in our ways. Many cultural critics and average folk alike always seem to think the best days are behind us and the current good-for-nothing generation and their new-fangled gadgets and culture are garbage.
Continue reading →
Of the many tech policy-related books I’ve read in recent years, I can’t recall ever being quite so torn over one of them as much as I have been about Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. There were moments while I was reading through it when I was thinking, “Yes, quite right!,” and other times when I was muttering to myself, “Oh God, no!”
The book is bound to evoke such strong emotions since Lanier doesn’t mix words about what he believes is the increasingly negative impact of the Internet and digital technologies on our lives, culture, and economy. In this sense, Lanier fits squarely in the pessimist camp on the Internet optimists vs. pessimists spectrum. (I outlined the intellectual battle lines between these two camps my essay, “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.”) But Lanier is no techno-troglodyte. Generally speaking, his pessimism isn’t as hysterical in tone or Luddite-ish in its prescriptions as the tracts of some other pessimists. And as a respected Internet visionary, a gifted computer scientist, an expert on virtual reality, and a master wordsmith, the concerns Lanier articulates here deserve to be taken seriously— even if one ultimately does not share his lugubrious worldview.
On the very first page of the book, Lanier hits on three interrelated concerns that other Net pessimists have articulated in the past:
- Loss of individuality & concerns about “mob” behavior (Lanier: “these words will mostly be read by nonpersons–automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals.”)
- Dangers of anonymity (Lanier: “Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies.”)
- “Sharecropper” concern that a small handful of capitalists are getting rich off the backs of free labor (Lanier: “Ultimately these words will contribute to the fortunes of those few who have been able to position themselves as lords of the computing clouds.”)
Again, others have tread this ground before, and it’s strange that Lanier doesn’t bother mentioning any of them. Neil Postman, Mark Helprin, Andrew Keen, and Lee Siegel have all railed against the online “mob mentality” and argued it can be at least partially traced to anonymous online communications and interactions. And it was Nick Carr, author of The Big Switch, who has been the most eloquent in articulating the “sharecropper” concern, which Lanier now extends with his “lords of the computing clouds” notion. [More on that towards the end.] Continue reading →
Harvard Berkman Center professor Jonathan Zittrain has published another pessimistic, Steve-Jobs-is-Taking-Us-Straight-To-Cyber-Hell editorial building on the gloomy thesis he set forth in his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. His latest piece appears in the Financial Times and it’s entitled, “A Fight over Freedom at Apple’s Core. Concerning the recent Apple iPad announcement, Zittrain warns: “Mr Jobs ushered in the personal computer era and now he is trying to usher it out.”
I’m not going to go into yet another lengthy dissertation about what it so misguided about his thesis that cyberspace is becoming more “regulable” and that digital “generativity” is dying because of the rise of devices like the iPhone & iPad, or sites like Facebook. Instead, I will just point you to the many things I’ve written before explaining just how far off the mark Prof. Zittrain is on this point. [See the complete list down below + video of our debate.]
But let me just say this… Ignoring that fact that he is an iPhone user himself — which makes no sense considering that he thinks of Apple as the font of all cyber-evil — he can’t muster any substantive empirical evidence proving that the Net and digital devices are being more “closed, sterile, and tethered,” as he repeatedly claims in his book and editorials. And that’s not surprising because the reality is that the digital world is more open and generative than ever, and even if there are some “closed” devices and systems out there, they are actually quite innovative and not perfectly closed as Zittrain suggests. The spectrum of “open vs. closed” systems and devices is incredible diverse and nothing is perfectly “open” or “closed.” We can have the best of both worlds: many open systems with some partial “walled gardens” here and there (or hybrid systems combining both). Regardless, we are witnessing greater digital “generativity” and innovation with each passing year. Until Zittrain can prove the opposite, his thesis must be considered a failure.
Finally, I want to associate myself with this excellent critique of the Zittrain thesis by Prof. Ed Felten, who points out that Zittrain’s argument doesn’t even work for the iPad, which I would agree is a fairly “closed appliance” in the Zittrainian scheme of the things:
Continue reading →
Over at Convergences I ponder a version of Mark Lemley’s argument to the effect that confusing patents tied up in administrative disputes are in effect the same as no patents. I write:
I recently read “Patenting Nanotechnology” by law prof Mark Lemley. Excitement about (and fear of) nanotechnology seems to be waning rather than waxing. The article nonetheless includes a curiously paradoxical line of argument about intellectual property that I think is worth setting out in detail.
Presently there is some concern that there are already too many overlapping nanotechnology patents, and/or too many nanotechnology patents that cover basic research concepts as opposed to actual useful products. A number of observers have warned that these patents could interfere with ongoing nanotechnology research. This is a familiar theme over the past couple decades of patent scholarship.
Of course, patents (with all their warts) were around during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, too, when a lot of important advances were made in technology. All kinds of things from sewing machines to radios were developed, and it all worked out okay in spite of much patent nonsense being involved.
Now, here is where Mark comes up with a twist on the familiar arguments. To help make his paper about nanotechnology more interesting, he seems to want to build up the case that nanotechnology is different from earlier technologies, so that the patent system might cause problems for nano that they did not cause for earlier technologies. So he goes through each earlier technology in some detail, and argues that in each case, in effect, for each of these key earlier technologies, patent protection was in effect non-existent. In the case of sewing machines, for example, the patents were tied up in litigation; in the case of radio, WWI intervened and the patents were taken over by the government.
Therefore, he argues, nanotechnology will be the first important technology that is in effect actually protected by patents. He goes on to conclude that there is no reason to worry about this yet. This conclusion seems sensible enough. So… what?
With his argument that previous key technologies were in effect devoid of patent protection as a practical measure, even though they were patented, well, he’s created a mythical monster, the worm who eats his own tail. I don’t think he fully realizes this, so I will play with the idea a little bit.
For the results of my exploration, kindly visit Convergences.
So, did the decade just end or do we have another year to go? Honestly, I’ve never understood when the cut-off is from one decade to the next. (My friend Larry Magid struggles with the same question in his recent column on “The Decade in Technology.”) Nonetheless, I’ve seen a lot of best-of-decade lists published recently, so I thought I would throw my own out there even though it is still a work in progress.
I have been attempting to compile the definitive bibliography for our digital decade—the definitive list of Internet policy books, that is. I started throwing this together two years ago when I was penning my list of “The Most Important Internet Policy Books of 2008” and continued to work on it as I was finishing up my 2009 installment as well. I grabbed every book off my shelf that dealt with the future of the Internet and the impact the Digital Revolution is having on our lives, culture, and economy and threw the title and a link onto this list. (I’m also using the list to help structure my thoughts for a forthcoming book of my own on Internet Optimists vs. Pessimists, something I’ve been writing a lot about here in recent years.)
Below you will find what I’ve got so far. There are around 80 90 books on the list. I’ve divided the list by year, but you may be wondering what determined the order the books appear in. In essence, I’ve listed what I feel are the 1 or 2 most important titles first and then just added others randomly. Eventually, I plan to post a “Most Important Internet Policy Books of the Decade” list outlining which titles I believe have been the most influential. I suspect I’ll name Benkler’s Wealth of Networks to the top slot followed closely by Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet, Lessig’s Free Culture, and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. Anyway, that’s for another day.
For now, I would just like to ask for reader suggestions regarding what other titles that should appear on this list. I will add titles as they come in. I want to stress, however, that I am trying to keep this list limited to books that have something to say about Internet policy (cyber-law, digital economics, information technology politics, etc).
I hope others find this useful. And yes, I have read all* most of the books on this list! As I’ve noted here before, I’m a bit of book nerd. (*Now that I’ve received so many helpful additions to the list, there are some titles on the list I have not had a chance to read through yet). Continue reading →
My friend Larry Magid, a technology columnist for CBS News.com and others, has a wonderful new column out about “The Decade in Technology.” You have to read it to appreciate just how far we have come in such a short time. Larry notes:
[T]he past 10 years were a momentous period for technology. Not only was there no iPhone a decade ago, there was hardly anything that could be considered a smartphone. The BlackBerry was introduced in 1999, when the well-heeled techno-savvy were carrying around flip phones. That year, 1999, was the height of the dot-com boom. But when you look back at it, the online world was nothing like it is today. There was no Facebook (founded in 2004) or Twitter (2007). Even MySpace wasn’t founded until 2003. The term Web 2.0 hadn’t been coined and most people who were online used the Web mostly to consume information. Those with the skills and resources to post to the Web were called “Webmasters.” Today, everyone with a Facebook account is a master of his or her own Web.
I tried to document the incredible technological changes in my own life over the past decade in this essay I penned on Super Bowl Sunday last February: “10 Years Ago Today… (Thinking About Technological Progress).”
Larry also notes that giants came and went as technology continued to evolve in unexpected ways:
Ten years ago AOL was the most popular Internet service provider and was so successful that it was able to purchase media giant Time Warner in January 2000 for $182 billion in stock. But the marriage didn’t make it through the decade. The two companies formally split up this month, with AOL, once again, being traded on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company. AOL thrived in the ’90s because people were using the service to go online via phone. Today most American homes have broadband.
That’s something I wrote about at length in my recent paper on “A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria.” Anyway, read Larry’s entire piece. It really drives home how lucky we are to be living in the midst of such at technological renaissance and information cornucopia.
Comments 
Posted in: Philosophy & Cyber-Libertarianism, What We're Reading 
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
