In a recent Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the Internet of Things, Senators Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) “announced legislation that would direct the National highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to establish federal standards to secure our cars and protect drivers’ privacy.” Spurred by a recent report from his office (Tracking and Hacking: Security and Privacy Gaps Put American Drivers at Risk) Markey argued that Americans “need the equivalent of seat belts and airbags to keep drivers and their information safe in the 21^st century.”

Among the many conclusions reached in the report, it says, “nearly 100% of cars on the market include wireless technologies that could pose vulnerabilities to hacking or privacy intrusions.” This comes across as a tad tautological given that everything from smartphones and computers to large-scale power grids are prone to being hacked, yet the Markey-Blumenthal proposal would enforce a separate set of government-approved, and regulated, standards for privacy and security, displayed on every vehicle in the form of a “Cyber Dashboard” decal.

Leaving aside the irony of legislators attempting to dictate privacy standards, especially in the post-Snowden world, it would behoove legislators like Markey and Blumenthal to take a closer look at just what it is they are proposing and ask whether such a law is indeed necessary to protect consumers. For security in particular, there may be concerns that require redress, but if one looks at the report, it becomes apparent that it lacks a very important feature:: no specific examples of real car hacking are mentioned. The only examples illustrated in the report are described in brief detail:

An application was developed by a third party and released for Android devices that could integrate with a vehicle through the Bluetooth connection. A security analysis did not indicate any ability to introduce malicious code or steal data, but the manufacturer had the app removed from the Google Play store as a precautionary measure.

Great! The company solved the problem. What about the other instance cited in the report?

Some individuals have attempted to reprogram the onboard computers of vehicles to increase engine horsepower or torque through the use of “performance chips”. Some of these devices plug into the mandated onboard diagnostic port or directly into the under-the-hood electronics system.

So the only two examples of “car hacking” described in the Markey report are essentially duds. The first is a non-issue, since the company (1) determined there was little security risk involved and (2) removed the item from the market anyways, just to be sure. The second is, in a sense, hacking, but it is individual car owners doing it to their own cars. Neither of these cases appears to be sufficient grounds for imposing a set of arbitrary and, in many cases, capriciously anti-innovation approaches to privacy and data security in cars.

In the wake of the report’s release, this past Tuesday, March 10, General Motors, Toyota, and Ford were all hit with a nationwide class action lawsuit, alleging that the companies concealed “dangers posed by a lack of electronic security in a vast swath of vehicles.” Specifically, the lawsuit is aimed at the presence of controller area network (CAN) buses, which act as data hubs between the various electronic systems in a car. These systems are, indeed, susceptible to hacking, but no more than any personal computer that is connected to the Internet.

The trouble with this lawsuit, brought by the Stanley Law Group, is that it has not cited any specific harms that have occurred as a result of this “defect” (as a side note, saying a computer being susceptible to hacking constitutes a defect in design is the equivalent of saying an airplane that is susceptible to lightning strikes is fundamentally defective). Rather, the plaintiffs argue that “[w]e shouldn’t need to wait for a hacker or terrorist to prove exactly how dangerous this is before requiring car makers to fix the defect.”

As Adam Thierer and I pointed out in our 2014 paper, Removing Roadblocks to Intelligent Vehicles and Driverless Cars:

Manufacturers have powerful reputational incentives at stake here, which will encourage them to continuously improve the security of their systems. Companies like Chrysler and Ford are already looking into improving their telematics systems to better compartmentalize the ability of hackers to gain access to a car’s controller-area-network bus. Engineers are also working to solve security vulnerabilities by utilizing two-way data-verification schemes (the same systems at work when purchasing items online with a credit card), routing software installs and updates through remote servers to check and double-check for malware, adopting of routine security protocols like encrypting files with digital signatures, and other experimental treatments. (pg. 40-41)

It’s always easy to see the potential for abuse and harm with any new emerging technology, but optimism and fortitude in the face of the uncertain is what helps society, and individuals, grow and progress. Car hacking, while certainly a viable concern, is not so ubiquitous that it necessitates a heavy-handed regulatory approach. Rather, we should permit various standards to emerge and attempt to deal with possible harms. In this way, we can experiment to properly determine what approaches work and what do not. Federal standards imposed from on high assume that firms and individuals are not capable of working through these murky issues. We should be a bit more optimistic about the human capacity for ingenuity and adaptability.

To end on something of a more optimistic note, Tom Vanderbilt of Wired magazine gives keen insight into the reality of regulating based on hypothetical scenarios:

Every scenario you can spin out of computer error – what if the car drives the wrong way – already exists in analog form, in abundance. Yes, computer-guidance systems and the rest will require advances in technology, not to mention redundancy and higher standards of performance, but at least these are all feasible, and capable of quantifiable improvement. On the other hand, we’ll always have lousy drivers.

Additional Reading 

• Law review article: “Removing Roadblocks to Intelligent Vehicles and Driverless Cars,” September 17, 2014.
• “Don’t Hit the (Techno-)Panic Button on Connected Car Hacking & IoT Security,” February 10, 2015.
• “Don’t Slam the Brakes on Smart Cars,” December 1, 2014.
• “Intelligent Vehicles Could Save Lives,” November 25, 2014.
• Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom (2014)

The use of unmanned aircraft systems, or “drones,” for private and commercial uses remains the subject of much debate. The issue has been heating up lately after Congress ordered the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to integrate UASs into the nation’s airspace system by 2015 as part of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012.

The debate has thus far centered mostly around the safety and privacy-related concerns associated with private use of drones. The FAA continues to move slowly on this front based on a fear that private drones could jeopardize air safety or the safety of others on the ground. Meanwhile, some privacy advocates are worried that private drones might be used in ways that invade private spaces or even public areas where citizens have a reasonable expectation of privacy. For these and other reasons, the FAA’s current ban on private operation of drones in the nation’s airspace remains in place.

But what about the speech-related implications of this debate? After all, private and commercial UASs can have many peaceful, speech-related uses. Indeed, to borrow Ithiel de Sola Pool’s term, private drones can be thought of as “technologies or freedom” that expand and enhance the ability of humans to gather and share information, thus in turn expanding the range of human knowledge and freedom.

A new Mercatus Center at George Mason University working paper, “News from Above: First Amendment Implications of the Federal Aviation Administration Ban on Commercial Drones,” deals with these questions.  This 59-page working paper was authored by Cynthia Love, Sean T. Lawson, and Avery Holton. (Love is currently a Law Clerk for Judge Carolyn B. McHugh in 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Lawson and Holton are affliated with the Department of Communication at the University of Utah.)

“To date, little attention has been paid to the First Amendment implications of the [FAA] ban,” note Love, Lawson, and Holton. Their article argues that “aerial photography with UASs, whether commercial or not, is protected First Amendment activity, particularly for news-gathering purposes. The FAA must take First Amendment-protected uses of this technology into account as it proceeds with meeting its congressional mandate to promulgate rules for domestic UASs.” They conclude by noting that “The dangers of [the FAA’s] regulatory approach are no mere matter of esoteric administrative law. Rather, as we have demonstrated, use of threats to enforce illegally promulgated rules, in particular a ban on journalistic use of UASs, infringes upon perhaps our most cherished constitutional right, that of free speech and a free press.”

The authors note that we already have a well-established set of principles that guide how government may set content-neutral regulations related to the time, place, or manner for how certain technologies can be used. Unfortunately, the FAA doesn’t seem to be paying any attention to this time-tested jurisprudence. As the authors note:

Because the airspace within a public forum should itself be considered a public forum, the government may only restrict the journalistic use of UAS technology with content-neutral regulations of the time, place, or manner of such use. Such regulations must be “justified without reference to the content of the regulated speech,” be “narrowly tailored to serve a significant government interest,” and “leave open ample alternative channels of communication.” The FAA’s blanket ban on commercial use fails to meet this test. The FAA’s ban is not a reasonable time, place, or manner restriction.

This new paper by Love, Lawson, and Holton will hopefully inform future policymaking and judicial activity on this front and, if nothing else, make the FAA to realize that it is not above the law–and in this case the First Amendment–when it comes to drone policy. Please read the entire paper for more details. It is exceptionally well done and could be a real game-changer in these debates.

P.S. I plan on attaching Love, Lawson, and Holton’s paper to my filing to the FAA next week in its proceeding on model aircraft regulation. The filing date for that proceeding was extended this summer and comments are now due next week. I will post my filing here shortly. The Mercatus Center filed comments with the FAA earlier about the prompt integration of drones into the nation’s airspace. You can read those comments here. You can also read Eli Dourado’s excellent Wired editorial on the matter here and here’s a video of me talking about these issues on the Stossel show a few months ago.

What works well as an ethical directive might not work equally well as a policy prescription. Stated differently, what one ought to do it certain situations should not always be synonymous with what they must do by force of law.

I’m going to relate this lesson to tech policy debates in a moment, but let’s first think of an example of how this lesson applies more generally. Consider the Ten Commandments. Some of them make excellent ethical guidelines (especially the stuff about not coveting neighbor’s house, wife, or possessions). But most of us would agree that, in a free and tolerant society, only two of the Ten Commandments make good law: Thou shalt not kill and Thou shalt not steal.

In other words, not every sin should be a crime. Perhaps some should be; but most should not. Taking this out of the realm of religion and into the world of moral philosophy, we can apply the lesson more generally as: Not every wise ethical principle makes for wise public policy.

Before I get accused of being accused of being some sort of nihilist, I want to be clear that I am absolutely not saying that ethics should never have a bearing on policy. Obviously, all political theory is, at some level, reducible to ethical precepts. My own political philosophy is strongly rooted in the Millian harm principle (“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”) Not everyone will agree will Mill’s principle, but I would hope most of us could agree that, if we hope to preserve a free and open society, we simply cannot convert every ethical directive into a legal directive or else the scope of human freedom will need to shrink precipitously.

Can We Plan for Every “Bad Butterfly-Effect”?

Anyway, what got me thinking about all this and it its applicability to technology policy was an interesting Wired essay by Patrick Lin entitled, “The Ethics of Saving Lives With Autonomous Cars Are Far Murkier Than You Think.” Lin is the director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and lead editor of Robot Ethics (MIT Press, 2012). So, this a man who has obviously done a lot of thinking about the potential ethical challenges presented by the growing ubiquity of robots and autonomous vehicles in society. (His column makes for particularly fun reading if you’ve ever spent time pondering Asimov’s “Laws of Robotics.”)

Lin walks through various hypothetical scenarios regarding the future of autonomous vehicles and discusses the ethical trade-offs at work here. He asks a number of questions about a future of robotic cars and encourages us to give some thoughtful deliberation to the benefits and potential costs of autonomous vehicles. I will not comment here on all the specific issues that lead Lin to question whether they are worth it; instead I want to focus on Lin’s ultimate conclusion.

I commenting on the potential risks and trade-offs, Lin notes:

The introduction of any new technology changes the lives of future people. We know it as the “butterfly effect” or chaos theory: Anything we do could start a chain-reaction of other effects that result in actual harm (or benefit) to some persons somewhere on the planet.

That’s self-evident, of course, but what of it? How should that truism influence tech ethics and/or tech policy? Here are Lin’s thoughts:

For us humans, those effects are impossible to precisely predict, and therefore it is impractical to worry about those effects too much. It would be absurdly paralyzing to follow an ethical principle that we ought to stand down on any action that could have bad butterfly-effects, as any action or inaction could have negative unforeseen and unintended consequences. But … we can foresee the general disruptive effects of a new technology, especially the nearer-term ones, and we should therefore mitigate them. The butterfly-effect doesn’t release us from the responsibility of anticipating and addressing problems the best we can. As we rush into our technological future, don’t think of these sorts of issues as roadblocks, but as a sensible yellow light — telling us to look carefully both ways before we cross an ethical intersection.

Lin makes some important points here, but these closing comments (and his article more generally) have a whiff of “precautionary principle” thinking to it that makes me more than a bit uncomfortable. The precautionary principle generally holds that, because a new idea or technology could pose some theoretical danger or risk in the future, public policies should control or limit the development of such innovations until their creators can prove that they won’t cause any harms. Before we walk down that precautionary path, we need to consider the consequences.

The Problem with Precaution

I have spent a great deal of time writing about the dangers of precautionary principle thinking in my recent articles and essays, including my recent law review article, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” as well as in two lengthy blog posts asking the questions, “Who Really Believes in ‘Permissionless Innovation’?” and “What Does It Mean to ‘Have a Conversation’ about a New Technology?”

The key point I try to get across in those essays is that letting such precautionary thinking guide policy poses a serious threat to technological progress, economic entrepreneurialism, social adaptation, and long-run prosperity. If public policy is guided at every turn by the precautionary principle, technological innovation is impossible because of fear of the unknown; hypothetical worst-case scenarios trump all other considerations. Social learning and economic opportunities become far less likely, perhaps even impossible, under such a regime. In practical terms, it means fewer services, lower quality goods, higher prices, diminished economic growth, and a decline in the overall standard of living.

In Lin’s essay, we see some precautionary reasoning at work when he argues that “we can foresee the general disruptive effects of a new technology, especially the nearer-term ones, and we should therefore mitigate them” and that we have “responsibility [for] anticipating and addressing problems the best we can.”

To be fair, Lin caveats this by first noting that precise effects are “impossible to predict” and, therefore, that “It would be absurdly paralyzing to follow an ethical principle that we ought to stand down on any action that could have bad butterfly-effects, as any action or inaction could have negative unforeseen and unintended consequences.” Second, as it relates to general effects, he says we should just be “addressing problems the best we can.”

Despite those caveats, I continue to have serious concerns about the potential blurring of ethics and law here. The most obvious question I would have for Lin is: Who is the “we” in this construct?  Is it “we” as individuals and institutions interacting throughout society freely and spontaneously, or is it “we” as in the government imposing precautionary thinking through top-down public policy?

I can imagine plenty of scenarios in which a certain amount of precautionary thinking may be entirely appropriate if applied as an informal ethical norm at the individual, household, organizational or even societal level, but which would not be as sensible if applied as a policy prescription. For example, parents should take steps to shield their kids from truly offensive and hateful material on the Internet before they are mature enough to understand the ramifications of it. But that doesn’t mean it would be wise to enshrine the same principle into law in the form of censorship.

Similarly, there are plenty of smart privacy and security norms that organizations should practice that need not be forced on them by law, especially since such mandates would have serious costs if mandated. For example, I think that organizations should feel a strong obligation to safeguard user data and avoid privacy and security screw-ups. I’d like to see more organizations using encryption wherever they can in their systems and also delete unnecessary data whenever possible. But, for a variety of reasons, I do not believe any of these things should be mandated through law or regulation.

Don’t Foreclose Experimentation

While Lin rightly acknowledges the “negative unforeseen and unintended consequences” of preemptive policy action to address precise concerns, he does not unpack the full ramifications of those unseen consequences. Nor does he answer how the royal “we” separate the “precise” from the “general” concerns? (For example, are the specific issues I just raised in the preceding paragraphs “precise” or “general”? What’s the line between the two?)

But I have a bigger concern with Lin’s argument, as well with the field of technology ethics more generally: We rarely hear much discussion of the benefits associated with the ongoing process of trial-and-error experimentation and, more importantly, the benefits of failure and what we learn — both individually and collectively — from the mistakes we inevitably make.

The problem with regulatory systems is that they are permission-based. They focus on preemptive remedies that aim to forecast the future, and future mistakes (i.e., Lin’s “butterfly effects”) in particular.  Worse yet, administrative regulation generally preempts or prohibits the beneficial experiments that yield new and better ways of doing things — including what we learn from failed efforts at doing things. But we will never discover better ways of doing things unless the process of evolutionary, experimental change is allowed to continue. We need to keep trying and failing in order to learn how we can move forward. As Samuel Beckett once counseled: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” Real wisdom is born of experience, especially mistakes we make along the way.

This is why I feel so passionately about drawing a distinction between ethical norms and public policy pronouncements.  Law forecloses. It is inflexible. It does not adapt as efficiently or rapidly as social norms do. Ethics and norms provide guidance but also leave plenty of breathing room for ongoing experimentation, and they are refined continuously and in response to ongoing social developments.

It is worth noting that ethics evolve, too. There is a sort of ethical trial-and-error that occurs in society over time as new developments challenge, and then change, old ethical norms. This is another reason we want to be careful about enshrining norms into law.

Thus, policymakers should not be imposing prospective restrictions on new innovations without clear evidence of actual, not merely hypothesized, harm. That’s especially the case since, more often than not, human adapt to new technologies and find creative ways to assimilate even the most disruptive innovations into their lives. We cannot possibly plan for all the “bad butterfly-effects” that might occur, and attempts to do so will result in significant sacrifices in terms of social and economic liberty.

The burden of proof should be on those who advocate preemptive restrictions on technological innovation to show why freedom to tinker and experiment must be foreclosed by policy. There should exist the strongest presumption that the freedom to innovate and experiment will advance human welfare and teach us new and better ways of doing things to overcome most of those “bad butterfly-effects” over time.

So, in closing, let us yield at Lin’s “sensible yellow light — telling us to look carefully both ways before we cross an ethical intersection.” But let us not be cowed into an irrational fear of an unknown and ultimately unknowable future. And let us not be tempted to try to plan for every potential pitfall through preemptive policy prescriptions, lest progress and prosperity get sacrificed as a result of such hubris.

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

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

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

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

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Check out national security reporter Shaun Waterman’s report on lapses in security using techniques that only recently became known as “social engineering.”

Ms. Sage’s connections invited her to speak at a private-sector security conference in Miami, and to review an important technical paper by a NASA researcher. Several invited her to dinner. And there were many invitations to apply for jobs. “If I can ever be of assistance with job opportunities here at Lockheed Martin, don’t hesitate to contact me, as I’m at your service,” one executive at the company told her.

Then there’s former DHS policy official Stewart Baker’s unusually harsh attack on the “privacy lobby” and Wired reporter Ryan Singel at Volokh.com. The comments are good-quality and interesting.

Knowing how canny Baker is, I would guess that his unusually shrill tone is a ploy to start a fight that helps him sells more copies of his book. But maybe he’s just losing his cool.

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

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

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

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

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

Web 1.0 Fight: Postman vs. Negroponte

In his 1992 anti-technology screed Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, the late social critic Neil Postman greeted the unfolding Information Age with a combination of skepticism and scorn.  Indeed, Postman’s book was a near-perfect articulation of the techo-pessimist’s creed.  “Information has become a form of garbage,” he claimed, “not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems.”  If left unchecked, Postman argued, America’s new technopoly—“the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology”—would destroy “the vital sources of our humanity” and lead to “a culture without a moral foundation” by undermining “certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.”

Postman opened his polemic with the well-known allegorical tale from Plato’s Phaedrus about the dangers of the written word.  Postman reminded us how King Thamus responded to the god Theuth, who boasted of how his invention of writing would improve the wisdom and memory of the masses relative to the oral tradition of learning.  King Thamus shot back, “the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it.”  King Thamus then passed judgment himself about the impact of writing on society, saying he feared that the people “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Web War II

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

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

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

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

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

The Debate over Learning & Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Debate over the Promise or Perils of Personalization

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

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

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

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

Who’s Got It Right?

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

Thoughts on the Pessimists…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on the Optimists…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: Toward “Pragmatic Optimism”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pragmatic (Internet) Optimist’s Creed

by Adam Thierer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

­­­­___

Additional Reading (from me):

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

Additional Reading (from others):

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

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

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

Interesting piece by Farhad Manjoo of Slate today entitled “So Gmail Was Down. Get Over It.” Manjoo notes that Google’s Gmail service went down briefly this week — for an hour and a half — and that led to a lot of people “freaking out” over the downtime. He asks” “Google’s e-mail service works 99.9 percent of time. Why do we freak out during the other 0.1 percent?”

That’s an good question, but I actually didn’t hear all that many people bitching about it this time around. In fact, I am rather surprised how little I heard about this incident. I think that’s because many of us are gradually growing accustomed to a world in which communications networks and digital devices deliver something less than the holy grail of “five 9s” uptime.  That was the standard for telephony and computing in the world I grew up in: 99.999% was the magic number that network engineers aspired to and that many of us in the public generally demanded.

Today, however, we settle for something less.  As Manjoo’s piece about Gmail suggests, we’ll settle “three 9s,” as in 99.9% reliability.  And sometimes we’ll settle for far less than that. Why is that?  I think Robert Capps has part of the answer in his recent Wired essay, “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine.” Capps points out the modern Digital Age has seen the “triumph of what might be called Good Enough tech.  Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere.” He continues:

So what happened? Well, in short, technology happened. The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they’re actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as “high-quality.”  And it’s happening everywhere.

I think that much is obvious. The triumph of “Good Enough” can be seen most notably in how we make phone calls today. Whether its the cell phone call that breaks up or drops out mid conversation, or the Skype call that sounds like two tin cans connected by string, the bottom line is we settle for something far less reliable today than we did in the past. When I was a kid growing up in rural Illinois and Indiana in the 70s, phones were blocky, all black, and plenty expensive. But they worked just fine. The call sounded great. I sometimes long for that quality today when struggling to put together a podcast and having to live with horrendous Skype quality problems.  Or when I am trying to listen to a conference call on my cell phone only to have the call dropped a couple of times, requiring me to call back in several times.

Robert Capps points out we have all made similar trade-offs for music. As an audiophile, I am just sick about the decline of high-quality music. The MP3 revolution has been marvelous in many ways, but the underlying quality of the music’s reproduction is not one of them.  Those of us with high-end audio equipment would be happy to do an “A/B” test for you non-believers any day of the week and show you just how lame over-compressed MP3s and satellite radio sound compared to CDs or, better yet, glorious old vinyl LPs!

But we live with these trade-offs because, as Capps suggests, flexibility, convenience and cost have improved so much.  Who doesn’t love the idea of carrying your entire music collection in your pocket on a media player or mobile phone that is smaller than a deck of cards?  And we all really like the sound of that when the the price is so nice; as in constantly falling. The price of communications connectivity and digital media have both plummeted in real terms compared to the past.

Thus, incidents like Gmail’s brief outage this week are likely to become less concerning for most of us as time goes on. Gmail a great free service that works great 99.9% of that time.  And that’s plenty good enough for most of us.

The latest edition (Version 4.0) of my PFF special report on “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods” is now up.  For those not familiar with the report, it explores the market for parental control tools, rating schemes, education and media literacy efforts, and various other tools, methods, and initiatives aimed at promoting online child safety.  After evaluating that state of this market, I conclude: “There has never been a time in our nation’s history when parents have had more tools and methods at their disposal to help them decide what constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children.”  Moreover, I believe that the parental controls and content management tools cataloged in the report represent a better, less restrictive alternative to government regulation.

Version 4.0 of the report is now over 250 pages long (up from 200 pages in Version 3.0) and it contains almost 70 exhibits (up from 50), 725 references (up from roughly 500), and numerous updates in all five sections of the book. Major updates have been made to the Internet, social networking, and mobile media sections, reflecting the growing importance of those sectors and issues. Other new sections or appendices have also been added to the report, including:

• a new section examining how many households really need parental control tools;
• a new appendix on the downsides of mandatory parental controls and restrictive default settings;
• a new section on the dangers of “deputizing the online middleman” solution as an approach to solving child safety concerns;
• a new appendix reviewing the findings of 5 past online safety task forces;
• … and much more.

I issue major updates once a year and 1 or 2 minor tweaks during the course of the year to reflect the evolution of the parental control and online child safety marketplace and debate. The report is available free-of-charge on the PFF website, and the previous editions of the report are housed there too in case you want to see how it has evolved over the past couple of years. For those interested in taking a quick look at the report, I have embedded it down below the fold as a Scribd file. Finally, as is always the case, I encourage readers to send me updates and suggestions for how to improve the report and I will incorporate them into future versions.

Great piece in Wired by Fred Vogelstein asking “Why Is Obama’s Top Antitrust Cop Gunning for Google?” It paints a pretty good picture of the coming antitrust ordeal that Google is likely to be subjected to by the Obama Administration. And, as usual, I couldn’t agree more with the skepticism that Eric Goldman of Santa Clara University Law School articulates when he notes: “The problem for antitrust in high tech is that the environment changes so rapidly. Someone who looks strong today won’t necessarily be strong tomorrow.”  More importantly, as Vogelstein’s article notes, we’ve been down this path before with less than stellar results when you look at the IBM investigation in the 70s and the Microsoft case from the 90s (a fiasco that is still going on today):

After the government initiated its case against IBM, the company spent two decades scrupulously avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. By the time the suit was dropped in the early 1980s, company lawyers were weighing in on practically every meeting and scrutinizing every innovation, guarding against anything that could be seen as anticompetitive behavior. A decade later, innovation at Big Blue had all but ceased, and it had no choice but to shrink its mainframe business. (It has since reinvented itself as a services company.) Microsoft took the opposite approach. Gates and company were defiant, to the point of stonewalling regulators and refusing to take the charges seriously. “Once we accept even self-imposed regulation, the culture of the company will change in bad ways,” one former Microsoft executive told Wired at the time. “It would crush our competitive spirit.” Gates put it even more directly: “The minute we start worrying too much about antitrust, we become IBM.” Microsoft’s hostility to the very idea of regulation resulted in several avoidable missteps—including remarkably antagonistic deposition testimony from Gates—that ultimately helped the DOJ rally support for its ongoing antitrust suit against the company. Although Microsoft ultimately settled, the public beating appears to have taken a toll on the company, which has been unable to maintain its reputation for innovation and industry leadership.

Read the whole article for all the gory details.  This is going to be the biggest antitrust case of all-time once it is finally launched and I feel confident predicting that it will make many lawyers and consultants very, very rich while doing absolutely nothing to help consumer welfare.  But perhaps those DOJ lawyers can at least get Google to lower the prices for all those services they offer. Oh, wait, they’re all free.  But don’t worry, I’m sure Beltway bureaucrats will do a great job of running something as complex as search algorithms and online advertising markets.  Right.

Fred Vogelstein’s essay in Wired, “Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out” describes the intensifying clash between Google and Facebook—a clash that focuses on the ability to target advertising:

Like typical trash-talking youngsters, Facebook sources argue that their competition is old and out of touch. “Google is not representative of the future of technology in any way,” one Facebook veteran says. “Facebook is an advanced communications network enabling myriad communication forms. It almost doesn’t make sense to compare them.”

Apart from noting that Facebook directs users to Microsoft’s Bing as its default search engine for the Internet at large, the most interesting part of the article is Facebook’s “4-Step Plan for Online Domination”:

1. Build critical mass. In the eight months ending in April, Facebook has doubled in size to 200 million members, who contribute 4 billion pieces of info, 850 million photos, and 8 million videos every month. The result: a second Internet, one that includes users’ most personal data and resides entirely on Facebook’s servers. 2. Redefine search. Facebook thinks its members will turn to their friends—rather than Google’s algorithms—to navigate the Web. It already drives an eyebrow-raising amount of traffic to outside sites, and that will only increase once Facebook Search allows users to easily explore one another’s feeds. 3. Colonize the Web. Thanks to a pair of new initiatives—dubbed Facebook Connect and Open Stream—users don’t have to log in to Facebook to communicate with their friends. Now they can access their network from any of 10,000 partner sites or apps, contributing even more valuable data to Facebook’s servers every time they do it. 4. Sell targeted ads, everywhere. Facebook hopes to one day sell advertising across all of its partner sites and apps, not just on its own site. The company will be able to draw on the immense volume of personal data it owns to create extremely targeted messages. The challenge: not freaking out its users in the process.

Facebook can’t keep losing money forever.  Indeed, investors are willing to keep sinking money into Facebook during Phases 1-3 because they think it will pay off in Phase 4—when Facebook really threatens to be a fGoogle-killer.  But rather the fact that investors are willing to subsidize the creation of a wonderful platform now used by 200 million people (one fifth of all Internet users worldwide), or that Facebook might finally provide a counter-weight to the fearsome Google, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Data (PETD) are appalled.  One commenter on the Wired story put it best:

I find it amazing that people will willingly post personal information to websites that will only use it for data mining and advertising revenue. They lay their entire life open to a corporation that’s only looking to profit from the information said corporation can gather for itself or it’s affiliates. When the government reads our emails, listens to our phone conversations, reads our text messages and monitors what we do online people are outraged at the invasion of our privacy. But then they log in to Facebook or Myspace or Twitter and reveal all. The Facebook “community”. Please. It’s a way for Big Business to pry into our private lives and exploit us in any way they can for the money they can make.

Such arrogant entitlement is astonishing—but hardly atypical: What makes this person (or his PETD comrades) so certain that they really know what’s best for everyone else and that Facebook users are poor, ignorant suckers being victimized by corporate greed?  As Adam Thierer and I have been saying, there is no free lunch! Do the PETD folks expect investors to pour hundreds of millions into building innovative social networks like Facebook out of… love?  As Adam Smith put it, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

While most in the PETD crowd are too young (or just historically deprived) to know the words to  The Internationale (my favorite line: “Masses, slaves, arise, arise!”), one can easily imagine them kicking off PETD meetings with a somewhat more recent anthem, Aquarius, from the hit 1967 rock musical Hair:

When the moon is in the Seventh House And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revalation And the mind’s true liberation

Nothing better captures the spirit of that thankfully-bygone era of narcissistic self-indulgence than the beginning of the 1979 film version:

Yes, Virginia, the marijuana-induced socialist-utopian delusions of the Sixties live on in a new generation of Techno-Aquarians, who want to have their digital cake—and eat yours too.  Something for nothing, free lunch for everyone!  Down with profit, up with privacy!  The “vision” (as in “Golden living dreams of”) behind this frenzy of frustration with online capitalism and PETD’s demands for regulation is what Thomas Sowell has called the “Vision of the Anointed,” “the talented few” who consider themselves wiser than everyone else, and therefore seek to impose their preferences on others, as Adam Thierer and I have both discussed.

But back to Wired:

The drumbeat of controversy surrounding Facebook illustrates the catch-22 the social network faces: It has a massive storehouse of user data, but every time it tries to capitalize on that information, its members freak out. This isn’t an academic problem; the company’s future depends on its ability to master the art of behavioral targeting—selling customized advertising based on user profiles. In theory, this should be an irresistible opportunity for marketers; Facebook’s performance advertising program allows them to design and distribute an ad to as narrow an audience as they would like. (It has also developed a program to create ads that are designed to be spread virally.) But as the Beacon debacle showed, there is a fine line between “targeted and useful” and “creepy and stalkerish”—and so far, not enough advertisers have been willing to walk that line… In a way, Facebook’s dilemma extends from its success. Users see the site as sanctified space, a place to engage in intimate conversations with friends—not to be laser-beamed by weirdly personal advertising. But with initiatives like Connect and Open Stream, Facebook can sell ads beyond its own site. Just as Google’s AdSense program sells ads on any participating Web site, Connect and Open Stream will eventually push Facebook-brokered advertising to any member site or app. But unlike with AdSense, Facebook’s ads could be exquisitely tailored to their targets. “No one out there has the data that we have,” says COO Sandberg.

Better targeted ads?  More useful information for Internet users?  A strong competitor for Google that could provide an alternative channel for advertisers and help drive up advertising revenue for publishers of “free” content and services?  Sounds great for all concerned.  Oh, but some people find relevant advertising “creepy?”  Ah, well, let’s call the whole thing off!  I’m sure Facebook will get by just fine selling crudely targeted ads on its own site for pennies a click.  Maybe they could ask for donations or hold a digital bake-sale (including tie-dyed t-shirts, of course)? Or we could just have “the government” support the most popular social networks (along with newspapers, banks, hedge funds and car manufacturers). And while they’re at it, why not have wise bureaucrats use antitrust laws to cripple Google and thus make up for the lack of a competitive threat from Facebook and the other Google-killers-that-might-have-been?

Wired suggests that Facebook’s strategy played some role in causing Google to embrace Interest-Based (behavioral) Advertising, playing catch-up to No.2 Yahoo!:

Google has even shown a willingness to join Facebook in gingerly tapping the third rail of Internet marketing—behavioral targeting. The search giant has long assured its users that it would never use their personal information to deliver targeted advertising, relying instead on aggregate data or search activity that preserves anonymity. (“There is a line with users that you don’t want to cross,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in the wake of the Beacon controversy.) But in March, Google started its own behavioral targeting campaign—tracking users’ browsing to deliver more-customized ads. Users have the option to either edit their profiles or opt out entirely.

With Google in the game, the fight is on.  The grand prize is clear—tapping into the most lucrative advertising purchased by leading brands:

Today, global online brand advertising accounts for just $50 billion a year. Offline brand advertising, meanwhile, accounts for an estimated $500 billion.

But I doubt there will ever be any clear “winner” in this race.  Instead, we’re likely to see fierce competition and ongoing one-upsmanship over the coming decade (and beyond) for users, for user data, and for they ad dollars they bring, among a variety of paradigms for what the Internet of the future should look like.  Facebook has already started implementing its paradigm with  Connect (launched Dec. 2008) and  Open Stream API (launched April 2009):

Connect and Open Stream don’t just allow users to access their Facebook networks from anywhere online. They also help realize Facebook’s longtime vision of giving users a unique, Web-wide online profile. By linking Web activity to Facebook accounts, they begin to replace the largely anonymous “no one knows you’re a dog” version of online identity with one in which every action is tied to who users really are. To hear Facebook executives tell it, this will make online interactions more meaningful and more personal…  But you don’t build a competitor to Google with people alone. You need data. And Connect and Open Stream are intended to make Facebook a much more powerful force for collecting user information. Any time someone logs in to a site that uses Connect or Open Stream, they give Facebook the right to keep track of any activity that happens there—potentially contributing tons more personal data to Facebook’s servers. Facebook Connect and Open Stream are also designed to make each user’s friend network, which belongs to Facebook, even more valuable and crucial to the Web experience. Together, they aim to put Facebook users’ social networks at the center of all they do online.

I, for one, think this competition will create enormous value for users by driving innovation that improves the usefulness of the Internet and increases the amount of funding available for an ever-greater, ever-richer torrent of “free” (ad-supported) content and services.  But if the Techno-Aquarians at PETD succeed in imposing regulatory mandates on the collection and use of online data through legislation or creeping regulation at the FTC, the Internet of the future won’t look all that different from the Internet of today: online content and services will continue to attract a small share of all ad dollars (just 7% in 2008), search engines will reap the bulk of that (42% in 2008), and most online content-publishers and service-providers will continue to get literally pennies per click while only a few are able to meet evolving standards of quality with purely ad-supported business models.

Heaven forbid we should allow those who offer “free” content and services to extract… profit from the unwashed masses of helpless consumers who are either too stupid, too lazy or too ignorant to manage their own privacy, no matter how powerful the privacy management tools at their disposal! The better alternative is empower users to make their own decisions about privacy, rather than imposing top-down “Industrial Policy for the Internet” on the entire country through outright prohibitions or restrictive defaults concerning data collection and use for targeting advertising—as Adam and I have said:

The ideal state of affairs would be to create a system of tools and data disclosure practices that would empower each user to implement their personal privacy preferences while also recognizing the freedom of those who rely on advertising revenues to “condition the use of their products and services on disclosure of information”—not to mention the viewing of ads!

As Google and Facebook do battle with each other, Microsoft, Yahoo! and other upstart rivals as-yet-unknown, I only hope they all—particularly their government affairs departments—remember that their common enemy is the Techno-Aquarians who seek to impose their subjective preferences about privacy on everyone else, no matter the costs to innovation, consumers, culture or media. We’ll discuss these trade-offs at our upcoming PFF Capitol Hill Briefing on July 10.

I’m intrigued by this new bill that Rep. Peter King has introduced to prevent video voyeurism. H.R. 414, the “Camera Phone Predator Alert Act” finds that “children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms and public places with the use of a camera phone.”  To remedy this problem, King’s “Phone Predator Alert” bill would require that:

any mobile phone containing a digital camera that is manufactured for sale in the United States shall sound a tone or other sound audible within a reasonable radius of the phone whenever a photograph is taken with the camera in such phone. A mobile phone manufactured after such date shall not be equipped with a means of disabling or silencing such tone or sound.

In other words, cameras would have to get noisy again!  Old timers will recall the days when our cameras were noisier than a box of rocks. Today’s digital cameras and camera phones, by contrast, are increasingly silent, but that also opens up the door to potential abuse by some creeps out there. While I don’t believe there’s evidence pointing to a national epidemic of digital voyeurism, there’s no doubt that some people — including many youngsters — are having their privacy invaded in this fashion.

I find King’s solution at once to be both ingenious and futile. It’s ingenious in that, if we could truly force it upon everyone, it might actually go along way towards solving this problem. The noisy camera would again act as the prime deterrent to such an act.

It’s futile, however, in that the real bad guys would likely get around the law pretty quickly. After all, if they are really determined to try to surreptitiously snap some shots in a locker room or elsewhere, it’s likely that they’ll quickly find a way to hack the device and disable the noise-maker. (By the way, exactly how loud do will our phones need to be to comply with the law?) Moreover, the market for old, unregulated phones would grow longer and a black market of illegal devices would likely spring up, too. (However, Wired reports that such a law is already in place in Japan, so it would be interesting to see how it is working out there.)

That being said, I don’t really have a better solution than Rep. King.  There are already laws on the books dealing with invasion of privacy that can be tapped to deal with this problem, but there are obvious problems going that route in terms of time and expense. The damage is already done once the photo is snapped. And usually you can’t find the creep who originally took the shot after it has been around the Internet a zillion times.

Self-regulation in semi-public spaces might help. My gym has clearly posted policies about where mobile devices can be used and makes it clear they are not to be used in the locker rooms. That’s a good first step that others should follow to help protect the privacy of people in areas where they are likely to be disrobing.  And schools can do the same thing for their locker rooms. Of course, that’s still going to be difficult to enforce. There’s just no easy solution here.

[Further discussion over at Washington Watch.com]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Electric Parallels

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

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

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

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

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

Carr’s Critique of “Techno-Utopianism”

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

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

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

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

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

Dangers of Disintermediation and the Problem with “Free”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Downsides of Hyper-Personalization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adherents & Their Books / Writings

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

Beliefs / Themes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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