I certainly
welcome the opportunity to talk with this interesting group
of Republican thinkers from David Winston to Ira Magaziner,
who have joined us to talk about the marketplace and its virtues.
I didn't
have the advantage of seeing what Ira was going to say, but
I do have a fairly good idea of what the Clinton Administration
has been doing in these issues, and he didn't disappoint me
in his discussion. Moreover, as during the Industry Revolution
in the nineteenth century to which he drew some comparisons,
those who made that revolution spoke the powerful language of
laissez-faire and said that government should keep its hands
off and not mess up the wonderful new cartel-economy being developed.
It didn't surprise me that he made exactly the same arguments
about the current technologies.
The one
word I did not hear in his discussion, and I did not expect
to hear, was the word "democracy." Among Republicans
like him, the word "democracy" is never used when
there's a discussion of government. One talks about "bureaucracy,"
"government," "them," "it," as
if we lived in the Soviet Union under a Marxist regime or in
fascist Germany. You wouldn't know that the inefficient, inflexible
institutions to which he was referring that we had to get rid
of in dealing with this wonderful new age were our democratic
institutions, our elected representatives, the only institutions
we have by which we can deliberate and think about how this
new technology might be used as a public utility.
Every confusion
about the marketplace and its supposed virtues was rehearsed
by Ira Magaziner in his presentation. It's no wonder that health
policy lost in the first Administration because it, too, had
little to do with democracy or a discussion with the American
people. It was a technocratic appeal to a complicated plan that
few Americans understood that was done in their name, but not
with their participation or understanding of the nature of American
democracy.
I find the
notion that, in an era where--and this is the one thing I agree
on with Ira--caution is needed and where none of us knows exactly
what's going to happen, that we should turn the development
of these new technologies about which we know so little and
whose impact is so uncertain, that we should turn them over
to a marketplace whose effects we do know, and whose aims and
objectives we understand well enough. Motivated, appropriately
by the way--I have no problem; I'm a capitalist--I have no problem
with the fact that the motivation of the marketplace is profit,
that its stakeholders are its shareholders, its stockholders,
not anybody else, however. That's as it should be. And there
are many important ways in which the marketplace has made America
one of the most productive and successful countries in the world.
But the notion that we should turn over so precious a commodity
as knowledge and information and the media and the communications
that go with it to that private marketplace and let profit,
greed, and private shareholders arbitrate what will happen to
it, and think that in doing that, we are, somehow, being cautious,
that we are somehow looking out for the difficulties that might
come is, to me, a kind of lunacy.
We can't
have this discussion without talking a little bit about democracy.
It's part of this extraordinary belief that democracy is no
more than bureaucracy, and that our representative institutions
don't belong to us, but do belong to pig-headed technocrats.
I do understand why people tend to think that, given what somehow
happens in Washington, as it did in the health-care debate.
But, nonetheless, it is deeply anti-democratic to think that
our democratic institutions don't belong to us and that our
power to deliberate publicly over how we use and deploy communication,
which is the essence of our civilization, our culture, our arts,
our education and our democracy we should be taken away. Is
it not clear that communication is what democracy is about?
Is it not clear that our capacity to talk to one another and
inform one another is the essence of western civilization? The
essence of what it means to be free men and women?
It doesn't
have anything to do with spectrum-scarcity; that's not why communication
is important. That's not why it's a public utility. It's because
it's the essence of how we share a culture, share our values;
it's how we arbitrate conflict; it's how we learn to live together,
despite our differences. I mean, how has it come to pass even
in traditional broadcast media that these public utilities that
we owned and that our government licensed to the private sector
has to be bought back by us during elections for billions of
dollars, bankrupting us, forcing our politicians to cut all
sorts of nasty deals to raise the money for it? It's exactly
the same logic. There is no more spectrum-scarcity. There is
enough for everybody, so let these private license-holders now
bill us and pay for the public use of our utilities that we,
I thought, had leased to them and then give away the digital
spectra, for nothing. Even Bob Dole--it's hard to tell who's
a Republican and who's a Democrat nowadays--even Bob Dole called
it "the give-away of the century." But that didn't
bother this Administration and its technology representatives
because the marketplace was going to solve all the problems.
I wonder,
Ira, if you look at the 'Net often. I do. Let me read you something
that I just came across in one of the chat-rooms through a project
at my Whitman Center; we're trying to look for civic spaces
on the Internet where serious political dialogue takes place.
I went into a political chat-room, and here's just a little
bit--just so we have some reality here about what this 'Net
is, what this new communication mode is that's being hard-wired
into the schools. You know, when you hard-wire the 'Net into
the schools, everything on the 'Net goes into the schools. Frankly,
I think poverty is going to protect some of our schools from
the worst of what's on the Internet, and, maybe, the Third World
as well. Poverty may turn out to be an insulation from the worst
of our commercial culture. But here's one of the things that
will now be in our schools and libraries:
"On-line
host. You're in Town Square. Deep Phase/Faze (These are handles
the kids use themselves) What guy wants to eat me out? Junior
Tweety. What's everyone talking about? Iceburn 911. Me, Lodino.
I don't no (spelled "no"). Deep Phase: (Sorry for
this, folks) 'Fuck me.' DWHKW: 'No problem.' Lodino: OK. Iceburn:
Deep is gay. Biania: It's no way, pal. DWJO: I'm a girl. Hulk
Dog: Hi. JW101: I'm a new aol-user from Long Island. Where are
any of you from? Jan Yeets: Big fat Harry Deal. Lean 77: Dork
Iceburn: 911, let's have cybersex. Otter Hawk: Get a clue. Bian
Yeets??: What's clue?" Then the conversation's concluded
by the posting of an ingenious digital image provided by one,
Ku-Yung Pro, apparently an image of Hulk Dog being fellated
by his "little sister."
That's not
rare. That's typical. Go on the 'Net. Go into the chat-rooms
and look. It makes what happens on talk-radio in the daytime
look relatively placid and uninteresting. If you're interested
in a more serious study of this, the Whitman Center has done
a study of the 50-top Internet chat-room sites that claim to
be, in some meaningful sense, political. Few of them are interactive.
The decent ones provide one-way, passive information. None of
them are among the top 50 sites in terms of hits, all of which
are entertainment, porn-based, or commercially involved. And
nothing more than that.
In fact,
technology is always a mirror. This is something I want to say
in general to those who think that technology and changed technologies
are going to change our society, because there are still those
in the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others who believe
that somehow the new technology is going to be more democratic
than the old technologies. One of the first things I learned
back in the late-70s was that phrase, GIGO--"Garbage in;
garbage out." Well, you can say it in a lot of ways. PIPO--Pornography
in; pornography out." CICO--Commerce in; commerce out,"
and that's what Ira Magaziner is talking about. Of course, the
fastest growing part of the 'Net is the commercial part. Obviously,
if we live in a society colonized by commerce--day and night,
malled and theme-parked to death, with advertisements everywhere,
on the telephone, stores open 24-hours a day--it's hardly a
surprise that this brave new democratic technology should become
one more tool of commerce and that our government should see
fit to say, "What a wonderful new tool in the spread of
enterprise."
We can be
sure that it will do that. But for those of us who believed
that it also had some pedagogical, some cultural, some educational,
some civic, and even some democratic promise, we need to ask
ourselves why on earth would we think that this new technology
borne of a commercial culture would be anything other than as
basely commercial as the rest of the culture. Why would we think
it would look different? Just because the technology, itself--and
I'm going to talk about that tomorrow afternoon, about the fit
between some of the characteristics of the technology and various
forms of democracy--but that discussion tomorrow afternoon,
in a sense, is moot. It's an interesting theoretical discussion,
as has been made clear all day today, particularly by that astonishing
presentation by Mr. Loeb this afternoon of the lobbying potentials
of the 'Net. And, by the way, I teach the Republic, and I do
need to go back and find out where he talks about optimization.
I had missed that paragraph in my reading of the Republic. But,
I think I'm going to ask Mr. Loeb for the citation.
The 'Net
today has ceased to be much of anything other than a technology
that reproduces, once again, the major and dominant characteristics
of the larger society. Pf course, it looks like that society.
Of course, it's dominated by pornography, by polarizing, flaming-style
talk-radio, by mindless debate and, of course, increasingly
by commerce, which is the growing phase. I knew that two years
ago when "U.S. News and World Report" had a cover
called, "Gold Rush in Cyberspace." That was the beginning
of the end. Once the big boys figured out they could make big
bucks there, you knew the little folks who thought, maybe, it
would be an instrument of democracy, an electronic frontier,
were going to lose out. Just as when the frontier-thesis was
first developed by a group of late-nineteenth century historians,
that frontier was already being closed down by the industrial
cartels of the nineteenth century. Even as the language of the
frontier was being developed. So too, we develop here in our
hermeneutic little cells, where we still think the 'Net holds
out democratic promises and we talk about the frontier, while
the big boys are taking it over and putting it to their uses,
and our government is putting out the welcome mat for them,
and saying they'll do a much better job than the American people
could possibly do.
When Ira
Magaziner says government can't do the job; it's inflexible;
it's bureaucratic, we have to put a translation in there. What
he's saying is:
You know
that these new technologies being turned over to the Internet
are being used to exploit and abuse our children, and I'm waiting
for this Administration to do something about the push-technologies
that ask four-year olds to give reports on their parents and
their parents' likes when they go on "Toys R Us"-'Net
space. I'm waiting for this Administration to take an interest
in the missing buffers which, on broadcast television, say,
"You can't run ads together with shows," but on the
Internet simply don't exist. Right now, our kids can be watching
something that, for a minute, they think is an ad and the next
minute, it's a show, and the next minute it's somebody selling
something to them. Apparently, the Administration thinks these
are issues that are better arbitrated by Toys R Us than parents,
the PTA, and the American people, themselves.
Let me conclude,
then, by saying that this is a confusion that runs deep in our
society, and it's not just about the Internet. It's a confusion
about public and private. We talk about privatization and all
laissez-faire, marketplace Republicans talk about the power
of choice in the consumer marketplace, but there's a fundamental
difference between democratic choice and consumer choice. Consumers
make private choices about their private needs and wants. Citizens
make choices about the public needs and the public goods of
the nation.
There is
no way, as private consumers, we can do that. We all know that.
I love driving a fast car, and I bought myself a fast car. As
a consumer, I love it, but, as a citizen, I helped to make laws
that limit the size and speed of cars because I know having
a lot of large, gas-guzzling, fast-moving cars is dangerous
for the health of me, my children, and every citizen of the
United States. I know the difference between those two things.
I can distinguish the citizen in me and the consumer in me.
You can't turn over civic public choices to private consumers.
We cannot, one by one, as private persons deal with the social
consequences of those private choices. That's why we have public
institutions. That's why we have government. Precisely, in order
to make the tough choices about and deal with the social consequences
of private choices.
Private
choice, consumer choice is choice without power. Ira talked
abut empowerment, and we agree that we need empowerment. Your
right in L.A. to choose a Chevrolet or a Dodge or a Mercedes,
although they're all roughly the same thing now after the recent
mergers, is not the same thing as your right to choose between
private and public transportation--a choice that people who
live in Los Angeles don't have. There is no public transportation.
But the illusion is there of a lot of choice. You can choose
between 89 kinds of toothpaste but, as Ira will be the first
to agree, you cannot choose public health service in America
for every American. But we have this notion that because we
can choose the medicaments that we buy, we have meaningful choices.
There's no way when you go in the drugstore and make consumer
choices, you can choose for a meaningful public health system
in America. That can only be done by our democratic institutions.
There is no way we can make choices about how the 'Net will
be used for cultural and educational and civic and democratic
uses unless we make those choices in public as citizens. And
what we do as consumers on the 'Net and with the media is utterly
irrelevant to the fundamental questions of what the role of
communications in the new media will be in our larger society.
To think anything else is to fundamentally misunderstand the
nature of democracy and the distinction between private and
public.
I think
that the most dangerous thing in our society today is the ideology
of privatization--the notion that by privatizing, by yielding
public to private choice, we are somehow improving not just
the efficiency and inflexibility but, more importantly, the
liberty of our system, that there's more freedom when you privatize.
There's not more freedom. There is less freedom, because our
political liberty, our real civic liberty, consists in our capacity
together to make tough choices about the kind of world we want
to live in, the kinds of public utilities we want, and the ways
in which we use all of the instrumentalities of our society.
The liberty we have in private to make consumer choices is always
choice without power.
It's time
for this Administration, it's time for Ira Magaziner to take
a course in democracy and the meaning of democracy. Once they
do that, they'll be in a position to talk about the future of
the new media. Thank you very much. (APPLAUSE)