Langdon Winner's homepage essay on cyberlibertarianism

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Langdon Winner makes some of the same points I make about Kurzweil
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/ (Bryan's site)
though with a much broader brush in this essay here on his home page:
http://www.langdonwinner.org/
"""
One especially foggy area in cyberlibertarian rhetoric is its depiction of
matters of power and distribution. Who stands to gain and who will lose in
the transformations now underway? Will existing sources of injustice be
reduced or amplified? Will the promised democratization benefit the populace
as a whole or just those who own the latest equipment? And who gets to
decide? About these questions, the cyberlibertarians show little concern.
Characteristic of this way of thinking is a tendency to conflate the
activities of freedom seeking individuals with the operations of enormous,
profit seeking business firms. In the Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,
concepts of rights, freedoms, access, and ownership justified as appropriate
to individuals are marshaled to support the machinations of enormous
transnational firms. We must recognize, the manifesto argues, that
"Government does not own cyberspace, the people do." One might read this as
a suggestion that cyberspace is a commons in which people have shared rights
and responsibilities. But that is definitely not where the writers carry
their reasoning.
What "ownership by the people" means, the Magna Carta insists, is simply
"private ownership." And it eventually becomes clear that the private
entities they have in mind are actually large, transnational business firms,
especially those in communications. Thus, after praising the market
competition as the pathway to a better society, the authors announce that
some forms of competition are distinctly unwelcome. In fact, the writers
fear that the government will regulate in a way that requires cable
companies and phone companies to compete. Needed instead, they argue, is the
reduction of barriers to collaboration of already large firms, a step that
will encourage the creation of a huge, commercial, interactive multimedia
network as the formerly separate kinds of communication merge. They argue
that "obstructing such collaboration -- in the cause of forcing a
competition between the cable and phone industries -- is socially elitist."
From that standpoint, The Magna Carta moves on to advocate greater
concentrations of power over the conduits of information which they are
confident will create an abundance of cheap, socially available bandwidth.
Today developments of this kind are visible in the corporate mergers that
have produced a tremendous concentration of control over not only the
conduits of cyberspace but the content it carries. We see elaborate weddings
between Turner Broadcasting and Time Warner, ABC and Disney, and other media
giants. What, one wonders, ever happened to the predicted collapse of large,
centralized structures in the age electronic media? And what happened to the
movement of power closer to the realm of everyday actors and decisions?
...
The larger issue concerns the problems for a democratic society created
when a handful of organizations control all the major channels for news,
entertainment, opinion, artistic expression, and the shaping of public
taste. In the dewy-eyed vision cyberlibertarian thought, such issues are
bracketed and placed out of sight. As long as we are getting rapid economic
growth and increased access to broad bandwidth, all is well. To raise
questions about emerging concentrations of wealth and power around the new
technologies would only detract from the mood of celebration.
The combined emphasis upon radical individualism, enthusiasm for free
market economy, disdain for the role of government, and enthusiasm for the
power of business firms places the cyberlibertarian perspective strongly
within the context of right wing political thought. Indeed, The Progress and
Freedom Foundation that sponsored the Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age, is
the creation of Newt Gingrich and his associates. It is no coincidence that
a radical cyberlibertarian vision is to an increasing extent the position of
persons who call themselves "conservatives." In Gingrich's view, the
celebration of cyberspace is directly linked to the attempts repeal the New
Deal and major social reforms enacted this century. Following the logic of
cyberlibertarianism one affirms a range of anti-government, anti-welfare,
anti-labor, anti-environment, and anti-public education policies. One aspect
of this thrust is the rejection of any and all attempts to guide
technological development in ways shaped by publicly debated, democratically
determined social choice, a commitment made more than clear by the abolition
of the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress. In his most
enthusiastic moments, Gingrich describes the computer as a powerful social
solvent that can help dissolve existing institutions in education, medicine,
law and the like, institutions that he associates with an outmoded welfare
state. As he asked a gathering at the Heritage Foundation in late 1996, "Why
can't we have expert systems and advanced computers replace 80 percent of
the legal system?" (Koprowski, 12)
It is interesting to speculate about how it happened that prominent views
about computing and society have become associated with a political agenda
of the far right. There are a number of explanations one might give,
explanations about the rise of the electronics industry in the of the Cold
War, or about the role of former hippies in Norther California's high tech
industries who now affirm libertarianism as the spirit of Haight/Ashbury
finally realized. But such speculation is a project for another occasion.
The pressing challenge now is, in my view, something entirely different:
Offering a vision of an electronic future that specifies humane, democratic
alternatives to the peculiar obsessions of the cyberlibertarian position.
...
In sum, my suggestion is not that we need a cyber-communitarian philosophy
to counter the excesses of today's cyberlibertarian obsessions. Instead is a
recommendation to take complex communitarian concerns into account when
faced with personal choices and social policies about technological
innovation. Superficially appealing uses of new technology become much more
problematic when regarded as seeds of evolving, long term practices. Such
practices, we know, eventually become parts of consequential social
relationships. Those relationships eventually solidify as lasting
institutions. And, of course, such institutions are what provide much of the
actual framework for how we live together. That suggests that even the most
seemingly inconsequential applications and uses of innovations in networked
computing be scrutinized and judged in the light of what could be important
moral and political consequences. In the broadest spectrum of awareness
about these matters we need to ask: Are the practices, relationships and
institutions affected by people's involvement with networked computing ones
we wish foster? Or are they ones we must try to modify or even oppose?
"""

I don't agree with his point towards the end of essentially "buy local to
promote community". I think we should just have community centers of various
sorts (including for making things) to promote community. :-) But, I agree
with much of the rest as far as big picture issues.

More on Langdon Winner, whose ideas I have found to be an inspiration in
many ways:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.