I’m currently finishing up my next book. It addresses various strands of “Internet pessimism” and attempts to explain why all the gloom and doom theories we hear about the Internet’s impact on modern culture and economy are not generally warranted.  A key theme of my book is that most Internet pessimists overlook the importance of human adaptability in the face of technological change.  The amazing thing about humans is that we adapt so much better than other creatures. We learn how to use the new tools given to us and make them part of our lives and culture. The worst situations often bring out the most creative, innovative solutions. Media critic Jack Shafer has noted that “the techno-apocalypse never comes” because “cultures tend to assimilate and normalize new technology in ways the fretful never anticipate.”

In a cultural sense, humans have again and again adapted to technological change despite the radical disruptions to their lives, mores, manners, and methods of learning. As Aleks Krotoski recently points out in her new Guardian essay, “How the Internet Has Changed Our Concept of What Home Is”:

We are adaptable creatures and will work within the confines of our existing homes to integrate this new creature into our lives. We have already made the web part of our domestic ecologies and we continually imbue it with a sense of place. Perhaps its malleability is why it has been so successful and why we are willing to bring this interruptive technology into our most intimate worlds.

Human adaption also works magic in an economic sense. Entrepreneurs are constantly developing disruptive technologies that transform markets and expand opportunities. Innovators respond to incentives, including short-term spells of excessive “market power.” [More on that in my latest Forbes column, “No One Owns a Techno Crystal Ball.”]

Techno-pessimism and technopanics are born from irrational fears and a failure to appreciate that humans have, many times before, faced and conquered the technological unknown. Simply put, pessimists have very little faith in human ingenuity and resiliency.

I’m always entertained by the talk among the Twitterati — especially those who seem to permanently reside in the #NetNeutrality and #FCC hashtags — about how the Internet’s “openness” is at risk, and that steps must be taken to preserve it.  Regulatory regimes are often birthed by myths, and this one is no different.  Contrary to what the regulation-happy worry-warts suggest, the Internet has never been more “open” than it is today. After all, as Geert Lovink reminded us in his 2008 critique of Jonathan Zittrain’s thinking about the decline of online openness:

[In] [t]he first decades[,] the Internet was a closed world, only accessible to (Western) academics and the U.S. military. In order to access the Internet one had to be an academic computer scientist or a physicist. Until the early nineties it was not possible for ordinary citizens, artists, business[es] or activists, in the USA or elsewhere, to obtain an email address and make use of the rudimentary UNIX-based applications. … It was a network of networks—but still a closed one.

And even though it will probably make the folks at Free Press and Public Knowledge have an aneurysm, it’s abundantly clear what shook-up this sleepy, closed model: commercialization.  That’s right, those evil folks who had the audacity to want to make a dollar online were the ones who brought us the “open” Internet we know and love today! 

Ironically, it was only because the so-called “walled garden” providers of that era — AOL and CompuServe, for example — came along that many average folk were even able to experience and enjoy this strange new world called the Internet. “The fact that millions of Americans for the first time experienced the Internet through services like AOL (and continue to do so) is a reality that Zittrain simply overlooks,” notes Lovink.

It’s true, of course, that services like AOL and CompuServe held our hands to some extent and gave many new Netizens a guided tour of cyberspace. Thus, many would push back against the suggestion that those companies actually helped promote “openness.”  Regardless, that’s all ancient history now because the walls around those particular gardens came crashing down after users became more comfortable navigating the Internet on their own. As a result, CompuServe faded from the scene and AOL lost all 25 million of its $20/month-paying subscribers as they were overtaken by the search and social networking paradigms they never saw coming.

But commercialization promoted openness in a more profound way with the rise of online commerce and the need to expand markets for goods and services, attract audiences, and grow advertising budgets. “Closed” business models just haven’t had much luck online.  Businesses of all flavors aren’t going to make more money online by “blocking” or foreclosing opportunities.

So, getting back to Net neutrality.. should we trust the claims of those who say the FCC will give us a more “open” Internet through a top-down regulatory regime?  I’ll let the brilliant Jack Shafer of Slate answer that question:

So the basic question here is who will set the Internet’s priorities, the government or the providers. That I have an innate distrust for government should surprise no regular readers. Traditionally, the state censors and marginalizes voices while private businesses tend to remain tolerant. Even at the height of the rebellions of the 1960s and early 1970s, political radicals and social radicals could always find printers to publish their most sordid, seditious, and sensational material. But that’s only because there was no FCC control over who could own and operate a printing press, no control over what prices they could charge for their services, and no state commandment that they had to accept any print job. The only times the FCC has spurred debate and commentary have been when it has stepped out of the way.

The FCC’s track record of encouraging innovation or “openness” has just not been a pretty one. Regulatory capture is one culprit here, obviously, but even when the agency’s heart is in the right spot, bureaucratic bungling usually derails the best of intentions with mounds of red tape and years of legal wrangling.

Again, the good news is that almost all signs point in the direction of things growing even more open over time — so long, that is, as the FCC doesn’t screw things up.

[ p.s. I will have much more to say about my views on “openness” and Net optimism in a chapter for Berin Szoka’s terrific upcoming book, The Next Digital Decade.  I built my chapter around this Concurring Opinions debate I had with Jonathan Zittrain earlier this year.]

Like James Gattuso, I have a lot of questions about the Federal Trade Commission’s new “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising,” especially as they apply to bloggers. (And over at Silicon Angle, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins has been doing a great job keeping tabs on the many questions and hypothetical situations that others have been posing about the new rules). But the one thing I just can’t wrap my head around is how the FTC plans to enforce these rules against those speakers or media outlets who have print publications which are fully protected by the First Amendment.  So, I was pleased to see my favorite press critic Jack Shafer of Salon, ask the same question in his latest column on “The FTC’s Mad Power Grab”:

Because of a pesky thing called the First Amendment, the guidelines don’t apply to news organizations, which receive thousands of free books, CDs, and DVDs each day from media companies hoping for reviews. But if the guidelines don’t apply to established media like the New York Review of Books, which also happens to publish reviews on the Web, why should they apply to Joe Blow’s blog? Regulating bloggers via the FTC while exempting establishment reporters looks like a back-door means of licensing journalists and policing speech.

Exactly.  Is the FTC just going to ignore such speakers or media organizations but enforce against everyone else?  Isn’t that just a bit silly and radically unfair?  Moreover, might such a policy end up incentivizing some folks to create token print publications to get around such the regulations?  I doubt it, but you never know.

Regardless, as Shafer notes, the rules are so hopelessly open-ended and arbitrary that they are bound to pose problems for whomever they are enforced against:

The guidelines have to be read to be believed. They are written so broadly that if you blog about a good and service in such a way that the FTC construes as an endorsement, the commission has a predicate to investigate. The only way stay on the FTC’s good side is with a “clearly and conspicuously” posted disclosure of the “sponsors” who provided you with the good or service (or money) to blog about the good or service. As I read the guidelines, the FTC could investigate you if you did disclose but it was not satisfied with the disclosure.

I really do wonder if the FTC realized what they’ve gotten themselves into here.  The enforcement nightmare associated with all this cannot be underestimated.

Interesting article here (“Not All Information Wants to Be Free“) by Jack Shafer of Slate. He notes that many people focus on why “pay wall” business models don’t work online, but few people discuss those models that do (i.e., the ones that successfully get customers to pay for access to content behind the wall).  Shafer walks through some of the ones that have worked and concludes:

Not all successful paid sites are alike, but they all share at least one of these attributes: 1) They are so amazing as to be irreplaceable. 2) They are beautifully designed and executed and extremely easy to use. 3) They are stupendously authoritative.

Succinctly stated, the pay-per-view sites are damn unique, offering content or a service that consumers are unlikely to find elsewhere. Of course, that’s a pretty small universe of sites, and unless you content is extraordinarily unique and time-sensitive, I have a hard time believing that a pay wall model will work for most sites.

Importantly, however, Shafer notes that the Internet is still young and business models still have a lot of evolving to do. He concludes his piece by comparing where the Net stands today relative to where broadcast television stood when it was still in its infancy:

If the commercial Internet didn’t get going until 1995, then we’re only 13 or 14 years into the Web era. When television was 13 or 14, practically no pay-TV operations existed outside of a relatively few cable television operations. Starting the 1970s and then in the 1980s, paid TV in the form of HBO and other premium stations started to take root. Radio, born in the early 1920s, didn’t arrive in a paid form until just early in this century. Very few online newspapers or magazines are sufficiently useful to demand a paying premium. But for those who hold dear the notion that information on the Web will forever want to be free, it’s early yet. Keep your eyes peeled for publications whose Web sites are sprouting nonbrowser apps, refining their content, experimenting with new reading devices, bulking up their databases, and above all, publications that are listening to the man from Google who this week wrote, “[O]nline journalism is still in its relative infancy. … The experience of consuming news on the web today fails to take full advantage of the power of technology”

Jack Shafer, editor at large of Slate, is my favorite media pundit. Everything he does is worth reading, and his column this week is no different. It’s entitled “The Digital Slay-Ride: What’s killing newspapers is the same thing that killed the slide rule,” and in it he notes how “Hardly a day goes by, it seems, without some laid-off or bought-out journalist writing a letter of condolence to himself and his profession.” “The underlying cause of their grief,” Shafer argues, “can be traced to the same force that has destroyed other professions and industries: digital technology.” He recalls how people scoffed back in 1993 when Wired founder Louis Rossetto’s said that the “digital revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon” and destroying the old order. But no one is laughing anymore.  As I noted in my Media Metrics report, digital disruption and disintermediation has completely upended the media marketplace, as well as countless others. Toward that end, Shafer actually starts a list of professions or technologies that have been “typhooned” by the digital revolution. It’s a pretty amazing (and entertaining) list for those of us old enough to remember when all these things were dominate in our society and economy. Can you think of others?

• Bank tellers • Typewriters • Typesetting • Carburetors • Vacuum tubes • Slide rules • Disc jockeys • Stockbrokers • Telephone operators • Yellow pages • Repair guys • Bookbinders • Pimps (displaced by the cell phone and the Web) • Cassette and reel-to-reel recorders • VCRs • Turntables • Video stores • Record stores • Bookstores • Recording industry • Courier/messenger services • Travel agencies • Print and cinematic porn • Porn actors • Stenographers • Wired telcos • Drummers • Toll collectors (slayed by the E-ZPass) • Book publishing (especially reference works) • Conventional-watch makers • “Browse” shopping • U.S. Postal Service • Printing-press makers • Film cameras • Kodak (and other film-stock makers)