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The Network Observer Vol 03 No 02
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 3, NUMBER 2 FEBRUARY 1996
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"You have to organize, organize, organize, and build and
build, and train and train, so that there is a permanent,
vibrant structure of which people can be part."
-- Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition
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This month: Arguments against privacy
Books about political networks
The economics of noise
Stereotyping the Internet censors
Names for newsletters
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Welcome to TNO 3(2).
This month I have gathered together another batch of arguments
against a broad right to privacy. They are no more impressive
than the batch that I reviewed in TNO 1(10), but nonetheless I
have been hearing them frequently; maybe you have too. For each
argument I have provided what I regard as an adequate response.
Even if you agree with my responses, though, it does not suffice
for someone to circulate such arguments on the Internet. Given
the great complexity of emerging privacy issues, I believe it
is crucial for defenders of freedom to bring these arguments, or
others like them, to a broad public. When someone is suddenly
faced with a form asking for their whole life history, it's
probably too late for them to start inventing arguments. Nobody
is born knowing the full range of arguments about privacy issues,
particularly when the opponents of privacy employ rhetorical
conflations and ambiguities that they may never have thought
through themselves. But if people are armed with good arguments
then they'll know how to say "no" when they're handed a pen and
asked to sign away their informational lives *and* when they hear
about some invasive new technology that is falsely portrayed as
the inevitable epitome of progress.
I've provided another reading list as well, this time on the
social networks through which individuals and communities conduct
their political lives. I've construed this topic broadly, so
that the bibliography includes a broad range of references on
formal theories of politics, as well as references on economic
networks. I hope that these references will be useful to people
who are trying to use computer networking technology to reinvent
democracy.
This month's "wish list" devoutly wishes for quiet and explores
how technology might help. Along the way it discusses further
the concept of economic externalities. Information technology
creates harmful externalities in great abundance, but perhaps it
can help eliminate them as well. The crucial issue is whether
such scenarios have any contact with reality.
A footnote. When I was in graduate school, one of my roommates
was the bass player for an excellent pop band called Sensible
Shoes. Sensible Shoes was rather a good name, and it fit well
with the kind of music they played. Now it so happened that
another band, in Los Angeles, was also called Sensible Shoes.
The two bands were aware of one another's existence, but they
didn't bother themselves very much about the conflict, figuring
that they would have to talk further in the unlikely event that
one of them actually got a national record contract. This kind
of conflict is common. The English Beat, for example, got the
"English" part when they came to the US and had to contend with
an obscure American band that was already called "The Beat".
And Dinosaur Jr. got their "Jr." to ward off legal trouble from
a band of aging rock stars who called themselves The Dinosaurs.
The underlying difficulty here is simple: there are untold
thousands and thousands of bands and only so many good names
to go around. I had occasion to think about this recently
when a guy in San Francisco started an Internet newsletter --
really more like an op-ed column that he distributes on the net
-- called The Online Observer. When I got the first issue of
this publication I was unhappy at the similarity to The Network
Observer, which was by now a very well-established publication
(at least in my own mind), and tried with no success to get him
to find a new name. Later on, though, I cooled off. The way
I see it now, just about the whole point of the Internet is to
allow newsletters and other such activities to become at least
as common as bands. If this actually happens then neophyte
newsletter editors will be going around asking their friends
to help them come up with newsletter titles, just as musicians
do when they are starting new bands. The fact is, I filled
several pages of my notebook with words and phrases trying to
come up with something less generic than The Network Observer
(which was about my second or third idea for a title when
I started this newsletter), without any success. Eventually
newsletter editors will be forced to invent whole new genres of
names. The best names for rock and roll bands, as my bass player
roommate pointed out, sound like this: Grateful Dead, Rolling
Stones, Talking Heads, Simple Minds, Sonic Youth -- two syllables
(first one stressed) then one syllable, adjective-noun, with
the short form sometimes being the noun -- as in The Stones and
The Dead. But after a while those names ran dry (just as the
computer industry is running out of company names like Apple,
Intel, and Lucid -- one word, two syllables, accent on the first
syllable), leading in short order to names like Pop Will Eat
Itself. Perhaps real democracy in communications will be around
the corner when Internet newsletters sprout up with names like
that. Do "Feed" and "suck" count? I don't think so, but time
will tell.
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More bogus privacy arguments.
In TNO 1(10) I collected a set of invalid arguments against a
broad right to privacy that I had encountered. Also, in TNO
1(6) I reported the astonishingly cynical argument, articulated
in this case by George Gilder but apparently widespread, that
massive collection of personal information actually protects
privacy by allowing commercial firms to target their unsolicited
sales calls more accurately. Since then I have encountered
several more mistaken arguments against a broad right to privacy.
Most have arisen in the context of privacy issues associated
with automatic toll collection on highways (see TNO 2(4)), but
they all have much broader application. Here they are, all in
composite form, with some appropriate debunking. I encourage
everyone to be on the lookout for arguments like these. Do not
let a single instance of these arguments go unrebutted. Raise
your hand in conference discussions, write letters to the editor
(people do read them), contribute responses in online discussion
forums, and just generally provide people with the arguments they
need when interested parties start to confuse the issues.
* "Most people are privacy pragmatists who can be trusted to make
intelligent trade-offs between functionality and privacy."
This argument, a favorite of public relations counselors, employs
a common PR technique: burying its principal thesis as a hidden
premise of an outwardly commonsensical proposition. The fact is,
the emerging technologies of privacy protection based on strong
cryptography, temporary identifiers, and the like can frequently
ensure that functionality does not trade off against privacy in
any important way. The problem, of course, is that most people
don't know this. If they are told they can have functionality
or privacy but not both then they will engage in an exercise
of weighing them against one another. Moreover, the scales of
this weighing process can easily be tipped by drawing attention
to cases where the functionality in question is particularly
needed by children or poor people or emergency medical patients
etc. The outcome of such exercises is virtually preordained --
some privacy protections, but none that affect the interests of
the largest and most organized privacy invaders in any material
way. The "trust" business tries to shift the issue from lack of
information to lack of intelligence, as if privacy activists were
paternalistically trying to prevent people from making their own
choices. Usually, in fact, the issue at hand concerns a proposed
or actual system in which people are technologically prevented
from making the choice they probably most want: functionality
*and* privacy together.
* "Our lives will inevitably become visible to others, so the
real issue is mutual visibility, achieving a balance of power
by enabling us to watch the people who are watching us."
If the institutions that watch us are so powerful that we cannot
possibly stop them from watching us, why in the world should we
be able to do something considerably harder, namely forcing them
to submit to surveillance by us? The underlying problem, in
my opinion, is a quasi-millenarian vision of computer technology
in which computers are a kind of global mirror, passively and
accurately reflecting more and more of reality in their stored
representations; it follows that any incompleteness of these
representations is simply a temporary glitch that progress will
surely overcome. Such proposals never come with any credible
political strategy for actually achieving this reciprocity of
surveillance, and I think their proponents tacitly believe that
power relations between people will automatically be swept away
by the inherent logic of the technology.
* "Once you really analyze it, the concept of privacy is so
nebulous that it provides no useful guidance for action."
Many people have observed that the term "privacy" has been used
to name a wide variety of interests and concerns which are hard
to subsume under any single definition. It seems to me that
many institutions would find it convenient if all discussion
of privacy issues were to grind to a halt at that point, unable
to proceed for lack of clarity, and that they sometimes even
encourage this muddled outcome by good-naturedly pointing at one
conceptual difficulty after another. This smoke-spreading tactic
should be recognized for what it is. When any particular privacy
issue arises, or when any particular technological proposal or
desired technical functionality is presented, it is usually easy
enough to indicate the places where average intuition detects a
privacy concern once the potential for concern is point out. It
can take real work to conceptualize these concerns in a way that
provides a useful basis for action, but doing so does not require
that we define privacy-as-such-in-general. The difficulty of
general definition, after all, is not limited to the concept of
privacy; it is shared by most abstract concepts of any importance
-- for example, truth, property, rights, tradition, and so on.
* "People *want* these systems, as indicated by the percentage
of them who sign up for them once they become available."
This argument turns on an important ambiguity in words such as
"want". In the case of automatic toll collection, we can imagine
two scenarios. In the first scenario, a proposal for automatic
toll collection is put before the citizenry at an early stage,
before any decisions have been made about highway services should
be funded, with experts and lay citizens given space and time to
present arguments pro and con. In the second scenario, decisions
are made quietly, with minimal public awareness and input, after
which systems are implemented and presented to the public as
faits accomplis, and individuals are presented with the decision
of whether to sign up for them or not. In each scenario, people
have been asked whether they "want" a particular proposition,
but it's probably not surprising that the answers they give
in each case are often radically different. To my knowledge
in every case when the first scenario has been enacted, people
have answered unambiguously that they do not want automated toll
collection. But when faced with the second scenario, people with
busy lives and virtually no prospect of changing the rules of the
game will simply make an economic decision from among the options
that are practically available to them. The result will then be
reported as "what people want", thereby feeding another round of
fatalism and cynicism about pervasive surveillance and regulation
of people's lives.
* "Concern for privacy is anti-social and obstructs the building
of a democratic society."
I have rarely heard this argument in the United States, but it is
a common argument in social democratic countries such as Norway
and Sweden. In such countries most people feel a relatively
strong identification with the state. They have highly effective
data protection laws, they presuppose a high degree of social
consensus about the values that should guide government policies,
and they feel that the government is under the effective control
of the citizens through the mediation of coherent, well-organized
political parties. In such countries I think it actually is
somewhat reasonable to regard excessive concern for privacy as
anti-social. But only somewhat. Even in a highly functional
social democracy, it is still wrong to stigmatize concern for
personal privacy except in cases where good evidence exists of
organized conspiracies such as tax evasion. Moreover, concern
for the smooth functioning of the state, even a state with
strong civil liberties protections, is no reason to gather more
information on people's lives than is necessary for the delimited
ends toward which a given policy is directed. New technology
greatly reduces the amount of information that must be gathered
to collect taxes, distribute social welfare benefits, regulate
traffic, and perform other legitimate state functions, and any
state that wishes to regard itself as responsible and modern
should be actively shifting its procedures toward these minimally
invasive methods as fast as it reasonably can.
* "Privacy regulation is just one more category of government
interference in the market, which after all is much better
at weighing individuals' relative preferences for privacy
and everything else than bureaucratic rules could ever be."
Although we should certainly pay attention if anybody can prove
empirically that the market actually does function to protect
privacy in accord with people's actual wishes, nonetheless when
taken in the abstract this argument involves several fallacies.
First of all, "government regulation" and "the market" are not
mutually exclusive categories. Only hard-core libertarians
deny that it is one purpose of government to define and enforce
property rights, and one large category of proposed privacy
policies involves the creation of property rights in personal
information. I happen to think that these proposals would be
both impracticable and ineffectual, but they are nonetheless
serious proposals that count as both "regulation" and "market".
It has become common to imagine the government as something
that swoops down out of nowhere and interferes with an already
functioning market, but this picture bears no relationship to
either the historical or legal reality of the market. Even
if it did, the argument that the market will weigh preferences
for privacy presupposes that the market is "perfect" in the sense
defined in neoclassical economics -- so that, among other things,
each individual knows, and can weigh, the full consequences of
every transaction. But this is rarely true, and it is a million
miles from being true in the case of the personal information
that large commercial organizations capture in their dealings
with individual customers. Most people do not understand the
consequences of participating in the creation of transaction-
generated information. In particular it is extremely difficult
for individual consumers to place a value on the surrender of
this information, because the consequences are generally opaque,
mediated through far-away computer databases whose connections to
subsequent sales calls and other involuntary costs are actively
hidden. Many privacy policies are aimed precisely at forcing
the market back toward "perfection" by supplying consumers with
the information they need to make rational economic decisions
about whether and when to surrender information about themselves.
But these measures, too, are "government regulation". A further
fallacy involves the broad categories of externalities that lead
to path-dependencies in markets. Infrastructures tend to be
highly path-dependent, since once they are created and lots of
uncoordinated economic actors make commitments to them, they are
very hard to change. And so an information infrastructure --
Internet payment systems, for example -- that does not protect
privacy might well get entrenched in the market before any large
number of actual or potential customers becomes fully aware of
the privacy issues that are at stake. It does not automatically
follow that government regulation should steer the direction of
these systems, but it does follow that the unfettered market is
not leading to privacy protection.
* "There's no privacy in public."
Many emerging privacy issues involve surveillance of activities
that occur in public places such as roads. Some people have
the intuition that activities that occur in public places are,
by definition, not private. The US Supreme Court, for example,
ruled in a case involving police tracking an individual's car
that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy
on public roads. And I have heard a prominent representative
of US law enforcement argue that law enforcement should have
unrestricted access to records of individuals' road travels
maintained by private organizations, on the grounds that road
travel occurs in a public place, so that the resulting records
are therefore public records! But the law is clearly failing
to respond to ordinary people's intuitions about the nature of
privacy here. First of all, people very frequently take steps
to protect their privacy in public places, for example by
conducting their conversations at a safe distance from others,
by lowering their voices, by rolling up the windows, and so on.
People develop their expectations about privacy in public places,
furthermore, against the background of their experience, which
includes their experience of the means that reasonable others
have to listen or watch. No reasonable person feels that their
rights have been violated if someone sees them entering a shop
on a certain date, or if someone working in a neighboring location
happens to notice them entering that shop every morning, but
they *do* feel a violation if someone has taken unusual measures
to record every shop they have entered across a great distance
over a month's time. In the past, these kinds of records have
only arisen in cases where someone has been laboriously followed,
usually by the police acting with some kind of probable cause.
New information technologies, though, make it entirely feasible
to track large populations on a routine basis, probable cause or
no. This is clearly a new situation, or at worst a qualitative
magnification of an existing situation, and it should be treated
as novel and thought through without the pretense that it is
covered by past precedents.
* "We favor limited access."
This one isn't even an argument but more of a verbal trick.
It has become common for would-be privacy invaders to express
"support for limited access" or accuse their opponents of being
"opposed to limited access". These lines can be confusing, as
well they should be. The trick is to make it sound as though
privacy advocates are wacky extremists who want absolutely
all data to be sealed off from everyone for all purposes; this
is opposed to the reasonable-sounding proposition of "limited
access". But the whole question is what "limited" is to mean.
Few organized interests actually need literally unlimited access
to information; they just need the particular very broad access
that serves their own purposes, and they are happy to affirm that
other kinds of access (by smaller competitors, for example) might
need to be restricted.
* "Privacy in these systems has not emerged as a national issue."
One hears this line in the context of automated toll collection
as a justification for neglect of privacy issues. It's hard
to know exactly what it means, since I have heard it uttered
even after privacy has been raised as an issue in numerous large
newspapers, analyzed in prominent law reviews, discussed on the
Internet, and so forth. What it comes down to in practice, I
think, is the assertion that privacy advocates have not mobilized
enough of a movement behind automated toll collection privacy
issues to force any large organizations to address them in a
serious way. This amoral attitude should be recognized for what
it is: an abdication of the individual's personal responsibility
to reflect on issues of right and wrong, even in situations when
nobody has exerted the force necessary to give the issue high
prominence in the esoteric circuitry of the policy-formation
process. This approach is often rationalized with appeals to
professional specialization: we just do technology here; the
policy department is down the hall. But of course, nobody over
in the policy department gets any points for raising obstacles
that nobody is forcing them to raise. The bottom line here is
elementary: everyone is obliged to take responsibility for their
actions, even when nobody is making them to do so, and this goes
double when systematic threats to the very foundation of a free
society are plausibly at stake.
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Bibliography on political networks.
A big rift runs through the academic study of the media, which
is roughly the opposition between political economy and culture.
On the political economy side lie issues of infrastructure,
industry organization, social networks, and the formal processes
of law and government; on the culture side lie issues of content,
symbols, meanings, and identities. Far too many studies focus
on one side while ignoring or minimizing or explaining away
the other side. Imagine an economic study of art that makes no
reference to what the paintings represent or mean, or imagine a
study of art that does not discuss how artists in a given milieu
manage to eat -- in neither case do we have a real explanation
of how certain paintings come to be, nor of the uses that people
come to make of them. Yet biases to one side or the other
are almost the norm. This unfortunate situation is not simply
a matter of narrowness, since studies of political economy
and culture have developed different tools and methods and
conceptual frameworks over many years. Nor is it a matter of
politics; the political economy/culture divide is present on
both the left and right. (First think about the tension between
socialists and feminists; then think about the tension between
economic libertarians and religious conservatives.) It's simply
*difficult* to integrate the two sides into account into a single
study or a single theory.
The same division affects studies of politics. One can conduct a
study of the content of political movements -- say, for example,
the story of how the American populist movements of the late 19th
century came to develop their particular understandings of money,
industry, race and class relations, and democratic processes.
But such a study would not tell us much about these movements'
practical ability to organize, coordinate their efforts, mount
political campaigns, and ensure that the politicians did what
they said they would. In order to understand *those* things,
we need to know about the communications technologies of that
day and the prevailing practices for using them, the economics
of that day's newspapers, interactions between urban and rural
patterns of political organization, and so on.
In recent times, the Internet has motivated a revival of
interest in this practical dimension of politics -- so to speak,
the political economy of political culture. It is inherently
difficult to analyze the place of technology in society, and one
always needs "bridging concepts" that connect the workings of
technology to the workings of society (see TNO 2(6)). The word
"network" seems a promising place to start building such concepts
because it refers nontrivially both to something technical --
digital communications networks -- and to something social --
patterns of human relationship. The danger, of course, is that
a focus on networks will encourage a tendency toward formalism in
the study of politics -- a focus on infrastructures, quantitative
measures, economic factors, mechanistic metaphors, resources and
their mobilization, information as a commodity, and so on -- and
a neglect of the content of politics -- social ideas, historical
memory, collective identity, information as a world of meaningful
symbols, and so on.
With these important caveats in mind, here is a bibliography
of useful research on politics and networks, plus a few items
that drift into the territory of economic networks as well. I
encourage everyone to read this stuff, and I encourage everyone
to think about what it would be like to marry this sort of
formal/structural analysis with an understanding of contents and
meanings. I have cited some of these materials in TNO before.
Craig Calhoun, The infrastructure of modernity: Indirect social
relationships, information technology, and social integration,
in Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser, eds, Social Change and
Modernity, University of California Press, 1992.
Brenda Dervin, Information <-> democracy: An examination of
underlying assumptions, Journal of the American Society for
Information Science 45(6), 1994, pages 369-385.
John A. Ferejohn and James H. Kuklinski, eds, Information and
Democratic Processes, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Beyond Agenda Setting: Information Subsidies
and Public Policy, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1982.
Mark Granovetter and Richard Swedberg, eds, The Sociology of
Economic Life, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992.
Bernard Grofman, ed, Information, Participation, and Choice:
An Economic Theory of Democracy in Perspective, Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Lawrence K. Grossman, The Electronic Republic: Reshaping
Democracy in the Information Age, New York: Viking, 1995.
David Knoke, Political Networks: The Structural Perspective,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Robert Perrucci and Harry R. Potter, eds, Networks of Power:
Organizational Actors at the National, Corporate, and Community
Levels, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989.
Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in
Modern Italy, Princeton University Press, 1993.
Slavko Splichal and Janet Wasko, eds, Communication and
Democracy, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1993.
Hilary Wainwright, Arguments for a New Left: Answering the Free-
Market Right, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Frederick Williams and John V. Pavlik, eds, The People's Right to
Know: Media, Democracy, and the Information Highway, Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum, 1994.
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Wish list.
I cannot tell you how many times I have stayed in an expensive
hotel with all kinds of free pens and mints on the pillow,
only to be kept awake by some ventilation unit that wheezes
and rattles obnoxiously all night long below my window, or else
(and this is my absolute favorite) a *refrigerator* in clear
view of the bed, with its compressor turning on and (especially)
off several times a night with loud shuddering and clonking.
And HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) systems the
world over are far too noisy, for example in the SSSSSHHHHHH'ing
of air through ceiling vents and the WWWWWWWOOOOOOO'ing of air
under and around doors. For example, the "faculty study carrels"
in the UCSD Library are useless and largely abandoned for this
reason.
Machines in general and compressors in particular, then, are
too noisy. No doubt some of this noise is inherent in the way
the things work. But much of it is random vibration that could
have been prevented if the designers had used finite-element
simulation methods to discover the principal vibrational modes of
their designs and adjusted the designs accordingly. Such methods
have been around for a while now, but the rapidly decreasing cost
of processor power should make their use more or less mandatory.
Another approach to suppressing noise is through active noise
cancellation, which works by "listening" to the sounds in the
air, using bandpass filters or a Fourier transform to break
them down by frequency, and then generating another sound that
contains the very same power spectrum, only with all of the
component frequencies shifted precisely out of phase relative
to the input. (This is a lot easier than it sounds.) This
"anti-sound" might sound pretty similar to the existing ambient
noise if played in an otherwise silent room, but when *added*
to that offending ambient noise the result (if you're lucky)
is a nearly flat-zero power spectrum -- that is, silence. This
technology too has been around for a while, but the availability
of cheap processing power should enable it to find much wider
application.
Perhaps a good approach to getting these technologies used is to
establish some standards. Of course dozens of standards already
exist for workplace noise and its measurement, but I have in mind
standards specifically geared to the needs of (say) people who
are staying in hotels. Once the standards have been established,
a publication such as the Wall Street Journal whose readers
include many frequent travelers could then start rating hotel
chains and other relevant businesses in terms of their compliance
with them, complete with excellent horror stories about the worst
offenders. Got a television set chattering away a foot from your
head, backed right up against the wall behind your bed, with no
adequate noise cancellation? Call the manager, quote chapter and
verse of the standards, and threaten to go to the press. It's an
excellent wish.
My even more ambitious wish is for a market in quiet. Noise
is one standard example of a negative externality in economics:
an economic cost which is borne by someone not a party to the
activity that caused it. That's why we have those obnoxious car
alarms, for example, and why machine manufacturers had so little
incentive to explore quiet technologies before workplace health
and safety regulations began to address the subject in earnest.
An externality is a failure of the market, and markets have many
more externalities than you would think from the rhetoric of
their promoters. One standard approach to fixing an externality
is to internalize it, in this case by creating a market for
quietness, so that it sometimes costs money to make noise.
How would this work? If you believe in neoclassical economics
then you would start by creating a set of property rights for
quiet. Someone who bought a house, say, would also be buying
the rights to a certain amount of quiet under certain conditions.
(Making noise to call for help in an emergency, for example,
would probably be excluded by the law that defined the right.
The sirens on car alarms would be not be excluded, though, since
there are better ways to protect cars.) Anybody who wanted to
disturb that quiet would have to pay for the right. This is
obviously extremely difficult to arrange, since the transaction
costs would be very high, both for defining the right to be
bought and sold, detecting when money is owed, and for collecting
it. But digital technology should start to bring it within reach.
If I want a machine to emit a noise, for example, the machine
can use digital wireless communications to poll all of the noise
monitoring boxes within earshot of the prospective noise, using
a simple protocol to negotiate a cost with them and then summing
the costs up. Then I have to decide if it's worth it. People
with stationary noise sources could then negotiate with their
neighbors, perhaps buying noise-cancellation devices for them
in exchange for lower quiet-disturbance costs. They would also
be able to make economic decisions about, for example, whether
to buy a power or manual lawn mower. Mobile noise-sources
such as cars would be a lot harder, but from the perspective
of neoclassical economics the only real problem is that the
roads already exist and noise was not factored into the economic
decision to build them.
The point of all this is not that it's necessarily feasible, but
to explore the contours of a problem. Neoclassical economics has
many things in common with computer science, and one of them is
that you can while away the hours "designing" elaborate formal
castles in the sky that are based on their generative ideas --
digital "mirrors" of concrete reality (an idea ultimately derived
from philosophy) in the case of computing and the mathematics of
equilibrium (an idea ultimately derived from physics) in the case
of neoclassical economics. In each case, one must learn to talk
a certain way, so that an unbounded range of affairs of human
life can be fitted to the frames that make the formal methods in
question work. Both computer people and economists, like many
kinds of professionals, have the luxury of being semi-detached
from the world: their work has real consequences for people's
lives three or four steps down the line, but they can count on
the people who implement those steps to cover up all the messy
gaps between the theory and the reality, leaving the theorist
to dream on in complacent wonder at how it all fits together.
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This month's recommendations.
Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds, Critical Terms for
Literary Study, second edition, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995. This is terrific book. It consists of perhaps
three dozen essays of perhaps ten pages apiece, each focused
on a single key word from literary criticism. If you've learned
about literary criticism from the stereotypes you've read in
the newspaper then I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by the
tremendous smartness on display here. I read the first edition
almost ten years ago, and it really made me happy to think that
there were such smart people in the world, able to write clear,
interesting essays that bear a personal stamp while representing
a diversity of opinion in a fair way. Each chapter includes
an analysis of a particular text using the theoretical concept
that the chapter has developed, and the result, for me, is that
I have read everything differently forever afterward, from novels
to newspapers to computer manuals. The new edition is greatly
expanded and thus even more useful in the same way.
Brian Kahin and James Keller, eds, Public Access to the Internet,
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. This book brings together most of
the best writers on the issue of ensuring broad public access
to the Internet, considering topics such as educational access,
access for the poor and for minority populations, and Internet
pricing and traffic measurement.
Cynthia Cockburn and Ruza Furst-Dilic, eds, Bringing Technology
Home: Gender and Technology in a Changing Europe, Buckingham, UK:
Open University Press, 1994. This is a fascinating collection
of studies of technology in women's lives by a cross-European
set of authors coming from different cultural and intellectual
traditions. Most of the studies are in early stages, and so
they are interesting more for the stories they tell than for
finished theories. But the stories are marvelous, and draw
out the complicated interactions among different aspects of the
women's lives, for example the ways in which unequal divisions
of housework have kept women from being active in union affairs,
thus helping reproduce unions' inattention to women's workplace
technology issues.
Kristine Bruland, Patterns of resistance to new technologies
in Scandinavia: An historical perspective, in Martin Bauer,
ed, Resistance to New Technology: Nuclear Power, Information
Technology and Biotechnology, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995. A useful article that breaks down some myths about
people's "resistance" to new technologies. Looking at historical
cases in the fishing, timber, and nuclear power industries in
Norway and Sweden, she argues that, despite stereotypes of shop
floor workers obstinately refusing to change with the times,
"resistance" to technology is really a complex form of social
choice with many players and many legitimate considerations
beyond those of local technical expediency.
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Follow-up.
In response to my hypothesis about the Christian Coalition's
strategy on the Communications Decency Act in TNO 3(1), some
people recited what I regard as the conventional wisdom: that
the CDA and similar measures are the products of People Who
Are Clueless About The Internet. A whole system of stereotypes
has arisen about these PWACATI's, starting with The Politician
Who Has Never Logged On, and these stereotypes provide a cheap
explanation for all things. I'm sorry, though, this whole
line of argument doesn't wash with me. Some people, of course,
really are clueless about the net. But the people who do the
major policy work at the Christian Coalition are not rubes who
wandered in from the sticks last week. We are talking about
sophisticated political professionals who have college degrees
and Web pages and high-powered lawyers just like the Internet
community's libertarian establishment does. Their statutory
language is not an amateur job but a sophisticated attempt
to draw out a broad analogy between the Internet and broadcast
media while forestalling some of the less fundamental challenges.
Given the reasoning in the broadcast precedents, the likely
successful appeals will probably have to be based in large part
on the availability of Internet filtering methods less drastic
than out-and-out content restrictions; this argument, while
true, will not be trivial to make. Despite my boundless respect
for the Christian Coalition's skills, of course, I regard most
of their concrete policy remedies as faulty, short-sighted,
and overly broad. And I also regard them as heavy-duty peddlers
of vicious stereotypes in their own right. But blowing them off
as ignorant fools is a bad idea, not least because they are the
major political organization that is articulating the legitimate
concerns that many ordinary people have about emerging media
technologies. There really do exist aggressive pedophiles
and out-of-control addicts to sick, objectifying pornography.
Policy responses to these losers' activities must take into
account a wide range of technical, moral, and legal issues. The
answer, as we all know, does not lie in the creation of broad,
simplistic third-party liabilities. But that doesn't mean that
the concerns are not legitimate or that nothing should be done.
It's quite possible that the window of opportunity for genuine
dialogue on this issue has passed, but that's no reason to fill
the vacuum with comfortable generalizations and stereotypes.
I've been struck, incidentally, by the number of libertarian
conservative polemics that present the CDA as part of a liberal
reign of terror; some that have arrived in my mailbox have
carried on against Bill Clinton using language like war, Nazis,
and Auschwitz. What's odd about this, of course, is that the
major political force behind the CDA was not Bill Clinton but
the Christian Coalition. (See TNO 2(6).) It's remarkable
that these two branches of the conservative movement can pursue
opposite policy agendas, each pretending that their main opponent
is the liberals rather than one another, without much attention
being drawn to the incongruity. Actually, it's not remarkable;
it's just more evidence of the complete and utter oblivion into
which the liberal coalition and its pundits have sunk. It is
as though the entire social structure and political spectrum of
the United States has been mapped into different segments of the
conservative movement. Sometimes, of course, the movement goes
to the trouble of ostracizing elements that do not fit with the
dominant coalition's strategy, as in the case of Pat Buchanan's
social views (which are far to the right of this strategy) and,
well, Pat Buchanan's economic views (which are far to the left
of it). Meanwhile, the various elements of the right are unified
in their very successful campaign of pulverizing the traditional
liberal coalition by systematically articulating issues that set
one element of it against another, recruiting the electorally
larger elements (the white working class) while stereotyping
the smaller (upper middle class professional "elites"). Any
effective response to censorship measures such as the CDA must
begin with a map of these shifting coalitions and an analysis of
the conditions that might permit newer coalitions to emerge on
the basis of reinvigorated democratic values. One unmistakable
sign of the decline of these values is the rapidly proliferating
belief that democracy simply means majority rule. This view
of democracy is upheld by cultural and libertarian conservatives
alike, but for opposite reasons: the cultural conservatives
favor majoritarian democracy as a justification for their agenda
of expanded social regulation, while libertarian conservatives
emphasize its evils in support of their agenda of curtailed
economic regulation. The true spirit of democracy, of course,
is considerably broader than that. It starts with social trust,
respect for diversity, cultural skills of organizing and debate,
broad access to education, and strong respect for the civil
liberties of individuals and groups. These conditions are never
perfectly met, any more than other sets of values, but they are
certainly an improvement upon the overt advocacy of intolerance
and the futuristic embrace of a world spinning out of control.
Following up on my bibliography on the economics of standards in
TNO 3(1), here are some more references, the first two of which
are available on WWW:
Francois Bar, Michael Borrus, and Richard Steinberg, Islands
in the Bit-Stream: Charting the NII Interoperability Debate, at
http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~fbar/inter.html
I highly recommend this paper as a guide to the issues as they
are currently understood, but I think that its analysis needs to
be generalized considerably. Briefly, they need to generalize
from "operating systems" to "platforms", to apply their analysis
recursively on every layer of the emerging NII, to take into
account the common trade-off between the potential for innovation
on a given layer of a network and the potential for innovation
on the layer above it, to move from an economic criterion of
NII policy success (level of investment in NII) to a political
criterion (broad access to the means of association), and to
broaden attention from state regulation (which, as they argue,
cannot accomplish much in isolation on these issues) to debate
in the public sphere (e.g., in the emergence of the discourse
of "openness" as a material force in influencing the trajectory
of path-dependent technology markets).
N. Economides, Bibliography on network economics, at
http://edgar.stern.nyu.edu/networks/biblio.html
Henry Chesbrough and David Teece, When is virtual virtuous?:
Organizing for innovation, Harvard Business Review 74(1), 1996,
pages 65-73. An article about the necessity of a single unified
firm when innovation requires the imposition of new standards.
Read as an exercise in microeconomics, this paper is an example
of the profound consequences of the non-neoclassical economic
phenomena surrounding standards, in this case for the boundaries
of the firm -- a matter that has been most commonly analyzed,
since Coase and Williamson, in terms of transaction costs and
without regard for the demands of innovation in changing markets.
Web picks.
How often do you hear a Web site being praised with any adjective
besides "hip" or "cool"? We're supposed to be serious people
here, not adolescent wannabes; why are we constantly using these
words? "Hip", of course, is the choice of marketers suggesting
that they know how to translate the Ford Taurus into Web pages
that speak to an audience raised on MTV and David Letterman.
"Cool", meanwhile, is the encomium of choice for the whole
subculture of people who are trying to get rich the same way
Bill Gates did ("software is cool", "profit is cool", ergo "cool
site of the day"). Truth be told, I'd like to be cool and hip
as much as the next person. But do those two words exhaust the
full scope of *your* values? Mine either. So let's practice
some other words of praise for Web sites, like "useful", "well
written", "carefully thought out", "intelligent", "beautiful",
and "doesn't require the latest release of Netscape". We'll
*need* some more terms of praise now, since my sense is that
the Web has crossed some kind of line over the last few months.
I'm tenaciously resistant to technological hype of all kinds,
but I have to say that I'm starting to be genuinely impressed
with the reality of the Web, as opposed to just its promise.
While I'm at it, curses on web pages with shaded backgrounds!
They are unreadable on black-and-white screens. People who build
web pages should comply with standards and use both the hardware
and software that the median user has available, not the high-end
latest stuff and non-W3C-compliant version of Netscape. That way
they can have a clue what their pages look like to others. It's
scary how many different hardware and software configurations you
have to check out to make sure your web pages look okay. Italics,
for example, are nearly unreadable on the Macintosh...
The Information and Privacy Commissioner for Ontario has a batch
of useful materials, and instructions for fetching his office's
reports (e.g., on privacy in intelligent transportation systems)
on the Web at http://www.ipc.on.ca/
Hans Pufal <hansp@plato.digiweb.com> is assembling Web pages
listing every model of computer that was ever made. The URL is
http://plato.digiweb.com/hansp/ccc/
There's a good source of pointers to humanities information at
http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/
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Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucla.edu
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles +1 (310) 825-7154
Los Angeles, California 90095-1520 FAX 206-4460
USA
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Copyright 1996 by the editor. You may forward this issue of The
Network Observer electronically to anyone for any non-commercial
purpose. Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.
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