Some people have urged me to make a fuller response to Evgeny Morozov’s “review” of Public Parts in The New Republic. I view it as more character assassination than discussion of ideas. But fine.
Overall,
I see Morozov engaging in the anti-intellectual activity of trying to
restrict intellectualism to those whose views and expression of them he
deems appropriate -- that is, those who agree with him and the orthodoxy
he promotes. An intellectual would discuss the ideas and argue with
evidence. He tries to attack the ideas by attacking the person who
espouses them -- a discreditable exercise and one I’d think he would
think twice about using, given his extensive writing about the tactics
of tyrants.
The
irony is that Morozov and I agree about his obvious argument that
technology can be used for bad as well as good; where we disagree and
strongly is on the emphasis. In the book, I cite him -- favorably, you
will note -- here in giving an example of how it can be used for evil ends.
He
calls me and my fellow travelers “comrades in the Cyber-Utopian
International.” Irony there, too, given the source. I will not apologize
for being an optimist. I’ll even accept Utopian. I believe we must
consider the edges of possibility to build a better future -- the bad so
we guard against it and the good so we strive for it.
I
argue in Public Parts that the worst-case analysis in privacy is well
attended to. I fear that we are not heeding the opportunities of the
best case in publicness, in the power our new tools give us to finally
gain our own voice as publics. There is evidence of the possibilities
everywhere: in Zuccotti Park and the #occupywallstreet hashtag
revolution, in the Arab Spring, in Iceland’s new collaborative
constitution, even in Wikipedia. I celebrate these movements and their
inherent optimism. I will not apologize for hope.
Those
who read my book will see that I treat privacy with great respect. I
argue strongly that it needs protection. I spend a good portion of the
book striving to find a usable definition of privacy -- not easy. I look
for effective ways to protect privacy, coming to the idea that privacy
is an ethic. I explore that ethic and how to execute it. I argue from
the start that privacy and publicness are not in opposition; one depends
upon the other.
Then
I turn to my real subject, publicness, examining the benefits, its
history, the ethic surrounding sharing, whether one can share too much,
how much we share, the sharing industry that is growing around us,
imagining radically public companies, and imagining transparent and
collaborative government. I look at the history of other tools of
publicness, primarily the Gutenberg press, to get a sense of the scope
of change and opportunity we face. At the end, I argue strenuously for
the need to protect our tools of publicness from control by tyrants,
censors, companies, governments, and over-regulation.
You
will see none of that in Morozov’s review. A review of value would at
least present -- if disagree with and argue against -- the essence of a
work. That is what I required of myself as a critic and of critics who
worked for me. But that is not Morozov’s intent. As I said earlier, he
gleefully announced that he had me in his cross-hairs and would go after
my book … even while I was still writing it. He was clearly assigned
for that purpose. He used me to attack the “cyber-Utopians” he so
regularly despises. Since he published his piece, he has been gleefully
goading in Twitter to throw barbs at me and get attention for himself --
he calls this “Jarviscide.”
That is not only sophomoric but also violent language and not much
appreciated by a man with two cancers and a heart condition.
I
would have preferred a mature discussion of ideas. I relish
disagreement and argument and invite it in the book. I find no value in
attack and personal invective. In using it, Morozov creates a
self-fulfilling promise of his own warnings about the worst of the net.
I
will respond here since some have asked me to do so. But I do not
intend to continue. I tire of the school playground attitude we see on
Twitter of yelling “fight! fight!” at any sign of argument, rewarding
attacks over substance. I have more and better things to do and I
sincerely hope he does as well.
Here
are my annotations and answers in bold. So as to give them in context, I
repeat the full, almost-7,000-word text of his piece from The New Republic. [LATER: Here is a link to Morozov’s reply to my reply.]
—Jeff Jarvis
* * *
In 1975, Malcolm Bradbury published The History Man,
a piercing satire of the narcissistic pseudo-intellectualism of modern
academia. The novel recounts a year in the life of the young radical
sociologist Howard Kirk—“a theoretician of sociability”—who is working
on a book called The Defeat of Privacy.
Building on “a little Marx, a little Freud, and a little social
history,” Kirk posits that “there are no more private selves, no more
private corners in society, no more private properties, no more private
acts.” (And, according to Kirk’s sardonic wife, “no more private parts.”
She finds her husband’s books “very empty” but “always on the right
side.”)
One
cannot fault Kirk for thinking too small. He is trying to prove that
“sociological and psychological understanding is now giving us a total
view of man, and democratic society is giving us total access to
everything. There’s nothing that’s not confrontable. There are no
concealments any longer, no mysterious dark places of the soul. We’re
all right there in front of the entire audience of the universe, in a
state of exposure. We’re all nude and available.”
Occasionally
Kirk practices what he preaches—his sociology class is invited to see
his wife give birth—but he hates it when his own privacy is violated.
When a student (who is also his lover) reads his book manuscript, he
protests that it is private. He is furious when another student, in a
desperate attempt to document the professor’s promiscuity, starts
chasing him with a camera.
Public Parts—the second book by Jeff Jarvis, the Internet’s loudest guru—reads like a glib, half-baked sequel to The Defeat of Privacy,
produced by an older and more conservative Howard Kirk, who has swapped
his tweed jacket for a tuxedo and his smoking pipe for an iPhone.
Jarvis’s intellectual heroes are different from Kirk’s, and the latter’s
hippie lingo is replaced by business-friendly clichés, but the message
is the same. With a little Habermas, a little Arendt, and a little media
history, Jarvis argues that “if we become too obsessed with privacy, we
could lose opportunities to make connections in this age of links.”
Privacy, he argues, has social costs: just think of patients guarding
their health information instead of sharing it with scientists, who
might use it to find new cures. For Jarvis, privacy is the preserve of
the selfish; keep too much to yourself, and the “Privacy Police” may pay
you a visit.
**
This is a willful mischaracterization of my views of privacy. I
envision no “privacy police.” No one should be forced to reveal what
they don’t want to reveal, by trick or force; I make that abundantly
clear in the ethic of privacy I present. I respect the need for privacy
and that is why I go to much effort to find a workable definition of it
and a set of principles to govern its protection.
I
also speculate about a better world -- Utopian, if you wish -- when
stigmas and regressive laws and company policies would no longer prevent
us from sharing health information openly. In such a world, I believe,
we could all benefit if we share and gain more information. In such a
world, I say, it might even be seen as selfish not to share. For
example, since I was at the World Trade Center on 9/11, I have
contracted three serious health conditions. Now those probably have no
correlation to the event. But what if they did? By our sharing this data
and bringing it together with others’, we might make connections that
could help people. I’m wishing for a world when we can do that. No
privacy police there.
Why
are we so obsessed with privacy? Jarvis blames rapacious privacy
advocates—“there is money to be made in privacy”—who are paid to mislead
the “netizens,” that amorphous elite of cosmopolitan Internet users
whom Jarvis regularly volunteers to represent in Davos. On Jarvis’s
scale of evil, privacy advocates fall between Qaddafi’s African
mercenaries and greedy investment bankers. All they do is “howl, cry
foul, sharpen arrows, get angry, get rankled, are incredulous, are
concerned, watch, and fret.” Reading Jarvis, you would think that
Privacy International (full-time staff: three) is a terrifying behemoth
next to Google (lobbying expenses in 2010: $5.2 million).
**
More willful mischaracterization: I do not put privacy advocates on any
scale of evil; those examples are most certainly his, not mine, though
he would lead you to believe otherwise. I don’t say “all they do” is cry
foul, etc. I do quote many, many examples of them doing so. I say that I
want to get past such overheated rhetoric.
Morozov’s
choice of Privacy International as the sole defender of privacy against
mighty Google is at least disingenuous if not intellectually dishonest.
I have gone to many quite crowded privacy conferences filled with
self-appointed watchdog groups, legislators, regulators, consultants,
companies, and chief privacy officers (an organization of the last, the
only-decade-old International Association of Privacy Professionals
already counts 8,800 members in 70 countries).
“Privacy
should not be our only concern,” Jarvis declares. “Privacy has its
advocates. So must publicness.” He compiles a long and somewhat tedious
list of the many benefits of “publicness”: “builds relationships,”
“disarms strangers,” “enables collaboration,” “unleashes the wisdom (and
generosity) of the crowd,” “defuses the myth of perfection,”
“neutralizes stigmas,” “grants immortality ... or at least credit,”
“organizes us,” and even “protects us.” Much of this is self-evident. Do
we really need to peek inside the world of Internet commerce to grasp
that anyone entering into the simplest of human relationships surrenders
a modicum of privacy? But Jarvis has mastered the art of transforming
the most trivial observations into empty business maxims.
In
one respect—his unrivaled ability to attract attention to his diva-like
self—Jarvis has outdone even the fictional Dr. Kirk. Jarvis’s public
parts are truly public: his recent battle with prostate cancer has
become something of an online Super Bowl, with Jarvis tweeting from the
operating table and blogging about the diaper problems that followed.
And like the fictional Kirk, Jarvis likes his privacy when he likes it:
the evangelist for publicness does not want his credit card numbers, his
passwords, his e-mails, his calendar, his salary, his browsing habits,
or his iTunes playlist made public. The digital disclosure of such
things is off-limits for Jarvis—but not because of a scruple about
privacy. He prefers to justify such immunities by appealing to other
rights, fears, and concerns: he won’t share his passwords out of a fear
of crime; or his calendar, because he is a busy man and doesn’t want any
more commitments; or his salary, because of “cultural conventions”; or
his iTunes playlist, because, well, it’s too trivial.
**
I never argue that everything in one’s life should be public; I say, to
the contrary, that it should not and later in the book give advice for
managing the limits of one’s publicness. I make it clear that I have my
own private life and I use a section of the book to examine my personal
boundaries.
Some
of those are obvious and already protected by other laws: of course, no
sane person would open up his passwords or bank accounts to theft,
identity theft, and fraud. That’s not a matter of privacy but of crime.
I
discuss how I am uncomfortable talking about income and examine why
that is. I think it is a matter of my culture. But then I do reveal my
salary (as teacher in a public university, it is public anyway) and what
I was paid for my last book, and more. So he is wrong about my not
revealing that. I simply discuss my reaction to it.
As for iTunes: It’s a *joke*. The problem is that I listen to too much Norah Jones.
HAD
JARVIS WRITTEN his book as self-parody—as a cunning attack on the
narrow-mindedness of new media academics who trade in pronouncements so
pompous, ahistorical, and vacuous that even the nastiest of
post-modernists appear lucid and sensible in comparison—it would have
been a remarkable accomplishment.
**
Here we see Morozov’s attempt to put a fence around his world of
academics and exclude others. I despise closed worlds -- whether in the
academe or media or government. I distrust priesthoods who would exclude
others from entering their fields and attempt to keep them out with
discrimination and exclusion and obfuscating, encoded language. I’d say that right there in this paragraph, Morozov is his own academic parody.
I wrote my book not for his academic approval but for others. He doesn’t approve.
But alas, he is serious. This is a book that should have stayed a tweet.
** And he makes fun of me for reduction to “business maxims.” That is tweetbait if I’ve ever seen it. Well-played, sir.
Stripped
of all the inspirational buzzwords, it offers a two-fold, and insipid,
argument. First, a democratic society cannot afford to have privacy as
its main—let alone its only—value. Second, the acts of information
disclosure—by individuals, corporations, or public institutions—can be
beneficial, under certain conditions, to some or all of the parties
involved. Jarvis believes that these points are new and original and
heroically subversive of the conventional wisdom.
** Never said they were new and original. If they were, I would not have explored the history of privacy and publicness.
Public Parts is meant to be a polemic, but Jarvis has a hard time finding anyone who disagrees with either of his premises.
** Have I not found one here?
Forced
to introduce at least some contention into the book, he has to venture
very far from his main themes, opining on the Arab Spring, the fall of
the Soviet Union, and the future of the car industry.
** I fail to see the sin there.
A
few such diversions are entertaining, but Jarvis cannot joke his way
through the banality of his book’s central argument. Here is Jarvis at
his most typical: “Memo to doctors, lawyers, and manicurists: You’d
better be online and public.” What an incredible insight, in 2011: an
online presence can help your business!
**
Fair enough. That’s hardly new insight. But in context, this comes in
the midst of many statistics from Pew about internet usage. To this
point, Pew says that 44 percent of online adults consult the web seeking
information about people who perform professional services for them. So
that verifies what is indeed already known: the need to be online. Note
also that 65 percent of American small businesses, I was just told,
still do not have web sites. So apparently, some still need to learn.
Or
consider this breakthrough in marketing theory: “If you are known as
the company that collaborates with customers to give them the products
they want, you may end up with more loyal customers.” Better products
boost customer loyalty! Such bland pronouncements make Public Parts sound less cutting edge than the 1996 edition of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Web.
**
Where are these many companies that follow this obvious dictum of
openness and respect for customers leading to collaboration in the
design, manufacture, marketing, sales, and support of products? A
criticism of the book I have heard from a well-respected venture
capitalist in the Valley is that I don’t have enough examples and I
agree with her as I wish I’d been able to find more. I wish there were
more.
Jarvis’s
sloppy discussion of privacy is emblematic of his overall approach, and
so it merits a closer look. There are certainly strong arguments to be
made about privacy’s often perverse impact on national security or
economic growth or the richness of public life, and many of those
arguments have already been made. Instead of familiarizing himself with
the work of leading contemporary critics of the unthinking celebration
of privacy—scholars such as Amitai Etzioni, Richard A. Posner, Richard
Wasserstrom, and others—Jarvis prefers to arrive at many of their
conclusions on his own, losing much intellectual sophistication along
the way, not least by failing to address any of the counterarguments
that have been raised in response to their work.
**
That’s a game that could go on forever: castigating me for whom I do
not quote (having already attacked me for whom I do quote). Of course,
there are always more resources one could use. I have no doubt I missed
important ones; that is sadly inevitable. You can look at my bibliography (which I just put online) to judge for yourself the sources I used.
I
also chose seek out some new and less-obvious sources (for example, the
Making Publics project of McGill University and the Gutenberg
Parenthesis project out of the University of Southern Denmark) to
illustrate and examine some points. Keep in mind that this is not a book
about privacy but publicness; privacy is a relatively small part of the
narrative and I dealt with it as I saw best.
Separately,
I’ll discuss on my blog Posner’s frightening attack on publicness and
his distortion of the notion of privacy in, for example, the Illinois
eavesdropping law now before his court. Posner seems to presume that
police have a right to privacy in public while performing their public
duties. I find that a terrible notion.
It
would be hard to exaggerate the intellectual laziness of this book.
When he is not re-phrasing the obvious, Jarvis churns out ideas that he
believes to be fresh and brilliant but turn out to be stale and boring
and old.
**
I leave it for you to judge whether that is an intellectually of
substance or simply a personal attack. Such attacks are, sadly, a price
of publicness, as we have all learned in blog comments and tweets.
Entries
for “privacy” and “public sphere” in any decent encyclopedia will note
that there are no good definitions for the former and that the English
translation of the latter is problematic, but for Jarvis such “insights”
pass for original thinking. His vision of a world where “the people
formerly known as consumers can move up the design, sales, and service
chains to say what they want in a product before it is made” looks pale
and dated compared with the original idea of “user innovation” theorized
by Eric von Hippel in the mid-1980s.
Whenever Jarvis assumes the role of a cultural anthropologist, Public Parts
turns from a really bad book into a really embarrassing one. Take his
perverse fixation on Germany. Jarvis is puzzled by what he calls “The
German Paradox”—the fact that Germans are at ease inside mixed-sex
saunas but vigorously protective of their privacy outside.
**
Note that I say the German attitude toward the body is more mature than
Americans’ and I use this as an illustration to lead to the question:
Why is the private private and the public public in various cultures?
The
Germans’ opposition to Google’s Street View service rattles Jarvis; he
takes it to mean that “their heritage is coming into fundamental
conflict with internet culture—with the future.” But does it?
**
In the fuller context, I quoted at length a German commenter to my blog
who posed this question, about whether the more closed nature of German
culture -- an unwillingness, specifically, to fail in public -- could
put the nation behind competing with a Silicon-Valley culture where
failure is a badge of experience.
And
what’s so bad about Germans defending their heritage from an anonymous
technofuture, in which the likes of Jeff Jarvis hold lucrative stock
options?
** I wish. You can see my holdings and business relationships here.
To
claim that Germans’ resistance to Google is primarily about privacy,
and is the result of their tragic memories of Hitler and the Stasi, one
needs to show that other possible explanations are invalid. What if
Germans simply do not want to be tyrannized by an American company?
**
Tyrannized? That’s quite a revealing comment about Morozov’s and
perhaps some Germans’ attitudes toward America and companies and perhaps
capitalism. I cannot see how taking pictures of buildings from public
streets is tyranny. I’m rather shocked that Morozov, who writes so much
about tyranny, would so devalue the word.
What if they do not want a company—any company—to make money by turning their dwellings into commodities?
**
As I make clear in the book, I do hear this argument. But note well
that newspapers, for example, make money from customers by turning them
into commodities to sell to advertisers. And just what is wrong with
that? What is the harm? Companies make money. Would you prefer
government to build its own Google (as has been proposed in France)? Or
is this an ideological point about economics and capitalism?
What
if they fear cyber-crime, and worry that Google may accidentally record
and release their WiFi passwords, as its cars cruise their
neighborhoods?
**
I’ve discussed that at length elsewhere. It was Google’s fuck-up. Even
so, it is impossible to imagine how random bits of data on random days
on random streets had any useful commercial purpose. I repeat: a
fuck-up.
Jarvis,
who was so keen to explain his own need for privacy by reducing it to
other goods and values, doesn’t want anyone else to enjoy the same
privilege.
A
similar confusion mars his treatment of Finland. He mentions it twice:
first, to tell us that Finnish employers are banned from Googling their
potential employees and, second, to muse over the fact that in Finland
everyone’s salary figures are available online. The latter practice
puzzles him, and he attributes it to local norms and culture,
emphasizing that the culture he lives in does not approve of such norms.
(“When it comes to money, I live by cultural conventions.... I’m not
100 percent public.”) The idea that privacy may be culturally dependent
is not new. Back in 1928, Margaret Mead posited that Samoans lacked a
sense of privacy—a finding that was heavily criticized by later
scholars, who faulted Mead for not being able to understand the ways in
which Samoans honor the concept. The case of Finland simply shows that a
nation’s respect for both privacy and publicness may depend on the
perceived levels of equality, the feelings of solidarity, class
distinctions, and many other factors.
**
I am not puzzled by others’ customs; I’m simply pointing out how mine
and ours in America vary. I’m not sure what he would have me do but I
will point out that I’m not the one who brought up the hackneyed example
of Margaret Mead and Samoans. Note here how I use my own income as an
example of examining such cultural conventions; it is not, as Morozov
said above here, that I am hypocritical about privacy.
You
do not have to be a privacy reductionist or a cultural relativist to
note that what people are prepared to share is a function of their
social and political arrangements, and of the ideologies that those
arrangements generate. The existence of such differences does not mean
that there are cultures where respect for privacy does not exist. It
means only that one needs extensive background knowledge to recognize
its precise manifestation in a culture. But Jarvis the cultural
anthropologist prefers to act like some naughty American freshman on his
first trip abroad. Everything is so weird! These people are naked in the sauna! They don’t want their houses online!
The ultimate point of all this playfulness remains unclear, as even
Jarvis acknowledges the cultural dependency of both privacy and
publicness. In the end all Jarvis can produce is a bizarre concern that
Berlin looks too blurry on Google Maps. Well, cultural apocalypse it
isn’t. And as long as Jeff Jarvis can get away with not disclosing his
income, it seems sensible to embrace pluralism and let Germans and Finns
do as they please.
** Once more, I do disclose my income.
And
the point on Germany and Street View, which I examine at length but
Morozov chooses to ignore, is that by forcing Google to blur public
images taken from public streets (through public pressure rather than
law), the government sets what I think is a dangerous precedent that
could limit the free-speech rights of others: if Google can be told not
to take pictures in public places, can journalists or citizens also be
told not to? When the public square is diminished it is the public who
loses. Morozov chooses to ignore that context and point of the German
discussion.
THINGS
GET WORSE when Jarvis enters the conceptual minefield that is the
theory of the public sphere. Why he feels the urge to opine on these
matters remains a puzzle, for this detour out of his depth does nothing
to help him champion publicness or defeat privacy. Perhaps Jarvis wanted
to assure the critic Ron Rosenbaum—who once challenged him to prove
that he had read Hannah Arendt—of his intellectual credentials. Or more
likely, Jarvis simply wanted to ride yet again the never-ending “future
of media” debate that he has done so much to trivialize.
Whatever
his motivation, Jarvis ends up making yet another grand pronouncement: a
world that respects and cultivates “publicness” will beget many more
publics, giving us a public life that is much richer than what the
tyranny of a single monolithic public sphere has produced so far. It is a
big thesis, but Jarvis is too impatient to treat it with the
intellectual care that it deserves. As with his treatment of privacy, he
is mostly indifferent to the existing literature, scholarly and
philosophical, on the subject. The Dewey-Lippmann debate, which broached
many of these issues almost a century ago, goes completely unmentioned.
Bruno Latour’s more recent attempts to produce a political theory that
could account for the emergence of issue-oriented and object-oriented
publics is nowhere to be seen.
**
Again, we can play the whom-you-don’t-quote game forever. I chose not
to include the Dewey-Lippmann debate precisely because it is has been so
well-covered elsewhere and I chose to use other sources, as I said
above, to examine these questions. One may certainly quibble with my
choices. But I find this form of criticism to be frustrating: Pauline
Kael describing the movie she would have made instead of the one that
was made. (Oh, no, criticizing Kael will no doubt get me in as much
trouble as my treatment of Habermas. That’s next...)
All
we get are some glimpses of Habermas. Less than glimpses, actually:
Jarvis seems to believe that multiple publics appeared only with the
emergence of the Habermasian public sphere of the coffeehouses and
salons of the eighteenth century, even though Habermas was making
exactly the opposite point—that the emergence of the public sphere
allowed numerous publics to come together, leave their particular
interests behind, and debate on common terms about their shared
interests. Misunderstanding this important point derails much of
Jarvis’s subsequent analysis of Habermas.
**
I do address this and say that leaving behind publics to become one
public -- indeed, a mass -- is where I differ with Habermas’ own sense
of what one could say is a utopian vision of a public sphere. In short: I
question the notion of a single public sphere. I also note the work of
others who complain that Habermas’ public sphere was quite exclusionary,
including only landed, male gentry.
Can people participate in the Habermasian public sphere and still preserve their privacy?
** I don’t put them in opposition. Straw man.
Of
course they can—as long as they transcend their social or group
particularities when they are in it. The reason Habermas emphasizes the
“rational-critical” nature of the discourse in the public sphere is not
because he looks down on other forms of expression, as Jarvis believes
him to do, but because rational argument—rather than, say, dance—was the
medium that helped individuals to abstract from their social and
political interests and engage with the larger fate of humanity.
**
But I quote Habermas in his one pronouncement on the internet at the
time, in a footnote to a talk, complaining about a million chatrooms
online; he ironically favored discussion mediated by “quality” media
over discussion of the public online. I do not.
Jarvis
seems unfamiliar with Habermas’s work on communicative rationality and
thus prefers to read him through the extremely tedious contemporary
debate about “experts” (journalists) and “amateurs” (bloggers).
Comically, he ends up accusing the great German thinker of being a smug
elitist.
**
Here is my greatest sin, you see: not treating Habermas with the
worship academics require. I predicted this would be the case before the
book was published and it’s become comically so. I make it clear in the
book that I am no Habermas scholar; I started reading him for this
project. Since then, whenever I speak to groups, I ask who has read or
studied Habermas; even among a large, well-schooled group at Google last
week, only two hands were raised. So I’m hardly alone. In this book, I
take you through my own education and discovery on many topics.
I
dare to disagree with the great man (Habermas, that is), but then I
come to agree with him as well. I do acknowledge, as I agree one must,
that Habermas sets the terms of the debate. I disagree about his vision
of the ideal society -- I favor remaining in many publics (which is what
I believe our tools of publicness enable) and am suspicious of the
single public sphere (that is, a mass). But in the end, I argue that the
tools of publicness may indeed lead us to a vision of publics closer to
Habermas’ ideal, which means that I accept his framing of it.
This is how Sarah Palin would read Habermas if she could read Habermas.
** Tweetbait.
But
even if we grant Jarvis his ridiculous oversimplification of Habermas’s
argument, so that a blog becomes the equivalent of a coffeehouse, why
stop there?
** Therein Morozov also dismisses the conversation we have here on the net and all of us who hold it.
Why
not also apply the rest of Habermas’s argument and examine how
corporate control of the media could undermine its civic spirit? The
Habermasian public sphere had an entire century to develop outside of
the market’s logic; but in the case of the Internet, that period of
freedom was limited to just a few years in the early 1990s. Neither
Jarvis nor Clay Shirky—that other promoter of “Habermas for Dummies: The
Web-Only Edition”—wants to grapple with the cultural consequences of
the political economy of today’s Web. Instead they make an implicit
assumption that today’s Internet companies will somehow prove more
benign than all the corporate-controlled media that preceded them.
**
Well, though the wires may be owned by companies, our words there are
not and I argue in the book that the net provides us the means to talk
with the world around mediation. This page is an example. Is it hosted
by Google? Indeed, Google allows me the space to do this. The New
Republic gave Morozov his space.
At
the end, in my discussion of principles that make up the point of the
book -- and which Morozov entirely ignores -- I argue for protection of
the neutrality and architecture of the net against both governments and
companies.
(In a recent essay about Google’s exit from China, Jarvis went as far
as to christen Google the “new world’s ambassador to the old world ...
[that] represented the rights, security, and principles of the Net to
Chinese bureaucrats and hackers.”)
**
I have gone on at great length online as well as in the book
criticizing Google for its initial China stance, then praising it for
changing its stance and finally following its own principles. But then I
criticize Google for entering what I call a devil’s deal with Verizon
splitting up the internet into a neutral wired net and a controlled
wireless net: the internet and the schminnternet. I use both cases to
demonstrate that we can trust no company -- not Google, not any company
-- to protect the net for us. That is precisely why I end up asking us,
the citizens of the net, to do so. Morozov says nothing of this so I can
see it only as a purposeful omission and mispresentation.
But
why assume that Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page will be different from
Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black? Because they are geeks? Anyone who
believes this is under the spell of geek religion.
Most
of the narrative tension in Jarvis’s book originates from linguistic
confusion over the numerous meanings of “publicness” and “privacy.” How
else could one mobilize Arendt to celebrate “public man” and demonize
the “private sphere,” when elsewhere in her work Arendt clearly
recognizes the importance of privacy—the ability to be “shielded from
the public eye,” as she put it—as a buffer against the encroachment of
totalitarianism? And to turn Richard Sennett into an apologist for a
privacy-less world is to give a very shallow reading to The Fall of Public Man, as well as to disregard his earlier work The Uses of Disorder,
which celebrates the anonymity and chaos of city life—a spirit that is
antithetical to the highly efficient and transparent Internet that
Jarvis recruits Sennett into celebrating. Both Arendt and Sennett were
lamenting the blurring of the lines between the public and the private,
but Jarvis wants to blur the lines even further.
**
I can be criticized for not dealing with Arendt more; one always can. I
quote her in relation to the history of the notion of privacy and, as I
say, I tried not to write an entire book about privacy. I do not
believe I turn Sennett into “an apologist for a privacy-less world.” I
quote him, too, in the context of the history of privacy.
JARVIS'S
STYLE IS itself a measure of what passes for Internet intellectualism.
Habermas appears next to German sausages and Oprah and botox and hair
extensions.
** There’s the most revealing snippet from Morozov. He decrees what intellectualism is and isn’t. And it isn’t being allowed to mention Habermas and Winfrey in the same book. As we cyber-folk say, LOL.
Even Thomas Friedman would be aghast at some of Jarvis’s cheesy sound-bites.
** Ooh, now that hurts.
“The
new American dream is to go viral.” Mark Zuckerberg is “an enigma
wrapped in a nerd becoming a mogul.” “Each time you don’t share, a
relationship loses its wings.”
** This from a master of tweetbait phraseology.
Jarvis’s
habit of restating his banalities at least three times is extremely
annoying: we are repeatedly told that “what’s public is public and
should remain so,” and “what’s public is owned by us, the public,” and
“what’s public is a public good.”
** Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
And
beyond all his vulgarities, Jarvis aspires also to the abstract and the
highfalutin’. People do not just co-found companies in his universe;
they “co-create” them.
**
Well, that’s what the people holding the conference on the topic call
it. And anyway, this isn’t about co-founding. It is about collaboration
with customers. Very different things.
The
retweet button in Twitter is “a substantiation of the sharing society.”
Publicness is “a progression to greater freedom,” an “emblem of epochal
change,” “a sign of our empowerment,” “a window on a society’s
attitudes towards change and risk, progress and innovation, success and
failure.”
** Yes, I believe that. I wrote it.
It
gets still worse. Jarvis contradicts himself every ten pages or so. He
acknowledges that the notion of “digital natives”—teenagers who are
inherently good with technology—might be a fiction, and then proceeds to
quote his 19-year-old son as the ultimate authority on all things
Internet.
**
Now that’s as inexcusable as it is illogical. First, leave my family
out of your attack, Mr. Morozov. Second, there is absolutely nothing
incompatible with arguing -- as danah boyd does -- that youth are not
digital natives (young people must learn how to navigate online just as
we all must) and that there are smart people among our youth (we’d
damned well better hope so).
The
same Jarvis who likes to boast that he wrote his first book on Google
without having much interaction with the company blames Aaron Sorkin for
not doing proper research at Facebook for The Social Network.
**I
made it clear that it was written from a distance as it was not a book
about Google but instead a book about change in our age and I used
Google as a model to examine how one company has succeeded in that
change. Some don’t like that method. Many apparently do. The book is now
out in paperback (with a new afterword).
He
cites a line from a French politician—that the Internet is an
“international space”—to bolster his case that the Internet belongs to
the netizens, even though the minister was arguing that, like any such
space, it should be subject to international laws and appropriate
governance structures.
**
No, I was merely discussing metaphors people use for the net to try to
understand it. This came in a discussion about whether we should view
the net as a medium (I say no) or as a place (that’s closer but I have
reservations there as well).
He
chides privacy advocates for focusing on edge cases, such as teenagers
who are ostracized because their private videos appear online—“this
debate tends to be held around the extremes.... edge cases are good at
feeding debates but not at informing norms”—but then he proceeds to
build the case for “publicness” entirely with edge cases. How normal are
Howard Stern, the “New York gadabout” Julia Allison, Oprah Winfrey, and
Josh Harris ofWe Live in Public fame?
**
I have hardly built the case “entirely” on those examples. The book is
filled with other examples, some of which Morozov complains about here.
Are any of them “informing norms” that would apply to an unemployed and uninsured single mother from Iowa?
**
Straw man. I write the chapter on living the public life about anyone. I
also acknowledge very early in the book that I stand in a privileged
position as a well-off white male in America who has been public and I
make clear that what holds for me does not hold, for example, for a gay
man in a repressive religious nation in Africa. Or a single mother in
Iowa, if you prefer.
As
if to live up to the old joke about an expert being someone who knows
more and more about less and less until eventually he knows everything
about nothing, Jarvis casts his eye over a gazillion different
industries—from cars to airlines and from retail stores to public
institutions—but rarely ventures beyond the most obvious analysis
anywhere he looks.
**
That’s a matter of opinion. As I said earlier, I wish I’d had more
examples of transparent companies but sadly I don’t think there are
enough.
There
are only two pages on WikiLeaks—an oddity in a book on the virtues of
publicness—and even those pages are filled with generalities (the
WikiLeaks scandal “demonstrated the banality of secrecy” and showed that
“government keeps too much secret”). According to Jarvis, Julian
Assange is driven by a law that posits that “those who held secrets once
held power. Now those who create transparency gain power.” What does
that actually mean? Journalists, NGOs, even Google: all of them create
transparency in one way or another. But is it true that they now hold
more power? What does the WikiLeaks disclosure of all those diplomatic
cables imply about the powers lost or gained by the likes of Human
Rights Watch, which needs secrecy to work in difficult countries but
also needs publicness to make the world aware of those countries’ dire
human rights record? Jarvis doesn’t say. If, as a result of legislative
changes triggered by WikiLeaks, whistle-blowers end up getting much
weaker legal protection, would it mean that they, too, gain power?
**
A fine discussion to have. I think Wikileaks and Assange continue to
become less emblematic as time goes on. They gave us revealing lessons
about secrecy but I believe they may not continue to be critical
entities in this discussion. We shall see.
THERE
IS NOT much consistency in Jarvis’s thought about technology. Whenever
he needs to explain something positive, his instinct is always to credit
the Internet: it is the one factor responsible for more publicness,
more democracy, more freedom. And every time he turns to darker and more
difficult subjects—like discrimination, or shame—he announces that they
have nothing to do with the Internet and are simply the product of
outdated social mores or ineffective politics. In Jarvis’s universe, all
the good things are technologically determined and all the bad things
are socially determined.
**
Therein lies the essence of Morozov’s and my disagreement and it would
have been better if he’d discussed this more than in one paragraph. I
do, like him, point to the ways the internet can be used by bad players.
I argue especially at the end that we have the responsibility to decide
how to use the internet. It is another mischaracterization to say that I
make such a black-and-white distinction that technology is good and
people bad. Absurd nonsense, but it’s his nonsense, not mine.
This
perverse analytical framework is most pronounced when he criticizes
privacy advocates for not wanting to tackle more fundamental
problems—such as social stigmas—that are made less severe by invoking
one’s privacy rights. Jarvis writes that “a larger fear of sharing
health information is the stigma associated with illness. That stigma is
most certainly society’s problem. Why should anyone be ashamed of being
sick?”
** Yes, as I said above, I hope for a society where health and sickness do not become objects of discrimination and shame.
He
applies the same logic to discrimination based on sexual orientation:
“That anyone would still feel shame about being revealed as gay ... is
also our failing. If we think that technology is the problem, we risk
ignoring the deeper faults and more important lessons.”
**
This is part of a larger argument. I believe that publicness was the
key weapon gays and lesbians had to fight back the bigots who forced
them into their closets. I want to make clear that I do not think anyone
should be forced out of those closets. But those who had the courage to
dare the bigots used publicness to fight the stigma. They are winning.
This particular quote comes in the context of discussing the violation
of the privacy of the young man at Rutgers who killed himself after his
roommate allegedly shared pictures of him with another man. I lament
that he should have felt such shame that he then killed himself. Who
could not lament that? But I do not blame him. I blame society.
Yet
Jarvis seems blind to ways in which the rhetoric of publicness could be
mobilized to distract from finding equally “deeper faults and more
important lessons” about the sprawling national security state. “Knowing
that no security at all is not an option, what’s your choice: body
scans, physical searches, facial recognition via surveillance cameras,
more personal data attached to travel records?” he asks—and quickly
informs us that he objects to none of the above. He includes this tirade
in a section called “publicness protects us”—but he presents no
evidence that it does protect us.
**
I do indeed examine our choices between privacy and security and make
it clear that it is not an easy decision. Morozov drops the context and
nuance.
And
why, one might ask, is the choice so stark? Why not entertain the
option of extirpating the roots of terrorism rather than investing more
money in surveillance technology and embracing “publicness”? It seems
that Jarvis wants to fight root causes only of problems such as shame
and discrimination; for everything else, there are quick technological
fixes.
**
Oh, jeesh, he would have us solve the entire problem of terrorism and
centuries of religious hatred and national struggles and poverty before
we can get on the next plane? This is a corollary to the argument that
we should not give African children computers until we have solved every
other problem there.
Jarvis’s
understanding of the law is as careless as his understanding of
technology. Discussing the proposed “Do Not Track” legislation that
would allow users to opt out of online tracking, he complains that
“there’s no real need [for it], since users already have tools to stop
tracking.” How far can such logic take us? Should we acquiesce to the
NSA’s wiretapping of our phones because we can already speak in code?
Should we allow dubious food products to be sold in supermarkets because
we already have the tools to disinfect them? There may be strong
reasons to oppose the legislation, but Jarvis is not interested in
exploring libertarian arguments against paternalism or consumer
protection. “The problem with regulating ... new technology around the
bad things that could happen is that it also cuts off the possible
good,” he writes. This is an oft-repeated criticism of the Precautionary
Principle, the idea that technologies should be regulated if there is
any probable cause to believe that they may be harmful; but Jarvis
refuses to discuss it in any more detail, just as he refuses to discuss
anything that reeks of public policy, philosophy, or law. It’s hard to
say whether he is incapable of discussing such matters or simply worries
that they are not the kind of eyeball-grabbing material that he wants
for his blog (where many of the ideas inPublic Parts were originally published).
**
This, too, is a valid debate. We disagree and can do so without hurling
insults. I explore what I argue could be the unintended consequences of
Do Not Track and other perhaps well-meaning but overextended
regulation. I do argue that we most need to guard against government
surveillance; so there we agree. The food argument is a non sequitur.
The argument in the end is that regulating the technology is often
unproductive: the blunderbuss of filtering all content in Australia to
get to child porn, for example, when there are serious unintended
consequences for free speech -- especially in the tyrannies Morozov
writes about (don’t they use such filtering to justify their
censorship?) -- and there is no proof that it will even solve the
problem. I discuss it in the detail I think is appropriate. Morozov
disagrees. Fine. I leave it to you to judge.
The
more of Jarvis one reads, the harder it is to avoid the impression that
all he wants is to wow the reader and move on to extolling the next
cool technology. Consider his celebration of the nascent “open
government” movement, a coalition of geeks and policy wonks who seek to
make government information more accessible online.
** What’s not to like about citizens collaborating in governance?
After
declaring how wonderful it is, Jarvis makes a passing reference to
Lawrence Lessig’s much-discussed argument in these pages that the blind
pursuit of government transparency may lead voters to disgust—and then
drops the issue almost as abruptly as he mentions it.
** So we’ve now each said as much about that.
This
aversion to philosophical considerations is deeply irresponsible. Is
hypocrisy an inalienable part of the political life in democracies, as
Judith Shklar and, more recently, David Runciman have argued? Will
efforts to make governments and politicians more open and transparent
undermine government and politics? Jarvis never broaches such
subtleties. His is a simple world: “outside of war, crime, and
protecting the individual, there is no reason for public officials to
hide what they know and do from their publics.” What about debates about
monetary policy by central banks? Or court deliberations? Should they
be streamed online in real time? Jarvis doesn’t say.
**
As in other areas of society, we will negotiate new norms. I am arguing
to start from a default of openness whereas now we have a default of
secrecy. I say we do need secrets as they relate to security, crime,
diplomacy, and privacy. I say that using transparency only as a gotcha
cudgel over government will lead to government fighting transparency.
That is why I devote an entire section to using transparency and
openness to lead to collaboration -- the section that Morozov ridicules
directly above.
Still,
he is sufficiently convinced of his opinions to demand the appointment
of “publicness czars” who will “represent the interest of the people in
openness.” After all, he is the people’s advocate: he knows what the
people want, and the people cannot be wrong.
** Yes, I argue that we need to protect to publicness as well as privacy. That’s what the entire book is about.
In
his first book, Jarvis announced that “we no longer need companies,
institutions, or government to organize us.” (An exception must have
been granted to his publisher, his university employer, and his
consulting clients.)
**
In both books, I confess the hypocrisy of publishing books rather than
doing this all digitally, but the system still works well enough. I also
talk about trying to do things in new ways with my next project. And,
yes, I work for a university. But I also write about the disruption
universities are sure to go through.
Now he is just as forthcoming about his populism. In fact, he would fit right in with the Tea Party:
** Over-the-top tweetbait.
“Publicness
is a sign of our empowerment at [the incumbents’] 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
Facebook to organize a protest.”
** So is he saying that #occupywallstreet with its distrust of institutions is an outlet of the Tea Party? Ridiculous.
This
stuff must elicit a lot of applause from basement-bound geeks. But why
not consider the possibility that the incumbents may be using the same
tools, Jarvis’s revered technologies, to tell us what to think, and far
more effectively than before? Internet shelf space may be infinite, but
human attention is not. Cheap self-publishing marginally improves one’s
chances of being heard, but nothing about this new decentralized public
sphere suggests that old power structures—provided they are smart and
willing to survive—will not be able to use it to their benefit.
**
We certainly disagree. Show me the legacy media institutions that are
doing brilliantly online. Mostly, I get accused of predicting their
deaths.
What
George Carlin said of the American dream is also true of the Internet
dream peddled by cyber-utopians like Jarvis: you have to be asleep to
believe it.
**
And there is Morozov distilled to his essence. He is as one-dimensional
on the topic of technology as he accuses me of being, only from the
pessimistic side.
I
won’t apologize for having dreams. Again, I won’t apologize for hope.
But I say loudly that my hope for a better future is most certainly not
assured and that is why I argue that we, citizens of the net, have a
responsibility to decide how best to use these tools to build a better
society. Again, that is the point of the book -- the final chapter --
the point that Morozov chooses to ignore.
FOR
A MAN PREACHING digital publicness, Jarvis seems unaware of one of its
inevitable consequences: one’s blunders are much easier to find and
document. In Jarvis’s case, he cannot help repeating what he has already
said in his first book. Jarvis 1.0 writes that “my life is an open
blog,” and Jarvis 2.0 that “my life is this open book.” Jarvis 1.0
proclaims that “the link changes everything,” and Jarvis 2.0 that “the
link is a profound invention.” Jarvis 1.0 quotes lines from David
Weinberger (“An age of transparency must be an age of forgiveness”) and
Raymond Williams (“There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of
seeing people as masses”), and so does Jarvis 2.0, and exactly the same
lines. (Jarvis 1.0 thinks that Williams’s Culture and Society
appeared in 1938.) Jarvis 1.0 builds his arguments around ideas such as
the Coase Theory of the Firm and the Dunbar Number—that staple of
positive Internet thinking—and so does Jarvis 2.0.
**
I do not presume that any reader of my second book read my first. Yes, I
bring up some of the same ideas. I’ve heard Morozov speak and read him
more than once. So does he.
It
is not surprising that the two books feature almost identical casts.
The list of fellow Internet gurus and believers who make appearances in
both books, repeating what they say in every other Internet book, is too
long to give in full, but here are Clay Shirky, Chris Anderson, Don
Tapscott, Jay Rosen, Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, Nick Denton, Umair
Haque, Arianna Huffington, Doc Searls, John Perry Barlow, Steven
Johnson.
** Aha. There is Morozov’s devil’s list of optimists and utopians, many of whom he has attacked more than once. As I said earlier, I am most honored to be included in this company.
Alas,
Jarvis 2.0 says nothing about Digg.com’s Kevin Rose—whom Jarvis 1.0
proclaimed to be “the new Turner, Murdoch, Hearst—or Oprah,” which is
understandable, given that Digg.com tanked right after it received
Jarvis’s blessing. Public Parts
has its own Digg.com moment, when Jarvis breathlessly celebrates
Blippy, an Internet start-up built on the ridiculous premise that
consumers want to share details of their credit card purchases.
According to Jarvis, “this start-up will blow your mind”—but the only
thing that Blippy has blown so far is its investors’ cash. It shut down
its flagship service back in May, but you won’t learn this from Jarvis.
**
True, Rose did not take over the world. My prediction was wrong. But
Digg is still alive and it led to Reddit and a new way for the public to
aggregate. Gutenberg -- if I dare bring him up again -- lost his
business to his funder but still changed the world. I remain a fan of
Rose’s and I eagerly await his next creations. Blippy, I said in the
book, did pivot to be more of a review service but the lessons from it
stand and I am glad I interviewed Philip Kaplan of Blippy for the book;
he brought many lessons.
An
Internet guru would not be an Internet guru if he didn’t make claims
that contradict what he has said or written before. Take the subject of
Google and its algorithms. Jarvis 1.0 was all about celebrating Google,
but Jarvis 2.0 has new friends in Facebook and Twitter. (An Internet
intellectual always keeps up.) Jarvis 1.0 wrote that “Google’s moral of
universal empowerment is the sometimes-forgotten ideal of democracy,”
and argued that the company “provides the infrastructure for a culture
of choice,” while its “algorithms and its business model work because
Google trusts us.” Jarvis 2.0 claims that “by sharing publicly, we
people challenge Google’s machines and reclaim our authority on the
internet from algorithms.”
**
I am not against algorithms suddenly. I am saying that they are now
challenged by sharing. And we are better off for having both.
What
happened to the dream of Google’s algorithmic democracy that Jarvis 1.0
was so busy celebrating? How did Jarvis 2.0 arrive at the conclusion
that “the clearest lesson of the social web is that people want
relationships with people, not with brands, spokesmen, rules, robots,
voice mails, machines, or algorithms”? (Did we really have to wait until
the invention of Twitter to learn that people prefer other people to
machines?) To be sure, people change and ideas evolve, and there is
nothing wrong with revising one’s views—as long as one is, well, public
about it. Jarvis gives a much less respectable impression. He makes it
look as if he fell out of love with Google when the venture capitalists
he meets and greets at technology conferences fell in love with Facebook
and Twitter.
**
Oh, and because I’m out of love with Google, I interviewed Eric Schmidt
and still said many favorable things about it? This comes straight from
Morozov’s wishful imagination. Am I still a Google fan? Yes, I am.
But in one crucial respect Jarvis’s second book is true to the spirit of his first one. The only way to make sense of Public Parts
is to read it as a wordy marketing brochure for Jeff Jarvis, the
thought leader, the consultant, the international man of mystery. The
brochure—a sophisticated signaling exercise—is full of potentially
useful information. We learn of Jarvis’s speaking fees (up to $45,000
for faraway corporate gigs) and the e-mail address we should use to
propose consulting work to him.
**
Remember when Morozov said I wouldn’t say how much I earn? As this
demonstrates, I did. Sadly, I’ve made that much or anything near it only
once but I reveal the range of my payments; that was at the extreme
high-end. The email address is in the book in the context of rethinking
conferences and books, not consulting. More on that soon.
We
learn that he gets face time with Mark Zuckerberg and that he rubs
shoulders with corporate bigwigs at exclusive events (Davos, Rupert
Murdoch’s corporate retreat in California, the DLD conference in
Munich). We know that he is unlikely to lose a lot of sleep consulting
for clients in dubious industries—he is down with the surveillance
industry and, at one bizarre point in his book, he even defends Big
Pharma.
**
Morozov accused me of consulting for dubious industries but lists none.
Apparently he thinks that newspapers are dubious. Go to the about-me page
linked above on my blog and you will see the companies for whom I have
consulted; I am quite public about that. I am not sure whom he includes
in the “surveillance industry,” but I have not worked with anyone in
that field, unless one includes media companies that use cookies. My
“defense” of Big Pharma (his caps) comes when I lament that current
practices have drug companies not listen to their customers and patients
for fear of liability and I see that as a lost opportunity for them to
learn more and serve better. So I criticize the pharma companies and
their attorneys and regulators as well for their system of willful
ignorance.
Also
he’s got a kid in college. Should we thank Jarvis for being so public?
To the extent that his quest for publicness helps to bolster his own
clown credentials, perhaps.
** If anyone questions this as a personal attack....
To
the extent that such openness leads us to question his ideas and the
ideas of his comrades in the Cyber-Utopian International, certainly. As
Jarvis himself writes, “say it once, and you’ve said it forever.”
WERE IT JUST an isolated case of hyperventilating cyber-punditry, there would be few reasons to fret too much about Private Parts.
But the oracular Jarvis plays a consequential role in shaping how we
see, design, and regulate the Internet. (Anyone doubting his influence
should watch a YouTube clip of him hectoring Nicolas Sarkozy about
Internet policy at a recent VIP gathering in Paris.) He is in some ways
the personification of the Internet intellectual.
**
Well, Morozov promotes me. Just a moment ago, I have “clown
credentials” and now I’m changing the world. I hardly have such a role.
But he wants to promote me to being “the personification of the internet
intellectual” so he can attack me and the list of others on his list
above. I am his straw man and this is his match.
I
am puzzled by his description of my discussion with Sarkozy. Given the
chance to talk to a head of state, should I simply bow? That is how
people are forced to behave in dictatorships. No, I had the opportunity
to ask him a question at his e-G8 and I asked him to take a Hippocratic
Oath for the net: First do no harm. The exchange is here.
Like
most Internet intellectuals, Jarvis is the Technology Man—the successor
to the History Man of Bradbury’s novel. While the fictional Howard Kirk
turned to Hegelianism and Marxism (of the most vulgar variety) to
explain everything in terms of the grand and inexorable march of
history, Jarvis has another reference point, another sacred telos: the
equally grand and equally inexorable march of the Internet, which in his
view is a technology that generates its own norms, its own laws, its
own people. (He likes to speak of “us, people of the Net.”) For the
Technology Man, the Internet is the glue that holds our globalized world
together and the divine numen that fills it with meaning. If you
thought that ethnocentrism was bad, brace yourself for
Internet-centrism.
**
If you would like to believe that the internet will not change society,
be my guest. But I believe we are undergoing inevitable change with no
inevitable outcomes. I fail to see arguments and evidence against that
here.
Does this mean that we should banish the Internet—and technology—from our account of how the world works? Of course not.
** Well, thank God for that. Speaking of obvious statements.
Material
artifacts—and especially the products of their interplay with humans,
ideas, and other artifacts—are rarely given the thoughtful attention
that they deserve. But the mere presence of such technological artifacts
in a given setting does not make that setting reducible to purely
technological explanations. “Seeing” the Internet’s invisible hand
everywhere is a sure way to lose one’s intellectual bearings. So is
opting for unsophisticated Internet-centric explanations simply because
they are lucrative, or likely to be celebrated by the technophilic
crowd. The global reach of the Internet is no excuse to adopt its
standpoint as a universal explanation: this globalism is crassly
provincial, and lazy thinking.
**
That’s misleading to call it a universal explanation. I do not do that.
I do examine the impact of the internet and well we all should. Morozov
jumps to the conclusion that this is a uniform theory of the world. I
never said it was. Of course, there are other forces at work. I set out
to examine this force -- as, say, the book 1493 examines mosquitoes as a
force of change in the world of that time without arguing that it
caused all change then.
Why
worry about the growing dominance of such digitalism? The reason should
be obvious. As Internet-driven explanations crowd out everything else,
our entire vocabulary is being re-defined. Collaboration is
re-interpreted through the prism of Wikipedia; communication, through
the prism of social networking; democratic participation, through the
prism of crowd-sourcing; cosmopolitanism, through the prism of reading
the blogs of exotic “others”; political upheaval, through the prism of
the so-called Twitter revolutions.
** There is Morozov’s anti-cyber orthodoxy, neatly summarized.
Even
the persecution of dissidents is now seen as an extension of online
censorship (rather than the other way around). A recent headline on the
blog of the Harvard-based Herdictproject—it
tracks Internet censorship worldwide—announces that, in Mexico and
Morocco, “Online Censorship Goes Offline.” Were activists and dissidents
never harassed before Twitter and Facebook?
Of
course, there is no denying that the Internet alters our ideational and
cognitive landscapes. A civilization that prides itself on building a
Wikipedia is likely to have certain ideas about democratic
participation, cooperation, research, expertise, and human nature. (The
title of a 2009 talk by Yochai Benkler, the smartest Internet utopian
and in many ways the anti-Jarvis, captures the stakes quite well: “After
Selfishness: Wikipedia 1, Hobbes 0 at Half Time.”) The ideas that the
Internet begets matter every bit as much as the Internet itself. This is
another reason to keep a close eye on Internet intellectuals such as
Jarvis: left unchallenged, they may succeed in convincing us that we do
indeed inhabit the digital wonderland of their imagination.
**
I am challenged all the time on my blog and in talks where I invite
challenge. I certainly have not been left unchallenged, as this very
document demonstrates. I wouldn’t worry about that, Morozov.
But
such vigilance is not easy. Our Internet intellectuals lack the
intellectual ambition, and the basic erudition, to connect their
thinking with earlier traditions of social and technological criticism.
They desperately need to believe that their every thought is
unprecedented. Sometimes it seems as if intellectual life doesn’t really
thrill them at all. They never stoop to the lowly task of producing
expansive and expository essays, where they could develop their ideas at
length, by means of argument and learning, and fully engage with their
critics. Instead they blog, and tweet, and consult, and give conference
talks—modes of discourse that are mostly impervious to serious critique.
They do write books, of course; but as the example of Jeff Jarvis
demonstrates, the books tend to contain almost only the slogans that
they have peddled in more lucrative and less rigorous formats. They
reject “the best that has been thought and said” for the best that has
been blogged and tweeted.
**
That paragraph is filled with sweeping condemnation of people who
disagree with Morozov. There, as I said above, he is dismissing the
people to dismiss the ideas, a dubious and anti-intellectual practice
itself. He sets himself up as the cop of intellectual ambition,
erudition, intellectual life, and more. He complains that we don’t write
long enough and then complains that I write a book.
As
Chuck Klosterman has observed, “the degree to which anyone values the
Internet is proportional to how valuable the Internet makes that
person.” Internet intellectuals like to tell companies and governments
what they like to hear-including the kind of bad news that is really
good news in disguise (you are in terrible shape, but if you only embrace the Internet, all your problems will be gone forever!).
Occasionally their gigs are embarrassing—Clay Shirky’s name turned up
on the despicable roster of consultants to Qaddafi’s government—but they
will take that risk. And the technology companies return the favor: the
opening pages of Macrowikinomics—another
recent best-seller in the sprawling library of techno-punditry—is
peppered with laudatory quotes from the CEOs of Dell, Best Buy,
Accenture, Dupont, Nike, Google, and a dozen other companies.
WHY
SUCH NARRATIVES are in demand by the general public is more mysterious.
It could be that ordinary people find the surreal perplexity of the
Internet—the stuff of WikiLeaks, Anonymous, Stuxnet, “Twitter
revolutions”—so maddeningly complex and labyrinthine that they are ready
to settle for whatever theory or pseudo-theory or theoretical uplift
seems to make sense of the puzzling new situation. And what better way
to make sense of it all than to claim that the source of their
perplexity is in fact a part of some inexorable historical process that
has been unfolding for centuries?
**
Ah, there comes Morozov’s terribly snobbery, dismissing the public as a
whole. Therein lies our key disagreement. I start by trusting the
people. Not to do so is to put myself above my neighbors and to reject
the value of democracy, free markets, education, journalism, even reform
religion (for why trust the people to rule themselves, set markets in
action, be educated or informed, or talk with God if they are all a
bunch of fools?).
Most
Internet intellectuals simply choose a random point in the distant
past—the honor almost invariably goes to the invention of the printing
press—and proceed to draw a straight line from Gutenberg to Zuckerberg,
as if the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, the Reign of
Terror, two world wars—and everything else—never happened.
The
ubiquitous references to Gutenberg are designed to lend some historical
gravitas to wildly ahistorical notions. The failure of Internet
intellectuals actually to grapple with the intervening centuries of
momentous technological, social, and cultural development is glaring.
**
I believe that Gutenberg is the clearest historical analog for what we
are experiencing now. Disagree if you wish. As Morozov points out above,
I also do discuss intervening events, such as the growth of publics and
the public sphere and mass media.
For
all their grandiosity about technology as the key to all of life’s
riddles, they cannot see further than their iPads. And even their iPad
is of interest to them only as a “platform”—another buzzword of the
incurious—and not as an artifact that is assembled in dubious conditions
somewhere in East Asian workshops so as to produce cultic devotion in
its more fortunate owners.
** After I attack the root causes of terrorism, I will address labor exploitation in the world.
This
lack of elementary intellectual curiosity is the defining feature of
the Internet intellectual. History, after all, is about details, but no
Internet intellectual wants to be accused of thinking small. And so they
think big—sloppily, ignorantly, pretentiously, and without the
slightest appreciation of the difference between critical thought and
market propaganda.
** Well, we disagree.
Evgeny Morozov is a visiting scholar at Stanford University and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (PublicAffairs). This article originally ran in the November 3, 2011, issue of the magazine.
Source URL: http://www.tnr.com/article/books/magazine/96116/the-internet-intellectual
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