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The Mind of a Censor, States Won't appeal ALA v. P
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Computer underground Digest Wed Nov 12, 1997 Volume 9 : Issue 83
ISSN 1004-042X
Editor: Jim Thomas ([email protected])
News Editor: Gordon Meyer ([email protected])
Archivist: Brendan Kehoe
Shadow Master: Stanton McCandlish
Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth
Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala
Ian Dickinson
Field Agent Extraordinaire: David Smith
Cu Digest Homepage: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest
CONTENTS, #9.83 (Wed, Nov 12, 1997)
File 1--The Mind of a Censor
File 2--States Won't appeal ALA v. Pataki, et. al
File 3--Response to Bell in #9.82
File 4-- Does Technology Set Us Free?
File 5--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 7 May, 1997)
CuD ADMINISTRATIVE, EDITORIAL, AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION APPEARS IN
THE CONCLUDING FILE AT THE END OF EACH ISSUE.
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Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 07:37:50 -0800
From: Jonathan Wallace <[email protected]>
Subject: File 1--The Mind of a Censor
THE MIND OF A CENSOR
by Jonathan Wallace [email protected]
On the Web there lives a genial fellow named David Burt. An
Oregon librarian, Burt operates the Filtering Facts Web page, at
http://www.filteringfacts.org. Burt's mission is to persuade the
world that censorware belongs in public libraries.
He describes Filtering Facts as a nonprofit corporation formed
under Oregon law which has as its goals to "educate the public and
media about Internet software filters; encourage libraries to
adopt filters; persuade the American Library Association to
rescind its Resolution on the use of filtering software in
libraries, and adopt a more tolerant view of filtering."
Burt says his sole concern is pornography on the Internet. His
organization's FAQ reveals that he works closely with two
fundamentalist organizations, Family Friendly Libraries and Donna
Rice Hughes' group, Enough is Enough. In fact, a good deal of
Burt's FAQ is cut and pasted from an Enough is Enough brochure,
including the following:
"[P]ornography is addictive and progressive in nature for many who
consume it. It affects their thinking and behavior and often leads
them to commit sexual crimes against innocent victims, usually
children and women."
Burt's Web page claims that he does not support state-mandated
filtering in libraries, and he also claims to think that there
are alternatives to filtering which will work to keep porn out of
libraries. But when you debate Burt, he never seems to agree that
there is an alternative--he just believes that librarians ought to
want to install censorware.
Members of Declan McCullagh's Fight-Censorship list, which Burt
frequents, are constantly calling Burt's attention to the flaws of
particular censorware products, particularly the socially
valuable, First Amendment-protected sites which they block. Burt's
usual response is to try to justify the blocking, though he will
sometimes admit that a site has been blocked in error. However, he
does not think the blocking of sites such as the EFF archive, the
National Organization for Women, the AIDS Quilt site, the MIT
Student Association for Free Expression and my own Ethical
Spectacle constitute a fatal flaw preventing the use of censorware
in libraries. Instead, Burt likes to point out that the products
endorsed on his site, such as Cyberpatrol and Bess, allow the user
to configure the products so as to allow access to blocked sites.
In the event of an erroneously blocked site, he says, just ask the
librarian to help you get access to it.
In September, several members of the Fight-Censorship list
collaborated in the preparation of an article which went out over
my byline, about a product that Burt then endorsed, X-Stop from
Log-On Data Corporation. The piece revealed that X-Stop, which was
marketed to libraries as blocking only legally obscene material in
its so-called "Felony Load" version, actually blocked the Quaker
website, the National Journal of Sexual Orientation law, the
Heritage Foundation, and The Ethical Spectacle. Burt and one of
his backers, Family Friendly Libraries, immediately issued
statements withdrawing their endorsement of the product.
I sent mail congratulating Burt on his willingness to back away
from a dishonestly marketed product. Burt and I had exchanged
private email on and off for months, and though our disagreements
were very deep, we had always maintained a cordial tone; Burt had
even complimented me for not flaming him, and had described me on
Fight-Censorship as being one of the people there with something
interesting to say. In a debate that blew up on the list after the
X-Stop article, I began to press Burt about the blocking of The
Ethical Spectacle by six of the leading censorware products. Since
my site contained nothing prurient, and was dedicated to the
discussion of ideas on a fairly dry and intellectual level, didn't
he see a systemic problem in the fact it was blocked by so many
products?
Perhaps Burt regretted backing off of his endorsement of X-Stop;
maybe he now thought that if he kept abandoning software which
blocked my site and others, he would have nothing left to endorse.
At any rate, there promptly appeared the following missive to the
list (really more of a missile than a missive):
"[T]he filtering vendors I talk to think that you are playing
games with them, putting
lurid articles like this full of foul language and reference to
sex and drugs, then claiming that
'your site is blocked when it is about the free discussion of
ideas'."
The "lurid article" Burt was referring to was a short story of
mine in the October issue of the Spectacle, entitled The Fall-Out.
Part of a series of stories and related fragments entitled Kazoo
Concerto, this story describes how a salesman, Ken Copeland,
decides to make the world manifest the perfect wife for him. He
calls up every stock-brokerage in New York City, describing to the
receptionist a woman stockbroker he claims to have met but whose
name he cannot remember. On the eleventh phone call, a
receptionist says, "Oh, you must mean Donna Ray." After eliciting
information about her from the receptionist, Ken meets Donna,
charms her, dates her and is prepared to propose when Donna
announces that she has decided to leave the brokerage and go to
social work school. She attributes her decision to a sister who is
often sick, but doesn't reveal the nature of the illness to Ken.
The real woman has now modified herself so that she no longer fits
Ken's fantasy. Ken has an image of life with Donna that persuades
him not to propose to her:
"He had a vision in which she inhabited his apartment, his
wonderful bachelor pad where so many women had passed, and her
combs and bras and bobby pins were in every corner. Her cold cream
and contact lens solution. Her little socks under the pillow.
Every night when he came home she was already there. With thick
books on 'Case Management' and 'The Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis.'.... And she would work with people who drooled
and slobbered, who were fat, smelly and drugged, or who were
smelly and elderly and festooned with dripping IV's and wires. And
then every once in a while a phone call would come, and they would
rush out at three in the morning to an emergency room to meet the
mongoloid or drug-addicted or MS-stricken or AIDS-suffering or
suicidal sister."
I was so startled by Burt's accusation that the story was full of
references to sex and drugs that I went back and re-read it
closely. There are no descriptions of sex acts or people's bodies
in the story; this is as explicit as it gets:
"Their lovemaking the weekend before had been a shock to him; he
had been so careful to stay away from women who might fall in love
with him that he had long forgotten how exciting it was to make
love to someone who was infatuated with you. He understood that
love was a feedback system, because it was easy and tempting to be
infatuated by someone else's infatuation. It was simple vanity,
the vanity of the master salesperson, to be almost in love with
someone because they loved you."
Burt's claim that The Fall-Out referred to drug use was even more
baffling. The only mentions of drugs in the story are in the first
paragraph I quoted above. In Ken's vision of married life with
Donna, he sees her working with people who are "fat, smelly and
drugged". He imagines rushing to the hospital in the middle of
the night on account of the "mongoloid or drug-addicted or
MS-stricken or AIDS-suffering or suicidal sister."
Burt is correct at least that the story contains a few four letter
words, none used in a sexual context. In a series of
conversations with his boss and friend, Lyle Doggett, who
disapproves of his wooing of Donna, Ken and Lyle exchange a few
"Fuck you's" and at one point Ken tells Lyle to "eat a bag of shit
and bark at the moon." I was reproducing the familiar dialog of
people I work with every day. In context, a few four letter words
scattered through the text, don't seem to me to add up to a
prurient, evil or dangerous work, spreading its tentacles across
the Net to corrupt the minds of children.
Ironically, as a result of Burt's attack a lot of Fight-Censorship
list members read The Fall-Out; most had friendly things to say
about it, but were unanimous that the story failed to appeal to
any prurient interest, favored marriage and opposed libertinage,
and was actually far blander in its content than the works of many
noted authors of the last fifty years whose works are presumably
collected in David Burt's library. People like Henry Miller,
Anais Nin, and Norman Mailer, for example.
Why is all of this significant? People flame each other on the Net
every day, and its not news. Burt took a cheap shot at me, but why
is it worth writing about?
Burt's reaction to The Fall-Out is worth discussing because he
behaved like a classic censor, and a close look at his behavior
gives insight into the mind of a censor. He never read the work
he was judging; he didn't even know it was a work of fiction,
since he called it an article. He didn't know, or didn't care,
that the only references to drugs were to medication and to Ken's
vision that Donna had an addicted sister. At best, Burt searched
the text of The Fall-Out looking for some keywords, and found
them. He failed to do what any court in the world would do in a
constitutional determination--he never looked at the work in
context. But he felt entitled, based on the few moments he spent
with the story, to classify it as "lurid" and to accuse the author
of playing games. And then he backed up the latter accusation by
referring to some unspecified filtering vendors, whom he never
named.
In fact, each of these vendors builds its blacklist of blocked
sites by following the same approach David Burt followed with The
Fall-Out. Underpaid human beings, some of them part-timers and
none of them librarians, looks at a site for a few minutes, scan
for occurrences of words like "fuck", "sex" or "gay", and make a
hasty determination to add the site to a blocked list. But that's
OK with Burt--if your site doesn't belong on the list, just
contact the company. Never mind that The Ethical Spectacle site
consists of hundreds of URL's, each of which I would have to check
with the product installed just to learn that a particular page of
mine was blocked. Never mind that not every censorware vendor will
unblock a page. Burt also suggests you can get the librarian to
bypass the software. But how many people will approach the
librarian and say, "Please disable the blocking software, so I can
look at 'Humans and Their Pornography'" (the issue of The Ethical
Spectacle blocked by I-Gear for its extremely nonprurient
discussion of the comparative thought of Nadine Strossen, Wendy
McElroy and Catharine MacKinnon)?
Another thing I learned from my run-in with David Burt. When
someone launches The Big Lie at your work, its easy to get
defensive. Within minutes I was playing on a field laid out by
Burt--counting occurrences of "fuck", debating whether the story
promoted good morals, was bland or sexy, etc.
It shouldn't matter. Literature, as Proust said, is a mirror held
up to life. It is not the quality of the life that makes great
art, it is the quality of the mirror. Madame Bovary was a great
mirror held up to a sad, dishonest life. The prosecutor who chased
Flaubert, and that work, for indecency confused the subject of the
work with the author's moral stand. He, and David Burt, stand
with the silly scientists in 1950's monster movies who intone,
"There are some things man was not meant to know." Will we really
protect our children if we insulate them equally from art and
life? Granted, some parents may answer this question with a loud
"Yes". Since that parent can teach values and has the authority
to decide what his child sees, must we really block art and life
from the library? And, most interesting of all, since David Burt
doesn't want The Fall-Out visible on the library computer, why
would he make an exception for it printed on paper and on the
shelves of his library? Or for Henry Miller? Burt won't say he
wants books off the shelves--but if not, he's got a hell of a
double standard.
Two weeks ago in Loudoun County, Virginia, the library board of
trustees voted the U.S.'s most restrictive Internet policy,
ordering mandatory blocking even for adult users of the library's
terminals. The director of libraries for the county offered a
compromise solution, in which the entire Internet would be blocked
except for sites reviewed and approved by a librarian. Dixie
Sanner, of Burt's partner organization Enough is Enough, responded
that putting library staff in charge of selecting Internet content
is "like putting the wolf in charge of the henhouse."
David Burt should be known by his deeds and by the company he
keeps. He claims to be concerned only by porn, but attacks The
Fall-Out. He says he only wants to filter the Net, but travels
with the same people who turn up to protest when a library buys a
copy of "Heather Has Two Mommies."
David Burt is entitled to his opinions. But they don't deserve to
be converted to practice in the First-Amendment enriched air of a
public library.
----------------------------------
The Fall-Out can be found at
http://www.spectacle.org/kazoo/fallout.html.
If you read the story, let me know what you
think; you might also want to copy your comments
to David Burt, who can be reached at
[email protected].
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 18:19:13 GMT
From: [email protected]
Subject: File 2--States Won't Appeal ALA v. Pataki, et. al
Cyber-liberties Update
October 17, 1997
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ACLU Victories Final, States Will Not Appeal ALA v. Pataki, ACLU v. Miller
Decisions in the two federal cases in New York and Georgia, that struck
down Internet censorship laws in those states, will not be appealed by the
states, said Ann Beeson, an ACLU national staff attorney and member of the
legal teams in the New York, Georgia and federal cases.
The two decisions were handed down by the courts this summer and gave
states deadlines until which time they could appeal. The deadlines have
now passed making the decisions final, Beeson stated.
"These decisions are extremely important given the continuing effort by
states to regulate speech on the Internet. The New York and Georgia
decisions say that, whatever limits the Supreme Court sets on Congress's
power to regulate the Internet, states are prohibited from acting to censor
online expression," she said.
"Taken together, these decisions send a very important and powerful message
to
legislators in the other 48 states that they should keep their hands off
the Internet,"
Beeson added.
The New York case, American Library Association v. Pataki, dealt with a law
virtually identical to the federal Communications Decency Act, which the
Supreme Court held was unconstitutional earlier this summer. Judge Loretta
A. Preska ruled that the law violated the Commerce Clause of the U.S.
Constitution because it attempted to regulate activity beyond the state's
borders.
In the Georgia case, ACLU v. Miller, Judge Marvin Shoob found a law banning
anonymous speech on the Internet to be an unconstitutional restriction on
free speech that "affords prosecutors and police officers with substantial
room for selective prosecution of persons who express minority viewpoints."
The court agreed with the ACLU, Electronic Frontiers Georgia and others
that the
statute was unconstitutionally vague and overbroad because it barred online
users from using pseudonyms or communicating anonymously over the Internet.
The Act also unconstitutionally restricted the use of links on the World
Wide Web which allows users to connect to other sites.
The N.Y. decision can be found at: http://www.aclu.org/court/nycdadec.html>
The Georgia decision can be found at
<http://www.aclu.org/court/aclugavmiller.html> .
+++++++++++++++++
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------------------------------
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 15:01:24 -0600 (CST)
From: Wade Riddick <[email protected]>
Subject: File 3--Response to Bell in #9.82
Please allow me to respond to Bruce J. Bell's post in CuD #9.82
regarding my article in #9.77. Some of the items are silly, but since
these remarks were made in a public forum I feel the need to reply
publicly.
First, I must address a general misinterpretation of the goal I
have in mind. According to Mr. Bell, my plan for world domination is to
"design all computers to refuse to duplicate data with a copyright
notice." I don't know whose fault this misinterpretation is.
I apologize to those readers who may have gotten that impression
from my BYTE commentary. I did not, in fact, ever say "the ease with
which digital information can be duplicated runs against the best
interests of society as a protector of intellectual property." The editor
said that when he struck "some people say" from the start of that
sentence. (Frankly I'm sure everyone would have rather had an extra two
hundred words on the page than my ugly mug to look at, but Mr. Bell might
disagree).
I do not think I made this mistake in the letter I sent to CuD. I
hope it's clear I believe just the opposite - that the ease with which
digital materials can be manipulated has the potential to vastly reduce
distribution costs and open up the market. One gets the impression from
Mr. Bell's response that I'm advocating the opposite - a rosy world where
copyright holders are at the mercy of large media publishers with the
might and power to enforce their rights.
Aren't we already there?
If you've looked at the DVD spec lately, you know computers are
already being hobbled by encryption 'protections' by forces outside the
industry. This article was merely my attempt to balance the forces
involved in a reasonable manner that recognized the rights of consumers,
authors and the needs of the free market in general. In fact the most
enthusiastic response my ideas have received to date has been from
associations of authors and composers who are often at odds with the large
publishing houses.
I direct those of you with an interest in my philosophy about the
ownership of copyrighted material in the digital domain to my previous
works in CuD and to the BYTE web site. Now as to the specifics of Mr.
Bell's criticisms...
He compares my proposal to the ill-fated Clipper Chip and then
goes on to ask, "why would anybody buy crippled computers when un-crippled
ones are available?" I have to ask if Mr. Bell has looked at the DVD
drives being sold and if he's aware of what the media industry is trying
to do to digital video. These devices already employ encryption. They are
essentially crippled computers and people are already buying them.
Furthermore, his analogy to the Clipper chip is flawed in that
Clipper applied to two way phone conversations. Encryption has long been
used as a distribution strategy for salable goods. Also, plenty of
'Clipper'-like open accounting procedures are provided for in many digital
currency schemes. They have to be or the financial institutions involved
would have criminal charges filed against them (something I'm sure we'd
all support, depending on the particular bank...).
Moving on...
>Although I'm sure this kind of proposal is a wet-dream to people in the
>recording industry, the movie industry, and the FBI, I doubt it will
>receive any kind of welcome from the computer industry, or from ISP's, or
>from the lowly consumer.
I cannot pretend to know the sexual predilections of these groups
and I can only refer Mr. Bell to my concluding analysis of the conflicting
interests involved in settling this issue which he appears not to have
read. I omit the FBI for reasons I make clear in the letter (and if it's
Mr. Bell's assertion that the government shouldn't have the right to issue
search warrants to assist the victims of crime, he ought to stop being coy
and just say so). I also point out that this proposal will be anything
but an orgiastic financial fantasy to the distribution arms of the
entertainment industry. If he disputes these conclusions of mine, he
ought to attack my premises and reasoning instead of just saying I said
something else.
As to the second half of the quotation, ISPs are *already* being
beaten in the head with the "liability stick," as Mr. Bell puts it. I
fail to see how by profiting from this beating they are any worse off.
As to the issue of consumer liability, he's absolutely right.
Consumers *ought* to be liable for their own private property. It's their
responsibility. That's the way the economy works. When you leave your
car door open and the keys in the ignition, you don't go blaming the owner
of the asphalt parking lot when someone steals your car. Nor do you unzip
a backup copy of your Chevy and drive off.
I will merely note in passing that the issue of who bears the
piracy cost has always been a problem for intellectual property since it
borders on the realms of both public and private goods. The liability
stick has long been out there. Although - hypothetically speaking, of
course - it might be fun to whack AOL in the head, that's not me out there
doing it. (And I'm not even certain I should be flattered by the
accusation).
About watermarks Mr. Bell states,
>Consider that deliberate 'pirates' could take the simple expedient of
>finding multiple copies of the original work. Any elements in the
>plaintext that are identical between all instances could not be used to
>identify the original purchaser; while elements that differ are those
>that may contain purchaser information, and can be scrambled, deleted, or
>even ignored...
More technically adept readers should stop me if I'm wrong here,
but watermarks are by their nature indelible. You can't strip them from a
picture without ruining the value of the picture. The same applies
sounds. (Of course text is another matter and is the weakest item to
protect, but I don't see why I should feed Mr. Bell ammunition when his
gun doesn't work). A pirate could, hypothetically, substitute one
watermark for another and even mix them up into composites - assuming the
overall structure of the work isn't protected - but in this case he's just
managed to steal a bunch of different items at once.
>Digital watermarking is an interesting concept, and it may be useful for
>some things, but it is not useful as a copy-protection scheme.
I hope this has been explained to the companies buying and selling
watermark technology. If it's not a copy-protection scheme, then I don't
know what it is.
>No matter what auxiliary "tamper-resistant" hardware is installed on the
>computer, once the data is in a form suitable for display and manipulation
>by the software, there is no practical way this hardware can keep the
>software from saving the plaintext data.
I have never made the claim that this method is full-proof for
preventing piracy. The goal here is two fold: 1) to raise the risks and
hence the costs associated with digital piracy which will then 2) allow
digital distribution to become widespread and vastly lower the transaction
costs involved, increasing the likelihood that consumers will adhere to
the system and purchase the relatively cheap product as opposed to going
with a pirated good.
For most users, it's assumed that breaking into the system will be
difficult, risky or undesirable relative to sticking with the status quo.
(This won't be true if large chains continue to monopolize distribution
and charge a premium as they tend to do for music CDs, but there is an
anti-trust remedy for this). On the pirate side, I count on a number of
accounting methods to reduce the volume of material reentering the
legitimate channels. I won't go into the specifics any more than I
already have in my writings but if Mr. Bell has a particular hole in mind,
he's welcome to bring it up.
As to the implementation end of things.
While I haven't wanted to restrict publishing, neither has it been
my objective to prevent users from writing their own software (the ten
gigabyte developers kits and interface libraries already do this quite
effectively, but how the programming industry restricts entry into its
ranks through needless complexity is another matter...) I'd rather see
the world of publishing opened up to consumers in a way that they can
collect a good profit and be more than hobbyists. When you consider how
digital cash cards work and think about the other items in the digital
economy that programmers won't have access to go mucking around in, this
isn't overly burdensome.
>all other OS's must necessarily be forbidden, and no modified, unapproved
>versions can be tolerated."
While it is true that in order for this standard to work, it must
be adhered to, it is not true that it will only work on one operating
system. The last I checked, PCI cards, for example, ran under a lot of
different operating systems. Nor is it true that "copyright-enabled
programs will be unable to store anything." They can store the encrypted
data anywhere they want. That's the whole beauty of the system.
>I submit that no software developer would accept the requirements and
>limitations necessary for this proposal, even if they could sell it in a
>market where software without these limitations is available. Perhaps
>they, too, must be made liable for all users of their product..."
I see no reason to advocate something that's already in the law.
Anyone who builds and releases tools with the explicit purpose of stealing
another's intellectual property is already liable. Indeed, I would hope
software developers welcome proposals to reduce the rather large piracy
rate robbing them of billions of dollars a year.
Furthermore, I was intentionally vague about how such a system
could be designed. There are several ways of doing it. One would hope it
became implemented entirely through operating system calls, thus rendering
the process transparent and relieving the programmer of mucking around in
the details.
Now, on the Mr. Bell's final point, "who will pay for developing
this software?" He asserts that "there is no 'information superhighway'
general expense account."
Well, duh.
He goes on to say that "the mere fact that Mr. Riddick would
mention such a cockeyed concept as a putative source of funding is
astounding." That's probably why I don't. The letter is addressed to a
congressman and the phrase is meant to suggest that Congress doesn't
necessarily need to expend any large sums of money to settle this issue.
It's simply not feasible in the current political environment anyway.
"The question of who would pay the costs for such a program is not
trivial." Indeed, it's not. A great deal of time, money and effort is
being spent to develop the digital highway but it's being done through the
private sector. I merely meant to show that the costs of building such a
copyright system are small relative to that of deploying high speed data
pipes into every home, that industry - through various combinations - is
already finding ways of sharing this burden and that new software will
have to be written anyway to confirm to a variety of new standards, this
present one excepted. In any event, one of the most serious cost issues
so far hasn't been in copyright management software, it's been in
micropayments - something far more fundamental. I have confidence these
hurdles will be overcome.
Also consider the costs involved in *not* solving this issue.
It's perfectly feasible to deliver all operating systems through one
vender (a place we're quickly heading). It's also possible to deliver all
the country's oil through one company or its entertainment through
cartels. Do you want to do that?
This brings me to my final point about Mr. Bell's criticisms.
It's pretty clear that, given the enormous pressures involved, something's
going to change the status quo on copyright law. Mr. Bell fails to
propose a more attractive alternative, explain why it's better or why it
might be less expensive. In fact, he fails to take any account at all of
the profits lost to piracy, the potential liability costs faced by ISPs if
the law is changed/reinterpreted or the transaction costs that would be
raised should our goods be delivered through a cartelized publishing
industry.
I hope this reply doesn't leave you with the impression that I
reject criticism from any given venue out of hand; I try to welcome it.
Some very thorny legal problems remain with respect particularly to fair
use and privacy rights. Arriving at any solution to the digital copyright
problem will require a lot of compromising, both political and technical.
But opinions which do not offer feasible alternatives or fail to even
recognize existing truths about the state of current affairs are
non-starters for us all.
Wade Riddick
Department of Government
University of Texas
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 4 Nov 1997 22:28:22 -0600 (CST)
From: Computer underground Digest <[email protected]>
Subject: File 4-- Does Technology Set Us Free?
Does Technology Set Us Free?
----------------------------
In the *New York Times Magazine's* special issue on technology (September
28, 1997), staff writer John Tierney argues that, while technology cannot
change human nature, it biases us toward becoming better people in a
better world.
One of his contentions is that computers, like all gadgets, will get
simpler to use. Hypnotized by the evolution of particular features, he
loses sight of the increasing complexity of context made possible by this
evolution. So, in welcoming the automobile's conversion from an
unreliable, high-maintenance machine to the relatively care-free device of
today, he fails to ask whether the accordingly lengthened daily commute is
in fact easier and less stressful now than in the bad old days.
(The logic of this kind of oversight, which I have called the Great
Technological Deceit, has proven irresistible to the cheerleaders of
technology. See "Is Technological Improvement What We Want?" in NF #38.)
As part of his argument for a blessed evolution of technology beyond its
early limitations, Tierney remarks that
the phone didn't become wholly civilized until people were freed to
ignore it by the invention of the answering machine -- a contraption
that was despised before coming to be regarded as a necessity.
He should have added that the answering machine *remains* one of the most
despised pieces of technology. And he might then have asked, How well are
Source - NetFuture (#59)
we mastering technology when the machines we despise become universal
necessities?
Tierney covers a lot of other ground in much the same, unreflective
manner. For example, he assures us that technology is solving our
environmental problems, decentralizing governments and defanging
dictators, saving us from the couch potato syndrome (there's the
obligatory quotation from George Gilder), shortening the work week,
presenting us with an unprecedented agricultural abundance, and giving us
more control over our lives, bodies, and genes.
The problem running through it all is his unrelieved focus upon externals.
Yet the decisive risk of technology has never been external. It has from
the first been recognized as the risk of losing our souls.
Tierney comes tantalizingly close to acknowledging the real issue, only to
drive past it:
Although new technology is often described as a Faustian bargain,
historically it has involved a trade-off not between materialism and
spirituality -- lugging water from the well was not a spiritually
uplifting exercise for most people, no matter how much it might appeal
to the Unabomber -- but between individual freedom and social virtue.
Unfortunately, Tierney says nothing further about this trade-off between
individual freedom and social virtue, except to deny that it applies in
the Age of Information.
The Internet may look like a dangerously anarchic world, but it's
actually fairly similar to the ancient environment in which humans
evolved to become the most cooperative, virtuous creatures on earth.
All this has something to do with the way our Pleistocene brains are
"naturally inclined" toward exchanging information on the Net, and leads
Tierney to his deepest attempt to analyze online communication:
A surprising number [of Net users] seem to be acting out of pure
goodwill.
We can be thankful for the goodwill, but is there nothing more to say
about the complex social impacts of electronic, networked communication?
As to Tierney's preference for freedom over "spirituality," two things
need saying. The first is that, if lugging water from the well is not a
spiritually uplifting exercise as such, neither is drawing water from the
tap or, for that matter, doing the work that pays for the water system,
appliances, sewage disposal, pollution control, and all the rest. Tierney
has failed to see that *what* we do, conceived in outward terms, is never
the critical thing, but rather *how* we do it and what it means to us.
Helena Norberg-Hodge, who has spent many years in the Himalayan mountain
state of Ladakh, writes,
Tourists see people carrying loads on their backs and walking long
distances over high mountain passes and say, "How terrible; what a life
of drudgery." They forget that they have traveled thousands of miles
and spent thousands of dollars for the pleasure of walking through the
same mountains with heavy backpacks. They also forget how much their
bodies suffer from the lack of use at home. During working hours they
get no exercise, so they spend their free time trying to make up for
it. Some will even drive to a health club -- across a polluted city in
rush hour -- to sit in a basement, pedaling a bicycle that does not go
anywhere. And they actually pay for the privilege. (*Ancient Futures:
Learning from Ladakh*, Sierra Club, 1992, p. 96)
The mountain tourists, like Tierney when he imagines lugging water, have
unwittingly become alienated from their own activities -- an alienation in
which the role of technology is surely suspect.
The second thing is this: the freedom Tierney hails must itself be an
inner, spiritual quality if it is to have any enduring virtue. Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn pointed to this quality when he wrote of the Gulag:
From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly
behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: "My life
is over, a little early to be sure, but there's nothing to be done
about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die --
now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder,
and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property
whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died.
From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and
my conscience remain precious and important to me."
Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogation will tremble.
It is not that freedom is impossible without terrible loss. But the loss
does strip away everything incidental, enabling us to recognize freedom's
essence and the interior source of its power. Despite external
circumstances, Solzhenitsyn, not his interrogator, was the truly free
individual. No other power than *this* freedom can defeat tyranny.
I would agree with Tierney that freedom is the decisive gift of
technology. However, it is not a ready-made gift; it is the reward for our
resistance to the invitations of the machine. It is the consequence of
our struggle to raise ourselves above the machine. And the more this gift
comes within our grasp, the more impossible it becomes to say that
technology makes us better. Why? Because to the extent we become free,
we determine ourselves from within, and therefore cannot be determined by
technology from without.
The case for pessimism about technology is not the mirror image of
Tierney's optimism. It is not a matter of saying that the material
circumstances of our lives have really worsened. No, the case for
pessimism lies in the degree to which technology has blinded us to what it
would mean for things to get better. We cannot in freedom surmount the
challenge of our machines so long as we fail to recognize it.
SLT
+++++++++++++++
NETFUTURE is a newsletter concerning technology and human responsibility.
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Date: Thu, 7 May 1997 22:51:01 CST
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