Wrapping Up: Internet Liberation
by The Editors
January 26th, 2006
Thanks to this month’s essayists for such a stimulating and wide-ranging conversation.
The discussion, you may have noticed, took some unpredictable turns, and this fact has something to teach us about this month’s theme. The Internet has become part of the basic structure of our society, economy, and lives, and a discussion about the Internet is bound to evolve into a discussion of the broader structure of institutions with which it has become entangled—capitalism, the university system, etc—and the history of those institutions.
In the Nineties, when the Net was young, it was possible to talk about it as a rapidly expanding network of computers that might change everything. Now, well into the 21st Century, the Internet has not changed everything, but it has changed a lot of things, having become intricately entwined in the way we work, play, learn, and talk with one another. It is increasingly difficult to discuss the Internet as an abstraction or potentiality separate from or peripheral to the interactive structure of everyday life.
As Jaron Lanier argued in his lead essay, the Internet is not so much a set of enabling technologies as a medium for the expression of human sociality. The important thing about the Net is not so much that it keeps making new, amazing goods and services available (”I can do my banking from home!” “I can email grandma in Boca!”), but rather that it is thereby slowly reshaping the terms of our association on a thousand margins. The way the Internet works (or doesn’t) matters, because the way we live together matters.
This month’s collection of visionaries seems to be in unanimous agreement that the Internet is, and will continue to be, a force for liberation. Their conversation has brought home the idea that the liberating power of the Internet works its way through the broader structure of institutions more by evolution than revolution. Our children and grandchildren will not stop to be dazzled by the fact that they can instantly discover the capital city of Macedonia, or speak to a friend in China, simply by talking into their watch (or simply by thinking into their brain implant), just as we do not now stop to be dazzled by the fact that the corner drugstore has a remedy for our toothache on its shelves at the trivial cost of a few minute’s wages. Among the amazing fruits of creeping Internet liberation will be the happy ignorance of our tremendous good fortune.
