tony curzon price the liberty the networked -1

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The liberty of the networked (1)

By Tony Curzon Price,

Created 2009-02-09 08:26Does technology liberate or enslave? When Prometheus first started the industrial revolution,Zeus thought he had liberated humanity and should be punished for it. The tension betweentechnology as empowering versus technology as sinister control continues. The web versus thedatabase, liberation or tool of tyranny? The Convention on Modern Liberty [1] of whichopenDemocracy is a sponsor, asks us to make the question of technology's social role central toour political thought and activity. The Convention is right that we must not patiently allow a newtechnological order to deeply rebalance tyranny and liberty.

This long essay, to be published in parts, tries to make sense of the libero-genic hope and

potential of computer and communications technology in a framework that also makes sense ofthe dangers. I return to a an essay from the adolescence of liberalism - Benjamin Constant's1816 "The liberty of ancients compared with that of moderns" [2] - to argue that the liberatinghyper-individualism of the web is also the source of its greatest dangers. It is now more urgentthan ever for us to reclaim our ability to decide all together on our common futures: we need toexercise our collective freedom to preserve our modern liberty.

1 [2]

Mill and Constant [2] Schema--The ancient, the modern and the networked [2]

Arguments and Forces [2]

Modern/Libero-genic: cheap communication [2] Ancient/Libero Genic: Every web site is a republic [2] Coming next: Tyranny [2]

Bibliography [2]

Mill, 1840 [2])

Will the technology optimists always be with us? Each age of technology brings with it the hopethat the ills of modernity will be cured. The railway that Mill pinned such hopes on also ferriedtroops to the front 75 years later for carnage on an unprecedented scale. The newspaper and

other mass media that would bring Athens to England would also stir up the passions thatushered in the totalitarianisms of the the twentieth century. Is it different this time, with theInternet? It might be. But the forces of social and technocratic tyranny are well poised to turn thenew networks into chains. This paper tries to describe the lay of the battlefield ahead.

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When Mill hopes to bring Athens to England, he is pointing back to the basic dilemma ofmodernity expressed 30 years earlier by Benjamin Constant (Constant, 1816 [2]) in his analysisof the liberty of the ancients and the moderns.

Constant applauds the freedom of the moderns--the ability to get on with one's own life andprojects without interference of the sovereign--but worries on two counts that we will miss thepolitical freedom of the ancients:

1. an instrumentalreason: the private and individual freedoms that thrive in modern masssociety are dependent for their continued existence on a proper, wise delegation ofpower to representatives of government. However the very desire to get on with ourprivate affairs saps the will to hold power to account. The powerful will naturally takeadvantage of such political dis-engagement and our modern freedoms will eventually beundermined.2 [2]

2. an intrinsicreason: participation in public life and collective decisions is part of the goodlife.3 [2]Participation in a free political realm--the common determination of collectivegoods and behaviours through discussion--is not just a means to private welfare, butitself a condition of a good life.

The issues identified by Constant are certainly with us still. Modernity in the West has hugelyexpanded the private realm of freedom, but the government of mass society has tended todestroy the meaningful exercise of self-determination in collective life--the ``freedom of theancients".

John Stuart Mill expresses the refrain of the modern techno-libertarian. The railway and the

printing press accomplish Constant's request that we need to find social organisations thatmerge the two freedoms.4 [2]The railway reduces distance; the printing press carries wisdomand discussion. The agora, the public forum in which the citizens of Athens participated incollective decision-making, is reconstituted in virtual form.5 [2]

Today we have the same question: are the Internet and the blogoshpere at last the solution toConstant's request that we cure mass society of its public-realm emptiness without abandoningthe gains for individuals of Enlightenment modernity? Should we now see the Internet asessentially a technology of freedom? Will the freedom of the networked be, at last, the synthesisof the freedom of the ancients and of the moderns?

The alternative view is as desperate as this one is hopeful. Just as Mill saw the potential of therailway for freedom and self-realisation, Saint-Simon, keen to use the new technologies toreplace the "government of men by the administration of things", prefigures a manipulative,bureaucratic attitude to mass society.6 [2]Will the new networked world be an instrument ofSaint-Simonian technocracy or will it create an arena for Millian liberty? I will argue that libertydoes not -- as it were -- come for free. It will not just drop out of the technological developmentsof the age. Every technology pits tyranny against freedom, and every technology requires thebattle to be fought again.

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1 [2]. The ancients had no checks on the

power of society; mores and law were fused.

Here is Constant again:

Similarly ostracism, that legal

arbitrariness, extolled by all the

legislators of the age; ostracism, which

appears to us, and rightly so, a revolting

iniquity, proves that the individual was

much more subservient to the

supremacy of the social body in Athens,

than he is in any of the free states of

Europe today.

(Constant, 1816 [2]) Society gave power tothe individual, but also had absolute power

over including or excluding the individual.

Collective power was bought at the cost of

individual rights and certainties. One of the

most troubling aspects of the wired world,with its assault on privacy and its

technologies of manipulation, may recreate

and amplify this aspect of the world of the

ancients.

At the same time, centralised, personalised databases, whether they are governmental or civil,give bureaucracy great power over the individuals. These are modern concerns, classicallyexpressed in Kafka (1925) [2] and Orwell (1949) [2]. The industrial processing of informationbrings this modern abuse of power frighteningly within the reach of our states and companies.

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[3]

Avoid the top, encourage the bottom.

The lower part of table 1 [3] represents technology-optimism. The networked world offers a

myriad of new opportunities for participating in collective spaces, some new and some old butnewly enhanced by technology. Wikipedia has brought encyclopaedic knowledge-gathering intothe public realm (openDemocracy is working at doing the same for news analysis andcommentary); Flickr has brought photographers from all over the world into the creation of apublic photo archive; YouTube hosts any number of niche communities that provide a publicspace for performance. In the digital age, Andy Warhol might have said, everyone can befamous to 15 people (Weinberger, 2002 [3]). This creates opportunities for the sort of sociallyrich, collectively oriented self-realisation and self-determination that Constant saw thatmodernity had destroyed.

At the same time, that quintessential freedom of the moderns, the expansion of the realm ofunrestricted private choice is being expanded by new goods and services, some very cheap,many free, and many seeminglyfree (more later on the indigestion that the Web2.0 "free" lunchis likely to cause).

[4]

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Lines of battle. (The weight of the line represents my assessment of the scale of the

danger)

The remainder of this article is an elaboration of the forces depicted here . Briefly, these are theeffects I will cover:

Finkielkraut, Warner

These are all thinkers who have described the way in which technology is changing--sometimes for the worse, they claim-- our thoughts, individuality and identities. The tyrannyof the group is moulding us as never before. These are interesting speculations, but I arguethat they are not the fundamental vector of tyranny.

Sunstein (2007) [4]

argues that the new economics of knowledge dissemination fragments society into non-communicating shards; solipsistic communities that grow apart and potentially find itincreasingly hard to co-habit as any habit of compromise is lost. We thus are moving fromthe freedom of the moderns, with its ``broad tent'' political institutions like parties andnewspapers, to an ``unfreedom of the ancient'' with its warring city states squaring upacross the Peleponese.

Zittrain (2008) [4]

sees that the Internet, once the fertile ground for all sorts of creative, ``generative''communities organised on Athenian grounds and delivering the social goods of ancientfreedom, is in danger of becoming the ``first self-closing open system" under the weight ofinsecurity, theft and other bad user experiences. Governments will be tempted to regulate,corporations will reduce the freedom of users that created the realm of pure possibility thatthe Internet briefly was.

Kafka (1925) [4], Orwell (1949) [4] and McNealyTechnology is being used to realise the nightmares of the database state. In somecountries--China, Russia, Iran--the process is advanced. In the West, it has gone muchfurther than most of us realise. These are not just government databases, but the use bygovernments, criminal organisations and some corporations of all sorts of overlappingdatabases of personal and quasi-persoanl information. We are building a world in whichJozef K.'s paranoia will become a natural state of mind for many. We are willinglycontributing, in the name of convenience, security or out of sheer ignorance, to thedatabases that could be used to enslave us. Imagine the world of the Stasi as decribed inDonnersmarck (2006) [4], with information willingly auto-submitted and efficientlyprocessed.

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[5]

Get over it!

Hope

In all this gloom is the hope, expressed in Net-Topians like Anderson (2007) [5], Benkler(2006) [5] and Lessig (2000) [5] who argue for the transformative potential of the Internet.``The Wealth of Networks" will allow for the fusion of the freedom of the old and the new:alienation and anomie, the diseases of the freedom of the moderns, will be banished by theflexibility and abundance of the virtual world; social tyranny, the disease of the ancients, isbanished by the endless multiplication of identities and affiliations that we can now enjoy.

[6]

Keys, money, cellphone.

Chipchase ought to give more weight to the ability the cellphone has provided to move aroundmass society while never being more than a thumb-twiddle from our friends--the private realm offamily and friendship has become portable.7 [6]

There have been previous massive changes in the cost and technology of disseminatinginformation, and these have had profound effects on society and the progress of freedom.

In 1557, in reaction to the printing revolution introduced to the West by Gutenberg,8 [6]PopePius IV published the first Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the titles that printing had let into mindsto corrupt them. Pius IV had it right that printing would revolutionise religion and fundamentally

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weaken the church, but had it wrong that he could stop it. Or take the mass-circulation dailiesand weeklies that appeared in the nineteenth century after paper-making and steam presses cutthe cost and time required to publish fast and in huge quantities. Governments quickly imposedselective taxes on printed material (like the Stamp Act of 1765, with the riots this caused in theAmericas) designed both to raise revenues and silence sedition. They could do the first, in theshort term, but not the second.

[7]

Net brain syndrome.

The printing press--the epoch that some are already calling the Gutenberg parenthesis--can beargued to have destroyed the authority of the Church, created the Protestant individual, madethe industrial revolution and organised mass social movements. The technology of the pressand later of broadcasting impose large fixed costs of production, so encouraged thedevelopment of mass markets.9 [7]

Changing production functions in the transformation of information are likely to be significantsocial events because knowledge is itself such an important input to the creation of socialbehaviour. We would expect the networked computer to have very broad social impacts--similarchanges in the costs of ball bearings would be big news, but probably not socially transformativein the same way.

The almost zero fixed costs of information dissemination and retrieval; the almost zero marginalcost of serving an additional copy of the information--the first round effect of this is to create"The Long Tail": the micro-markets for informational goods and services that were previously

ruled out by market-size constraints.

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Curzon Price, 2008 [7]). Intended from the

beginnings of ArpaNet as a network so

decentralised it would allow the basic

functioning of government even after atargeted nuclear strike, the Internet invented

rules for its operation as it went along.

Experts who needed to get a job done

formed ad hoccommittees and established

de facto standards. The Unix gurus whowere the head of computer systems at the

big American Universities, in the major

research establishments and in a few early-

adopting corporations formed an

aristocracy of nerds who built an open,

scaleable network architecture that became

the Internet we know.

Zittrain (2008) [7] tells the story of the development of this ``generative" technology. At everyturn, the ad hocgroupings made decisions that maximised the flexibility of the network. Theprinciples of experimentation, procrastination--``make constraining decisions as late aspossible"--and contribution rule in this world. Academic institutions provide the "infant industryenvironment" in which systems that rely in their early stages on expert users all providing good

will that allows the Internet to stabilise, open itself outwards and become the phenomenon ofgeneral scalability we saw in the 1990s.

There is a profoundly non-market aspect to this development of open systems. The market, withCompuserve, Prodigy and AOL tried to deliver closed, controlled and safe networks. The FrenchState, with its Minitel, did the same. The American academe provided the world with aremarkable interconnected hierarchy of public goods--from the most basic protocols like TCP/IPto the machines that could operate the network (Stanford University Netowork, SUN) to thecomplex software that bundled all this together (Berkeley Standard (Unix) Distribution, a versionof which this Apple still runs on today) and the millions of lines of useful code, much of it

developed under the watchful eye of Richard Stallman, the austere high priest of the freesoftware movement, at MIT, that provided end-user functionality.

This is (Zittrain, 2008 [7]):

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The generative Internet and PC were at first perhaps more akin to new societies; aspeople were connected, they may not have had firm expectations about the basics ofthe interaction. Who pays for what? Who shares what? The time during which theInternet remained an academic backwater, and the PC was a hobbyists tool, helpedsituate each within the norms of Benkler's parallel economy of sharing nicely, of greatercontrol in the hands of users and commensurate trust that they would not abuse it.

That culture of expert-led generative development has extended into the domain of webapplications with projects like Wikipedia. A self-selected and self-appointed group of under5,000 editors, fact-checkers, conflict resolvers and coders have created a compendium that willrank with the Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie as a great achievement of human culture.Under the aegis of open-access, transparency and the power of self-determination, Wikipedia isits own republic. It levies voluntary taxation from users; its aristocracy makes critical decisionsabout the common good. It gives away what it makes, since making it, and having it used andperceived as useful, is its own reward. Benkler (2006) [7] finds in this sort of project ``TheWealth of Networks", and these are enabled in all sorts of new spaces by the technology of nearzero cost information dissemination. openDemocracy [8], for example, has staked its ground as

being the global Public Service provider of news analysis and commentary.

The emerging world of ``free'' [9], Video.

The wealth of networks [10], Yale UniversityPress.

The liberty of ancients compared with that of

moderns, [11] Essay.

From zittrain to aristotle in 600 words [11],

openDemocracy.

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Das leben der anderen, [12] Film.

The Trial, [13] Project Gutenberg EBook.

Code and other laws of cyberspace, [14]

Basic Books.

DE TOCQUEVILLE ON DEMOCRACY IN

AMERICA, [15] Online Library of Liberty.

.

1984, [16] Secker and Warburg.

Republic.com 2.0, [17] Princeton University

Press.

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Small pieces, loosely joined, [18] Perseus

Books.

The Future of the Internet (and how to stop

it), [19] Princeton University Press.

.

Footnotes

1 [19]

Many thanks to all the people who have

commented on early drafts of this paper--Selina O'Grady, Graeme Mitchison,

Victoria Curzon Price, Anthony Barnett,

Jonathan Zittrain, David Hayes, Jeremy

O'Grady, Stefaan Verhultz. This paper

owes a great deal to a seminar funded bythe MacArthur foundation in March 2008,

"Credibility in the New News" in London.

Many thanks to Kathy Im and Elspeth

Revere for making that gathering and

space for thinking possible. I presented a

version of this paper to the Annual

Meeting of the Mont Pellerin Society [20]

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in Tokyo in September 2009. It was a

personally emotionally charged occasion,

being the child of two members of the

society while feeling uncomfortable withmost of the positions taken by its

members. On the question of the

authoritarian state, however, we were on

common ground - at least at some level of

abstraction.2 [20]

This is just the agency problem that the

subprime crisis has made so familiar but

applied to politics rather than finance. The

gigantism of modernity--driven often byapparently genuine economies of scale--

produces freedom-destroying loss of

control. That loss of control should be

factored as a cost into any analysis of the

economies of scale that are justifying themove to gigantism. Technology can

certainly be gigantisms's friend.

3 [20]

Constant writes that human beings arecalled to ``self-development [...] and

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political liberty is the most powerful, the

most effective means of self-development

that heaven has given us. Political liberty,

by submitting to all the citizens, withoutexception, the care and assessment of

their most sacred interests, enlarges their

spirit, ennobles their thoughts, and

establishes among them a kind of

intellectual equality which forms the gloryand power of a people.'' (Constant, 1816

[20])

4 [20]

``Sirs, far from renouncing either of the

two sorts of freedom which I havedescribed to you, it is necessary, as I have

shown, to learn to combine the two

together". (Constant, 1816 [20]).

5[20]Every technology seems to call forth its

wild optimists. Here, for example, Arthur C

Clarke on the telegraph and the satellite:

A hundred years ago, the electrictelegraph made possible - indeed,

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inevitable - the United States of

America. The communications

satellite will make equally inevitable a

United Nations of Earth; let us hopethat the transition period will not be

equally bloody.

Arthur C. Clarke, First on the Moon, 1970

6 [20]

Constant anticipates the position:

From the fact that the ancients were

free, and that we cannot any longer be

free like them, [some thinkers]conclude that we are destined to be

slaves. They would like to reconstitute

the new social state with a small

number of elements which, they say,

are alone appropriate to the situationof the world today. These elements are

prejudices to frighten men, egoism to

corrupt them, frivolity to stupefy them,

gross pleasures to degrade them,

despotism to lead them; and,indispensably, constructive

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knowledge and exact sciences to

serve despotism the more adroitly.

7

[20]I am told--and would love to find a

reference--that Karl Popper thought that

mass society would be civilised only once

instant communication between any

members became possible.

8 [20]

Note, from Korea, and not from China as

often mis-stated. The Chinese

bureaucracy encouraged the printing of a

small number of classic texts. These couldbe produced quite easily with fixed-type

technology. It was the Koreans who first

introduced moveable type, the invention

which allowed the printer to re-use and re-

assemble the plates used by the press.The Gutenberg revolution was one of

movable type--just as Zittrain (2008) [20]

argues that the true revolution of the

networked PC is its myriad, decentralised

re-purposability, which he calls``generativity".

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9 [20]

The capital costs of the Internet are huge

too, but they are general purpose and,

often by regulation, open access--thesame telephone line is used for all the

content that passed down it.

Source URL:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/the-liberty-of-the-networked-part-1

Links:

[1] http://modernliberty.net[2] http://www.uark.edu/depts/comminfo/cambridge/ancients.html[3] http://www.scrnshots.com/users/tonycurzonprice/screenshots/33324[4] http://www.scrnshots.com/users/tonycurzonprice/screenshots/37337[5] http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/01/17538[6] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826602.000-interview-the-cellphone-anthropologist.html?full=true[7] http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/07/net_brain_syndr.php[8] http://opendemocracy.net[9] http://www.chryswu.com/blog/2007/12/18/wired-ed-chris-anderson-discusses-emerging-

market-of-free/[10] http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php?title=Main_Page.[11] http://www.uark.edu/depts/comminfo/cambridge/ancients.html[12] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/[13] http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/ktria11.txt[14] http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php?title=Main_Page[15] http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/233/16544[16] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four[17] http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8468.html[18] http://www.smallpieces.com/

[19] http://yupnet.org/zittrain/[20] http://www.montpelerin.org/

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