2013 is shaping up to be another big year for Internet and information technology policy books. Here’s a list of what’s coming out or already on the market.  As faithful readers know, I put together end-of-year lists of important info-tech policy books, and here are the lists for 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and the most recent one for 2012. And here’s my compendium of all the major tech policy books from the 2000s. So I’ll do my best to get through all these books and whatever else follows throughout the year. Consider this my public service to the Internet policy community: I read nerdy Internet policy books so that you don’t have to!

Let me know what else I may have missed and I will add it to the list.

• Ian Brown & Christopher T. Marsden – Regulating Code: Good Governance and Better Regulation in the Information Age
• Robert W. McChesney – Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
• Jaron Lanier – Who Owns the Future?
• Marvin Ammori – On Internet Freedom
• Abraham H. Foxman and Christopher Wolf – Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet
• Giovanni Ziccardi –  Resistance, Liberation Technology and Human Rights in the Digital Age
• John O. McGinnis – Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology
• Scott Shackelford – Managing Cyber Attacks in International Law, Business and Relations: In Search of Cyber Peace
• Viktor Mayer-Schonberger & Kenneth Cukier – Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
• Evgeny Morozov – To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
• Ronald Deibert – Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace
• Eric Schmidt & Jared Cohen – The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business
• Dorothea Kleine – Technologies Of Choice? ICTs, Development, and the Capabilities Approach
• Nicco Mele – The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
• Thomas Rid – Cyber War Will Not Take Place
• Ethan Zuckerman – Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection
• Nate Anderson – The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed
• Paul Rosenzweig – Cyber Warfare: How Conflicts in Cyberspace Are Challenging America and Changing the World
• Alice E. Marwick – Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age
• Gautam Shroff – The Intelligent Web: Search, Smart Algorithms, and Big Data
• Anupam Chander – The Electronic Silk Road: How the Web Binds the World Together in Commerce
• Laura DeNardis – The Global War for Internet Governance  (likely 2014 launch)

My thanks to both Maria H. Andersen and Michael Sacasas for their thoughtful responses to my recent Forbes essay on “10 Things Our Kids Will Never Worry About Thanks to the Information Revolution.” They both go point by point through my Top 10 list and offer an alternative way of looking at each of the trends I identify. What their responses share in common is a general unease with the hyper-optimism of my Forbes piece. That’s understandable. Typically in my work on technological “optimism” and “pessimism” — and yes, I admit those labels are overly simplistic — I always try to strike a sensible balance between pollyannism and hyper-pessimism as it pertains to the impact of technological change on our culture and economy. I have called this middle ground position “pragmatic optimism.” In my Forbes essay, however, I was in full-blown pollyanna mode. That doesn’t mean I don’t generally feel very positive about the changes I itemized in that essay, rather, I just didn’t have the space in a 1,000-word column to identify the tradeoffs inherent in each trend. Thus, Andersen and Sacasas are rightfully pushing back against my lack of balance.

But there is a problem with their slightly pessimistic pushback, too. To better explain my own position and respond to Andersen and Sacasas, let me return to the story we hear again and again in discussion about technological change: the well-known allegorical tale from Plato’s Phaedrus about the dangers of the written word. In the tale, the god Theuth comes to King Thamus and boasts of how Theuth’s invention of writing would improve the wisdom and memory of the masses relative to the oral tradition of learning.  King Thamus shot back, “the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it.”  King Thamus then passed judgment himself about the impact of writing on society, saying he feared 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.”

After recounting Plato’s allegory in my essay, “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society,” I noted how this same tension has played out in every subsequent debate about the impact of a new technology on culture, values, morals, language, learning, and so on. It is a never-ending cycle. Now, here’s the interesting thing about that allegory that you will be surprised to hear an optimist like me admit: King Thamus was right! Well, at least partially right. There is little doubt that the invention of writing largely displaced the tradition of oral learning and instruction. Let’s face it, once people knew they could write something down or go back and read a passage from an important text, what was the use in memorizing it? Thus, there was a clear cost associated with the advent of writing and printing: A diminished interest in committing lessons or texts to memory. More profoundly, one might argue this also diminished our cognitive capabilities by requiring less of a mental workout for our brains. Thus, had Nick Carr been around to document the Theuth-Thamus debate, he might have penned a book entitled, “Is Writing Making Us Stupid?” (I’m assuming everyone is aware of Nick’s recent article asking “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and his subsequent book, The Shallows, which discussed “what the Internet is doing to our brains.”) Of course, it would have been a bit ironic for Nick to write it all down, so perhaps he would have just memorized it all and verbally passed his analysis along to descendants and followers!

Anyway, here’s what I am getting at by returning to Plato’s allegory: Technological change forces tradeoffs upon us. It forces sacrifices. There are definitely losses. But, in each case, we must ask two essential questions:

(1) Don’t the benefits of technological change generally outweigh the costs? I think they generally do, and that’s why I tend to side with the optimists more often than not. Sure, we can find plenty of reasons to be nostalgic about the decline of letter-writing, the disappearance of expensive encyclopedias, the end of typing classes, the elimination of phone booths on the corner, the loss of community video stores or record stores, or any of the other things I identified in my Forbes essay. But we should consider the many ways in which those changes have generally benefited society and opened the door to new innovations, new ways of learning and communicating, and new forms of culture and expression.

(2) Even if we are skeptical about the benefits of technological change, what are we going to do about it? Are we going to take steps to slow down technological change? What sort of steps are we talking about? Who makes that call or determines those responses? These are difficult but essential questions. Too many social critics get a free pass when it comes to answering them. This is what always drives me batty when reading the work of Net pessimists like Neil Postman, Lee Siegel, Andrew Keen, Jaron Lanier, etc. These guys excel at the art of the teardown. They can lambast the agents and elements of technological change with immense rhetorical power. At times, even I find their case convincing.  But these critics are horrible when it comes to proposing alternatives or constructive solutions. Often they have none. I believe it is the duty of a good social critic to offer constructive solutions to the problems they identify. One reason they probably don’t offer many is because they are simply afraid to admit that, if they could play God for a day, they probably would roll back the clock and slow or stop many forms of technological change.

The more constructive approach to these challenges comes back to education and empowerment. If we can be mature enough to (a) admit that pessimistic social critics have some valid concerns but that (b) the optimists are right about the benefits typically outweighing the costs, then the logical response is to take steps to educate people about technological change and empower them to deal with it. Other times, however, people simply have to learn how to adapt and be resilient through experimentation and coping strategies. It isn’t easy, of course. But education can help here, too. I’ve spent time trying to educate my father and other older relatives about how to use digital technologies they continue to be very uncomfortable with. I appreciate their concerns about privacy, security, and technological complexity. These are valid concerns or complaints. But these technologies are not going away and I have taken upon myself to help them assimilate the new tools and methods into their lives. I also mentor my children and guide their use of these new information technologies. They are surprisingly good at adapting to their new tools, but we must take to heart the lessons the social critics and pessimists offer about the downsides and dangers of some of those new tools.

As you can sense, my perspective here is very much shaped by the fact that I am, for the most part, a technological determinist. Not a rigid or “hard” tech determinist, but at least a “soft” one.  In a brilliant and highly provocative recently paper, “ Hasta La Vista Privacy, or How Technology Terminated Privacy,” Konstantinos K. Stylianou of the University of Pennsylvania Law School discusses varieties of technological determinism as it pertains to information control and noted:

In-between the two extremes (technology as the defining factor of change and technology as a mere tangent of change) and in a multitude of combinations falls the so called soft determinism; that is, variations of the combined effect of technology on one hand and human choices and actions on the other. (p. 46)

Unfortunately, Stylianou notes, “The scope of soft determinism is unfortunately so broad that is loses all normative value. Encapsulated in the axiom ‘human beings do make their world, but they are also made by it,’ soft determinism is reduced to the self-evident.”  Nonetheless, he argues, “a compromise can be reached by mixing soft and hard determinism in a blend that reserves for technology the predominant role only in limited cases,” since he believes “there are indeed technologies so disruptive by their very nature they cause a certain change regardless of other factors.” (p. 46) He concludes his essay by noting:

it seems reasonable to infer that the thrust behind technological progress is so powerful that it is almost impossible for traditional legislation to catch up. While designing flexible rules may be of help, it also appears that technology has already advanced to the degree that is is able to bypass or manipulate legislation. As a result, the cat-and-mouse chase game between the law and technology will probably always tip in favor of technology. It may thus be a wise choice for the law to stop underestimating the dynamics of technology, and instead adapt to embrace it. (p. 54)

That pretty much sums up where I’m at on most information policy issues and explains why I sound so fatalistic at times. But my soft determinism also explains why I feel it is so important to devise coping strategies to help us through the changes that the information revolution has ushered in and forced upon us. There’s just no putting the digital genie back in the bottle. We can wax nostalgic all we want about those supposedly “good ‘ol days” but they ain’t never coming back. And they weren’t that great anyway!

If this discussion interests you, you might want to read my book chapter from the book The Next Digital Decade, which was entitled, “The Case for Internet Optimism, Part 1: Saving the Net From Its Detractors.”   Oh, and if you don’t already have Michael Sacasas’s blog (The Frailest Thing) at the top of your RSS feed, add it now. Absolutely terrific reading, even when I don’t agree with (or even understand!) all of it.

Here’s the first of two essays I’ve recently penned making “The Case for Internet Optimism.” This essay was included in the book, The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet (2011), which was edited by Berin Szoka and Adam Marcus of TechFreedom.  In these essays, I identify two schools of Internet pessimism: (1) “Net Skeptics,” who are pessimistic about the Internet improving the lot of mankind; and (2) “Net Lovers,” who appreciate the benefits the Net brings society but who fear those benefits are disappearing, or that the Net or openness are dying.  (Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with these themes since I sketched them out in previous essays here such as, “Are You an Internet Optimist or Pessimist?” and “Two Schools of Internet Pessimism.”) The second essay is here.

This essay focuses on the first variant of Internet pessimism, which is rooted in general skepticism about the supposed benefits of cyberspace, digital technologies, and information abundance. The proponents of this pessimistic view often wax nostalgic about some supposed “good ‘ol days” when life was much better (although they can’t seem to agree when those were). At a minimum, they want us to slow down and think twice about life in the Information Age and how it’s personally affecting each of us.  Occasionally, however, this pessimism borders on neo-Ludditism, with some proponents recommending steps to curtail what they feel is the destructive impact of the Net or digital technologies on culture or the economy.  I identify the leading exponents of this view of Internet pessimism and their major works. I trace their technological pessimism back to Plato but argue that their pessimism is largely unwarranted. Humans are more resilient than pessimists care to admit and we learn how to adapt to technological change and assimilate new tools into our lives over time. Moreover, were we really better off in the scarcity era when we were collectively suffering from information poverty?  Generally speaking, despite the challenges it presents society, information abundance is a better dilemma to be facing than information poverty.  Nonetheless, I argue, we should not underestimate or belittle the disruptive impacts associated with the Information Revolution.  But we need to find ways to better cope with turbulent change in a dynamist fashion instead of attempting to roll back the clock on progress or recapture “the good ‘ol days,” which actually weren’t all that good.

Down below, I have embedded the entire chapter in a Scribd reader, but the essay can also be found on the TechFreedom website for the book as well as on SSRN.  I have also includes two updated tables that appeared in my old “optimists vs. pessimists” essay.  The first lists some of the leading Internet optimists and pessimists and their books. The second table outlines some of the major lines of disagreement between these two camps and I divided those disagreements into (1) Cultural / Social beliefs vs. (2) Economic / Business beliefs.

The Case for Internet Optimism Part 1 – Saving the Net From Its Detractors (Adam Thierer) http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf

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Wow, what a year for cyberlaw and information technology policy books!  Both in terms of number of titles and the gravity of the books released, 2010 was one of the biggest years of the past decade (perhaps matched only by 2006 or 2008 in terms of significance).  So, here’s my annual list of the Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2010.

First, however, as is the case each year [see my 2008 & 2009 lists], I need to repeat a few disclaimers.  First, what qualifies as an “important” info-tech policy book is highly subjective, but I would define it as a title that many people — especially scholars in the field — are currently discussing and that we will likely be referencing for many years to come.  But I “weight” books in the sense that narrowly-focused titles lose a few points. For example, books that deal mostly with privacy issues, copyright law, or antitrust policy do not exactly qualify as the same sort of “info-tech policy book” as other titles that offer a broader exploration of policy issues / concerns. For that reason, “big picture” info-tech policy books tend to rank higher on my lists.

The second caveat: Merely because a book appears on my list it does not necessarily mean I agree with everything in it. In fact, as was the case in previous years, I found much with which to disagree in my picks for the most important books of 2010 and I find that the cyber-libertarianism I subscribe to has very few fans out there.

With those caveats in mind, here are my choices for the Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2010.

(1) Tim Wu – The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

In The Master Switch, Tim Wu claims that information industries are prone to “cycles” that generally advance from “open” to “closed” and he correctly notes that regulatory capture and bureaucratic mismanagement are major culprits. “Again and again in the histories I have recounted,” he says, “the state has shown itself an inferior arbiter of what is good for the information industries. The federal government’s role in radio and television from the 1920s through the 1960s, for instance, was nothing short of a disgrace… Government’s tendency to protect large market players amounts to an illegitimate complicity … [particularly its] sense of obligation to protect big industries irrespective of their having become uncompetitive.”

Wu is correct. Strangely, however, he never seems to draw any lesson from that “disgrace” and “complicity.” Indeed, sometimes within a line or two of raising such concerns in his book, Wu seems to dismiss those findings entirely and proposes giving the government far more power to play games within the information sector. If Wu believes what he said about the dangers of regulatory capture and bureaucratic bungling, why is he so eager to empower the State to do even more meddling in information technology sectors?

When it comes to solutions, Wu fails to conduct any serious cost-benefit analysis of the trade-offs associated with an aggrandizement of State power in the name of countering the supposed evils of private power. The solutions Wu offers are typically presented as cost-free options. Yet, Prof. Wu’s primary solution, a so-called “Separation Principle,” would have a devastating impact on high-technology innovation and competitiveness. Claiming that information industries are too important to be governed by traditional laws and regulations, Wu advocates a sweeping industrial policy that would separate information industries into three buckets — content, distribution, and devices — and keep them segregated by force of law. Integration and cross-sector arrangements would essentially become illegal in this system of information apartheid.

Mysteriously, Wu is adamant about this not being a regulatory solution, instead preferring to call it a “constitutional” approach. But such semantic sophistry can’t disguise the fact that his regime would be an ambitious industrial policy for America’s information economy. Entire companies and sectors would need to be undone, and all future technological innovation would need to be subjected to regulatory classification proceedings to determine in which bucket they belong.  Ironically, therefore, Wu’s proposed approach would greatly empower the same regulators that he claimed drove previous industries into the ground! They would have even more sway over the future of technological innovation, media policy decisions, and free speech issues. Again, Wu never address the potential downsides or costs of his proposed approach even though we know that, when it comes to regulation, there is no free lunch. Something has to give.

In sum, I believe Wu’s hyper-pessimistic worldview and extreme recommendations are unwarranted and I made my reservations known in a 6-part series of essays about his book.  [See Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.]  Nonetheless, The Master Switch is a profoundly important book that we’ll be debating for many years to come.

Listen to Jerry Brito’s “Surprisingly Free” podcast discussion with Tim Wu here.

(#2) Kevin Kelly – What Technology Wants

Kevin Kelly has written a terrifically interesting book that is actually two books in one. The bookends (Parts 1 and 4) are pretty out there. In those portions of the book, Kelly aims to prove that “the technium” – “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us” — is a “force” or even a living “organism” that has a “vital spirit” and which “has its own wants” and “a noticeable measure of autonomy.” “The technium is whispering to itself,” he says. At times, Kelly sounds like he’s longing for humanity’s assimilation into the machine or The Matrix. “We can think of technology as our extended body,” he says. He speaks repeatedly of human-machine “symbiosis.” “We are now symbiotic with technology” and, apparently, that symbiotic bonding can get pretty intense as “humans are the reproductive organs of technology.” Sounds a little kinky, but what the hell does that even mean? I think those are the weaker sections of the book. He sounds like one of those enviro-extremists who proselytizes about Gaia theories of Earth as a spirit or deity.

But Kelly redeems himself with eight absolutely stunning chapters in the middle two sections of the book. Gone is most of the Gaia-like talk of the technium as a living organism. Kelly instead focuses on explaining to us in plain terms the progression of technology in our lives and how we’ve come to cope with it. He notes, for example, that “Over the centuries, societies have declared many technologies to be dangerous, economically upsetting, immoral, unwise, or simply too unknown for our good. The remedy to this perceived evil is usually a form of prohibition. The offending innovation may be taxed severely or legislated to narrow purposes or restricted to the outskirts or banned altogether.”

But banning technology never works, he argues, largely because humans adapt and embrace new tools and developments. “[H]istory shows that it is very hard for a society as a whole to say no to technology for very long.” “Prohibitions are in effect postponements” and “wholesale prohibitions simply do not work to eliminate a technology that is considered subversive or morally wrong. Technologies can be postponed but not stopped.”  Importantly, Kelly doesn’t turn a blind eye to the downsides of technology. In fact, he is refreshingly candid about the trade-offs we face. He argues that, “If we examine technologies honestly, each one as its faults as well as its virtues. There are no technologies without vices and none that are neutral. The consequences of a technology expand with its disruptive nature. Powerful technologies will be powerful in both directions – for good and bad. There is no powerfully constructive technology that is not also powerfully destructive in another direction, just as there is no great idea that cannot be greatly perverted for great harm… This should be the first law of technological expectation: The greater the promise of a new technology, the greater its potential for harm as well.”

Quite right. But then Kelly then goes on to masterfully discuss the dangers of applying the “precautionary principle” to technological advancement. Kelly correctly argues, is that because “every good produces harm somewhere… by the strict logic of an absolute Precautionary Principle no technologies would be permitted.” (p. 247-8) Under such a regime, progress becomes impossible because trade-offs are considered unacceptable. This doesn’t mean humans shouldn’t try to foresee problems associated with new technologies or address them preemptively. But that can be done without resisting new technologies or technological change altogether. “The proper response to a lousy technology is not to stop technology or to produce no technology,” Kelly argues. “It is to develop a better, more convivial technology.”

In sum, I loved the middle sections of What Technology Wants, but I could have done without the silly “technology-as-organism” theories found in the opening and closing chapters. Overall, however, Kevin Kelly has written a book that demands our attention. We will be talking about What Technology Wants for many, many years to come.

See my complete review of the book here, and make sure to listen to Kelly’s interesting podcast discussion with Jerry Brito here.

(#3) Jaron Lanier – You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget is an intriguing but highly pessimistic look at the impact of the Internet and digital technology on our lives, culture, and economy. Like other Net skeptics, Lanier worries about the loss of individuality, the rise of “mob” behavior, the dangers of free culture, and the rise of a new sharecropper economy in which a small handful of capitalists are supposedly getting rich off the backs of free labor. As a respected Internet visionary, a gifted computer scientist, an expert on virtual reality, and a master wordsmith, the concerns Lanier articulates here deserve to be taken seriously — even if one ultimately does not share his lugubrious worldview. And I don’t.

He rightly castigates extreme varieties of quixotic techno-utopianism, which he labels “cybernetic totalism,” or the belief by some extreme digital age optimists that a “hive mind” or “noosphere” is coming about. It’s a vision of the Net as an organism powered by the wisdom of crowds. Lanier thinks such thinking is all bunk and, worse yet, that it has dangerous ramifications for humanity and individuality. He also asks us to think twice before taking too big of a gulp of the “free culture” kool-aid and extreme varieties of cyber-collectivism, which I wholeheartedly agree with.

But his critique is too sweeping and he refuses at times to acknowledge the many legitimate innovations associated with open source software or Web 2.0 technologies. He also gets so caught up in his critique of the free culture movement that he unfairly indicts the entire digital generation and wrongly claims most modern culture is moribund and little more than “a petty mashup of preweb culture.” Sorry, but I just don’t buy that. And it’s entirely subjective, anyway.

I also found Lanier’s “lords of the cloud” critique of social networking and advertising unpersuasive. Lanier seems to believe that Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 sites are all just part of the hive mind indoctrination scheme. Or, at a minimum, they are turning our brains into Jello, he claims, and destroying our individuality. But here Lanier is guilty of a form of hyper-nostolgia about those mythical “good ‘ol days” when all was supposedly much better. The Web 1.0 world was any better than today’s cyberspace; it had its own share of problems. And today’s leading cloud companies aren’t exploiting us or manipulating our minds by offering us great platforms or free services. Indeed, they are offering us wonderful new avenues for self-expression and interaction with others.

Lanier doesn’t seem willing to leave room for a middle ground position that rejects extreme techno-utopianism and the most extreme elements of the free culture mindset, but which also acknowledges there is much good to be found in modern digital culture and online life. Despite that, his book is easily one of the most important information technology policy books of recent years.

My lengthy review of Lanier’s book is can be found here.

(#4) Nicholas Carr – The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

Rich with historical anecdotes and replete with scientific surveys and evidence, The Shallows is a book that demands your respect whether you are comfortable giving it or not. And many people won’t be. After all, Carr is a bit of a skunk at the cyber-garden party. I mean, how dare he suggest that all is not wine and roses with our glorious new world of instantaneous connectivity, abundant information flows, and cheap (often free) media content! Obviously, most of us want to believe that all adds up to a more well-rounded worldview and greater wisdom about the world around us. Carr is skeptical of those claims and The Shallows is his latest effort to poke a hole in the cyber-utopian claims that sometimes pervade discussions about Internet. Although, ultimately, he doesn’t quite convinced me that “The Web is a technology of forgetfulness,” he has made a powerful case that its effects may not be as salubrious as many of us have assumed.

But the ultimate question is: Do the costs really outweigh the benefits? Is it the case that these technologies “turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities — those for reason, perception, memory, emotion”? I think that goes a bit too far. Importantly, Carr doesn’t really ever answer the crucial question: Were we really better off in the decades prior to the rise of the Net? Did we really read more and engage in the more contemplative deep-reading and thinking he Carr fears we are losing because of the Net? Count me among those who think that — whatever most of us are doing in front our our computers most nights, and no matter how distracting it is — it has to be better than much of the junk we wasted our spare time on in the past!

It would have also been nice to have seen Carr offer up some personal suggestions for how we each might better manage cognitive overload, which can be a real problem. In a brief “digression” chapter entitled “On the Writing of This Book,” Carr does mention some of the steps he took personally to make sure he could complete The Shallows without being driven to distraction by the Web and digital technologies. But he doesn’t dwell on that much, which is a shame. A bit of a self-help can go a long way toward alleviating the worst forms of cognitive overload, although it will continue to be a struggle for many of us.

Despite the reservations I raised in my review of the book, Nick Carr’s The Shallows is beautifully written and will be required reading in this field for many years to come.   And make sure to check out this “Surprisingly Free” podcast conversation that Jerry Brito had with Carr back in June.

(#5) Clay Shirky – Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

If you are an avid reader of everything Clay Skirky pens, then the chapters you’ll find in his new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in the a Connected Age, will seem quite familiar.  We’ve seen or heard most of the material in Cognitive Surplus many times before and I think we got the point: The Internet and digital technology has freed up an enormous amount of time for more productive / worthwhile endeavors that was previously squandered — most by too much coach potato television consumption. He spells out his thesis a bit more eloquently on pg. 63:

The harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways, relative to their old status as consumers and couch potatoes. The raw material of this change is the free time available to us, time we can commit to projects that range from the amusing to the culturally transformative. […] Flexible, cheap, and inclusive media now offers us opportunities to do all sorts of things we once didn’t do. In the world of “the media,” we were like children, sitting quietly at the edge of a circle and consuming whatever the grown-ups in the center of the circle produced. That has given way to a world in which most forms of communication, public and private, are available to everyone in some form. (p. 63)

Shirky spends 200+ pages here trying to bolster that claim in various ways. But, again, I’m not sure he needed to. The notion that the Net has made us and our culture better off seems fairly uncontroversial to most of us. But Shirky also overplays his hand at times and tries to read a bit too much into the significance of the rising cognitive surplus.  It’s less likely to reshape politics or civic spirit, for example, as much as he seems to suggest.

My longer review of Cognitive Surplus can be found here and you’ll want to listen to Jerry Brito’s very interesting “Surprisingly Free” podcast discussion with him here.

(#6) Barbara van Schewick – Internet Architecture and Innovation

Barbara van Schewick’s book is an extended — and I do mean extended — love letter to the “end-to-end” principle and Net neutrality.  Weighing in at almost 600 pages, van Schewick goes on much longer than she needed to make her core argument: The structure of the current Internet is sacrosanct and must be preserved. Deviations from end-to-end or “neutrality,” however defined, are to be discouraged or disallowed. “[D]ifferent ways of structuring the Internet result in very different environments for its development,” she argues.  “If left to themselves, network providers will continue to change  the internal structure of the Internet in ways that are good for them, but not necessarily for the rest of us,” she says. (p. 377)

Of course, we’ve heard all these arguments made ad nauseam in the Net neutrality wars, but to her credit, van Schewick makes them far more eloquently in this book than they have ever been made before.  She does a particularly good job of walking the reader through the guts of the Internet’s current architecture.  The layman will find the book quite challenging in light of its highly technical nature, however.  But her grasp of the subject is impressive.

Unfortunately, van Schewick doesn’t spend much time addressing the downsides associated with expanding regulation of the Internet.  There’s no acknowledgment of the danger of regulatory capture, regulatory creep, or bureaucratic meddling with highly complex systems.  She seems to assume regulators will be immune to such tendencies and, more surprisingly, have a crystal ball with which they can view the wisdom of current regulatory actions. She argues, for example, that in some cases “regulators will need to shape the technology before it is deployed.” (p. 388)  This suggests a return to the sort of anticipatory, “Mother, May I” regulatory regime America began turning away from following the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.  Do we really want the FCC micro-managing every important innovation and business decision in these fast-moving, complex markets?   Experimentation with different digital architectures would essentially become verboten under van Schewick’s paradigm.

When it comes imposing “an engineering design principle” from above, van Schewick claims that “the broad version [of the end-to-end principle] provides much more flexibility for the evolution of the network’s core than is often assumed.” (p. 389)  Yet, she never spells out what she means by that and how much flexibility she would allow in terms of core innovation before having regulators intervene.  For those of us who favor a more dynamic, experimental, and evolutionary approach to markets and technical engineering determinations, van Schewick’s approach looks like one that would freeze current high-tech markets and networks in stone.   Her occasional lip-service to the trade-offs involved in this process are appreciated but, ultimately, unbelievable since she always comes down in favor of maximizing opportunities or innovation at the edge of networks relative to the core. Innovation at the core of networks is every bit as important as innovation at the edge, however. We don’t want stagnation at the core of networks or else the applications that ride on them will suffer.

(#7) Milton Mueller — Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance

Milton Mueller’s Networks and States isn’t the most important information technology policy book of the year, but it was easily my favorite.   Mueller’s book continues his exploration of the forces shaping Internet policy across the globe. What Mueller is doing in his work in this book and elsewhere is becoming the early chronicler of the unfolding Internet governance scene. He meticulously reports on, and then deconstructs, ongoing governance developments along the cyber-frontier. He is, in effect, a sort of de Tocqueville for cyberspace; an outsider looking in and asking questions about what makes this new world tick. Fifty years from now, when historians look back on the opening era of Internet governance squabbles, Milton Mueller’s work will be among the first things they consult.

Mueller’s goal in Networks and States is two-fold and has both an empirical and normative element. First, he aims to extend his exploration of the actors and forces affecting Internet governance debates and then develop a framework and taxonomy to better map and understand these forces and actors. He does a wonderful job on that front, even though many Net governance issues can be incredibly boring. Mueller finds a way to make them far more interesting, especially by helping to familiarize the reader with the personalities and organizations that increasingly dominate these debates and the issues and principles that drive their actions or activism.

Mueller’s second goal in Networks and States is to breathe new life into the old cyber-libertarian philosophy that was more prevalent during the Net’s founding era but has lost favor today. Mueller says his “normative stance is rooted in the Internet’s early promise of unfettered and borderless global communication, and its largely accidental and temporary escape from traditional institutional mechanisms of control.” Mueller makes a convincing case for giving cyber-libertarianism, or what he calls “denationalized liberalism,” another chance; a chance that it really never had. “At its core,” Mueller continues, “denationalized liberalism favors a universal right to receive and impart information regardless of frontiers, and sees freedom to communicate and exchange information as fundamental and primary elements of human choice and political and social activity.” Moreover, “this ideology holds a presumption in favor of networked, associative relations over hierarchical relations as a mode of transnational governance,” he argues. “Governance should emerge primarily as a byproduct of many unilateral and bilateral decisions by its members to exchange or negotiate with other members (or refuse to do so).” Finally, he says, “a denationalized liberalism strives to make Internet users and suppliers an autonomous, global polity.” In essence, it’s about free will, freedom of action, and freedom of association. It’s essentially classical liberalism for the Information Age. Mueller admits that “such an ideology needs to answer tough questions about when hierarchical exercises of power are justified and through which instruments they are exercised.” But he continues on to make the case for “question[ing] the scope of national sovereignty over communications.” “The governance of the Internet needs to explicitly recognize and embrace the principle that there are limits to national sovereignty over the flow of information,” he says.

Mueller has made a beautiful case for cyber-libertarianism and he has given the movement its marching orders: “In short, we need to find ways to translate classical liberal rights and freedom into a governance framework suitable for the global Internet. There can be no cyberliberty without a political movement to define, defend, and institutionalize individual rights and freedoms on a transnational scale.”   Even if you aren’t compelled to join the cause, however, I highly recommend you pick up Mueller’s Network and States, anyway. It’s a terrific survey of the current state of Internet governance and an important work of political science since it offers us a useful spectrum of Net governance viewpoints.

My longer review of Networks and States is here and here’s Jerry Brito’s podcast discussion with Mueller about his book.

(#8) Ronald J. Deibert, John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain (eds.) – Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace

Smartly organized and edited, Access Controlled is essential reading for anyone interested in studying the methods governments are using globally to stifle online expression and dissent. There is simply no other resource out there like this; it should be required reading in every cyberlaw or information policy program.

The book, which is a project of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), is divided into two parts. Part 1 of the book includes six chapters on “Theory and Analysis.” They are terrifically informative essays. The beefy second part of the book provides a whopping 480 pages of detailed regional and country-by-country overviews of the global state of online speech controls and discuss the long-term ramifications of increasing government meddling with online networks.

The book also offers a useful taxonomy to illustrate the three general types of speech and information controls that states are deploying today. Throughout the book, various authors document the increasing movement away from “first generation controls,” which are epitomized by “Great Firewall of China”-like filtering methods, and toward second- and third-generation controls, which are more refined and difficult to monitor.

The individual authors seem to adopt a somewhat gloomy outlook toward the long-term prospects for “technologies of freedom” relative to “technologies of control.” But I think it’s vital to put things in some historical context in this regard. It’s important to recall that, as a communications medium, the Net is still quite young. So, is the Net really more susceptible to State control and manipulation than previous communications technologies and platforms? I’m not so sure, although it’s hard to find a metric to compare them in an analytically rigorous fashion. It’s certainly true that the State has access to more data about its citizens than in the past, but it’s also true that we have more information about the State than ever before, too! And, again, we also have access to more of those technologies of freedom than ever before to at least try to fight back. Compare, for example, the plight of a dissident in a Cold War-era Eastern Bloc communist state to a dissident in China or Iran today. Which one had a better chance of getting their words (or audio and video) out to the local or global community?  And what do the recent Wikileaks episodes teach us in this regard?

Despite those small quibbles, Access Controlled is an indispensable resource that belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who covers information technology policy and wants to better understand global Internet regulation.  Very highly recommended.  My complete review of the book is here.

(#9) Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake – Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It

Clarke and Knake’s book is important if for no other reason than, as they note, “there are few books on cyber war.” Thus, their treatment of the issue will likely remain the most relevant text in the field for some time to come. They define cyber war as “actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption” and they argue that such actions are on the rise. And they also claim that the U.S. has the most to lose if and when a major cyber war breaks out, since we are now so utterly dependent upon digital technologies and networks.

At their best, Clarke and Knake walk the reader through the mechanics of cyber war, who some of the key players and countries are who could engage in it, and identify what the costs of such of war would entail. Other times, however, the book suffers from a somewhat hysterical tone, as the authors are out here not just to describe cyber war, but to also issue a clarion call for regulatory action to combat it. A bigger problem with the book is the complete lack of reference material, footnotes, or even an index. If you’re going to go around sounding like a couple of cyber-Jeremiahs, you really should include some reference material to back up your gloomy assertions of impending doom.

The authors go after ISPs and many other companies for supposedly not caring about cyber-security. In reality, those companies have powerful incentives to make sure their networks are relatively safe and secure to avoid costly attacks and retain customers who demand their online information and activities be trouble-free. And most ISPs take steps not just to guard against malware and other types of cyber attacks, but they also offer customers free (or cheap) security software as part of a growing suite of gratis services (anti-virus, parental controls, e-mail, etc).

Clarke and Knake would like to see government impose a fairly sweeping set of new rules on ISPs to better secure their networks against potential attacks. In true deputize-the-middleman fashion, they want ISPs to engage in a great deal more network monitoring (using deep-packet inspection techniques) under threat of legal sanction if things go wrong. They admit there are corresponding costs and privacy concerns, but largely dismiss them and essentially ask us to just get over those concerns in the name of a safer and more secure cyberspace. They do, however, say they would be willing to have a “Privacy and Civil Liberties Board” appointed “to ensure that neither the ISPs nor the government was illegal spying on us.” I doubt that will soothe the fears of those who (like me) are fundamentally suspicious of government snooping.

Overall, Clarke and Knake have written a book that is worth reading, but suffers from hyperbolic rhetoric and a serious lack of documentation. Readers should also seek out other perspectives on cyber-security issues, which take a more reasoned approach to the issue.   Read my longer review of Cyber War here.

(#10) Adrian Johns – Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates

I can’t remember the last time I read a book that qualified as a “magisterial treatment” of an issue (I suppose it would be Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change), but Johns’ book on piracy certainly qualifies as one.  As the subtitle makes clear, it’s a sweeping 400+ year history of the intellectual property wars.

This mammoth tome was a real struggle to finish since Johns leaves no stone unturned in his exhaustive overview of the history of intellectual property and piracy.  I read it over the course of 6 months because it felt like I was running a marathon to get through each chapter. I needed a big break between each one.  So, pick it up and get ready to pace yourself for the long slog through this important book.  And don’t jump ahead!   Some of the most interesting stories are from the early battles about the very concept of copyright and intellectual property.  I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the early American experience, which began with widespread piracy of English works as a method of undermining the tyranny of the Crown. (Reminded me of how we still screw Cuba by denying trademarks in their cigars just to stick it to Castro).

Johns offers a fairly objective narrative throughout the first 500 pages, but toward the end his own views start to emerge:

“[Enforcement] issues, it seems, have dogged intellectual property policing throughout its history, because of he nature of the enterprise.  They continue to do so today in new forms and media.  Large-scale, intensive, and internationally coordinated antipirate enforcement is sometimes justifies–the effort against counterfeit medicines is a relatively clear example–but in other cases the public good is not so evident.” (p. 507-508)

He goes on to suggest that IP may need to be rethought given new realities. “Intellectual property being a relatively recent concept, it ought to be possible to conceive of an alternative to it that suited the twenty-first century rather than the nineteenth,” he argues.  (p. 515)  Yet, the only alternatives he suggest — prizes, subsidies, compulsory licenses — are decidedly nineteenth century in nature.  That leaves him with few other options other than to suggest that the entire concept of IP should potentially be rethought, or that it may perhaps be fading anyhow in light of recent development in the information age, anyway.  IP defenders, however, should not let that discourage them from reading this book. It’s an insightful, interesting, one-of-a-kind history of this contentious subject.

(Listen to Jerry Brito’s “Surprising Free” podcast discussion with Adrian Johns here.)

Honorable Mentions:

* Rob Frieden – Winning the Silicon Sweepstakes: Can the United States Compete in Global Telecommunications?

Frieden’s book argues America has lost its edge in the global telecommunications and broadband race and that government must intervene to set us back on the right course.  What’s the proper course?  He suggest it’s the forced access infrastructural-sharing regime for communications and broadband networks that existed for several years following the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.  (UNE-P, TELRIC, line-sharing, etc) That regime was largely abandoned, however, after it became evident to most market analysts and economists that, despite the best of intentions, infrastructure-sharing did little to promote investment and innovation.

Frieden suggests all that legal and economic thinking was flawed and that we should go ‘back to the future’ with telecom / broadband policy.  I’m not buying it for one minute, but if you’re looking for a blueprint for resurrecting yesterday’s regulatory regime, this book is it.

Here’s a conversation Jerry Brito had with Rob Frieden on his podcast back in March.

* Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma (eds.) – Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice

Open Government is a terrific collection of 34 essays covering the full gamut of transparency and “Government 2.0″ issues.  The collection was published by O’Reilly Media and Tim O’Reilly himself has one of the best chapters in the book on “Government as a Platform.” “The magic of open data is that the same openness that enables transparency also enables innovation, as developers build applications that reuse government data in unexpected ways.” (p. 25) This explains why in their chapter on “Enabling Innovation for Civic Engagement,” David G. Robinson, Harlan Yu, and Edward W. Felten, of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, speak of “a new baseline assumption about the public response to government data: when government puts data online, someone, somewhere will do something valuable and innovative with it.” (p.84) “By publishing its data in a form that is free, open, and reusable,” they continue, “government will empower citizens to dream up and implement their own innovative ideas of how to best connect with their governments.” (p. 89)  The book also includes a terrific chapters by my TLF colleagues Jim Harper and Jerry Brito.  This is an indispensable resource for your bookshelf. Pick it up.

* William Powers – Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age

Powers is a gifted storyteller and his walk though the history of philosophy and technology makes this slender volume an enjoyable, quick read. He begins by reminding us that “whenever new devices have emerged, they’ve presented the kinds of challenges we face today — busyness, information overload, that sense of life being out of control. These challenges were as real two millennia ago as they are today, and throughout history, people have been grappling with them and looking for creative ways to manage life in the crowd.”

His key insight is that is that humans can adapt new technology, but it takes time, patience, humility, and a little effort. “The key is to strike a balance,” he says, between “the call of the crowd” and the “need for time and space apart” from it. The problem we face today is that all the pressure is on us to be what he calls “Digital Maximalists.” That is, many of us are increasingly out to maximize the time spent in front of various digital “screens” whether we have made the determination that is really in our best interest or not. It has just gradually happened, Powers argues, because “The goal is no longer to be ‘in touch’ but to erase the possibility of ever being out of touch.”

Even though Powers clearly leans more toward the techno-pessimist camp, what I like best about his book is that he generally avoids a preachy tone and excessive hand-wringing. He isn’t one of those pessimists who adopts a holy-than-thou, the-rest-of-you-just-don’t-get-it attitude. In fact, there’s a great deal of self-deprecating humor in the book as Powers explains how he is struggling with the same issues the rest of us are and trying to figure out how to strike the right balance in his own life. Importantly, he notes that each of us will strike that balance differently. “[E]veryone has to work that out for himself. We’re all different, and there’s no one-size-fits-all way to balance the outward life and the inward one.” That is a crucial insight. There’s nothing worse than a techno-skeptic who tells us they have discovered the one true path to enlightenment or happiness — especially when it entails giving up new technologies that can have so many beneficial upsides. Indeed, Powers argues that “It’s never a good idea to buy into the dark fears of the techno-Cassandras, who generally turn out to be wrong. Human beings are skillful at figuring out the best uses of new tools. However, it can take awhile.”

Indeed, the struggle with information clutter will continue. Assimilating new communications and entertainment technologies into our lives has always been challenging, but, thanks to excellent advice like that offer by William Powers in Hamlet’s BlackBerry, I am optimistic that we humans can do so sensibly and be happier — and wiser — for it in the long-run.

Here’s my complete review of Hamlet’s Blackberry and make sure to listen to Jerry Brito’s discussion with Powers here.

• Robert W. McChesney & John Nichols – The Death and Life of American Journalism

If my list was of the most important media policy books of the year, McChesney and Nichols’ book would be a shoo-in for the top spot. It’s easily the most significant text on media policy in the past few years.  It’s also the most horrifying.  In their world of “post-corporate” newsrooms, the State serves as the primary benefactor of the Fourth Estate.  Billions would flow from bureaucracies to media entities and individual journalists in the name of sustaining a “free press.” And this new media welfare state is funded by steep taxes on our mobile phones, broadband connections, and digital gadgets. McChesney and Nichols model their $35 billion annual “public works” program for the press after the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal era. Their media WPA would include a “News AmeriCorps” for out-of-work journalists, a “Citizenship News Voucher” to funnel taxpayer support to struggling media entities, a significant expansion of postal subsidies, a massive new subsidy for journalism schools, corporate welfare for newspapers sufficient to pay 50 percent of the salaries of all “journalistic employees,” and more. It’s a veritable industrial policy for the press that resembles a Soviet-style five-year plan.

Who pays the bill and how much will the takeover cost? McChesney and Nichols take a remarkably cavalier attitude about it: “The money must be spent and we will worry about where it comes from later.” Such “we’re-all-dead-in-the-long-run” reasoning seems to be the dominant philosophy in Washington policy circles these days. But the estimated $35 billion annual price tag for a “public works” program for the press should give us pause. Moreover, like every other corporate-welfare program (think agriculture subsidies), a journalistic welfare state would no doubt grow in scope and cost over time.

McChesney and Nichols suggest several potential funding sources for the program, many of which would end up burdening commercial media providers in order to subsidize their noncommercial/public media competitors. They advocate a four-part tax plan that would include: a 5 percent tax on new purchases of consumer electronics, which they estimate would bring in $4 billion a year; a 3 percent tax on monthly ISP & mobile-service bills (estimated at $6 billion a year); a 2 percent sales tax on advertising (estimated at $5 to $6 billion a year); and a 7 percent tax on broadcasters’ spectrum licenses (estimated to sap another $3-6 billion a year from an already reeling industry). In other words, they would tax every device and network in your house to transfer money to the federal government to set up a journalistic welfare state.

What McChesney and Nichols essentially advocate is a radical form of media redistributionism — with struggling private entities and others forced to the fund public or non-commercial media outlets they desire. That is, what they seek is not so much a bailout for the familiar private media that has served America so well for two centuries, but rather a massive wealth transfer from one class of media to another, with the stipulation — which they repeat numerous times in the book — that state-subsidized entities are to forgo private advertising revenues, copyright protection, and any affiliation with corporate parents. These restrictions are an essential part of their push for a “post-corporate,” government-controlled press. Indeed, it would virtually make such a press a self-fulfilling prophecy, since copyright laws and advertising have been core ingredients of a successful private media system in the U.S. They’re also why we haven’t had to resort to massive public subsidies for media, as many other nations have.

The Death and Life of American Journalism is a troubling book, but I will give it this: For those of us who still care about our fundamental First Amendment freedoms and a truly free and independent press, McChesney & Nichols’ book clearly draws the battle lines for the future of media and provides a fresh reminder about what it is we’re fighting for.

My longer review of this troubling book can be found here.

Couple of others…

• Nick Bilton –  I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works. I didn’t have a chance to formally review Bilton’s interesting book, but make sure to listen to Bilton’s appearance on the “Surprisingly Free” podcast here.
• Lee Bollinger – Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-open: A Free Press for a New Century I had a very hard time taking this book seriously since Bollinger proposes the creation of a massive U.S. propaganda machine.  Bollinger doesn’t just want our government to help out a bit at the margins like it currently does; he wants the State to get under the covers, cuddle tight and become intimate lovers with the Press.  And then he wants the Big Press to project itself more, especially overseas, to compete with other State-owned or subsidized media enterprises.  It’s almost as disturbing as the McChesney and Nichols book referenced above.  Read my short review of Bollinger’s book here.

Let me know what I’ve missed and tell me what you think is the most important info-tech book of 2010!

[I am currently helping Berin Szoka edit a collection of essays from various Internet policy scholars for a new PFF book called “The Next Digital Decade: Essays about the Internet’s Future.”  I plan on including two chapters of my own in the book responding to the two distinct flavors of Internet pessimism that I increasingly find are dominating discussions about Internet policy. Below you will see how the first of these two chapters begins. I welcome input as I refine this draft. ]

Surveying the prevailing mood surrounding cyberlaw and Internet policy circa 2010, one is struck by the overwhelming sense of pessimism about our long-term prospects for a better future.   “Internet pessimism,” however, comes in two very distinct flavors:

1. Net Skeptics, Pessimistic about the Internet Improving the Lot of Mankind: The first variant of Internet pessimism is rooted in general skepticism regarding the supposed benefits of cyberspace, digital technologies, and information abundance. The proponents of this pessimistic view often wax nostalgic about some supposed “good ‘ol days” when life was much better (although they can’t seem to agree when those were). At a minimum, they want us to slow down and think twice about life in the Information Age and how it is personally affecting each of us.  Other times, however, their pessimism borders on neo-Ludditism, with proponents recommending steps be taken to curtail what they feel is the destructive impact of the Net or digital technologies on culture or the economy. Leading proponents of this variant of Internet pessimism include:  Neil Postman (Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology), Andrew Keen, (The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture), Lee Siegel, (Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob), Mark Helprin, (Digital Barbarism) and, to a lesser degree, Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget) and Nicholas Carr (The Big Switch and The Shallows).
2. Net Lovers, Pessimistic about the Future of Openness: A different type of Internet pessimism is on display in the work of many leading cyberlaw scholars today.  Noted academics such as Lawrence Lessig, (Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace), Jonathan Zittrain (The Future of the Internet & How to Stop It), and Tim Wu (The Master Switch The Rise and Fall of Information Empires), embrace the Internet and digital technologies, but argue that they are “dying” due to a lack of sufficient care or collective oversight.  In particular, they fear that the “open” Internet and “generative” digital systems are giving way to closed, proprietary systems, typically run by villainous corporations out to erect walled gardens and quash our digital liberties.  Thus, they are pessimistic about the long-term survival of the wondrous Internet that we currently know and love.

Despite their different concerns, two things unite these two schools of techno-pessimism.  First, there is an elitist air to their pronouncements; a veritable “the-rest-of-you-just-don’t-get-it” attitude pervades their work.  In the case of the Net Skeptics, it’s the supposed decline of culture, tradition, and economy that the rest of us are supposedly blind to, but which they see perfectly—and know how to rectify.  For the Net Loving Pessimists, by contrast, we see this attitude on display when they imply that a Digital Dark Age of Closed Systems is unfolding since nefarious schemers in high-tech corporate America are out to suffocate Internet innovation and digital freedom more generally.  The Net Loving Pessimists apparently see this plot unfolding, but paint the rest of us out to be robotic sheep being led to the cyber-slaughter since we are unwittingly using services (AOL in the old days; Facebook today) or devices (the iPhone and iPad) that play right into the hands of those corporate schemers who are out to erect high and tight walled gardens all around us.

Unsurprisingly, this elitist attitude leads to the second thing uniting these two variants of Net pessimism: An underlying belief that someone or something—most often, the State—must intervene to set us on a better course or protect those things that they regard as sacred.  They either fancy themselves as the philosopher kings who can set things back on a better course, or they imagine that such creatures exist in government today and can be tapped to save us from our impending digital doom—whatever it may be.

In both cases, I will argue that today’s Internet pessimists have over-stated the severity of the respective problems they have identified.  In doing so, I will argue that they both have failed to appreciate the benefits of evolutionary dynamism.  I borrow the term dynamism from Virginia Postrel, who contrasted the conflicting worldviews of dynamism and stasis so eloquently in her 1998 masterpiece, The Future and Its Enemies.  Postrel argued that:

The future we face at the dawn of the twenty-first century is, like all futures left to themselves, “emergent, complex messiness.” Its “messiness” lies not in disorder, but in an order that is unpredictable, spontaneous, and ever shifting, a pattern created by millions of uncoordinated, independent decisions.

However, because “these actions shape a future no one can see, a future that is dynamic and inherently unstable,” Postrel noted.  But that inherent instability and the uncomfortable realization that the future is, by its very nature, unknowable, leads to exactly the sort of anxieties we see on display in the works of both varieties of Internet pessimists today.  Postrel contrasts the two visions of stasis and dynamism and makes the case for embracing dynamism as follows:

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 [Tim] Appelo that “we’re scared of the future” and join [Judith ] 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 divide is growing deeper as the two schools of Internet pessimism—unwittingly, of course—work together to concoct a lugubrious narrative of impending techno-apocalypse.  It makes little difference whether the two schools agree on the root cause(s) of all our problems; in the end, it’s their unified call for a more “regulated, engineered world” that makes them both suffer from the same stasis sickness.

In this chapter, I will take on the first variant of Internet pessimism (the Net Skeptics) and make the dynamist case for what I call “pragmatic optimism.”  I will argue that the Internet and digital technologies are reshaping our culture, economy and society in most ways for the better, but not without some serious heartburn along the way.  My bottom line comes down to a simple cost-benefit analysis: Were we really better off in the scarcity era when we were collectively suffering from information poverty? Generally speaking, I’ll take information overload over information poverty any day.  But we should not underestimate or belittle the disruptive impacts associated with the Information Revolution.  We need to find ways to better cope with those changes in a dynamist fashion instead of embracing the stasis notion that we can roll back the clock on progress and recapture “the good ‘ol days”—which actually weren’t all that good.

In another chapter in the book, I will address the second variant of Internet pessimism (the Net Loving Pessimists) and show how reports of the Internet’s death have been greatly exaggerated.  Although the Net Loving Pessimists will likely recoil at the suggestion that they are not dynamists, the reality is that their attitudes and recommendations are decided stasisist in nature. They fret about a cyber-future in which the Internet might not as closely resemble its opening epoch.  Worse yet, many of them agree with what Lawrence Lessig said in his seminal—by highly pessimistic—1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, that “Left to itself, cyberspace will become a perfect tool of control.”  Lessig and his intellectual disciples—especially Zittrain and Wu—have continued to forecast a gloomy digital future unless something is done to address the Great Digital Closing we are supposedly experiencing.  I will argue that while many of us share their appreciation of the Internet’s current nature and its early history, their embrace of the stasis mentality is unfortunate since it forecloses the spontaneous evolution of cyberspace and invites government intervention to create a more “regulated, engineered world” that will, ironically, undermine much of what they hope to preserve about the current Internet.

[ I’ll then go on to finish this chapter, basically by finally completing my essay, “ Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.” In the second chapter addressing the pessimism of the “Net Lovers,” I will build on my review of Zittrain’s “Future of the Internet,” my two–part debate with Lawrence Lessig on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of “ Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” and my forthcoming review of Tim Wu’s soon-to-be-released book, “The Master Switch The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.”  I will then eagerly await the hate mail from all the affected parties.]

Of the many tech policy-related books I’ve read in recent years, I can’t recall ever being quite so torn over one of them as much as I have been about Jaron Lanier‘s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.  There were moments while I was reading through it when I was thinking, “Yes, quite right!,” and other times when I was muttering to myself, “Oh God, no!”

The book is bound to evoke such strong emotions since Lanier doesn’t mix words about what he believes is the increasingly negative impact of the Internet and digital technologies on our lives, culture, and economy. In this sense, Lanier fits squarely in the pessimist camp on the Internet optimists vs. pessimists spectrum. (I outlined the intellectual battle lines between these two camps my essay, “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.”) But Lanier is no techno-troglodyte. Generally speaking, his pessimism isn’t as hysterical in tone or Luddite-ish in its prescriptions as the tracts of some other pessimists.  And as a respected Internet visionary, a gifted computer scientist, an expert on virtual reality, and a master wordsmith, the concerns Lanier articulates here deserve to be taken seriously— even if one ultimately does not share his lugubrious worldview.

On the very first page of the book, Lanier hits on three interrelated concerns that other Net pessimists have articulated in the past:

1. Loss of individuality & concerns about “mob” behavior (Lanier: “these words will mostly be read by nonpersons–automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals.”)
2. Dangers of anonymity (Lanier: “Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies.”)
3. “Sharecropper” concern that a small handful of capitalists are getting rich off the backs of free labor (Lanier: “Ultimately these words will contribute to the fortunes of those few who have been able to position themselves as lords of the computing clouds.”)

Again, others have tread this ground before, and it’s strange that Lanier doesn’t bother mentioning any of them. Neil Postman, Mark Helprin, Andrew Keen, and Lee Siegel have all railed against the online “mob mentality” and argued it can be at least partially traced to anonymous online communications and interactions. And it was Nick Carr, author of The Big Switch, who has been the most eloquent in articulating the “sharecropper” concern, which Lanier now extends with his “lords of the computing clouds” notion. [More on that towards the end.]

Singularity Silliness & a Kantian Categorical Imperative for High-Tech

Lanier is fairly thoughtful when walking us through these concerns, although at times his passions get the best of him as we’ll see later. He does a nice job asking people to think twice before taking too big of a gulp of the “free culture” kool-aid and extreme varieties of cyber-collectivism.  More broadly, his book is an attack on what he calls “cybernetic totalism,” or the belief by some extreme digital age optimists that a “hive mind” or “noosphere” is coming about; it’s a vision of the Net as an organism powered by the wisdom of crowds. Lanier thinks such thinking is all bunk and, worse yet, that it has dangerous ramifications for humanity and individuality. He is guided by the equivalent of the Kantian categorical imperative:

I take a mystical view of human beings. My first priority must be to avoid reducing people to mere devices. The best way to do that is to believe that the gadgets I can provide are inert tools and are only useful because people have the magical ability to communicate meaning through them. (p. 154).

Lanier is refocusing the inquiry (about the Net’s impact on society & culture) around the question of whether it has bettered the lot of the individual human being, not the group. What he laments is that the early cyberspace dream was supposedly guided by “a sweet faith in human nature,” but this “has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the Internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature.” (p. 14)  Referring to these folks as “digital Maoists,” Lanier argues that this movement “starts to look like a religion rather quickly”:

The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerge from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud’s calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians. (p. 18)

I too have grown tired of such quixotic techno-utopianism and those Internet pollyannas who sound like they long for the Singularity, global cybernetic consciousness, and life in The Matrix. (Kevin Kelly, I’m looking at you!) But I think Lanier casts this critical net far too wide by suggesting that this thinking has become the dominant mindset among modern digerati. While I agree it has caught on in some circles, I think plenty of others have called out this kookiness or refused to embrace it as a enthusiastically as Lanier suggests.

Lanier’s Critique of the Free Culture / Open Source Movement

Lanier is on safer ground in pushing back against the occasional narrow-mindedness of the free culture / open source movement and their frequently hostility to traditional forms of content creation. Like other Net critics before him, he stresses the occasional downsides of “the wisdom of the crowd” (groupthink, mob-like behavior, puerile comments, etc). And Lanier rightly points out that—contrary to what some free culture / open source advocates would have us think—personal expression and proprietary models have driven some amazing recent innovations, from great video games to Pixar movies to the iPhone. When specifically referring to the work of famed video game innovator Will Wright, creator of The Sims and Spore, Lanier notes:

Wright offers the hive a way to play with what he has done, but he doesn’t create using a hive model. He relies on a large staff of full-time paid people to get his creations shipped. The business model that allows this to happen is the only one that has been proven to work so far: a closed model. You actually pay real money for Wright’s stuff. (p. 132)

And, yet, Lanier notes that, “When Spore was introduced, the open culture movement was offended because of the inclusion of digital rights management software,” and “as punishment for this sin, Spore was hammered by mobs of trolls on Amazon reviews and the like, ruining it public image. The critics also defused what should have been a spectacular debut,” he claims.  I think Lanier makes many fair points here. First, it is certainly true that we occasionally see an entitlement mentality at work with some digital natives who seem to think that intellectual property rights and DRM are akin to a form of slavery. The notion that all intellectual creations must be released immediately into the wild without any constraint, protection, or form of payment is surely the height of digital utopianism, and Lanier is quite right to castigate those who adopt such an approach to culture and its creation.

But, again, one must be careful not to go overboard here. In particular, I think Lanier goes too far when he questions whether open source software has really advanced since the early days of its inception. “Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t produced the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science,” he says. (p. 126) He calls Linux merely “a superbly polished copy of an antique” bit of code, and says that he “long(s) to be made obsolete by new generations of digital culture, but instead I am tortured by repetition and boredom.”  Really? How hard are you looking, Jaron?  Because I believe you can find more—and more interesting—forms of culture today than at any point in human civilization. I’m constantly amazed by the creativity and innovation of all sorts that we see on display every day thanks the Internet and digital technologies— including open source-based efforts.

Generally speaking, I’ve tried to stake out a middle ground, Rodney King (“why-can’t we-all-just-get-along?”) position by arguing that free and open source software (FOSS) and remix culture more generally has offered society enormous benefits, but that FOSS (or collective “wiki” models) will not replace all proprietary business models or methods entirely. Each model or mode of production has its place and purpose and they will continue to co-exist going forward, albeit in serious tension at times.  We should appreciate the benefits of both models and be thankful these distinct modes of cultural production are at work in our modern society and economy.

That said, I find myself increasingly agreeing with Lanier’s worry that “The distinction between first-order expression and derivative expression is lost on true believers of the hive.” He elaborates:

First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something entirely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first-order expression. A movie like Blade Runner is first order expression, as was the novel that inspired it, but a mashup in which a scene from the movie is accompanied by the anonymous masher’s favorite song in not in the same league.(p. 122)

He’s onto something here. I sometimes find myself perplexed by the amount of remix worship going on in cyberspace and worry that the underlying creativity of the original, first-order work is being downplayed or forgotten. And there are plenty of epigones out there who are butchering someone else’s original work of art on a regular basis. Just search YouTube for the phrase “guitar solo” and be prepared to have your ears violated by those who fancy themselves the reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix or Stevie Ray Vaughn.

Of course, some would claim that a redo, remix, or mashup of first-order creations is the highest form of adoration of that original content—even if it is poorly done. Perhaps. But all too often the focus and adoration is on the redo or remix itself, which often doesn’t share the same degree of creative genius as the underlying first-order expression. And then, of course, there are the sticky copyright / fair use battles. Do I need permission to remix first-order expression?  To be clear, I am not against remix; I made that clear here when commenting on Lessig’s book of the same name. But I generally side with those whose adoration and amazement lies with the original creator(s) of the underlying first-order work. Moreover, I also fear that too often there is a blurring between remix culture and“ripoff culture” (i.e., those who aren’t out to create anything new but instead just take something without paying a penny for it).

For those reasons, I sympathize with Lanier’s critique of the free culture movement when it comes the question of derivative works and how little focus is on the underlying first-order expression. And this is exacerbated when the free culture movement adopts an entitlement mentality regarding access to that first-order expression, regardless of the impact of unlimited use on the first-order creator. Lanier fears that eventually this will result in the loss of a great deal of original culture and creativity:

I don’t claim I can build a meter to detect precisely where the boundary between first- and second-order expression lies. I am claiming, however, that the web 2.0 designs spin out gobs of the latter and choke of the former. It is astonishing how much chatter online is driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media and than is now being destroyed by the Net. Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games must be responsible or almost as much bit traffic as porn. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock. (p. 122)

I’m not sure I would go that far, and in some ways Lanier is undercutting his own argument here since he points out that those free culture fanatics in the webosphere are still plenty enamored with old media!  But his broader concern—about us eating our own seed stock—deserves to be taken seriously. It’s great that the online mob still appreciates professional, first-order cultural production, but will they support it monetarily going forward so that it can be sustained? It’s a fair question.

Lanier’s Short-Sighted Critique of Modern Culture

At other points in the book, Lanier’s critique of the free culture movement and the modern Web 2.0 world goes off the rails because it devolves into a subjective attack on almost all modern culture. I find that many Net pessimists engage in this sort of philomaths-vs-the plebians, elites-vs-common folk critique. In defending the continued importance of professional content creators, proprietary business models, or intellectual property rights, many Net critics unfortunately often feel the need to denigrate all digital era culture or digital natives themselves. Helprin, Keen, and Siegel were guilty of this in the extreme in their books; Lanier somewhat less so here.  But he still does so occasionally throughout the book.

For example, Lanier dismisses most modern culture as “retro” and “a petty mashup of preweb culture.” “It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump.” (p. 131) I find this argument largely uncompelling and quite myopic. I believe many Net pessimists (and many other cultural critics, for that matter) are guilty of a form of hyper-nostolgia about those mythical “good ‘ol days” when all was supposedly much better. It’s a common refrain we’ve heard from many social and cultural critics before, of course. But the problem with such cultural critiques is that they are highly subjective in nature. And, like many other critics before him, it seems likely that Lanier’s “adventure window” has slammed shut. Our willingness to try new things and experiment with new forms of culture—our “adventure window”—fades rapidly after certain key points in life, as we gradually get set in our ways. Many cultural critics and average folk alike always seem to think the best days are behind us and the current good-for-nothing generation and their new-fangled gadgets and culture are garbage.

But Lanier’s specific assertion that modern culture has “frozen” and is little more than “a petty mashup of preweb culture” demands closer inspection.  I will be guilty of a bit of subjectivity here myself, but looking back over the list I put together here of my choices for “Best Albums Every Year Since Your Birth,” I am struck by how much incredibly innovative music has been made over the past decade. Among my favorites: Muse, The White Stripes, The Flaming Lips, The Secret Machines, Vampire Weekend, The Killers, Modest Mouse, White Lies, Arcade Fire, Them Crooked Vultures, Silversun Pickups, Stufjan Stevens, Wolfmother, The Airborne Toxic Event, Phoenix, Manchester Orchestra… these bands are making some absolutely amazing music.

Now, if by “retro” Lanier means that some of these modern bands draw upon past musical influences well, then, that is pretty much the history of all music in a nutshell!  Consider my favorite rock band of all time: Led Zeppelin.  Zep was creative beyond belief with a thunderous sound that many others have tried, but failed, to reproduce ever since. If you know anything about Zep, however, you realize how profoundly they were influenced by blues artists. Not only are the influences unmistakable, but their first album is practically a tribute to the genre. But then Zep began experimenting with new sounds based on alternative influences and elevated their art to a whole different level. By their third album, they were drawing upon Celtic influences. By their fifth, east Asian influences can be detected. By their last, they were even toying with a bit of disco. So, are we to conclude from this that Zep was “retro” and “a petty mashup of [previous] culture”? The answer is YES! But only in the sense that all musicians are influenced to some degree by those that came before them.  And the same is true of some modern bands like The White Stripes, Wolfmother and Them Crooked Vultures, all of which are clearly influenced by Zeppelin. (Of course, John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin is also a member of Them Crooked Vultures, so it only makes sense in that case!) Regardless, these are great bands making great original rock music, even if they also draw upon earlier sounds and influences.

In sum, Mr. Lanier and other cultural critics who lament supposed declines in the quality of modern music (or other culture) typically fail to acknowledge the highly subjective nature of their critiques. Moreover, even if we had a metric by which to judge, it is simply much to early to judge how this generation’s music stacks up against previous eras. Regardless, I wish Net critics like Mr. Lanier would stop tying their critiques of the free culture movement to such subjective theories about the supposedly death of quality content or modern culture. It seriously undercuts their case. There are ways to properly express concerns about the potential downsides of the free culture mindset without suggesting the entire digital generation is a lost cause or that all modern culture is moribund.

“Lords of the Cloud” & False Consciousness

I also find Lanier’s “lords of the cloud” critique of social networking and advertising unpersuasive.  Lanier seems to believe that Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 sites are all just part of the hive mind indoctrination scheme. Or, at a minimum, they are turning our brains into Jello: “Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the Internet with the rise of web 2.0,” he claims.  “The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process,” and “using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity.” (p. 48)  I don’t know what the hell that even means, but Lanier’s general crankiness here goes back to his nostalgic view of the supposed passing of Web 1.0’s halcyon days.  As Glenn Harlan Reynolds noted in his review of Lanier’s book:

Mr. Lanier is nostalgic for that era and its homemade Web pages, the personalized outposts that have largely been replaced by the more standardized formats of Facebook and MySpace. The aesthetics of these newer options might be less than refined, but tens of millions of people are able to express themselves in ways that were unimaginable even a decade ago. And let’s face it: Those personal Web pages of the 1990s are hardly worth reviving. It’ll be fine with me if I never see another blinking banner towed across the screen by a clip-art biplane.

Amen. Most of us who endured the Web 1.0 world wouldn’t want to go back to the floppy disk era for one second, regardless of Lanier’s romantic view of it.  And are Web 2.0 sites really “de-emphasizing individual humans” as Lanier suggests?  I think that would come as a surprise to a lot of other web critics who think such sites over-emphasize humans by allowing us to have the equivalent of the “Daily Me”, or hyper-tailored content and endless interactions with chums. Of course, the reality is somewhere in between: modern social networking sites and Web 2.0 offer opportunities for us to engage in, or view moments of, both beautiful self-expression and embarrassingly excessive narcissistic immaturity.

But even if Lanier could be convinced that Web 2.0 offered more opportunities for exactly the sort of individual excellence he desires, he wouldn’t care because his view of the modern Netizenry is that we are all just mindless sheep who are being ruthlessly exploited by our commercial masters. “The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers–we might call them messianic advertisers–who could someday show up.” (p. 54) He then goes into some nonsense about social networking sites manipulating people and “violating privacy and dignity.”  What’s ironic about this argument is that Mr. Lanier goes around calling people “digital Maoists” and yet here he is trotting out some classic Marxist tripe about consumer manipulation! As Clive Thompson’s correctly noted in his review of the book:

Lanier’s critique of online life has a strong whiff of the “false consciousness” dicta that gained currency in the aftermath of the New Left. Lanier assumes people are essentially imprisoned by the software around them and are so witless that they aren’t aware of how impoverished their lot has become—Facebook as the high-tech iteration of Plato’s cave. Now, it’s certainly true that software can influence our behavior… But it’s also true that users aren’t so easily controlled. Indeed, the history of technology is full of people using software in ways the designers never intended or even imagined.

Quite right. Indeed, someone as sapient as Lanier should have a little more faith in humanity and their ability to use new tools and adapt to new realities to better the lot of mankind. Sadly, he’s bought into the sad ‘we’re-all-just-sheep-being-led-to-the-slaughter’ view of things.

Conclusion

Despite the reservations I’ve raised here, Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget is an important book worthy of your attention. It will certainly find a slot high up on my next end-of-year “Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books” list since we’ll be talking about Lanier’s book for many years to come.

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Additional Thoughts on Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget:

• review by Michael Agger in Slate
• review by Glenn Harlan Reynolds that appeared in The Wall Street Journal
• a review by Ellen Ullman that appeared in The Washington Post
• a review by Clive Thompson
• New York Times article by John Tierney, “The Madness of Crowds and an Internet Delusion“
• Lanier interview on NPR’s “On Point” with Tom Ashbrook, “Where the Web Went Wrong“
• WNYC radio debate between Nina Paley and Jaron Lanier
• some typically snarky commentary from Mike Masnick of TechDirt
• + Jaron’s personal website and his bio
• + some videos featuring Jaron discussing or debating the themes from You Are Not a Gadget…

A PBS News Hour Debate

Jaron Lanier: Staying Human in a Tech-Driven World from Richard Huskey on Vimeo.

[I’ve been working on an outline for a book I hope to write surveying technological skepticism throughout history. I first started thinking about this topic two years when I noticed that a great number of recent books about Internet policy could generally be grouped into one of two camps: Internet optimists vs. Internet pessimists. I subsequently penned an essay on the subject that generated a fair bit of attention. So, I figured I must be on to something, and the more Net policy books I read, the more I realized that the divisions between these two camps were growing wider and increasingly heated. Thus, I thought I would share this very rough draft (much of it still in outline form) of the opening chapter of that book I want to write about this great intellectual war over the impact of technology on society. I invite reader input. Update Jan. 2011: I finally published a full-length essay on this topic. You can find it here. ]

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The impact of technological change on culture, learning, and morality has long been the subject of intense debate, and every technological revolution brings out a fresh crop of both pessimists and pollyannas. Indeed, a familiar cycle has repeat itself throughout history whenever new modes of production (from mechanized agriculture to assembly-line production), means of transportation (water, rail, road, or air), energy production processes (steam, electric, nuclear), medical breakthroughs (vaccination, surgery, cloning), or communications techniques (telegraph, telephone, radio, television) have appeared on the scene.

The cycle goes something like this. A new technology appears. Those who fear the sweeping changes brought about by this technology see a sky that is about to fall. These “techno-pessimists” predict the death of the old order (which, ironically, is often a previous generation’s hotly-debated technology that others wanted slowed or stopped).  Embracing this new technology, they fear, will result in the overthrow of traditions, beliefs, values, institutions, business models, and much else they hold sacred.

The pollyannas, by contrast, look out at the unfolding landscape and see mostly rainbows in the air. Theirs is a rose-colored world in which the technological revolution du jour is seen as improving the general lot of mankind and bringing about a better order.  If something has to give, then the old ways be damned! For such “techno-optimists,” progress means some norms and institutions must adapt—perhaps even disappear—for society to continue its march forward.

Our current Information Revolution is no different. It too has its share of techno-pessimists and techno-optimists. Indeed, before most of us had even heard of the Internet, people were already fighting about it—or at least debating what the rise of the Information Age meant for our culture, society, and economy.

Web 1.0 Fight: Postman vs. Negroponte

In his 1992 anti-technology screed Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, the late social critic Neil Postman greeted the unfolding Information Age with a combination of skepticism and scorn.  Indeed, Postman’s book was a near-perfect articulation of the techo-pessimist’s creed.  “Information has become a form of garbage,” he claimed, “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.”

Postman opened his polemic with the well-known allegorical tale from Plato’s Phaedrus about the dangers of the written word.  Postman reminded us how King Thamus responded to the god Theuth, who boasted of how his invention of writing would improve the wisdom and memory of the masses relative to the oral tradition of learning.  King Thamus shot back, “the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it.”  King Thamus then passed judgment himself about the impact of writing on society, saying he feared 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.”

And so Postman—fancying himself a bit of a modern King Thamus—cast judgment on today’s comparable technological advances and those who would glorify them:

we are currently surrounded by throngs of zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo. We might call such people Technophiles. They gaze on technology as a lover does on his beloved, seeing it as without blemish and entertaining no apprehension for the future. They are therefore dangerous and to be approached cautiously. … If one is to err, it is better to err on the side of Thamusian skepticism.

Nicholas Negroponte begged to differ. An unapologetic Theuthian technophile, the former director of the MIT Media Lab responded on behalf of the techno-optimists in 1995 with his prescient polemic, Being Digital.  It was a paean to the Information Age, for which he served as one of the first high prophets—with Wired magazine’s back page frequently serving as his pulpit during the many years he served as a regular columnist.

Appropriately enough, the epilogue of Negroponte’s Being Digital was entitled “An Age of Optimism” and, like the rest of the book, it stood in stark contrast to Postman’s pessimistic worldview.  Although Negroponte conceded that technology indeed had a “dark side” in that it could destroy much of the old older, he believed that was inevitable, but also not cause for much concern. “Like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped,” he insisted, and we must learn to appreciate the ways “digital technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony.” (This sort of techno-determism is a theme we would see on display in many of the works by other Internet optimists that followed in Negroponte’s footsteps.)

To Postman’s persistent claim that America’s technopoly lacked a moral compass, Negroponte again conceded the point but took the glass-is-half-full view: “Computers are not moral; they cannot resolve complex issues like the rights to life and to death. But being digital, nevertheless, does give much cause for optimism.”  His defense of the digital age rested on the “four very powerful qualities that will result in its ultimate triumph: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering.” Gazing into his techno-crystal ball in 1995, Negroponte forecast the ways in which those qualities would revolutionize society:

The access, the mobility, and the ability to effect change are what will make the future so different from the present. The information superhighway may be mostly hype today, but it is an understatement about tomorrow. It will exist beyond people’s wildest predictions. As children appropriate a global information resource, and as they discover that only adults need learner’s permits, we are bound to find new hope and dignity in places where very little existed before.

In many ways, that’s the world we occupy today; a world of unprecedented media abundance and unlimited communications and connectivity opportunities.

But the great debate about the impact of digitization and information abundance would not end with Postman and Negroponte. Theirs would only be Act I in a drama that continues to unfold, and it is growing more heated and complex with each new character that comes on the stage.

Web War II

The disciples of Postman and Negroponte are a colorful, diverse lot. The players in Act II of this drama occupy many diverse professions—journalists, technologists, business consultants, sociologists, economists, lawyers, etc.—and they are disagreeing even more vehemently and vociferously about the impact of the Internet and digital technologies than Postman and Negroponte did.

In Exhibit 1, I have listed the Internet optimists and pessimists and list their key works.

In Exhibit 2, I have sketched out the major lines of disagreement between these two camps and divided those disagreements into (1) Cultural / Social beliefs vs. (2) Economic / Business beliefs.

When you boil it all down, there are two major points of contention between the optimists and pessimists:

1. The impact of technology on learning & culture & the role of experts vs. amateurs in that process.
2. The promise—or perils—of personalization.

The Debate over Learning & Culture

• Internet optimists and pessimists have engaged in heated debates over role of amateur production and benefits of abundant media

• pessimists fear impact of Net and “cult of amateur” on “professional” media

• without “enforceable scarcity” and protection for the “enlightened class,” the pessimists wonder how “high quality” news or “high art” will get funded and disseminated; and they worry about the decline of authority & truth

• optimists argue that new modes of production (namely peer-production) will be an adequate (if not superior) alternative
  • or they believe new business models will evolve to support professional media

• but pessimists argue that all the new choices are largely false choices
  • participatory democracy all bunk (“mob rule” and rumor mill mongering)
  • just more force-fed commercial propaganda; concerns about advertising
  • also worry about “digital sharecropping” where small group of elites make money off backs of free labor

• optimists counter that Web 2.0 offers real choices and voices
  • optimists argue that many (perhaps most) aren’t in it for the money
  • they do it for love of knowledge & “free culture”

• pessimists argue that “free” culture isn’t free at all; often just parasitic copying / piracy
  • could have profound ramifications for future of news, journalism, “high culture”
  • fear loss of trusted intermediaries & authorities
  • could “dumb down” the masses

• the centrality of Wikipedia to the discussion serves as a microcosm of the entire debate
  • does Wikipedia mark the decline of authority?
  • what is “truth,” the pessimists ask? [“truthiness” fear, a la S. Colbert & Manjoo]
  • who and what can be trusted if everyone is considered an authority?
  • on the other hand, what if it works (at least reasonably well)?
  • what does that tell us about peer production / crowdsourcing?

The Debate over the Promise or Perils of Personalization

• both optimists and pessimists agree that Net & Web 2.0 is leading to more “personalized” media experience
  • but they vehemently disagree on whether that is good or bad
  • what will it mean for participatory democracy?

• pessimists fear Negroponte’s “Daily Me” (i.e., hyper-personalization) leads to:
  • homogenization
  • close-mindedness
  • an online echo-chamber
  • overload of choices + just more corporate brainwashing

• optimists counter that personalization leads to:
  • heterogeneity / chance for everyone to be heard
  • openness
  • exposure to new thinking and opinions
  • abundance of choices = diversity of thought / participation
• in the extreme, some pessimists fear the “mechanization of the soul” and the “surrender to the machine”

• while that may sound a bit over the top, it doesn’t help that some optimists speak of the noosphere & “global consciousness” and seem to long for the eventual singularity

Who’s Got It Right?

• On balance, I believe the optimists generally have the better of the argument today
• But pessimists make many fair points that deserve to be taken seriously; they just need a more reasonable articulation of (some of) those concerns
• The better approach is what I call “pragmatic optimism,” which attempts to rid the optimist paradigm of its kookier, pollyannish thinking while also taking into account some of the very legitimate concerns raised by the pessimists, but rejecting its Luddite fringe in the process.

Thoughts on the Pessimists…

• First and foremost, the pessimists need better spokespersons! Or, they at least need a more moderated, less hysterical tone when addressing concerns raised by technological progress (many of which are quite legitimate).

• It’s often difficult to take the pessimists seriously when they persist with their seeming outright hostility to most forms of technological progress / change. Every one of them claim they are not a Luddite, and often I believe them. But the tone of some of their writing, and the thrust of some of their recommendations, have clear Luddite tendencies.

• Moreover, their endless name-calling and derision for the digital generation is, at times, just as insulting and immature as they “mob” they repeatedly castigate in their works. Too often, their criticism devolves into philosophical snobbery and blatant elitism. Constantly looking down their noses at digital natives and all “amateur” production doesn’t help them win any converts.

• It’s quite shocking how the pessimists have almost nothing good to say about Wikipedia and demonize it endlessly. Much the same goes for open source and other collaborative efforts. They don’t appear willing to accept the possibility of any benefits coming from collective efforts. And they wrongly treat the rise of collective / collaborative efforts as a zero-sum game; they seem to imagine it represents a net loss of individual effort & “personhood.” That simply doesn’t follow.

• Most importantly, the pessimists need to come to grips with the Information Revolution and offer more constructive and practical solutions to legitimately difficult transitional problems created by disintermediating influences of the digital technologies and Net.

• The nostalgia the pessimists typically espouse for the past is a common refrain of cultural and technological critics who fear that the “good ‘ol days” are behind us and the current good-for-nothing generation and their new-fangled gadgets are steering us straight into a moral abyss.  The truth typically proves less cataclysmic, of course.  The great thing about humans is that we adapt better than other creatures. When it comes to technological change, resiliency is hard-wired into our genes.  We learn how to use the new tools that are given to us and gradually assimilate them into our lives and culture.  Indeed, we have lived through more radical revolutions than the Information Revolution. We can adapt and learn to live with some of the legitimate difficulties & downsides of the Information Age.

• The pessimists are at their best when highlighting the very legitimate concerns about the challenges that accompany technological change, including the impact of the digital revolution on “professional” media and the decline of authority among trusted experts and intermediaries.
  • we absolutely don’t want to lose all that
  • there are real benefits associated with it
  • and we need to find a way to fund “professional” media / art going forward

• But, practically speaking, what would the pessimists have us do if we can’t mitigate these problems? Would they roll back the clock with burdensome restrictions? As Ben Casnocha noted recently: “the wind at the backs of all techno-optimists … [is] the forward momentum of technological development. You cannot turn back the clock. It is impossible to envision a future where there is less information and fewer people on social networks. It is very possible to envision increasing abundance along with better filters to manage it. The most constructive contributions to the debate, then, heed Moore’s Law in the broadest sense and offer specific suggestions for how to harness the change for the better.”  That’s what many pessimists have failed to do in their works.

Thoughts on the Optimists…

• The optimists currently have the better of the debate as the abundance of Web 2.0 riches is generally benefiting culture / society.

• Relative to the past it is almost impossible to see how one could argue society has not benefited from the Internet and new digital technologies. The Digital Revolution has greatly empowered masses and offered them more informational inputs.

• An age of abundance is certainly preferable to an age of information scarcity!

• But optimists need to be less Pollyanna-ish and avoid becoming the “technopolists”  (or digital utopians) that Postman feared were taking over our society
  • Way too much Rousseauian romanticism at work in some optimist writings. All this talk of the Net “remaking man” or human nature is pure rubbish.
  • Not all change is good change; the optimists need to be mature enough to understand and address the occasional downsides of digital life without dismissing the critics.
  • And they need to acknowledge that sometimes the wisdom of crowds really can = the stupidity of crowds (when does collective intelligence devolve into herd mentality?) And all this crazy talk of “the hive mind” and the “noosphere” must end.  Some of optimists sound like they long for life in The Matrix; bring on the Singularity!  That’s when you know an optimists has crossed over into the realm of quixotic techno-utopianism.

• Optimists often overplay the benefits of collective intelligence, collaboration, and the role of amateur production.  They need to frame Wiki / peer-production models as a complement to professional media, not a replacement for it.
  • Could The New York Times really be cobbled together by amateurs each day?
  • Why aren’t there any really compelling open source video games?
  • There is a big difference between “remix culture” and “rip-off culture”
  • “The Long Tail” is not “the future of all business”; but it is an increasingly important part of it, and it is wonderful that it is so much more accessible than it was in the past.
  • Will we really be better off if all professionals & intermediaries disappear? Optimists play the “old media just don’t get it” card too often and snobbishly dismiss all their concerns and efforts to reinvent themselves

• Optimists need to place technological progress in context and appreciate that, as Postman argued, there are some moral dimensions to technological progress that deserve attention.

• Of course, on the other hand, some of those moral consequences are profoundly positive, which the pessimists usually fail to appreciate or even acknowledge.

Conclusion: Toward “Pragmatic Optimism”

• Generally speaking, I believe the optimists currently have the better of the debate. It is impossible for me to believe that we were better off in an era of information poverty & un-empowered masses.

• But there’s a kernel of truth to what the pessimists predict about how the passing of the old order leaving society without some things that might be worth preserving.  And they are certainly correct that each of us should think about how to better balance new technologies and assimilate them into our lives.

• The sensible middle ground position is “pragmatic optimism”: We should embrace the amazing technological changes at work in today’s Information Age but do so with a healthy dose of humility and appreciation for the disruptive impact and pace of that change. [See my “Pragmatic (Internet) Optimist’s Creed” below]

• We need to think about how to mitigate the negative impacts associated with technological change without adopting the paranoid tone or Luddite-ish recommendations of the pessimists.

• And it is important for us to personally exercise some personal restraint in terms of the role technology plays in our life. While pessimists from Plato and Postman certainly went too far, there is a kernel of truth to their claim that, taken to an extreme, technology can have a negative impact on life and learning.  We need to focus on the Aristotelian mean. We must avoid neo-Luddite calls for a return to “the good ‘ol days” on the one hand, while also rejecting techno-utiopian Pollyanna-ism on the other

• Regardless, the old Theuth-Thamus debate about the relationship between technological change and its impact on culture and society will continue to rage. There is no chance this debate will die down anytime soon. And just wait till virtual reality goes mainstream!  Oh brother, now that is going to be a lively debate. I might turn into a Thamusian once I find my son playing a virtual gangster or pimp in “Grand Theft Auto 12: The Immersive Experience.”

• Nonetheless, generally speaking, I remain quite bullish about the prospects for technology to generally improve the human condition.

The Pragmatic (Internet) Optimist’s Creed

by Adam Thierer

I believe that the Internet and digital technologies are reshaping our culture, economy, and society in most ways for the better, but not without some serious heartburn along the way.

I believe that the world of information abundance that has dawned is vastly superior to the world of information poverty that we just left. But I also understand that not all information is equal and that that the rise of abundance raises concerns about information overload, objectionable content, and the role of “authority” and “truth.”

I believe the era of traditional Mass Media is coming to an end, but “professional” media institutions and creators continue to play a vital role in the creation, aggregation, and dissemination of news, information, culture, and entertainment. The Internet, however, will force gut-wrenching changes on traditional media institutions and some of the more traditionally vital ones (ex: daily local newspapers) will struggle to re-invent themselves, or may wither away entirely. And while I believe that “professional” journalism faces very serious challenges from the rise of the Internet and user-generated content, but I also believe that hybrid forms of news-gathering and reporting are offering society exciting new ways to learn about the world around them.

I believe Wikipedia is an amazing example of collection action / intelligence at work, but I also understand it is not without flaws and limitations. I believe Wikipedia is a wonderful complement, but not a complete substitute, for other media and information sources and inputs.

I believe that free and open source software (FOSS) has produced enormous social / economic benefits, but I do not believe that FOSS (or “wiki” models) will replace all proprietary business models or methods.  Each model or mode of production has its place and purpose and they will continue to co-exist going forward, albeit in serious tension at times.

I believe the Long Tail is a powerful phenomenon, but not “the future of all business.” It is now a more important part of the future of business, but not the entirety of it. But it is wonderful that it is more accessible than ever and that we have found ways to monetize it to benefit less well know creators and innovators.

I believe there is a difference between “remix culture” and “ripoff culture.”  Remix culture generally enhances and extends culture and creativity. Blatant content piracy, on the other hand, can discourage the creative efforts of the citizenry and deprive some of society’s most gifted creators of the incentive to produce culturally beneficial works. Likewise, hacking, circumvention, and reverse-engineering all play an important and legitimate role in our new digital economy, but one need not accept the legitimacy of those activities when conducted for nefarious purposes (think identity theft or chip-modding to facilitate video game piracy.)

I believe that the Internet has empowered the masses and created a world of “pro-sumers” that gives every man, woman, and child a soapbox on which to speak to the world. But that does not mean that all of them will have something interesting to say, and I won’t praise user-generated content as a good in and of itself. It’s quality, not volume, that counts.

I believe that the Internet’s empowering nature has changed much about society and culture, but I do not believe in the romanticism some espouse about how the Net “remaking man” or changing human nature in any fundamental way. The Internet does not liberate us from all earthly constraints and it cannot magically solve all of civilization’s problems.

I believe that the Internet is reinvigorating deliberative democracy and giving us increased exposure to a breathtaking diversity of views previously inaccessible. On the other hand, I understand that some will often seek out only those views that reinforce their pre-existing biases.

I believe in the liberating power of freedom of speech and expression, and appreciate that the Internet and the rise of user-generated content has given us a world of unprecedented information and cultural riches. I also understand, however, that unrestricted freedom of speech and expression permits an increase in the prevalence of objectionable, even loathsome, speech and content. On net, however, (excuse the pun) the Internet is the most important medium of human communication and expression yet.

In sum, there are more reasons to be optimistic than pessimistic about the Internet and its role in shaping our lives, culture, economy, and society. But that doesn’t mean it will be all roses going forward.

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Additional Reading (from me):

• Two Schools of Internet Optimism
• The Digital Decade’s Definitive Reading List: Internet & Info-Tech Policy Books of the 2000s
• Grouping Recent Net Books: Internet Optimists vs. Pessimists
• Can Humans Cope with Information Overload? Tyler Cowen & John Freeman Join the Debate
• Book Review: Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in the a Connected Age
• Book Review: Jaron Larnier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
• Book Review: A Better Pencil by Dennis Baron
• Book Review: Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine
• Book Review: Nick Carr’s Big Switch and The Shallows
• Book Review: Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin
• Thoughts on Andrew Keen, Part 1: Why an Age of Abundance Really is Better than an Age of Scarcity
• Thoughts on Andrew Keen, Part 2: The Dangers of the Stasis Mentality
• The 10 Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2009
• The Most Important Tech Policy Books of 2008

Additional Reading (from others):

• Plato on writing
• Cyberspace and Information Overload (by Tim Lee)
• Michiko Kakutani essay in the New York Times, “Texts Without Contexts”
• Andrew McAfee’s terrific essay “I Know I’m Not the Only Internet Optimist…” from his blog
• the great PBS documentary about these issues: “Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier” (+ my thoughts on the film)
• a video from a Family Online Safety Institute event about the PBS documentary that features a discussion about Internet optimism vs. pessimism
• Gordon Crovitz of The Wall Street Journal asks “Is Technology Good or Bad?”
• Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal argues that “Information Overload is Nothing New“
• “Technology Sabbaths and Other Strategies for the Digitized World,” by Michael Sacasas
• “Are We Too Plugged In? Distracted vs. Enhanced Minds“, by Aaron Saenz at the Singularity Hub blog

• and here’s a great video from 1995 featuring the late Neil Postman with his pessimistic take on cyberspace..

Also, courtesy of the Brain Pickings blog, check out this amazing 1972 documentary based on Alvin Toffler’s famous 1970 book, Future Shock. It perfectly foreshadowed so many of today’s technology policy debates.