Lewis Lapham on the Internet and the EFF [sent with permission of reviewer]

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Tue, 28 Dec 93 21:12:03 EST
From: Scott Bodarky <bodarky () TWIZ NCSL NIST GOV>


...
Lewis Lapham's column in the January '94 Harper's Magazine includes a
discussion of the Internet and the Electonic Frontier Foundation. I
think it is quite good.


I have culled some excerpts below.  I hope that some of the impact and
scope of the original will be preserved, and heartily exhort
acquisition of the actual magazine.


Enjoy...


[begin excerpts]


                             Notebook
                        Robber barons redux
                          by Lewis Lapham


...


[N]obody speaks more eloquently in favor of an open system than
Mitchell Kapor, who resigned the chairmanship of Lotus to set up the
Electronic Frontier Foundation.  The foundation promotes the hope of
cheap, easy, and equal access to a data highway constructed along the
lines of the Internet, the impromptu network of 1.3 million computers
in forty countries that allows roughly 30 million people to talk to
one another, read E-mail, post messages, download texts (from the
Library of Congress as well as from most university libraries), play
chess, conduct symposia, organize political rallies, tell jokes---all
without having to pay tolls, receive authorization, submit a financial
statement, or prove that they don't smoke.


Kapor construes the argument at hand as a variant of the
early-nineteenth-century argument between Thomas Jefferson and the
Federalists about the disposition of the western frontier, and in an
essay published last summer in Wired, he proposed the Internet as a
model of the democratic Eden, a public space held in common between
two or more linked computers in which individuals might communicate
with one another without fear of embarrassment or censure.  Just as
Jefferson defined the ownership of land as "a natural right" that
guaranteed the prosperity and self-reliance of the American farmer,
Kapor defines access to information as a natural right conferring the
same boons on any American citizen possessed of a computer, a modem,
and a password.  Proposing the image and analogy of a bountiful
wilderness, Kapor wrote, "Life in Cyberspace is often conducted in
primitive, frontier conditions.  But at its best, it is more
egalitarian than elitist, more decentralized than hierarchical.  It
serves individuals and communities, not mass audiences."


By temperament nonconformist and anticorporate, Kapor worked briefly
as a disc jockey and stand-up comic before stumbling across the
computer trades, and on reading his essay I thought of the fur
trappers in the Rocky Mountains in the late 1830s already beginning to
notice that the high country was becoming as crowded as Ohio and
looking with suspicion at the first wagon trains toiling west across
the Great Plains.  Like the early hackers in Cyberspace, the mountain
men delighted in the beauty and strangemess of a new land, and they
were loath to see it sold in sections convenient to the grazing of
sheep.


...[T]hrough the first half of the nineteenth century the adventurous
spirit of the new American nation showed itself most
characteristacally in the deeds and exploits of the wayward
individual---the fur trader, the prospector, the pioneer, the man or
woman looking to take a chance on a play of the light or a scent in
the wind.  By 1850 the mountain men had been reduced to serving as
scouts for the immigrant caravans (not unlike the hackers now yoked to
the harness of MicroSoft and IBM), and in the latter half of the
century the triumphs were those of the corporation---the mining
company, the railroad monopoly, the land trust, the stockholders
looking for a safe bet and a sure thing.


The story of the great American fortunes is largely the story of
well-arranged monpolies---in commodities as various as sugar and tin
and football players, and over lines of communication as various as
steamboats and pipelines.  Jefferson died bankrupt, and the fur trade
succumbed to the monopoly operating on the upper reaches of the
Missouri River under the direction of John Jacob Astor.  At Fort
Laramie in 1846 the traders selling goods to the westbound pilgrims
pegged the prices of coffee and nails at twenty times their cost in
St. Louis or Santa Fe.  By 1880 most of the land opened for settlement
under the Homestead Act had been acquired by speculators or distant
corporations (many of them owned by British capital), and the railroad
builders at work in the later years of the century measured the value
of wayward individuals at the prices paid for the shipment of their
coffins.


Although I can share Kapor's hope for a sweeter, greener world, I
don't find much reason to believe that the latter-day princes of the
fourth estate will act any differently from their nineteenth-century
forebears.  They dream of cornering a market, of the mass audiences
available to cable, not of free individuals speaking to one another on
the Internet.  Nor do I expect the government to advance the hopes of
democracy over the interests of oligarchy... [T]he trend in Washington
supports the principle of enriching the few at the expense of the
many.  Representative Frederick Boucher (D., Va.) already has proposed
legislation transferring the management of the Internet to corporate
interests, and the Clinton Administration has proposed selling to
private owners frequencies in the public-radio spectrum.  What, after
all, would the government want with a forum in which a significant
number of literate citizens might organize their politics in a manner
unflattering to the status quo?


Toward the end of his essay, Kapor hedged his fear of monopolies with
the reassuring thought that even the most dim-witted businessmen
surely must see the advantages of an open system, must see how the
freedom of mind leads, inevitably, to bigger markets and greater
prosperity.  His faith in the good sense, much less the humanist
compassion, of the prototypical American capitalist seems to me
farfetched, if for no other reason than it ignores the lessons taught
at every football stadium and baseball park in which the beer and
souvenir concessions plunder the fans like scythes moving through
wheat.  He would be better advised to place his trust in bankruptcy
and the press of events.


On this point the historical record is reassuring.  Most of the
nineteenth-century railroad ventures collapsed under the weight of
their own watered stock, and the promoters of the current media
speculations don't even enjoy the advantage of an indentured
audience. The farmers who relied on the railroads to ship their
freight had no choice but to pay what the traffic would bear or watch
their produce rot on a siding ten miles west of the nearest middleman,
but the market in images isn't as certain as the market in apricots or
hogs.  Even if the customers live in the same town, their proximity
doesn't guarantee a community of intellectual or spiritual interest.
Who can guess what they'll pay to watch?  The question is one that
cable operators tend to obscure, answering it whenever possible with a
good deal of talk about the wonders of their new technology and the
heartiness of their connections to the necessary politicians.  What
also was true of the nineteenth century was the breakneck speed of
technological change.  It took only twelve years to exhaust the fur
trade; the heyday of the Mississippi steamboat lasted fewer than ten
years; the moment of the overland stagecoach between St. Louis and San
Francisco, fewer than five.  The pony express came and went in the
space of eleven months.


Everything was over so soon, almost before anybody knew what to look
for or why they had come so far.  By the end of the century it was
understood that the capture of the American West had ended in both
victory and defeat.  Victory for the public parade of bustling
commerce that so efficiently turned so many things into property.
Defeat for the private expeditions that went in search of the soul's
oasis.  What remained is what still remains---the dreaming optimism of
the American mind, its delight in metaphor, and its wish to believe in
what isn't there.


[end excerpts]


 -Scott (bodarky () nist gov) | "Congress is not the sole
                           |  suppository of wisdom."
  The National Institute   |
 of Standards & Technology |    -Rep. Bill Schuette [R-MI]
                           |