The new politics of technology in the US. from T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V

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

  The new politics of technology in the US.


  It's time for people engaged in technology activism on the net,
  at least within the United States, to realize that they're really
  a coalition of two groups with different underlying philosophies,
  progressives and libertarians.  These two groups are not
  homogenous or precisely defined, of course, but the growing
  depth of ideological commitments among a variety of people
  on the right has introduced a lot of frictions that should be
  openly discussed.  For example, at the most recent Conference on
  Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in Chicago, I saw several liberal
  speakers unnecessarily piss off the libertarians in the audience
  by presupposing that everyone in the audience agreed with their
  own agenda, vocabulary, and values.  The point isn't that the
  two sides should agree about everything, since that won't happen.
  The point is that they should work together when they can through
  a conscious coalition, and then only disagree when they can't.


  Both groups, as I say, embrace a fair amount of diversity.  The
  term "progressive" has enjoyed a new life in American politics
  in the last few years, both because the right has thrown such
  scorn upon "liberals" and as a reflection of the diversity of
  the American left which was masked during the period of liberal
  ascendancy in Washington.  The progressive movement includes the
  liberals, a largely middle-class movement with largely patrician
  leadership, whose agenda focuses on the redistribution programs
  and consumer and environmental regulations that arose in the
  1960's and 1970's.  It also includes a range of socialist views,
  mostly democratic in nature, and a wide variety of populist
  social movements from the labor movement to the community-based
  environmental justice movement.  It also may or may not include
  the "communitarians", many of whose sentiments are found in the
  community networking movement.  What unites these movements is
  the notion of political empowerment -- the idea that people's
  interests lay in organizing themselves into specifically
  political movements for redress of social grievances, whatever
  their particular grievances might be.  Although it is hard to
  remember this now, the liberal Great Society programs at their
  peak included extensive funding for actual community organizing
  activities, a picture quite at odds with the right's caricature
  of passive victims lining up for handouts.


  Libertarians are also diverse.  Many of them are part of the
  still dominant wing of the Republican party.  But many others
  think of themselves as a third force in American politics,
  distinct from both the established parties.  (A handful of them,
  having taken etiquette lessons from Rush Limbaugh, have engaged
  in nasty and unscrupulous on-line red-baiting of organizations
  such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  But I'm talking
  about the majority of decent, honorable ones.)  The central
  concept of libertarianism (and, again, I am referring to the
  American usage of the term, which differs from that in most
  other countries) is, of course, liberty -- a "liberty" conceived
  in relation to the government.  Libertarians tend to be strong
  individualists who insist on their right to be left alone,
  although libertarian intellectuals are starting to emphasize
  voluntary associations whose role in society, they believe, was
  displaced by the rise of the welfare state.


  The technological issue upon which progressives and libertarians
  have worked together most harmoniously has been privacy.  Each
  movement has its own pictures of oppressive invasions of personal
  space that might be facilitated by technology.  This alliance is
  particularly natural when the possible invasions of privacy come
  from the government, given progressives' collective memories of
  government-sponsored pogroms against the left and libertarians'
  generalized opposition to state power.  The Clipper chip has
  been a tremendously productive issue in this regard, since it
  provides an extremely unusual alliance of everybody from the
  ACLU to the captains of industry.  It is not normal for industry
  to be so clearly aligned against the preferences of the national
  security state, and privacy activists should enjoy this while it
  lasts.


  What is surprising is how well the libertarian and progressive
  sections of the privacy movement get along when it comes to
  invasions of privacy by private organizations such as marketing
  firms.  After all, a thoroughgoing libertarian should oppose
  government regulation of private entities and should not be
  disposed to regret invasions of privacy by such entities,
  except insofar as these invasions result from government actions
  such as the sale of public records.  Yet many libertarians, in
  my experience, are really driven by an intuitive desire to be
  left alone and by an intuitive opposition to large, established
  authority, whether or not that authority is part of the state.


  Although such views may seem contradictory, they are more natural
  in the context of a larger view of technology and its place in
  society that has been growing among the constituency of things
  like Wired magazine.  The focus here is on decentralization
  and markets.  Computer networks, it is held, are instruments
  of liberty that allow people to communicate laterally, thereby
  breaking down the hierarchies of governments and corporations
  alike.  The resulting vision is actually similar to that of Adam
  Smith, who thought of the market as a vast network of artisans
  and entrepreneurs and who had little or no inkling of the large,
  bureaucratic corporation.  Highly exaggerated tales about the
  role of computer networks in the democracy movements in Russia
  and China have become part of the folklore of this movement, and
  a pervasive confusion has arisen between decentralized forms of
  organization and decentralized distribution of power.  The actual
  evidence, such as it is, points largely in the other direction:
  computer networks decentralize organization (in the sense of
  operational decision-making) while simultaneously increasing the
  power of corporate central management.


  Be this as it may, little purpose is served by ignoring the
  considerable philosophical differences that underlie coalitions
  about issues like the Clipper chip.  Indeed, exploration of these
  differences will be important in extending political cooperation
  to new realms, for example in building the community networking
  movement, which will someday become big enough to have political
  enemies who seek to stifle or digest it through regulation,
  most likely under the guise of deregulation.  On the other
  hand, new conflict will most likely arise as each side explores
  and develops its particular model for organizing people around
  technology issues.  Whereas each side has its own concept of
  self-help and cooperative work, they have different ideas of the
  purpose of such activities.  For libertarians they are ends in
  themselves, understood as ordinary expressions of liberty within
  a framework of markets.  For progressives, by contrast, they are
  a prelude to political organizing; in particular, they provide
  the experience in successful joint action and the skills of
  organizing that are required to get a political movement going.


  In this regard, I think it is valuable to investigate the often
  tacit politics of a wide variety of emergent movements around
  technology.  I have mentioned the community networking movement,
  which has extraordinary potential as both a political movement
  in its own right and as an infrastructure for democratic activity
  more generally.  Another movement is the world of discourse
  in MUD's and IRC and the like, in which individual and group
  identities are explored and reconfigured on a daily basis in
  incorporeal "places" and "spaces" whose construction routinely
  encodes elaborate commentaries upon the places and spaces of the
  rest of social life.  Yet another is the explosion of affinity
  groups organized around mailing lists, from people living with
  a common illness to people sharing a particular professional
  speciality.


  What, in political terms, are these people doing?  They often
  do not conceive of themselves as engaging in a specifically
  political movement, but that's alright.  As emergent forms
  of group activity and social imagination, they are inherently
  political at some level, in some way.  Most likely they are
  internally diverse, in which case we can set about articulating
  points of agreement and disagreement, shaping agendas that afford
  shared action, and get about the hard work of building democracy.