Since deciding to start my own blog I’ve been thinking about the effects the technology I’m employing here is having on humanity as a whole. Yesterday, I ran into Evgeny Morozov, who’s currently an Open Society Institute Fellow, and he was thinking about the same issues I was, having just read a post on Ethan Zuckerman’s blog where Ethan wrote:
It’s my strong sense that internet technology isn’t neutral. It isn’t equally useful for participatory and repressive movements – it’s inherently participatory and open, and inevitably easier to deploy for conversations than for a theoretical fascist movement leader.
I’ve been turning these two sentences over in my head since I first read them and think that analyzing Ethan’s claims would be a fitting way to inaugurate this blog.
Without question, Internet technology has altered the trajectory of human history. In that sense, it’s trivially true that Internet technology is not “neutral.” However, in saying that Internet technology is not “neutral,” Ethan clearly means more than that Internet technology is changing history. In saying that the Internet technology is inherently partipatory and open, it become obvious that in saying that Internet technology is not “neutral” he means this in normative and not merely descriptive sense. The question for Ethan is not whether Internet technology has or will have an effect on the human condition, but whether the overall effect will be positive of negative.
As the title of this blog suggests, my own intellectual history has been profoundly affected by readings of Emerson, Thoreau and the American transcendentalists, whose democratic individualism resists claims of technological determinism I find it hard to accept that it is technology or the economy are the agents moving humanity history as opposed to the decision of individual human beings. It is my sense that it’s not technology the determines our fate, but what we choose to do with it. That said, I’m the first to reject the claim that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” when it is used to defend the so-called right to bear arms. The development of gun powder has had as profound and lasting influence on history as the development of Internet technology surely will, and it’s hard to resist the temptation to judge these technological developments differently. Yet, despite these temptations, I think that in placing normative tags on technological developments we are making a category mistake. People kill people with guns. People with guns are more likely to harm one another than people without guns, which is why it makes sense to restrict people’s access to guns. If gun enthusiasts really could prove that gun possession makes society safer, then I too would oppose gun control laws, but I still don’t think it makes sense to describe guns as inheretly good or bad. Undeniably the world would be a very different place had gun powder never been developed, but the moral consequences of the development of gun powder depended exclusively on the choices people made individually and collectively in how to employ that technology.
Ethan appears to be arguing that Internet technology is a technology inherently more easily used for good than bad and that it will thus have a Whiggish effect on human history. Ethan surely knows all the harmful uses that Internet technology can be put to; he is aware that it’s not just “theoretical” fascists that deploy this technology. Yet, to warrant the claim that there is something “inherently” good about Internet technology that on balance the good uses to which this technology can be put will necessarily outweigh the bad. To be fair, Ethan is not arguing that Internet technology is inherently “good.” There is a degree of separation between claiming that Itnernet technology is “inherently participatory and open,” and the claim that it’s inherently good. One could potentially argue that being “transparent and open” doesn’t necessarily make Internet technology good, and similarly one could question the assertion that Internet technology is inherently either participatory or open. However, those are arguments for another day.
In the end, ironically, I think Ethan’s ultimately going to be proven correct: the effect Internet technology will have on human history will be good. However, Ethan’s prognostications will prove correct not because of any inherent normative qualities of the technology, but on the moral agency of the majority of people who will put this technology to use. The anti-majoritarian sentiments that many of the Internet’s harshest critics betray, are I believe completely misplaced. The reason why the Internet is more likely to beneit the demagogue than the democrat is as simple: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
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