Over at the American Institute for Economic Research blog, I recently posted two new essays discussing increasing threats to innovation and discussing how to counter them. The first is on “The Radicalization of Modern Tech Criticism,” and the second discusses, “How To Defend a Culture of Innovation During the Technopanic.”

“Technology critics have always been with us, and they have sometimes helped temper society’s occasional irrational exuberance about certain innovations,” I note in the opening of the first essay. The problem is that the “technology critics sometimes go much too far and overlook the importance of finding new and better ways of satisfying both basic and complex human needs and wants.” I continue on to highlight the growing “technopanic” rhetoric we sometimes hear today, including various claims that “it’s OK to be a Luddite” and push for a “degrowth movement” that would slow the wheels of progress. That would be a disaster for humanity because, as I note in concluding that first essay:

Through ongoing trial-and-error tool building, we discover new and better ways of satisfying human needs and wants to better our lives and the lives of those around us. Human flourishing is dependent upon our collective willingness to embrace and defend the creativity, risk-taking, and experimentation that produces the wisdom and growth that propel us forward. By contrast, today’s neo-Luddite tech critics suggest that we should just be content with the tools of the past and slow down the pace of technological innovation to supposedly save us from any number of dystopian futures they predict. If they succeed, it will leave us in a true dystopia that will foreclose the entrepreneurialism and innovation opportunities that are paramount to raising the standard of living for billions of people across the world.

In the second essay, I make an attempt to sketch out a more robust vision and set of principles to counter the tech critics. Building on my last book, as well as a forthcoming one, I outline a sort of “rational-optimist creed.” This vision is inspired by the important work of Matt Ridley and his excellent book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. Generally speaking, rational optimists:

• believe there is a symbiotic relationship between innovation, economic growth, pluralism, and human betterment, but also acknowledge the various challenges sometimes associated with technological change;
• look forward to a better future and reject overly nostalgic accounts of some supposed “good ‘ol days” or bygone better eras;
• base our optimism on facts and historical analysis, not on blind faith in any particular viewpoint, ideology, or gut feeling;
• support practical, bottom-up solutions to hard problems through ongoing trial-and-error experimentation, but are not wedded to any one process to get the job done;
• appreciate entrepreneurs for their willingness to take risks and try new things, but do not engage in hero worship of any particular individual, organization, or particular technology.

Going further, I build on the excellent work of Robert D. Atkinson, founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, who in his 2005 book, The Past and Future of America’s Economy, identified the way “a political divide is emerging between preservationists who want to hold onto the past and modernizers who recognize that new times require new means.” I tried to provide a breakdown for how this conflict of visions plays out in various ways:

I also highlight some of my favorite works by other rational optimists, including, Steven Pinker ( Enlightenment Now), Deirdre McCloskey (Bourgeois Equality), Calestous Juma (Innovation and Its Enemies), Samuel Florman (The Existential Pleasures of Engineering), and Virginia Postrel (The Future and Its Enemies), and Joel Mokyr, (The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress).

I encourage you to jump over to the AIER blog and read both essays in full.

What follows is a response to Michael Sacasas, who recently posted an interesting short essay on his blog The Frailest Thing, entitled, “10 Points of Unsolicited Advice for Tech Writers.” As with everything Michael writes, it is very much worth reading and offers a great deal of useful advice about how to be a more thoughtful tech writer. Even though I occasionally find myself disagreeing with Michael’s perspectives, I always learn a great deal from his writing and appreciate the tone and approach he uses in all his work. Anyway, you’ll need to bounce over to his site and read his essay first before my response will make sense.

Michael:

Lots of good advice here. I think tech scholars and pundits of all dispositions would be wise to follow your recommendations. But let me offer some friendly pushback on points #2 & #10, because I spend much of my time thinking and writing about those very things.

In those two recommendations you say that those who write about technology “[should] not cite apparent historical parallels to contemporary concerns about technology as if they invalidated those concerns. That people before us experienced similar problems does not mean that they magically cease being problems today.” And you also warn “That people eventually acclimate to changes precipitated by the advent of a new technology does not prove that the changes were inconsequential or benign.”

I think these two recommendations are born of a certain frustration with the tenor of much modern technology writing; the sort of Pollyanna-ish writing that too casually dismisses legitimate concerns about the technological disruptions and usually ends with the insulting phrase, “just get over it.” Such writing and punditry is rarely helpful, and you and others have rightly pointed out the deficiencies in that approach.

That being said, I believe it would be highly unfortunate to dismiss any inquiry into the nature of individual and societal acclimation to technological change. Because adaptation obviously does happen! Certainly there must be much we can learn from it. In particular, what I hope to better understand is the process by which we humans have again and again figured out how to assimilate new technologies into their lives despite how much those technologies “unsettled” well-established personal, social, cultural, and legal norms.

To be clear, I entirely agree with your admonition: “That people eventually acclimate to changes precipitated by the advent of a new technology does not prove that the changes were inconsequential or benign.” But, again, we can agree at least agree that such acclimation has happened regularly throughout human history, right?  What were the mechanics of that process? As social norms, personal habits, and human relationships were disrupted, what helped us muddle through and find a way of coping with new technologies? Likewise, as existing markets and business models were disrupted, how were new ones formulated in response to the given technological disruption? Finally, how did legal norms and institutions adjust to those same changes?

I know you agree that these questions are worthy of exploration, but I suppose where we might part ways is over the question of the metrics by which judge whether “the changes were inconsequential or benign.” Because I believe that while technological change often brings sweeping and quite consequential change, there is a value in the very act of living through it.

In my work, including my latest little book, I argue that humans have exhibited the uncanny ability to adapt to changes in their environment, bounce back from adversity, and learn to be resilient over time. A great deal of wisdom is born of experience, including experiences that involve risk and the possibility of occasional mistakes and failures while both developing new technologies and learning how to live with them. I believe it wise to continue to be open to new forms of innovation and technological change, however, not only because it provides breathing space for future entrepreneurialism and invention, but also because it provides an opportunity to see how societal attitudes toward new technologies evolve — and to learn from it. More often than not, I argue, citizens have found ways to adapt to technological change by employing a variety of coping mechanisms, new norms, or other creative fixes.

Even if you don’t agree with all of that, again, I would think you would find great value in studying the process by which such adaptation happens. And then we could argue about whether it was all really worth it! Alas, at the end of the day, it may be that we won’t be able to even agree on a standard by which to make that judgment and will instead have to settle for a rough truce about what history has to teach us that might be summed up by the phrase: “something gained, something lost.”

With all this in mind, let me suggest this friendly reformulation of your second recommendation: Tech writers should not cite apparent historical parallels to contemporary concerns about technology as if they invalidated those concerns. That people before us experienced similar problems does not mean that they magically cease being problems today. But how people and institutions learned to cope with those concerns is worthy of serious investigation. And what we learned from living through that process may be valuable in its own right.

I have been trying to sketch out an essay on all this entitled, “Muddling Through: Toward a Theory of Societal Adaptation to Disruptive Technologies.” [ update: Here it is!] I am borrowing that phrase (“muddling through”) from Joel Garreau, who used it in his book “Radical Evolution” when describing a third way of viewing humanity’s response to technological change. After discussing the “Heaven” (optimistic) and “Hell” (skeptical or pessimistic) scenarios cast about by countless tech writers throughout history, Garreau outlines a third, and more pragmatic “Prevail” option, which views history “as a remarkably effective paean to the power of humans to muddle through extraordinary circumstances.” That pretty much sums up my own perspective on things, but much study remains to be done on how that very messy process of “muddling through” works and whether we are left better off as a result. I remain optimistic that we do!

As always, I look forward to our continuing dialog over these interesting issues and I wish you all the best.

Cheers,

Adam Thierer

Loyal readers know of my generally bullish, optimistic outlook regarding the Internet’s impact on society, economy, and even politics. On that last front, columnist Peggy Noonan has a nice piece in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Internet Helps Us Get Serious.” Serious about politics and political rhetoric, she means. Speaking about how politicians are addressing the current fiscal crisis in the U.S., Noonan argues:

One way to change minds about the current crisis is through information. We all know this, and we all know about the marvelous changes in technology that allow for the spreading of messages that are not necessarily popular with gatekeepers and establishments. But there’s something new happening in the realm of political communication that must be noted. Speeches are back. They have been rescued and restored as a political force by the Internet.

She then makes the point that I always stress when debating Net pessimists: You have to measure progress against the yardstick of the past and ask yourself if we really better off in a world of information scarcity. Noonan does that beautifully when she notes:

In the past quarter-century or so, the speech as a vehicle of sustained political argument was killed by television and radio. Rhetoric was reduced to the TV producer’s 10-second soundbite, the correspondent’s eight-second insert. The makers of speeches (even the ones capable of sustained argument) saw what was happening and promptly gave up. Why give your brain and soul to a serious, substantive statement when it will all be reduced to a snip of sound? They turned their speeches into soundbite after soundbite, applause line after applause line, and a great political tradition was traduced. But the Internet is changing all that. It is restoring rhetoric as a force. When Gov. Mitch Daniels made his big speech—a serious, substantive one—two weeks ago, Drudge had the transcript and video up in a few hours. Gov. Chris Christie’s big speech was quickly on the net in its entirety. All the CPAC speeches were up. TED conference speeches are all over the net, as are people making speeches at town-hall meetings. I get links to full speeches every day in my inbox and you probably do too.

And Noonan debunks the argument skeptics like Cass Sunstein and others have made about the atomization of the audience or fracturing of the public’s attention:

People in politics think it’s all Facebook and Twitter now, but it’s not. Not everything is fractured and in pieces, some things are becoming more whole. People hunger for serious, fleshed-out ideas about what is happening in our country. … A funny thing about politicians is that they’re all obsessed with “messaging” and “breaking through” and “getting people to listen.” They’re convinced that some special kind of cleverness is needed, that some magical communications formula exists and can be harnessed if only discovered. They should settle down, survey the technological field and get serious. They should give pertinent, truthful, sophisticated and sober-minded speeches. Everyone will listen. They’ll be all over the interwebs.

Amen, sister.

Over at the Brain Pickings blog, Maria Popova has posted an amazing 1972 documentary based on Alvin Toffler’s famous 1970 book, Future Shock.  The documentary, like the book, focuses on many of the themes we hear Internet optimists and pessimists debating all the time today:  “information overload,” excessive consumerism, artificial intelligence and robotics, biotechnology, cryonics, the nature of humanity and how technology impacts it, etc, etc.  Again, all the same stuff people are still fighting about today.

Popova correctly notes that “The film, darkly dystopian and oozing techno-paranoia, is a valuable reminder that… societies have always feared new technology but ultimately adapted to it.”  Indeed, at one point in the film we hear, “The future has burst upon us… [but] is technology always desirable?”  And that’s just in reference to the (now-obsolete) supersonic jet transport, or Concorde!  “Changes bombard our nervous systems, clamoring for decisions. New values, new technologies, flood into our lives… Escape from change in today’s society become more and more impossible. But change itself is out of control.”  Geez.. how did we make it past 1972!

The documentary is narrated by Orson Welles, which makes it even more fun.  Welles had a presence that just made everything seem larger than life, and his voice-of-God narration here really added a nice touch to this film.

It’s an absolutely great find.  Here’s the first 10-minute segment from the documentary. Watch all five segments over at Brain Pickings.

I really enjoyed this editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal by sci-fi novelist Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game, among many other books.  Card engages in some interesting soul searching about the impact of the Net and digital technology on our lives, economy, and culture.  He concludes his essay by noting that:

We’re still the same human beings we always were. Consumers still act like consumers; people still search for love and friendship. But the Internet has freed us from the boundaries of distance and many of the risks of embarrassment in social interactions. This re-sorted geography has brought its own pitfalls and forced us to create new rules of etiquette. But just as I have no desire to give up cars, trains and planes to return to the hay-eating, vet-needing, poop-generating, one-horsepower horse, I don’t want to go back to pre-Google research, pre-Amazon shopping, pre-blog newsmedia, or the loneliness of villages limited by geography.

Quite right.  Card is expressing the sort of “pragmatic optimism” I’ve written about here before in my essays about the ongoing battle between Internet optimists and pessimists.  I’ve tried to articulate a sort of middle ground position in this debate that embraces the amazing technological changes at work in today’s Information Age but does so with a healthy dose of humility and appreciation for the disruptive impact and pace of that change. As I’ve noted before, 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.  Read Card’s entire essay to get a better feel for how we can begin to think in that way.

As I continue to do research for what will become a chapter-length version of my old essay, “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society,” I am reading or re-reading some old books that have touched upon these debates through the years.  Earlier this week, after an event over at ITIF, my friend Rob Atkinson reminded me that he had discussed some of these issues in his 2004 book, The Past and Future of America’s Economy.  Specifically, in Chapter 6, “The New Economy and Its Discontents,” Rob showed how “American history is rife with resistance to change,” as he recounts some of the heated battles over previous industrial / technological revolutions. I really loved this bit on page 201:

This conflict between stability and progress, security and prosperity, dynamism and stasis, has led to the creation of a major political fault line in American politics. On one side are those who welcome the future and look at the New Economy as largely positive. On the other are those who resist change and see only the risks of new technologies and the New Economy.  As a result, a political divide is emerging between preservationists who want to hold onto the past and modernizers who recognize that new times require new means.

I like those “Preservationists” vs. “Modernizers” descriptors, and I like the fact that Rob also uses the “dynamism and stasis” paradigm, which he borrowed from Virginia Postrel, who contrasted those conflicting worldviews in her 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies.  As I noted in my essay about “Two Schools of Internet Pessimism,” I think that “dynamist vs. stasis” model — more than anything else I’ve read before or since — best explains the chasm that separates competing schools of thinking about the Internet’s impact on culture, economy, and society.

But Rob’s “preservationists” label is also apt. It correctly identifies the fundamental conservatism that lies at the heart of the pessimistic attitude and the “stasis” mentality.  Many Net skeptics just can’t seem to let go of the past. They are too invested in it or wedded to something about it.  They want to imagine that some earlier time was more unique and valuable than the unfolding present or unpredictable future.  From their perspective, evolutionary dynamism is undesirable precisely because we can’t preserve some of the things which they feel made that previous era great. That something could be a specific form of culture, a particular set of institutions, or any number of other things.  The key point is: The don’t like the fact the technology is fundamentally disruptive and that is dislodges old norms and institutions. What is familiar is more comforting than that which is unknown or uncertain.  That’s the security blanket that the stasis / preservationist mentality provides.

Dynamism, by contrast, requires ongoing leaps of faith since we must continuously embrace, or at least accept, the fundamental uncertainty of social / technological change.  I love the scene at the end of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” [clip below] where Indy has to make the “leap of faith” and step out onto a walkway that doesn’t appear to be there at first. It’s a useful way of thinking about how we must sometimes approach life in the Digital Age.  Who knows what lies around the cyber-corner?  Answer: nobody.  As I’ve pointed out before, what pessimists of all varieties seem to fail to appreciate is that markets are evolutionary and dynamic, and when those markets are built upon code, the pace and nature of change becomes unrelenting and utterly unpredictable. We humans have never seen an industrial or technological revolution that has unfolded at the breakneck pace of the Digital Revolution.  And as I noted in this debate with Zittrain, nothing—absolutely nothing—that was sitting on our desks in 1995 is still there today (in terms of digital hardware / software, I mean) and I doubt that much of what was on our desk in 2005 is still there either.  And our online communities have seen similar revolutions during that time. It’s easy to forget that most of us had never read or used a blog 10 years ago. Or that even just five years ago, few of us had ever heard of Facebook or other social networking sites. And Twitter, Android, and the iPhone were still a ways off.

It’s just amazing how fast disruptive innovation unfolds on the digital frontier.  Again, no one knows what lies around the corner next.  But if we were to adopt the “preservationist” mentality, we might never find out. We have to continue to be willing to take little leaps of faith each day.  It’s vital that we embrace evolutionary dynamism and leave a broad sphere for continued experimentation by individuals and organizations alike because freedom broadly construed is valuable in its own right—even if not all of the outcomes are optimal.  As Clay Shirky rightly noted in his 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody:

This does not mean there will be no difficulties associated with our new capabilities—the defenders of freedom have long noted that free societies have problems peculiar to them. Instead, it assumes that the value of freedom outweighs the problems, not based on calculation of net value but because freedom is the right thing to want for society.

Ryan Radia brought to my attention this excellent Slate piece by Vaughan Bell entitled, “Don’t Touch That Dial! A History of Media Technology Scares, from the Printing Press to Facebook.” It touches on many of the themes I’ve discussed here in my essays on techno-panics, fears about information overload, and the broader optimists v. pessimist battle throughout history regarding the impact of new technologies on culture, life and learning. “These concerns stretch back to the birth of literacy itself,” Bell rightly notes:

Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label.

Quite right. And Bell’s essay reminds us of this gem from the great Douglas Adams about how bad we humans are at putting technological change in perspective:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

So true, and I wish I would have remembered it before I wrapped up my discussion about “adventure windows” in the review of Jaron Lanier’s new book, You Are Not a Gadget, which I published last night. As I noted in that essay:

Our willingness to try new things and experiment with new forms of culture—our “adventure window”—fades rapidly after certain key points in life, as we gradually get set in our ways. Many cultural critics and average folk alike always seem to think the best days are behind us and the current good-for-nothing generation and their new-fangled gadgets and culture are garbage.

Perhaps most important is Bell’s indictment of the science—or complete lack thereof behind—the chicken-littleism:

These fears have also appeared in feature articles for more serious publications: Nicolas Carr’s influential article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for the Atlantic suggested the Internet was sapping our attention and stunting our reasoning; the Times of London article “Warning: brain overload” said digital technology is damaging our ability to empathize; and a piece in the New York Times titled “The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive?” raised the question of whether technology could be causing attention deficit disorder. All of these pieces have one thing in common—they mention not one study on how digital technology is affecting the mind and brain. They tell anecdotes about people who believe they can no longer concentrate, talk to scientists doing peripherally related work, and that’s it. Imagine if the situation in Afghanistan were discussed in a similar way. You could write 4,000 words for a major media outlet without ever mentioning a relevant fact about the war. Instead, you’d base your thesis on the opinions of your friends and the guy down the street who works in the kebab shop. He’s actually from Turkey, but it’s all the same, though, isn’t it? There is, in fact, a host of research that directly tackles these issues. To date, studies suggest there is no consistent evidence that the Internet causes mental problems. If anything, the data show that people who use social networking sites actually tend to have better offline social lives, while those who play computer games are better than nongamers at absorbing and reacting to information with no loss of accuracy or increased impulsiveness.

Amen!

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.

The PBS documentary series Frontline aired a new program last night called “Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier.” [You can watch it online at that link.] Produced by Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff, the 90-minute special touched on several themes we have debated here through the years including:

1. concerns about information overload and multitasking;
2. the role of computers and digital technology in education & learning; and,
3. the nature and impact of virtual reality and virtual worlds on real-world life and culture.

As a student of information history, I’m particularly interested in these subjects because I’ve written frequently about the lively debates between techno-optimists and techno-pessimists throughout history. (See my latest essay: “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.“) I thought Dretzin and Rushkoff did a nice job covering a lot of ground in a very short amount of time and providing balance from folks on both sides of the optimist/pessimist spectrum. Below I’ll just summarize a few notes I took while watching “Digital Nation” and offer a few thoughts on these controversial topics. Mostly, I’ll just discuss the first two, interrelated issues. (My thoughts on the third issue — virtual worlds and virtual reality, can be found in these videos from my recent speech in Second Life).

The Pessimistic Take on the Impact of Digital Technologies

The program opens on a pessimistic note with interviews and survey data suggesting that digital multitasking strains attention spans, especially among students.  We hear of studies suggesting that brain scans suggest a 2-fold increase in brain activity when individuals multitask. And a trip by Rushkoff to South Korea discusses how that early-adopting nation is trying to deal with Internet and gaming addiction among youth. “Causalities of the digital revolution,” Rushkoff calls these kids. He visits addict camps and clinics that focus on re-connecting such kids with the outside world and the simple life.

Similarly, when the program turns to the question of whether the Net and digital technologies help kids learn, we hear from several educators and parents who express concern that the Internet and digital technologies are “dumbing down” this latest generation of kids / students. We hear from critics such as Todd Oppenheimer, author of The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology, Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30), and Clifford Nass of Stanford University, author of the forthcoming book, The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Computers Can Teach Us About Human Interactions.

They question whether technology is helping improve learning & culture, or even suggest that it is destroying opportunities to learn. We here them and others claiming that “kids don’t read anymore” or that youngsters just “think in paragraphs” and can’t write at length or put ideas together in a coherent fashion without getting distracted. They and others express concern that, unless steps are taken, it could have a permanent impact on how future generations think or behave, although they never really get concrete about the actual ramifications or what steps should be taken to avoid them.

The Optimistic Take: Things Are Getting Better

Dretzin and Rushkoff interview others, however, who have a decidedly different view of things. First, they talk to students themselves to get their take and, unsurprisingly, most consider themselves master multitaskers and think information overload is really no big deal.  We also hear from some experts who wonder aloud how much of this “problem” is really just an old-young divide.  They point out that “digital natives” (those who came of age in the digital era) and “digital immigrants” (analog era folks) view these concerns quite differently, and the older digital immigrants who are having a hard time adjusting themselves are often overly concerned about the impact of digital technologies on the younger generation.

Dretzin and Rushkoff also highlight some schools that have successfully integrated digital technologies into their programs with great result. “Technology is like oxygen” we hear one school administrator note when he stresses how important is is for educators accept the reality of digital technology in the lives of students and find ways to make it work for them. While some educators continue to worry about students being driven to distraction by all the things vying for their attention today, others seem willing to embrace this as an opportunity to teach kids about new subjects using new methods of interactive instruction.

Professors James Paul Gee and Henry Jenkins, both experts on new media and its impact on youth and culture, stress that we’ve been here before to some extent. “There are always gains and losses,” Gee notes, since every new technology giveth and taketh away something simultaneously. We suffered loss of memory capability after writing and print came on the scene since we no longer needed to remember and recite long stories. Was that a Net loss for society and culture? Plato thought so.  But as Jenkins notes, concerns about technology-as-distraction is not a new issue, yet humans have survived and adapted over time. [Update: Here are some of Henry’s thoughts about the documentary from his blog.]

My Thoughts: We Are Adapting & Learning to Cope, But Not Without Some Heartburn Along the Way

As I pointed out in my recent “Net Optimists vs. Pessimists” essay, this is actually a very, very old debate. From the time of Plato on down, experts have been engaged in raging debate about the impact of new technologies or methods of communications on human existence.  The hyper-pessimists worry deeply about the impact of technological change on culture, learning, and morality, while various techno-pollyannas proclaim that the new technology in question is improving the general lot of mankind and bringing about a better order.

But there are people on either side of these debates who are closer to reasonable middle ground position. There are skeptics who understand technology brings disruptive change but rightly caution humility in the face of  that change. And there are optimists who welcome change but also are willing to acknowledge the short-term growing pains associated with new technologies.

I’m generally more sympathetic to the latter position, which I have labeled “pragmatic optimism.” As I argued in a previous essay, “Can Humans Cope with Information Overload?”:

I guess I have have a bit more faith in humans than the pessimists do. We humans adapt. We learn to cope. We’re actually pretty good at it, too. It’s not like this is the first social or technological revolution we’ve lived through, after all.  In fact, one could make a good case that many previous revolutions were far more jarring than our modern Digital Revolution.

On the other hand, there is absolutely no denying that technological change can force gut-wrenching changes upon culture, institutions, businesses and individuals.  Digital distraction is real problem and we’d be fools to dismiss the skeptics who fear that kids (and many adults) are finding it more difficult to concentrate on specific tasks or digest long tracts. (Nick Carr penned a controversial article on this topic — “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” — and has a book coming out this year, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, that will expand upon it. John Freeman’s recent book, The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, also touches on these issues.)

We also can’t ignore evidence pointing to the very real physical toll that too much screen time takes on our eyes, ears, and body. I have seen it myself — quite literally — with the rapid deterioration of my eyesight in recent years and the increasing pains in my fingers from all these endless hammering on keyboards, which (like screens) just keep getting smaller and smaller.

And then there are concerns about how digital life is affecting real life and living — sociability and manners, in particular. I’ve noted here before how I’ve tried “push the pause button” increasingly by working mini-“digital sabbaticals” into my life. I try to find specific moments each day to shut the lid on my laptop, toss my smartphone in the drawer, and turn off all my other digital gizmos and gadgets and just go do something terribly old-fashion and non-techie in character.  But the struggle continues.

At the end of the day, however, I continue to believe that we are better off in an age of information abundance that our past eras of information poverty. You don’t need to think that far back to recall a time when the sum of our informational and entertainment experiences were so limited that you could count them on one hand. When I watch my 8 year old daughter and 5 year old son sit in front of a computer today and explore the world, I simply cannot express how joyful I am for the world that lies at their fingertips — and how envious I am that I had none of that when I was growing up!  Sure, when I was growing up in rural Illinois and Indiana back in the ’70s , I had a great collection of books, a nice National Geographic collection, 3 or 4 broadcast TV channels, and a local movie theater. But today my kids have all that plus much, much more at their disposal.  The challenge is figuring out how to make sense of it all and assimilate all these new technologies and new informational inputs into their lives.  But that’s a wonderful dilemma for me (and society) to face!  I’ll take that problem over the previous one of information scarcity any day of the week.

Anyway, make sure to check out “Digital Nation.” [watch it here] It’s a terrific overview of this incredibly interesting ongoing debate. And here are some additional reactions to the program from my friends Stephen Balkam, Larry Magid, and Anne Collier. Finally, Stephen Balkam’s Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) will be hosting a screening of “Digital Nation” here in DC on February 25th.  Rachel Dretzin will be on hand to discuss the program and I’ve been asked to provide some thoughts afterward. Looking forward to that and hope those of you in the DC area will join us.

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I recently finished Tyler Cowen’s latest book, Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World.  Like everything he writes, this book is worth reading and it will be of interest to those who follow technology policy debates since Cowen makes a passionate case for “Internet optimism” in the face of recent criticisms of the Internet and the Information Age in general.

Cowen is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and the co-author, along with Alex Tabarrok, of the wonderful  MarginalRevolution.com blog.  And if you haven’t read Cowen’s In Praise of Commercial Culture, stop what you’re doing and go get yourself a copy right now. Brilliant book.  Compared to that book, Create Your Own Economy is a difficult book to summarize.  Seriously, this book is all over the place… but in a good way.  Even though it sometimes feels like “Tyler’s Miscellaneous Ramblings,” those ramblings will keep you engaged and entertained.  Cord Blomquist did a pretty good job of summarizing the general themes of the book in this post two months ago when he noted that, “despite cultural reflexes that would have us do otherwise, we should embrace… new technologies as means to be more selective about what information we absorb and therefore welcome the increased volume of bytes into our lives.  In his new book, [Cowen] explores technology as a vehicle to help you determine what you really value, not a series of a email-powered torture devices.”  That’s a pretty good summation, but the book is about much more than that.

Instead of a full-blown review, I want to focus on some of passages from Cowen’s book about coping with information overload, which I think readers here might find of interest. In doing so, I will contrast Cowen’s views with those of John Freeman, who just penned “A Manifesto for Slow Communication” in The Wall Street Journal. As we will see, Cowen and Freeman’s differences exemplify the heated ongoing debate taking place among “Internet optimists &  pessimists,” which I have discussed here many times before.  

My favorite chapter of Cowen’s book is entitled, “Why Modern Culture is Like Marriage, In All Its Glory.”  In it, Cowen takes on those who claim citizens are now being overwhelmed by a deluge of digital information, or are suffering from “information overload.”  In particular, Cowen addresses criticisms such as those leveled by social critics like Nick Carr, who penned a widely-read Atlantic article last year entitled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  Cowen responds:

[Carr] missed how people can construct wisdom — and long-term dramatic interest in their own self-education–from accumulating, collecting, and ordering small bits of information. What we’re growing impatient with is bits that are fed to us and that we really do not want. Contrary to Carr, we still have a long attention span when it comes to the broader picture, and if anything Google lengthens our attention span by allowing us to follow the same story over many years’ time. (p. 54)

Additionally, Cowen points out, search tools like Google and other information gathering and processing technologies actually “lengthens our attention spans in another way, namely by allowing greater specialization of knowledge”:

We don’t have to spend as much time looking up various facts and we can focus on the particular areas of interest, if only because general knowledge is so readily available.  It’s never been easier to wrap yourself up in a long-term intellectual project, yet without losing touch with the world around you. As for information overload, it is you who chooses how much “stuff” you want to experience and how many small bits you want to put together. […]  The quantity of information coming our way has exploded, but so has the quality of our filters. (p. 55)

This is an important point and one made previously by Chris Anderson in The Long Tail. I was a bit surprised that Cowen failed to reference him on this point.  Anderson defined filters as “the catch-all phrase for recommendations and all the other tools that help you find quality in the Long Tail” and noted that “these technologies and services sift through a vast array of choices to present you with the ones that are most right for you.” (p. 108 of 2006 hardback edition)  “The job of filters is to screen out [the] noise” (p. 115) or all the information clutter (crap?) that is out there.

Cowen argues that the filtering technologies are getting better at this sifting and processing process, but so too are humans, he says.  The key to this, he argues, is that we are getting better are “ordering” information.  And something real exciting (other might say scary!) is happening to us:

Fundamentally the relationship between human minds and human cultures is changing. … There is quite literally a new plane for organizing human thoughts and feelings and we are jumping on these opportunities at an unprecedented pace.  (p. 9)  […] For a typical person, you encounter the web, and you feel overwhelmed, but you figure out how to impose some local coherence in your own way, if only by using Google search or going to your “favorite places” bookmarks.  You resort to some mental ordering, usually with the aid of technology. At first you’re just struggling to keep up, but the more time you spend on the web, the more you are in control. You move from bookmarks to Facebook to Twitter and then to hyper-specialized sites for ordering the details of your life. You move from bewilderment to a sense of increasing mastery. Economists have studies our species as homo economicus, and a few decades ago, when social science colleagues investigated our game-playing nature, homo ludens was born. Today a new kind of person creates his or her very own economy in his or her head.  The age of homo ordo is upon us. (p. 13)

Cowen is firmly aligning himself with what I have referred to as the “Internet Optimist” school of thinking.  As I pointed out in my “Internet Optimists vs. Internet Pessimists” essay last September, recent commentators on the impact of Internet on culture and economics tend to fall into one of these two camps.  There’s very little middle ground.

The optimists argue that the Internet and Information Age are improving the general lot of mankind and bringing about a better order.  Even if some norms and institutions are being forced to adapt or disappear, that’s a small price to pay for the amazing advancements that the Internet has brought us.  The Internet pessimists see things quite differently.  Net skeptics such as the late Neil Postman, Carr, Andrew Keen, Lee Siegel, and Mark Helprin have argued that the Internet is destroying popular culture and professional media, that it is calling “truth” and “authority” into question by over-glamorizing amateurism and user-generated content, and that increased personalization and customization is damaging deliberative democracy by leading to homogenization, close-mindedness, and an online echo-chamber. Here’s the chart I used in a previous essay to highlight the differences between these two camps:

Now joining the ranks of the skeptics is John Freeman, the acting editor of Granta magazine and the author of the forthcoming book, The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, which is due out in October.  As mentioned above, an excerpt from the book appeared in weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal. In that essay, Freeman makes an eloquent case that we should all take a collective pause and consider what the Internet and all this information and digital gadgetry means for life and how we live it:

In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and per­sonal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget. This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, work­place meltdowns, and unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen? If we are to step off this hurtling machine, we must reassert principles that have been lost in the blur. It is time to launch a manifesto for a slow communication movement, a push back against the machines and the forces that encourage us to remain connected to them. Many of the values of the Internet are social improvements—it can be a great platform for solidarity, it rewards curiosity, it enables convenience. This is not the mani­festo of a Luddite, this is a human manifesto. If the technology is to be used for the betterment of human life, we must reassert that the Internet and its virtual information space is not a world unto itself but a supplement to our existing world…

I take Freeman at his word that he is not out to pen a Luddite manifesto and I very much  look forward to reading his book.  I do hope he makes a better case than some other Internet skeptics — especially Keen, Siegel, and Helprin — who have unfortunately crossed that Luddite line with their tedious, anti-all-things-digital screeds.  Simply stated, the pessimists need a better spokesman.  They raise valid concerns that deserve to be taken seriously and yet it is extremely difficult to take them seriously when they persist in their seeming outright hostility to almost all technological change. The skeptics need a more balanced, less fanatical approach to addressing concerns about the Information Age and information overload.  I hope Mr. Freeman can provide it.  I look forward to his book to see if he has.

Nonetheless, I generally side with Cowen and the Internet optimists — at least when it comes to concerns about information overload.  I guess I have have a bit more faith in humans than the pessimists do. We humans adapt. We learn to cope. We’re actually pretty good at it, too. It’s not like this is the first social or technological revolution we’ve lived through, after all.  In fact, one could make a good case that many previous revolutions were far more jarring than our modern Digital Revolution.

Of course, that’s not to say that change can’t be gut-wrenching and destructive — of both economies and cultures. When I engage in debate with conservative-minded friends about the supposed destructive influences of new forms of pop culture (rock-and-roll or video games, for example), I don’t deny that new media and communications technologies alter culture and behavior in many ways, some negative. But, again, we adapt and learn to cope. The world goes on. It doesn’t get better in every way, but it does in most. I love industrial rock music and violent video games.  Am I a bad person? An uniformed one?  Well, guess what… there are millions out there like me who are getting along just fine, raising a family, holding down steady work, and being good little community citizens.  Perhaps I would swear less if I didn’t grow up listening to punk rock. Then again, my dad and his dad hated all forms of rock music but swore like sailors with their pants on fire.

Regardless, even if you align with the skeptics and believe that, on balance, things (speech, culture, communications, or whatever else) are getting worse because of the Internet and digital media, it begs the obvious questions: What, exactly do you want to do about it?  While I can appreciate the concerns raised by social and technological critics such as Mr. Freeman, they rarely seem to be willing to explain how far they would go to reverse whatever problem it is they have identified.  As Ben Casnocha pointed out in this excellent review of Tyler Cowen’s book, which appeared in The American:

The factor most in Cowen’s favor is the wind at the backs of all techno-optimists like his brethren Clay Shirky and Don Tapscott: 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.

I generally agree with Mr. Casnocha except I would argue that, at least in theory, it would be possible to turn back the clock with repressive enough means.  About the closest that any of the Internet pessimists ever came to explaining what that might mean in practice was this 2007 article by Andrew Keen in Advertising Age in which he claimed that the only way to save traditional media outlets and their advertising support mechanisms was to “re-create media scarcity”:

That means less user-generated content and more professionally created information and entertainment, less technology and more creativity. The advertising community desperately needs more gatekeepers, more professional creative authorities, more so-called media “elites” who will curate, filter and organize content. That’s the way to re-establish the value of the message. It’s the one commercial antidote to Web 2.0’s radically destructive cultural democracy.

One wonders, how we go about “re-creating scarcity” in this sense. Who exactly brings in the regulatory wrecking ball and starts tearing down digital abundance?  And is that really a sensible solution?  Instead of calling for solutions that would be both intrusive and destructive, can’t we embrace the best of the modern digital age and try to temper its worst elements using other means?

The problem with the Internet optimists, by contrast, is that they only tend to see the upside of the Information Age. They sometimes fall into the trap of being pollyannas who look out at the unfolding landscape and see only rainbows in the air. Optimists need to place technological progress in context and appreciate that, as Neil Postman argued in Technopoly, there are some moral dimensions to technological progress that deserve attention. For example, if Cowen is correct that “the age of homo ordo is upon us” and we humans are now engaging in unprecedented amount of sorting, organizing, categorizing, and so on, is that entirely salubrious? Or, as the pessimists suggest, might there be downsides to that development worth exploring?

But the pessimists need to refocus their concerns and criticisms into more level-headed, practical prescriptions instead of going off the Luddite deep-end with talk of “re-creating scarcity” or “destroying the machine,” as Siegel and Helprin say.  Toward that end, I like a lot of the advice that John Freeman offers in closing of  his essay:

We need context in order to live, and if the environment of electronic communication has stopped providing it, we shouldn’t search online for a solution but turn back to the real world and slow down. To do this, we need to uncouple our idea of progress from speed, separate the idea of speed from effi­ciency, pause and step back enough to realize that efficiency may be good for business and governments but does not always lead to mindfulness and sustainable, rewarding relationships. We are here for a short time on this planet, and reacting to demands on our time by simply speeding up has canceled out many of the benefits of the Internet, which is one of the most fabulous technological inventions ever conceived. We are connected, yes, but we were before, only by gossamer threads that worked more slowly. Slow communication will preserve these threads and our ability to sensibly choose to use faster modes when necessary. It will also preserve our sanity, our families, our relationships and our ability to find happiness in a world where, in spite of the Internet, saying what we mean is as hard as it ever was. It starts with a simple instruction: Don’t send.

At times, I have talked here about my attempts to strike a more sensible balance between my online and offline lives. After my two kids were born, I became acutely aware of the need to take more “digital sabbaticals” or a weekly “technology Sabbath.”  I now try to find specific moments each day to shut the lid on my laptop, toss my mobile phone in the drawer, and turn off all my other digital gizmos and gadgets and just go do something terribly old-fashion or archaic.  Alas, the struggle continues. Even when I swear off digital gadgets or connectivity for a few hours, I still find myself sneaking a peak at e-mail traffic piling up on my phone.

In closing, as an information historian, I find this debate between the Internet optimists and pessimists incredibly interesting. Indeed, we can trace the intellectual roots of this struggle all the way back to the well-known allegorical tale from Plato’s Phaedrus about the dangers of the written word and the great debate between the god Theuth and King Thamus. When Theuth 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.” (Of course, I’d like to think that Theuth got the better of that one!)

And so the great debate about the impact of technological change on culture, learning, and morality continues.  And don’t expect it to ever end.  Just wait till virtual reality technology goes mainstream!  Oh my, that’s going to bring out a whole new batch of Theuthian technophiles and Thamusian technophobes.  And I greatly look forward to the discussion.

P.S. I have a lengthy article in the works entitled, ” Theuth, Thamus & the Great Debate over Technology & Culture,” and I’m currently looking for a publisher.  If anyone out there is interested, please let me know!  It will build on what I have said in this essay as well as those below:

• Grouping Recent Net Books: Internet Optimists vs. Pessimists
• The Pragmatic (Internet) Optimist’s Creed
• Book Review: Nick Carr’s Big Switch
• Book Review: Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine
• 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
• Book Review: Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin
• Review of Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com (in Regulation magazine)

A few months ago, Adam Thierer penned The Pragmatic (Internet) Optimist’s Creed in response to calls from “Internet pessimists” for increased regulation of the Internet on many fronts. Adam‘s recent 4-way debate with pessimists Larry Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain (as well as optimist Declan McCullagh) inspired me to pen the following cheeky homage to Lessig, the Father of Internet Pessimism, whose work has launched a thousand efforts to increase government control of the Internet in the name, ironically, of “freedom:”

Our Lessig, who art in Harvard, Hallowed be thy blog. Thy Free Culture come. Thy Code be done, In Washington as it is in thy Ivory Tower.

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

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

As I noted in my earlier “Net optimists vs. pessimists” essay, after reading Cult of the Amateur, I didn’t think anyone else could ever be quite as over-the-top and Chicken Little-ish as Keen. But after working my way through Siegel’s Against the Machine, I realized I was wrong. It made Keen seem downright reasonable and cheery by comparison! Keen and Siegel seem to be in heated competition for the title “High Prophet of Internet Doom,” but Siegel is currently a nose ahead in that race.

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

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

1. The Net is destroying (or at least greatly diminishing) the role of experts, authority, “truth”, and traditional societal norms and institutions. This is having (or eventually will result in) dangerous ramifications for our culture, economy, and democracy.
2. The personalization and customization that the Information Age and the Internet have spawned is an unambiguously negative development for our society and culture. Moreover, in large part, the entire Web 2.0 experience is largely just about commercial interests furthering their ends.

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

Experts, Authority, and “Truth”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Supposed Perils of Personalization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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