Net Loss: Internet Prophets, Private Profits, and the Costs to Community

Preface

Preface On Not Writing on Internet Time You hold in your hands an ancient document—at least by Internet standards. It is a relatively minor rewrite of a  manuscript published as my doctoral dissertation, whose research in turn was begun back in . The vagaries of life and traditional publishing timelines means that parts of what you are reading date back almost a decade. Which is a good thing. Too much of what passes for analysis of technology takes six-month-old trends, projects them twenty years into the future, and discovers that the world will be remade completely. What is ignored is that not only does technology on its own terms not evolve in linear fashion, but technology exists in the context of broader economic structures and policy decisions that can and are modified in response to that technology. Hopefully, if this book’s basic analysis has survived and is still compelling after the past four years of turmoil in the technology world, it may maintain its relevance into the future. One message of this book is that technology eludes easy prediction based on short-term deterministic trends. Technology is not destiny, either positive or negative, but its fate and its effects are based on contingency and collective decisions by society. This book places the evolution of the Internet and Silicon Valley in a much broader history dating back decades and even back centuries. It also situates the technology in the broader economic forces of the ‘‘old economy’’ and of the government policies that birthed the Internet, pointing to realities of which many technologists are in almost pathological denial. This is not done to claim some deeper predictive power based on a broader vision, but to challenge the easy assumption that any writer can second-guess the future, since the future can be changed. I have my proud two-bit Nostraxiii xiv Preface damus predictions from that first version four years ago, including my general expectation of the coming technology bust and my specific prediction of utility blackouts following the Internet-driven deregulation of energy markets. (For those interested in such predictions or the general evolution of the work, check out http://www.nathannewman.org/diss/index.html for the original draft.) But even the conditions that made those events likely are being rapidly altered as new political and social decisions are made. Just in the past six months, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Enron scandal have inspired social reactions that will have far-reaching and unpredicted and unpredictable effects on everything from the movements organizing around global justice to the shape of Internet security protocols to the structure of America’s regulatory regime. Predictions in such a rapidly changing world are a fool’s game. However, a healthy respect for contingency does not mean that social analysis is useless; quite the contrary. But the point of good social analysis is not to predict the future, but rather to give people the tools to participate in changing it. Soothsaying essentially brings readers to the world as the audience of a spectator sport; social criticism invites them into active participatory action to improve that world. The goal of this work is to encourage the latter and it is dedicated to the community activists, labor organizers and social visionaries seeking to channel these technological changes into bringing about a more just world. In writing this book, I owe a debt of gratitude to a wide range of people, who in conversation and in their writings inspired its creation. Many of them are acknowledged in the footnotes, whether through books and articles they wrote or from the interviews I conducted with a range of business executives, union organizers, government officials, and community leaders. There are no doubt numerous others who in conversation or writing influenced me over the years. I do want to say a good word for journalists, who often get little respect from academic writers (at least until they are dead, whereupon they may be elevated to the higher plane of ‘‘primary source’’). One side effect of the technology boom was a flourishing subculture of technology journalists who lived and breathed the environment of the emerging Internet world. They no doubt helped promote many of the public misunderstandings of that world—and fed the financial bubble of the s—but within that group were some admirable social analysts whose deep firsthand knowledge was invaluable in any attempt to write a wide-ranging synthetic...