"That Deep Romantic Chasm": Libertarianism, Neoliberalism, and the
Computer Cultureé.
Nelson's vision, in contrast, is rooted in a romantic, not utilitarian,
form of individualism. He was not envisioning himself as simply a
pragmatic, self-interested businessman. He never mentioned markets,
profitability, or business incentives. His writings bespeak a passion for
inquiry and experimentation for their own sake, and a disdain for
traditional business practices and shallow economic self-interest. And, in
any case, by most accounts his major efforts to launch or participate in
business ventures have been disasters (Wolf, 1995, p. 137).
The romantic character of Nelson's individualism is most evident in his
proposals for a hypertext system called Xanadu, which helped inspire the
World Wide Web and which, appropriately enough, is named after the exotic
"pleasure palace" in Coleridge's opium-induced poem Kubla Khan. Xanadu was
described in Computer Lib and has apparently been Nelson's life's
work ever since; as of this writing, after one major failed attempt to
develop the system under a corporate umbrella, a small group in Australia
seems to be carrying the flame for the project (Nelson, 1997a).
Xanadu, according to Nelson, is supposed to be a computer-based system of
"connected literature" that's easily accessible worldwide, much like
today's World Wide Web. But with an important difference: "the system,"
Nelson says, "must guarantee that the owner of any information will be
paid their chosen royalties on any portions of their documents, no matter
how small, whenever they are most used" (Nelson, 1997b). Nelson thus has
always been opposed to those, like Richard Stallman, who argue that
computer software should be freely distributed (Nelson, 1974b, p. 158).8
His argument is on the surface a recapitulation of the (highly
questionable) common sense of intellectual property law in the US:
"[C]opyright," he argues, "makes publishing, and the better computer
software, possible" (Nelson, 1974a, p. 3).
It's crucial, however, that Nelson's desire to uphold an intellectual
property system seems to have been, not fostering an industry, but a
certain vision of fairness: "You publish something, anyone can use it, you
always get a royalty automatically. Fair." The vision is of an isolated,
"free" individual who communicates without the mediation of publishers,
libraries, or educational institutions. This economic fairness, moreover,
is of a piece with intellectual fairness: "You can create new published
documents out of old ones indefinitely, making whatever changes seem
appropriate -- without damaging the originals. This means a whole new
pluralistic publishing form. If anything which is already published can be
included in anything newly published, any new viewpoint can be fairly
presented" (Nelson, 1983, chap. 2, p. 38). With Xanadu, each individual
contribution to the system is perfectly preserved and perfectly rewarded:
the computer system itself is supposed to prevent the possibility of
unattributed theft of ideas because each "quotation" is preserved by an
unalterable link that not only allows readers to instantly call up
intellectual sources but that also ensures direct payment for each "use."9
It's a vision of a mathematically perfect property system, of Lockean
abstractions made manifest by computer technology.
By standard measures, Nelson's career has been a checkered one on the
margins of the same commercial and educational computing communities that
have been so deeply influenced by his ideas. With that in mind, there's
something poignant about his vision: it's the vision of an outsider, never
entirely secure or well-rewarded by institutions -- who's never been
treated "fairly" -- who imagines a utopia in which those "unfair"
institutions are supplanted altogether by communities of free individuals
working at computer consoles. It's a utopia where there are no arbitrary
powers like IBM's monopoly or arbitrarily powerful authorities with
careers built on glad-handing or hot air; a utopia where no tenured
journal editors can prevent one's article from reaching publication, and
no short-sighted corporate executive can arbitrarily deep-six a beloved
project on behalf of cost-cutting. Nor can any of these people claim an
underling's idea as their own.
By most accounts (though not by Nelson's), Xanadu itself has been a
failure; it's the mother of all vaporware. Nelson's writings for the last
quarter century are full of unfulfilled predictions of the system's
imminent completion and publication; to this day Nelson insists that a
viable working system is just around the corner (Nelson, 1997a). Wired
magazine published a lengthy history of Xanadu, titled "A Hacker Tragedy,"
which depicted the effort as a Quixotic and fundamentally impractical
effort driven more by neurosis than by programming ability or vision
(Wolf, 1995). While I am not competent to evaluate the specifics of the
software (which in any case remain largely proprietary), I'd hazard a
guess that part of the impossibility of the effort may be of a piece with
Nelson's vision of property. The logarithmically increasing demands on
computing resource that such a perfect system would demand (each
alteration recorded, each reading generating compensation for each author,
a complete record or all such transactions accessible to all throughout
the system) may have been its technological Waterloo; in conventional
economic language, the system would probably drown in its own "transaction
costs."
The tragic impossibility of Xanadu may be of a piece with the dream that
motivates it: a dream of community unmediated by the complex burdens of
history and institutions, of individual creativity without the ties of
social context. What's missing from Nelson's view of the world, of course,
is a sense of the determining character of history, politics, and social
complexity; his dream, in fact, is precisely to overcome the arbitrary
hierarchies and messy interconnectedness of our imperfect world, not by
struggling with that interconnectedness but by escaping from it into the
computer screen. That's why, in all the countless computer utopias we've
seen depicted over the last fifteen years, no one changes any diapers. In
Nelson's visions of cyberspace, as in so many others, there's no
particular sense of people eating, growing food, getting old or sick, or
building roads, houses and factories. There's generally an absence of,
even a disdain for, bodies: actual human bodies are often cavalierly
dismissed as mere "meat" in net culture, and the real world described as
"meat space" (Dery, 1997).
The entire transaction cost problem in neoclassical economic theory is
itself an effort to account for economic "externalities"; all that messy
political and social stuff that doesn't fit the conventional economic
models of isolated individuals competing in a marketplace. In Nelson's
computer utopia, as in most such visions, there's little sense of any of
the constitutive character of even the most immediate of those
"externalities": the expensive educational systems and the massive
government funding of science and defense that provided the context for
all the computer-oriented experimentation, speculation, and reflection
like Nelson's. The fact that computer experts are overwhelmingly
well-educated middle and upper class white males working in cozy research
campuses of universities and corporations is studiously ignored. The
social conditions that formed the background conditions for the computer
culture and its accomplishments of the `70s and `80s -- patriarchy, class
relations, the wide availability of higher education in the `50s and `60s
through government programs like the GI bill -- are rendered invisible.
The oft-told story of Bill Gates learning about computers in high school
and then dropping out of Harvard to found Microsoft is treated as an
example of classic entrepreneurial pluck, as if Gates were some modern day
Robinson Crusoe operating in isolation from social support; the profound
difference in social power available to the young man from a wealthy
family who drops out of Harvard compared to, say, one who drops out of an
inner city high school, or to a woman who drops out of college to have a
baby, disappears from the computer libertarian scenarios. The expensive
computer that Gates learned on in high school is treated like a fact of
nature, not the product of the well-funded school system of the type
increasingly available only to the privileged.
LAW AS COMPUTER CODE: THE FANTASY OF ESCAPE FROM
HISTORY INTO THE COMPUTER SCREEN
The means by which the eventual marriage of the computer counterculture's
libertarianism with today's conservative movement were accomplished are
well illustrated by Stewart Brand's (1987) celebratory book about MIT's
Media Lab. Brand opens with an epigraph that dedicates the book to the
"drafters and defenders of the First Amendment" and that describes the
Amendment as "Elegant code by witty programmers." Here in a nutshell are
the characteristic tropes of the computer culture: wry wit, iconoclasm,
and a breathtakingly naive denial of history and social process. For as
any legal historian and most lawyers know, the First Amendment, whatever
its merits, is not at all like computer code. It has never functioned with
the automatic, mechanical certainty of a computer program. Its
contemporary meanings in American law are barely half a century old; in
the nineteenth century, for example, it was frequently interpreted to mean
that censorship was discouraged at the federal level, but completely
legitimate at the local and state levels. A computer program executes
itself in the same way each time, regardless of who is operating the
computer; a legal principle, in contrast, is interpreted differently
depending on its social and historical context. The current strong
interpretation of the First Amendment in the U.S. is a political
accomplishment, a result of complex social and ideological struggles, not
a result of feeding the Bill of Rights into a neutral legal machine
(Kairys, 1990; Streeter, 1995).
Yet the fantasy that laws do work that way is a key commonality between
the current rising conservative tide and the otherwise disparate computer
culture. A radical distinction between law and politics is central to the
libertarian faith; law, the theory goes, underpins a system of individual
liberties neutrally and mechanically, whereas government involves the
arbitrary and subjective political interference with those rights. Clever
and elegant legal codes by witty legal programmers allow us to be
self-interested, unattached, free individuals, monads in a marketplace,
whereas government coerces us into repressive collectives. That's why
conservatives can imagine there's no contradiction between their frequent
calls for law and order and their criticisms of government intrusion into
our lives. The fantasy that law works like a computer code, in sum,
undergirds the denial of history, social structure, and political struggle
that is central to the libertarian faith in markets, at least in its more
naive forms. The habits of thought that metamorphosed from sixties
countercultural social libertarianism into technology-based economic
libertarianism, and eventually lent credibility to today's dominant
neoliberalism, thus rely on a metaphorical interfusion of law with
computers, in which each is imagined to function like the other.
Ted Nelson's faith in the ahistorical formalist understanding of law
becomes clear when he defends his insistence on copyright protection: I've
heard . . . arguments, like `Copyright means getting the lawyers
involved.' This has it approximately backwards. The law is ALWAYS
involved; it is CLEAN ARRANGEMENTS of law that keep the lawyers away. . .
. If the rights are clear and exact, they are less likely to get stepped
on, and it takes less to straighten matters out if they are. Believe it or
not, lawyers LIKE clean arrangements. `Hard cases make bad law,' goes the
saying (Nelson, 1997b). Most of those familiar with the historical details
of intellectual property law would probably be more than a little
skeptical of the idea that intellectual property can be rendered into such
"clean arrangements." Based as it is on such nebulous notions as
"originality" and the distinction between an idea and its expression,
intellectual property is a famously shifting and murky area of the law,
replete with qualifying complications like fair use, copyright
collectives, and compulsory licensing. Intellectual property is a classic
example of a form of property where, as one famous essay on property law
put it, "crystals turn to mud" (Rose, 1988). With Xanadu, of
course, Nelson promises a technological fix to all this murkiness. But
historical experience and a little common sense would suggest that the fit
between technologies and intellectual property has only grown murkier as
technologies have grown more sophisticated. The internet and the World
Wide Web in particular, though they do embody much of Nelson's utopian
fantasy, blur rather than clarify the boundaries of authorship and
intellectual property that were central to his vision; it's easier than
ever before to copy someone else's work without attribution, and
uncertainty in the realm of intellectual property is one of the major
legal and policy issues of the day.
Both the passionate attachment to the formalist vision of law and its
naiveté became abundantly clear when Congress added the porn-prohibiting
Communications Decency Act to the `96 Telecommunications Act, and the
computer culture flew into a libertarian high dudgeon over the CDA.
Computer pundit Brock Meeks, for example, flooded the internet with
outraged diatribes, frequently repeating the query "Which part of NO LAW
don't you understand?" -- as if no one could read the amendment and
interpret it differently. (The fact that for 150 years the best trained
jurists in the land did read the First Amendment quite differently
seemed to have escaped Meeks' consciousness.) Similarly, the EFF's John
Perry Barlow distributed an outraged "Declaration of Independence of
Cyberspace," as if the CDA were the last straw that would precipitate a
popular rebellion against governments world wide. As the First Amendment
is a favorite topic of reporters, the flap over the CDA became the primary
focus of press coverage of the `96 Act, the only element of the Act that
had any controversy associated with it.
In fact, the CDA takes up less than a page of the nearly 100-page act,
and was correctly understood by many at the outset as unenforceable and
unconstitutional. The bulk of the Act, by contrast, is a rather typical
piece of corporate welfare, handing out various favors to corporate
interests while creating some behavioral ground rules that provide
industry overall with stability and protection from cutthroat competition
during a period of organizational and technological change. The key
progressive component of the Act, one with important implications for
fostering the open, public debate that is the goal of free speech law, was
arguably the creation of a universal service fund for schools and
libraries. Yet all this was accomplished by elaborate inside-the-beltway
maneuvering, and even the universal service issue escaped any widespread
public debate, even on the internet. In retrospect, it seems probable that
the computer culture's loud objections to the CDA, rather than promoting
the cause of freedom, in fact served to deflect attention from the much
more important, and in the long term, more freedom-restricting
pro-corporate components of the `96 Act. One of the more enduring legacies
of computer libertarianism may be the way it served to distract attention
from the core of the `96 Act, thus ensuring its easy passage.
CONCLUSION
There's much of value in the computer culture and its legacy. It's
important that people like Ted Nelson were more right about the future of
computers than the bulk of the managers who controlled decision making in
the electronics industry; the computer culture was on to something. And
its success has helped keep alive a respect for iconoclasm. While I think
the dominant impact of Wired was conservative and co-optive, it's
intriguing that, for a few years during the height of its popularity,
business managers across the land were thumbing through a magazine that
would routinely include observations like, "One of the dirty secrets of
capitalism is that the harder you work the less you get paid."
The most important lesson of the computer counterculture is that the
dramatic success of the internet, of small computers, of
user-friendliness, of open systems, and of hypermedia are evidence of a
widespread desire for connection and cooperation in a context free of the
private and public hierarchies that so often dominate our lives. Unlike
the standard conservative marketplace fables in which we're told that all
will be well if we dedicate ourselves to the selfish, calculating pursuit
of the profit motive, computer utopians like Ted Nelson and Stewart Brand
celebrate pleasures of unrestricted communication, of connection
with others, pleasures that are both aesthetically and intellectually
creative and social and that cannot be reduced to the calculating
self-interest of homo economicus. Nelson's vision of computers was
always one in which computers are interlinked and used creatively in
liberatory ways, in which they are a tool for social interaction, not
merely tools for controlling people and machines in the name of enhancing
the efficiency of profit-driven enterprises. Ted Nelson may have been an
outlier, but he spoke to real resentments and dissatisfaction with the
hierarchical worlds of managers and bureaucrats that characterize so much
of modern life.
As a political formula, the romantic libertarianism that the computer
culture offers as an alternative is as powerful as it is wrong-headed.
True, in the hands of political hacks like George Gilder, the formula may
be just an after-the-fact rhetorical trick to justify broader conservative
social policies. But what the cases of Theodor Nelson or Stewart Brand
suggest is that, for many, the formula can be deeply compelling. In a
warped way, it articulates genuine dissatisfaction with existing power
structures and genuine desires for forms of social life that are less
hierarchical and more liberating than those offered by the current
corporate-dominated welfare/warfare state.
Any politically progressive use of the insights, styles, and
dissatisfactions that gave birth to the computer culture would have to
bring out its hidden histories and social constituents. One of the
liabilities of the colloquial, accessible writing style of the computer
culture is that it obscures intellectual legacies and context; you have to
read Gregory Bateson very carefully to notice his debts to Freud and
social and anthropological theory. It needs to be made clear that the
pleasant anarchy of the internet is not the just the product of an absence
of control, but that it was built upon a foundation of support from
nonprofit research universities and their costly and fragile culture of
open intellectual exploration. The inanities of corporate managerialism
that are so deftly criticized by both Ted Nelson and Dilbert need to be
put in the historical context of the modern corporate form of organization
and its supports in the legal system such as the fiction of the corporate
individual.
More abstractly, I think a compelling alternative form of individualism
needs to be developed. Nelson's dream of freedom in computer screens in
practice devolves into a desire for disconnection, freedom from
relations with others through illusions like legal neutrality or the
"technical fix" of the computer itself. This articulates with the
conventional conservative notion of freedom as purely negative, as freedom
from , not freedom to. And like that conventional
conservative idea of freedom, it too easily works to support the corporate
hierarchies it imagines it will overthrow. For a certain kind of person
(mostly white, mostly male, mostly educated and middle- and upper-middle
class), playing with a computer in fact feels like an escape into
another world, into a kind of freedom. Computer obsession bespeaks, I
think, a fear of the political, of interconnectedness, a distorted wish to
escape the unpredictability and unknowability of relations with others
that comes from being social creatures. That obsession is understandable,
perhaps, given the limitations of contemporary life; but it's a shallow
and ultimately illusory form of freedom. Over the long term, any
successful left politics will have to address the genuine dissatisfactions
and desires that make the computer seem like a form of freedom, like an
escape, but it must do so in a way that leads beyond them in the direction
of something more situated: a mature version of freedom.
REFERENCES
Anderson, J. (1984, November), "Dave Tells Ahl -- The History of Creative
Computing," Creative Computing, Vol. 10, No. 11, pp. 67-74.
Barbrook, R. and Cameron, A., (1996) `The Californian Ideology,'
http://www.wmin.ac.uk/media/HRC/ci/calif5.html.
Bateson, G. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York:
Ballantine Books.
Brand, S. (1987), The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, New
York: Viking Penguin.
Dery, M. (1997, September 28) "The Cult of the Mind," New York Times
Magazine, pp. 94-96.
Frank, T. (1997) The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture,
Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press.
Cringely, R. X. (1996) Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon
Valley Make their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't
Get a Date 2nd edition, New York: HarperBusiness.
Horwitz, R. (1989)The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of
American Telecommunications, New York: Oxford University Press.
Kairys, D. (1990) "Freedom of Speech," in Kairys, D. (ed.), The
Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique (Revised Edition), New York:
Pantheon, 1990, pp. 237-272.
Kleiner, A. (1986), "A History of Coevolution Quarterly," in Art Kleiner
and Stewart Brand (eds.). News that Stayed News: Ten Years of
Coevolution Quarterly 1974-1984, San Francisco: North Point Press.
Nelson, T. (1974a), Computer Lib. (Flip side of Dream Machines),
self-published
Nelson, T. (1974b), Dream Machines. (Flip side of Computer Lib),
self-published.
Nelson, T. (1983) Literary Machines, fifth edition (first edition
1981), self-published.
Nelson, T. (1987) Computer Lib/Dream Machines (revised edition),
Redmond Washington: Tempus Books of Microsoft Press.
Nelson, T. (1997a), "The Xanadu Australia web page"
http://www.xanadu.net/the.project/.
Nelson, T. (1997b), www.hyperstand.com/Sound/Ted_Report2.html.
Rose, C. (1988, February) "Crystals and Mud in Property Law," Stanford
Law Review, Vol. 40, pp. 577-610.
Streeter, T. (1995),"Some Thoughts on Free Speech, Language, and the Rule
of Law,"in Robert Jensen and David S. Allen (eds.), Freeing the First
Amendment: Critical Perspectives on Freedom of Expression, New York
University Press, pp. 31-53.
Streeter, T. (1996) Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of
Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press.
Williams, R. (1961), The Long Revolution, Westport, Connecticut:
Greenwood Press.
Wolf, G. (June, 1995) "The Curse of Xanadu," Wired 3.06. [1]The
political full-circle of Brand and his cohort can be seen in the fact
that, while in 1969 arch Viet Nam war-supporter Ithiel de Sola Poole and
Brand were on opposite sides of the barricades, by 1987 Brand was
explictly basing his political analysis on de Sola Poole's Technologies
of Freedom (Brand, 1987, p. 214).
[2]Stewart Brand set out to create a Whole
Earth Software Catalog and a Software Review in the summer
of 1983. Editors for these projects were offered salaries competitive with
other computer-writing jobs, and the policy of equal-pay-for-all-staffers
that had been in place at CQ since 1976 came to an end. The same year, CQ
raised its subscription prices without, as had been done in the past,
discussing it or mentioning it in the magazine. In the fall of 1984, the Whole
Earth Software Review and Coevolution Quarterly were
combined and the joint publication was named Whole Earth Review.
See Art Kleiner, "A History of Coevolution Quarterly," pp. 336-337.
[3]Computer Lib resists
conventional citation. It has two "halves," printed back-to-back in the
same volume with each half inverted to the other, so that it essentially
has two front covers, one titled Computer Lib and the flip side
titled Dream Machines: New Freedoms Through Computer Screens. As
each half has separate page numbers, citations below will refer to page
numbers in Computer Lib or Dream Machines, as appropriate.
The copy used here is described as the First Edition, "NINTH PRINTING,
Sept. 1983," and thus, though the copyright listed on both first pages is
1974, a description of events of 1975 like the appearance of the MITS
Altair are described, and in Nelson's own biography on page 3 of Computer
Lib he describes activities through 1977. A heavily revised and
re-typeset edition was published in 1987 by Tempus Books of Microsoft
Press; as some of the more interesting historical material was removed in
this revision, citations below are to the First Edition unless otherwise
noted.
[4]Dream Machines, p. "X" (the
second page of a lettered, unnumbered "Special Supplement to the Third
Printing, August 1975" that starts Dream Machines.) The passage
predicts that Xerox PARC's innovations -- those that would lead to the
creation of the Macintosh less than a decade later -- will lead Xerox to
dominate the computer field. But are concluded with the following
prescient paranthetical statement: "The above predictions are based, of
course, on the assumption of Xerox management knowing what it's doing.
Assumptions of this type in the computer field all too often turn out to
be without basis. But we can hope."
[5]In one of many prescient passages,
Nelson critiques a June 30, 1975 Business Week article on "The
Office of the Future," which predicts computerized offices staffed by
centrally located, specially trained word processing technicians, and that
the only companies that will succeed in this field will be IBM and Xerox.
Nelson goes on: "Well, this is hogwash. . . . The office of the future, in
the opinion of the author, will have nothing to do with the silly
complexities of automatic typing. It will have screens, and keyboards, and
possibly a printer for outgoing letters . . . All your business
information will be callable to the screen instantly. An all-embracing
data structure will hold every form of information -- numerical and
textual -- in a cats'-cradle of linkages; and you, the user, whatever your
job title, may quickly rove your screen through the entire
information-space you are entitled to see. You will have to do no
programming." (Dream Machines, p. "X.")
[6]Robert Hobbes Zakon's "Hobbes Internet
Timeline v3.1"
(http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html) attributes
the first use of the term "web surfing" to Jean Armour Polly in 1992.
7Lest there be any doubt that Nelson was familiar with the Catalog,
on Dream Machines, p. 3, he writes "of course I'm blatantly
imitating, in a way, the wonderful Whole Earth Catalog of Stewart
Brand." He also cites the Domebook, a popular instruction manual
on geodesic domes, as inspiration. And on p. 69, Computer Lib
visually quotes The Whole Earth Catalog's cover (and most famous
image) with a full page computer-generated image of earth from space,
captioned "The Hole Earth Catalog."
8These ideas are more explicitly elaborated in Nelson's
self-published Literary Machines, fifth edition published 1983
(first edition 1981) Chapter 2, pp. 35-38. (Each chapter has separate page
numbers.)
9The Xanadu Australia web page
(http://www.xanadu.net/the.project/) describes the project thusly: "We
need a way for people to store information not as individual "files" but
as a connected literature. It must be possible to create, access and
manipulate this literature of richly formatted and connected information
cheaply, reliably and securely from anywhere in the world. Documents must
remain accessible indefinitely, safe from any kind of loss, damage,
modification, censorship or removal except by the owner. It must be
impossible to falsify ownership or track individual readers of any
document. This system of literature (the "Xanadu Docuverse") must allow
people to create virtual copies ("transclusions") of any existing
collection of information in the system regardless of ownership. In order
to make this possible, the system must guarantee that the owner of any
information will be paid their chosen royalties on any portions of their
documents, no matter how small, whenever and wherever they are used."