Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Also, some of the hippiest visionaries were calling for the
government to stay out of cyberspace. (Which is rich, considering
its origins.) Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of
Cyberspace" appeared in 1996. Was it the same day the
Telecommunications Act went into effect?  
  

    
Yes, the Telecommunications Act was signed into law on February 8,
the same day Barlow published his Declaration. In 2004 Barlow wrote
"the main thing I was declaring was that cyberspace is naturally
immune to sovereignty and always would be. I believed that was true
then, and I believe it's true now."
  

    
And what that really meant was that cyberspace would be ruled by
tech giants, and their profit lines, with government only there to
reinforce the right of the tech giants to extract. We lose track, I
think, of the reality that none of us exist in a vacuum. Nothing is
immune to sovereignty - the question is whether we hold sovereignty
accountable or responsible.

And, of course, the bulk of Ben's book isn't just about the pipes,
it is about that tech giant grab for our personal data, and the
unexpected consequences to our ability to work together - the
antithesis of the internet as we dreamed it decades ago.
  

    
> what that really meant

That's not what John was thinking, i.e. not what *he* meant. But
that does seem to be how it's played out.
  

    
I'm not impugning Barlow's idealism, nor our collective ignorance.

I think that point cuts to the heart of why this book resonates so
strongly for me - it makes manifest not only how things have really
turned out, but also makes manifest that we have choices.

It's not a prescription for "what to do," but rather a change from
black and white to color - the ability to see what is - now that
we've cottoned on to the fact that the wizard isn't quite so
wizardly, or different from other power grabs.
  

    
> I'm not impugning Barlow's idealism, nor our collective ignorance.

It seems to me that the idealism is laudable and our task is to climb
out of the pitfalls of our collective ignorance. Never easy.
  

    
Here are a couple of pertinent paragraphs from the book:

> Online malls are inequality machines in part because they offer
> new opportunities to political forces committed to promoting
> inequality. These are the forces of the Right, which, as the
> political scientist Corey Robin argues, has always been devoted
> to the defense of hierarchy. Yet this defense is a surprisingly
> radical one. Since modern conservatism first took shape in the
> aftermath of the French Revolution, it has waged insurgencies
> from above to combat insurgencies from below. The point is not
> the preservation of the ancien régime but its reconstitution on
> a reinvigorated basis, what Robin calls the "new old regime."
>        
> Seeing conservatives as radicals helps explain a theme found
> throughout their history: their remarkable creativity with
> the media technologies of their time. In every era, they are
> "innovation opportunists," to borrow a term from the sociologist
> Jessie Daniels. Direct mailing campaigns were central to their
> success in the 1970s, talk radio in the 1980s and 1990s. In our era,
> they have turned their talents to the internet, particularly social
> media. Through a well-organized offensive, right-wing activists have
> made social media into an accelerator for their politics. Indeed,
> the resurgence of the far Right, both in the US and around the
> world, is hard to imagine without this development. It was David
> Duke, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, and not John Perry Barlow,
> former Grateful Dead lyricist, who saw the future of the internet
> most clearly. - pp 139-140
  

    
Ben,

The first third of this book is devoted to "the pipes" - the
infrastructure that underlies everything else. Before we go on to
the layers of the stack that lie on top of the pipes (sheesh - we're
almost halfway through this discussion and we have yet to tackle the
big stuff!), I want to pose some final questions about
infrastructure, privatization, and deprivatization.

In your discussion of the Detroit Community Technology Project, for
instance, you note that it isn't just the difference between a
community organization ensuring affordable access to decent service
(or even free, in some cases - although that raises additional
issues to discuss), but rather than, like the post office, these
systems can serve as centers for community organizing. They can
provide easy access to bus schedules, for instance, forums to
discuss local issues and problems, easy access to government and
other agencies.

It occurs to me that in this sense, community-controlled internet
services, for all of the problems that come with them, also provide
an answer to the news deserts that increasingly occupy most of
America. The same cooperative that provides access to the internet
and provides affordances to municipal government and important
everyday information and services can also provide a home to the
ultra-local journalism that no longer exists in most small towns.
This takes me back to the role the post office once played as a
center not just of mail - communication with the outside world, as
it were, but a place where people often gathered to discuss and
gossip.

Does this make sense? Neo-liberal economics pretended that the only
thing that matters is economic efficiency. Somehow, large
corporations making more money was supposed to make everyone richer.
Instead, we hollowed out the middle class and re-energized income
(and wealth) inequality.

Organizers talks about three general roles: business, government,
and a third role played by community leaders such as pastors or the
heads of local rotary groups. It occurs to me that the Detroit model
of internet access and the community organizing that comes with it
provide a natural "third space" for that latter role.

Of course, that isn't a panacea. Those old newspapers quite handily
represented the local power structure, not the needs of the
community, per se. But, if I understand the first section of your
book, the point _isn't_ that small internet cooperatives are a
panacea, but that they provide the opportunity to experiment and
explore and to rediscover that there are a plethora of models that
might work.

Sorry, I didn't mean to make this a long-winded question, but does
this make sense? If so, are we making any progress since you wrote
your book? Did any of the local-centric funding survive the various
"build back better" bills? To what should we be paying attention
right now?

[And then let's spend time considering the bulk of the book, which
is the stuff built on top of the bottom of the stack]
  

    
Boy, am I grieving for Inouye's public lane that never was allowed
to pass. 
  

    
Thanks for this excellent book, Ben. I tore through it.

Following on <ari>'s question about how we tackle these problems in
the present, I am especially curious about the process of
deprivatization. Are there deprivatization efforts underway in other
social/economic domains that might provide some momentum? Should we
imagine a broader movement toward deprivatization that includes
telecom alongside healthcare, transportation, education, etc.? 
  

    
Ari, in response to 33:

Yes, I think building up the capacity of local noncommercial
journalism through investment in public media is an integral part of
building a better internet. Again, I would refer to Victor Pickard’s
excellent work on the subject. An internet organized around the
principle of profit maximization tends to privilege sensationalistic
content of the kind that often favors the Right — part of a long
tradition of media hypercommercialization creating opportunities for
reactionary propagandists. And the internet’s own role in the
decimation of local newspapers has created even greater space for
the Right to operate — donor-subsidized right-wing sites, or
right-wing social media operations, have stepped in to fill the
void. 

Not all of the investments we need to make in public media have to
be local, of course — I’m not a localist. Small is not always
beautiful — there are plenty of problems with the local scale. The
local is a good starting point, not least because it’s often a more
feasible, and cheaper, level at which to intervene. But we need
action at the national level. And I’m afraid I don’t see much action
toward that. There is anxiety in certain liberal circles about
“disinformation” — a framing that I find counterproductive for a
number of reasons - but not much political will or social movement
momentum around making the public media investments necessary to
improve our informational environments, online and off.
  

    
Thanks Kevin (35). I’m so glad you liked the book.

Deprivatization is the term I use in the book, because it draws a
nice contrast with privatization, and the book is mostly a history
of how the internet was privatized. But another term that’s quite a
close cousin is decommodification. For anyone reading who may be
unfamiliar with the term, decommodification is when something that
was once bought and sold on the market as a commodity is provisioned
as a matter of right. So instead of going out and buying health
insurance, the government insures you, as in a single-payer system.
The Danish political theorist Gotta Esping-Andersen has an
influential book called The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism that
uses the concept of decommodification to analyze the kind of social
welfare regimes created by social-democratic political parties —
think Sweden in the 1970s. 

So, yes, I certainly think we do see social-movement momentum around
certain decommodifying demands. Medicare for All, social housing,
and free public transit are all good examples. And I think the
project of deprivatizing the internet fits well within that broader
context. There is of course always the question of what one’s
horizon is: there will be those who support the decommodification of
certain goods and services but not others — a mixed economy, let’s
say — and those who see decommodification as a process that may help
bring us, however nonlinearly, toward the abolition of capitalism
and the creation of a socialist society. I’m in the latter camp. But
politics is coalitional, and I think we've seen that you can put
together some fairly broad coalitions to pursue decommodification
campaigns of various kinds.
  

    
But do you see any of this happening in the current political
climate?

I guess from my own experience with decentralized,
community-oriented organizations, it may work best to nibble around
the edges given the mess we're in politically.
  

    

nibbling around the edges is such a good way of putting it...
  

    
Jennifer, in response to 38:

By “this,” do you mean progress toward deprivatizing the internet,
or momentum around decommodifying demands of the kind I described in
my response to Kevin (37)?

When it comes to deprivatizing the internet, I think we do see
modest progress. I consider the hundreds of community networks —
that is, publicly owned and cooperatively owned broadband networks,
which I describe at further length up-thread at 10 — as part of the
broader project of deprivatizing the pipes. Moving up the stack,
there are valuable experiments being conducted within the
“decentralized web” and “platform cooperativism” communities, such
as cooperatively governed social media sites and worker-owned
app-based services, that I would also place under the heading of
deprivatization. But deprivatization is my own coinage — there
aren’t any organizers out there using the term. Still, my argument
is that deprivatization is the implicit unifying theme of these
various pursuits, and my hope is that this theme can become explicit
as people come to understand the history of the internet’s
privatization, and the role that privatization has played in the
problems they are trying to mitigate.

As for momentum around decommodifying demands more broadly, I think
we see a fair amount. Social housing initiatives are underway in San
Francisco and Seattle. Free public transit, either on some or all
routes, has been implemented in several cities; it was a major plank
of Michelle Wu’s successful mayoral campaign in Boston, to take one
example. It’s not a particularly good time for the Left, of course,
but there are some encouraging things happening, and I don’t expect
we’ll have to wait too long for the next social explosion. The
kindling remains very dry!
  

    
I think you've caught both meanings really well. 

As someone who spent my life as an activist, trying very hard to get
cooperative communities functioning on the ground, the failures I've
run into have been when we've tried to bridge from small groups to
something more regional or far-flung. 

That was before the internet though, and I'm always looking to find
out whether closing the communications gap could change that.

I'd be very interested in any examples you could point to of
community networks. It seems to me that the corporate pushback on
these has been intense. And I would expect the same for any
community effort that makes real progress.
  

    
Some years ago I was involved in the community networking movement,
in a lot of meetings with people like the late Steve Cisler, the
late Gene Crick, Richard Civille, the late Dave Hughes, etc. Noting
that three of those four are gone now, I'd like to hear more about
what's happening with community networking as a movement. I drifted
away from that work many years ago, drawn to other work and
projects, and I'm wondering if a 'movement' still exists vs many
smaller individual projects. If so, what people and organizations
are still doing that kind of advocacy?
  

    
Thanks for the reference, Ben. The link between deprivatization and
decommodification is super helpful.

I'm curious to see if/how cooperatives will benefit from the NTIA's
new "Internet for All" program. The "middle mile" infrastructure
program specifically mentions cooperatives and nonprofits as
potential funding recipients:
https://www.internetforall.gov/program/enabling-middle-mile-broadband-infrastr
ucture-program
  

    
Jennifer, in response to 41: Probably the best known community
network in the United States is the Gig, which is owned by the city
of Chattanooga. Here's some more information:
https://logicmag.io/justice/the-new-sewer-socialists/. 

Jon, in response to 42: I'm afraid I don't know much about the
community networking movement. I suspect Kevin Driscoll would have
more to say about that.

Kevin, in response to 43: I actually did an interview with Protocol
about the Internet for All initiative, which you can find at
https://www.protocol.com/policy/internet-for-all-ben-tarnoff.
Briefly, the initiative takes an "all-of-the-above" approach that is
heavily weighted toward the big telecoms. In particular, there are
specific implementation details that will make it difficult for
community networks to benefit. As an alternative model, I point to
Bernie Sanders's "High-Speed Internet for All" plan that he put
forward during the 2020 Democratic primary, which would have
provided more than $100 billion in grants and technical assistance
to help fund publicly owned and cooperatively owned networks.    
  

    
Ben, thank you for those responses. I've been slow to get to the
bigger half of the book, the stuff higher on the stack. You start
discussing the initial dot.com boom and note (I've concatenated bits
from a few pages here - hope I have captured the larger meaning):

""The dot-com entrepreneurs faced a larger challenge: they had to
find a way to monetize activity rather than access.... eBay enlisted
its users in its own creation. The site didn't just offer a space
for their activities--it was constituted by them... [I[n the near
term, ... [the internet's] real value was social. The internet
survived and grew, because it gave people a way to communicate....
Here, social relationships have merged so completely with market
relationships as to become indistinguishable. The internet is the
instrument of this union; it brings people together, but under the
sign of capital."

We're talking about an initial process where there is, say, formal
subsumption of social activity - moving it, as it then existed -
into capital-owned processes, and then in not too much time, turning
those relationships into "real" subsumption - now the processes
themselves are tuned to extract value from our very posts. 

Have I got the description of what is happening up the stack
correct? And if so, what happened here? What happened to that
glorious "Virtual Community" about which <hlr> and so many others
rhapsodized?
  

    
Ari: 

As I argue in the book, the real value of the internet has always
been social. The internet protocol was first created in the
mid-1970s in the hopes that it would facilitate "resource sharing"
-- that is, that it would enable a computer to access a program
running on another computer, more or less the utility model of
computing that today has been fulfilled by the modern cloud. But
what the internet would actually be used for as it developed was
primarily email. It would be a social medium, in other words, and
this quality enabled successive generations of internet users to
develop online communities of various kinds.

What happens in the latter half of the 1990s, and really in the
2000s, is that the social quality of the internet is applied to the
task of building very profitable businesses on the web. The
community is synthesized with the market, thus "pushing
privatization up the stack" and thereby finding a way to unlock the
profit potential of the internet. In my book, I argue that
AuctionWeb (the first iteration of eBay) was the first internet
company to create a highly successful community-market. And, in
doing so, AuctionWeb prefigured the rise of the so-called platforms
in the 2000s and 2010s.

To my mind, this isn't a moral story. I wouldn't argue that the
forces of commercialization "corrupted" the internet by
instrumentalizing its fundamentally social nature toward capitalist
ends. Figures like Omidyar, creator of AuctionWeb (later eBay),
truly believed that they were creating an online community. And real
communities did and continue to populate the privatized internet,
albeit within certain constraints. But, ultimately, for
privatization to ascend from the lower floors of the internet -- the
pipes -- to the higher floors -- the application layer, where the
internet is actually experienced -- it had to make use of the
internet's sociality as a kind of propulsion. And, in doing so, it
remade the internet, and remade how we connect to one another
through the internet.
  

    
I hear you, but I have to think that in some weird ways, what has
actually happened is that what we're talking about is sort of what
happens when "community" is productized. Notwithstanding Omidyar's
good intentions, and for that matter, the good intentions of many of
us who began exploring online community back in the day, there is
something toxic when that basic human desire to connect is turned
cancerous by processes designed to keep us clicking. It feels as
though the real food of online community has been replaced by fast
food.

At the same time, I have been seeing research recently that
emphasizes that Facebook and Twitter and Tiktok may be toxic, but
they aren't nearly as influential, overall, as traditional media
such as Fox.

So, as we come to the end of this discussion, where are we now? 
  

    
> what we're talking about is sort of what happens when "community"
> is productized.

Seems true. But, perhaps, this is just one of the many ways we might
characterize what happens to groups of individuals as they interact.
There are natural processes by which various forms of 'alignment'
arise. And some individuals tend to become more adept at leading and
shaping group alignment and stimulating group action.

Humans have so much history and experience with collaborative groups
that we've learned that some of the principles that apply to groups of
individuals can also be applied to *coalitions* of groups. And some
individuals (and even groups) will naturally become better at leading
and directing others. An architecture of power dynamics appears.

Repeated application of such seemingly simple patterns has generated
the rich complexity of today's social (and political) realities. And
a part of that is the emergence of 'bad-actors' -- individuals and
groups that can hide their ill-intent behind an attractive facade.

As individuals, we repeatedly face the task of aligning ourselves with
the good-actors and avoiding the bad. And experience has shown us how
difficult this can be. The bad-actors have gotten very good at what
they do.

The extreme cases are sometimes described as involving 'cult-like'
behavior, and terms like 'brain-washing' or 'mind-control' can sometimes
seem appropriate.

The danger, I think, is that by focusing on avoiding just the extremes,
we may miss the subtle, "pre-cancerous" risks that can lead us into
the truely dangerous territory.
  

    
Good points, Craig. I'm looking at my notes. Here are some of the
things I wrote going through the last section (and I'll save the
final set once people have had a chance to respond to these):

- Google assumed that they would make money selling their search
technology. But they did a lot of tracking user behavior to improve
search, and then became profitable when they introduced "AdWords" in
2002 using that data to set up online auctions for ad space. In a
blink, "Surveillance Capitalism" was invented.

- Uber abstracts things further - using that data to provide
incentives to put drivers where they are needed and to charge peak
pricing - but also to keep drivers out of the benefits of the value
that is being created - this is perhaps one illustration of why I
use the word "cancerous." Being an Uber driver is a very hard way to
make a living. Uber, the company loses millions each year, but its
executives make a lot of money - not its drivers.

In sum: Online malls, whatever their particular entanglements, are
inequality machines. [T]hey reallocate the existing distribution of
risk and reward. They push risks downward and spread them around.
They pull rewards upward and focus them in fewer hands.
  

    
> [T]hey reallocate the existing distribution of
> risk and reward. They push risks downward and spread them around.
> They pull rewards upward and focus them in fewer hands.

Illustrates the challenge, perhaps. Following specific examples of
bad-behavior on the part of online malls, this rhetorical structure
naturally leads us to look askance at the very notion of reallocating
"the existing distribution of risk and reward."

But wait! Surely this is just short-hand speech for something else,
right? Isn't much of human history about our struggles to overturn
existing distributions of risk and reward that were seen to be unjust?

I sometimes imagine that writing itself was invented to account for
individual stores of grain contributed to centralized (and protected)
granaries for the express purpose of minimizing the risk of famine and
sharing the rewards of a plentiful harvest.