Fight the Steamroller, or Lie Down in Front of It?
When Congress overwhelmingly passed the Communications Decency Act last year, many horrified observers assumed it was just cynical politicians winning cheap support by voting against pornography. Surely the law would be found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, as it was last month.
But another view is that Congress was expressing the overwhelming desire of the majority of Americans who actually do want to limit children’s access to porn and other vile material on the Internet.
Parents, and even people without children, are alarmed by trends in society that suggest “anything goes” in the communication of images and ideas. And many people are annoyed by the need to buy even more technological products, like filtering software or V-chips, to curtail what some regard as “info-sewage.”
Such people quite understandably ask when we’ll decide that “enough is enough.” (A pro-CDA organization, led by Donna Rice Hughes--briefly famous for her liaison with former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart--is called Enough Is Enough.)
These feelings are not going to go away, and they are likely to intensify as new technological developments continue to threaten basic values such as privacy, security, and community and personal autonomy. Everyone knows that there is a widespread feeling that technological innovation is eroding our sense of being in control of our lives.
Even Bill Gates concedes, as he did in a speech at the National Educational Computing Conference two weeks ago, “This rate of change is scary, but it’s not something we can vote on to stop.”
In the aftermath of the CDA decision, we’re left with a troubling question: Just how do we control and shape technology?
“Technology out of control” is an old theme in our culture, stretching back at least to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” a novel of tragedy and warning published in 1818. The Frankenstein story, still popular throughout the world, is a cautionary tale about the dangers of experimenting with technologies we don’t fully understand.
Another opinion, however, is that “out of control” is a new and rewarding way of life. Kevin Kelly, author of the 1994 book “Out of Control,” argues that technological and social systems are now so complicated that the enlightenment ethos of controlling life through rational policy is outmoded and obsolete.
Kelly believes that the only way to think about how systems develop now is by using biological metaphors, particularly evolution. Systems like the Internet, says Kelly, are under no one’s control, but instead evolve through the complex interactions of millions of components, such as users and their technologies.
The implication is that policymaking, and indeed even norms and values, are anachronisms. Discussion about the “good life,” or what we want from our society, is hopelessly out of touch. The only appropriate response is to surrender our desire for control.
Langdon Winner, professor of science and technology studies at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute and author of the book “Autonomous Technology,” says that recent trends have in fact revealed “a deep desire not to have any control over emerging technologies.”
Kelly is executive editor of Wired magazine, an influential publication among young cyberphiles and one with a distinct ideology that its editors correctly label as countercultural. Wired and its readers were among the most vocal opponents of the CDA.
The conflict that’s central to the counterculture of the wired generation is whether we’re going to assert control over technologies or whether we’re going to surrender control to whatever innovation delivers. As Kelly’s colleague and mentor Stewart Brand once put it, “Either you’re on the steamroller or you’re part of the road.”
Here’s a rebuttal, from Henry David Thoreau: “All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end.”
This is the fundamental debate we’re facing after the Supreme Court’s ruling on the CDA. If Kelly’s countercultural ideology prevails, then policymaking for the Internet, or for any technological system, is pointless. But that ideology slams head-on into many of the basic values of Americans, who are increasingly uncomfortable with some of the things technology is imposing upon us.
The immediate question is whether we’ll develop tools to shape technology to the way we want to live our lives, or whether we’ll dismantle what tools we have and turn our fate over to the “techno-logic” of value-free systems.
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Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu
