Chronicles of a Liquid Society

by Umberto Eco

  2000

  The hacker is crucial to the system

  The recent global incidents on the Internet come as no surprise. Clearly the more sophisticated technology becomes, the more it lends itself to acts of terrorism. It was easy to deal with the hijacker of a propeller aircraft with an unpressurized cabin: the door could be opened and the hijacker ejected. On an intercontinental jetliner, even a madman with a blank pistol can keep everyone on tenterhooks.

  The problem here is more that technological development is accelerating. Once the Wright brothers had attempted the first flight, decades passed before Louis Blériot, Baron von Richthofen, Francesco Baracca, Charles Lindbergh, and Italo Balbo could adapt to the subsequent improvements in aircraft technology. The car I drive today does things that were unimaginable for the old Fiat 600 in which I passed my driving test, but if I had started then with the car I’m driving now, I’d have crashed it in no time. Fortunately I have grown with my cars, adapting gradually to their increased power.

  With computers, on the other hand, I don’t get enough time to learn all the possibilities of one machine and its software before a new machine and more complicated software appear on the market. I can’t even opt to continue with the old computer, which would perhaps be adequate, because essential updates are available only on the new machines. This rate of acceleration is due first of all to commercial imperatives—the industry wants us to scrap the old and buy the new, even if we’re happy as we are—but it also depends on the fact that no one can stop a researcher from inventing a more powerful computer. The same is true of cell phones, video recorders, personal organizers, and digital equipment in general.

  Our reflexes would not be able to keep up with cars that increased their performance every two months. Fortunately cars are too expensive and highways are what they are. Computers cost less and less, and the highways on which their messages travel impose no restrictions. As a result, the latest version appears before we’ve come to grips with the full potential of the previous one. This is a problem not just for the ordinary user, but also for those who ought to be monitoring data flow, including FBI agents, banks, and the Pentagon.

  Who has the time, twenty-four hours a day, to work out the new capabilities of their personal equipment? The hacker. He’s a kind of stylite, a desert father, who devotes his entire day to meditation—electronic meditation. Have you seen pictures of the hacker who recently found his way into Clinton’s message system? All hackers look like that: fat, clumsy, malformed people who have grown up in front of a computer screen. Having become the only complete experts in an innovation that moves at breakneck speed, they have the time to understand everything their machine and the Web do, without developing any new philosophy or studying its positive applications. So they devote themselves to the single direct action their inhuman competence allows: hijacking, interfering, destabilizing the global system.

  In doing so, many of them may well believe they are acting in the “spirit of Seattle,” and are thereby combating the new Moloch. In truth, they end up being the system’s best collaborators, since to counteract them requires further innovation, carried out ever more swiftly. It’s a vicious circle in which the hacker strengthens what he thinks he’s destroying.

  2000

  Too much of the Internet? But in China . . .

  Over the past ten days I took part in three different cultural events. One had to do with the problems of information and the other two on other matters. But there were questions and heated discussions in all three about the Internet. There again, the same would probably have happened if I’d been involved in a conference on Homer, and if you don’t believe me, go to a good search engine and see how much you find, good and bad, about Homer on the Web. Any conference on Homer now needs to express judgments on the reliability of sites dedicated to the poet; otherwise, students and academics will no longer know what they can trust.

  I’ll list just a few of the points in the discussions. When one delegate praised the Internet as the achievement of total democracy in terms of information, another objected that a young person today could stumble across hundreds of racist sites and download Mein Kampf or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Reply: if you leave this building and visit the occult bookshop down the road, you’ll come across a copy of the Protocols right away. Counter-reply: yes, but you have to want to look for it, whereas on the Web you’ll find it even when you’re looking for something else. Counter-counter-reply: but at the same time you’ll come across a vast number of antiracist sites, therefore Web democracy self-compensates.

  Final response: Hitler published and distributed Mein Kampf before the Internet, and perhaps that was lucky for him. With the Internet there could never be another Auschwitz, since everyone would find out about it right away, and no one could say they didn’t know.

  In support of this final comment, I heard a Chinese sociologist a few days later speak about what was happening with the Internet in China. Users cannot get direct access to the Web, but have to pass through state centers that screen information. So there seems to be censorship. Yet it appears that censorship of the Internet is impossible. First example: it’s true that state filters allow you, let us say, to access site A but not site B, yet every good navigator knows that, having reached A, in some way or other you can get from A to B. Then there’s email: once you allow this, people begin to circulate news. Lastly there are chat rooms. In the West, it seems, they are visited mostly by people who have nothing better to do and nothing to say, but in China it’s different: people discuss politics there, which they couldn’t do elsewhere.

  But the state’s impotence in relation to the network goes further. Network bureaucrats don’t know what to block. Some time ago, it seems the New York Times telephoned to protest that its site was being screened, but that of the Washington Post was not. The bureaucrats said they’d check it out, and the next day they responded by saying not to worry, they’d taken steps to block the Washington Post as well. But these are anecdotes. The fact is that, for example, if I remember correctly, you can’t access the CBS site, but you can reach ABC. I asked a Chinese friend why. There are no good reasons, he replied; bureaucrats have to show they’re doing something, and they strike more or less at random. Conclusion: in the battle between the Chinese government and the Internet, the government is bound to lose.

  Every so often, some good news.

  2000

  Here’s a good game

  If today a new Humbert Humbert, the celebrated character in Lolita, were to leave home with a young girl, we’d be able to find out all about him. The satellite navigator in his car would tell us where he is and where he’s going; his credit cards would show which motel he’s been at and whether he booked one or two rooms; the closed-circuit television in supermarkets would show him buying a porno magazine rather than a newspaper, and if he gets a newspaper we could discover his political leanings; if he buys a Barbie doll at the supermarket, we can assume the girl is still underage; and if he links up to a pedophile site on the Internet, we could draw our own conclusions. Even if Humbert Humbert hasn’t yet committed any crime, we could decide he has dangerous inclinations and think it a good idea to have him arrested. If, then, the young girl happens to be his niece, and if this person’s private fantasies didn’t in fact lead to any criminal acts, no matter: it’s better to have one more innocent person in prison than a dangerous loose cannon in society.

  All of this can now be done. Furio Colombo, in his book Privacy, adds a small touch of science fiction and imagines a device that makes it possible to monitor not just behavior but also thought. Build into it a belief that prevention is the supreme good, and there you have it. By comparison, Orwell’s 1984 is a fairy tale with a happy ending.

  Reading Furio Colombo’s book, you might wonder whether we’re not already nearing the future it predicts. I’d like to use his book as a pretext for imagining a game halfway between the present reality and the future he foretells.

  Th
e game is called Brothers of Italy but can be played just as well in other countries, and is a refinement of Big Brother. Instead of people sitting in front of a television to watch the goings-on of a few half-wits put into an artificial situation, by extending supermarket monitoring systems to the entire urban setting, to every street and public building, perhaps even to private homes, viewers could follow hour by hour, minute by minute, the daily goings-on of other citizens as they wander the streets, do their shopping, make love, work, come to blows over some minor car accident. Great fun. It would make reality seem far more exciting than fiction. The taste for voyeurism and gossip in each of us would be given free rein.

  I can’t pretend that it wouldn’t raise certain problems. Who is watching, and who is performing? At first, those who watch would be the ones who didn’t have anything better to do, whereas the action and entertainment would come from those who did. Later it may turn out that some preferred not to be seen, but to stay at home and watch others. But the monitoring would also reveal the private lives of those watching, and sixty million viewers could end up watching sixty million viewers in real time, prying on the expressions on their faces. And most probably, since it’s becoming increasingly important to be seen, everyone would perform so as to be seen. But who then would watch? They would all need a small portable viewer in which, as they perform, they could see others performing. We could be left with sixty million people behaving abnormally while they watch the others behaving abnormally as they stumble about performing while watching their tiny portable televiewer. In short, we’d have a real treat in store.

  2001

  The textbook as teacher

  The government’s idea, still in the planning stage, of replacing textbooks with material taken directly from the Internet (so lightening the weight of schoolbags and pushing down the price of schoolbooks) has caused mixed reactions. Educational publishers and booksellers have two objections to this. First, they see the project as a death blow for an industry that provides work for thousands of people. While I sympathize with the publishers and booksellers, it’s also true that the same arguments could have been used by carriage builders, coachmen, and grooms on the advent of the steam train, or by textile workers, as indeed happened on the introduction of the mechanical loom. If history is moving inescapably in the direction determined by the government, this labor force ought to be finding alternative work, perhaps producing material for the Internet.

  Their second objection is that the proposal envisages a computer for every pupil: it’s unlikely the state would saddle itself with such an expense, and if parents had to pay, the cost would be more than for the textbooks. On the other hand, if there were only one computer for each class, pupils would have little opportunity to use it for personal research, which is the intriguing aspect of this proposal. One computer per class would be about as beneficial as the government printing and distributing thousands of leaflets each morning, like handing out bread to the poor. There again, perhaps everyone will have a computer one day.

  But the problem is another. The Internet is not going to replace books; it is simply a formidable complement, an incentive to read more books. The book is still the main tool for providing and transmitting knowledge (what would pupils study on a day when there’s a blackout?), and textbooks are the first priceless opportunity to teach children how to use a book. Moreover, the Internet provides a fantastic store of information but offers no filters, whereas education is about not only transmitting information but also teaching the criteria for selecting it. This is the role of a teacher, but it is also the function of a schoolbook, which is an example of a selection made from the great sea of all possible information. This is true even of the worst textbook, and here the teacher must criticize its one-sidedness and provide supplementary information from a different point of view. Unless pupils are taught that culture is not accumulation but discrimination, then what they’re learning is not education but mental clutter.

  Some pupils when interviewed said, “Great, so we can print out only the pages we need and not carry around those we don’t have to study.” Wrong. I remember in my rural secondary school, which operated more or less on alternate days during the last year of World War II, the teachers, the only ones in my whole school and university career whose names I’ve forgotten, didn’t teach me a great deal. Instead, I spent my time leafing through my poetry anthology, and that was how I first came across the poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Eugenio Montale. It was a revelation; I was introduced to a new world. The value of a schoolbook is that it provides a chance to discover something the teacher has not taught, whether through idleness or lack of time, and that someone else considered fundamental.

  The textbook also remains a poignant and useful past record of school years, whereas a few printed sheets for immediate use, which are continually slipping to the floor and get tossed away after a few underlinings—that’s true for us academics, so it’s bound to be true for pupils as well—would leave no trace on the memory. It would be a great loss.

  Books could certainly be lighter and less expensive were it not for the color illustrations. It would be sufficient for a book to explain who Julius Caesar was, and then it would be interesting for anyone with their own computer to look for pictures of Julius Caesar or contemporary reconstructions of Rome, for diagrams that explain how a Roman legion was organized. Even better if the book suggested a few reliable websites and further areas of study, so that pupils could embark on a personal adventure, but the teacher would need to show them how to distinguish between serious and reliable sites and those that are cobbled together and superficial.

  Lastly, though abolishing textbooks is a bad idea, the Internet could certainly replace dictionaries, which weigh down schoolbags more than anything else. Downloading a dictionary in Latin, Greek, or any other language would be useful and fast.

  But everything should always revolve around the book. It’s true that our prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, once claimed he hadn’t read a novel in twenty years, but schools don’t have to teach pupils how to become prime minister—at any rate, not like this one.

  2004

  How to copy from the Internet

  There’s great debate in the Internet world about Wikipedia. I don’t know to what extent its administrators can control the content from all its contributors, but when I’ve had reason to consult it on familiar topics, to check a date or a book title, I’ve always found it well done and well informed. But to allow collaboration from anyone whatsoever has its risks, and people have sometimes found themselves wrongly accused of certain acts or even misdemeanors. When they have protested, the entry has been corrected. At one time the page relating to me contained an inaccurate biographical detail. I corrected it and the error is no longer there. I also found an interpretation, in a summary of one of my books, that I felt was wrong: the entry suggested that I had advanced an idea about Nietzsche when in fact I disputed it. I changed “develops” to “argues against,” and this correction was also accepted.

  But I’m not at all happy about the situation. Somebody could interfere with this entry tomorrow and suggest the opposite of what I have said or done, perhaps as a joke, or out of malice or stupidity. There again, since it’s rumored on the Internet that I am the well-known hoaxer Luther Blissett, even years after the authors of those pranks have come out and revealed their true identities, I could be scurrilous enough to go around tampering with entries on authors I don’t like, accusing them of plagiarism, pedophile pasts, or links to the Daughters of Satan.

  It’s argued that, as well as editorial control, there’s a self-correction, so that sooner or later someone will identify and correct false information. Let’s hope so, but clearly there is no absolute guarantee, as we have with a wise encyclopedia editor who compiles all the entries and accepts responsibility for them.

  Yet the case of Wikipedia raises little concern in comparison to another serious problem of the Internet. Along with reliable s
ites created by competent people, there are bogus sites, developed by blockheads, nutcases, or Nazi subversives, and not all Internet users are able to judge whether a site can be trusted.

  This is of major concern for education, since many pupils and students don’t bother with textbooks and encyclopedias, and they take information straight from the Internet, and to such an extent that I’ve been arguing for some time that the new core subject for the school syllabus ought to be techniques for selecting information online. Yet it’s a skill that’s hard to teach, since those who teach are often as unprepared as students.

  Many educators also complain that when young people write a research paper, they copy what they find on the Internet. If they’ve copied from an unreliable site, it has to be assumed the teacher realizes they are writing drivel, but when it comes to specialized subjects it’s difficult to establish immediately whether a student’s arguments are false. What happens if a student chooses to write a paper on an author of marginal importance, about whom the teacher has only indirect knowledge, and the student claims the author wrote a particular book? Would the teacher be in a position to state that the author had never written that book, which would mean carefully checking the various sources for every essay, and he may have dozens to read?

  There again, the student may present research that seems, and is, correct, but has been cut and pasted directly from a website. I tend to regard this situation as less serious, since copying well is not a simple art, and a student who knows how to copy well is entitled to a good mark. Besides, before the Internet, students could copy from a book they’d found in the library and the issue was the same, even though more physically tiring. In the end, a good teacher always notices when a text has been copied indiscriminately and will sniff out the trick. There again, if it has been copied selectively, the student deserves full credit.