Below is the introduction and the first chapter of "the control
Revolution" a new book by andrew Shapiro. It discusses the many changes
brought on by the new information technology. Many of these changes
impact the blind community tremendously and should not be overlooked.
kelly
URL: http://www.controlrevolution.com/complete.html
The Control Revolution:
How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the
World We Know
By Andrew L. Shapiro
A Century Foundation Book
Published by PublicAffairs,
a member of the Perseus Books Group, New York
Copyright © 1999 by Andrew L. Shapiro.
Introduction
and
Chapter 1
Introduction
One of the curious things about living through a time of whirlwind
change is that it is often difficult to understand exactly what is
changing. In recent years, new technology has given us the ability to
transform basic aspects of our lives: the way we converse and learn;
the way we work, play, and shop; even the way we participate in
political and social life.
Dissidents around the world use the Internet to evade censorship and
get their message out. Cyber-gossips send dispatches to thousands via
email. Musicians bypass record companies and put their songs on the
world wide web for fans to download directly. "Day traders" roil the
stock market, buying securities online with the click of a mouse and
then selling minutes later when the price jumps.
This book argues that there is a common thread underlying such
developments. It is not just a change in how we compute or
communicate. Rather, it is a potentially radical shift in who is in
control-of information, experience, and resources.
Part One, Revolution, explains how new technology is allowing
individuals to take power from large institutions such as government,
corporations, and the media. To an unprecedented degree, we can decide
what news and entertainment we're exposed to, whom we socialize with,
how we earn, and even how goods are distributed and political outcomes
are reached. The potential for personal growth and social progress
seems limitless.
This shift in control, however, is no sure thing.
Part Two, Resistance, shows how powerful entities are trying to limit
our new digitally enabled autonomy. Some governments, for example, are
restricting our access to certain content and preventing us from
taking advantage of certain technologies. Some corporations are
manipulating our information choices while creating the illusion of
personal freedom. And we, unwittingly, may be their accomplices.
Seduced by the rhetoric of individual power, we may not even realize
that the old guard is still in charge.
At the same time, the new personal control is threatened by an equally
menacing but less predictable foe: its own unyielding momentum.
Part Three, Oversteer, warns that individual control can be pushed too
far. Enthralled with the idea of taking power from politicians, media
giants, and price-inflating middlemen, we may lose sight of the
benefits of representative democracy and of the need for
intermediaries who bring us reliable news and high-quality products
and services. Comforted by the sanctuary of filtered order in a world
of sensory overload, we might unintentionally narrow our horizons,
depriving ourselves of opportunities. Cherished values like community,
free speech, and privacy could be diminished.
Part Four, Balance, charts a path between this Scylla and Charibdis.
It describes how we can reap the benefits of the new control without
succumbing either to resistance or to excess. To preserve democracy,
truth, and individual well-being in this uncertain age will require a
renewed sense of personal responsibility and commitment to our
communities, as well as a fresh approach to governance that takes into
account the shifting of control from institutions to individuals. We
must achieve a balance of power for the digital age-between
self-interest and public interest, the market and government, personal
control and shared power.
That is an extremely abridged summary of my argument. What it doesn't
explain is the host of interesting controversies and policy issues
through which we will trace the new regime of changing and contested
control. This cornucopia includes: cyberporn and censorship,
customized news delivery, electronic commerce, online democracy,
Microsoft's market power, encryption and law enforcement, copyright in
the digital age, virtual communities, Matt Drudge, privacy, and the
role of interactive technology in struggles against political tyranny.
My goal, it should be clear, is not to treat each of these issues
comprehensively, but to use them to illustrate both the ways in which
new technology allows power relations to be transformed and the ways
in which different actors are responding to this possible sea change.
The reader should bear in mind that the viewpoints of the first three
parts of the book are meant to be quite distinct: Part One presents
the control revolution in the most optimistic light (with Chapters 4
to 6 particularly geared toward those who are not that familiar with
the Internet), whereas Parts Two and Three take much less sanguine
views. Part Four attempts to harmonize these competing voices, and a
preview of my conclusions there may be helpful. There are six ideas
that I believe should guide us as we respond to new technology's
impact on society. Each is a call for balance between competing
values:
1. Rules and contexts: When technologies change, it may seem that
old rules no longer work. Some observers claim, for example, that
digital technology makes copyright law obsolete, while the FBI says
advances in encryption are undermining conventional law
enforcement. Yet generally, the principles that underlie existing
rules should still apply. We just need to map those principles in a
way that respects new contexts.
2. Convenience and choice: Antitrust regulators claim that
Microsoft's software design and business practices inhibit
competition, while Microsoft responds that it is just trying to
make computers and the Internet easier to use. Whatever the law
says, the rub is that both claims are right. Consumers must be
mindful of the trade-offs between convenience and robust choice.
3. Power and delegation: The Internet gives individuals the ability
to bypass many intermediaries-in commerce, culture, and
politics-and thus to make decisions that traditionally were made
for them. Empowering as this may seem, real personal authority is
about knowing when to make choices for yourself and when to let
others whom you trust make them for you.
4. Order and chaos: New technology gives people the ability to
personalize the information they receive and the social
environments they inhabit. Yet as we order our worlds according to
our own desires, we must not forget the value of remaining open to
serendipitous encounters.
5. Individual and community: The global reach of the Internet gives
individuals an unparalleled degree of access to people, resources,
and experience. All this potential will amount to little, though,
if people use technology to ignore their local communities and
commitments. We must use the Internet both to explore globally and
to engage locally.
6. Markets and government: With the help of technology, individuals
should increasingly be able to use market forces to their
advantage. But relying excessively on markets threatens both equity
and efficiency. Government has important roles to play in solving
social problems, maintaining fairness, and protecting democratic
values.
Finally, a word about perspective. Upon launching a new technology
section in 1998, the New York Times ran advertisements that asked
readers: Are you a technophile or a technophobe? My answer to that
question would be neither, or perhaps both.
Technology is not like anchovies, which some people love and others
hate, nor is it like the right to an abortion, which some are for and
others are against. Rather, it is an indelible feature of our cultural
environment-one that we must strive to understand, in all its
gray-shaded complexity, so that we can make it as consistent as
possible with our personal and collective values. Toward that end, my
goal here is to present a forward-looking yet unvarnished view-what I
would call a technorealist view [1]-of how new tools such as the
Internet are changing our lives.
_________________________________________________________________
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Revolution
"I would have nobody to control me; I would be absolute ...."
-Cervantes, Don Quixote
"We Have Revolution Now"
On August 19, 1991, I received a remarkable fax from a friend in
Moscow. That morning, news alerts had informed the world that a coup
had been launched by communist hard-liners against the reform
government of President Mikhail Gorbachev, but media coverage was
spotty and little else was known. Even President Bush and his staff
were in the dark.
"We really aren't sure what's happening at this point," said one U.S.
official. "We have no independent knowledge of what's going on," said
another.
Phone lines between the USSR and the U.S. were reportedly down. But
somehow my friend Oleg, whom I had met two years earlier when I
visited the Soviet Union as a student, managed to get a message
through to me in New York using the fax machine in the office where he
worked as a translator. In frenzied desperation, he wrote:
I don't know how long it will be possible for me to use this
channel of sending information. Situation is changed every minute.
Two hours ago all Soviet Radio and TV programs began to read
official propaganda messages of State Committee of Extraordinary
Situation, which was organized last night.... So, it is military
coup d'etat.
Some independent Moscow broadcasters were stopped working this
morning. Very popular independent broadcasting "Echo of Moscow" was
turned off at 7:55 A.M. after they told that tanks are near Moscow.
You can't imagine what I do feel now. I am afraid of civil war....
If you need any information from me send me fax A.S.A.P. This is
only thing that I can do now for my poor country.
I was working as an intern at a national weekly magazine at the time.
We were, of course, hungry for information about the putsch. I quickly
scribbled a reply, asking my friend a number of questions. Three hours
later, there was another fax from Oleg:
There are a lot of tanks in the city. I counted more than 40 in my
district. They are going to Kremlin. Downtown is full of tanks and
soldiers. I have seen more than three battalions near the American
embassy. There are many guns and cannons in the center of Moscow.
People here are shocked.... waiting for information about what's
happened. All broadcasting and TV programs are still transmitting
propaganda documents I wrote about before.... All mass media are
under control now. It's terrible.
In a handwritten scrawl at the bottom of the fax was a postscript:
"The clouds are gathering over the city. It'll be storm."
Over the next few days, a truly historic battle for freedom was waged
in what we now call the former Soviet Union. But curiously, there were
no more faxes from my friend. Only on August 26, a week after his
initial message, were we able to reestablish contact. By that time,
the world had learned that the pro-democracy forces had successfully
put down the coup. A fax from Oleg explained his silence. Just hours
after he had sent his second message, his international phone service
had been cut off:
"What could I do? So I spent two nights and one day near our 'White
House.' It was like a dream, but Kafka dream.... In any case, today
I live in free country. A lot of things are changed or going to be
changed very soon. We have revolution now."
We have revolution now. Oleg was referring literally to the transition
from Soviet communism to free-market democracy that was sweeping
Eastern Europe—a series of events that signaled the end of the
cold war and the rise of global capitalism. But there was another
remarkable shift implied by the way in which he and I were
communicating. Back in 1991, fax machines were still new enough that
Oleg's ability to transmit instant, detailed reports of the Soviet
Union's demise halfway across the world seemed itself to be
revolutionary.
The newly minted independent media in the USSR had been neutralized by
the old guard. In the West, journalists and heads of state alike were
groping for the facts on the ground. Meanwhile, my humble
twenty-one-year-old pal was able, for a time, to bypass official
channels of communication to provide a firsthand account of a nation
in tumultuous transition.
Oleg's ability to get information out of his country was actually only
half the story. The revolution in Eastern Europe that took place
between 1989 and 1991 owed much to the fact that new technology
allowed dissidents to receive information-information that the ruling
elites did not want them to have. This was a classic chapter in the
ongoing historical relationship of technology to knowledge, and
knowledge to power.
The highlights of this epic are familiar. In the wake of Gutenberg's
fifteenth-century printing press, the availability of noncanonical
religious tracts, most notably Luther's Ninety-five Theses, challenged
and ultimately undermined the authority of the Roman Church. As
printed works became available, individuals could for the first time
begin to exercise real discretion over their information intake and
their beliefs. As a sixteenth-century historian described it, "Each
man became eager for knowledge, not without feeling a sense of
amazement at his former blindness."
As printing methods improved in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, books circulated more widely, and literacy and education
blossomed. The scientific advances of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton
became widely known. The Enlightenment philosophies of writers like
Locke, Rousseau, and Paine found an audience-Paine's "Common Sense,"
for example, sold 120,000 copies in three months-and ultimately
popular expression in the rise of the republic in Europe and America.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the advent of mass
media-the rotary press, penny papers, photography, film, radio,
television-helped to pull together increasingly large communities and
to spur cohesive modern nation-states. In certain parts of the world,
like the United States, constitutional safeguards led to the emergence
of a vibrant free press. In areas like the Soviet bloc, however, mass
media mostly meant an information monopoly for state propagandists.
Industrious folks behind the iron curtain might have managed to
procure some clandestine samizdat materials. But with their gulags and
secret police, the autocrats still had the upper hand in the battle
over the free flow of information.
During the late cold war years, though, as satellite, video, and
microprocessors proliferated, it became increasingly difficult for
dictators of the world to regulate knowledge. Oleg and I were a case
in point. From the time we met in 1989, I had been faxing him clips
from the Western press and peppering my messages with the latest news
about uprisings in the communist satellite states. And this kind of
information was flowing in to Oleg and others like him via other
electronic media, as well. In the Baltics, television broadcasts from
Northern Europe, including reruns of American programs like Dallas and
Dynasty, seeped across the border. Video- and audiotapes with
dissident messages circulated throughout Eastern Europe's underground.
(In fact, when I visited the USSR in 1989, the most valued Western
commodities were not Marlboro cigarettes or blue jeans, as
conventional wisdom had it, but blank cassettes.) And in universities
throughout the region, computer users were starting to keep in touch
with colleagues around the globe using a growing computer network that
would come to be known as the Internet.
The same uninhibited exchange was going on around the world. In China,
the students of Tiananmen Square faxed pleas for help to the West and
received faxes from supporters abroad giving them vital information
and encouragement. In Central America, activists used shortwave radio
to communicate with allies in the U.S. In short, technology was
gradually giving individuals everywhere the ability to take control of
information that was once parceled out exclusively by the state.
Corrupt officials might have succeeded, for a time, in exercising
their military might, but their efforts to hide the truth from their
own people or the outside world were becoming futile.
"A Whole New Technology"
I was reminded of this new reality a little more than five years after
Oleg's faxes when I sat in front of my home computer listening to
programming from a Belgrade radio station that was being "broadcast"
over the Internet. It was December 1996. The war in the former
Yugoslavia was over and Serbian democracy activists had won local
elections, but the authoritarian ruler Slobodan Milosevic had
nullified the vote. Anti-Milosevic protesters filled the streets of
Serbia's main cities and were emboldened by an independent radio
station, Radio B92, which regularly aired updates about the protests.
Recognizing the station's power, Milosevic forcibly shut it down on
December 3. Since he already controlled Serbia's TV stations,
Milosevic must have thought this would fully silence the opposition.
But in no time, Radio B92 rerouted its programming to the Internet
where it was available, in digitized form, to computer users in Serbia
and around the world. News of the activists' feat immediately flooded
the email boxes of government officials, humanitarian groups,
journalists, and supporters. So successful were the Belgrade activists
at getting their message out over the global network that, within two
days, they had garnered enough international support to force
Milosevic to let them back on the air.
"The irony is that the Government meant to silence us, but instead
forced us to build on a whole new technology to stay alive," said
Drazen Pantic of Radio B92. "The drive to close us down has given us a
tool to vastly expand our audience."
The Radio B92 cybercasts continued the innovative political use of new
media that had begun in Eastern Europe and China, but also represented
an important advance. Though the Internet existed in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, it was not yet widely used. The Serbian democrats
were among the first activists to utilize the network in a way that
tangibly and immediately affected global politics. By doing so, they
amply demonstrated its unique strengths.
The Radio B92 activists showed, for example, how the Internet allows
an individual to send a message-be it text, audio, video, or some
combination-to hundreds or thousands of destinations as easily as to
one, with no discernible increase in cost or time. Thus they could
instantly and cheaply get their programming out to listeners around
the world, along with text and pictures of the Belgrade street
protests.
To experienced Internet users, this may seem old hat-but not when
compared to other communications tools, even those that we consider
fairly new.
Had Oleg been able to send his alerts to me by email, for example, the
Soviet hard-liners probably would not have succeeded in silencing him.
When they shut down international phone lines, they made his fax
machine useless. But with the Internet he could have emailed his
bulletins to an endless number of individuals in the USSR with
confidence that someone would have had the means to forward them out
of the country-by satellite or other advanced wireless technology. He
could have been in immediate contact with an endless number of
citizens around the Soviet Union and abroad, as the Belgrade activists
were when they coordinated protests and international support in
cities in Serbia and around the world. And, like them, he could have
sent sound and images along with his written updates.
Just a few years after the popularization of the Internet, the Radio
B92 incident made it clear that this simple combination of computers
and modems combines some of the best elements of all preexisting
media. Organizers can, for example, merge the pinpoint accuracy of
one-to-one technologies like the telephone with the broad reach of
expensive media like television. They can use the Internet to create
both a permanent archive, covering every detail of their struggle, and
an instant alert network that will inform the world within seconds of
late-breaking developments. Most important, they can create vibrant
streams of conversation that are as free from restraint as any we
know-streams that can, within hours, grow from a rivulet into an
unstoppable rapid.
This is one of the true marvels of interactive technology: the instant
ability to spread your unexpurgated words-a piece of yourself,
really-to the four corners of the earth. Even in the rush of
millennial tidings, the singularity of this achievement cannot be
overlooked. It is a privilege that would stir envy in the hearts of
history's most powerful rulers and statesmen, not to mention fear. The
Serbian democracy activists must have realized this, because they
began to refer to their struggle against Milosevic as "the Internet
revolution."
A Fragile Reordering
If the phrase "Internet revolution" sounds familiar, that's because
technology talk these days is suffused with references to revolution.
Of course, we don't generally mean to conjure up images of tanks in
the street or Che Guevara types. Rather, we speak of a communications
revolution, an information revolution, a digital revolution. And the
rebels in our midst are CEOs of huge telecommunications companies
boldly "synergizing" their way into multimedia or young software
entrepreneurs hoping to get lucky with "the next big thing." There is
something undeniably convenient about these allusions to revolution.
They are shorthand for a presumed common understanding of all that is
happening because of the creeping ubiquity of new technology.
But as linguistic proxies, they are also a bit perplexing. What do
they mean in relation to the other things we have called
revolutionary-say, the American or French Revolution, the scientific
revolution or the industrial revolution? Or, for that matter, the
upheaval in Eastern Europe a mere decade ago?
Each of those revolutions signified a distinct break with the past,
the rise of a new order. Is that what we are experiencing because of
the Internet and other new media? Certainly, we are communicating in
ways that are different from before. And we have a whole new way to
access and manipulate information. These are, no doubt, major
developments. But in an age of unchecked hyperbole, it makes sense to
ask: Are these changes really revolutionary? And if so, exactly what
type of revolution are we experiencing?
To make sense of these questions, we need to probe deeper: How will
the Internet affect our social lives, our jobs, and our perspective on
the world? What will it do to our basic relationships with family and
friends, with neighbors and far-flung fellow citizens, and with the
powers that be in government and the corporate world? Will it enhance
or diminish core democratic values like freedom, equality, community,
and social responsibility?
Refocusing the inquiry this way requires us, I believe, to look past
the terms we commonly bandy about to find a new description that
captures more accurately what it is that is changing. Terms like
communications revolution and information revolution actually don't go
far enough in explaining the transition at hand. There is more at
stake here than being able to send messages more quickly or having
access to a supercharged digital library. That's just the immediate
effect. It's like when a stone is thrown into a pond: the splash
catches your eye first, but it's the endless ripples that have the
broadest impact and are most interesting to observe.
In this case, there is a pattern to those undulations. What they
suggest is a potentially momentous transfer of power from large
institutions to individuals. The real change set in motion by the
Internet may, in fact, be a control revolution, a vast transformation
in who governs information, experience, and resources. Increasingly,
it seems that we will.
To be sure, "individuals" and "institutions" are not monolithic
entities. But these terms do capture something fundamental: the
palpable sense of deciding for yourself as opposed to having some
larger, impersonal them deciding for you. This includes choices about
intake of news and other information, social interactions, education
and work, political life and collective resources. It is a time of
diminishing stature for many authority figures: legislators and other
public officials, news professionals, commercial middlemen, educators.
Hierarchies are coming undone. Gatekeepers are being bypassed. Power
is devolving down to "end users."
The upshot of new technology, then, seems to be its ability to put
individuals in charge. Yet what makes this upheaval so much more
authentic than those revolutions described by Panglossian futurists is
its volatility and lack of preordained outcome. Contrary to the claims
of cyber-romantics, individual empowerment via technology is not
inevitable. Rather, it faces predictable and unpredictable challenges.
It will likely be defined by protracted struggle, a clash of values,
and a fragile reordering of the social landscape that could come
undone at any time. That is why the word "revolution" actually
describes well the shift in control made possible by the Internet.
Some institutional forces are resisting, and will continue to resist,
giving up power to individuals. And there is a danger that some
individuals will wield their new control carelessly, denying
themselves and others its benefits.
Still, the resemblance to political revolution is, in important ways,
only metaphorical. Computer nerds aside, there is no junta driving
this process of change. In a sense, we are all its protagonists
(whether or not we know it). The control revolution, in fact, has some
of the texture of a subtle historical shift such as the agricultural
revolution or the industrial revolution-not in the sense that it will
be centuries in the making, but because it may emerge undetected. At
the same time, we will see that institutional resistance to this
change may be just as inconspicuous.
Not every form of individual empowerment by technology, though, is a
zero-sum game. In addition to assuming command of functions once
managed by others, individuals are increasingly able to control
aspects of life that previously were outside anyone's dominion. New
media, we will see, allows us to manipulate and even conquer some of
the limits of time and space. And outside the realm of communications,
other innovations also are presenting us with remarkable new
opportunities to shape our world.
"Individuals are acquiring more control over their lives, their minds
and their bodies, even their genes," says New York Times writer John
Tierney. Biotechnology allows us to know things about our physical and
psychological makeup that once were unknowable, such as the likelihood
of getting cancer or of having a predisposition toward violence. New
developments in science increasingly will let us control our health
and well-being, and our natural environment, in ways that we never
could have before. From genetic screening to "the wholesale alteration
of the human species and the birth of a commercially driven eugenics
civilization," as author Jeremy Rifkin describes it, technological
advances will allow individuals to make unprecedented decisions about
their lives (and the lives of their offspring), decisions that will
raise thorny issues of ethics, spirituality, and fairness.
Important as these and other technological developments are, I will
focus in this book almost exclusively on communications technologies.
Still, there is a lesson to learn from the coming biotech battles as
we consider the control shift made possible by new media such as the
Internet: No one doubts that decisions made by governments and
corporations on issues of cloning, gene therapy, and the like, are
political and highly charged. Similarly, few would deny that even
individual decisions about biotech may be matters of both personal and
public concern. Yet for some reason our assumption is the opposite
when it comes to the design and development of communications tools,
and the manner and environment in which we utilize them. We tend to
see these as apolitical choices of significance only to narrow
constituencies.
The truth, though, is that these decisions about communications
technology may affect who we are socially and politically as much as
biotechnology can alter who we are genetically and physically. To
begin to understand this, we first have to become more familiar with
the features of new communications technology. Only then will we start
to appreciate what these features make possible and why they are at
the heart of an unfolding battle for control.
ENDNOTES
[Endnote 1] Technorealism, a term coined by author David Shenk and
myself, is a critical perspective on technology that is meant to go
beyond the simple dualism of cyber-utopianism and neo-Luddism. In
early 1998, Shenk and I asked a handful of technology writers to join
us in drawing up a set of principles that might begin to define
technorealism. This book is, in a sense, an attempt to continue that
effort.
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