The Info Age, Our Way:

The Road Ahead Less Traveled

Eessay for The Stranger, 5/1/96

You’ve heard lots of hype about the Information Superhighway, the Infobahn, a bright promising tomorrow coming your way out of a little wire running into your home.You may think the hype sucks.

You’re right to be skeptical. The digital utopia promised more or less in unison by the phone companies, the cable TV companies, the online services, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Alvin Toffler, George Gilder, Wired magazine, and Bill Gates (all of whom get their ideas from the same handful of pro-business think tanks) is a future not appreciably better than our present, and potentially a lot costlier. While claiming to promote “empowerment,” it would merely move us from a society run by a financial elite to one run by a technological elite.

But theirs is not the only possible scenario. The Digital Age can be better, if we can wrest control of it away from the people doing the promising.

THEIR FUTURE

As late as 1994-95, the corporate techno-futurists were boasting of a future in which everyone (or at least everyone who mattered) would live through computer/video screens connected by fiber-optic lines to proprietary online networks. The owners of these online services would become America’s most powerful institutions, controlling everything from entertainment to banking and even politics.

In this future, you could look forward to choosing your morning news packaged in assorted combinations of verbal and visual output, filtered to emphasize your favorite subject areas. You could even choose your news interpreted from a variety of ideological perspectives, all the way from the far right to the near right.

Then, after you’ve downloaded Rush Limbaugh’s or Pat Robertson’s latest commentary, you could instantly contact your elected representatives to demand their support of the Limbaugh/Robertson agenda.

From there, you could log onto a commercial online services to see the latest Treasury Bill yields or a video by your favorite major-label singer. You could enter a virtual-reality chat room, where you’d control a 3-D cartoon character exchanging pleasantries with other characters (all supervised by service employees, ensuring nobody says anything they oughtn’t).

But eventually you’d have to get to work. In this future, all the important work will be done by an upscale Knowledge Class, who will all live in big isolated houses in the country or outer suburbs (since the techno-futurists believe nobody, given the choice, would ever want to live in a city). Most of the Knowledge Class would operate from home workstations, in contact with the boss via video teleconferencing. The other 80 to 90 percent of the population would be freed from the daily grind thanks to corporate downsizing; they’d get to go into business for themselves, selling products or services to the upscale class, at wages competitive with Third World labor.

Come the evening, you wouldn’t need to leave home to be entertained. Just order the latest hit violence movie on Pay Per View, available whenever you are. Hungry? E-mail for grocery delivery from the digital mall; while you’re “there,” get that blouse for tomorrow’s video-conference meeting. The kids, meanwhile, are entertaining themselves with their masturbation robot dolls or vicariously exploding other kids in virtual-reality games.

This nonexistent world already looks incredibly passé. Initial market tests show little interest in high-price, low-selection pay-per-view systems. Meanwhile, the Internet’s near-instant popularity has throttled all but the biggest online services, and those such services that remain are rapidly trying to reposition themselves as Internet gateways.

So instead we’re getting the revised pipe dream of a corporate Internet, in which the wide-open online frontier would be tamed. Data transmission might be based on a decentralized Internet protocol or something like it, but a few dozen companies would still control most of the content and most of the transactions.

ANOTHER FUTURE, AND ITS PAST

But there’s another potential future. It’s a future without major record labels, big Hollywood studios, or broadcast networks; or at least one where they’d have less power. Instead of 50 or even 500 TV channels, Internet server computers would offer tens of thousands of text, video, and audio programs–some free, some pay-per, some by subscription. Virtually anyone with something to say or show could send it to virtually anyone else.

Thousands of subcultures would thrive, none interested in lowest common denominators. Uncensored chat, bulletin boards and e-mail could spark a revolution in active, highly personal, discourse.

This re-personalization of everyday life could lead to a whole re-scaling of American society: co-operatives, barter associations, community schooling, a Babel of new political movements, religious cults, sub-genres of art and literature, cuisines and craft movements, ethnic pride groups (and, yes, a few ethnic hate groups).

These creative, energized people would tire of staying home on the keyboard. They’d find ways and reasons to gather in the flesh: cafés, theaters, musical societies, youth soccer leagues, reading clubs, performance-art troupes, sewing circles. Many would eschew the sterility of the subdivision, the isolation of the exurb, in favor of real communities.

Work and commerce would be increasingly conducted on a person-to-person level, instead of being molded to fit the long-term strategies of giant organizations. Corporations would devolve into small, focused operations doing a few things well, joining forces by short-term contracts to complete individual projects.

The Internet’s most enthusiastic followers are the inspirational descendents of a subculture where “computer hacker” meant a highly individualistic programming ace, not a crook. They’re the people who started using university e-mail in the late ’70s, PC-based bulletin board systems in the early ’80s, the Internet in the late ’80s, and the World Wide Web in the early ’90s. As this group grew, it developed a communications aesthetic now known as “Netiquette,” an aesthetic favoring unfettered, ungated info-culture (expressed in Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand’s 1986 adage that “information wants to be free”).

Corporate futurists patronize these people as “early adopters of technology” whose wishes must now be abandoned so the Net can be “mainstreamed.” But the Internet doesn’t want to be “mainstreamed,” and neither do many of its users. They don’t want to be constrained by top-down ad agency, studio and network thinking–the cornerstone of American mass culture since the 1920s. They also want to talk to one another. Even on the commercial online services, whose only unique selling point is professionally-created “content,” e-mail and discussion-group messages between users account for an estimated two-thirds of time spent online.

MY LIFE AS AN EARLY ADOPTER

I’ve had the privilege to see this culture develop. I was on local bulletin board systems as early as 1983, and was co-sysop of a board from 1984-88. I wrote a hypertext novel in 1988. I watched as university e-mail systems evolved and merged with a military research network to become the Internet. I saw bulletin board systems like Robert Dinse’s Eskimo North develop the threaded message-topic systems later adapted into Internet newsgroups. Eskimo North went on to add Internet e-mail, then add Internet newsgroups with once-a-day feeds of new material, then become a professional Internet service provider with a full-time Net connection. Some BBSs fell by the wayside as their operators moved to other pursuits; others started up to take their place. New companies started up as Internet service providers; it proved not to be a simple “turnkey” moneymaking operation, and many providers died off if they charged too much and/or couldn’t keep up with user demands for faster connections and fewer busy signals.

I’ve seen online services like Prodigy and CompuServe grow from novelties to semi-major powers, then saw them shrink in relative importance as the World Wide Web became the flavor of the year.

MORE BACKTRACKING

The Web is hard to describe tersely, and most mainstream journalists don’t try too hard. Basically, it’s an Internet-based system for transmitting documents of text, graphics, and/or other media formats, with clickable links within and between documents.

It was developed over the winter of 1989-90 at a Swiss particle-physics lab by programmer Tim Berners-Lee. He wanted a simple, unified system for accessing and cross-referencing research data, one that would work on all the lab’s computers. He used the concept of clickable hypertext links (conceived of by computer visionary Ted Nelson and implemented in the mid-’80s in programs like HyperCard and SuperCard) to interconnect texts, graphics, and other document types. Berners-Lee wrote a simple hypertext programming language, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), that allowed some limited text formatting.

Berners-Lee expressly wanted to move the premises of communication from one-to-many to many-to-many. In his initial proposal to CERN management Berners-Lee wrote, “Everything we have seen so far (in the telecommunications field) is information distributed by server managers to clients everywhere. A next step is the move to universal authorship, in which everyone involved in an area can contribute to the electronic representation of the group knowledge.”

The web initially spread to other research institutions, including the UW. In early 1993 Marc Andressen, a $6.75-an-hour student programmer at a U. of Illinois computer center, devised a program called Mosaic as a “graphical front end” to the Web on Unix terminals. That fall, Mosaic came out for Mac and Windows. The following spring, after Wired and others started to hype the web, Andressen got California venture capital to start Netscape Communications, releasing its first Web browsers in October 1994.

Faster than you could download an audio clip, the culture of telecommunications changed. The corporations didn’t notice at first, or didn’t admit it. They continued to talk about the umpteen channels of HBO action hits they’d love to sell us if we’d only give them unregulated-monopoly powers and wait 5-10 years for them to figure out which kind of new wiring systems to install.

The buzzword in places like Wired last year was how the spoils in the New Media race would go to the best-marketed (not necessarily the best) infotainment “brands.” This is the thinking that got us big media mergers and the so-called Telecommunications Reform Act.

But the Web’s astounding growth shows a different paradigm. People are hungry for unfiltered artistic work, for honest discourse and forthright opinions. The web provides a glimpse of such a culture, and it leaves people hungry for more.

THE ROAD TO BANDWIDTH

The content of a post-mass-media culture is here already, or will readily get here. The means to distribute quality audio, video, graphics, and formatted text on the Internet, one- and two-way, exist. But existing modems take forever to receive them. Right now, conventional phone-line modems (which translate data into analog audio signals and back) run no faster than 28.8 kilobits per second. Experts used to claim higher bandwidth would require all-new wiring to every home and business; and that phone and/or cable companies needed an “incentive” to lay this wiring by getting to monopolize the content sent thru it. That was the original justification for the pre-World Wide Web vision of an Information Superhighway of hit movies and home shopping. But the Net community hasn’t been clamoring for a hundred channels of Van Damme movies, but for high-speed transmission from anywhere to anywhere.

The only way now to get anything faster to your home is to plead with US West to sell you an ISDN line. ISDN is technologically and bureaucratically cumbersome, and costly–US West charges $60 a month for a basic package; it’s applied to the state to triple that rate. For that you get up to 128 kilobits per second, a rate barely fast enough to get tiny, lo-res video at Max Headroom frame speeds.

One potential ISDN rival is TCI’s scheme for cable modems. Most neighborhoods are already wired for cable TV, and those cable lines can potentially send digital data much faster than analog phone lines can. TCI said it would start testing its system in California by now, but has pushed that back to later this year. If it works out as currently planned, your cable system would also become your Internet provider (eliminating all the independent phone-based providers) and a subscription-based content provider too.

Meanwhile, Lucent Paradyne (one of the companies being spun off from AT&T) is pushing a scheme called ADSL to fit ultrafast data through regular phone lines refitted with new all-digital modems at each end, as long as you’re within 2-3 miles from your phone exchange office (good news for us in-towners, tuff luck to the exurbanites). It’s potentially cheaper than ISDN and offers far greater speeds (as much as 6,000 kilobits per second). US West and GTE are just starting ADSL test installations, both in other states. US West tentatively plans to eventually offer ADSL as part of its “Interprise” service package, also supplanting the role now provided by indie Internet providers.

There’s another drawback: Like the Hotel California, ADSL and cable modems are programmed to receive. ADSL only lets you transmit at the speed as ISDN; cable modem users might have to use a regular phone modem to send data out. At worst, this will mean a continued role for independent Internet service providers, as operators of high-speed uplink lines connected to hard drives where “publishers” of music, movies and digi-zines would make their works available.

A third scheme for cheap broadband could eliminate even that obstacle. Apple Computer’s asked the FCC to allocate a chunk of the airwaves for two-way wireless data. Potential uses for these frequencies include two-way digital radio units sending and getting data at up to 24,000 kilobits a second.

OTHER OBSTACLES

If bandwidth were the only obstacle toward my ideal networked nation, I’d have little to worry about. But there are other obstacles. One is the corporate-culture status quo. It’s invested a lot toward its vision of a global business cadre dictating the world’s entertainment, cuisine, behavior, politics, and even religion. It’ll maneuver and hustle to preserve the one-to-many communication model into the digital age. (Note TCI’s logo, depicting a satellite beaming its one-way wares to all the Earth.)

Another obstacle is the Net-censorship movement in this and other countries. The futility and unconstitutionality of Net censorship won’t stop politicians from trying to impose it. If we’re lucky, the battle over censorship could lead to a breakdown of relations between the religious right and the political right (the latter opposing it on the principle of unfettered trade). In time, I believe many people who care about religious beliefs will find their causes better served by the Internet’s wide-open exchange of ideas than by cowtowing to politicians who exploit religion to buy votes and promote authority.

CONCLUSIONS AND POTENTIALS

I suspect so many people wanted to own Netscape stock not because of expected profits (they’re not likely to have any for some time) but because they wanted to own a piece of the Web, in a sense of being connected with that amorphous non-thing that’s starting to change the world and could mean the end of media as we know them.

There’ll still be daily papers and broadcast TV, just as there’s still radio. But the change that’s coming will be more profound than the change TV brought to radio. We’re talking information and art, not marketing and entertainment. We’re talking about what the DIY punk rockers were talking about: Cultural expressions people actively relate to, not just time-wasters.

It won’t be a utopia. Some censorship advocates have sincere reasons for fearing a wide-open Net. It now provides voices for unpopular ideas and unpopular sexualities. It’ll eventually provide voices for every conceivable point of view, including perhaps a million Limbaughs and Robertsons as well as a few thousand Jesse Jacksons. Without mass news media to impose a semi-official version of “the truth,” what’s real and what’s important could depend on who you choose to believe.

On a less political level, an open Net will lead to a lot of bad art and media (you think you’re tired of rave graphics and sword-and-sorcery imagery now?). It could collapse the economies of scale that make major motion pictures possible (look what happened to porn movies when shot-on-video took over).

And it could increase the factionalization of America, as the artifice of “mainstream society” withers to leave thousands of warring subcultures. As we’ve seen in Africa and the Balkans, there’s a side to “tribal consciousness” you don’t hear about in New Age fantasies. And what will “alternative” folks do when there’s no more mainstream to rebel against?

Yet it can also become Patti Smith’s “age when everybody creates.” Imagine the potentials. Then go fulfill some of them.

(The Seattle Community Network, a bulletin board and web site operated by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, has started a “Market Place” group to bring independent Internet service providers together and to “protect the grass roots nature of the Internet.” To get involved contact Doug Tooley, P.O. Box 85084 Seattle, WA 98145, or e-mail dltooley@scn.org.)

SIDEBAR: FOR WHOM THE CHIMES TOLL

As I’ve said before, I’m no conspiracy theorist. But if I were, I’d ponder the following:

1) Microsoft enters into “strategic alliances” with NBC (a couple of high-profile Bill Gates-Tom Brokaw interviews, Leno plugging Windows 95, and a planned jointly-owned online news service to be called MSNBC). Brokaw even became the UW’s first out-of-town commencement speaker in years–not because the UW was the alma mater of Brokaw’s late predecessor Chet Huntley but because Gates reportedly asked him to come.

2) The Internet has gotten in the way of both companies’ plans. MS doesn’t own the Net or the software that runs it. Companies like Sun Microsystems claim with the right Net connection, many users could do all their computing on a $500 terminal device instead of a full PC, a setup that could render MS software obsolete.

3) NBC, meanwhile, sees TV viewership on a long-term decline, and (here’s where the theory starts) perceives a threat not just from online usage but from the Internet aesthetic, encouraging many-to-many communication and close community/ subculture ties instead of submission to Big Media.

4) MS first tried to extend its rule of software into the online biz with the Microsoft Network. But paid-access services like MSN are getting swamped as more and more users prefer the Internet, where no head office decides what you’ll get to see. The surviving online services are trying to reposition themselves as Internet access points. But the MSNBC service is planned to reinforce MSN’s position as a provider of exclusive “professional” content.

5) The biggest threat to the Internet as a free, uncentralized medium is the “Communications Decency Act,” championed by retiring Sen. James Exon. Passed as an amendment to a bill to let broadcasters and phone companies consolidate ever-larger empires, the act (if upheld in court) would stick it hard to any Internet server, service provider or content producer who uploads anything a Utah prosecutor might declare “indecent.” It thus threatens everything online except the precensored content of online services. Exon’s original inspiration? An exaggerated, sensationalized “cyberporn” segment on (yep!) Dateline NBC.

The theory breaks down after this point. Gates has issued statements opposing Net censorship; MS and MSN are among the plaintiffs in the court case trying to overturn the Communications Decency Act. And NBC, particularly the Brokaw show, has lately gone out of its way to praise Web-based enterprises including Netscape.