annotation on a 20-page article

11

1

What Is the Elephant in the Digital Room?

Any history of the past three decades will give prominent, if not preeminent, attention to the emergence of the Internet and the broader digital revolu- tion. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, signs point to its being a globally defining feature of human civilization going forward, until it even- tually becomes so natural, so much a part of the social central nervous sys- tem, as to defy recognition as something new or distinct to our being, like speech itself.

To some extent, the revolution can be chronicled in the sheer amount of information being generated and shared. In 1989, which seems like a century ago, Richard Saul Wurman wrote of “information anxiety” created by overload because there were a thousand books published every day world- wide and nearly ten thousand periodicals then being published in the united States.1 Google’s Eric Schmidt estimates that if one digitally recorded all extant human cultural artifacts and information created from the dawn of time until 2003, one would need 5 billion gigabytes of storage space. by 2010 people created that much data every two days.2 by 2012 the amount of video being uploaded to youTube had doubled since 2010, to the equivalent of 180,000 feature-length movies per week.3 Put another way, in less than a week, youTube generates more content than all the films and television programs hollywood has produced in its entire history.

Another way to grasp the digital revolution is by the amount of time people immerse themselves in media. An extensive 2009 study found that most Americans, regardless of their age, spend at least eight and a half hours per day looking at a television, computer screen, or mobile phone screen, frequently using two or three screens simultaneously.4 Another 2009 study, by the Global Information Industry Center, determined that the average

2 digital disconnect

American consumes “information” for 11.4 hours per day, up from 7.4 hours in 1980.5 A 2011 study of twenty thousand schoolchildren throughout Mas- sachusetts determined that 20 percent of third graders had cell phones and over 90 percent were going online. Forty percent of fifth graders and nearly 85 percent of middle schoolers had cell phones, generally smartphones with Internet access.6 The Internet has long since stopped being optional.

In the united States, Europe, and much of the rest of the world, one need not have a teenage child to understand that “social networks have become ubiquitous, necessary, and addictive.” 7 To the students I teach, life without mobile Internet access is unthinkable. When I describe my college years in the early 1970s, they have trouble grasping how people managed to com- municate, how anything could get done, how limited the options seemed to be, how life could even be led. It would be akin to my great-grandparents from 1860 Nova Scotia or eastern Kentucky returning to describe their youth to me when I was growing up in suburban Cleveland in the 1960s. “For society as a whole the Net has become the communication and information medium of choice,” Nicholas Carr writes. “The scope of its use is unprec- edented, even by the standards of the mass media of the twentieth century. The scope of its influence is equally broad.” 8

Consider this: in 1995 the Internet had 10 million users, still dispropor- tionately at u.S. universities, and it was all the rage. by 2011 the Internet had 2 billion users and was growing by leaps and bounds. by 2020 another 3 billion people will be online. In Africa, mobile telephone penetration has gone from 2 percent in 2000 to 28 percent in 2009 to an expected 70 per- cent in 2013.9 by 2020, according to IMS Research, there will be roughly 22 billion devices connected to the Internet and communicating online.10

by 2012 three quarters of the world population already had access to a mo- bile phone.11 “Mobile communication,” a 2012 World bank report stated, “has arguably had a bigger impact on humankind in a shorter period than any other invention in human history.” 12

This only begins to convey the extent of the changes being wrought. The Internet is the culmination of nearly two centuries of electronic develop- ments in communication, from the telegraph, photography, telephony, and recording to cinema, radio, television, and finally satellites and computers. The Internet itself has already experienced several lifetimes in the course of two decades, from usenet days to the World Wide Web and AOL and then broadband followed by Google and now wi-fi, iPads, smartphones, and social

what is the elephant in the digital room? 3

media. As ben Scott puts it, we are in a “triple paradigm shift,” wherein personal communication, mass media, and market information have been subsumed within the new order so that the distinctions are becoming passé.13

The economy has adapted to the Internet and is now populated by digital industries, with colossal firms that mostly did not exist when most Americans were born. The Internet has seemingly colonized and transformed every- thing in its path.

Even more astonishing, this is just the beginning. Eventually, at least in theory, all humans could be connected to one another at speeds approach- ing the speed of light, able to send and receive all manner of communica- tion with instant access to the entirety of human culture. Moreover, the “interface among human beings, objects, and the infosphere,” Pamela Lund writes, “is becoming intuitive, less cumbersome.” 14 We are entering terra in- cognita as machines change our basic understanding of what it means to be a human. Even now, the nature of such a world defies our comprehension.

Despite the difficult-to-imagine twists and turns in the future, the Internet has extensively crystallized. With the Internet enmeshed in the fabric of nearly every aspect of life, with giant firms attempting to dominate it (and our politics), and with a series of crucial policy issues emerging that will be central to its development, we seem to have reached a base camp of sorts. From the firmer ground of this base camp we can look back to where we came from and look ahead to where we might be going. We are in a position, in some respects for the first time, to make sense of the Internet experience and highlight the cutting-edge issues it poses for society. We are also in a position to better understand the decisions that society can make about what type of Internet we will have and, accordingly, what type of humans we will be and will not be in future generations.

The purpose of this book is to contribute to that conversation. because of the enormity of the digital revolution, I make no pretense of providing a comprehensive or general theory. Instead the point is to ask a series of questions about the Internet and begin to offer answers. The first and most important question is this: in view of the Internet’s magnitude, complexity, exponential growth, and unpredictable gyrations, how can we even begin to make sense of what is taking place?

We have mountains of scholarly examinations, in the finest American social science tradition, of discretely defined problems concerning the Inter- net, but they focus primarily on micro-issues, like how specific sets of people

4 digital disconnect

use digital communication for specific types of purposes. This research tends to studiously avoid making any larger claims about the broad role of the Internet in society. It tends to ignore institutional matters and questions of structure. It takes the world as it is, accepts it, and assesses it on those terms. This research is necessary and can have considerable value—I cite some of it herein—but it is not asking the central questions, so it is not set up to produce the answers we need.

For the big questions, the way to start is by reviewing the body of work produced by public intellectuals and scholars from a wide range of disci- plines that has assessed the Internet over the past two decades, attempting to locate it in a broad historical perspective. Going back to the early 1990s— from George Gilder’s Life after Television and Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital to Clifford Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil and Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, numerous writers have provided their assess- ment of the digital revolution. As one might expect, some of this material ages well, and some of it now seems ridiculous. The amount has increased, perhaps exponentially, in the past decade, becoming a veritable publishing genre. In view of how the Internet affects nearly every aspect of our lives, that is to be expected.

Even if the work does not always stand the test of time, and if some of it may seem superficial, it is of tremendous importance. These efforts by pub- lic intellectuals to make sense of the digital revolution, more than anything else, define how Americans—including scholars, concerned citizens, activ- ists, journalists, and policy makers—view the Internet and lay out what many of the relevant issues are. It is a discussion I wish to join.

Robin Mansell has analyzed this Internet literature as falling into two broad camps, the “celebrants” and the “skeptics.” both camps continue to thrive, though the context and issues have changed. Some observers have been in both camps; there is no berlin Wall dividing the two sides. It is a schema that captures two distinct frames of mind as much as two distinct sets of individuals, although there are some individuals who fall squarely, even defiantly, in one of the two camps.

I have been influenced by both celebrants and skeptics but believe each position is ultimately unsatisfactory and puts us on a dead-end street. I pro- pose in this book a means to take the best of what each side has to offer and make it part of a far more serious discussion with real political implications. beyond its self-evident importance, there is immense and revolutionary

what is the elephant in the digital room? 5

potential implicit in the Internet. My overriding concern has been and re- mains that this tremendous democratic potential—some of which has been realized—can be and has been undermined, leading to a world, at worst, where one could logically wish the computer had never been invented.

The Celebrants

because the celebrants are the loudest and most publicized Internet observ- ers, it is probably best to allow them the opening argument. In the illuminat- ing 2012 book Misunderstanding the Internet, James Curran summarizes the first tidal wave of Internet celebrants: “In the 1990s,” he writes,

leading experts, politicians, public officials, business leaders and jour- nalists predicted that the internet would transform the world. The internet would revolutionise, we were told, the organisation of busi- ness, and lead to a surge of prosperity. It would inaugurate a new era of cultural democracy in which the sovereign users—later dubbed “prosumers”—would call the shots, and old media leviathans would decay and die. It would rejuvenate democracy—in some versions by enabling direct e-government through popular referenda. All over the world, the weak and marginal would be empowered, leading to the fall of autocrats and the reordering of power relations. More generally, the global medium of the internet would shrink the universe, promote dialogue between nations, and foster global understanding. In brief, the internet would be an unstoppable force: like the invention of print and gunpowder, it would change society permanently and irrevocably.

And, of course, changing “the world beyond all recognition” permanently and irrevocably for the better. As Curran puts it, at the heart of most of these claims was what he terms “Internet-centrism, a belief that the internet is the alpha and omega of technologies, an agency that overrides all obstacles, and has the power to determine outcomes.” 15 Or as Mansell puts it, “innovations in digital technologies, including the virtual spaces on the Internet, are ac- corded near-mystical qualities.” 16

The early celebrants generated a wave of resistance from the skeptics as few of their predictions materialized and as problems emerged—including

6 digital disconnect

the economic crash of 2000–2001 following the high-tech bubble—that seemed to provide daunting obstacles to reaching the digital promised land. Nevertheless, the continued expansion of the Internet, especially Google search, the blogosphere, wikis, broadband, smartphones, and social media, has rejuvenated the celebrants and has spawned a number of successful ca- reers explaining the genius of cyberspace and the glorious world it is in the process of creating.

No one has celebrated and championed the revolutionary Internet in re- cent years more furiously than Clay Shirky, who is somewhat of a digital Johnny Appleseed. In his 2010 Cognitive Surplus, Shirky writes that with the new digital media, “the kind of participation we’re seeing today, in a rela- tive handful of examples, is going to spread everywhere and to become the backbone of assumptions about how our culture should work.” The young generation “will just assume that media includes the possibilities of consum- ing, producing, and sharing side by side, and that those possibilities are open to everyone.” Moreover, and this is where the revolution really kicks in, “the wiring of humanity lets us treat free time as a shared global resource, and lets us design new kinds of participation and sharing that take advantage of that resource.” It is this “cognitive surplus” that holds the potential for previously unimaginable collaboration that will radically transform and improve our lives.17 henry Jenkins makes a similar argument, extolling the mushroom- ing “collective intelligence,” when, because of the Internet, “we pool our resources and combine our skills.” 18

Physicist and quantum computing expert Michael Nielsen argues in 2012’s Reinventing Discovery that the mass collaboration generated by the Internet is in the process of revolutionizing science by increasing scale and cognitive diversity. “Online tools are transforming the way scientists make discoveries,” leading to a big shift in the relationship of science to society. Now countless citizens can also participate and the potential is endless and endlessly exciting. “Will we one day see,” he asks, “Nobel Prizes won by huge collaborations dominated by amateurs?” Nielsen concedes this revo- lution in “how knowledge is constructed” faces some speed bumps—not the least of which comes from commercial interests’ desire to patent every- thing—but the general trajectory is irreversible.19

In his 2011 The Penguin and the Leviathan, yochai benkler sees the In- ternet as driving a fundamental shift in human nature, one very much for the better:

what is the elephant in the digital room? 7

All around us we see people cooperating and working in collaboration, doing the right thing, behaving fairly, acting generously, caring about their group or team, and trying to behave like decent people who recip- rocate kindness with kindness. Nowhere has this fact been more obvi- ous than online, where Wikipedia and open-source software have been so successful. Tux, the Linux Penguin, is beginning to nibble away at the grim view of humanity that breathed life into Thomas hobbes’s Leviathan.20

These developments are so powerful, they have even brought a pro- nounced skeptic back toward the celebrant fold. Cass Sunstein once wrote of “information cocoons” and how the Internet would make it possible for people to avoid or ignore much of humanity, with dire implications for pub- lic life.21 With his 2006 Infotopia, Sunstein turned—heralding “the develop- ment of cumulative knowledge” online, “producing an astonishing range of new goods and activities.” With wikis, with “respect to the aggregation of information, we are in the first stages of a revolution.” 22

“Enabled by the Internet and social media,” Simon Mainwaring writes in 2011’s We First, “we are connecting with each other across geographic, cul- tural, and language barriers, reawakening our innate capacity for empathy and allowing ourselves to derive great satisfaction from social contributions as well as our self-interested endeavors.” he continues: “We have entered an amazing and exciting era in human history. We are fast acquiring the knowl- edge and technology to meet the challenges of poverty, malnutrition, child mortality, and the myriad social ills that blight our planet.” 23

In his 2011 Public Parts, Jeff Jarvis captures the political implications of a wired society now typified by unprecedented “publicness,” with the Internet as a supercharged public sphere. “Publicness is an emblem of ep- ochal change. It is profoundly disruptive. Publicness threatens institutions whose power is invested in the control of information and audience.” he continues:

Publicness is a sign of our empowerment at their expense. Dictators and politicians, media moguls and marketers try to tell us what to think and say. but now, in a truly public society, they must listen to what we say, whether we’re using Twitter to complain about a product or Face- book to organize a protest. If they are to prosper, these institutions must

8 digital disconnect

learn to deal with us at eye-level, with respect for us as individuals, and for the power we can wield as groups—as publics.24

In sum, the celebrants reaffirm one of the most important original argu- ments from the 1990s, that the Internet will be a force for democracy and good worldwide, ending monopolies of information and centralized control over communication. In 2009 Manuel Castells chronicled the many cases worldwide in which insurgent popular forces had successfully used the In- ternet to advance democratic politics.25 Celebrants like Peter h. Diamandis and Steven Kotler cite the 2009 Swedish government report that concluded increasing access to digital communication in the developing world encour- aged “economic development, poverty reduction and democratization— including freedom of speech, the free flow of information and the promotion of human rights.” 26

The 2011 revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and protests worldwide are offered as clinching evidence, exhibits A and b through Z. “Social media and technology,” Pamela Lund concludes, “give you more power than ever before to create the world you want.” 27 Though some celebrants express concern that bureaucrats or monopolists might muck it up a bit, the gen- eral sense is that these genies are supercharged and cannot be put back in the bottle. “The tipping point is upon us. The unprecedented power of the emerging social media is helping people connect online and in the streets to push the entire world over the edge of change,” veteran journalist and film- maker Rory O’Connor notes. “Watch out, big Media, big business, and big Government—here come our friends, our followers, and our future!” 28 As Jarvis puts it, “Resistance is futile.” 29 It is difficult to read these books and not look to the sky and thank one’s lucky star for having been put on the planet at this unprecedented glorious moment in history.

The Skeptics

The skeptics directly counter some of what the celebrants say, but to a cer- tain extent the two sides are talking past each other. Shaheed Nick Moham- med, in his 2012 The (Dis)information Age, takes dead aim at the notion that the Internet is spawning greater levels of knowledge, “the notion that these technologies and their popular modes of usage necessarily lead to a

what is the elephant in the digital room? 9

more informed public.” he notes that the Internet works as much or more to promote ignorance as knowledge; hence survey research demonstrates little if any improvement in the knowledge levels of Americans between 1989 and 2007.30 Mark bauerlein develops this point, noting that study after study con- firms that young people today constitute “the dumbest generation,” shock- ingly ignorant of civics, history, geography, science, literature, the works. To bauerlein, the emergence of digital media is the main culprit in this sudden transformation. “Dwelling in a world of puerile banter and coarse images,” they “are actively cut off” from world realities like no other generation.31

Jaron Lanier, considered the father of virtual reality technology, also ques- tioned the idea that the Internet is a knowledge factory in 2010’s You Are Not a Gadget. In summarily dismissing Shirky, he notes:

Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmen- tary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well- thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer sci- ence comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.

After describing Shirky’s idea of cognitive surplus at length, Lanier re- sponds, “So how many seconds of salvaged erstwhile television time would need to be harnessed to replicate the achievements of, say, Albert Einstein? It seems to me that even if we could network all the potential aliens in the galaxy—quadrillions of them, perhaps—and get each of them to contribute some seconds to a physics wiki, we would not replicate the achievements of even one mediocre physicist, much less a great one.” 32

In his 2011 book, The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser argues that because of the way Google and social media have evolved, Internet users are increas- ingly and mostly unknowingly led into a personalized world that reinforces their known preferences. This “filter bubble” each of us resides in under- mines the common ground needed for community and democratic politics; it also eliminates “ ‘meaning threats,’ the confusing, unsettling occurrences that fuel our desire to understand and acquire new ideas.” Pariser invokes research on scientific discovery showing that serendipity is necessary for creativity and that “blind discovery is a necessary condition for scientific revolution.” The research demonstrates that the filter-bubble environment will likely make discovery less likely: “The Einsteins and Copernicuses and

10 digital disconnect

Pasteurs of the world often have no idea what they are looking for. The big- gest breakthroughs are sometimes the ones we least expect.” 33

Lanier extends the argument to all creativity on the Internet and observes that the most discernible effect of the Internet on artists has been to make it ever more difficult for them to support themselves, with dire consequences for art and culture. “Creative people—the new peasants—come to resemble animals converging on shrinking oases of old media in a depleted desert.” 34

Rebecca MacKinnon in her 2012 Consent of the Networked and Evgeny Morozov in his 2011 The Net Delusion each reject the idea that the In- ternet will necessarily lead to democratic political revolutions worldwide. They point out that the bad guys—who are in power—have the ability and resources to regulate, manipulate, and use digital communication just as much as, if not more than, those out of power. MacKinnon documents, for example, how the Chinese government is able to let the Internet pro- vide what it needs for economic purposes while providing layers of regula- tion and subtle censorship that render it mostly impotent as a democratic organizing force.35 She also documents how private corporations, as well as governments both authoritarian and democratic, participate in this shrinking of Internet freedom. Resistance to the Internet apparently is not futile.36

This realization leads to a familiar refrain among skeptics: that technol- ogy is as capable of being destructive as it is progressive. Virginia Eubanks, in her 2011 Digital Dead End, notes that “many of us in the united States have engaged in a massive, collective, consensual hallucination about the power of technology, particularly information technology (IT), to ‘level the playing field,’ create broad-based economic and social equality, and nurture transparency and accountability in democratic governance.” 37 Even in the united States, skeptical scholars have chronicled how the Internet routinely generates bogus information, violates people’s privacy and civil rights, and facilitates various forms of harassment.38 Viktor Mayer-Schönberger writes about how people can never escape their pasts in the Internet era, and some- thing very important to being human is being lost.39

This harks back to the first wave of skepticism by people like Clifford Stoll. In 1999’s High-Tech Heretic, Stoll emphasized that the Internet iso- lated people, made them addicted, and probably created more unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life than anything else.40 Sexuality is one area to

what is the elephant in the digital room? 11

which skeptics can point. The explosion in online pornography has created an “orgasmatron” effect, as an increasing number of people get their sexual satisfaction via the Internet.41 The writer Russell banks acknowledges this phenomenon in the title of his 2011 novel, Lost Memory of Skin, which “re- fers to the way real flesh has been supplanted by the virtual kind.” 42

Skeptics argue that the emergence of Facebook and other social media, ironically enough, correlates with a marked increase in loneliness. An AARP study showed that the rate of loneliness in Americans over forty-five has nearly doubled in just the last decade. “Within this world of instant and absolute communication,” Stephen Marche writes, “we have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier.” Scholars term this the In- ternet paradox. “Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increas- ingly superficial connections,” Marche writes, “at exactly the same moment they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easier.” And the evidence is in: “loneliness makes us miserable,” leading to all sorts of health-related problems.43 Psychologist Larry Rosen argues that Internet addiction and/or obsession contributes to a wide-range of mental health problems.44

Psychologist Sherry Turkle notes that people “seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the de- mands of a relationship.” She writes of the “flight from conversation,” as people find it increasingly difficult to talk with each other. “Many people tell me they hope that as Siri, the digital assistant on Apple’s iPhone, becomes more advanced, ‘she’ will be more and more like a best friend—one who will listen when others won’t.” Turkle concludes, “Even when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on their own devices.” 45

The idea that the Internet is transforming people unwittingly in ways that may be less than desirable is best developed in The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. While acknowledging all the benefits of the Internet, and his own ad- diction to it, Carr argues that the advantages “come at a price,” specifically by reshaping the way our brains work. Carr draws from the recent surge in brain science research demonstrating that brains are “massively plastic” and can be changed dramatically by their environment and how they are used and not used. Carr argues that research demonstrates that with the rise of the Web and the decline in traditional reading, humans are losing their “linear thought process.” 46 The Internet’s “cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking

12 digital disconnect

either deeply or creatively.” People substitute skimming for reading, and “off- load” their memory to computers. The consequences are disastrous. Carr invokes William James, who declared that “the art of remembering is the art of thinking.” 47

The concerns resonate even with people like Arianna huffington, one of the great champions of the Internet as the basis of new media and democrati- zation. “All these new social tools can help us bear witness more powerfully,” she acknowledged in a blistering 2012 attack on the inanity of the exuberant self-congratulation of social media, “or they can help us be distracted more obsessively.” 48 Skeptics like Carr and Lanier fear deeply that the Internet is re-creating people in technology’s image, flattening our intelligence and lessening our creativity. In short, they worry that we are losing what was once thought of as our humanity. It is a world where the past, warts and all, looks more attractive than the future.

What Elephant?

Reviewing these two sets of critiques, one feels like a person who has one foot in an ice bucket and the other in boiling water. There is no immedi- ately apparent intellectually honest way to split the difference and say, “On balance, I feel fine.” Although there is much to learn from both sides, both have their weaknesses. The celebrants mostly tap into an untethered love of some combination of technology, gadgetry, markets, utopianism, progress, and individualism that is quintessentially American and downright intoxicat- ing; you get the benefits of a revolution without the messy politics. This may explain why it is so widely embraced in the mainstream culture and can be regarded as the dominant mode of thought about the Internet.

The skeptics provide a dash of realism and raise important deep-seated concerns, but like the original skeptics in ancient Greece, their values are unclear and they generally offer no credible alternative course. John Naugh- ton characterizes the skeptics as contrarians who provide dissent to the domi- nant groupthink.49 The skeptics provide plaintive wails, basically footnotes to the celebrants’ defining narrative. In this sense, they are almost necessary to legitimize the celebrants and make the dominant view appear the result of extended debate. The skeptics can have the ironic effect of ending further examination, not encouraging it. And in this supporting role, some skeptics

what is the elephant in the digital room? 13

can be prone to playing the role of curmudgeon and bending the stick too far to make their point.

both camps, with a few exceptions, have a single, deep, and often fatal flaw that severely compromises the value of their work. That flaw, simply put, is ignorance about really existing capitalism and an underappreciation of how capitalism dominates social life. Celebrants and skeptics lack a politi- cal economic context. The work tends to take capitalism for granted as part of the background scenery and elevate technology to ride roughshod over history.50 both camps miss the way capitalism defines our times and sets the terms for understanding not only the Internet, but most everything else of a social nature, including politics, in our society.

Political economy—an understanding of capitalism and its relationship to democracy—can provide a rudder as we make sense of the Internet. To the extent that both celebrants and skeptics consider capitalism, they often do so in almost mythical form. It is high time to recognize the elephant in the room.

Political economy should be the organizing principle for evaluating the digital revolution for numerous reasons. The ways capitalism works and does not work determine the role the Internet might play in society. The profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising—all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism—are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop. Any attempt to make sense of democracy divorced from its relationship to capitalism is dubious. Despite all of the routine assumptions equating capitalism—or its euphemism, free markets—with democracy, they remain distinct undertakings with very strong tensions that can boil over into direct conflict.

The most striking tension, the one that has been an issue between prop- erty systems and self-government from the beginning of the republic, indeed since classical Athens, has been the conflict between rich and poor caused by the inequality generated by the economy, which can undermine the po- litical equality upon which democracy is premised. “If income, wealth, and economic position are also political resources, and if they are distributed unequally, then how can citizens be political equals,” the yale political sci- entist Robert Dahl asked. “And if citizens cannot be political equals, how is democracy to exist?” 51

The now widely acknowledged massive increase in economic inequality

14 digital disconnect

in the united States over the past three decades poses an existential threat to the possibility of self-government and eventually to many of the freedoms most Americans take for granted. The scholarly research demonstrates that the poor and even middle class have virtually no influence over their elected representatives. Not so for the wealthy.52 The ability of wealthy interests to play an outsized role in American elections is merely one manifestation of a long process. Any big-picture assessment of the Internet that disregards the very real and immediate threat of inequality to self-governance and freedom is going to be flawed from the get-go.53

Inequality promotes a thoroughgoing corruption of the governing process as wealthy special interests come to dominate, forcing the system to main- tain and even increase their privileges further. As celebrants and skeptics alike acknowledge, there are several core policy issues that will influence or determine the course of digital communication. If the governing system is in the tank for special interests, it is going to directly affect the shape of the Internet. but without an understanding of capitalism’s dynamics, most celebrants and skeptics have undermined their ability to provide much more than bland generalizations and hand-wringing.

To be clear, few if any of the Internet observers I have cited are apolo- gists for existing capitalism; many envision a world in which the excesses and problems of capitalism are eliminated, if not capitalism itself. Many celebrants, in particular, extol the Internet because it is allowing for a more cooperative and humane economy and society, and considering the growth of Wikipedia and other cooperative efforts, the basis for the argument is not purely hypothetical.

but it is not historical or credible. untethered from a historical or empiri- cal understanding of capitalism, celebrants tend to have a decidedly utopian notion of political economy. “The entire system of free market capitalism, as it is practiced in the united States and in many Western nations,” Simon Mainwaring writes,

is leading us further and further down the wrong path, toward a world dominated by narrow self-interest, greed, corporatism, and insensitiv- ity to the greater good of humanity and to the planet itself. Short-term thinking and the single-minded pursuit of profit are increasingly sub- verting an economic system that otherwise has the capacity to benefit everyone.

what is the elephant in the digital room? 15

he concludes that because of social media, “we can transform the role of the private sector, including both corporations and consumers, to build a better world.” 54

The problem is that celebrants often believe digital technology has super- powers over political economy. “What I found,” yochai benkler writes, “was that the Internet has allowed social, nonmarket behavior to move from the periphery of the industrial economy to the very core of the global, net- worked economy.” 55 “We are talking about deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and our economy,” Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams write, “based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally.” And the good news is, “smart companies are encouraging, rather than fighting, the heaving growth of online communities.” 56 Jeff Jarvis sees corporations evolving into effec- tively democratic institutions—“radically public companies”—with control in the hands of employees, consumers, and other stakeholders.57 Rachel botsman and Roo Rogers characterize this epoch as a time “when we took a leap and re-created a sustainable system built to serve basic human needs— in particular, the needs for community, individual identity, recognition, and meaningful activity—rooted in age-old market principles and collaborative behaviors. Indeed, it will be referred to as a revolution, so to speak, when society, faced with grave challenges, started to make a seismic shift from an unfettered zeal for individual getting and spending toward a rediscovery of collective good.” 58

“business is rising to the challenge” of social media, Mainwaring tells us. “Top-down hierarchical organizing principles rooted in fear are being su- perseded by organic, distributed, and free-flowing structures. Leading-edge companies are integrating values into their business strategies and embracing their role as enduring custodians of community and planetary well-being.” 59

Wow! Wouldn’t all our lives be blissful, were this the case! We could head off to a beach with our laptops, iPods, Kindles, and smartphones—not to mention a daiquiri and a bag of potato chips—and live happily ever after. There is only one problem: there is precious little proof that capitalism as a system is moving in this direction. To be more precise, there is none. The system is in a fairly significant crisis, and there is not a scintilla of evidence that it is in the process of bursting through to a new digital Age of Aquarius. Certainly the Internet is changing capitalism in significant ways, and it may well assist those who wish to reform or replace it in the political arena; but it

16 digital disconnect

is not making capitalism become, in effect, for lack of a better term, a green, democratic socialist utopia. I argue in what follows that it cannot do so.

I think when celebrants incorporate political economy into their analysis, they do not become skeptics and certainly not cynics, but they do become much more aware of the importance of politics. They need not abandon their vision of digital promise; they simply have to accommodate that vision to the political economic world in which they actually live. Likewise, when the most militant skeptics engage with political economy, their powerless- ness and defeatism can be trumped by a better appreciation for what human agency can accomplish via technology. In this way, the ice water and boiling water can be merged, producing a comfortable outcome.

Why Is Capitalism the Third Rail of Internet Scholarship?

What accounts for the persistent reluctance, even refusal, of Internet observ- ers to engage in political economy and make a no-holds-barred assessment of really existing capitalism? To be accurate, it is not only Internet observers like Cass Sunstein who see markets and democracy as two sides of the free- society coin.60 This is the case throughout the social sciences and the pun- ditry, from liberal to conservative. It includes much of the respectable left, which sees its role as humanizing capitalism, not questioning it.

The core problem is that observers confuse the market, which exists to some degree in all modern societies, including Maoist China, with capi- talism, or the market system, which has an overriding logic with powerful implications. The quasi-mythical competitive “free market” provides an overpowering metaphor for a free and efficient economy, but it has little to do with real-world capitalism. As Charles E. Lindblom put it, conventional wisdom continually “stumbles” and is incapable of grasping capitalism as a system, “because the market’s dazzling benefits half blind it to the defects.” 61

To be intentionally provocative, the “genius of the free market” to which all are expected to pay homage has as much to do with really existing capitalism as paeans to the workers’ paradise did to really existing communism in the old Soviet union.

What gives the notion of the “free market” such a sacred position in our society, such that even those who study capitalism as a whole feel obliged to swear fealty to the existing economic structure as the ante to admission?

what is the elephant in the digital room? 17

Consider a superb economist like the university of Cambridge’s ha-Joon Chang—who is sharply critical of “the ‘truths’ peddled by free-market ideo- logues” that “are based on lazy assumptions and blinkered visions.” Chang emphasizes his unwavering belief that capitalism is the best possible eco- nomic system before launching his devastating and often brilliant critique of a “global economy” that “lies in tatters.” 62 Why is this loyalty oath necessary? What purpose does it serve?

Moreover, this is a problem limited to the analysis of contemporary capi- talism. A scholar studying the Soviet union would never discount the mo- nopoly of economic and political power held by the Communist Party and the state and then focus on other matters. The political economy would be central to any credible analysis, or the scholar would be dismissed as a char- latan. The same is true of any academic study of any ancient civilization.

This gets to probably the best explanation: whenever scholars examine their own society, it is generally taboo to challenge the prerogatives and privi- leges of those who stand atop it and benefit from the status quo, even in po- litical democracies. This may be nearly as true of the united States as it was of the old Soviet union. And there is little doubt that in the united States, real power is with those who have the most money. Now of course the con- temporary united States is not a police state and does not have gulags, but it has a variety of powerful material and cultural inducements to encourage a hands-off policy toward capitalism. A ritualized chant to the genius of the free market is a good place to start.

To some extent this internalization of capitalism can be explained by the dismal record of those one-party communist regimes, which were pro- claimed by their supporters and their enemies as the only possible alternative to capitalism. If they were the only possible alternative, scholars committed to democracy understandably had no desire to open that proverbial door. Stick with capitalism, regardless of any faults, and thank your lucky stars! but that narrow “capitalism or communism” choice never made much sense, as the same political left that criticized capitalism was responsible for an outsized portion of the political liberties, voting rights, and social programs of advanced democracy. Likewise, those who benefited from and promoted capitalism tended to be either agnostic about these democratic advances or resistant to them. Moreover, much of the left opposed left-wing dictator- ships and developed some of the strongest critiques of them on democratic grounds.

18 digital disconnect

At any rate, because mainstream scholarship simply accepted capitalism as the same as democracy and the only possible economic system, schol- arship that emphasized political economy was left to those who were by definition radicals, which increased its likelihood of being stigmatized as “ideological” and “unscientific.” The rational play for a scholar who wished to change the system for the better in the here and now was to pledge alle- giance to it, hoping to get taken seriously by those with power and thereby be effective. The motivation to take the loyalty oath was based on a realistic assessment of the political lay of the land as well as a desire to do good.

In stable times when the political economic system is working adequately, presupposing the status quo as a benevolent given would be an intellec- tual problem, but it would be understandable. however, when the political economy is in crisis, as it is in the united States and much of the world today, this presupposition moves from benign neglect to irresponsibility, from scholarship to propaganda. This is doubly true when one is discussing a social phenomenon of such sweeping importance as the Internet.

Internet scholars need not become anticapitalist. To the contrary, in my view it is a reasonable position to think that capitalism, and especially mar- kets, have some, perhaps many, virtues that will be present in a good society. but I think it is a similarly reasonable position to think that a good society will have progressive taxation, widespread free trade unions, high-quality mass transit, universal free health care, guaranteed employment, and high- quality universal public education. yet all of these points are debatable if not controversial among American scholars and pundits. There is no valid reason why American scholars should bow down to capitalism in general and corporate power specifically.

In the end, this is not a left-right issue. Some of the finest public intel- lectuals of the past century who ruthlessly criticized capitalism and its rela- tionship to democracy were also advocates of capitalism as well as political conservatives. The most famous was Joseph Schumpeter, but the tradition lives on. Kevin Phillips wrote a series of thoughtful books in this vein over the past two-plus decades. In 2009 and 2010, renowned conservative Rich- ard Posner wrote two stellar books precisely on the crisis of capitalism and the problem of self-government. honest inquiry is not monopolized by any political ideology.63 Indeed, only a handful of liberals, like John Kenneth Galbraith, have been up to the task of providing an unvarnished view of capi- talism’s deep flaws, without necessarily rejecting it.64 If capitalism is as great

what is the elephant in the digital room? 19

as its defenders claim, it can survive and even prosper by being subjected to criticism, examination, and open debate. And if it cannot triumph after a round in the hot seat, this becomes a conversation that was long overdue.

Preview

In this book I will make the case that political economy holds a key to un- derstanding the Internet. Political economy does not provide all the answers to all the questions, but it provides valuable and indispensable context and insight for the most important questions. The celebrants and skeptics alike— as well as the majority of Internet social scientists—have produced much of value as we ponder the fate of the Internet. Political economy does not obvi- ate that work; it elevates and empowers it.

I am not the only person who has made this argument. Dan Schiller, Michael Perelman, James Curran, Vincent Mosco, Graham Murdock, and Luis Suarez-Villa, among others, have all contributed to the cause, but to date little of our work has had much success in penetrating the main- stream debate.65 Through a grounding in political economy and capitalism, scholars and citizens can make much better sense of why the Internet is the way it is and what the real options are. Political economy is the necessary missing ingredient to take the debate from parlor chitchat to serious social critique.

Chapters 2 and 3 set up the explicit analysis of the Internet that comes in the subsequent chapters, although at numerous points I bring the Inter- net directly into the discussion. In chapter 2 I introduce elements of po- litical economy. I debunk the mythological notion of free markets—the “catechism”—and provide what I believe is a more accurate understanding of capitalism. My aim is to introduce those elements necessary for the cri- tique of the relationship of capitalism to political democracy that follows. In particular, I assess how capitalism affects inequality, concentrated economic power, and economic growth. Political democracy is threatened when the first two factors are large and growing and the third is small and stagnant.

I argue that the nation Americans generally regard as the epitome of what is possible for self-government, the present-day united States, is actually a rather weak democracy once one sees it in the light of capitalism. If scholars want to make big claims about how the digital revolution is fundamentally

20 digital disconnect

invigorating democracy, they must start from a stronger foundation. More- over, capitalism is not a magical merry-go-round that continually improves people’s material well-being. The evidence points in one direction: for the visible future, capitalism in the united States is marked by increasing stagnation, the likes of which have not been seen for eight decades, which translates into declining incomes, austerity, ever increasing inequality, and a lower quality of life. history suggests that this is not a political economy compatible with a high level of democracy. Something has to give.

In chapter 3, I introduce the subfield of the political economy of commu- nication, or the PEC. If the standard free-market model is of only marginal analytical value for understanding bricks-and-mortar capitalism, it is useless for understanding how markets operate regarding information, commercial entertainment, and journalism. The same is true for the Internet. The dis- cussion shows how, and with what effects, all these markets diverge at their very creation from the free-market norm. It pays particular attention to the relationship of communication to capitalism and to democracy. Students of PEC are centrally concerned with technology, advertising, and public rela- tions, and most important, they have a singular devotion to studying com- munications policies and the policy-making process. The entire tradition is germane to making sense of the digital revolution and finding workable solu- tions to its problems.

In chapters 4 and 5, I turn to the relationship of really existing capital- ism to the Internet. Much of the Internet literature, celebrant and skeptic alike, accepts that the Internet and capitalism have been and will be bound together in a natural and necessary relationship. I will provide an alternative view, one that elevates the many disharmonies between the two. Indeed, at several places in recent history, the tensions between the possibilities of the technology and the needs and desires of commercial interests have crescen- doed, leading to ferocious policy debates.

In chapter 4, I review the Internet’s 1990s transition from noncommercial oasis to capitalist hot spot. I assess how the “dinosaur” firms in telecommuni- cations and media, which were generally considered to be facing extinction, have fared. In chapter 5, I examine the rise of a handful of gigantic monopo- listic firms to dominance of the Internet alongside the telecommunication giants. I chronicle how advertising has flooded the Internet in a manner quite unlike the way it operated in “old media.” It has led to a degree of surveillance of nearly all Americans far beyond anything remotely possible

what is the elephant in the digital room? 21

only a decade ago. The chapter concludes with an examination of the rela- tionship between the Internet giants and the military and national security agencies of the u.S. government; it seems to be a marriage made in heaven, with dire implications for liberty and democracy.

In chapter 6, I examine the state of journalism in the digital age. Way back in the 1990s, the emerging digital era was often referred to as the in- formation age. The assumption was that there would be a wealth of quality information readily available to citizens such that they could exert effective control over their lives and make politics appreciably more democratic. This was arguably the most powerful and attractive claim for the Internet. It is an issue of first-order importance, because a credible political information system is the foundation of effective self-governance. It is mandatory if there are going to be effective democratic solutions to the social problems of our times.

Journalism is the main way modern societies produce and disseminate political information, and it is of singular importance in democracies. Much has been made of how the Internet has destroyed the commercial news media business model. With no sense of irony, the same people argue that the Internet will combine with free markets to magically re-create a new, different, and superior news media system sometime in the future. I assess and reject those claims. Moreover, there is general naïveté about the quality of journalism, even in its “golden age.” Drawing from the PEC tradition, I provide an alternative way to understand journalism and its importance to a free society. I provide the actual history of journalism in the united States and other democratic nations as the basis for my argument that journalism is a public good and if it is to thrive, it will require resources and institutions, and that will mean large public investments.

Throughout the book, in virtually every chapter, I touch on specific Inter- net and communication policies and debates. In the conclusion, chapter 7, I consider them as a whole and ask what it will take to get these core policies out of the hands of self-interested corporations (and the politicians they own) so the broader population might participate. For this central political ques- tion, I draw on my work as a scholar and as the co-founder of Free Press, the media reform group.

I then turn to the implied questions: can the Internet be a democratic force without making any changes in the broader political economy? What sort of revolution is this, anyway? I argue that the united States and the

22 digital disconnect

world are not merely in political economic turmoil, but that we are wit- nessing the emergence of broad social movements for democratic renewal, reform, and revolution. Even the united States, long regarded as a political laggard, is seeing a generational shift politically, although the bankruptcy and corruption of its political system is masking this phenomenon. At the center of political debate will be economics: what sort of economy can best promote democratic values and structures and self-governance while nurtur- ing the environment? And at the center of everything will be the Internet. The democratization of the Internet is integrally related to the democratiza- tion of the political economy. They rise and fall together.