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The Age of Paine Revisited
I had no doubt that I was seeking the start of a transformative global revolution. The fervor and excitement I felt then are still fresh in my mind, though few of those fantasies have yet materialized and some, as the years pass, are seeming increasingly unlikely in my lifetime. And I'm still not sure I was wrong.
Many of the ideas in that essay were indirectly inspired by the hell-raiser of the American Revolution, a writer I've admired all my life. Thomas Paine, a media pioneer, one of the first people in the world to advance the notion of free information in an open society, of individual liberty flourishing amid the demise of institutions and monarchies. In my piece, I imagined Paine online, flaming and blasting away.
In the overheated Wired environment of the time -- some of the people running the magazine were true political radicals, a rare breed in popular media -- the prevailing idea was that the Net would sweep away hoary institutions like Congress, Big Media and Wall Street, changing more or less everything. Top-down, exclusive, closed and proprietary entities would tremble and collapse at the outpouring of ideas, intellectual property, education, democracy and ideas that the Net would provide. One magazine columnist even gushed that illiteracy among the young would vanish because kids all over the world would be so desperate to get online.
I was Wired's easternmost correspondent, based not in California but New York; as such, I got a first-hand look at just how the Net was traumatizing Eastern media. The spectre of all these weird kids hacking together this exciting new kind of many-to-many information culture really shook people up. The bland, filtered, from the top-down media, Wall Street, Congress -- they were all scared to death. They hated the Net then; they still do. (Though just this week, I noticed the stodgy New York Times op-ed page appending e-mail addresses to its regular columns; a landmark of sorts.) Yet as much as the Net has evolved, it's shocking to see how little traditional politics or the popular press has. Real interactivity, perhaps the most political idea ever in media, barely exists off-line.
In my essay, published in the April, l995 issue of the magazine, I wrote that the pamphleteering Paine, who had no children, did have a descendant
"where his values prosper and are validated millions of times a day: the Internet. There, his ideas about communications, media ethics, the universal connections between people, the free flow of honest opinion are all relevant again, visible every time one modem shakes hands with another. The Net offers what Paine and his revolutionary colleagues hoped for in their own new media - a vast, diverse, passionate, global means of transmitting ideas and opening minds. That was part of the political transformation envisioned when he wrote: 'We have it in our power to begin the world over again.' Through media, he believed, 'we see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used.'"
It isn't clear whether we -- you -- began the world over again. We do -- thanks to the Net -- see with other eyes and hear with other ears, and think new thoughts. Those are still prescient and timely words.
Paine's ideas about a free press, an outpouring of individual opinion and a ferocious sense of social justice seem especially alien to the corporatized, homogenized, blow-dried practioners of "objectivity" who have inherited the American press. The Net suggested a rebirth of Paine's fading values.
Did it deliver? For sure, the pamphleteering model was true. The explosion in weblogs, pages, mailing lists, groups, topics, threads, message boards and p2p systems has introduced nothing less than a new age of individual expression. The personal archives now on the Net are unprecedented in human history, from family bios to discussions of gardening, dogs, politics and sex. Sites like Napster, Deja and EBay -- even Amazon -- have revolutionized business and consumerism. Sexuality has been liberating online, and TV and other forms of entertainment are sure to become subordinate to the Web. Cultural movements like open source have spread far beyond software in terms of their impact on society. The Net has made anyone with a computer a world-wide communicator or entrepreneur, at least potentially. Individuals are freer than ever to talk about sex, engage in heresy, sound off, connect with others, and distribute their thoughts. People with unimaginably diverse interests can now find one another instantly. It's easier to be a gay teenager, a member of a militia, an ex-Marine, a rabbit lover, a scientific researcher. Thanks to computers, there are now a million Paines out there.
But some things have been lost, as well -- influence and commonality. This new individualistic medium is so personal it's become self-absorbed, almost narcissistic. Individuals are speaking out, but it isn't clear who, if anyone, is listening. And it isn't always democratic either. There are few common grounds, town squares or open spaces online. People frequently use blocking and filtering software and programs to stick with the like-minded, not explore the different or experience other points of view. Ideas fly all over the Web, but they often end up on the screens of people who already agree, otherwise they would have long ago unsubscribed. Teenagers and political fanatics have turned the Net's public forums -- on Slashdot, CNN, ABCNews and MSNBC -- into hostile electronic cesspools. To have actual conversations online, you're forced to join clubs where membership and speech boundaries are regulated, even to the point of specialized blocking programs that permit people to gauge levels of hostility or agreement. The digital citizen isn't always very free and open to new ideas. Some of those sites are great, but this doesn't exactly constitute an open and democratic environment, one of the great early dreams of the Net. Joining a rational discussion of a common issue has become virtually impossible on any Net forum that's not restricted by membership or other restrictive tools.
In practical ways, the Net has proved more revolutionary than most of us thought. In l995, few people imagined how ubiquitous e-mail would become, how much of a family communications tool, how natural a medium for teenagers and college students and for grandma and grandpa, how fundamental to research and text, how threatening to copyright and intellectual property traditions. I hardly expected within a few years that a U.S. President would be passing along URLs in a speech before Congress. The explosion in gaming and online entertainment was similarly unforeseen -- most people took the new medium too seriously for that. Almost nobody predicted how specialized online communications would become, how polished online retailing would get, or imagine the marketplace potential of an entity like eBay. We did lots of heavy breathing about the rise of the virtual community -- expectations that have not been met. The hostility bred by the Internet wildly exceeded anyone's expectations, and is nothing less than a tragedy for the idea of the digital citizen.
The Net is, if anything, bigger than people thought it would be now, a part of more people's work and personal lives. Also their creativity -- art and writing flourish online, even when they can't make it off. But its primary impact has been practical, not ideological. Instant messaging has probably had greater import for younger Americans than digital pamphleteering has.
The hacker universe has sobered up as well. Who would have thought, a decade back, that one company, Microsoft, would in fact achieve everyone's paranoid fantasy and conquer the global desktop? Or that that one of the primary champions of Linux would be IBM? In the post September 11 era, hackers are in for a rough time, and the environment of the Net may change again. In the name of national security, authorities will be more vigilant and visible online, with the authority to throw up roadblocks all over the Net. The consequences of cyber-terrorism would now be staggering, and the spectre of the Twin Towers will give government the upper hand politically in its long brawl with the free spirits online.
Nor did anyone quite expect the speed of the transition from capitalism to corporatism, an era in which global corporations acquire media, commerce and popular culture; control copyright and intellectual property; and become the primary funders and corrupters of the political system.
Despite the flowering of individual voices on the Net, we live in an arguably less democratic culture than we did a decade ago, even before Attorney General Ashcroft's sweeping actions.
So does this add up to grim news? I don't know yet, and may not know in my life. The rise of individualism online seems irreversible. If individuals can't reach mass audiences, they can't easily be shut down, either. It seems inconceivable that our society will ever return to a few-to-many model of information, when masses of people waited for a handful of information gatekeepers to parcel out information. But as for the contemporary armies of Paine's some hoped would emerge from the digital din, make themselves heard, even achieve influence -- I'm still waiting for them.
"This new individualistic medium is so personal it's become self-absorbed, almost narcissistic. It isn't clear who, if anyone, is listening. "
Uh-huh.
In any group with a sufficiently large number of people the majority are idiots. You can find this out by reading slashdot comments, and the quality here is certainly better than in the average AOL chat room. Interactivity doesn't make sense unless you find a good way to filter out all these idiots. Who cares about the ability to read the thoughts of 4 billion idiots?
And even if you were able to filter them out, it would not really help to improve the world. Ok, you could read stuff written by non-idiots, but as long as the majority of voters can still be influenced by those few media corporations. Most of your examples are either "mass-media delivers to idiots" or "idiot to idiot" communication.
Abolish the democracy, form a technocracy!
Things like this, the whole digital-anarchist/netizen/dig-my-meme garbage, is precisely why I stopped subscribing to Wired within a couple of years of it starting out. "Transcending dogma and cant?" Give me a freakin' break, man.
In 91 OS/2 was out. It was a 32 bit os with a GUI. Very technically sweet for it's day. It also cost about 5 times what Dos+Windows cost. IBM was held up as the shining example of a company that couldn't market space heaters in Alaska in January. Everyone (except IBM) knew that the pricing was killing OS2. People who used OS2 were as fanatical about it as the Mac users are. IBM could easily taken the desktop if it had lowered the price. It didn't. As Cringely pointed out a month ago Microsoft has succeeded because its competitors have acted like idiots.
Best Slashdot Co
Before the Internet, most people were dumb, passive consumers. Let me just buy things and watch TV, and let others produces things, let others make decisions, let others tell me what my opinions are.
The Internet hasn't changed this. It's turned into Just Another Medium through which we dummies can be told what to wear, what soft drink is cool, who to vote for, who to fuck, and consume, consume, consume!
Today, like years ago, we are told that the masses are meant to be all-consuming pac-men, and the few are meant to produce, lead, and make decisions.
The Internet is not going to bring about a global outpouring of creativity and information sharing, simply because most people can't be bothered to come up with an original thought, much less published writing or software. How many people post to
Why would anyone expect the Net to "change everything"? People have always had the ability to stay informed through the quality newspapers, magazines, etc, but very few take the time to try and understand complex issues.
On the one hand, the Net gives us the ability to ready any Joe Blo's rants about subjects he knows nothing about, which actually reduces how informed the average citizen is because of all the noise.
On the other hand, if you are selective about what you read and believe, you can occasionally find gems of wisdom that give you information that might not have otherwise found. Take Slashdot -- the editor's are HUGELY ignorant and foolish about things (*cough*michael*cough*), and the posters are usually even worse. But where the editors do a good job is in their story selection. That attracts the smart, knowledgeable people that occasionally post these gems.
The question is whether the Net is a net loss or a net gain in educating the public, and I'm just not sure.
[controversial opinion alert] One huge win in my opinion that the Net has been a great influence on bringing the American ideas of freedom to the rest of the world. The greatest evil of the world, next to communism, is Socialism and I would like to see it finally die like it should have died last century as the failed experiment it was. The more socialism, the less freedom. [/alert]
And please spare me the "America WAS the home of freedom" blah DCMA blah blah. That's a great example of the narrow-minded, single-issue ignorance that I'm talking about. If you think any of these minor issues are significant in the big picture of freedom, then you need to expand your views are what freedom is.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
30 years ago, science fiction was kid's stuff - only children wanted to watch it, only children liked it, etc.
30 years have passed, and the children have grown up. Now Sci-fi is a complex medium intended for the use of adults - it grew up with its fans.
15 years ago video games started getting to be more than just 'Pong,' and the children started to play them. Now games are complex, and getting more so. Today, games are still for the young - but not just for kids.
A mere 10 years ago the net started to become a popular means of [everything the wired article talks about]. It has powerfully transformed the world BEFORE a generation has come to power. That is truly amazing, but you can't expect all of the changes that are on the way to happen overnight.
In 20 years, after the internet has had as much time as Sci-Fi to become commonplace, we will be an internet generation. Then all the people who are using this as their media outlet will have it, and just like the stock market, it will become a chaotic tyranny of the majority's decisions swayed by the charisma of those who write well.
Bring it on. The written word has always been my favorite medium of information exchange.
On the side: I don't care if this issue is last year's news, or last century's. Its relevant today, and there are more things that cna be said about it now than could be said last year!
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I agree completely. The magazine started it's descent when they were bought by Conde Nast. They swung into the Red Herring pro-ebiz sector and suck at it. All they have are special advertising sections, electronic/carbon fiber toy buyer guides for people making US$250k/year and business stories I can find in the WSJ. What happened to the revolution? Oh, that's right, it got co-opted by the borg.
/. Let his comments be modded up or down like everyone else. Techno-democracy.
And Katz should hang it up. I don't know why he has the resident professor emeritus status he does on
on Slashdot, CNN, ABCNew and MSNBC -- into hostile electronic cesspools. To have actual conversations online, you're forced to join clubs where membership and speech boundaries are regulated, even to the point of specialized blocking programs that permit people to gauge levels of hostility or agreement.
What did you expect, for all your utopian dreams, you forgot one thing. Most people are fucking stupid. And a great many of them are annoying as well. "giving everyone a voice" (the phrase) might sound good, but actually giving everyone a voice won't. leveling the playing field for everyone and you end up with a world awash in moronic penis bird posts and SPAM promoting porn sites.
The hacker universe has sobered up as well. Who would have thought, a decade back, that one company, Microsoft, would in fact achieve everyone's paranoid fantasy and conquer the global desktop?
What is this supposed to even mean? The "global desktop"? Lots of people run windows on desktops across the globe, but M$ hasn't got central control over much of anything, just lots of revenue streams. And its not like their market share has gone up much since the DOS days anyway.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You just had to get a swipe at the AG in there, eh? All this digital hand wringing about the High Lord of Evil, John Ashcroft, is really stupid. I live about 1/2 mile north of what was the World Trade Center. I lived through military checkpoints and police blockades for 2 weeks to get into my apartment. Outside those that lost loved ones, were injured by the attacks or lost jobs, I have had a lot to put up with to get my life back together the way it was before 9/11. None of the barriers were created by AG John Ashcroft. His actions have actually made me feel more comfortable about my situation.
But then I have to listen to the Chicken Little's of the Civil Liberties gang. The group of "well meaning, good intentioned" Americans that only believe that effective policing can occur when the "Cops" are handcuffed and blindfolded. You got to love their arrogance when they proclaim that non-US citizens are guaranteedprotection of our Constitution even though they never lived in the US. I am sure that would be a shock to those folks living in China that were run over by tanks 12 years ago.
The amazing thing at the end of the day, no matter what Ashcroft w/ Congress has done, I feel no loss in liberty. No evil corporation is holding me down. Jack booted thugs haven't beat down my door or surrounded my place of worship with tanks and set it on fire. I have no fear to speak my mind. And to prove it, I am going to say the most controversial thing I can imagine, "John Katz is an insightful, intelligent, fully informed writer focusing on the issues that matter to citizens of Cyberspace and his witty commentary is a favorite of all Slashdot readers." It might not be true but I have no fear in saying it. Just like Jon Katz, I have the Constitutional Right to be full of sh*t and spout it out to the masses. Don't worry Jon the High Lord of Evil, John Ashcroft, is not going to gag you no matter how bad your writing is.
P.S. Jon if you are talking about the US, I need to remind you that we are not a democracy, we are a constitutional republic. If we were a democracy, evil would reign via the power of the ballot box -- majority gets to force the minority to do anything it wants.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
This comment has been moderated as "offtopic", but I think it bears more relevence than its moderation would have us believe.
Truly intellectual individuals do not limit themselves to conversation within their own area(s) of interest. If anything, learning about politics and the opinions of people not like ourselves help remind us of who we are. Also, I certainly see nothing wrong with talking about politics on Slashdot, especially as it pertains to all things geek. There is almost a certain meta-geekness involved in talking not only about geeky things, but the nature of "geeky" itself. Political discussions about such things as rediculous patents, DMCA misuse (well, I've never found a good use, but I digress), privacy, freedom, and the endless attempted assassination of rational thinking and individual thought all hinge upon principles that are near and dear to many a Slashdot reader's heart. If anything, political advocacy in traditionaly geeky subject areas such as science and the like could help more of the public understand the virtues (or possibly enlighten us upon hitherto non obvious disadvantages) of our way of thinking and our way of life.
Recent research in the area of human intelligence has shown that even being slightly smarter than the rest of the population has tremendous advantages, because it allows you to step back and view human interaction separate from your involvement in it. Talking about "meta-geeky" subjects is one way to do this. As I like to say, the group model of human behavior is far more apparent when even a small foot stool can place your eyes above the group.
One more objection to this mentality that we should be allowed to speak only of geeky things on Slashot: By mere coincidence I happened to have read Common Sense and Age of Reason by Thomas Paine a few days before Jon Katz' article. I remember thinking just how ahead of his time this man was, and just how well he would have fit in our communications centric culture. Should this view not be allowed to be discussed on Slashdot? Isn't this the very censorship and tunnel vision most Slashdotter's profess to despise? "Why can't that young Earth Creationist just close his Bible for a few moments, open his mind, and take a look at reality?" Shouldn't we be practicing what we preach? Or is this kneejerk response so typical of Jon Katz articles only here because it was written by Jon Katz? Surely those among us who fancy ourselves as rational and intellectual appreciate the dangers and fallacies of ad hominem arguments.
A person is smart. People are stupid.
One on one you can reason with people. En masse, you can only emote with them.
Emotions have huge bandwidth but tiny frequency ... in other words: they're very powerful but they're incredibly stupid (low infomrational content).
Changing that reality would entail re-engineering the human race.
The web succeeds at instantaneous rabble-rousing; but, as yet, the medium is too physically uncomfortable a read to invest much time with, as one would with a good book. Consequently, Michener's Caravans has the power to instill a much greater understanding of Afghanistan, say, than a whole year surfing cnn.com.
I frequent many web forums and I can tell you that there are Thousands of people out there, sharing information, creating websites, building on each others ideas. People, regular folks, with AOL accounts or Roadrunner cablemodems are enabled by the internet to find information and people with common interests.
And I've found or been informed about many very unique and entertaining sites, put up by people in their spare time, who would definately not have bothered to publish a 'zine or even a pamphlet - which wouldn't have made it to my eyes anyway if it were not for the internet.
It's all relative, and maybe for now it's just a start. I don't post to Slashdot very often (or at all) myself. But I was able to read Your thoughts on this subject, wasn't I? (Most of the time I come to the discussion pretty late and any points I would've wanted to contribute have already been made)
Yes, people are Lazy. The cool thing about the 'Net is that it's easy for even lazy people (like me) to put stuff out there for all to see. Even if the majority of that stuff ends up being pointless and dumb, some fraction of it will shine.
H.L. Mencken once wrote favorably of predujice (in the sense of being opinionated) because he thought indicated a person cared enough about an issue to give it some consideration.
The above comments and a couple of others make me wonder just how thoughtful consideration Katz engages in.
1. The web will democratize society. Both Cuba society and your average high school student government can conduct wide-ranging, open discussions of issue, but the participants in either have little formal power and I wouldn't call either democratic. In fact, it is the discussion which is cynically used (in both cases) to give the illusion of power, accountability, democracy etc.
2. The rise of corporate power within capitalism has been going on a long time (the legal foundations for it were laid during Reconstruction) and has nothing to do with the Internet (and they don't even coincide historically). Furthermore, moneyed-interest have been corrupting American government since the beginning and before the rise of the modern corporation as even a cursory reading of history reveals.
It is by coff... er, will, alone I set my mind in motion...
Henry Miller is just flat out wrong. His prose is beautiful, and his message enticing, but he is wrong all the same. There are plenty of opinions that are worthy of denigration, that deserve to be despised, and that should be denied. The opinions of madmen like Hitler or Osama bin Laden will never become a source of beauty, joy or strength, but will instead remain nasty, painful, and even evil forever.
These examples may be extreme, but they show clearly the basic premise. Opinions and ideas do not all hold equal value. Some are dangerous and even poisonous. Other are merely misleading or misinformed. Some are completely delusional.
I think the point he was trying to make with the filtering software is when others filter on your behalf. When you control the filter (like the /. comments filter) then you decide and this is ok. When we get to the point where CmdrTaco decides what we see and what we don't, then filtering will not longer be useful and will become a hindrance instead.
You obviously haven't read the fine print yet, have you?
If you had, you'd realize that many of the shiny new powers granted to the Prez, AG, the USAGs, the FBI, and others, have no limits as to their scope. Like in programming, things with global scope tend to cause problems, sooner or later.
Easy examples in U.S. Federal law: RICO statutes, Co-Intelpro, automatic drug-related asset forfeiture laws.
RICO was a good thing that neither sunseted nor was limited in scope. It ended up being applied to cases it wasn't suited for, and it's a very difficult thing to defend against. Enables AGs to say "we believe you've done a bad thing, we don't have proof, but you're going down anyway." Justice, eh?
Much of Bush and Ashcroft's rhetoric presumes guilt before innocence. The new structure of Bush's military tribunals assume that this form of Justice is infallible: As a defendent, you've one turn at bat. If you lose, you have no appeal, even if you received the death sentance. Plus, evidence can be withheld from the defense, and the sessions can be closed, so there's no chance to analyze or debate a ruling. Also, the jury is an empanelment of military law officers -not a jury of peers, not a jury of equals.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
I think we need two new moderation categories. "Wrong" and "Stupid" (or "Dumb"). Be nice to be able to apply them to articles too...
I lived through military checkpoints and police blockades for 2 weeks to get into my apartment.
I got there a couple of days after they moved the checkpoints from 14th St. to Canal St. This was lucky, as the only place I had to stay was on Christopher St. When I was there, in the bars between stints of volunteering, I got a very good impression of the people. I already admired New Yorkers, not least because I grew up there. It seemed to me that at that time, most were not in favor of war and would have been opposed to restrictions on civil liberties. Perhaps that has changed.
The group of "well meaning, good intentioned" Americans that only believe that effective policing can occur when the "Cops" are handcuffed and blindfolded.
You don't need to mince words. As one of those people concerned with civil liberties, I am well aware that people think of us as horrible, vicious, anti-American scum.
The trouble is this. When people speak of security, it can mean two things:
When you write "His actions have actually made me feel more comfortable about my situation," you are clearly referring to number 1. I view 2 as being more important than 1. I also think that, in many instances, the sweeping measures taken support 1 at the expense of 2.
This is a fundamental philosophical difference, and I'm well aware that people who are concerned with 2 are a reviled minority. Consider the case of the ACLU pushing so that Nazis could march in Skokie. Most people think that's horrible, because people who are hated by Nazis have a right to feel comfortable. Personally, as someone who is Jewish enough for Hitler and Israel, I want Nazis marching. That's because I want to see and count them. Forcing them to stay in their homes doesn't make them or their hatred vanish, it just allows people to keep their head in the sand. I am well aware that most people consider my perception monstrous.
What concerns me about the recent legistlation is not the ostensible use to track down foreign nationals. Rather, it is the big bunch of riders that have been attached to these bills that grant more surveilance power over civilians. The FBI once got into a little bit of trouble for wiretapping Martin Luther King and about 10,000 other Americans. At the time, that was illegal. Now it would be perfectly legal. All the FBI would have to do is note that there were riots of black people, and that there were some inciting violence (therefore terrorists), and that even though MLK taught nonviolence, he was potentially associated with suspects. You may not care, but I don't think I like that.
Right now, I think that the FBI is too busy to bother too many private citizens much. However, in the past there have been actions on suspected Communists, people who wanted civil rights for black people, pornography, and supposed ritual satanic abuse in day care centers. I'm not sure what the next fad will be, but I'm pretty sure there will be one, and when there is, there will be less oversight. In the words of Spider Robinson, "we may even be making the problem worse, but hey, that's the price we pay for drama."
In addition, I think that, Serpico notwithstanding, the NYC police are pretty good, probably second only to the Austin, TX police. Not everywhere is it like that. There are, for example, the Washington DC police, who were responsible for more than 300 accidental shootings in the first 18 months after the introduction of the Glock 9mm, some in the words of one perpetrator because the cops didn't know not to put their fingers on the trigger unless they wanted to shoot the weapon. There's New Orleans, where one of my friends was hit by a beer bottle thrown from a Police car. I think my trust that they will always do the right thing is far from total.
A couple things. This is not really a new phenomina. Does the term "millitary industrial complex" ring a bell. Same process.
More importantly, the recent trend of "corporatism" is unlikely to go on much longer. Already you can see the rise of the independent professional, the enterprising individual. I know a lot of corportate people who got their first taste of enterprise and freedom at some now defunct
One associate of mine said he'd have to get a pre-frontal lobotomy before taking another corporate job. Backlash is on the way.
The truth is that corporations are beureaucratic. And because they don't have even the limited accountability/transparency of governments, they tend to be the most inefficient beureucracies around. They waste so much money and time it's rediculous.
And another thing...
What's up with all the pessemism? All the "you can't change people" and "people are going to be consumers no matter what". Come on, people: Cynicism isn't cool. Maybe it's fun to pretend when your a teenager so you can feel grown up, but in real life it's stupid. It doesn't get you anywhere.
People are not by nature consumers. It's just the current situation. Instead of sniping and whining, why don't we try and improve?
Try constructing positive arguments: don't just argue against something without arguing for something else.
Howard Dean for president
1) The terrorists we're looking for probably aren't worried about acquiring their guns illegally.
2) The terrorists we're looking for probably are using the publicly-available communications infrastructure, even if they're not using crypto. We also know they're using it for money-laundering, even if they're not using it to discuss their operational plans.
Ergo, if you want to find the terrorists, monitor the communications infrastructure, not gun purchase records. > Thinking that a computer is scarier than a gun is about as rational as prefering a musket to a crossbow. Isn't it?
Who was the mobster who said that he'd teach his son computers rather than bank-robbing, because you can steal a lot more money with a computer than you can with a gun?
I'd say Ashcroft's on the right track. We use guns on the battlefield today, not crossbows, no?
15 years ago I began studying politics intensely with the notion that there were real answers out there to public policy questions. Actually began my quest trying to figure out why my guy lost the election, I must obviously know something that 52% of the population didn't.
Now, as a PhD in political science I realize how true the following statement is: The fundamental nature of politics is the distribution of resources among people according to ones moral and ethical beliefs.
One can change the mechanisms for obtaining information. One can spend large amounts of money on campaigns, one can wire houses for some sort of electronic democracy. But these are only foolish dances around the core issues. Moral and ethical beliefs do not change significantly for an adult. Societal norms only change with new generations and advances in education and income (which allow individuals more liberty to contemplate instead of planting corn).
Technology will have an effect on politics, but only because it creates wealth and perhaps accelerates the underlying growth in access to education.
Sort of interesting to note that media exposure actually tends to result in more ephemerial political attitudes, not really a more serious contemplation.
The digital citizen would be smart, civil and rational, outgrowing labels like "liberal" or "conservative", engaged in civics, technology, business and government; transcending dogma and cant. Maybe he or she will pop up, but probably not in my life.
I think there's every bit of evidence that people who meet this description exist today. Mr. Lessig, as an example, would qualify.
I agree that the vision of a world where everyone is like this is unlikely to be met anytime soon. But the fact that every tree in the forest isn't the tree you're looking for does not mean the trees you are looking for do not exist.
The problem with net personalities is that they are essentially pure idealogues. There is none of the courtesy that you find in face-to-face meetings; there is only thought and belief. The emotions that bind together as human beings fade away because they no longer interact; all you have are a billion voices screaming of one belief or another.
Now, whether that's a good or a bad thing depends on the person. Some people need a kick in their belief system, and the Internet happens to supply it. On the other hand, for those already with pretty strong beliefs, it goes too far - and the shouting and "I'm right, you're wrong, why don't you listen to me?" begins.
Yes, the Internet is a billion voices. How to get heard? Start to whisper. In such an environment, a quiet, private voice is more likely to attract attention than the invective Paine was fond of. Whisper... but never go silent.
Who decides which opinions are worthy of being denied? This is more murky than you might suppose. The way you fight these opinions are not with censorship but with more speech. In fact these bad opinions should be allowed for all to judge their value. Perhaps former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said it best: "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."
As an example, when the Nazis (or was it the KKK?) wanted to march in Washington D.C. recently, the counter demonstration was so huge that they canceled the march and ran out of D.C. with their tails between their legs. This is how one fights opinions that are evil. Not with censorship.
I really don't see how the fact that we still have the U.S. Congress changed Mr. Katz's original point. We haven't revolted or amended the Constitution to eliminate Congress, but we keep much better track of what they are doing now than we used to. Several times in the past few years modern communications have brought citizens together to pressure Congress one way or the other, and reversed a previously all-but-certain outcome. Private citizens have a lot more power than they (we) used to. (True, only as long as enough of us agree on something. But that's democracy for you.)