I very much enjoyed Dennis Baron’s new book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, and highly recommend you pick it up. Baron does a wonderful job exploring the 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).

I have a complete review of Baron’s A Better Pencil now up on the City Journal‘s website here.  I’ve also pasted it down below.

Plato Wrote it Down by Adam Thierer

a review of A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, by Dennis Baron (Oxford University Press, 280 pp., $24.95)

In the beginning, Dennis Baron reminds us in his new book, A Better Pencil, there was the word—the spoken word, that is. Oral tradition, the passing of knowledge through stories and lectures, was the primary method of instruction and learning throughout early human civilization. But then a few innovative souls decided to start writing everything down on stones and clay. Almost as soon as they did, a great debate began on the impact of new communications technology on culture and education. And it 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, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, begins his splendid history of these debates with the well-known tale from Plato’s Phaedrus about the dangers of the written word. The Egyptian god Theuth boasts to King Thamus about how his invention of writing will improve the wisdom and memory of the masses. Thamus shoots back, “The discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it.” Thamus then passes judgment on writing’s impact on society, saying he fears that the people “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”

Of course, as Baron points out, we remember this warning only “because Plato wrote it down.” It’s one of the recurrent ironies in the history of techno-skepticism that while “the shock of the new often brings out critics eager to warn us away,” those critics often embrace—or, at the very least, benefit from—the very tools that they want the rest of us to shun. Whether it’s Luddites On-Line winning Yahoo’s “Cool Site of the Day” award, or the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association promoting National Handwriting Day via the Internet, or Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber Manifesto attracting unprecedented readership thanks to its availability on the Web, those who have a “common tendency to romanticize the good old ways” of doing things often fail to appreciate how new technology can benefit society—including themselves.

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. “According to the latest generation of critics and naysayers,” Baron notes, “today it is computers that are producing texts whose value and credibility we question; computers that are giving too many people control over the creation and publication of text; computers that are wreaking havoc with our handwriting.” Contemporary critics also fret over “information overload.”

The backlash against computers and digitization began while the Internet was still in its cradle, with the 1992 publication of Neil Postman’s anti-technology screed, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Postman’s intellectual descendants include Internet critics such as Lee Siegel, Andrew Keen, and Mark Helprin, whose works drip with disdain for all things digital. They warn of a coming dystopia where truth and authority vanish, culture crumbles, and political polarization breeds closed-mindedness and even the death of deliberative democracy.

These overly pessimistic critics turn a blind eye to both the wonders of the digital age and humanity’s ability to adapt. As Baron persuasively argues, “English survives, conversation thrives online as well as off, and on balance, digital communications seems to be enhancing human interaction, not detracting from it.” In fact, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that previous generations would have found unimaginable. As Baron puts it: “The Internet is a true electronic frontier where everyone is on his or her own: all manuscripts are accepted for publication, they remain in virtual print forever, and no one can tell writers what to do.” Such human empowerment is worth celebrating, even if it does have the occasional downside. Abundance is better than a world of scarce choices and few voices.

Baron’s retelling of the history of techno-skepticism is edifying, but it leaves one with the nagging feeling that these debates will never cease. Each generation will witness a technological watershed that brings out a fresh crop of both pollyannas and pessimists. Like Plato, however, most of us will embrace whatever’s next and move forward.

Last month, National Review magazine published a review that I penned of Mark Helprin’s new book, Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto.  Helprin’s book is both a passionate defense of copyright law as well as a mini-autobiography.  Helprin is one of the great novelists and essayists of the past half-century, and his book A Soldier of a Great War is one of my all-time favorite novels.  I cannot in strong enough words encourage you to read that book; it is profoundly moving. (I almost named my son after the lead character in the book!)

Thus, I was quite excited when I learned that Helprin had penned a defense of copyright and I jumped at the chance to review it when the folks at National Review asked me to do so.  Alas, as you will see in my review, I was terribly disappointed.  I wish Helprin would have stuck with the very reasonable tone he adopted in this excellent podcast interview he did recently with John J. Miller of National Review Online. Unfortunately, he went a different direction in the book, as I make clear in my review:

National Review July 20, 2009

“Man, Machine, and Copyright” a review of Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto, by Mark Helprin by Adam Thierer

It would be difficult to think of anyone more ideally suited to pen a passionate defense of copyright law than novelist Mark Helprin.  Helprin has written several of the finest works of modern literature, including his masterpiece, A Soldier of the Great War, a narrative of transcendent beauty. In Digital Barbarism, Helprin sets out to use his formidable gift for the written word to repel the “cyber mob” that has attacked copyright law and called for its curtailment, or even abolition.

Unfortunately, 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 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. This is a shame, because, in places, Digital Barbarism makes a fine case against those critics who wrongly view copyright as an impediment to the creation and diffusion of content. “The availability of information is not and will not be restrained by the copyright system any more than it is or will be restrained by the delivery systems that make it possible,” Helprin argues. Why, he asks, “must ‘content’ be free” when everything else — access to the Internet, digital devices, etc. — costs good money? He notes that the movement that advocates “free,” universal access to all copyrighted material in the name of “openness” and “the public good” would, ironically, “destroy the dream it advocates”:

By insistence upon unhindered access without regard for rights and incentives that have been carefully balanced over centuries, the hurried new order will diminish the substance over which it demands sovereignty. It will have its access, but, as time passes, to less and less, and eventually perhaps to almost nothing, the means having grossly overpowered the ends. The past may be brilliantly cataloged and made accessible as never before, but at the cost of making the culture of the present relatively barren. Though it may never be entirely extinguished, it can be made as eerily quiet as if without the beat of a single heart.

The power of Helprin’s defense of copyright is that it is grounded in both this sort of utilitarian rationale and a Lockean, natural-rights-based conception of man’s moral right to the fruit of his mental labor. But there are many thorny issues Helprin fails to address in setting forth his dual defense of copyright.

To begin with, things just aren’t as black-and-white as he makes them out to be. There’s a certain inherent messiness to “intellectual property,” at least when compared with tangible property. As an abstract concept, it’s easy enough to defend. In practice, however, it often proves exceedingly challenging to delimit and enforce, since intangible creations cannot be enclosed the same way our back yards can.

This does not mean, however, that the opposite approach — a collectivized “commons” for intellectual creations — is more sensible. That intangible property is harder to enclose and protect doesn’t mean the law shouldn’t seek to do so. “Copyright is important because it is one of the guarantors of the rights of authorship,” Helprin argues, “and the rights of authorship are important because without them the individual voice would be subsumed in an indistinguishable and instantly malleable mass.”

American copyright law has generally cast this right in utilitarian terms, ever since the Founders gave Congress the power under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” But how much “limited time” is enough time to incentivize creativity and invention? Under the first Copyright Act, enacted by Congress in 1790, the term of protection was just 14 years plus a right to renew for an additional 14 if the author was still alive.

There are many legitimately difficult questions about the enforceability of copyright in an age of ubiquitous digital connectivity and instantaneous information flows. I came to appreciate these challenges several years ago after transferring my entire 30-year CD collection to a portable music player that was smaller than a box of cards. How can copyright coexist with the giant copying machine represented by the combination of personal computers, digital devices, and the Internet? What sorts of restrictions on devices and networks are required to ensure that we continue to reward intellectual creativity without destroying the forms of technological innovation? How should copyright law define “fair use” in a culture that increasingly enables collaboration and encourages “remixing”? Will we need to create new “compulsory licensing” schemes — already in place for radio and television — to ensure that creators are compensated through mandatory fees embedded in digital devices or our monthly broadband bills?

These are challenging questions that deserve a fair hearing. But Helprin rarely bothers with these details because he’s too busy trading jabs with “the mob.” Unfortunately, his manifesto goes off the rails as his defense of copyright quickly morphs into an indictment of the Internet and all things digital.

At times, Helprin seems to be channeling the ghost of the late social critic Neil Postman, who, in his 1992 anti-technology screed, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, heaped contempt upon the unfolding Information Age. Recently, Internet critics such as Lee Siegel (Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob) and Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture) have continued this tradition of deep techno-skepticism. With Digital Barbarism, Helprin joins this cause, arguing 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 Helprin is just getting started. While he claims that he is “not decrying the digital revolution per se,” it often sounds that way. He speaks repeatedly about the “surrender” of human nature to “the machine revolution” and the corresponding need to “control the machine.”

Much of Helprin’s Internet ire seems to originate with the anonymous “blogging-ants” who have attacked his earlier essays in defense of copyright-term extension. Digital Barbarism becomes his chance for payback. “It would be one thing if [the digital] revolution produced Mozarts, Einsteins, or Raphaels,” Helprin says, “but it doesn’t. . . . It produces mouth-breathing morons in backward baseball caps and pants that fall down; Slurpee-sucking geeks who seldom seek daylight; pretentious and earnest hipsters who want you to wear bamboo socks so the world won’t end . . . beer-drinking dufuses who pay to watch noisy cars driving around in a circle for eight hours at a stretch,” and so on.

Unfortunately for Helprin, would-be rappers, basement-dwelling geeks, enviro-hippies, and NASCAR fans all predate the rise of the Internet, so one wonders if he has fingered the right culprit for civilization’s supposed decline. The fundamental problem with Digital Barbarism is that the cultural decay Helprin laments cannot be so easily tied to the battle over copyright. Indeed, most of what Helprin condemns in modern culture has come about during a time when copyright’s protections — at least as defined by law — have been expanded considerably in both length of term and breadth of coverage.

Moreover, he is simply too quick to proclaim the decline of modern civilization by looking only to the baser elements of the blogosphere. The Internet is a cultural and intellectual bazaar where one can find both the best and the worst of humanity on display at any given moment. True, “brutishness and barbarism” can be found on many cyber-corners, but not all of its corners. And, contrary to Helprin’s assertion that blogging “begins the mad race to the bottom,” one could just as easily cite countless instances of the healthy, unprecedented conversations that blogs have enabled about a diverse array of topics. Finally, even if one concedes, for the sake of argument, that blogging produces more cultural trash than treasure, would greatly enhanced copyright protection really turn things around?

There are strong moral and utilitarian arguments for protecting copyright and, during his calmer moments, Helprin articulates some of them quite effectively. He is surely right that “theft is ugly,” and that far too many people (especially in academia) are turning a blind eye to the injustices of the widespread copyright infringement taking place online today. There’s a lot of good sense buried underneath the angry rhetoric of this book; it’s regrettable — and surprising — that someone of Mark Helprin’s literary prowess didn’t make a better effort to persuade his readers.

Additional Reading about Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto:

• Mark Helprin’s home page, his Claremont Institute page, and his Wikipedia entry
• Helprin’s New York Times editorial that prompted a backlash and led him to write the book
• Helprin podcast interview with National Review Online
• Russ Roberts interviews Helprin for the Econ Talk podcast
• Lawrence Lessig’s written response at the Huffington Post and an NPR interview with Lessig about the book
• Helprin’s recent Wall Street Journal editorial, “Copyright Critics Rationalize Theft,” which is condensed from the book
• the Amazon page and HarperCollins page for the Digital Barbarism
• a review by Jeremy Philips, and executive with News Corp, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal
• a review by Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal (+ lots of good comments)
• a review by Patrick Ross of the Copyright Alliance (Part 1, Part 2)
• a review by Jonathan Bailey that appeared on the Plagiarism Today blog
• a review by Nate Anderson of Ars Technica

I finally got around to reading Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know, by Randall Stross. It’s very well done. Stross is a frequently contributor to the New York Times and the author of several other interesting books on the technology industry. He knows how to weave a story together, and it helps that Google’s story is a pretty amazing one.

Each chapter discusses a different part of Google’s growing family of services — GMail, Google Maps, Google Earth, Book Search, and YouTube. Of course, it all started with search and Stross does a good job explaining how the ingenious Google search algorithm has grown from dorm room project to the greatest aggregator of human knowledge that the world has ever known. This, in turn, has powered Google’s hugely successful online advertising system. The real secret of their success with online advertising, Stross argues, is that “Google’s impersonal, mathematical approach search also provides you with the ability to serve advertisements that are tailored to a search, rather than to the person submitting the search request, whose identity would have to be known.”

Despite the benefits of such generally anonymous searching, as Google has grown and added new services and capabilities, concerns about the sheer volume of data that the company collects have led to heightened privacy concerns. Indeed, privacy is a core theme that Stross uses in the book to tie many of the chapters and issues together. Google is constantly struggling to strike the right balance between providing more access to the world’s information while also being careful not to raise privacy concerns. But it’s unclear exactly how much more information collection that users (or public officials) will tolerate before advocating stricter limits on Google’s reach.  As Stross points out:

Guided by its founding mission, to organize all the world’s information, Google has created storage capacity that allows it to gain control of what its users are you doing in a comprehensive way that no other company has done, and to preserve those records indefinitely, without the need to clear out old records to make way for new ones. Moreover, Google differentiates its service by refining its own proprietary software formula to mine and massage the data, technology that it zealously protects from the sight of rivals. This sets up a conflict between Google’s wish to operate a “black box” (completely opaque to the outside) and its users’ wish for transparency.

At the very least, users would like Google to disclose what protections are in place to safeguard their privacy. It is also natural that users would be curious about the machines that hold their personal data, as well as about which employees within Google have access to that data, and about the risks that it might be leaked, stolen, or transferred, for example, to a government agency that requests it. (p. 62)

Personally, I think most of these privacy fears are overblown. The mundane, trivial aspects of our daily lives aren’t really of much interest to Google. And to the extent users are concerned about their privacy, there are plenty of ways they can take steps to better protect their personal information or web-surfing habits.  Blocking ads, rejecting cookies, and using encryption are three steps that privacy-sensitive users can take to better shield the personal info or surfing habits. Finally, the concern about government access to data is best remedied by limits on what government can access in the first place. We shouldn’t be regulating Google or other companies to limit information collection based on a fear of government access; we just need to tightly limit the government’s ability to enlist private companies as agents of the state.

Still, as Stross points out, privacy concerns persist:

How can users be certain that their personal information won’t be put to uses to which an individual would never willingly consent? Privacy concerns extend across all Internet companies, but those concerns of our greatest where personal information is gathered in the largest pool. This makes the stewardship of Google’s machine a subject of public interest. Whatever is behind a door that is intentionally kept closed will appear sinister, whether deservedly so or not. For the sake of improving its public image, it’s possible that Google may relent and open its doors, at least enough to afford a peek inside. (p. 62)

I think that’s a fair point and this is something Google is really going to struggle with in coming years, especially as its search algorithm and other applications grow more powerful and comprehensive.  A good example of that is already seen with Google’s amazing “Street View” technology, which provides panoramic street-level views of maps searched via Google Maps. “What neither Google nor its critics realized,” Stross says, “was that our anonymity while walking about in public space in the predigital age was protected not by law but by the crude state of technology–we felt invisible only because cameras were not in place to capture our images.” (p. 145)

As a society, we had better get used to this because Street View is just the beginning of what will eventually grow into a far more sophisticated set of technologies as geo-mapping, geo-location, and image retrieval are married to virtual reality technologies. We’re really not that far away from Star Trek “holodecks” being projected into our living rooms, and once those holodecks let us walk down any street in the world, things are going to get both really exciting and a little bit creepy at the same time. But even if Google abandoned Street View tomorrow, somebody else would pick it up and run with it. Innovation in this space cannot be frozen. (Microsoft’s recent launch of Photosynth shows us that).  Google has already taken steps to protect privacy on Street View by blurring facial images and letting users flag “inappropriate or sensitive imagery for blurring or removal.”  That’s about all we can ask for.

Another theme that Stross develops nicely in the book is the ongoing war between Google and Microsoft. He argues that “Google’s ascendance has been accompanied by Microsoft’s decline.” (p. 195)  But that does not mean Google will be able to hold their current lead. As Stross rightly points out:

No computer company has ever been able to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two successive technological eras. IBM in the mainframe era could not head off the ascent of Digital Equipment Corporation in the minicomputer era, which, in turn, could not head off the ascent of Microsoft in the personal computer era.

And now Google has “succeeded in pushing Microsoft into a defensive crouch” and made life very difficult for that supposed “monopolist” of the PC era.  As a result, some Google critics claim this latest King of the Tech Hill cannot be toppled and that Google is the new “monopoly” we need to worry about.  But these fears are also overblown. Google faces threats today from many different providers and doesn’t really even have its act together in other areas. For example, Stross points out how Facebook and other social networking sites have been a real pain for Google. Facebook, in particular, is creating a massive walled garden that is largely outside Google’s search and information retrieval capabilities. “In a twinkling,” Stross argues, “Facebook became a miniature Web universe–behind a wall, inaccessible to Google.” (p. 30)  Meanwhile, in recent months, Google has annouced layoffs and has scuttled a variety of programs and projects which haven’t panned out, including experiments in social networking, virtual worlds, and a Twitter competitor.

But it is tomorrow’s providers and technologies that will pose the most serious challenge to Google’s current hegemony. No one can predict what big application(s) or competitor(s) will emerge next, but it all could happen faster than you think.  After all, let’s not forget that most of us hadn’t even conducted our first Google search 10 years ago, and no one considered Google a serious threat to Microsoft back in 1999.  Just a decade later, Google has Microsoft wondering if they have a future at all. Things can change that rapidly in the digital world and it should make us question the wisdom of government intervention into such a fast-moving field.

Moreover, government micromanagement of the services Google provides–especially search–is troubling to imagine. I don’t even want to think about how a DOJ consent decree would seek to control Google’s algorithm or the search business in general. But some critics are already speaking of “Googleopoly” and calling for a “Federal Search Commission,” foreshadowing the fight to come.  Google’s rapid growth and sheer size may end up tilting both policymakers and public opinion against them more and more in coming years as such “Googlephobia” increases. Stross notes that:

Google’s future will be determined to no small degree by the view that its users hold of the company itself. Google has enjoyed mostly favorable public notice in its first ten years, but maintaining a cuddly, anticorporate image when it stands among the U.S. companies with the largest market capitalization may pose an increasingly difficult challenge. (p. 18)

Indeed, Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto is already wearing a little thin in some quarters. And some of us still aren’t even sure what it means. As Google grows bigger and makes buckets more money in coming years–and they likely will–I think Stross is correct in arguing that Google’s honeymoon with the public and policymakers will likely come to an end. That doesn’t mean they won’t still be a great company doing great things, it’s just that they’ll be antagonizing even more competitors, lawmakers, and other groups than they already do today. And that will likely spell serious trouble for them. It’s never good to have so many enemies. Just ask Microsoft!

In the meantime, we shouldn’t lose sight of what an amazing capitalist success story Google has been and how lucky we are that they have been at least a little bit successful in their mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”  It’s an incredible story, and Planet Google is a fine early history of the company and the new era of computing it has ushered in.

I used to have a (semi-crazy) uncle who typically began conversations with lame jokes or bad riddles. This sounds like one he might have used had he lived long enough: What do Thomas Jefferson, a moose, and cyberspace have in common?

The answer to that question can be found in a new book, In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace, by David G. Post, a Professor of Law at Temple University. Post, who teaches IP and cyberspace law at Temple, is widely regarded as one of the intellectual fathers of the “Internet exceptionalist” school of thinking about cyberlaw.  Basically, Post sees this place we call “cyberspace” as something truly new, unique, and potentially worthy of some special consideration, or even somewhat different ground rules than we apply in meatspace. More on that in a bit.

[ Full disclosure: Post’s work was quite influential on my own thinking during the late 1990s, so much so that when I joined the Cato Institute in 2000, one of the first things I did was invite David to become an adjunct scholar with Cato. He graciously accepted and remains a Cato adjunct scholar today. Incidentally, Cato is hosting a book forum for him on February 4th that I encourage you to attend or watch online. Anyway, it’s always difficult to be perfectly objective when you know and admire someone, but I will try to do so here.]

Post’s book is essentially an extended love letter — to both cyberspace and Jefferson. Problem is, as Post even admits at the end, it’s tough to know which subject this book is suppose to teach us more about. The book loses focus at times — especially in the first 100 pages — as Post meanders between historical tidbits of Jefferson’s life and thinking and what it all means for cyberspace. But the early focus is on TJ.  Thus, those who pick up the book expecting to be immediately immersed in cyber-policy discussions may be a bit disappointed at first.  As a fellow Jefferson fanatic, however, I found all this history terrifically entertaining, whether it was the story of Jefferson’s Plow and his other agricultural inventions and insights, TJ’s unique interest in science (including cryptography), or that big moose of his.

OK, so what’s the deal with the moose? When TJ was serving as a minister to France in in the late 1780s, at considerable expense to himself, he had the complete skeleton, skin and horns of a massive American moose shipped to the lobby of his Paris hotel. Basically, Jefferson wanted to make a bold statement to his French hosts about this New World he came from and wake them up to the fact that some very exciting things were happening over there that they should be paying attention to. That’s one hell of way to make a statement!

Questions about Frontiers, Both Old and New

Now you see the connection to Post’s investigation into the state of cyberspace. Like Jefferson, Post is very excited about a new frontier and he wants to alert people to it. Importantly, however, Post isn’t at all ashamed to admit when he doesn’t understand why some things are the way they are in this new world.  And so Post begins asking questions — lots and lots of questions — to guide our investigation.

Thus, in much the same way that Jefferson penned Notes on the State of Virginia as guidebook for newcomers to the strange new world of his time, David Post has penned this slender volume as a guidebook to our modern cyber-frontier. If you’re looking for a book with concrete positions on all of cyberspace’s pressing policy problems, this book is not it. Instead, it is meant to help us frame the issues and questions properly and consider how this new frontier is unfolding in the early years of its existence. As Post puts it:

We are at the very beginning of what will become a centuries-long conversation about these questions, and my goal here was not to put anything to rest but to put everything in play, not to conclude any part of that conversation but to help you get started. We need, more than answers to today’s questions about law and policy on the network, new ways of thinking about the questions themselves, new vocabularies, new visions of the possible, new ways of identifying and organizing what we know and what we don’t know about the new place. (p. 209)

Post does a very nice job of giving us “new ways of thinking about questions” in his book. These questions generally fall into two categories.  First, Post wants to know why cyberspace works the way it does, or more profoundly, why it works at all. How did this little experiment with networking protocols turn into the most revolutionary global communications and information distribution system of modern times?  Second, Post wants to know “Who makes the rules ‘there’… and what should they be? What does the law look like there? How does it get made, and by whom? Who governs? By what means, and by what right?” (p. 4)

What Jefferson (and Hamilton) Can Teach Us

Post brings Jefferson into the story in the hope that TJ’s profound thinking on the issues of his time might help us getter a better handle on the cyber-controversies of our own time. After all, Jefferson was a man who spent much of his life thinking about uncharted subjects and frontiers. And law, of course!

Using this approach to help us explore cyberspace and cyberlaw works quite well in many cases. It works particularly well when Post brings TJ’s leading intellectual nemesis into the drama — Alexander Hamilton.  “Their feud the longest-running in American political history,” Post correctly notes, “for they stood on opposite shores of the great intellectual divide, a divide that encapsulates something fundamental in the way we think about society and government.” (p. 107). Jefferson desired liberty above all else; Hamilton stressed order and authority. Whereas Jefferson trusted decentralization and wanted diffuse communities making political decisions, Hamilton looked to a strong central authority to guide the nation.

Many modern cyberspace disputes, Post suggests, can be viewed through this same Jeffersonian vs. Hamiltonian philosophical dichotomy. Post continues:

Cyberspace is not the American West of 1787, of course. But like the American West of 1787, cyberspace is (or at least it has been) a Jeffersonian kind of place. Jeffersonians always predominate in new places, because new places attract people who find new places attractive and retell people who do not. […] Hamiltonians, though, inevitably make their way to Jeffersonian places (certainly once gold is discovered there!), claims of order and authority and power assert themselves, and struggles over the shape of the place begin in earnest. And like the West of 1787, cyberspace poses some hard questions, and could use some new ideas, about governance, and law, and order, and scale. The engineers have bequeathed to us a remarkable instrument, one that has managed to solve prodigious technical problems associated with communication on a global scale. The problem is the one that Jefferson and his contemporaries faced: How do you build “republican” institutions — institutions that respect the equal worth of all individuals and their right to participate in the formation of the rules under which they live — that scale? (p. 116-117)

Will Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian thinking prevail as this process unfolds? That remains to be seen, and although Post clearly falls in the Jeffersonian camp on these issues, he doesn’t really place odds on the outcome. Moreover, I would have liked to see Post offer a more full-throated defense of cyber-Jeffersonianism and Interent exceptionalism, or at least better explain to the reader how the debate between exceptionalism and unexceptionalism — or Jeffersonianism vs. Hamiltonianism — has progressed since the mid-1990s.

I think it’s clear that the cyber-Hamiltonians (i.e., the Internet unexceptionalists) are in the midst of a major “Empire Strikes Back” moment today as cyberspace is coming under increasing political pressure from many corners, and calls for more centralized authority abound — whether we are talking about domain name regulation, net neutrality mandates, speech controls, or whatever else. I just wish Post would have spent more time developing a “Return of the Jedi” defense of cyber-Jeffersonianism in this book.

Central Planning vs. Self-Governing Communities

Incidentally, Post has put forward such a defense elsewhere. Along with my former Cato colleague Wayne Crews, I co-edited a beefy book on Net governance issues back in 2003 entitled Who Rules the Net? Internet Governance and Jurisdiction. It contained some truly wonderful essays and they are all still quite relevant today. Jonathan Zittrain’s essay on “Reconciling a Global Internet and Local Law” remains one of the best primers on the subject you can find. But the exchange about Internet governance between David Post and Jack Goldsmith in that book is really a classic Jeffersonian-Hamiltonian debate about cyberlaw. [You can read their chapters at the link above.]

In Jefferson’s Moose, Post comes closest to developing a fuller theory of Internet exceptionalism in his excellent chapter “Governing Cyberspace III: Law.” In that chapter, he takes the unexceptionalists to task for their troubling logic, which “leads inexorably to the conclusion that (just about) everything you do on the Web may be subject to (just about) everybody’s law.” (p. 167). Indeed, the unexceptionalist vision is quite a miserable one when you get right down to it; one that treats this new frontier as a plaything in an endless power struggle between competing political bodies. Meanwhile, as Post points out, the rule of law loses its meaning and becomes less about the consent of the governed and more like a game of “Jurisdictional Whack-a-Mole,” with countless “sovereigns” asserting authority and trying to beat cyberspace and digital denizens into submission in one way or another.

Because Post believes that the unexceptionalists are wrong in their assertion that the Internet is merely the “functional equivalent of mail, or telephone, or smoke signals,” he offers — but does not fully develop — an alternative framework based on Jefferson’s vision for how to settle the Western frontier: Give settlers maximum flexibility to create free, independent, self-governing communities. In Jefferson’s words, “an empire of liberty.. built not on conquest, but on principles of compact and equality.” And this empire of liberty would be, in Post’s words, “held together by consensual bonds and adherence to republican principles, not coercive power, an ever-expanding union of self-governing commonwealths joined together as peers.”

Now that is a beautiful vision for cyberspace!  And, in many ways, it partially explains why cyberspace has been such a special place — at least so far in its early history. But as more and more Hamiltonians assert the need for greater “order,” all that could change. Again, I wish Post would have put some more meat on the bones of his beautiful cyber-Jeffersonian framework to counter the increasing calls we hear for more cyber-Hamiltonianism.  Specifically, Post needs to better address the accusation made by the Digital Age Hamiltonians that Internet exceptionalism is little more than cyber-anarchism. In reality, Internet exceptionalism is essentially something akin to decentralized federalism for the Internet; a federalism that the Founders — or at least Jefferson — would have likely strongly supported.  As I wrote here recently, I like to think of Internet exceptionalism as a variation on Robert Nozick’s “utopia of utopias” vision of an ideal society: “a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others.” (Nozick, 1974)

Post begins a sketch of that Nozickian vision for cyberspace in Jefferson’s Moose, but he doesn’t really finish painting his masterpiece. To be fair, however, Post did make it clear right from the start of the book that it was going to be about asking the right questions, not necessarily providing all the answers.

Two Big Issues, Both Then and Now

Incidentally, using Jefferson as a guide to understanding modern cyberlaw controversies also works well when it comes to “the two issues [that] have been featured in virtually all of the Internet’s Big Cases” — free speech and intellectual property. As Post reminds us, Jefferson had a bit to say about those issues during his own lifetime.

“Jefferson was America’s first, and probably its greatest, First Amendment absolutist”  Post says, (p. 188), because Jefferson viewed free speech as part of a greater “interconnected whole”:

republican self-government, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech. You couldn’t have any without the others; they were inextricably bound together into a single system, and they would stand, or fall, together. (p. 189-190)

Consequently:

To a Jeffersonian, then, free speech questions are always simultaneously (a) of supreme importance and (b) pretty easy. The answer to free speech questions is always (or almost always) simple:  The more protection for, and the fewer the restrictions on, speech, the better. (p. 194)

And Jefferson held true to that principle throughout his life, most notably with his strenuous opposition to the horrendous Sedition Act of 1798.

But intellectual property is a far thornier issue — for both Jefferson and modern cyberlaw. Jefferson was a great inventor himself and keenly interested in the topic. But he also saw IP rights in a different light than speech rights.  Post explains Jefferson’s position:

Unlike free speech rights, intellectual property… cannot, in nature, be a subject of property; they do derive from the “social law,” from the laws of England, or Virginia, or whatever; they’re not antecedent to the law, but entirely dependent on it. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have intellectual property rights. It only means that we get to decide (and we have to decide) whether to have them or not, and how much of them to have. (p. 198) […] Intellectual property law in a Jeffersonian world, then, is always a matter of degree, of finding that balance, of drawing the line… Protection for intellectual property shouldn’t be too weak (or it won’t give creators enough of an incentive to create) or too strong (or it will choke off future creativity), but just right. We’ll never get it exactly right, but it is what we are always aiming for — in a Jeffersonian world, at least. (p. 201)

Of course, finding that “balance” is easier said than done and efforts to strike it engender even more controversy today in the digital world than they did during Jefferson’s time.

Conclusion

David Post has given us an enlightening map to help us navigate the new frontier of cyberspace and cyberlaw. I’m confident Jefferson’s Moose will be on my next end-of-year list of important tech policy books. And I hope my handful of small nitpicks here about the lack of details or answers regarding Post’s beautiful Jeffersonian vision for cyberspace will inspire him to pen yet another book on the subject! We need more friends of true cyber-freedom like David Post.

P.S. David Post is also the co-author of an outstanding treatise on cyberlaw with Patricia L. Bellia and Paul Schiff Berman: Cyberlaw: Problems of Policy and Jurisprudence in the Information Age. The text sits on top of my desk at all times, never far from reach when I need to a quick refresher on some arcane aspect of early Internet jurisprudence. A highly recommended resource.

It’s been a big year for tech policy books. Several important titles were released in 2008 that offer interesting perspectives about the future of the Internet and the impact digital technologies are having on our lives, culture, and economy. Back in September, I compared some of the most popular technology policy books of the past five years and tried to group them into two camps: “Internet optimists” vs. “Internet pessimists.” That post generated a great deal of discussion and I plan on expanding it into a longer article soon. In this post, however, I will merely list what I regard as the most important technology policy books of the past year.

What qualifies as an “important” tech policy book? Basically, it’s a title that many people in this field are currently discussing and that we will likely be talking about for many years to come. I want to make it clear, however, that merely because a book appears on this list it does not necessarily mean I agree with everything said in it. In fact, I found much with which to disagree in my picks for the two most important books of 2008, as well as many of the other books on the list. [Moreover, after reading all these books, I am more convinced than ever that libertarians are badly losing the intellectual battle of ideas over Internet issues and digital technology policy. There’s just very few people defending a “Hands-Off-the-Net” approach anymore. But that’s a subject for another day!]

Another caveat: Narrowly focused titles lose a few points on my list. For example, as was the case in past years, a number of important IP-related books have come out this year. If a book deals exclusively with copyright or patent issues, 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 that have a bearing on digital technology policy. The same could be said of a book that deals exclusively with privacy policy, like Solove’s Understanding Privacy. It’s an important book with implications for the future of tech policy, but I demoted it a bit because of its narrow focus.

With those caveats in mind, here are my Top 10 Most Important Tech Policy Books of 2008 (and please let me know about your picks for book of the year):

(1) Jonathan Zittrain ­– The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It

Zittrain’s book is the most important of 2008 because it’s the one we will still be talking the most about a decade from now. However, I think we’ll be talking about how wrong his thesis was that the “generative” Internet and general purpose PCs are dying.  Indeed, I’ve been quite critical of the thesis that Jonathan sets forth in his book, and I have discussed my reservations in a lengthy book review and a series of follow-up essays here and elsewhere. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).  We’ve also debated his book on the an NPR-Boston [audio is here] and we debated in person at New America Foundation in early November [video is here].

Despite my serious reservations, Jonathan’s book is important, well-written, and absolutely deserves your attention if you care about the future of technology policy.

(2) Nick Carr – The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google

Part 1 of Nick Carr’s book is an eloquent early history of cloud computing, nicely comparing it to previous technological revolutions. It’s beautifully done. In Part 2 of the book, however, Carr turns sour and argues that the impact of cloud computing will be quite miserable for our economy, culture, and society. The Big Switch probably makes the best case than any Net pessimist has been penned thus far, and for that reason alone it deserves your attention. Ultimately, however, I found his case unconvincing.

You can find my complete review of Carr’s book here.

(3) John Palfrey and Urs Gasser – Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives

Palfrey and Gasser’s fine early history of this generation of “Digital Natives” serves as a starting point for any conversation about how to mentor and interact with the children of the Web. It’s a comprehensive and very even-handed discussion about a variety of concerns or Internet pathologies, including: online safety, personal privacy, copyright piracy, offensive content, classroom learning, and much more. Despite a few nitpicks, I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it. Importantly, it is a very accessible book that even the non-tech layman can pick up and appreciate. [Note: Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, shares a lot in common with Born Digital, but Tapscott doesn’t spend much time on policy issues and that’s why his book isn’t on my list.]

My review of Palfrey and Gasser’s Born Digital is here. [Update Feb 2009: I also hosted a podcast about the book featuring Prof. Palfrey.]

(4) Clay Shirky – Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations

While Nick Carr [see #2 above] and Lee Siegel [see #5 below] are leading the “techno-pessimist” parade this year, Clay Shirky is this year’s leading cheerleader for “cyber-optimism.” Shirky argues that the falling costs and growing ease of digital distribution are making it increasingly easy for individuals to engage in group-forming and collective action endeavors. The resulting rise of “mass amateurization” poses a significant challenge to old media operations and traditional business models and practices. In this sense, Shirky is building on many of the themes and arguments previously set forth in books like The Wealth of Networks (Benkler), Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams), and Convergence Culture (Jenkins). If you’ve already read those titles, you’ll find a great deal of familiar thinking here.

I never got around to putting together a full review of Here Comes Everybody, but Tim Lee had a nice write-up over at Ars earlier this year.

(5) Lee Siegel – Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

Siegal is this year’s Andrew Keen; a cyber-sourpuss who thinks the whole world is going to hell and that the Internet is to blame. Like Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, Siegel’s Against the Machine is an anti-Web 2.0 screed that finds no redeeming qualities about the Internet or user-generated content.  In particular, Wikipedia and amateur production are blasted as being detrimental to professional media.

Both Siegel and Keen are essentially channeling the ghost of the late Neil Postman, whose 1992 book Technopoly remains the classic statement of techno-pessimism. They prove worthy disciples as they preach the Gospel According to Chicken Little and push for a neo-Luddite revival. But Siegel’s techno-pessimism is boundless and his hatred for all things digital is truly breathtaking. For that reason, however, his book deserves attention.

My lengthy critique of Siegel’s book can be found here.

(6) Ronald J. Deibert, John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain (eds.) – Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering

This is essential reading for anyone studying the methods governments are using to stifle online expression. The contributors provide a regional and country-by-country overview of the global state of online speech controls and discuss the long-term ramifications of increasing government filtering of online networks. Even if you don’t read the whole thing, this is a must-have title for your bookshelf since there is no other resource out there like this. And it should be required reading in every cyberlaw class in America. [Note: It also contains a very helpful chapter on the mechanics of Net filtering.]  Very highly recommended.

(7) Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis – Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion

Think of this book as “Internet Policy for the Educated Layman.” Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis survey a broad swath of tech policy territory — privacy, search, encryption, free speech, copyright, spectrum policy — and provide the reader with a nice history and technology primer on each topic. Like Palfrey and Gasser’s Born Digital [see #3 above], Blown to Bits is very accessible and each chapter contains a great deal of useful information to bring you up to speed on the hottest tech policy debates under the sun. Recommended.

My review of Blown to Bits can be found here.

(8) Lawrence Lessig – Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

Remix treads a lot of ground already covered in Lessig’s other books and essays (perhaps it should have been called “Rehash”), but it more fully develops his thinking on the legal treatment of derivative works. Actually, in some ways (especially in the second half of the book), it’s more of a restatement of much of what is found in Benkler’s Wealth of Networks, albeit in a far less verbose fashion. Regardless, Prof. Lessig has attained rock-star status in tech policy circles and the release of each of his new books or papers becomes a bit of an event. Remix has been no different. It has already attracted a great deal of attention and deserves to be on this list for that reason alone. But if you have read his previous work, you’ll already be familiar with much of what you find in Remix.

Generally speaking, I thought Prof. Lessig made a good case regarding the benefits of remix culture and why copyright law should leave breathing room for the various derivative works of amateur creators. But he too often blurs remix culture with “ripoff culture” (i.e., those who aren’t out to create anything new but instead just take something without paying a penny for it). To solve that latter problem, he endorses a “simple” blanket licensing scheme for the Internet. In this essay, I addressed why blanket online licensing would be anything but simple.

(9) James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer – Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk

Bessen and Meurer argue that America’s patent system is in trouble because “it fail[s] to provide clear and efficient notice of the boundaries of the rights granted.” Patent litigation has exploded, they say, and the costs of the system now outweigh the benefits. Generally speaking, with the exception of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, Bessen and Meurer don’t feel the patent system does a lot of good.”[I]t seems unlikely that patents today are an effective policy instrument to encourage innovation overall,” they conclude. They detail several reforms to help improve notice and to “make patents work as property” again the way they claim they once did.

Although the authors deal with patents broadly, the book has great relevance to digital technology policy because of their discussion of business method patents and software patents. (Incidentally, that chapter from the book is available online). They argue that software technology is especially prone to problems of “abstraction” and obviousness. As a result, software patenting has been a major contributor to the litigation explosion we have seen in recent years.

Although I agree with their case against software patents, I remain unconvinced that the patent system is failing as badly as Bessen and Meurer claim. Nonetheless, they present a powerful case that deserves to be taken seriously. Patent Failure will have an enormous impact on these debates going forward.

For more opinions on the book… Tim Lee posted a favorable review of Patent Failure over at Ars this summer. And, back in March, there was a lively discussion about the book over at Patently-O. Finally, at last year’s PFF “Aspen Summit,” Michael Meurer debated these issues with some of America’s leading patent law experts. Bronwyn H. Hall, Professor of Economics at Cal-Berkeley, challenges his findings. The video of that panel is here.

(10) Daniel Solove – Understanding Privacy

Daniel Solove’s book — and his approach to classifying and dealing with privacy problems — will have a profound impact on all future privacy debates. In that sense, it is a vital text; a must read for all who follow, or engage in, privacy debates.  On the other hand, Solove’s claim that he can construct a new paradigm based strictly on a pragmatic, utilitarian, “?problem-solving” approach, is ultimately a failure. There is just no getting around the fact that, at some point, you are going to have to provide a more robust theory of rights or justice to explain why one right trumps another. I elaborate in this lengthy critique of Solove’s Understanding Privacy.

Honorable Mentions: Here are a couple of titles that I couldn’t fit on my list but that you might want to also consider reading: Neil Netanel – Copyright’s Paradox; Matt Mason – The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism; David Friedman – Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World; Cory Doctorow — Content; and Don Tapscott — Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World.

Please let me know if there are other titles I have overlooked, and let me know your opinion about the best technology policy book(s) of 2008 by voting in our poll and commenting more down below.

[poll id=”3″]

With the publication of Understanding Privacy (Harvard University Press 2008), George Washington University Law School professor Daniel J. Solove has firmly established himself as one of America’s leading intellectuals in the field of information policy and cyberlaw.  Solove had already made himself a force to be reckoned with in this field with the publication of important books like The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet (Yale University Press 2007), The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age (NYU Press 2004) and his treatise on Information Privacy Law with Paul M. Schwartz of the Berkeley School of Law (Aspen Publishing, 2d ed. 2006).  But with Understanding Privacy, Solove has now elevated himself to that rarefied air of “people worth watching” in the cyberlaw field; an intellectual — like Lawrence Lessig or Jonathan Zittrain — whose every publication becomes something of an event in the field to which all eyes turn upon release.

Like those other intellectuals, however, my respect for their stature should not be confused with agreement with their positions.  In fact, my disagreements with Lessig and Zittrain are frequently on display here and, we have been critical of Solove here in the past as well. [Here’s Jim Harper’s review of Solove’s last book, with which I am in wholehearted agreement.]  In a similar vein, although I greatly appreciate what Prof. Solove attempts to accomplish in Understanding Privacy — and I am sure it will change the way we conceptualize and debate privacy policy in the future — I found his approach and conclusions highly problematic.

Let me begin by summarizing Solove’s bold objective in Understanding Privacy. In the book, he attempts “to set forth a theory of privacy that will guide our understanding of privacy issues and the crafting of effective laws and policies to address them.” (p. 2) Solove’s “pragmatic” proposal to rethink privacy requires us to abandon the ways we have traditional thought about it. He begins by rightly noting that privacy has long been a “conceptual jungle” (p. 196) and a “concept in disarray.” (p. 1) “[T]he attempt to locate the ‘essential’ or ‘core’ characteristics of privacy has led to failure,” he says. (pg. 8 )

Consequently — and this is what make’s his approach so unique and important — Solove’s proposal to rethink privacy begins with a call to abandon the entire philosophical exercise of trying to tie privacy rights to some “common denominator” (pg. 8 ) since “Nobody can articulate what it means.” (p. 1) Actually, what he really means to say is that plenty of theorists can articulate what it means, it’s just that there is rarely any strong consensus about what justifies a particular theory of privacy. Indeed, in Chapter 2, he walks the reader through a half-dozen “conceptions of privacy” and illustrates how each has intellectual weaknesses and suffers from over- and under-breadth problems in terms of what it types of privacy it protects.

More importantly, according to Solove, not only has the effort “to locate the ‘essence’ of privacy” failed, but there is never any hope of it succeeding. Instead of continuing the futile search for such a grand, unified theory of privacy, Solove says we should tackle privacy issues from the “bottom up” by looking to “solve certain problems” (p. 75) The key to making it all work, he says, is “balancing”:

Because privacy conflicts with other fundamental values, such as free speech, security, curiosity, and transparency, we should engage in a candid and direct analysis of why privacy interests are important and how they ought to be reconciled with other interests. We cannot ascribe a value to privacy in the abstract. The value of privacy is not uniform across all contexts. We determine the value of privacy when we seek to reconcile privacy with opposing interests in the particular situations. (p. 87)

It is tempting to applaud Solove’s attempt to unhinge privacy from any “common denominator” and instead get more concrete about how to work through the details of practical privacy problems. After all, it is easy to get frustrated with some modern theories of privacy that have been tied up with amorphous, warm-and-fuzzy terms like “personhood” and “intimacy.” The inherent subjectivity of some of those terms makes it challenging to derive bright-line principles and tests to help craft law or resolve privacy disputes when they come before the courts.

But I believe there are serious problems with any attempt to completely divorce privacy policy from a theory of rights or justice. In my opinion, you can’t just dynamite all conceptual frameworks to the ground; value judgments will persist and references to rights theory will always be required. Even Solove’s pragmatic, bottom-up approach is value-laden; he just doesn’t acknowledge it. The majority of privacy controversies he attempts to work through in Chapter 5’s ambitious 16-part “Taxonomy of Privacy” mostly end up coming down in favor of taking stronger steps (i.e., rules, regulations, lawsuits, etc) to enhance privacy rights. He clearly has a bias in favor of enhancing and extending privacy rights relative to many other rights, but he doesn’t bother grounding it in any substantive theory of rights or justice.

Simply stated, even though Solove claims he can construct a new paradigm based strictly on a “pragmatic,” utilitarian, “problem-solving” approach, there is just no getting around the fact that, at some point, you are going to have to provide a more robust theory of rights or justice to explain why one right trumps another.

For example, let’s consider the frequent clash between privacy and free speech rights. As any casual reader of this blog knows, I feel quite passionately about the First Amendment and free speech rights. And, in all but the most extreme cases or circumstances, I will argue that speech rights should trump privacy rights. When would speech rights not trump privacy rights? For me, that would only occur when a clear, quantifiable harm resulted from the speech. But what is “clear, quantifiable harm”?  Reputation, for example, is not something one can easily quantify the loss of. When a company or a government agency loses or sells your personal health records without permission, however, that privacy violation gets a little more quantifiable. And in the case of someone stealing your personal information to engage in identity theft, the harm becomes still more quantifiable. But those cases often involve monetary damages, whereas something like defamation is much more difficult to quantify. However, when considering privacy-vs.-free speech trade-offs, I would first look to identify and quantify to concrete harm to an individual before allowing the state to curtain freedom of speech.

Solove acknowledges these privacy-speech trade-offs and cites the work of scholars like Eugene Volokh, Fred Cate, Virginia Postrel, and Solveig Singleton, who have all discussed these problems in their work. Volokh, for example, wrote an incredibly important 2000 law review article entitled, “Freedom of Speech, Information Privacy, and the Troubling Implications of a Right to Stop People from Speaking About You.” As he pointed out in that piece:

The difficulty is that the right to information privacy — the right to control other people’s communication of personally identifiable information about you — is a right to have the government stop people from speaking about you. And the First Amendment (which is already our basic code of “fair information practices”) generally bars the government from “control[ling the communication] of information,” either by direct regulation or through the authorization of private lawsuits.

Without reference to some higher set of first principles or theory of rights / justice, I believe it is very difficult to sort through thorny problems like these. We need to know how and when one right trumps another. A theory of rights that focuses on avoiding direct, tangible harm to others — but largely leaves individuals otherwise free to do what they wish — would generally place speech rights above many privacy “rights” (some of which perhaps should not quality be rights at all). Of course, this more libertarian construction of rights remains quite controversial in our modern society, and there are other theories of rights and justice that would minimize the importance of speech rights relative to privacy.

Importantly, there also needs to be some recognition of the qualitative difference between government threats to privacy versus private threats. The harm that can come from government violations of privacy are generally far more troubling (surveillance, taxation, fines, imprisonment, etc) than potential private harms. I don’t think Solove’s framework appreciates that distinction.

Regardless of which approach one adopts — reasoning from first principles, or working from the “bottom up” (a la Solove) — there will always be fair degree of “balancing” undertaken by legislatures and the courts when crafting privacy policies. Indeed, in many ways, I see Solove’s more “pragmatic” approach often getting us to the same point we would find ourselves in if we took a more philosophical, first principles-based approach. It’s just that under his approach, he would often give the nod to privacy concerns over other rights whereas others (like me) would first look to enhance other values, especially free speech.

In sum, I believe that if one attempts to divorce the exercise of “understanding privacy” from any theory of rights, inevitably, you end right back in the same “conceptual jungle” you were in before. In that sense, I regret to say that Solove’s approach in Understanding Privacy ultimately fails. There’s just no escaping a fight over first principles.

But make no doubt about it, Daniel Solove’s book — and his approach to classifying and dealing with privacy problems — will have a profound impact on all future privacy debates. In that sense, it is a vital text; a must read for all who follow, or engage in, privacy debates.

P.S. Prof. Solove contributed an article to this month’s big Scientific American special issue on “The Future of Privacy.” Many articles in that issue worth reading.

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”:

Of the titles I included in a mega-book review about Internet optimists and pessimists that I posted here a few months ago, I mentioned Lee Siegel’s new book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.  It is certainly the dourest of the recent books that have adopted a pessimistic view of the impact the Internet is having on our culture, society, and economy. Because Siegel’s book is one of the most important technology policy books of 2008, however, I decided to give it a closer look here.

Siegel’s book essentially picks up where Andrew Keen’s leaves off in Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture (2007).  I posted a two-part review of Keen’s book here last year [Part 1, Part 2], but here’s a quick taste of Keen’s take on things.  He argues “the moral fabric of our society is being unraveled by Web 2.0” and that “our cultural standards and moral values are not all that are at stake.  Gravest of all,” Keen continues, “the very traditional institutions that have helped to foster and create our news, our music, our literature, our television shows, and our movies are under assault as well.”

As I noted in my earlier “Net optimists vs. pessimists” essay, after reading Cult of the Amateur, I didn’t think anyone else could ever be quite as over-the-top and Chicken Little-ish as Keen. But after working my way through Siegel’s Against the Machine, I realized I was wrong. 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.

Keen and Siegel are both essentially channeling the ghost of the late Neil Postman, the one-time dean of the modern school of techno-pessimism. Postman’s 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, was the first major anti-Digital Age diatribe and it remains the reigning champion of anti-technology screeds. “Information has become a form of garbage,” Postman argued, “not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems.” If left unchecked, Postman argued, America’s new technopoly — “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology” — would destroy “the vital sources of our humanity” and lead to “a culture without a moral foundation” by undermining “certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.”

Although Lee Siegel doesn’t bother citing him, he owes much to Postman’s brand of social criticism. Indeed, in large part, Siegel is simply bringing Postman’s critique of the Information Age up to date. Like Postman and Keen, Siegel is concerned about the “destructive side” of the Internet and the Information Age, which they all feel is being overlooked. Specifically, the attack these authors mount on the Information Age and the Net can be boiled down to two major themes:

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 is an unambiguously negative development for our society and culture. Moreover, in large part, the entire Web 2.0 experience is largely just about commercial interests furthering their ends.

Let’s take a closer look what Siegel says about each.

Experts, Authority, and “Truth”

Like Postman and Keen, Siegel doesn’t mix words when it comes to his contempt for the disintermediating influences of modern information technology. He is particularly concerned about the loss of “truth” and “authority” in our new environment. “Culture needs authoritative institutions like a powerful newspaper; it needs them both to protect its critical, independent spirit and to make sure that culture’s voices heard in the louder din of more powerful economic and political entities.” (p. 140-1) By empowering the masses to have more of a voice, Siegel says, “unbiased, rational, intelligent, and comprehensive news… will become less and less available.” (p. 165) “[G]iving everyone a voice,” he argues, “can also be a way to keep the most creative, intelligent, and original voices from being heard.” (p. 5)

Like many other Net skeptics, Siegel views Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs, and almost all user-generated content with a combination of confusion or contempt. “[S]elf-expression is not the same thing as imagination” or art, he argues. (p. 52)  Instead, he regards the explosion of online expression as the “narcissistic” bloviation of the masses and argues it is destroying true culture and knowledge. “Under the influence of the Internet,” he says, “knowledge is withering away into information.” (p. 152) Our new age of information abundance is not worth celebrating, he says, because “information is powerlessness.” (p. 148).

One reason Siegel gets nostalgic about the age of scarcity is because elites like him — and others who were lucky enough to have access to mainstream media — had a more privileged place in the old media world.  As a social / cultural critic, he can’t be happy with all the competition he now faces in that field from the blogosphere and online media outlets.

But it’s difficult to sympathize with Siegel’s position that others should be excluded from having a voice now in an effort to preserve the old order. After all, for the past seven decades, public policy has largely been preoccupied with getting society out of the scarcity mess (even though public policy created much of that mess!) by ensuring that citizens had more choices and outlets. Now that we have more options, some people like Keen and Siegel aren’t happy about the fact that the hoi polloi have been empowered. But, even if some traditional institutions lose the dominant position they once held in society, plenty of “authoritative” and “professional” media options and outlets continue to exist. Our new Information Age simply empowers millions of other voices to join the conversation and offer alternative perspectives and input.

But Siegel also disputes what he regards as such romanticized notions of “online participation” and “personal democracy.” To him, everyone is just in it for the money. “Web 2.0 is the brainchild of businessmen,” and the “producer public” is really just a “totalized ‘consumerist’ society.”  But what about all those bloggers who (like me!) are in it for the love of the conversation and debate?  Well, says Siegel, we just don’t realize the harm we are doing by trying to have our say!  “[T]he bloggers are playing into the hands of political and financial forces that want nothing more than to see the critical, scrutinizing media disappear.” (p. 141) And as for those true believers and Net evangelists who believe that something truly exciting is happening with our new online conversation, according to Siegel, they are simply “in a mad rush to earn profits or push a fervent idealism.” (p. 25-6)

It’s difficult for me to imagine anything more insultingly stupid than those last two statements.  The insulting part about them is that Siegel is essentially telling us all to shut up!  We all need to put down our pens — or, rather, our keyboards — and understand that we are doing great harm to those journalists, institutions, or other enlightened few who are really providing the “critical, scrutinizing” function so essential for a healthy democracy and culture. It’s just blatantly elitist for Siegel to suggest that only a select few have any business sharing their views with the world, and he even acknowledges that several times in the book. But he wears that elitist tag like a badge of honor as he stares down his nose at the newly empowered masses, snorting in disgust at everything he sees.

And the stupid part about those statements above is that the vast majority of bloggers or online participants are absolutely not in it for the money, or even out to take down mainstream media. They just want to be heard. But, again, Siegel believes that what you all have to say is not worth hearing anyway.

The Supposed Perils of Personalization

Indeed, Siegel’s primary gripe with the Web 2.0 world is that while most of us appreciate the growing personalization of information and content as well as the increasingly participatory nature of the Internet, he sees that as an unmitigated evil.  “The Internet is the first social environment to serve the needs of the isolated, asocial individual.” (p. 6)  The “Daily Me” (personalized, instantaneously delivered content) that Nicholas Negroponte predicted and longed for in his prescient 1995 book Being Digital, is viewed by Siegel as nothing more that the creation of a “narcissistic culture” in which “exaggeration” and the “loudest, most outrageous, or most extreme voices sway the crowd his way; the cutest, most self-effacing, most ridiculous, or most transparently fraudulent of voices saw the crowd of voices that way.” (p. 79)  He goes so far as to refer to it as our “democracy’s fatal turn” in that, instead of “allowing individuals to create their own cultural and commercial choices,” Web 2.0 has instead created “a more potent form of homogenization.” (p. 67)

In this regard, Siegel is channeling another Net skeptic, the prolific Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School.  In his 2001 book Republic.com, Sunstein also referred to Negroponte’s “Daily Me” in contemptuous terms, saying that the hyper-customization of websites and online technologies was causing extreme social fragmentation, isolation, and alienation, and could lead to political extremism. “A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government,” he wrote. As I said in my review of his book in Regulation magazine that year, Sunstein was essentially saying that the Internet is breeding a dangerous new creature: Anti-Democratic Man. “Group polarization is unquestionably occurring on the Internet,” he proclaimed, and it is weakening what he called the “social glue” that binds society together and provides citizens with a common “group identity.” If that continues unabated, Sunstein argued, the potential result could be nothing short of the death of deliberative democracy and the breakdown of the American system of government.

Siegel continues this line of reasoning in Against the Machine but, like Sunstein, completely fails to offer anything more than a few random anecdotes in defense of their thesis that the Net is leading to close-mindedness, homogenization, and the death of deliberative democracy. Worse yet, they also both completely fail to look at the other side of the story, which is that the Internet and Web 2.0 may be having the exact opposite effect. I made that argument in my 2005 book, Media Myths: Making Sense of the Debate over Media Ownership (p. 39):

The reality is that citizens do face an overwhelming number of media choices today, and that probably does make it somewhat more difficult for them to have “shared experiences” involving any individual news or entertainment program. But that isn’t really such a lamentable development. Government need not take steps to make sure everyone watches or listens to the same programs each night so they can all talk about them around the watercooler at work the next day. It’s just as good that everyone can discuss something different that they saw or heard the night before. And the very fact there are so many distinct media options available to citizens is better for a healthy democracy than a limited range of media options. Again, regardless of who owns what, the fact remains that we have more sources of news, communications, and entertainment than ever before in this country. Still, some media critics wax nostalgic about a mythical time — a supposed “Golden Age” of newspapers, radio, or television — when the populace was more closely linked or unified in some grand sociological sense by common reporting or programming options. But that is a stretch. The days when William Randolph Hearst dominated media, or when only three TV networks brought us our news at a set time each night, could hardly be labeled the “Golden Age” of those respective mediums. If that’s the world media critics want us to return to, then this represents, as Jonathan Knee argues, “an argument for homogeneity hiding under the pretext of diversity.”

And, indeed, that’s exactly what Siegel is proposing in his book, as Keen also does in his. They want to roll back to clock and return us to the mythical “good ‘ol days” of media. Again, when were those days? I simply cannot fathom how anyone can claim that the age of media scarcity — with its limited outlets and opportunities — was truly better than the world we find ourselves in today. As I noted in the first part of my two-part review of Keen’s book, which was entitled “Why an Age of Abundance Really is Better than an Age of Scarcity”:

What Keen doesn’t seem willing to tolerate is that when everyone has a voice, a lot more silly things are going to be said and heard. Back in the days before we all had our own soapboxes (websites, blogs, social networks, YouTube posts, etc.) we all had opinions, but we had few ways to get those opinions out. Now that the Internet has become the great leveler and given everyone the ability to be a one-person newspaper or broadcaster to the world, the dream of a more fully empowered citizenry is slowly becoming a reality. The upside is that everyone gets an equal chance to be heard. But the downside is that everyone gets an equal chance to be heard! That is, with the good comes some bad. There are wonderful contributions to culture and human communications being made by average Joes and Janes across the globe because of the Web. But let’s face it, there’s a lot of crap out there too. Cutting through the cultural clutter can been a real challenge, and even with the best search tools in the world at your disposal, it can still be difficult to find that diamond in the rough. But aren’t we better off as a society because of the opportunities now at our disposal? Isn’t an age of media and cultural abundance — warts and all — still preferable to the age of scarcity which preceded it?

I believe it is. And as I concluded in my review of Keen’s book, which seems like an equally sensible way to conclude this review of Lee Siegel’s tedious screed:

I think we are definitely better off because of this seismic shift in our communications and media environment. The human conversation is more diverse than ever before, and we have been empowered to experience the full range of culture and human creativity (for better and for worse!)

Earlier this year, I mentioned an outstanding book that John Palfrey of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School co-edited entitled Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering.  It’s an excellent resource for anyone studying the methods governments are (unfortunately) using to stifle online expression across the globe.  It’s one of the most important technology policy books of the year.

Well, it looks like John Palfrey will have a second title on this year’s “Best Tech Books” list.  I’ve just finished his new book with his Berkman Center colleague Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, and it is definitely worthy of your attention. In my book review posted today on the City Journal’s website, I argue that “Palfrey and Gasser’s fine early history of this generation serves as a starting point for any conversation about how to mentor the children of the Web.”  It’s a comprehensive and very even-handed discussion about a variety of concerns or Internet pathologies, including: online safety, personal privacy, copyright piracy, offensive content, classroom learning, and much more.

My City Journal review is down below, but in coming weeks I will be posting some additional thoughts about some specific things in the book worthy of more attention (including a few things I disagreed with).  Overall, I’d say Born Digital is a close runner-up in the race for “Tech Book of the Year,” closely trailing Jonathan Zittrain’s Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (which I have reviewed multiple times) and Nick Carr’s The Big Switch.  But I found far more to agree with in Born Digital than I did in those two books.  Highly recommended.

Understanding Our Digital Kids A new book offers a guide for mentoring the children of the Web.

a book review by Adam D. Thierer of

Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser (Basic Books, 288 pp., $25.95)

City Journal 10 October 2008

You can’t blame parents today if they think that their children have been assimilated into the Borg or are living in the Matrix. Members of the “always on, always connected” generation have surrounded themselves with digital devices and networks and colonized cyberspace in the process. Meanwhile, back in “meatspace,” many Analog Era parents scratch their heads, trying to make sense of these momentous changes and what they mean for their kids and society.

Answers are available in Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, both of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Each chapter in the book addresses a different parental concern or Internet pathology: online safety, personal privacy, copyright piracy, offensive content, classroom learning, and more. Palfrey and Gasser aim “to separate what we need to worry about from what’s not so scary, (and) what we ought to resist from what we ought to embrace.”

The authors offer a balanced treatment of these issues—almost to a fault, in that they occasionally fail to develop fully their own positions. Of course, as they repeatedly—and correctly—note, often these thorny questions have no easy answers. “The hard problem,” they point out, “is how to balance caution with encouragement: How do we take effective steps to protect our children, as well as the interests of others, while allowing those same kids enough room to figure things out on their own?”

If there is a single solution, they argue, it’s education. The authors want parents, educators, and lawmakers to do more to engage the digital generation in a dialogue, instead of leaving it to fend for itself. “The traditional values and common sense that have served us well in the past will be relevant in this new world, too,” they maintain. But Palfrey and Gasser don’t rule out additional tools and methods, including technical controls, industry self-regulation, social norms, and even government action.

Consider online privacy concerns. “Never before has so much information about average citizens been so easily accessible to so many,” they note—and particularly when it comes to our kids. Despite the growing amount of online information about our kids (“digital dossiers”) and other potential threats to privacy, Palfrey and Gasser counsel prudence: “The answer . . . is not to avoid the networked publics in which so many people—especially Digital Natives—are leading their lives. Instead, we need to develop more nuanced ways to navigate these new publics.” Though “there is no single, simple answer,” they argue that “parents, peers, teachers, and mentors [all] have a role to play” to encourage youngsters to protect their information and identities. Most importantly, the digital natives must learn to use common sense when sharing information online.

The authors advocate the same reasoned approach when it comes to online child safety. The safety risks have often been greatly overstated—or at least largely misunderstood—by parents and policymakers. “The data do not suggest that the world is a more dangerous place for young people” because of the Internet, the authors contend. Most of the problems we see online today—cyber-bullying, for example—are really just old problems playing out on new platforms. “Involved parenting” and “open and honest conversations” are the most sensible responses, but intervention strategies by others—including kids’ peers—may be another part of the solution. Parental empowerment tools and industry self-regulation can help, too.

Palfrey and Gasser are open to government playing a role in some cases. They believe “governments should restrict the production and dissemination of certain types of violent content in combination with instituting mandatory, government-based ratings of these materials.” They also call for greater liability for online service providers and social networking sites to encourage them to crack down on potential dangers to children. Given their vagueness, however, both proposals would likely smash into serious First Amendment roadblocks that the authors fail to explore fully.

Palfrey and Gasser view government action less favorably when it comes to combating copyright piracy. “Creativity is the upside of this brave new world of digital media,” they suggest, but “the downside is law-breaking. The vast majority of Digital Natives are currently breaking copyright laws on a regular basis.” But what should we do about piracy? Palfrey and Gasser sidestep some of the underlying ethical issues and bluntly declare that “the goal should be for copyright holders, technologists, and their customers to exchange royalty checks with one another instead of legal complaints.” Yes, but what happens when many refuse to pay even one penny for copyrighted content, as often happens today? Education can encourage youngsters to obey the law, but difficult questions remain about how to deal with those who won’t play by the rules.

In chapters debating the Internet’s impact on learning and culture, the authors worry about shortening attention spans and the rise of a “cut-and-paste culture,” due to the immediate gratification provided by Google searches, Wikipedia, blogs, and instant messaging. On the other hand, they rightly underscore how “Digital Natives are quite sophisticated in the ways that they gather information” and are learning “sophisticated information-gathering and information-processing skills,” while also creating content and sharing information with peers in ways unimaginable just a generation ago.

It will be fascinating to see what impact these changes have on digital natives as they get older and become parents themselves. Regardless, Palfrey and Gasser’s fine early history of this generation serves as a starting point for any conversation about how to mentor the children of the Web.

Update Feb. 2009: I hosted a TLF podcast featuring Prof. Palfrey and discussed this book with him. Listen here.

[Note: You might want to first read my review of Jonathan Zittrain’s book to give this essay some context.]

Jonathan Zittrain must have been smiling as he read Leander Kahney’s excellent Wired cover story this month, “How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong.” In a sense, the article vindicates Zittrain’s thesis in The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It. Again, in his provocative book, Zittrain argues that, for a variety of reasons, the glorious days of the generative, open Internet and general-purpose PCs are supposedly giving way to closed networks and a world of what he contemptuously calls “sterile, tethered devices.” And Apple products such as the iPhone, the iPod, and iTunes serve as prime examples of the troubling world that await us. And Kahney’s article confirms that Apple is every bit as closed and insular as Zittrain suggests. Kahney nicely contrasts Apple with Google, a company that “embraces openness,” trusts “the wisdom of crowds,” and has its famous “Don’t be evil” philosophy:

It’s ironic, then, that one of the Valley’s most successful companies ignored all of these tenets. Google and Apple may have a friendly relationship — Google CEO Eric Schmidt sits on Apple’s board, after all — but by Google’s definition, Apple is irredeemably evil, behaving more like an old-fashioned industrial titan than a different-thinking business of the future. Apple operates with a level of secrecy that makes Thomas Pynchon look like Paris Hilton. It locks consumers into a proprietary ecosystem. And as for treating employees like gods? Yeah, Apple doesn’t do that either.

On the other hand, Kahney’s article serves as vindication of my response to Zittrain’s book since the article illustrates how, despite breaking all the typical rules of Silicon Valley, the company is more successful than ever and has legions of happy customers. Again, in my review of his book, I argued that there is no reason that we can’t have the best of both worlds. Much of the time, “open” systems produce the best results. Other times, more closed, proprietary models give rise to great products. Today’s digital marketplace is full of wonderful devices and services of both flavors. Apple’s success proves that point, as Kahney’s Wired article shows:

by deliberately flouting the Google mantra, Apple has thrived. When Jobs retook the helm in 1997, the company was struggling to survive. Today it has a market cap of $105 billion, placing it ahead of Dell and behind Intel. Its iPod commands 70 percent of the MP3 player market. Four billion songs have been purchased from iTunes. The iPhone is reshaping the entire wireless industry. Even the underdog Mac operating system has begun to nibble into Windows’ once-unassailable dominance; last year, its share of the US market topped 6 percent, more than double its portion in 2003. It’s hard to see how any of this would have happened had Jobs hewed to the standard touchy-feely philosophies of Silicon Valley. Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. It’s hard to see the Mac OS and the iPhone coming out of the same design-by-committee process that produced Microsoft Vista or Dell’s Pocket DJ music player. Likewise, had Apple opened its iTunes-iPod juggernaut to outside developers, the company would have risked turning its uniquely integrated service into a hodgepodge of independent applications — kind of like the rest of the Internet, come to think of it.

Importantly, it’s not just that Apple has thrived, it’s that consumers have loved their products to the point that there is a sort of “cult of Apple” out there. I should make clear that I am no Apple fanboy. As my TLF colleagues Tim Lee and Jerry Brito can attest, I am constantly making fun of them for their love of Apple products. I am willing to deal with the warts associated with the PC environment because I love the more open-ended nature of it. That being said, there are times when I have to swallow my pride and admit to Tim and Jerry that, in many ways, their Apple products are superior to my PC and Windows-based toys. It’s impossible to spend a few minutes with the iPhone or the latest iPods and Macs and not fall in love with those devices and their interfaces. They are truly spectacular. Thus, as Kahney’s article makes clear, whether you love him or hate him, you have to admit that Jobs is on to something:

No other company has proven as adept at giving customers what they want before they know they want it. Undoubtedly, this is due to Jobs’ unique creative vision. But it’s also a function of his management practices. By exerting unrelenting control over his employees, his image, and even his customers, Jobs exerts unrelenting control over his products and how they’re used. And in a consumer-focused tech industry, the products are what matter.

Indeed they are. And even though Zittrain labels Apple’s products “sterile and tethered,” there is no doubt that the company’s approach has produced some wonderful results. Personally, they are not for me since I prefer all those “general purpose” devices that Zittrain lionizes. But, again, we can have both. Let Steve Jobs be a control freak and keep those walls around Apple’s digital garden high and tight if he wants. There are plenty of other wide open gardens for the rest of us to play in.

In a previous essay, I critiqued Andrew Keen’s thesis that our culture was better off in the age of scarcity than it is in today’s world of media and cultural abundance. In this essay, I want to make a few comments about his latest anti-Web 2.0 rant regarding how, in addition to destroying art and culture, the age of abundance and “amateur” content creation is going to result in the death of advertising.

In an AdWeek guest editorial this week, Keen argues that:

Web 2.0 is, in truth, the very worst piece of news for the advertising industry since the birth of mass media. In the short term, the Web 2.0 hysteria marks the end of the golden age of advertising; in the long term, it might even mark the end of advertising itself.

[…]

[F]or the advertiser, media content is indeed losing its value, a value historically derived from its scarcity. This devaluation of media isn’t hard to quantify: It can be measured everywhere, in falling CPM and the failure of social networks to develop viable business models. No new technology—neither the false dawn of mobile, nor the holy grail of personalized, targeted advertising—is going to save the advertising business now. No, the truth is that advertising can only be saved if we can re-create media scarcity. That means less user-generated content and more professionally created information and entertainment, less technology and more creativity. The advertising community desperately needs more gatekeepers, more professional creative authorities, more so-called media “elites” who will curate, filter and organize content. That’s the way to re-establish the value of the message. It’s the one commercial antidote to Web 2.0’s radically destructive cultural democracy.

Oh my, where to begin…

Well, Keen is right about one thing (and only one thing) here: The end of the age of scarcity is certainly shaking up the advertising world. Bob Garfield of Ad Age wrote an interesting set of articles on this issue recently under the title “Chaos Scenario.” (Part 1 and Part 2.) When Bob called me for a comment for Part 2 of that series, here’s what I told him:

“It’s a very different kind of world. The problem is, the expectations are there to capture that mass audience that long ago disappeared. We are witnessing the gradual death of the business models that thrived in that age of scarcity.”

So, in a sense, I agree with Keen that the death of scarcity will challenge traditional advertising arrangements and media business models. Unlike Keen, however, I am not Chicken Little-ish in my outlook of things and I certainly do not believe that the end of scarcity “might even mark the end of advertising itself.” Just because media and advertising are changing doesn’t mean they are dying. They are just evolving. As John Gartner of the Marketing Shift blog notes, “Advertising won’t die. But it will never be the same.”

Indeed, there are some incredibly innovative advertising strategies being developed today in response to the changing nature of media development, distribution, and consumption. For example, I knew the world had changed in a major way when a friend sent me the link to the latest Geico ad that had been posted on YouTube and I spent the next twenty minutes watching a whole batch of new and old Geico ads. [I don’t know who developed those ads, but they deserve a raise! Brilliant stuff.] But I’ve also found myself watching ads in other strange places lately. The Microsoft XBox 360 Marketplace, for example, has many ads and promo clips that I find myself viewing regularly. And yes, I’ve even clicked on a few ads I’ve found on my mobile phone.

But Keen doesn’t seem willing to acknowledge that such innovative changes are occurring or that they might be a perfectly healthy evolution of the marketplace. Instead, he makes the preposterous argument that “advertising can only be saved if we can re-create media scarcity” and that “The advertising community desperately needs more gatekeepers, more professional creative authorities, more so-called media “elites” who will curate, filter and organize content. That’s the way to re-establish the value of the message. It’s the one commercial antidote to Web 2.0’s radically destructive cultural democracy.”

There are times when I am reading Keen’s book and articles like this and I find myself wondering: Does he really believe this stuff, or is he just a savvy idea marketer who understands that the best way to sell books its to be more over-the-top than the last guy?

Sadly, Keen seems to be a true believer in the Coming Cultural End Times and the collapse of all things once sacred (at least that which he holds sacred). As I pointed out in my previous essay about Keen, his view of the world is unapologetically techno-conservative and culturally elitist. Indeed, he is the living embodiment of what Virgina Postrel calls “the stasis mentality.”

Keen’s work really got me thinking about Virginia Postrel’s wonderful book The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, which is now almost ten years old. In her book, Postrel paints a brilliant picture of how many debates about technology and progress will unfold in the future. She contrasts stasis thinking with dynamism, and her work is worth quoting extensively here because it perfectly unlocks the mystery behind Keen’s thinking:

How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis—a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism—a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition? Do we value stability and control, or evolution and learning? Do we declare with Appelo that “we’re scared of the future” and join Adams in decrying technology as “a killing thing”? Or do we see technology as an expression of human creativity and the future as inviting? Do we think that progress requires a central blueprint, or do we see it as a decentralized, evolutionary process? Do we consider mistakes permanent disasters, or the correctable by-products of experimentation? Do we crave predictability, or relish surprise? These two poles, stasis and dynamism, increasingly define our political, intellectual, and cultural landscape. The central question of our time is what to do about the future. And that question creates a deep divide.

Indeed it does, and that is the divide that now exists between Andrew Keen and most of the rest of us who have fully embraced (or at least learned to cope with) the sweeping changes brought about by the rise of the Internet, user-generated content, and “amateur” culture in general. No doubt, as Keen suggests, disintermediation has been a destabilizing force. The death of scarcity and the rise of abundance have shaken up the old order. But it is not all for the worse. While the creative destruction of the capitalist marketplace is always difficult, in the long run, it typically brings about better business models and modes of thinking.

But Keen wants to wind back the clock and “re-create scarcity” to save traditional business models. How would that even work? He never seems to get around to providing clear answers to that question, and for good reason: It would likely be incredibly intrusive and destructive. Virginia Postrel perfectly identified the logical implications of the stasis mentality that Keen represents when she wrote:

Stasist social criticism… brings up the specifics of life only to sneer at or bash them. Critics assume that readers will share their attitudes and will see contemporary life as a problem demanding immediate action by the powerful and wise. This relentlessly hostile view of how we live, and how we may come to live, is distorted and dangerous. It overvalues the tastes of an articulate elite, compares the real world of trade-offs to fantasies of utopia, omits important details and connections, and confuses temporary growing pains with permanent catastrophes. It demoralizes and devalues the creative minds on whom our future depends. And it encourages the coercive use of political power to wipe out choice, forbid experimentation, short-circuit feedback, and trammel progress.

And therein lies the ultimate danger of the stasis mindset that Keen embodies: It isn’t just silly, it’s downright destructive and a significant threat to our liberties.

Andrew Keen is the web’s favorite whipping boy these days, and in some ways he has it coming. His latest book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, is an anti-all-things-Web 2.0 screed. Keen lambastes “Internet democracy” (specifically the Wiki model of collaborative creation) and decries the rising tide of user-generated everything. When you get right down to it, Keen’s view of the world is unapologetically techno-conservative and culturally elitist. He’s angry that there are fewer intermediaries minding the culture. As a result, he argues, “professional” media (by which he means to say “better” media) is giving way to “amateur” media (which he regards as synonymous with, well… crap).

Unsurprisingly, the blogosphere has fought back with a vengeance and called Keen every nasty name in the book. But the best and most level-headed critique of Keen’s work is still this old essay by the ever-insightful Clay Shirky. Clay’s response rightly concedes that Keen in correct in pointing out that some important things have been lost with the rise of the Internet. There certainly are fewer intermediaries filtering our culture for us, and that will sound like a great thing to many of us. But it’s important to realize that some of those mediating forces serve a valuable role. Editors, for example, play an important, but often overlooked, role in terms of improving the quality of great deal of media content of all varieties (journalism, books, movies, music, etc). The blogosphere is becoming an editor-free zone, and at times it really shows. There are times when some particularly insulting things are said or silly mistakes are made that probably would have been corrected had a good editor been responsible for overseeing the final product.

On the other hand, the unfiltered Web 2.0 experience is wonderfully refreshing. Sometimes it’s nice to see what the uninhibited exchange of ideas results in. Regardless, the bottom line is that the editing profession (broadly defined) is changing because of the Internet. That is undeniable. And other mediating forces or institutions are seeing their power or relative importance in the cultural creation process diminished as the Internet-spawned disintermediation continues unabated.

Will that create short term problems? Undeniably. But Keen thinks these developments are contributing to a sort of cultural catastrophe and that we are collectively much worse off because of this disintermediation and empowerment of the “amateur.” This goes much too far in my opinion.

What Keen doesn’t seem willing to tolerate is that when everyone has a voice, a lot more silly things are going to be said and heard. Back in the days before we all had our own soapboxes (websites, blogs, social networks, YouTube posts, etc.) we all had opinions, but we had few ways to get those opinions out. Now that the Internet has become the great leveler and given everyone the ability to be a one-person newspaper or broadcaster to the world, the dream of a more fully empowered citizenry is slowly becoming a reality. The upside is that everyone gets an equal chance to be heard. But the downside is that everyone gets an equal chance to be heard! That is, with the good comes some bad. There are wonderful contributions to culture and human communications being made by average Joes and Janes across the globe because of the Web. But let’s face it, there’s a lot of crap out there too. Cutting through the cultural clutter can been a real challenge, and even with the best search tools in the world at your disposal, it can still be difficult to find that diamond in the rough.

But aren’t we better off as a society because of the opportunities now at our disposal? Isn’t an age of media and cultural abundance–warts and all–still preferable to the age of scarcity which preceded it? Think about the big picture. As I pointed out in my recent City Journal essay on “The Media Cornucopia”:

Throughout most of history, humans lived in a state of extreme information poverty. News traveled slowly, field to field, village to village. Even with the printing press’s advent, information spread at a snail’s pace. Few knew how to find printed materials, assuming that they even knew how to read. Today, by contrast, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that once would have been the stuff of science-fiction novels. We can increasingly obtain and consume whatever media we want, wherever and whenever we want: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the bewildering variety of material available on the Internet.

I think we are definitely better off because of this seismic shift in our communications and media environment. The human conversation is more diverse than ever before, and we have been empowered to experience the full range of culture and human creativity (for better and for worse!)

Moreover, the old mediating institutions aren’t dead yet. There are still plenty of large-scale media operations and content creators / editors that are alive and well producing a wide variety of culture. It’s just that they now face a lot more competition than ever before, and from sources of a very different nature (small-scale, independent, and wonderfully “amateur-ish.”)

Finally, let’s not forget that the age of scarcity and mediated culture that Keen seems to put on pedestal created a lot of crap too! Sure, the Internet era gave us Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and plenty of pathetic, time-wasting YouTube videos. But the age of media “professionalism” gave us “Three’s Company,” the Bay City Rollers, and “Killer Klowns from Outer Space.” Each era produced its fair share of quality and crap. There’s just more of both these days and that’s what Keen doesn’t seem willing to accept. But I’ll take that deal any day over the limited choices of the bygone scarcity era he seems eager to reestablish.

[Note: Part 2 of this essay can be found here.]