| Home | Sampler | Buy it online | Reviews | Feedback/forward |
|
||
|
The wisdom of the Net... |
 |
It's impossible to read the history of the Net without being struck by the extent to which the genius of particular individuals played a crucial role in the development of the concept and its realisation in hardware and software. It's easy to look back now and laugh at Licklider's vision of "man-computer symbiosis", or to describe Donald Davies's idea of packet-switching, Wesley Clark's notion of a sub-network of message processors, or Vint Cerf's concept of a gateway between incompatible networks as 'simple' or 'obvious'. But that, in a way, is a measure of their originality. They are those "effective surprises" of which Jerome Bruner writes - the insights which have "the quality of obviousness about them when they occur, producing a shock of recognition following which there is no longer astonishment". The fact that we live now in a packet-switched and networked world should not blind us to the ingenuity of the original ideas. And the people who conceived them should not be the subject of what the historian E.P. Thompson called 'the condescension of posterity'. This is not a fashionable view in some quarters, especially those lodged on the higher slopes of the history and sociology of technology. From that lofty vantage point, scientists, inventors and engineers look rather as rats do to a behaviourist - creatures running in a maze created by economic and social forces which they do not understand, and achieving success only when they press the levers which the prevailing order has ordained will yield success. It's rather like the view famously expressed by Bertrand Russell when he observed that economics was about how people make choices and sociology about how they don't have any choices to make. Under this view, the ARPANET would have emerged anyhow, even if Bob Taylor hadn't willed (and funded) it. The military-industrial complex needed a communications system capable of surviving a nuclear onslaught and would have obtained one eventually. Likewise, the multimedia conglomerates of this world needed something like the Web and would have created one even if Tim Berners-Lee had never been born. It would be foolish to deny that this argument has some force. Computer networking would certainly have evolved even if the people who created the Internet had never existed, simply because the technological and economic imperatives to share computing resources were so strong. Similarly, a global multi-media distribution system would eventually have emerged from the marketing drives of the Disneys and Time-Warners and Murdochs who dominate the infotainment business. But - and here's the critical bit - the networking systems that would have arisen from such institutional needs would have been radically different from what Licklider, Taylor, Berners-Lee and the others dreamed up and built. Does anyone seriously believe that a military-industrial complex left to its own devices would have consciously willed a network entirely devoid of central control, powered by a technology based on open standards which allows anyone to hook up to it? Or that Disney & Co - the corporate behemoths who have built global businesses on pushing content at consumers -- would have designed a 'pull' medium like the Web which enables anyone to become a global publisher and gives the consumer the power to fetch what he or she wants and nothing else? This is the point that is continually missed by those who sneer at the Net because of its military provenance. They fail to appreciate the values that those who created it built into its architecture. "It is no accident", writes Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard lawyer who understands the Net like no other member of his profession, "that it came from the research communities of major universities. And no accident that it was pushed onto these communities by the demands of government. Once forced, researchers began to build for the Internet a set of protocols that would govern it. These protocols were public - they were placed in a commons, and none claimed ownership over their source. Anyone was free to participate in the bodies that promoted these commons codes. And many people did. There was a barn-raising,…, that built this Net". -oOo- When Bill Clinton first ran for President, his chief political strategist, James Carville, advised him to focus obsessively on the state of the US economy as the core campaign issue and to ignore more or less everything else. Carville expressed this philosophy in a mantra which the entire campaign team was expected to recite at regular intervals: "It's the economy, stoopid". Well, with the Net, it's the values, stoopid. What are they? The first is it is better to be open than closed. Lessig makes the point that there have been electronic networks since the late 19th century, but they were predominantly proprietary, built on the idea that protocols should be private property. As a result, they "clunked along at a tiny growth rate". He contrasts this with the Web, where the source code of every single page is open -- for anyone to copy, steal or modify simply by using the View: Source button on their browser -- and which is the fastest-growing network in human history. "Nonproprietary, public domain, dedicated to the commons, indeed some might think, attacking the very idea of property -- yet generating the greatest growth our economy has seen". The openness which is at the heart of the Net is often portrayed as its central weakness by a corporate culture which cannot figure out how to make money from it. In fact, openness is the Net's greatest strength and the source of its power. It's why a system of such staggering complexity works so well, for one thing. It's also why the Open Source movement is significant -- because it understands that the best way to produce high-quality, reliable computer software is to maximise the number of informed minds who scrutinise and improve it. As Eric Raymond once said, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". Or, as a software engineer said to Lawrence Lessig: "The 'ah-ha' for Open Source Software came to me when I realised, 'Wait, open source is the Internet'". The openness of the Net also applies to its future. The protocols which govern it leave the course of its evolution open. (Contrast that with France's legendary Minitel system - a flagship for its time, but now beached like a rusting World War Two destroyer while its erstwhile users struggle to get up to speed on the Net.) TCP/IP allows anyone to hook up to the Internet and do their own thing. It doesn't prescribe what they shall do, only the lingo their software should speak. And it evolves to handle new applications and technologies. Similarly HTML does not prescribe what people shall put on their Web pages, and it evolves as an open standard to cope with their desires and demands for new facilities. Nobody plays God on the Net. Its protocols evolve in response to its users' needs and the possibilities offered by new technology -- imperatives which are mediated through open institutions. As Dave Clark of MIT, one of the Net's Elders, observed, "We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code." The other core value of the Net is what Lessig calls "Universal Standing". Anyone can download the source code for the Linux operating system and alter it. You don't need to ask permission of the government, Bill Gates -- or even of Linus Torvalds, who created the damn thing. And having downloaded and tampered with the code, you can put it back on the Net for others to do the same. Cyberspace is the only place I know where Equal Opportunity really is the order of the day. There is no formal power on the Net, no "kings, presidents and voting", no agency which can say "this is how it's gonna be because we say so". But just because there's no formal power on the Net doesn't mean there's no authority. Lessig's principle of Universal Standing keeps open the space for individuals to gain -- not power, but authority. "One gains authority not by a structure that says, 'You are the sovereign', but by a community that comes to recognise who can write code that works. Everyone has a right to be heard, in other words, but not everyone is taken seriously". The Net, in this sense, is the ultimate meritocracy. It is the craft of your work, and the elegance and power of your solution, that commends it, and gives it power. Not your status, not your rank, not your corporate position, not your friendships, but your code. Running code, that by its power produces rough consensus. Most debates about the Net ignore all this, of course. In them, Cyberspace is regarded much as the African interior was regarded by European imperialists in the 19th century -- as a region inhabited by "lesser breeds without the law" with poor personal hygiene, little discipline, and woeful ignorance of the laws of Tort and contract, private property, the need for firm government and other appurtenances of civilisation. The talk is all about how the Internet should be regulated and controlled -- of how, in other words, the procedures and norms of what we laughingly call the real world ought to be applied to the virtual one. If there is a lesson to be drawn from my little history of this extraordinary phenomenon it is that we've got it the wrong way round. The real question is not: what has the Internet to learn from us, but what might we learn from it.
|
||
|
|
|
This is an excerpt from A Brief
History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet by John Naughton Copyright notice: © 1999 by John Naughton. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.K. and international copyright law and agreements, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that John Naughton and Weidenfeld and Nicolson are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of John Naughton. |
||
| Home | Sampler | Buy it online | Reviews | Feedback/forward | |
||