2009 was not as big of a year for Internet and information technology (“info-tech”) policy books as 2008 was, but there were still some notable titles released that offered interesting perspectives about the future of the Net and the impact the Digital Revolution is having on our lives, culture, and economy.  So, like last year, I figured I would throw together my list of the 10 most important info-tech policy books of the year.

First, let me repeat a few of the same caveats and disclaimers that I set forth last year.  What qualifies as an “important” info-tech policy book? Simply put, it’s a title that many people are currently discussing and that we will likely be referencing for many years to come.  However, I want to be clear that merely because a book appears on my list it does not necessarily mean I agree with everything said in it. In fact, as was the case in previous years, I found much with which to disagree in my picks for the most important books of 2009 and I find that the cyber-libertarianism I subscribe to has very few fans out there.

Another caveat: Narrowly-focused titles lose a few points on my list. For example, if a book deals mostly with privacy issues, copyright law, or antitrust policy, it does not exactly qualify as the same sort of “tech policy book” as other titles found on this list since it is a narrow exploration of just one set of issues with a bearing on technology policy.

With those caveats in mind, here are my choices for the Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2009.

(1) Chris Anderson – Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Chris Anderson’s 2006 book The Long Tail will be remembered as one of the most influential tech policy books of the decade.  It changed the way we talk about the digital marketplace and it instantly garnered a huge audience outside of the nerdy world of Internet policy.  While Free: The Future of a Radical Price will forever live in the shadow of The Long Tail, it too is an important book and in many ways it is a much better one.

In The Long Tail, Anderson tried too hard to invent the latest business theory du jour, and in doing so he went much too far in proclaiming that, as the subtitle of the book argued, “the future of the business is selling less of more.”  That’s just not true. While there’s certainly a lot more action in the long tail than ever before since it is so much more accessible, that does not mean the entire future of business lies in “selling less of more.”  To the contrary, the fat head of the tail is just as profitable as ever.

Free certainly contains some of the flamboyance on display in The Long Tail, but Anderson has matured as a writer and is now far more willing to point out the limitations of his theories in a business sense.  He does a splendid job in Free of creating a taxonomy of free-oriented business models to guide discussions about these issues.  And he explains how “free” can be part of many different business models and strategies. His historical treatment of the issues is outstanding and includes many entertaining examples of how these “free” strategies have been used over time to offer innovative new goods and services.

The reason his book is important for Internet policy discussions is obvious: “free” is increasingly viewed as a threat to many existing companies, industry sectors, and traditional media business models.  For example, battles about the future of journalism and search engine indexing of news sites are obviously tied up with battles over “free.”  And, it goes without saying that the traditional entertainment industry business models are increasingly challenged by “free” as many struggle to adapt to the new realities of the online world, in which “free” (primarily advertising-supported  and “freemium” models) seems to be the only model with any legs.

Much like my top pick for 2008 book of the year, Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Net and How to Stop It, Chris Anderson’s Free is the most important information technology book of the year because it is the one we will still be talking about the most a decade from now.  However, unlike Zittrain’s book and thesis, which I think will be largely discredited in another ten years, Anderson’s book will likely be viewed as an important and lasting contribution to the field.

(2) Larry Downes – The Laws of Disruption: Chaos and Control in Your Virtual Future

The Laws of Disruption is the closest thing you will find to a genuine cyber-libertarian manifesto these days.  But Downes isn’t a rigid ideologue; his skepticism of government regulation of the high-tech economy is based more on practical considerations and the fundamental “law of disruption”: “technology changes exponentially, but social, economic, and legal systems change incrementally.” Downes says this law is “a simple but unavoidable principle of modern life” and that it will have profound implications for the way businesses, government, and culture evolve going forward. “As the gap between the old world and the new gets wider,” he argues, “conflicts between social, economic, political, and legal systems” will intensify and “nothing can stop the chaos that will follow.” In this sense, The Laws of Disruption reads like an addendum to one of Alvin Toffler’s old books on technology and futurism in that Downes is essentially walking us through the practical consequences of life in a “post-industrial society.”

In terms of what it all means for public policy, Downes doesn’t so much fear legal and regulatory over-reach the way many cyber-libertarians do. Rather, he thinks most regulatory schemes just won’t work. In essence, he is a technological fatalist or consequentialist: Progress happens whether we like it or not, so get used to it!  Thus, the “laws of disruption” he articulates serve primarily as “Just-Don’t-Bother” warnings to over-eager government meddlers. “The best way to regulate innovation is to leave it alone,” he counsels.

In terms of structure, The Laws of Disruption resembles Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion by Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis, (which I reviewed here last year and named to my 2008 list). Both books survey a vast swath of territory — privacy, copyright, security, etc — and each chapter offers unique perspectives on each debate. In that sense, the book is useful to readers if for no other reason than you get a taste for how a wide variety of issues are playing out. Downes also owes much to Clayton M. Christensen and his seminal 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Like that book, The Laws of Disruption is a business book with a strong policy hook.  That is, both books focus on advice-dishing for companies and innovators looking to “stay ahead of the curve” in the midst of relentless, gut-wrenching technological change, but the books also include important lessons regarding the public policies that should govern high-tech sectors.

I highly recommended The Laws of Disruption and found it to be the most enjoyable of all the books I read this year.

(3) Dawn C. Nunziato – Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age

Dawn Nunziato is the perfect foil for Larry Downes. Her book is a manifesto for cyber-collectivism and “media access theory.”  (For those unfamiliar with media access theory, see my old essay: “Your Soapbox is My Soapbox! Thoughts on the Media Access Movement in General and the Media & Democracy Coalition’s ‘Bill of Media Rights’ in Particular.”)  She attempts to bring media access theory up to date by taking the ideas made famous by Jerome Barron, Owen Fiss, Cass Sunstein, and others, and applying them to the Internet and digital technologies.  Like those earlier legal thinkers, she argues for “an affirmative conception” of the First Amendment that would allow government to use the First Amendment to “facilitate the conditions necessary for democratic self-government” (whatever that means). Net neutrality regulation becomes one of many ways she would put this theory into action. Importantly, she would not stop with ISPs. She makes the case for extending the entire regulatory regime to Google and search platforms. Welcome to the Brave New World of the the FCC as the Federal Search Commission or Federal Cloud Commission!

Her attempt to cast Net neutrality as the Internet’s First Amendment is a grotesque contortion of the real First Amendment, and a complete betrayal of the Founder’s original intentions.  As I made clear in my recent essay on “Net Neutrality Regulation & the First Amendment,” the Internet’s First Amendment is the First Amendment, not some new, top-down, heavy-handed regulatory regime that puts the Federal Communications Commission in control of the Digital Economy. Her conception of the First Amendment would convert it from a shield against government control into a sword that the government could use as it wished. It would mean that “Congress shall make no law…” would suddenly be replaced by “Congress shall make whatever law it wants” so long as it serves some amorphous “public interest.” Can you say “tyranny of the majority”?

Regardless, event though I find her views to be morally repugnant and the antithesis of true digital freedom, Nunziato’s book is a concise articulation of that vision and it deserves everyone’s attention. It serves as a blueprint for where the Net neutrality wars are taking us.

(4) David Bollier – Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own

David Bollier’s Viral Spiral is the first major history of the “digital commons” / “free culture” movement, and despite my many person disagreements with him and this movement, it is an excellent treatment of the topic. Bollier surveys this growing intellectual movement from its early open source days to the rise of the Creative Commons and on into the present.  The cast of characters in this drama will be well-known to anyone involved in modern tech policy debates: Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, Yochai Benkler, et al.

There is absolutely no doubt that this intellectual movement is winning the war of ideas in cyberlaw front today, as I noted in a recent debate with Lessig and Zittrain over at Cato Unbound.  As a cyber-libertarian, I find myself occasionally at odds with these guys and this movement on a variety of policy issues, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying David Bollier’s treatment of this movement and these issues.

(5) David Post – In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace

David Post is one of the early intellectual giants in the field of cyberlaw. Back in the days when most of us were still just trying to get our 14.4 modems to work properly to get on Al Gore’s “Information Highway,” David Post was writing essays and law review articles that were a decade ahead of their time.  In particular, his work on Internet governance and jurisdictional matters was path-breaking, and much of it is updated and extended in Jefferson’s Moose.

I must admit, however, that I was hoping for a bit more from David in this book.  Beyond just being a first-rate intellectual in this space, he is also one of the few remaining defenders of “Internet exceptionalism,” and he has genuine cyber-libertarian leanings.  After waiting almost 10 years for David to wrap this thing up after he first told me about it back around 2000, I was thinking he might come up with the sort of cyber-libertarian manifesto I’ve always hoped he would write.  Although he fell a bit short in that regard, it doesn’t mean it’s not a good book. It is. You will enjoy it no matter what cyber-philosophy you subscribe to.

Read my entire review of Jefferson’s Moose here.

(6) Dennis Baron – A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution

Baron’s A Better Pencil is a splendid history of techno-pessimism and the endless battles about the impact of new technologies on life and learning, something I have written about here before in my essays on “Internet optimists vs. pessimists” (See: 1, 2, 3).   Baron notes that almost as soon as people learned to put chisel to stone and then quill to paper, a great debate began about the impact of new communications technology on culture and education. And that debate rages on today with a new generation of optimists and skeptics battling over the impact that computing, the Internet, and digital technologies have on our lives and on how we learn about the world.

Baron walks us through a litany of historical examples—the printing press, the telegraph, telephones, typewriters, pocket calculators, personal computers, word processors, webpages, blogs, social-networking sites, and more—and identifies the usual pattern: we greet each new technology with deep distrust and dire warnings, but in time we adapt to the new realities. Indeed, as a species, we have an unparalleled ability to learn new ways of doing things. We don’t always like technological change, and often we deeply resent or fear it, but in the end, we learn to live with it and eventually to embrace it.  With the rise of the Internet and digital technologies, we see this pattern unfolding once again. But Baron counsels patience and understanding instead of the sort f hysteria and backlash we see from the likes of Andrew Keen, Lee Siegel and others.  It’s a refreshing and uplifting perspective.

Highly recommended. See my complete review of Baron’s A Better Pencil over at the City Journal website.

(7) Mark Helprin – Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto

No book has been more disappointing to me in recent memory than Mark Helprin’s Digital Barbarism. As someone who still finds a lot to defend in copyright law, I was excited when I learned that one of America’s most gifted authors–and the author of my favorite literary work of the late 20th century (A Soldier of the Great War)–was taking a crack defending copyright in a short manifesto.

Alas, as I argued in my review of the book for National Review, while Helprin occasionally rises to great heights in his defense of copyright, he too often sinks to lamentable lows–by resorting to the same unbecoming rhetorical tactics used by the “cyber-mob” he seeks to condemn. Indeed, his book is filled with gratuitous vitriol and neo-Luddite ramblings about the Internet and Information Age that severely detract from his defense of copyright. Channeling the ghost of the late social critic Neil Postman, Helprin’s critique of copyright skeptics quickly turns into an all-out assault on modern digital culture and cyberspace. He argues that we are witnessing “the decline of culture,” the “mechanization of the soul,” our “intellectual and spiritual destruction,” and the rise of a movement of “wacked-out muppets led by little professors in glasses” that “threatens in a decade or two to dissolve the accomplishments of millennia, reordering the ways in which we think, write, and communicate.” And it just gets worse from there. Much like recent rants by Andrew Keen and Lee Siegel, Helprin speaks repeatedly about the “surrender of human nature” to “the machine revolution” and the corresponding need to “control the machine.”

How a man who has penned some of the most beautiful prose in modern times could craft an off-the-rails screed of this magnitude remains incomprehensible  to me.  What’s worse is that he set back the cause of defending what’s best about copyright in the process. Luckily for Helprin, there’s plenty of hysteria on the other side, as the next book on my list makes clear.

(8) William Patry – Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars

Bill Patry is an angry man. He is the anti-Helprin. The vitriol that Helprin directs against the copyright-haters is reversed in this screed and turned against not just copyright holders and content creators, but against the entire capitalist system. Patry, who is the author of a multi-volume treatise on copyright law, has done the intellectual equivalent of “going postal” within his own intellectual community. He has turned his intellectual guns on anyone and everyone who has ever had a kind word to say about copyright. He cannot find one nice thing to say about copyright or anyone who defends copyright in this book. Not one.

What’s most ironic about the book is that Patry seems utterly oblivious to the fact that in the process of critiquing the inflammatory rhetoric and “misuse of language” occasionally emanating from some copyright defenders, he goes completely over the top himself and engages in even more egregious rhetorical flourishes. Choice gems from the book include: “digital guillotines,” copyright as “cancer,” “copyright dwarves,” Maoism, the “sins” of copyright, “socialism for the wealthy,” and a comparison of the DMCA to “Mussolini’s Fascist Italy.”  Apparently when it comes to the “misuse of language,” Patry believes that two wrongs make a right.

And then there is his mind-boggling conclusion that: “I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries.”  Apparently, every great book, every great movie, every great video game, and ever great musical composition of the past century was done solely for the love of it all. Copyright had apparently had absolutely nothing to do with it according to Patry’s logic. That is just an astonishingly naive notion, in my opinion. Apparently this man’s hatred for copyright-related industries is so intense that it has blinded him to any potentially positive effects of copyright law. If nothing else, it would have been nice to see Mr. Patry address how it is that America is the world’s leading creator and exporter of creative arts.  Certainly copyright law must have had something to do with that!

Chapter 5 of his book makes it clear that Patry’s critique of copyright is actually rooted in a much deeper suspicion about capitalism itself.  He speaks of “the myth of economic freedom” and claims that “free market fundamentalism… destroyed much of the world’s economies.”  He then launches into a neo-Marxist critique of property rights more generally, treating property as a zero-sum game of winners and losers.  At times it all begins to sound like a rant from an old Herbert Marcuse book with questions like: “why are the interests of one social group favored over another?” and “What social objective is being furthered by the decision to privilege one group over another?”  And there’s all sorts of talk about “regulation in the public interest,” which I have critique as a meaningless non-standard here many times before.

In the end, Patry’s book will–along with Helprin’s–long be remember as marking the nadir in the “copyright wars;” a moment when grown men of great intelligence decided to trade in their integrity for the opportunity to engage in below-the-belt rhetorical cheap shots that would typically be reserved for college student debating politics over beers and shots at two in the morning.  They should both be ashamed of themselves.

(9) Gary Reback – Free the Market!  Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive

Gary Reback’s over-the-top ode to antitrust as the great savior of capitalism reads like an extended love letter. As I noted in my lengthy critique of his book, his fairy tale narrative of antitrust as the savior of capitalism is hopelessly one-sided, and his recommendations to expand antitrust enforcement wouldn’t “Free the Market” as he argues in his book’s shameful title, but would instead wrap it in regulatory chains.

He repeatedly insults the intelligence of the reader by claiming antitrust is supposedly not a form of economic regulation and that is can only have beneficial effects. He wants antitrust officials to intervene early and often in high-tech markets to guide markets to a supposedly better place. Reback considers just about everything “the Chicago School” taught us to be antitrust apostasy and he would like to erase four decades worth of economic literature and evidence that suggests antitrust law is a form of economic regulation and does have unintended consequences that often hurt consumer welfare.  Even if you are not an inherent antitrust skeptic like me, I think most people would hope for a better treatment of the other side of this story.

Read my lengthy review of Reback’s Strangle Free the Market here.

(10) tie – Tyler Cowen – Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World and John Freeman – The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox

OK, so I just couldn’t figure out which of these two to cut from the list so I took the easy way out by having them tie for the last slot!  In this case, however, there’s another reason it makes sense for both of them to round out the list: Both Freeman and Cowen explore how humans are coping with information overload–albeit from two very different perspectives.

As I noted in my lengthy essay on the topic earlier this year, Cowen is an unrepentant optimist. He believes humans have the ability to adapt to new technological realities and a world of information abundance. In fact, Cowen argues, new tools and information gathering and processing technologies actually “lengthens our attention spans in another way, namely by allowing greater specialization of knowledge.”

John Freeman, by contrast, wants us all to take a high-tech time out. Like other Internet skeptics, he is worried that cyberspace and digital technologies are reshaping humanity–and not for the better. “If we are to step off this hurtling machine, we must reassert principles that have been lost in the blur,” he argues. “It is time to launch a manifesto for a slow communication movement, a push back against the machines and the forces that encourage us to remain connected to them.”

Unlike most other Internet pessimists, however, Freeman’s tone is more measured and his recommendations more reasonable.  Of course, it helps that he is magical wordsmith. Even if you find yourself disagreeing with many of his ultimate conclusions–as I did–you should read The Tyranny of E-Mail for a lesson in how to construct an argument and to appreciate the gift of fine writing. It’s easily the best tract by any Net skeptic since Nick Carr’s The Big Switch, and a much better one in many ways. It will force you to ask tough questions about the impact of the Information Age on you and the world around you.  Nonetheless, I remain an unrepentant techno-optimist (albeit a pragmatic one)!

Honorable Mentions: Here are a couple of other books that I couldn’t fit on my list but that you might want to also consider adding to your bookshelf:

• Manuel Castells – Communication Power
• James Boyle – The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
• Randall Stross – Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know [my review]
• Ken Auletta – Googled: The End of the World As We Know It [my review]
• Scott Rosenberg- Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters
• John W. Dozier Jr. and Sue Scheff – Google Bomb

Please let me know what titles might be missing from this list and which books you think are the best of the year.

And speaking of bookshelves, here’s my Shelfari digital bookshelf in case anyone is interested. If you hadn’t figured it out yet, I am a bit of book nerd!  My life is spent swimming through oceans of paper.  My friends often ask me, “How can you spend so much time reading?” My question back to them is: “How can you not?”

I just finished reading through The Economist’s new 14-page special report on cloud computing, “Let It Rise” in which Ludwig Siegele provides an outstanding overview of cloud computing and why it is so important:

The rise of the cloud is more than just another platform shift that gets geeks excited. It will undoubtedly transform the information technology (IT) industry, but it will also profoundly change the way people work and companies operate. It will allow digital technology to penetrate every nook and cranny of the economy and of society, creating some tricky political problems along the way.

Even if you are very familiar with cloud computing, I recommend you take a look at the article. Anyway, while I was reading it, I was unsurprised to come across some comments from Nicholas Carr, whose new book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, is essentially an early history of cloud computing and an investigation into its effects on our economy, culture, and society. And that also reminded me that, even though I have mentioned Carr’s book here several times since it was released earlier this year, I have failed to give it a dedicated review. And it certain deserves one because “The Big Switch” is easily one of the most important technology policy books of 2008.

One of the reasons Carr’s book will be high up on my end of the year list of best tech books has nothing to do with substance. It’s his style. Carr is one of most gifted writers in the tech policy field today. His eloquence and brilliant story-telling skills remind me of George Gilder in his prime. Carr nicely places modern developments in a historical context and relates the changes we are witnessing today to previous technological innovations and eras.

At the same time, however, Carr has also become one of the America’s leading Internet skeptics and vocal critics of techno-utopianism, as I noted in an essay a few months ago about Internet optimists and pessimists. He is, by far, the most reasonable and respected of those Net skeptics, using a measured tone when attacking those who have adopted a more pollyanna-ish, rose-colored view of the world. [For similar reasons, Carr’s “Rough Type” blog is must-reading for anyone who monitors technology policy.]

Electric Parallels

But on to the substance of the book. Carr’s thesis is that we are in the midst of “another epochal [technological] transformation” that parallels what happened with the “democratization of electricity” a century ago:

What happened to the generation of power a century ago is now happening to the processing of information. Private computer systems, built and operated by individual companies, are being supplanted by services provided by a common grid — the Internet — by centralized data-processing plants. Computing is turning into a utility, and once again the economic equations that determine the way we work and live are being rewritten. (p. 12)

“That shift,” Carr continues, “promises not only to change the nature of corporate IT departments but to shake up the entire computer industry.” (p. 13) Indeed, the “revolutionary potential of the information utility” promises to have profound implications:

In the years ahead, more and more of the information processing tasks that we rely on, at home and at work, will be handled by big data centers located out on the Internet. The nature and economics of computing will change as dramatically as the nature and economics of mechanical power changed in the early years of the last century. The consequences for society — for the way we live, work, learn, communicate, entertain ourselves, and even think — promise to be equally profound. (p. 21)

Unsurprisingly, Google is the central player in Carr’s drama because it is “a giant information utility” (p. 13) that has capitalized on the movement of so much knowledge and technology into the cloud and off of our desktops. Carr argues that “once utility services mature, the idea of getting rid of your PC will become much more attractive” (p. 80) and “We may find, twenty or so years from now, that the personal computer has become a museum piece, a reminder of a curious time when all of us where forced to be amateur computer technicians.” (p. 81)

Carr’s Critique of “Techno-Utopianism”

Part One of The Big Switch is primarily concerned with this progression of computing and IT from specialized service to mainstream utility, and I believe that most readers will find it as engrossing and enlightened as I did. But the tone and focus of Carr’s book change dramatically as Part Two opens. Whereas Carr keeps Part One fairly value- or viewpoint-neutral, Part Two is a more spirited critique of the economic and cultural consequences of “The Big Switch.”

In Part Two, he launches into his attack of the “techno-utopianism” that sometimes accompanies discussions about the implications of the Information Age and life in the cloud. “[O]ptimism is a natural response to the arrival of a powerful and mysterious new technology,” but, Carr warns, “it can blind us to more troubling portents.” And “there is reason to believe that our cybernetic meadow may be something less than a new Eden.” (p. 125)

It is here that Carr’s critique becomes familiar to those of us who follow the modern Internet policy debates. As I noted in my “Internet Optimists and Pessimists” essay, Carr is joining the ranks of other Net skeptics like Andrew Keen, Lee Siegel, and others. In my recent review of Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, I traced this strand of social criticism back to the late Neil Postman, author of the 1992 anti-technology manifesto, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.

Carr’s concerns about the consequences of cloud computing and the rise of “techno-utopianism” parallel those found in those other “pessimistic” tracts, although Carr is far more level-headed in articulating those fears. As I noted in the Siegel review, those concerns can generally be grouped as follows:

1. The Net is destroying (or at least greatly diminishing) the role of experts, authority, “truth”, and traditional societal norms and institutions. This is having (or eventually will result in) dangerous ramifications for our culture, economy, and democracy.
2. The personalization and customization that the Information Age and the Internet have spawned could have troubling ramifications for our society and culture.

Dangers of Disintermediation and the Problem with “Free”

Regarding the first of these concerns, Carr argues that “while it’s true that the reduction in production and distribution costs is bringing us many more options, it would be a mistake to leap to the conclusion that nothing will be sacrificed in the process. More choices don’t necessarily mean better choices,” he says. (p. 151) He continues:

Many cultural goods remain expensive to create or require the painstaking work of talented professionals, and it’s worth considering how the changing economics of media will affect them. Will these goods be able to find a large enough paying audience to underwrite their existence, or will they end up being crowded out of the marketplace by the proliferation of free, or easily accessible products? Even though the Internet can in theory accommodate a nearly infinite variety of information goods, that doesn’t mean that the market will be able to support all of them. Some of the most cherished creative works may not survive the transition to the Web’s teeming bazaar. (p. 151)

More specifically, Carr is worried about what “The Great Unbundling” — i.e., the radically disruptive disintermediation associated with the Internet Age — will mean for the future of “hard news,” investigative journalism, and prized forms of culture. The cross-subsidies that have supported the creation of such content are at risk, Carr fears, as the Net’s relentless drive for increased efficiency rolls like a digital wrecking ball through the old media and cultural landscape. “[T]he largest threat posed by social production won’t be to big corporations but to individual professionals — to the journalists, editors, photographers, researchers, analysts, librarians, and other information workers who can be replaced,” Carr says, by “crowdsourcing.” (p. 142)

In this way, Carr’s concerns are quite similar to those raised by Andrew Keen and others about how the Internet is potentially “killing our culture” (or at least the best of it as they would define it). But Carr extends this social critique in an important way by claiming that the problem with the emerging model of social production and “free” business models that dominate the online marketplace today is that they are built on a “sharecropper model.” The Net’s dominant giants, he argues, are reaping their riches on the back of free labor. These new sites and services “are essentially agglomerations of the creative, unpaid contributions of their members. In a twist on the old agricultural practice of sharecropping, the site owners provide the digital real estate and tools, let the members do all the work, and then harvest the economic riches.” (p. 137-8)

I have some sympathy for these arguments, especially as they have been articulated by Carr here in The Big Switch. Compared to the way other critics like Keen and Siegel have used over-the-top apocalyptic, neo-Luddite rhetoric when discussing their related concerns, Carr generally avoids such hysteria and does a better job of laying out his concerns about the Net and cloud computing in a more reasonable fashion. And there is little doubt that the Internet and social production models are placing enormous strain on many traditional professions and professionals.

I have problems with his “sharecropper” argument, however. This logic ignores the non-monetary benefits that many of us feel we extract from today’s online business models and social production processes. Most of us feel we get a lot back as part of this new value exchange. Carr is certainly correct that Google, Facebook, MySpace, and a lot of other Net middlemen are getting big and rich based on all the user-generated content flowing over their sites and systems. On the other hand, most cyber-citizens extract enormous benefits from the existence of those (mostly free and constantly improving) platforms and services. It’s a very different sort of value exchange and business model than most of us have been accustomed to in the past, but we are adjusting to it. We humans are resilient, adaptable creatures and we can usually learn to cope with such changes and find a way to use them to our advantage. It’s not all about companies getting rich; we are getting richer too, but in a different way. We have an abundance of information, culture, and communications opportunities at our disposal today that were simply unthinkable even a generation ago.

Carr and other Net skeptics certainly raise some very legitimate questions about the limitations of the “free culture” mindset, however. There are times when the net optimists really do sound like the pollyannish “utopians” that Carr claims they are. When I am reading the work of Benkler and other optimists, it sometimes comes across as techno-Rousseauian gibberish (or what Carr labels “the Internet’s liberation mythology.”) The Internet isn’t remaking man or changing human nature in any fundamental way, which is what some optimists seem to imply. Moreover, when it comes to economics, all this talk about the Long Tail being “the future of business” (Chris Anderson) and of “Wikinomics… changing everything through mass collaboration,” (Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams) goes much too far in my opinion. It’s irrational (techno-) exuberance.

On the other hand, Carr and the other pessimists occasionally go to the opposite extreme in critiquing new models of social production, open source, and other collaborative creative endeavors. Their obsession with Wikipedia is particularly curious. If one views Wikipedia and Wiki- models as supplements or compliments to traditional media and communications models and activities, then where is the harm? Most of us understand they are not perfect, but we can appreciate the benefits they bring society despite their limitations.

When it comes to the true impact of the Internet on our economy and culture, the truth is somewhere in between the two extremes staked out by optimists and pessimists. My own position in this regard might best be labeled “pragmatic optimism”: One can appreciate how much better off the Internet has made society while also recognizing that it has created new challenges that we need to think through.

Downsides of Hyper-Personalization

The other important theme developed by Carr in the second half of The Big Switch, which also runs throughout the work of other techno-pessimist tracts, is that the increased personalization and customization facilitated by the Internet is breeding dangerous anti-social attitudes and tendencies. Building on an argument first put forth by Cass Sunstein in his 2001 book Republic.com , Carr worries about the impact of the “Daily Me.” The “Daily Me” was the term Nicholas Negroponte coined in his prescient 1995 book Being Digital, to describe the new digital world he hoped would develop, filled with hyper-personalized, instantaneously-delivered content. And that’s largely the Web 2.0 world we live in today.

But Carr, Sunstein, and many other Net skeptics, refer to Negroponte’s “Daily Me” in contemptuous terms, arguing that the hyper-customization of websites and online technologies is causing extreme social “fragmentation,” “polarization,” “balkanization,” and “single-mindedness.” Carr warns:

Every time we subscribe to a blog, add a friend to our social network, categorize an email message as spam, or even choose a site from a list of search results, we are making a decision that defines, in some small way, whom we associate with and what information we pay attention to. (p. 160)

Thus, he fears, we could be “click[ing] our way to a fractured society” (p. 160) because of the “ideological amplification” (p. 164) bred by the Daily Me. There’s even the risk of increased fanaticism, radicalization, and extremism, he warns.

I have addressed this argument at length in my 2005 book, Media Myths (p. 39) but, to summarize, the fundamental problem with this logic is that it ignores the fact that, thanks to the rise of the Net, most of us are experiencing far more diverse voices and viewpoints than we ever did in the past. Sure, it is true that we also can now find our little niche groups and bunk-up with them online for extended periods, but I find it absurd to claim that we humans are less exposed to diverse viewpoints today than in the past.

Regardless, even if Carr and the other Net skeptics are correct and the Net is breeding such isolation and balkanization, what are we suppose to do about it? Should we roll back the clock to the good ol’ days? Carr doesn’t give us a straight answer. But, again, there are good reasons to question whether society was really better off in the pre-Internet days. The Analog / Scarcity Era had it’s own share of problems, beginning with the fact that it was extremely difficult for niche interests in our society to be served when media was catering to a mass audience through newspapers and broadcast stations. Certainly, the old model of media delivery had its advantages, but the drawbacks were enormous, and not just as it pertained to entertainment. Consider news: If we all weren’t home sitting in front of our TV sets at exactly 6:30 each night, then we missed our chance to hear the same three old white guys in bad suits tells us what the important news of the day was. Look, I liked Cronkite, Brinkley & Co., but I will take today’s 24/7 news cycle of instantaneous news over that old system any day of the week.

Again, there are trade-offs at work here. Things are not all roses like Net optimists would claim. The downside of an endless news cycle is that people can just find a niche news channel or program that feeds them news more closely in line with their own ideological tendencies. Moreover, there very well may be — to use Glenn Reynolds’s phrase — “An Army of Davids” out there in the blogosphere today taking on traditional media and expressing themselves however they wish, but that doesn’t automatically mean they all have something interesting to say! Even when they do, there is still a useful role played by mass media providers or “professional” media in steering news and culture. Indeed, they provide an essential editing function in terms of helping us decide what types of news or culture may be more important. I personally rely on the Wall Street Journal to help guide my investigation of what financial market news is worth exploring each week. I wouldn’t want to just set up my Google Alerts to feed me “financial news” and then trust that everything that came into my RSS reader was worth reading. In this sense, the WSJ is what I call a “trusted information intermediary” (or “old school filter” if you will) that many of us could not live without.

But that traditional intermediary editing and filtering function, which used to be total in its applicability to news and culture, is now shrinking rapdily. “Mass media” just isn’t quite as MASS-ive as it once was, and the rise of personalized “Daily Me” media and culture certainly has had something to do with that since it has allow us to filter news and culture ourselves.  But why can’t we have the best of both worlds — some old school filtering by trusted information intermediaries along with plenty of personalized filtering? In many ways, I think we have that balance today — and it is a wonderful thing. Pessimists like Carr seem to only focus on the downsides of customized media, and that’s unfortunate. Nonetheless, they are right to ask the tough questions about how long those old school filters (traditional media intermediaries) will survive if all of us flock to an extreme “Daily Me” mindset. My contention, however, is that we won’t. Most of us appreciate the balanced approach and are willing to support some — but not all — of those old intermediaries and filters.

I have far less sympathy for Carr’s argument that increased specialization and customization are breeding “fanaticism” and “radicalization.” Last time I checked, mobs weren’t rioting in the streets or rushing out to join the Nazi or Communist parties! Those knuckleheads still exist, of course, but they have always existed. And let’s not forget, it was during the age of scarcity and mass media that those movements gained traction and took control in some countries. In the Internet Age, by contrast, such extremist loonies usually get exposed and widely ridiculed. As the old saying goes, the answer to bad speech is more speech. The Internet has given it to us and helped us counter such societal extremism, even if it has simultaneously given such extremists a new soapbox to stand on and spew their hatred and stupidity. Let them spew it and we will respond! And we will marginalize them in the process. There’s just no chance some sort of mini-Hitler is going to use the Net to revive fascism and build a mass audience today.

Finally, I believe Carr makes a similar mistake when he argues that computers and the Internet are really more “technologies of control” than “technologies of emancipation.” (p. 191)  “While the Net offers people a new medium for discovering information and voicing opinions, it also provides bureaucrats with a powerful new tool for monitoring speech, identifying dissidents, and disseminating propaganda.” (p. 200)  In this sense, Carr is adopting the same pessimistic tone set forth by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu in their book Who Controls the Internet? While I agree that computers and the Net give the big bad statist bureaucrats new tools of control, I persist in my belief that these digital tools offer the masses more methods of evading and minimizing the power of government over their lives and liberties.  Again, I think it is important to put things in some historical context. In the past, governments could completely control the media and disseminate incessant propaganda. It is far more difficult for them to get away with that today, and citizens have many tools and outlets at their disposal to respond.  Digital technologies really are technologies of emancipation, but we can’t expect them to break the backs of the statist thugs overnight.

Conclusion

Carr’s pessimism on the two issues discussed above is succinctly captured on pg. 167 of his book when he argues that:

it’s clear that two of the hopes most dear to the Internet optimists — that the Web will create a more bountiful culture and that it will promote greater harmony and understanding — should be treated with skepticism. Cultural impoverishment and social fragmentation seem equally likely outcomes.

That almost perfectly delineates the battle lines in the great debate taking place today between Internet optimists and pessimists. The Big Switch probably makes the best case for the pessimists that has been penned thus far, and for that reason alone it deserves your attention. However, I continue to remain cautiously optimistic that the Net is moving our economy, culture, and society in a better direction — at least compared to a past, which had its own share of drawbacks and problems.

P.S. If you are interested in the ongoing debate about cloud computing — and specifically the question of how much competition we can expect going forward — you’ll definitely want to check out this very interesting discussion taking place between Hugh Macleod, Tim O’Reilly, and Nick Carr.

• “The Cloud’s Best-Kept Secret” — Hugh Macleod
• “Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing” — Tim O’Reilly
• “What Tim O’Reilly gets wrong about the cloud” — Nick Carr
• “Further musings on the network effect and the cloud” — Nick Carr

Also, here’s a video of Nick Carr’s recent appearance on “The Colbert Report”:

[Note: I updated this discussion and chart in a subsequent essay. See: “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.”]

A number of very interesting books have been released over the past year or two which debate how the Internet is reshaping our culture and the economy. I’ve reviewed a couple of them here but I have been waiting to compile a sort of mega-book review once I found a sensible way to conceptually group them together. I’m not going to have time to cover each of them here in the detail they deserve, but I think I have at least found a sensible way to categorize them. For lack of better descriptors, I’ve divided these books and thinkers into two camps: “Internet optimists” versus “Internet Pessimists.” Here’s a list of some of the individuals and books (or other articles and blogs) that I believe epitomize these two camps of thinking:

Adherents & Their Books / Writings

And here’s a rough sketch of the major beliefs or key themes that separate these two schools of thinking about the impact of the Internet on our culture and economy:

Beliefs / Themes

So, what to make of this intellectual war? Who’s got the story right?

Although it will be easy for many in the blogosphere to side with the Internet optimists — and I would count myself as generally being in the optimist camp — I think the Net pessimists make many fair points about the disruptive nature of the Internet and how it forcing individuals and industries to completely reconsider the way they live their lives or organize their business affairs. Many Net optimists have a tendency to paint an excessively rosy picture of the transformative nature of the Net. In the extreme, the optimists seem to imply that the Net is somehow remaking man, altering human nature, and changing the economy only for the better. Among the Net optimists, there’s often a lot of romanticized talk of collective action / intelligence overcoming all barriers to knowledge or progress, and so on. (Sometimes I am guilty of a bit of that myself in my writing here). Net optimists need to be careful about overstating their case, especially on the economic front, and we would be wise to read the work of the Net pessimists with that criticism in mind.

The problem with the Internet pessimists, however, is that their skepticism often borders on Chicken Little-ism or outright Ludditism. I thought Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur was about as over-the-top as things could get in this regard. (See my 2-part book review here and here), but then I worked my way through Lee Siegel’s tedious screed, Against the Machine. It made Keen seem downright reasonable and cheery by comparison! Keen and Siegel seem to be in heated competition for the title “High Prophet of Internet Doom,” but Siegel is currently a nose ahead in that race.

Nick Carr is probably the most reasonable and respected of the Net skeptics. He is an enormously gifted writer and I always enjoy reading his books, articles, and blog entries, even when I disagree with him. In The Big Switch, he makes many valid points about the downsides of the gut-wrenching changes that the Net is bringing about. Similarly, in his provocative recent Atlantic article, “Is Google Making us Stupid?”, he wonders how the Net is negatively affecting our minds and attention spans. Carr also argues that the Internet economy is increasingly built on a “sharecropper” model that essentially exploits the free labor of the multitudes to make just a handful of major Net operators rich. He makes some interesting points but, ultimately, I think he overstates the problem. Most of us feel we get a lot back as part of this value exchange. Sure, Google, Facebook, and a lot of other Net middlemen are getting big and rich based on all the user-generated content flowing over their sites and systems, but we extract enormous benefits from the existence of those (mostly free and constantly improving) platforms and services.

Nonetheless, the Net pessimists (especially Carr) raise some very legitimate questions about the limitations of the “free culture” mindset. They are on stronger ground when the highlight the problems associated with online piracy, however, than when they are critiquing Wikipedia and the occasional limitations or errors of collaborative endeavors like it. But Wikipedia in particular seems to be an obsession for many of the Net pessimists, especially Carr and Keen.

It is also true, however, that Net optimists like Tapscott and Benkler sometimes make too much out of “wiki” / collective intelligence models, seemingly implying that proprietary business models, private firms, and potentially capitalism itself are passé notions. I disagree. While I think wiki / collective intelligence approaches have their place and play a vitally important role in our new digital economy, the old ways of doing things are still alive and well and producing some wonderful results. For example, “The Dark Knight” wasn’t the product of spontaneous collective action, and I still don’t see any truly compelling open source video games to compete with the likes of “Madden 2009” or “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.” I think some of the Net optimists get a bit carried away at times when the place too much faith in the “Wikipedia-ization” of everything, or the idea that the Long Tail is somehow “The Future of Business,” as the subtitle of Chris Anderson’s book suggest. I think that goes much too far. On the other hand, I am huge fan of Wiki & Long Tail models and, like most others, understand their limitations. Those models will play an increasingly important role in the Net economy moving forward whether the Net pessimists like it or not. Bottom line: each model or mode of production has its place and purpose and they will continue to co-exist going forward, albeit in serious tension at times.

Perhaps when I have more time I will return to this discussion and fill it out more with some passages and quotes from each book. I just don’t have the time right now but I will try to do so at some point in the future. Anyway, these are important books that deserve your attention if you are following the debate over the impact the Net is having — for better or worse — on our culture and economy.