There'S No Government Like No Government

["Charles F. Moreira" <charlesm@tm.net.my>]

Sangkancilers,

Here is another article featuring a debate betwen the founder of Wired
Magazine and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Regards

Charles

http://www.sfbg.com/epicenter/96_11/111096epitwo06.html

Title: SF BAY GUARDIAN : EPICENTER: THERE'S NO GOVERNMENT LIKE NO GOVERNMENT:11-10-96

SF BAY GUARDIAN: EPICENTER: THERE'S NO GOVERNMENT LIKE NO GOVERNMENT

There'S No Government Like No Government

Wired founder Louis Rossetto talks about the cyberlibertarian agenda.

By David Hudson

LOUIS ROSSETTO

had already seen an early draft of my article on Wired before I even contacted him for an interview. (That's a long story; suffice it to say, E-mail spreads very quickly.)

But after a few harsh exchanges, he was more than willing to talk -- in fact, we communicated for several weeks by E-mail.

Piecing together an interview conducted via E-mail is akin to making a coherent narrative out of a three-ring circus. Discussions of various points split and branch off, but are all carried on "simultaneously." I've tried to capture the flow without letting it get too choppy or losing any of the content or context.

The entire 11,500-word interview is available on the Cyberlibertarian conference in the Politics section of Guardian OnLine and on the Bay Guardian Web site(www.sfbg.com/cyber).

Bay Guardian: Let me quote from a sentence in my early draft: "Wired is robbed of any credibility as anything other than a glossy stooge for out-of-whack libertarians." And for color, let's set it next to early Wired contributor Mark Dery's assessment last year [in Educom Review] of the magazine as "a bully pulpit for corporate futurists, laissez-faire evangelists, and prophets of privatization." I think what gets a lot of people so riled up about Wired is that it's been enormously successful, has literally become a cultural icon, doing just that -- not simply giving voice to the George Gilders, Alvin Tofflers, etc., but actually serving as a mouthpiece for them. And I think these same people sense the Net slipping out of their hands. They sense a very rapid evolution, over which they have little or no control, from the Net's many-to-many potential to the old "top-down" media models.

Louis Rossetto: Wired never set out to be anyone's hero. All we wanted -- and still want -- to do is report accurately on the future that's arriving. The Wired editorial line is exactly the same today as it was when it launched. We believe as strongly in Mitch Kapor's vision of a Jeffersonian democracy in cyberspace today as when we published it in our first year. We have fought very hard for freedom in cyberspace. IDG and Ziff haven't, the New York Times hasn't, Mother Jones hasn't. We have turned on no one.

Wired reports on the world that's really out there, not the world that the PC Left or the Christian Right would like to believe is out there, nor the one that the cynical/mindless media distortion machine would have us believe is out there, but the one that's really emerging today. That world is in the midst of a profound revolution driven not by disgusting political ideologies but by the people creating and using convergence technologies to solve problems and create opportunities in their business and private lives. That is the overwhelming fact of our time. To deny it is to live in a fantasy world shaped by 19th century or older social nostrums that border on religions. I don't believe in religions.

This new world is characterized by a new global economy that is inherently anti-hierarchical and decentralist, and that disrespects national boundaries or the control of politicians and bureaucrats and powermongers; and by a global, networked consciousness that is creating a new kind of democracy for achieving social consensus that is turning the bankrupt electoral politics we are witnessing this year into a dead end. These two factors are not about top-down control to accomplish either selfish or noble ends, but about a global hive mind that is arriving at a new, spontaneous order.

Wired is not about regurgitating 19th-century social thinking. If people want that, they are free to look at the Nations and National Reviews of the world; there are plenty of them. Indeed, I would probably say that all of the rest of media is stuck in that place. Wired is about talking about this erupting future. Economists, philosophers, artists, scientists, technologists, and businesspeople -- and yes, Gilder and Toffler -- are talking about this future, and we report on them.

If there was anyone on the Left that had any original thoughts about the future, we would report on them too. But the sad fact is there aren't many at all, and I mean the word "sad" precisely.

BG: Really? The mailing lists I subscribe to seem full of them. To be fair, a lot of my fellow subscribers work at Wired or HotWired. Probably a dumb question, but I have to ask: Do you pursue new ideas on this [the Left] side of the fence as actively as you pursue those on the other [the Libertarian] side?

LR: Story ideas at Wired come from two sources: internal and external. The majority of ideas that get turned into stories come from the outside. If you have an idea, send it in.

This medium [the Net] is evolving, as it has from the day the first byte moved across it. If you think the corporate world has a clue about what's going on, that it can "control" it, go ask Microsoft how they let Netscape become the fastest growing software company in history.

BG: And then once they felt it breathing down their neck, started -- and are still -- swatting it dead like some pesky fly.

LR: It's totally unclear how this Microsoft/Netscape thing is going to turn out. If you know, you can become one hell of rich guy. Netscape is not going away. And Microsoft may have bitten off more than it can chew.

The Net is, and will remain, many-to-many. Top-down media models do not work, and are not present on the Net today. There aren't three networks. There are 500,000 Web sites. You do not need to talk to the programming director of NBC to put Rewired [an on-line magazine] out on the Net. All you have to do is get a computer and buy access, at a derisory cost compared to what it used to take to get a press, develop the distribution channels, etc. People who talk about the arrival of top-down control don't know what they are talking about.

BG: The sad irony they're picking up on is that the voice of what was supposed to be our "revolution" is telling us to let the top run wild and do its thing.

LR: The sad irony is that the group that used to shout "Power to the People" doesn't really trust the people, and continues to insist that "controlling" this revolution is necessary, much less possible.

Because the reality is, this revolution really is out of control. And the more out of control it is, the better. The top isn't "running wild," as anyone who has spent any time talking to so-called media leaders knows. It's running scared. No one knows what the Net is going to look like six months from now, much less five years. And the larger the company, the more "top" they are, the more clueless they are.

No, this obsession with the "top running wild" is a characteristic knee-jerk reaction of the Left when it is confronted with the idea of freedom, the same way "child pornography" is the knee-jerk reaction of the Right when it thinks about freedom. Each obsession is a product of the dark corners of their [the Left's and the Right's] respective psyches: on the one hand, that the successful might continue to be successful, on the other that somewhere, someone might actually be enjoying themselves. And sorry, both are wrong -- and neither is going to get space in Wired.

If "lefties" really want to have an impact on how the revolution is going to turn out, they should stop fighting the inevitable; recognize that, just as the earth is not the center of the universe, the state is not the engine of social change; forget about trashing the cyber-libertarians who are probably their allies in fighting the existing social order; rediscover their roots; and begin developing a truly progressive vision for the future.

BG: Could the Net evolve away from the democratic model?

LR: Anything can happen. But right now, there are no signs that it is becoming any less democratic. What is happening is that commerce is arriving on the Net, as it arrives anywhere humans congregate. I don't think that's a bad thing. People who do think it's a bad idea need to explain why, not fall back on knee-jerk (and ultimately hypocritical) reactions to anything commercial.

BG: Hypocritical? In what way?

LR: Because commerce is inherent in human life. Everybody engages in it. And everyone needs to be part of it to survive. Even the Unabomber needed to go to the store. Treating it like it's heresy, like there's some pure world out there that it violates, while at the same time living off it, one way or the other, is hypocritical.

BG: Here's my main question, then. You're saying Wired is neither right nor left, but represents something new, a third alternative. This is very exciting and appealing, obviously, as the electorate, in its "throw the bums out" mood, swings every two years between its seemingly very limited choices. But how does "out of control" translate in real, what-to-do-about-it terms? Isn't it, so far at least, just the New Right's wide-open-market approach dressed up in cyber-cool?

LR: There are really only two alternatives: trust the universe, or trust the politicians and bureaucrats. Right now, most people who have been educated believe that governments are necessary, and that electoral politics is the highest form of democracy. Indeed, they equate electoral politics with democracy. And that may have been true when these ideas of representative government were formulated in opposition to the high-handed rule of monarchs in the 18th century. That equation of democracy with electoral politics is entirely inappropriate now.

People believe electoral politics is democracy because they have been brainwashed, period. Children are collected in public schools and taught history, which means basically they are taught the history of the state, or rather the history of a particular way of looking at their state, and that idea is continually reinforced by mass media and the structure of the game. Democracy in America? It's quadrennial Kabuki paid for with tax dollars administered by politicians and bureaucrats ultimately for their benefit, and for the benefit of the economic interests that influence them.

BG: Here's a quote from Richard Sclove, author of Democracy and Technology: "Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation, explained 50 years ago that truly unfettered competitive markets are unfailingly a human and social disaster. They trammel people, communities, and natural environments in devastating ways, and have always resulted eventually in compensatory regulation to try to clean up the mess, ameliorate some of the suffering." Would such lessons, drenched in history, have any bearing in the 21st century?

LR: On the most primitive level, thousands of people carry on a plebiscite about the market every day. They decide to leave the countryside and move to the city. Despite the horrors of the favelas, despite the grimness of being at the bottom of the social order, they continue to stream into cities -- to the market. They do it because they perform the calculus and decide that the benefits outweigh the costs, that they're better off. If Polanyi was right, the mass migration would be going in the other direction.

Change has costs, no question. Massive change has massive costs. The world as we know it is being overturned. There's lots of dislocation. People are hurt. But on the whole, society is benefited. There's a reason there are five billion people alive on the planet today, and it's not because a politician or bureaucrat planned the whole thing out.

BG: This sort of opens a Pandora's box of case-by-case quibbling -- we could, theoretically, get into ticking off specific countries in the first through fourth worlds and citing different reasons for different migrations. For weeks.

But instead, let me just say, as someone who appreciates the role of free markets in society, in conjunction with other factors, that I find this paragraph pretty scary. You're not only saying that it's OK that entire populations are uprooted and forced to abandon the land (where the real resources still are, even in the digital age) and try to make do in already congested, depleted cities, but that it's the market that's left them no choice. I'm tweaking your words, but my real question is, doesn't your example actually only prove Polanyi was right?

LR: I'm saying that people always have choices. I've traveled extensively through the third world. A lot of it is outside the money economy, as it's been for millennia. They live in that pre-money economy as well (or as miserably) as they ever have. Meanwhile, there's a money economy that exists in the cities. Relatives come back and tell them about it. They decide to leave for the city. The city is hard, horrible maybe -- but not so horrible that they turn around and return to the pre-money economy they came out of -- because that is even more horrible.

This is not about force. Force is what Jackson did to the Seminoles. Force is Stalin deciding that the Volga Germans should be "uprooted" and driven to the middle of Russia. Force is what the Serbs did to the Bosnians. The migration to the city in most of the third world is about people deciding on the micro level what is best for them.

BG: Is the minimum wage worth preserving?

LR: Is the minimum wage a religious artifact worth fighting over? If you could make people wealthy by passing a law, why doesn't Congress just raise the minimum wage to $20 dollars an hour, or $100? Because, surprise, the laws of economics have yet to be repealed. You raise the cost of something, you diminish its consumption, it's that simple. You raise the minimum wage, and those people who still have a job are better off, and those whose job has suddenly become redundant because the business cannot absorb the cost, those people are unemployed.

BG: What about positive activism toward goals such as universal access?

LR: Universal access is only an issue in an environment of a certain kind of scarcity. Do we ensure universal access to air, water, food, clothing, television sets? No, we only do it to regulated, monopoly communication services. That monopoly is going away with deregulation. The increased supply of telecommunications services (wireless, cellular, satellite) is driving the cost of access to affordability for the entire population. Access is a nonproblem. I keep comparing it to television. Should we have had government mandates to insure universal access to television? Cars? No, because even though at the beginning they were restricted to elites, it was the elites who helped amortize the development costs and pave the way for the mass market.

BG: What about toward getting schools and public spaces wired?

LR: An equivalent at the turn of the century would be automating blacksmith shops. Schools are obsolete. We should be doing all we can to liberate children from the slavery of the classroom, not wiring their jail cells.

BG: OK, I'll bite. How does education work in the future?

LR: Like the saying goes, "If schools had the responsibility to teach people to talk, we'd be a nation of mutes." Most of what we learn, we learn because we're curious, not because we are in a classroom. The vast majority of what we learn, we learn outside the classroom. What we mostly learn inside a classroom is how to fit into a hierarchy, and how to sit in one place for eight hours -- in other words, how to be good industrial workers.

The whole system, from top to bottom, is obsolete. You don't need education factories. You don't need to enslave children to "make" them learn.

BG: Is there a role for government when monopolies do arise? It happens. And aren't consumers, and the telecommunications industry as a whole, better off for the breakup of AT&T?

LR: The role of governments in breaking up monopolies is way overrated. The largest Justice Department antitrust case ever was against IBM. Cost both parties tens of millions, and burned up thousands if not tens of thousands of human-years. At the time the case was started, IBM was a colossus, with 400,000 employees in most of the countries around the world, with a majority share of the global computer market. It was the best-run, the most efficient, the richest company on the planet. Lots of people argued it was a monopoly. The government took it to court.

We know the ending of the story, of course. The government lost the IBM case, yet the company is no longer the dominant player it was. In fact, its competitive position deteriorated so seriously in the past 10 years that it shed the majority of its employees and lost $75 billion in shareholder value -- that's the GNP of Sweden. Why? Clearly not because this monopolistic company was broken up by the Justice Department. But because it was unable to maintain its monopoly in the face of rapid technological change, and insurgent, smarter companies.

Meanwhile, there's a whole line of economic thinking today that is arguing that temporary monopolies can actually be good. Think VHS. The fact that a standard gets set can offer downstream benefits that far outweigh the temporary costs.

BG: If networked communications are to be an alternative to electoral politics, I guess the most obvious question is the most pertinent. How? Do you see a consensus building out there on any single issue other than the Communications Decency Act (a special case in that it was so blatantly absurd, and we all had a shared interest in its defeat)?

LR: I don't think the CDA is a special case. It was an assault on what the arrogant political establishment thought was a small, hapless minority. And if this minority, namely us, had reacted like every other minority -- by holding protest marches, lobbying politicians, infiltrating local party organizations, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam -- it would still be bound by this disgusting law as we spent years trying to change the minds of a political generation that is terminally out to lunch. Instead we used the Net. And we turned the entire thing around.

This is not an exception, nor a trivial example. Keeping the government out of cyberspace is crucial to the Net's development, and to the development of the New Economy and global consciousness. To me, that one single battle, in what is still a very large war, was an incredibly important turning point.

BG: The brilliance that went into Wired's conception and packaging immediately made it the most widely recognized voice of the digital revolution, an incredible position of power and, as some would see it, responsibility. If it were on Wired's agenda, how would you go about communicating to those who fear being left out that the coming transition, be it an evolution or a revolution, is inclusive rather than exclusive?

LR: I suppose I haven't felt it necessary to explicitly spell this out because I find the possibility of everyone not being included to be literally incredible.

The idea that we need to worry about anyone being "left out" is entirely atavistic to me, a product of that old economics of scarcity, and the 19th-century social thinking that grew out of it. Mass communication, mass production, mass poverty, mass markets, mass society, mass media, mass democracy -- that's history. Ford and Marx are well and truly dead. We are living in the 21st century....

Everything, as [Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John] Barlow says, is in the process of becoming its opposite.

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SF BAY GUARDIAN: EPICENTER: THERE'S NO GOVERNMENT LIKE NO GOVERNMENT

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