< https://www.wired.com/story/tech-swagger-triggered-government-distrust/ >
How Tech Swagger Triggered the Era of Distrust in Government
Susan Crawford
10.11.18
Much of that early libertarian net culture -- white, rich, smart, and
full of "let's just geek around it" swagger when it came to government
-- has become mainstream in Western democracies in 2018. Central
Press/Getty Images
Last month, I heard Jill Lepore give a talk about These Truths, her
single-volume history of America from the 15th century through the 2016
presidential election. She got her biggest laugh when she made fun of
WIRED for predicting in 2000 that the internet would both lead to the
end of political division and be a place where government interference
would be senseless.
There are many famous WIRED moments that also fit this description,
including Jon Katz's assertion in 1997 that Netizens had nothing but
contempt for government, John Perry Barlow's 1996 Declaration of the
Independence of Cyberspace, or the Joshua Quittner profile of EFF in
1994 depicting Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder Mitchell Kapor
and the fabled Esther Dyson as people who "got it." Their goal was to
have the net be a wiring together of humanity that would restructure
civilization. The EFF would "find a way of preserving the ideology of
the '60s," Kapor told WIRED.
Much of that early libertarian net culture -- white, rich, smart, and
full of "let's just geek around it" swagger when it came to government
-- has become mainstream in Western democracies in 2018. Paradoxically,
that ideology came from a time when, in fact, government was doing a lot
for people.
Those baby boomers being profiled by WIRED had known only a United
States full of generous government support for education, a time of
continuous upward mobility, and an America that could carry out enormous
and inspiring public infrastructure projects -- including requiring that
phone companies permit competing internet service providers to use their
lines. The voices in WIRED were those of a very secure bunch of people.
And they were bored by it all; they saw government as a set of clueless,
bland bureaucracies. Who needed that?
As it turns out, we all did. Today, globally interconnected changes in
climate and widespread disdain for democratic institutions are the key
titanic, messy trends that are likely to begin producing shocking
results 25 years from now. At that point, with the globe dealing with
punishing heat and alarming levels of water, it won't be internet
technology that will be doing the disrupting. There are signs that the
internet will be fading from view as a distinctive “place” prompting
political and social changes. Indeed, if we keep to our current course,
communications capacity and what humans do online may be controlled by a
few highly profitable actors who will be uninterested in the
unpredictable. Given this context, there is a substantial risk that 25
years from now the breathlessly libertarian views trumpeted by WIRED's
early voices will have reached their unpleasant apotheosis.
I hope I am wrong.
Let's start with the weather. Techies are good at positive feedback
loops, and these days we're seeing one operating at global scale. As the
dynamics of air patterns change around the world in response to overall
warming, melting ice in the Arctic is having an effect on distant lands.
Weather is getting stuck in place, making both extreme dryness and
extreme downpours routine. It's a giant, resonating system of
ever-increasing cataclysmic change.
Susan Crawford (@scrawford) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED, a
professor at Harvard Law School, and author of Captive Audience: The
Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.
We humans are a resilient, cheerful group, so presumably we'll adapt.
But it is probably already too late to carry out the large-scale
planning that would have been necessary to move people comfortably and
gradually away from the coasts and change the economics of places that
are plunging into unending drought. Millions or billions of our fellow
less-well-off beings will be forced into climate refugee status.
What's particularly troubling is that even relatively rich countries may
be losing the capacity to plan ahead for all of their citizens. And
that's the second messy force that will affect the next 25 years:
increasing cynicism about the role of democratic government in people's
lives, particularly in Western Europe and the US.
Unless something changes, government at all levels will come to be
viewed as a thin, under-resourced platform whose purpose is to help
already-thriving people make even more money. The familiar drumbeat that
will get us there will include fewer people voting, increasing talk
about shrinking government, declining trust in most levels of
government, and outright, unabashed disdain for "bureaucrats." And so
authoritarianism may increasingly fill the void, with countries like
Hungary, Poland, and Brazil added in the years to come to a list that
now includes places like Cuba, Russia, and China.
Into this swirl of depressing global trends steps WIRED, the internet,
and those '60s-culture voices. It turns out the pixie dust of digital
did not remove the crushing economic and social truth that unrestrained
moneymaking leads to chaos and despair. But the larger public caught the
WIRED mystique and amplified the message of complete freedom from
old-fashioned governmental constraints -- not knowing that the message
had implicitly assumed the ongoing presence of a functioning public
sector. (For starters, absent government involvement and regulation --
that dreaded word -- the early net-heads would not have been able to use
an internet protocol that elegantly allowed computers to speak to each
other across heterogeneous networks.)
Take these trends to their extremes decades from now and you could have
a hollowed-out public sector, growing affection for essentially private
strongmen who might be able to protect your socioeconomic tribe from
searing heat and punishing storm surge, and an online world that has,
like electricity, faded into the background as a social change agent.
Not only will all generations be used to "digital" (at varying levels
depending on their wealth and location), but if we keep following the
Barlow rhetorical path, life online may not be all that that
interesting. Imagine a wholly oligopolistic, vertically integrated
online ecosystem focused on entertainment and advertising -- access to
which is subject to neither competition nor oversight -- and try to feel
creative.
After the two world wars and the Great Depression, Americans and the
citizens of every other developed country absolutely understood that it
simply is not true that the incentives of unrestrained private gain are
always aligned with or lead to public good. You would have been laughed
off the stage in the early '50s -- under a Republican president, by the
way -- if you'd said anything like that.
Nothing happens quickly, and we may still see a return to a more
balanced view of the role of government, particularly as rising waters
and changing weather dynamics disastrously change human lives. But for
now, and for the foreseeable future, we are increasingly on our own.
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