Democracy and Cyberspace: Response to Ira Magaziner

by Benjamin Barber

3,468 words
posted:  september 3,  1998

[The text below is a complete transcript of Barber's remarks following Ira Magaziner's keynote presentation at the conference on Democracy and Digital Mediaheld at MIT on May 8-9, 1998.]

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:

"The American people, their democratic institutions and our public will is inflexible, inefficient, can't get the job done. We can't make thoughtful, deliberative decisions about how we want to use our communication media, whether we want to use it on behalf of education or commerce; whether we want to use it on behalf of culture or crassness; whether we want to use it on behalf of democratic deliberation and elections that don't depend on raising billions of dollars or use it for the push-technologies that sell our children things they don't even know are being sold."

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)