The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World

by Nick Harkaway

  Usenet was a motherlode of unlikely facts – and, no doubt, non-facts – and I should probably have realized the potential to learn more about my degree course, but inevitably I got sidetracked instead, pondering a modern revisiting of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. Researching supertankers (in the story, my new Edmond Dantès was going to be first mate on one of the huge ones), I discovered the diary entries of a man who had sailed aboard Ultra Large Crude Carriers in the previous decade as part of what he described as a kind of gay ocean-going swingers’ party. He had only uploaded the diary, he wrote, because as far as he knew he was one of the last men left who had really been in the heart of this brief, joyful subculture, the vast majority having succumbed to HIV-related illness.

  The World Wide Web – the combination of images and text with clickable links which most people mean when they talk about ‘the Internet’ – grew from a way of displaying data which which was created at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee and let out into the wild in around 1990. In the interest of absolute clarity: the Internet is a network connecting computers; the World Wide Web is the system of documents written in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) which are viewable through that network. The viewing of HTML documents is only one of the things the network facilitates – though, clearly, it is a definitive one at present. The Web (the term itself feels antiquated now) was initially just a way of sharing information, enabling users to connect a particular word or image with a further document; a logical progression from the Internet’s roots as a tool for pooling scientific information.

  It became more and more – and the Internet was used for more and more activities in our lives – as personal computers became cheaper and more common and connection speeds rose throughout the 1990s, allowing for the downloading of more complex files such as images and eventually music and movies. The services and companies we think of now as being an integral part of the digital realm are relatively recent. Amazon.com began in 1995, letting people order through its digital shopfront from what was effectively a warehouse system. In the same year, eBay was born, hosting 250,000 auctions in 1996 and 2m in 1997. Google was incorporated in 1998. The first iPod was sold in 2001, and the iTunes Store opened its online doors in 2003. Facebook went live in 2004. YouTube did not exist until 2005.

  This extraordinarily rapid development can create the illusion that the Internet and the aspects of our culture it supports came from nowhere, a feeling strengthened by the metaphor of cyberspace, the notion of a foreign land brought abruptly into existence inside and yet somehow beyond the beige box cases of our computers. Zeitgeist novelist and commentator William Gibson coined the term in 1982, ushering in a new fictional mood (cyberpunk) which, while futuristic, was also noirish, baroque and gritty. Cyberpunk presented the electronic environment as a three-dimensional virtual world which was both beautiful and dangerous, the preserve of a technological elite. Around the same time, the first Graphical User Interfaces – early versions of today’s Mac OS X and Windows – began to tempt people away from the command line interface to the desktop metaphor of folders and piles of paper. However flat and simplistic the representation of a desk was, with pixellated images of folders and in-trays, the iconography did its job. In our minds, the space behind the screen was no longer occupied by a cathode ray emitter: the glass was a barrier between us and another place where anything was possible.

  That sense of the digital as belonging to another place strikes me as pivotal in our relationship with it. We feel that what happens online somehow does not happen in the real world. It doesn’t feel like something which should have real world consequences. The ethos of the Internet and the way people use it is often seen to be in conflict with the dictates of non-digital life, as if the Internet were a kind of perpetual pirate ship circling the globe; a roving rebel anti-nation where normal nation-state rules do not apply. This was shaped in part by Free Software pioneers such as Richard Stallman, who created the GNU project in an effort to resist proprietary operating systems, and who is also a principal architect of the copyleft movement. Stallman’s touchstone is the hacker culture of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s, a free-wheeling techno-cooperative mood drawing on the hippie ethos and notions of libertarianism and political anarchism which perhaps bizarrely was underpinned by DARPA. (The word ‘hacker’ is endlessly misapplied. It means, originally, someone with the technological skill to make devices or software. That it subsequently became a synonym for ‘cracker’ – one who unlawfully and sometimes maliciously breaks into someone else’s computer systems – is an irritation to those to whom it more rightly belongs. A ‘good hack’ is an elegant solution to a problem, not a successful intrusion.)

  Stallman famously resisted the introduction of passwords on the system at MIT, and urged fellow users to change theirs to an empty string (i.e. no password at all) to preserve the open culture at the time, and remains a powerful voice of resistance to the corporatization of and governmental interference in the affairs of the Internet. The important point is this: that from the very beginning, the makers of the digital realm saw it as something different, something which would change the world. The Internet has always been – perhaps was created to be – disruptive, to mount a challenge to the conventional norms of behaviour which have grown up around the inherited structures of the modern world which derive from the history of the last 400 years.

  But powerful though the influence of figures such as Richard Stallman may be on our understanding of what the digital realm is and how we should act within it – even among those of us who don’t know his name – the notion of a separate space is all the more so. Inadvertently, Gibson, along with Steven Lisberger (writer and director of the original Tron, which also came out in 1982) and others who played with the same idea, crystallized the language and the notion of the space behind the screen as another country. That space came to be seen as having very few if any laws, as being outside any country – or perhaps more interestingly in a no-man’s-land between countries – and bound by no jurisdiction. For a long time, courts in many states were unwilling to accept jurisdiction over actions on the Internet; it was unclear where an offence might be taking place and under what law it should be prosecuted. Free speech was assumed, and (notoriously) copyright was seen as void by many users – even if it was understood at all. In the 1993 Time article, David Farber, then a Professor of Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, joked to Philip Elmer-DeWitt that the Internet itself should apply to be recognized by the UN as a state – incidentally providing Time with a title: ‘First Nation in Cyberspace’. Almost everyone quoted in the piece – along with the author himself – refers to the Internet as if it were a physical space. Perhaps the most telling description came from Glee Willis, engineering librarian at the University of Nevada: ‘It’s a family place. It’s a place for perverts. It’s everything rolled into one.’

  This is the first point which needs to be understood in any discussion of digital technology and its influence upon us: for all that it’s almost impossible to discuss the issues of digitization and the adoption of new technology without using the expression, there is no such thing as ‘the digital world’. The metaphor of space behind the screen is just that. The Internet is not separate from the physical world we inhabit day to day, it is an expression of it, and of us. All of it – the Internet and the World Wide Web, the social media sites they facilitate, the cellphone network and the twenty-four-hour news channels which rarely have much more to tell us at five thirty than they did at five or four or three – is a part of us, just as the football field, the economy-class cabin of an aeroplane and the green room of a television studio are aspects of our lives. There are simple historical reasons why we tend to think of computer-mediated communications as a separate place, but the separation is a false one. What occurs online is a reflection of what occurs offline, though it often occurs much faster and much more publicly, and it is less ephemeral: the memory of computers lasts as long as
anyone can be bothered to maintain it.

  Looking back, the enthusiasm and idealism of the Internet’s arrival in the public awareness seems similar to the wild, magnificent fantasies of space colonization in the mid-1970s, which dovetailed high science, post oil-crisis resource worries and ecological concerns. NASA design studies and countercultural re-imaginings of human life came together in plans for toroidal space stations and rich, comic-book-style illustrations of cylinders in space, open-plan, park-filled orbitals serviced by a commuter version of the Space Shuttle or perhaps a Space Elevator. The images generated at NASA Ames Research Center are a mix of eco-utopian frontier town and suburban grid-system living, a kind of perpetual space-going America, with the best view in the solar system. It seems that we – modern industrial societies – have a slight cultural claustrophobia, a need to get up and out of our lives and away to ‘somewhere else’ where life is less restrictive and where the liens of history and existing law weigh less heavily upon us. In 1975 that was space. By 1995 it was cyberspace: the infinite, lawless, playful world behind the screen.

  When governments and corporations at last woke up to what was happening and tried to enforce ‘real world’ laws, it was as if lawyers had walked into private houses during Sunday lunch and started demanding that everyone pay for using the cutlery. The arrival of sheriffs and Pinkertons on the digital frontier was the start of a conflict of law and ideology that continues to this day. The assertion of national and corporate power – often in aggressive ways as officials and business affairs departments raced to preserve their authority and their bottom line – created an online resistance. As well it might; it is very hard, in drawing up legislation to deal with the Internet, to avoid legislating broadly about human life. Attempts to curtail undesirable behaviour which is conducted through the embedded and ubiquitous communications medium of the Net almost inevitably cannot be restricted to a single venue. Legislation about the Internet almost inevitably becomes legislation about everything, because the Net is everywhere.

  The promise and rhetoric of the Internet as given in the 1990s – when it ceased to be part of the on-campus life of specialists and met the wider world – was of open systems, free speech, individual privacy and governmental transparency. The electronic realm would be the crucible in which the physical one was remade. An untouchable refuge for revolution and experiment, the Net was the venue where anything that was suppressed could be given voice. Creativity would no longer be locked in old corporate patterns but opened up to everyone. The gatekeepers of the existing cultural order – publishers, music executives, newspaper barons – would be bypassed or inundated, and new voices and new identities would find their expression. The ownership of the means of creation, to put it in Marxian terms, would no longer rest solely with established power structures. The digital cottage industry could and would compete with the big boys on equal terms. In 1998 Microsoft’s Bill Gates told writer Ken Auletta that he wasn’t worried about challenges from regular companies, but rather from someone working on something amazing in a garage somewhere. The right person in the right place, the stories went, could change the world. And it was true, to a point: in 1998 Google was being born, exactly as Gates predicted, and rapidly evolved into a creature to alarm even the powerhouse of Redmond, Washington.

  This sense of laws not applying online and the ease of digital copying threw Net users into direct conflict with copyright holders and – in some cases – law enforcement and the courts. The rows continue: the UK courts faced simple disobedience from users of Twitter regarding injunctions against the publication of certain information early in 2011. The company itself went to court in America to secure the right to notify users that their information was being requested by the US government in connection with WikiLeaks – and won, prompting Wired magazine to suggest that Twitter’s corporate response should be the industry standard to demands from law enforcement and government for secret access to user data.1

  There’s nothing specifically digital about breaking an injunction, of course, but there is a feeling among some Net users that the online world is a special case, a free speech zone, and that in cyberspace it is entirely appropriate to divulge what a print journalist, subject to national laws, dare not. On the other hand, government and legislation have also designated digital communications as a special case, asserting that they do not merit the same kind of protection given to older media. In November 2011 a US judge ordered Twitter to give up the data, despite filings by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the individuals named. The ACLU response was trenchant: ‘The government shouldn’t be able to get this kind of private information without a warrant, and they certainly shouldn’t be able to do so in secret. An open court system is a fundamental part of our democracy, and the very existence of court documents should not be hidden from the public.’

  In the context of copyright, the famous statement by Stewart Brand, publisher of the original Whole Earth Catalogue, has become a motto for those who believe any information once released into the digital wild is communal property, and that creativity – taking place in the context of a shared global cultural heritage – is not uniquely the property of whoever creates, but also of everyone else. What Brand said in 1985 and restated in 1987 was: ‘Information wants to be free.’ There’s more to it than that, of course, and the full quote from his The Media Lab is prescient – or, at least, insightful:

  Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

  This philosophical clash has become an often vicious legal battle in the real world. The ethos of groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) (in which the word ‘free’ means not just ‘given away’ but also ‘ungoverned’ or ‘unshackled’) evolved in opposition to the growing sense among lawmakers and corporations – and, to be fair, some citizens – that the Internet had to be regulated, whether for reasons of security and criminal law or for the purposes of making money. These Internet freedom advocacies are not primarily manifesto organizations, with a list of positive statements in their pockets. The early generation of Internet pioneers didn’t need a manifesto, because they all knew what they were doing – indeed, in most cases they knew one another – and so saw no point in articulating what they believed in because they lived it, wrote it and coded it all the time. Rather, although they have clear statements of identity, the EFF and the FSF are in the first instance an attempt to retain and defend a spirit that existed before the Net was big enough to need a constitution, when it was acted and known by all who participated. The EFF, in particular, came in part out of a massively misguided United States Secret Service raid on a company called Steve Jackson Games (SJG), which must rank as one of the all-time law enforcement fiascos; although, in keeping with the sense of the Internet as being ultimately a consequence-free environment, no one actually died.

  Briefly, the Secret Service raided SJG and confiscated their computers in pursuit of a document which was alleged to have been illegally obtained from the telecoms company BellSouth. SJG was at the time in the process of making a role-playing game with a cyberpunk tone, which perhaps explains somewhat why the Secret Service agents, having confiscated the company’s online bulletin board and files (called ‘Illuminati’), apparently decided that they had uncovered ‘a handbook for computer crime’. The Secret Service retained the confiscated computers for several months, and finally returned them stripped of much of their data. The company sued, and the trial judge found against the government, determining: ‘there has never been any basis for suspicion [that SJG] have engaged in any criminal activity, violated any law, or attempted to communicate, pub
lish, or store any illegally obtained information or otherwise provide access to any illegally obtained information or to solicit any information which was to be used illegally.’

  Nonetheless, by that time the company was in dire financial straits. As a result of discussions on the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (the WELL), one of the earliest digital communities which is still active to this day, Mitch Kapor of Lotus, John Perry Barlow of the band the Grateful Dead, and John Gilmore, then an employee at technological powerhouse Sun Microsystems, founded the EFF. The Steve Jackson Games case established electronic mail as having the same protections under US law as a phone conversation – a protection which, apparently, has not yet reached Twitter. (Obviously, Twitter is premised on sharing thoughts with a wider audience than a phone call, but that does not immediately mean that the private data of a user should be less well protected in law.)

  In other words, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is at root the digital resistance, seeking to preserve the ideals of a digital environment which was still small and built on notions of community and cooperation. Likewise, the Free Software movement was and is a response to the rise of proprietary operating systems and the attempt (presently successful) by Apple and Microsoft to use operating systems as a springboard to dominance over how people access information and view content over the Internet. This is worth remembering as one encounters these organizations, and their central themes: we’re not seeing them now in a pure state, but rather as they try to codify a more diffuse ideal of the living Internet in the face of activities by corporate and government power to control, limit, censor and commodify what the key players in the EFF and similar organizations took to be an opportunity to leave behind these kinds of capitalistic, nationalistic and paternalistic ways of being, and seek a better world. The hard part of any revolution begins not with conquering the enemy – the Internet, after all, has become as ubiquitous as any reasonably high-level technology can be in our fragmented world – but with what comes next: the encounter between the dreams of the revolutionaries and the smaller, more specific concerns of the people they think they represent.