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Heart of the Net
The Net has evolved, and radically. It's much too big and diverse for a single locus. It's also much too corporatized, and its new kinds of messaging systems increasingly too personalized and subterranean. Unless you're selling things via AOL or MSN, there's no longer any way even to reach a significant chunk of the Net universe, including the tech elites who still wield so much influence in cyberspace. The new media sites are all struggling; Wired has become a homogenized bulletin board for computer execs; and the most successful and heavily trafficked sites are about products, games or entertainment.
Since the Net has always been an almost organic, free-form entity -- nobody's in charge of it, or really decides how it will evolve and grow -- its epicenter floats all over. For a while, the heartbeat resided in the dream of new kinds of virtual and media communities -- the WELL, ECHO, Salon, Slate -- that popped up to connect people of common cultural or political interests. They were supposed to herald the movement of traditional media online. They were top-down, agenda-setting and, almost without exception, marginal or unsuccessful.
Enter AOL, then and now a Main Street for middle-class access. Its labyrinthine commercial sites, shameless peddling of goods, vast network of messaging boards and sex sites a form perfect metaphor for the evolution of the modern Internet -- people selling things like mad, and forming ever smaller, more specialized groups to talk to people much like themselves, with the same interests and ideals.
Of these developments, probably the early design era -- the Net's actual construction -- was its most idealistic. The early BBS's felt -- and were -- revolutionary, and few of the people first going online could help but feel they were participating in and witnessing the birth of a new kind of culture. Engineers and defense researchers like Postel, Licklider set out to build a free and open information network that would theoretically be open to and benefit everyone. Net architecture was certainly designed that way, and government, media and business paid little attention to the network, dismissing it as the handiwork of tech-heads and kids, irrelevant once the Cold War had passed.
The hacker period was the most revolutionary, and the open source phase one of the most political, especially when that movement rose to challenge the Microsofting of the desktop. The rise of the dot.coms might have been the most purely American era, in its speedy rise, greed and eventual collapse. Open source didn't stop the Microsofting of the Net, but it might have forced programmers to write better code, and greatly influenced the culture in other ways, creating a community of programmers committed to the idea of open access to information. And panicking corporate lobbyists into co-opting intellectual property legislation.
In between, enterprises like Amazon.com, which teased and tantalized investors and analysts with the retailing promise of networked computing, served as the heart of the Net, at least for a time, because they were so closely studied and monitored, and in some ways, highly innovative. For better or worse, Amazon has changed marketing in America for good.
Napster, which freed millions of music lovers from the hoary grip of the recording industry, symbolized the Net's challenge to hierarchical business and institutional structures -- until it showed the true power of corporatists. For years, the hackers believed nobody could stop them. After the Napster battles, it was clear that lobbyists and lawmakers, especially conjunction with wealthy corporatists, could. Briefly, Napster was the heart of the Net, and the Napster era -- now over -- one of it's most pivotal periods. Perhaps inevitably, this wasn't a fight the good guys ever really had a shot at winning, although they were slow to see it. While free music is still widely available online - free software types and music and movie traders are all over the place - the Net, it's now clear, will not remain a free frontier except in certain isolated and idiosyncratic corners.
The free software movement, in fact, was the apogee of the Net's most recent political period, the legacy to the hacker idea of liberating information, especially its sudden radical promise and challenge to proprietary institutions and information. For the hackers, the idea of an Open Net was their shining hour. Then the software turned communications inward, mostly permitting shoppers, chatters and people of like mind to talk to one another and shut out the clutter and the spam, including different points of view. At first, it was just religious fanatics and pious Boomers who embraced the idea of blocking and filtering. Then even hackers adopted it as a means of filtering out all that noise and an enormous volume of unwanted messiahs. The Net, designed to be the most open medium ever, became an increasingly closed nation of blockades, guardhouses and moderation and ratings systems. What the corporatists didn't sanitize, the hackers themselves chopped up.
An idea very close to the heart of the Net -- an open medium -- died, probably for good.
Where's the heart of the Net now?
The odd truth is that there probably isn't one.
The Net has become an economic and utilitarian rather than social, political or idealistic network. It has grown beyond almost anybody's earliest imaginings to become a thoroughly mainstream and very American communications medium., thoroughly corporatized and Disnified. Its grown too diffuse to have a center. Half of the nation is now online, says the U.S. Department of Commerce, nearly 90 percent of all kids.
AOL, a peculiar notion of the Net, is dominant -- with more than 25 million subscribers, it's probably the biggest single entity on the Net, at least in the U.S., and the largest host of utilitarian virtual communities. MSN is fast closing the gap. Who imagined just how prescient Steve Case really was, or how determined Bill Gates was? The middle-class wants to use the Net for pragmatic purposes -- shopping, entertainment, personal communications, and yes, sex. And they don't mind giving up privacy and freedom from corporate and government monitoring to do it.
This isn't meant to be a lament, not entirely. The Net was intended as an individualistic medium; it was inevitable that it would grow beyond a single focal point. Individualists still use it to chatter around the clock via mailing lists, blogs, vanity sites and IRC. But mostly, they appear to be speaking to ever smaller increments, like one another, rather to the larger world. The notion of the Net as a new kind of common ground is nearly over.
It isn't yet possible to know if this is a good or bad thing. The flowering of individual ideas is astounding; it's also a cacophony and something of a trap. Few of them escape their immediate surroundings. The fragmentation, hostility and narcissism are equally jarring. The Net may never recover from the waves of hostile adolescents and intellectual programming crackers, like the DoS vandals -- often bitter enemies of free speech -- who thundered online in the 90s, nor from the corporatists who shaped and co-opted telecommunications policy, copyright and intellectual property law. The Net is perennially interesting, and in many ways its story is just beginning to unfold, but in a far subtler way. This culture is being transformed by its own success.
Slashdot News Flash - Katz STILL has nothing interest or substance to say.
Centre of the net? Bulls**t. The whole point of the net is that it IS decentralised and anarchistic. There has never really been a centre - but there are clusters. The groups and communities that he mentions as 'having had their time', etc all still exist and contribute to the experience that is otherwise known as the Internet, for better or (in AOL's case) for the worst
The Media's focus on what is hot might have changed, but so what? Media attention is the most fickle of creatures. I never understood the anti-Katz sentiment on Slash as I never bothered reading his articles, but now that I have I can't think why he is given such bandwidth!
Mod me down as a troll or flamebait, but I dare someone to point me to a link with a Katz article which actually has any useful or genuinely though provoking information about technology and culture!
My complaint about Jon Katz:
May I be cynical for a bit? I hope you don't mind,
but with Katz's latest barrage of
malodorous notions, I can't resist the urge to make a
few cynical comments. To get right
down to it, some of the facts I'm about
to present may seem shocking. This
they certainly are. However, it's time that a few
facts had a chance to slip through the fusillade of hype.
What's my problem, then? Allow me to present it
in the form of a question: Where are the people
who are willing to stand up and acknowledge
that Katz, in his infinite wisdom, has decided
to destroy the natural beauty of our parks and forests?
On the surface, it would seem to have something to do
with the way that his whole approach is repugnant.
But upon further investigation, one will find that
by allowing Katz to put mephitic thoughts in our
children's minds, we are allowing him to play puppet master.
As for the lies and exaggerations, Katz's
epigrams are rife with contradictions
and difficulties; they're entirely maladroit,
meet no objective criteria, and are unsuited
for a supposedly educated population.
And as if that weren't enough, if Katz is going to
obstruct important things, then he should at least have
the self-respect to remind himself of a few things: First, a
true enemy is better than a false friend. And
second, many people respond to his debauched vituperations
in much the same way that they respond to television
dramas. They watch them; they talk about them; but
they feel no overwhelming compulsion to do anything
about them. That's why I insist we pronounce the truth
and renounce the lies.
Even people who consider themselves scornful
foolhardy-types generally agree that Katz's slurs
symbolize lawlessness, violence, and misguided rebellion
-- extreme liberty for a few, even if the rest of us
lose more than a little freedom. One might conclude
that Katz is incapable of writing a letter without using
such phrases as "crapulous pop psychologists", "loquacious
exhibitionists", "oppressive personae non gratae", or
some combination thereof. Alternatively, one might conclude
that Katz has a different view of reality from the rest of us.
In either case, if you're not part of the solution,
then you're part of the problem. His historical record of
fickle pleas is clearer than the muddled pronouncements
of his apple-polishers for a variety of reasons. For
instance, the worst sorts of inconsiderate Neanderthals there
are must be treated with political justice, not with
civil justice, as they are sincerely not real citizens. Let me
rephrase that: I wonder if he really believes the
things he says. He knows they're not true, doesn't he?
A complete answer to that question would
take more space than I can afford, so I'll have to give
you a simplified answer. For starters, if
we let him cause riots in the streets, then greed,
corruption, and tribalism will characterize the government.
Oppressive measures will be directed against citizens.
And lies and deceit will be the stock and trade of the
media and educational institutions.
Even Katz's bedfellows couldn't deal with the full impact of
Katz's refrains. That's why they created "Katz-ism," which is
just a garrulous excuse to force square
pegs into round holes. He plans to drag everything
that is truly great into the gutter. He has instructed
his votaries not to discuss this or even admit to his
plan's existence. Obviously, Katz knows he has
something to hide. Most of you reading this letter
have your hearts in the right place. Now
follow your hearts with actions. I have traveled the length and
breadth of this country and talked with the best people. I can
therefore assure you that Katz's artifices cannot stand on
their own merit. That's why they're dependent on elaborate
artifices and explanatory stories to convince us that Katz's
warnings can give us deeper insights into the nature of
reality. We can and we must protect ourselves by any means
necessary against the unrestrained bestiality
of stupid, quasi-macabre paper-pushers. And that's the honest truth.
Well, I guess I'm finally motivated enough to go and find out if jonkatzsucks.com is registered...
No, it's available.
Tempting, very tempting indeed... oh, the karmic implications!
NO TOUCH MONKEY!