Nation Topics - computing | The Nation

Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus is the latest monotonous revery about the Internet social revolution. Evgeny Morozov punctures that bubble.

The US economy rewarded the finance industry at the expense of our most creative problem-solvers. We need an innovation revival to grow our way back to health.

Part of the Air Force's new "above all" vision of full-spectrum dominance, America's emerging cyber force has control fantasies that would impress George Orwell.

Americans interested in economic justice used to consider antitrust litigation a top priority. Perhaps soon we will think along these lines again.

How are AT&T, Sprint, MCI and other telecommunications giants
cooperating with the National Security Agency's warrantless
surveillance program?

The longer the Bush Administration is in office, the clearer it becomes that it has a disordered relationship not just with one aspect of the world or another, such as the war in Iraq or the budg

In 1813, as part of a correspondence with Isaac McPherson, Thomas Jefferson penned a mini-disquisition on the peculiar issues confronting patent law: "That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation."

Information, to borrow a more recent slogan, wants to be free. According to Lawrence Lessig's dazzling new book, The Future of Ideas, that freedom is under assault, despite recent technological developments that would seem to embody the Jeffersonian vision. "The digital world is closer to the world of ideas than to the world of things," Lessig writes. "We in cyberspace, that is, have built a world that is close to the world of ideas that nature (in Jefferson's words) created: stuff in space can 'freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition."

And yet the freedom of cyberspace and its capacity for mutual instruction is under fire. The very ethos of the web--a kind of organized anarchy, free of both government and private-sector control--has been gravely injured by recent events: changes in copyright law, changes to the underlying architecture of the net, changes in the competitive landscape of the digital economy. "The essence of the changes in the environment of the Internet that we are observing now are changes that alter the balance between control and freedom on the Net. The tilt of these changes is pronounced: control is increasing."

The word "control" itself is used advisedly. Lessig, now a professor at Stanford Law School, begins The Future of Ideas with a shout-out to his former colleague Andrew Shapiro, whose book The Control Revolution discussed the battle between control and freedom without necessarily predicting which side would win (or even which deserved to win). "Shapiro did not predict which future would be ours," Lessig explains. "Indeed, his argument was that bits of each future were possible, and that we must choose a balance between them. His account was subtle, but optimistic. If there was a bias to the struggle, he, like most of us then, believed the bias would favor freedom. This book picks up where Shapiro left off. Its message is neither subtle nor optimistic.... we are far enough along to see the future we have chosen. In that future, the counter-revolution prevails. The forces that the original Internet threatened to transform are well on their way to transforming the Internet."

Translated into another revolutionary's language, Lessig's is a story of all that is air melting into solid. But is our digital future--not to mention the present--really as grim as Lessig claims? Whether you accept the premise of Lessig's argument, The Future of Ideas confirms what his first book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, originally promised: Lessig is one of the brightest minds grappling with the consequences of the digital world today, as deft and original with technical intricacies as he is with broad legal theory. He manages to breathe new life into seemingly exhausted economic ideas--his take on the tragedy of the commons is likely to entrance even the most jaded game theorist--and tell some fascinating stories along the way, on the freewheeling early days of the radio spectrum, or the distributed computing project that harnesses spare processing cycles from thousands of computers around the world to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

The Future of Ideas is also a deeply iconoclastic work, at least when measured against the standard assumptions of American politics. Lessig is sometimes cast as a trustbusting progressive after his brief involvement as "special master" in the Microsoft antitrust case (appointed by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to advise the court, he was subsequently removed after Microsoft protested that he was biased against the software giant). Lessig's positions can seem contradictory: The book is fundamentally a celebration of decentralized innovation, and yet it is deeply distrustful of too much power concentrating in the hands of the private sector. Lessig is no middle-of-the-road New Democrat: He's a radical critic who doesn't fit readily into any existing ideological camp. In a sense, you can see his politics as distinctly net-native, closest in spirit to those of open-source software, the semi-anarchic collective movement that engineered the now-legendary Linux operating system.

Open-source software projects tilt heavily in the direction of freedom: No one owns the underlying code behind Linux, and thousands have contributed to it. The software grows more sophisticated over time for three central reasons: (1) The ethos of the hacker community has a strong communitarian tradition that encourages contributions, which are rewarded only by the respect of one's peers, (2) modern software applications are modular enough to be built by committee, with thousands of dispersed participants chipping in their ideas, and (3) because the code base is openly shared with anyone interested in looking at it--unlike Microsoft's hidden Windows source code--interesting new ideas "freely spread from one to another over the globe," if not for the moral and mutual instruction of man, then at least for the improvement of his printer drivers.

This is the story of the triumph of the commons--free of both government and corporate control. Its principles animate nearly every page of Lessig's book: a mix of the libertarian's contempt for centralized control and the socialist's belief in the power of communal property. This would sound schizophrenic and impractical if it weren't for the empirical success of open-source projects like Linux, or the widely used web server Apache--or indeed the web itself, which was founded on nonproprietary standards. What are the politics of these new systems? It is not, according to Lessig, "the traditional struggle between Left and Right or between conservative and liberal. To question assumptions about the scope of 'property' is not to question property. I am fanatically pro-market, in the market's proper sphere.... The arguments I draw upon...are as strongly tied to the Right as to the Left.... Instead, the real struggle at stake now is between old and new."

The trouble, as Lessig sees it, is that the new is being challenged by the old. We are in the midst of a kind of digital-age Restoration, in which the old emperors of centralized control are returning to power after a brief but dizzying spell of Glorious Revolution. The free flow of code and information is being channeled once again in conventional directions, and the burst of innovation and media diversity that the Net produced over the past decade is regressing to the days of concentrated media oligarchies. "The promise of many-to-many communication that defined the early Internet will be replaced by a reality of many, many ways to buy things and many, many ways to select among what is offered," Lessig writes. "What gets offered will be just what fits within the current model of the concentrated systems of distribution."

Lessig cites a number of recent developments to support his grim prognosis, including the increased role of cable companies in the net economy:

As the Internet moves from telephone wires to cable, which model should govern? When you buy a book from Amazon.com, you don't expect AOL to demand a cut. When you run a search at Yahoo!, you don't expect your MSN network to slow down anti-Microsoft sites. You don't expect that because the norm of neutrality on the Internet is so strong...
      But the same neutrality does not guide our thinking about cable. If the cable companies prefer some content over others, that's the natural image of a cable provider. If your provider declines to show certain stations, that's the sort of freedom we imagine it should have...
      So which model should govern when the Internet moves to cable. Freedom or control?

Lessig is not optimistic about the cable companies' ability to adapt to the open-access neutrality that has been a founding principle of the Internet to date--particularly when those companies are part of massive content empires like AOL Time Warner. Lessig is typically persuasive in his argument against these controlled systems, an argument that he brilliantly mounts not by thundering against "evil" corporations but rather by pointing to the success of previous open systems whose existence we now take for granted. "When the United States built its highway system, we might have imagined that rather than fund the highways through public resources, the government might have turned to Detroit and said, Build it as you wish, and we will protect your right to build it to benefit you. We might then imagine roads over which only American cars can run efficiently, or exits and entrances that tilt against anything built outside Detroit." Instead, the government built a highway system that was open to all users and (almost all) uses--a foundation for commerce and recreation that was biased only in the sense that it "tilted" against mass transport. The Net was an equivalently open platform, engendering a thousand unforeseen uses--everything from sharing music files to creating hypertext archives of public domain books to hosting online auctions for Pez dispensers and million-dollar artworks. The strength of the system lay in the fact that there were no gatekeepers deciding which were approved activities and which weren't.

Lessig is particularly concerned about the resurgence of gatekeepers in the domain of copyright law. The past few years have witnessed a dramatic expansion in the legal rights granted to copyright holders: Books can now take more than a hundred years to enter the public domain, and entertainment industry organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America have won a number of high-profile lawsuits--most notably against Napster and against the hackers who broke the DVD compression scheme and distributed it over the web. Lessig's fear is that the great connectedness produced by the Net may lead to a system of near-perfect copyright control, as all appropriations of intellectual property can theoretically be tracked, and unlawful appropriations prohibited. Jefferson's "freely spreading ideas" starts to look more like Foucault's take on Bentham's panopticon, with every bitstream monitored for pilfered data. "The content layer--the ability to use content and ideas--is closing," Lessig writes. "It is closing without a clear showing of the benefit this closing will provide and with a fairly clear showing of the harms it will impose.... [It is] mindless locking up of resources that spur innovation. Control without reason."

The Future of Ideas succeeds marvelously at its primary task, which is to persuade the reader of the virtues of a balance between control and freedom in this new world, and of the importance of understanding how technological changes can unintentionally alter that balance. (In this respect, the book builds on the argument of Code, which demonstrated the ways in which software architecture possesses the force of law in digital environments.) There may be no thinker today grappling more tenaciously with the legal issues unleashed by the digital revolution, and the book's maverick positioning on the conventional political spectrum should make it a landmark work for that reason alone. Ever since the open-source software movement entered mainstream culture, its followers have been wondering about what a larger political philosophy based on its values would look like. The Future of Ideas is the first significant step in the formulation of that philosophy.

That said, it's hard to read a book that makes such bold claims about such a dynamic and complex field, and not pose a few counterarguments, even if they run against the grain of your habitual assumptions about the world. I've long shared Lessig's amazement at the explosion of ideas and new voices unleashed by the Net over the past decade, but because his argument rests so heavily on this premise--the uncontrolled nature of the Net's underlying architecture as an unparalleled engine for innovation--I found myself questioning the assumption the more I heard it repeated. Two potential objections spring to mind. First, the Internet proper is more than three decades old; its open protocols have been evolving steadily since then, and yet compared with other high-tech industries over that period--personal computers, semiconductors, nontelecom software--its overall rate of innovation was not particularly noteworthy until the mid-1990s, when the web took off. The period that followed was without question one of tremendous innovation, but it was also a period bankrolled by an unprecedented infusion of venture capital, which fueled both the exploration of just about every conceivable web-based activity and the mass adoption of the medium itself. Now, it may well be that the capital influx was a secondary effect, and the primary cause of the explosion was the Net's open protocols. But then why did it take so long to blossom?

The distinction wouldn't matter so much if Lessig didn't point to the Net's track record of innovation so often in his argument for maintaining--or replicating--its distinctive balancing act between too much control and too much freedom. Consider another area of software development: applications created for the DOS/Windows platform over the past ten years. In areas where Microsoft doesn't control the market with its own products--pretty much everything other than the core applications in MS Office--the Windows-based software industry has produced a staggering number of programs in a short amount of time, including whole new genres of software: sales-force-automation applications, accounting packages, video-editing tools, games. The Windows software ecosystem is broad enough to support huge corporate giants with millions of customers, along with niche producers selling to tiny markets. (It has also managed to cultivate something that the web has had trouble with thus far: profitable companies.) And yet Windows is the epitome of a closed architecture, its source code controlled by a mighty centralized authority and defended by a phalanx of lawyers. So where does that innovation come from? It's worth remembering that the Napster client software itself, while inconceivable without the underlying connectivity offered by the Net, was nonetheless originally written for the Windows platform.

Napster brings us back to the question of Lessig's pessimism, and his vision of a control counterrevolution. Nowhere is Lessig's dark outlook more convincing than in his survey of recent changes to copyright law, and yet even here the dystopian tone seems unwarranted: "The content layer--the ability to use content and ideas--is closing." Closing on what time scale? Compare my ability to copy books, music tracks and video clips today with what it was just five years ago. Electronic books barely existed, and so copying books meant a laborious trip to Kinko's; borrowing music from a friend meant swapping cassette tapes; and the idea of high-quality video residing on your hard drive was laughable, given the slower CPUs and smaller hard drives of the day. Even after the shutdown of Napster, I have access to terabytes of music files via the more distributed--and thus harder to shut down--Gnutella service, and soon those Napster-descendants will be serving full-length movies as well. The law may be cracking down on the technological explosion that made all this possible, and thus in some sense it might be true to say that "control is increasing," particularly if you're trained as a law professor. But on the ground--or perhaps it's better to say in the ether--the technology is still outmaneuvering the counterrevolutionaries. That's not cause to ignore Lessig's warnings, or ignore the remarkably sophisticated model of technopolitics that he develops in The Future of Ideas. But perhaps it's reason to hope that the forces of freedom--if they have technology on their side--are still stronger than the forces of control.

E-FAHRENHEIT 451?

Berkeley, Calif.

The article on electronic books ["On Pixel Pages It Was Writ," June 12] left out the most intriguing aspect of this new format: digital rights management technologies (DRM). These technologies are being developed by the electronic publishing industry to protect the rights of the copyright holders and, of course, are not so diligent about protecting the rights of readers. DRM standards, such as the XrML standard developed by Xerox and endorsed by Microsoft, contain mechanisms to allow publishers to put time limits on reading, to potentially charge by the page or by the minute, to protect against excerpting and printing. These "rights" go significantly beyond the rights recognized by copyright law.

Among the many annoyances of these systems is that works are generally licensed to a particular piece of hardware, such as an individual computer or e-book reader. While the hardware industry is working to make our computing devices obsolete, the content industry is tying our content to those same machines. Upgrade your computer, and you lose access to all the content you have licensed. So, the question is not whether we'll be able to read digital works in the bathtub or on the beach--the question is whether we'll be able to reread them in a few years, quote from them or offer them to friends once we've finished with them.

KAREN COYLE

BREAD, CIRCUSES & MUSIC

Cambridge, Mass.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, in "MP3: It's Only Rock and Roll and The Kids Are Alright" [July 24/31], suggests that Metallica has somehow "forgotten that it got rich through free music" simply because the band objects to Napster's accessory to theft. Giving away free music to build a following is a valid business model; as a musician, I may do the same thing. But the fact that Metallica gave away the music it once created has nothing to do with whether it wants to (or ought to) give away the music it now creates. That's Metallica's choice, but Napster, Gnutella, etc., make it easy to take that choice away; they don't distinguish between music that an artist has granted permission to distribute free and music that some unethical third party has offered without the artist's permission.

As we celebrate the demise of the recording industry's distribution near-monopoly, the distinction between freedom of information and respect for intellectual property is being ignored. Music fans rejoice in the "right to free music" Napster has brought them, but it has brought them no such thing; it has simply permitted them to do something possibly illegal without facing the consequences. Any musician will tell you that they're last in line to get paid; stealing from them and justifying it by pointing to recording industry profiteering is intellectually dishonest.

Vaidhyanathan levels fair criticism at the recording industry, which is clearly fighting a losing battle to retain its monopoly over distribution channels, but his dismissal of Napster as a serious issue defeats his own alternative. He points out that bands can bypass the entire conventional production/distribution/marketing monopoly through home production and Internet alternative-music websites, charging "$1 per song for MP3 downloads." But Napster, Gnutella and the rest don't come close to enabling that business model to be used; in fact, they make it absurdly easy to defeat. Certainly, these services are not going to go away, but it's crucial to recognize that they are morally and ethically neutral and that they fail to make distinctions between lawful and unlawful behavior. How to support the decision of the artist about how his or her music is to be distributed is the conversation we ought to be having. My music is not yours simply because I created it.

SAMUEL BAYER

TALES OF 'OLD BUBBLEHEAD'

Guadalajara, Mexico

In a hagiographic review of the Culver/Hyde biography of Henry Wallace ["The Wallace Doctrine," June 12], Kai Bird rhetorically inquires as to "who wouldn't" like its protagonist. I, for one. Whatever Truman's failings, at least he didn't belong to a weird cult in which he used the code names "Shamballal" and "Logvan" (his wife was "Poroona") and uttered such inanities as "I shall obey the Gita as remorselessly as Krishna." For all his loony mysticism, Wallace was quite capable of double-crossing his guru, Nicholas Roerich, when he thought he had become a political embarrassment. Having sent him on a mission to Asia, Wallace prevented him from returning by threatening him with a $14,000 tax lien.

Wallace's insensitivity in personal relations was legendary. Given a new car when he married, he went off on a three-hour solo spin while his bride waited in bewilderment. A rich man, he was such a stingy tipper that at restaurants aides would have to surreptitiously flesh out his niggardly gratuities. In World War I, his well-heeled family kept him out of military service as an "essential farmer." After the 1948 election, he walked out of his headquarters without a word of thanks to devoted campaign workers. When asked by H.L. Mencken about the "guru letters"--fawning missives he had addressed to "Beloved Master" Roerich in happier days-- Wallace weaseled, causing intense mirth among the press corps, who unaffectionately referred to him as Old Bubblehead. Objective scrutiny of the man and his record makes Westbrook Peglers of us all.

JIM TUCK

BIRD REPLIES

Washington, D.C.

So Wallace was quite a character! I'll still take his eccentricities any day over the men who defeated him.

KAI BIRD

BOWLING ALONE IN THE 8TH CIRCLE

Richmond, Calif.

The August 7/14 issue contained two articles that, when read against each other, produce serious discontent. In "The Crack in the Picture Window," Benjamin Barber's review of Bowling Alone, we are presented with an analysis of the loss of "social capital" and "civic grace" in the face of growing social isolation. It's astounding that no mention is made of the profound dominance of social life by corporations. In fact, no meaningful reference to the tyranny of corporate power occurs in the entire review.

If only Barber had read E.L. Doctorow's passionate polemic in the same issue, "In the Eighth Circle of Thieves." Doctorow sees clearly that American life outside and in is manipulated for the sake of corporate dominance and gain; the consequent result is distorted priorities, child poverty, media domination, the swelling of ethnic prison populations, the high cost of health insurance, international trade agreements that defeat national environmental laws--"the list is long."

Doctorow calls on the iconic power of Whitman and proposes a reform bill. Barber could not recognize corporations, but Doctorow cannot, apparently, recognize that corporations are embedded in a social-productive system--capitalism. Capitalism forces the movement of corporations among their various paths to venality and social-environmental destruction. What has come to dominate The Nation is a new populism, a recognition of large-scale social destructiveness unrelated to its underlying economic determinant.

RICHARD LICHTMAN

S. Gardiner, Me.

E.L. Doctorow remarks that "campaign finance reform as a phrase has been bruited about so long and to so little effect and is so yawningly dull, dreary and unresounding, it makes one wonder if it's not partly responsible for the conditions it has so far failed to address." I totally agree. "Graft" seems the appropriate term. It puts the focus on the politician, which is exactly where it belongs.

And while we're calling a spade a spade, how about returning the name of the Defense Department to its historical and accurate name, the War Department? It would have a major effect in stemming that hemorrhage from the public treasury. Just imagine how it would sound: "President recommends increase in the war budget." It would be a well-placed thorn in the media's bag of foul air.

R. D. BALDWIN

OLD LEFT/NEW LEFT, RED LEFT...

Amsterdam

Tom Hayden ["Harrington's Dilemma," June 12] draws a plausible lesson from Michael Harrington's life: The Shachtman-Harrington crowd shouldn't have been so nasty to the rest of the left. But there's another lesson, more relevant for today: The left is torn apart and weakened when part of it makes peace with the US war machine. When Harrington was expelled from Norman Thomas's Socialist Party in 1952 "because of his involvement in trying to take over its youth branch," the underlying reason was that Harrington was against the war in Korea, while Thomas was for it. And in Hayden's 1965 debate with Irving Howe, I'd have been more upset at Howe for supporting the Vietnam War than for his "paternalistic needling." Now that Soviet-style Communism is dead and buried, the US empire is more powerful and seductive than ever. Drawing this lesson seems more important than rehashing old feuds among ex-Communists, ex-Trotskyists and ex-New Leftists.

PETER DRUCKER

Brooklyn, N.Y.

For those of us who knew Harrington and worked with him, one of his more endearing qualities was his capacity to reflect, in a self-critical way, on his political past. Both in his published writings and in conversation, he would forthrightly state that he mishandled the relations between the parent League for Industrial Democracy and the newborn Students for a Democratic Society in 1962, that he waited too long to express publicly his opposition to the Vietnam War and that his censure of the New Left had often been unduly harsh and unnecessarily polarizing. Harrington's description of that behavior as "stupid" in the copy of his autobiography he signed for Hayden was quite characteristic.

But Harrington and others from the old left had no monopoly on stupidity and sectarianism. Those of us who came of political age as part of the New Left contributed mightily in both of those areas, and any reasonable account of that period would have to address the incredible self-destructiveness of that movement, which ended with SDS dissolving into a bunch of warring sects adhering to the worst caricatures of Marxism-Leninism and Stalinism. Until the New Left is as direct and as honest in our self-evaluations as Harrington was, we will be willfully blind to our own history. Hayden made his share of mistakes, and then some, as a leader of SDS and the New Left, and one would have hoped he would use this review to acknowledge them. If there is a "true believer" in this story, it is much more my fellow New Leftist Hayden than Harrington.

LEO CASEY

Philadelphia

"Indeed, it seems to me that Nader, who is a reformer acting empirically, has in many ways raised more radical questions, and possibilities, than the European social democrats. His lead should be carefully followed."

Prophetic words? They were written by Michael Harrington in 1972, in Socialism, chapter 12. The torch was passed, unremarked, nearly thirty years ago. Now it's up to the rest of us to unite behind another torchbearer in an international Green-Red movement. Is that Michael's ghost with a hopeful smile?

HENRY EISNER

We are entering, techno-boosters breathlessly proclaim, a "third industrial revolution," that of the "knowledge-based" or "new" economy.

Record numbers of students are going online, according to UCLA's annual survey of college freshmen released this past January.