Tom Loosemore at the 4IP/Polis, #recasting event last night talked about the deep rules of the internet (those summarised beautifully by Zittrain - distributed, minimalist, messy, collaborative, adaptable ...) and argued that these deep rules give the net certain characteristics---good samaritanism, openness, etc. And he didn't like it when I called him a technological determinist.
I think this is about a disagreement with what we mean by technological determinism. I meant that you can't infer much---and certainly not much that's obvious---about the wide social impacts of any process from an examination of the internal organisation of that process. My example was this - imagine a meeting 3 million years ago in the Rift valley where humans get together around a carcass to discuss language and the revolution it will bring. Someone plausibly steps up and says: "this language stuff is great: it's decentralised, open, participative, messy, collaborative, adaptible... and we will become all those things because of its influence". Well ... plausible, but language turns out to be able to run totalitarianism as easily as it runs democracy. Our recent piece on Facebook in Iran suggests that the regime there may be intelligently opening itself for highly non-democratic ends. Cuba's recent liberalisation of email amongst university students could be a similarly totalitarian use of the web. Evgeny Morozov has been chronicling - some of it for us here at oD - the totalitarian uses of the web.
I think Tom thought I meant by technological determinist that "the technology is so powerful it will sweep all before it, so we don't have to worry about the politics." I agree Tom's talk was not that -- it was indeed highly Zittrainian in asking for the preservation through political processes of the spirit of the web. I agree we should bring the anti-trust authorities to bear on search monopoly at Google.
I meant it in a much more methodological sense -- attempts to understand our history as we are living it cannot think only - or mainly - about technology as a deep cause; and attempts to be a part of that history need to think about meanings, interests, histories that are only peripherally about technology.
Technological determinists will otherwise end up influencing only - well - the history of technology.
