The Internet

A Philosophical Inquiry

Gordon Graham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781134738045
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Internet: A Philosophical Inquiry develops many of the themes Gordon Graham presented in his highly successful radio series, The Silicon Society. Exploring the tensions between the warnings of the Neo-Luddites and the bright optimism of the Technophiles, Graham offers the first concise and accessible exploration of the issues which arise as we enter further into the world of Cyberspace.
This original and fascinating study takes us to the heart of questions that none of us can afford to ignore: how does the Internet affect our concepts of identity, moral anarchy, censorship, community, democracy, virtual reality and imagination?
Free of jargon and full of stimulating ideas, this is essential reading for anyone wishing to think clearly and informatively about the complexities of our technological future.

Neo-Luddites versus Technophiles

DOI: 10.4324/9780203003503-2

The origins of Luddism

In the early nineteenth century the followers of Ned Ludd (according to some his name was actually Ludlum) smashed machinery in factories across Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, fearing that these new devices would destroy their jobs and livelihood. Whatever the justice of their cause and the truth of their contentions, they paid very dearly for their actions, being subsequently tried and hanged. However, in hindsight what is more striking than the savage way they were treated, common enough at the time unfortunately, is the marked futility of their attempt to stop the new technology of textile manufacture from radically altering the world, not only of textiles, but of industrial production at large. Ludd and his companions, we might say, were engaged in fighting the future, and so described this was a battle that was bound to end in defeat, as now seems obvious. Their major contribution to history, in fact, was to provide a name – Luddites – for all those who hopelessly and fruitlessly resist and oppose technological innovation.

The Luddites were neither the first nor the last such protesters. Tailors who had welcomed the advent of machine-produced cloth, only a few years later smashed the still more innovative technology of Barthelemey Thimonnier, an early French inventor of the sewing machine. Likewise, the growth and development of information technology, at a prodigious rate in recent years, has produced a Neo-Luddite reaction – the term Luddite being deployed in this context with a small measure of pride by Ian Boal in a book (partly) entitled Resisting the Virtual Life. Another self-confessed Neo-Luddite is the essayist and conservationist Wendell Berry, author of ‘Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer’ in which (as the title suggests) he defends the retention of old methods and decries the deleterious effects of the new. Like the original Luddites, opponents of computers and the Internet often make predictions about the dire effects of these new ways of doing things – for instance that bookreading will become a thing of the past, that personal communication will cease to be face to face, that future generations will be computer junkies, ‘amusing themselves to death’ (the title of another book by Postman), or that a new and anarchical form of radical social isolation has come into view as individuals live more and more in their own self-chosen (and fantastical) worlds of virtual reality.

Undoubtedly the most dramatic (and unpleasant) recent expression of Neo-Luddism is that of the Unabomber, so-called because his campaign against modern technology took the form of posting bombs to universities and airlines. The Unabomber preserved his anonymity for several years, but was eventually identified as Dr Theodore Kaczynski, a brilliant mathematician who, after a brief academic career, retired to a cabin in Montana from which he pursued his campaign against modern technology. In 1995, under pressure from the US Attorney General, the Washington Post and the New York Times published his manifesto: ‘Industrial Society and the Future’. This triumph led, ironically, to his detection, arrest and conviction, but as Kujundzic and Mann have pointed out, it is easy to dismiss the document as the ravings of a madman because of the violence and destructiveness of his campaign. In fact he gives cogent expression to a Neo-Luddism which is more widely held and deserves serious attention. According to Kaczynski:

The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in ‘advanced’ countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to psychological suffering in the Third World (to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world.

(Kujundzic and Mann, p. 12)

These are serious charges, and Kaczynki’s manifesto (regardless of his methods) makes a not inconsiderable defence of them. But even if in the end we dismiss it, there are more modest voices to be contended with. In a much less general and much less apocalyptic form, Neo-Luddism often contents itself with doubting whether the new technology of the computer and the Internet really does bring greater benefits, whether, that is to say, we are in fact better off than we were before its advent. This is the general direction of Berry’s objections, in fact.

Is there any truth or substance in either version of the Neo-Luddites’ view? It is notable that even plausible predictions about the effects of new inventions can turn out, in retrospect, to be ludicrous. John Phillip Souza – the composer who was to the march what Strauss was to the waltz – regarded the introduction of the phonograph with great foreboding: ‘I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue – or rather by vice – of the multiplication of the various musicproducing machines’ (quoted in Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience , p. 657). Ninety years later, the survival of traditional instruments and the vigorous state of music-making makes such a remark appear ridiculously wide of the mark. Still, one point worth making is that the predictions Luddites make may sometimes come true – what the future holds is always hard, perhaps impossible, to say. Moreover it is plausible to think that in several cases their estimates of cost over benefit are correct. This second possibility, that new technology does not in fact bring a net benefit, is a claim to which we will return, but what is more interesting for present purposes is that even the accuracy of their predictions, which only the actual course of the future can confirm or refute of course, does little to alter the futility of Luddism. Whatever the elegance and attractiveness of the fountain pen or the typewriter, it seems certain that, pace Berry, widespread use of the information technology of the computer is here to stay (and set to expand) in as yet unforeseeable directions. As has often been said in other connections – nuclear power or genetic manipulation, for instance – what has been invented cannot be uninvented, and once invented someone somewhere will want to use it and succeed in doing so. In the case of the Internet, there is no need to speculate on ‘someone, somewhere’. Such large numbers of people, everywhere as it seems, have taken it up that we can be sure it will not go away. At the same time, to declare all doubts and questions about the Internet to be Luddite, is to run the danger of falling victim to the other extreme, an extreme we might call ‘the ideology of technology’.

Technophilia

The ‘ideology of technology’ is most evident in Technophiles: those who believe that technological innovation is a cornucopia which will remedy all ills. ‘Technophiles’ is a term coined by Neil Postman and he defines such people as those who ‘gaze on technology as a lover does on his beloved, seeing it without blemish and entertaining no apprehension for the future’ (Postman, Technopoly, p. 5). Along with Postman, I shall have more that is critical to say about this sort of technophilia, but to anyone who observes the matter with reasonable impartiality it is an important fact, and one to be accommodated, that computers and computing generate a striking degree of enthusiasm. When the World Wide Web was first being developed, for example, a large number of very talented people became engrossed in the technical problems it gave rise to and devoted a huge amount of time and talent to producing solutions which they freely released into the world of cyberspace. They did so, however, not so much (if at all) because they were enthused by the project of creating a vast international system of communication and exchange, still less because they had weighed up the pros and cons, the costs and benefits of such a system. Their motivation lay, rather, in the fact that they were intrigued by the technical problems. This is one aspect of the ideology of technology – technological problem-solving becomes an end in and of itself, irrespective of larger considerations. Or, to put the matter more accurately, the question of means is the dominant (even sole) consideration and the question of the value of ends to which they are the means is left to take care of itself.

A second important aspect of the ideology of technology is its assumption that the most technologically advanced is the best. This might be taken as the defining characteristic of technophilia, in fact. It is also the belief that (according to Postman) has ushered in ‘Technopoly’, a world ruled by technological innovation. He contrasts the modern world, especially in America, with earlier ‘tool using’ societies. In these, technology was the servant of other independent purposes, and regulated by them. Technopoly, by contrast ‘eliminates alternatives to itself’ (Postman, Technopoly, p. 48). Postman, in my view, generalizes and dramatizes too much, but he does identify an important assumption that accompanies a great deal of modern technology – that all that went before is redundant and to be discarded because inferior. Allied with it is a further, almost equally important, assumption – that countries and individuals who want to increase or preserve their prosperity must invest heavily in hi-tech. This explains both the increasing number of government initiatives which aim to make everyone computer literate and the widespread introduction of in-service IT training courses. The desirability of such initiatives rests upon several unexamined suppositions. Chief among these are two ideas, first, that the source of the ends which technology serves lies elsewhere than in the sort of intellectual inquiry and imagination which technological invention itself requires (in consumer demand, perhaps, which in turn is thought of as simply the reflection of individual desires) and, second, that technology is neutral with respect to those ends – it merely serves them (or fails to do so) and does not influence or determine them.

These assumptions, in my view, make the ideology of technology very powerful and help to explain why opposition to technological innovation is easily dismissed as Luddism. Yet it is not difficult to find evidence that under the influence of an unquestioning ideology of technology, large errors have indeed been made, and made in the recent past. Some of these rest upon false predictions, many have involved considerable, but unnecessary expenditure, and all of them have, in one way or another, been a waste of time. Nor are such objections forthcoming only from those who have failed to master the technology of the new way. On the contrary, some of the gravest doubts come from those who know it from the inside. Clifford Stoll, for instance, one of the pioneers of the Internet, has written a book entitled Silicon Snake Oil and significantly subtitled Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. In it he records very many ways in which this highly advanced technology is used for the most trivial, and trivializing, of purposes, to the point where the degree of sophistication in the means and the lack of it in the ends takes on the character of a gross absurdity.

Some of the sort of doubts Stoll has we will return to. The point to draw from his making them is that they are not the doubts of a technological ignoramus. But even those much less expert than Stoll can see that IT has not always realized the predictions of its enthusiasts. One very familiar example is the ‘paperless office’. In the preface to his acclaimed book Why Things Bite Back, Edward Tenner records how when personal computers first appeared

Futurism was thriving. Its most successful practitioner, Alvin Toffler, had declared in his best-selling The Third Wave that ‘making paper copies of anything is a primitive use of [electronic word-processing] machines and violates their very spirit’. Yet the paper recycling bins seemed always to be brimming with printouts, and even after the office was networked and electronic mail had replaced hardcopy memos, the paper deluge continued … Networking had actually multiplied paper use. When branches of Staples and OfficeMax opened near Princeton, the first items in the customers’ view (and in the catalogues) were five-thousand-sheet cases of paper for photocopiers, laser printers and fax machines.

(Tenner, p. ix)

A related but in many ways more important example is the home office. Telephone lines and computer terminals make it possible for office workers to be linked just as effectively if they are miles apart as if they are in the same room. So people do not need any longer to go out to work and can as a result locate themselves wherever they choose. The time of the home-based worker may yet come, but for over a decade now it has been predicted that, as people acquire more IT skills and equipment becomes more widely and more cheaply available, the days of the traditional workplace are numbered. Yet the proportion of the workforce working from home is small and to date shows relatively little sign of growing. The fact appears to be that most people want to work with other people face to face, they want a workplace to go to, a company of fellow workers to belong to and they are willing to pay the price of commuting back and forth in order to have it. Against these facts about human beings, many training initiatives that increase IT skills are for the most part worthless. They have not, and probably will not, lead to the maximization of hi-tech communication, because their doing so conflicts with the patterns of social life that people are disposed to retain.

This feature of the home office and the ‘virtual company’ (one in which everyone works from home electronically networked to everyone else) is one of the sources of the ‘discontent’ described by Ellen Ullman in Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents . Ullmann describes her experience of her ‘virtual’ software company worked from home.

Most of all, I had to accept that I was now on my own. The place I had come to before, and would come to again: alone. After two weeks of intense interaction with the programmers at the net-working software company, the true nature of my new contract became clear. I sat in my loft all day staring into my computer. I designed software. Now and then, I sent the designs to the programmers by e-mail or fax. Once or twice a week, I drove down to their office through traffic made hellish by road construction. My most intense relationship became the one with my car.

(Ullman, p. 125)

There are no doubt compensations to ‘home offices’ and ‘virtual companies’ but most people, I imagine, would react as Ullman did, and for this reason there is a check on how far such developments are likely to go. Such, at any rate, is a plausible hypothesis. It does not follow that present patterns of work will always remain. After all, there is an historically recordable shift in the other direction; the original Luddites were in part resisting the move from home-based small-scale production to factorybased mass production, which nevertheless came to be the order of most people’s lives. Still, what the example of the home office shows is that the value of technology in some part derives from the ends it serves, and if the advance of technology tends to serve ends that run counter to those that will readily be adopted by people at large, technological innovation can be imaginative and dynamic without being useful or valuable. In which case, it is simply costly.

There is, as I have observed, an assumption on the part of the Technophile that the value of technology is neutral. Technophiles tend to believe that the latest device is more efficient, but in so believing they assume that the value of some piece of technology is wholly derived from the purpose it serves; if new technology serves some such purpose better than that which it threatens to replace, then it is to be welcomed. This truth of this, if true it be, does not imply of course that every and any innovation is valuable. Only if we hold the further supposition that later is inevitably better, and hence that the latest is the best, could we justifiably draw this further inference. But, more fundamentally, the supposed neutrality of technology seems easy to refute. Consider in illustration of this the technology of transport. It is by now a commonplace that the building of better cars and better roads – freeways, Autobahnen or motorways – has a decided effect upon the demand for these things. It does so by influencing the ends to which they are put. New roads, which are intended to ease the flow of traffic and reduce journey times, almost always lead to greater traffic congestion and longer journey times. Why is this? The answer is not far to seek. Journeys which were less readily undertaken with less efficient cars and poorer roads, become (in prospect) less daunting if we have the use of better cars and roads. Accordingly many more people are willing to undertake them. But this fact itself induces a great increase in the number of motorists, which in turn undermines the very advantage which the technological advances promised. It is a salutary statistic that journey times in central London (and many other places) are now no better than they were one hundred years ago, and this despite the enormous technical advances in transport that have been made within that period.

Critical realism about technology

Doubts about the value of technological innovation are not without substance, therefore, and the examples which support them could be multiplied indefinitely. At the same time, it seems plain that setting one’s face against modern technology is, in a deep sense, to be at odds with reality. A devoted attachment to the quill pen and the oil lamp, so to speak, flies in the face of history, whatever the respective merits of these particular devices. If so, how are we to avoid the futility of Luddism and at the same time escape the ideology of technology? In a way this is the central question of this book, though its concerns are focused on information technology and in particular the dramatic innovation of the Internet or World Wide Web. The answer can only emerge from a critical examination of some of the conceptual and evaluative assumptions that underlie this new technology. In short, there is a crucial role here for the philosophy of technology and, as I hope to show, this is not a new discipline but the investigation of age-old philosophical questions in a new context.

Before the philosophy proper begins, however, we need to be reminded of some relatively simple facts. The first of these is that technological advances are, in a sense, self-undermining and this inevitably lends them a measure of transience. That is to say, the technological advances of one era generate the ideas and tendencies which come to replace them in the next. It is an outcome that is repeatedly found even in technological advances which are dramatic and widespread in their effect, a truth illustrated again and again in the history of technology. By and large we remember the successes, the things that made a difference. What all but the historians forget are the blind alleys and the total failures. However, just as easily forgotten is the relative transience of even the most influential technology. The United States (like many other parts of the world) was utterly transformed, economically, socially and politically, by the development of rail transport. The owners of railways became the most powerful people in the country, the great railway hubs grew to be centres of civic and commercial life. At one time the economic health of the country rose and fell in almost perfect line with the state of the railway...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Neo-Luddites versus Technophiles
• 2 The radically new and the merely novel: how transformative is the Internet?
• 3 The Faustian bargain: assessing the value of technology
• 4 The Internet as democracy
• 5 The Internet as anarchy
• 6 Policing the Internet
• 7 New communities
• 8 Virtual reality: the future of cyberspace
• Bibliography
• Index