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TNO 3(3).
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 3, NUMBER 3 MARCH 1996
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"You have to organize, organize, organize, and build and build, and train and train, so that there is a permanent, vibrant structure of which people can be part."
-- Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition
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This month: Efficient markets on the Web Communications technology and the Constitution Christian rock More fallacies of neoclassical economics
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Welcome to TNO 3(3).
This issue Ramin Zabih reflects on an experiment in creating an efficient market in computer peripherals on the Web. I do not regard efficient markets as an end in themselves. But I do think that everyone needs to learn their ways, and the Internet can make the process of market rationalization particularly visible. In particular, we must be aware of what happens as computer networking makes it cheaper to gather and distribute price information. You would think that this topic has been thoroughly investigated by economists. But even though some good work has been done, much more often they simply assume that price information is free. Such is obviously not the case, and a large number of social phenomena, both good and bad, depend on the resulting economic friction and hysteresis. Yet even as computer networking helps make some markets more efficient, they also tend to create highly nonclassical markets through the externalities inherent in information technology; this month's "follow-up" continues my discussion of such things.
Now that the Communications Decency Act has become law and the resultant ligitation is under way, it's time for a industrial- strength post-mortem on the failed campaign to stop it. This issue of TNO offers my own small contribution to this sad task, in the form of an account of the political value of the Internet. Why would someone want to impose such extravagant burdens on such a promising medium? Part of the answer, I want to suggest, was already evident to the folks who wrote the Constitution.
A footnote. When civil libertarians upset at the passage of the CDA called for web pages to be inverse-videoed, the Christian Coalition's Mike Russell had this to say: "This is a predictable response from the left. They're trying to overturn the same indecency provisions and guidelines that radio and TV have been following for years" (New York Times, 2/8/96). Never mind the sophistry by which radio and TV are conflated with the Internet. The more important consequence, I think, is that supporters of communications freedom will now have to get used to the idea that the largest organized constituency in the majority Congressional party regards them as leftists.
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The political value of the Internet.
These days one often hears questions such as: What effect will the Internet have on politics? What effect will the Internet have on the economy? What effect will the Internet have on relations between men and women? The questions always make it sound like the Internet is in charge here, as if the machines have finally taken over the world and are only going to keep us around as long as we continue to amuse them. Although a high level of public interest in the Internet is certainly justified by its remarkable growth and promise, at the same time I think that the Internet also serves as a symbol -- a symbol of a loss of control that people feel over their lives. In the economic realm the Internet is simply the most visible element of a much more extensive technological change that is facilitating rapid global restructuring. And in the cultural realm the Internet symbolizes the anxieties that arise as a great diversity of people find themselves being rapidly interconnected through a whole variety of means. To reason rationally about the Internet, we have to take care to evaluate the cultural constuctions of technology, neither dismissing the deeper and very legitimate concerns that people have nor permitting these concerns to be channeled into unwise policy responses that may endanger other, equally important social values.
The Communications Decency Act is a case in point. We have to acknowledge the legitimate concerns that motivated it. Pedophilia, for example, is real. Children really should be protected from exposure to disturbing material. Some people really do have sick minds. Yet very significant questions have been raised about the approach that the CDA takes to addressing these concerns.
It helps to put the matter in historical context. When any new technology comes along, people understandably try to interpret it through the analogies and precedents provided by other, existing, familiar technologies. Debates about the new technology regularly take the form of conflicts over which old technology provides the appropriate precedent. In the early days of the telephone, for example, businessmen regarded the phone as a means for speeding up orders for goods, which were formerly conveyed on paper, and they complained at great length about women who insisted on using the telephone for extended conversations. Phone books were even amended to explain that extended chatting on the telephone was not a proper use of it. There is little evidence that the women in question paid these instructions any mind, and soon enough the phone companies -- which were numerous then and mostly small -- figured out that the women were actually a promising market for phone services. (See Michele Martin, Hello, Central?: Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991.)
Similarly with the Internet -- is it like a telephone, like a newspaper, like a radio, like a postal system? The warring parties in any given conflict over the Internet (intellectual property protection is another example) will often be found choosing the precedent that suits them best. The trouble, of course, is that the Internet is quite capable of being all of those things, all the time, in any combination. So strange and unruly is the Internet that a remarkable myth has arisen and entrenched itself in public discourse -- the myth that the Internet is unregulated. In the Washington Post, for example, I recently read of "the vast and unregulated Internet". The problem is that, quite aside from the CDA, the Internet is not unregulated at all. Virtually all conduct that is illegal or actionable in other media is equally so on the Internet. Libel, threats, conspiracy, insider trading, espionage, obscenity, fraud, solicitation or luring of minors -- you name it -- if you do it on the Internet and you get caught then you get arrested or you get sued. Are any crimes even possible on the Internet that are so original, so undreamt-of, that they are not covered by existing law? No doubt there are, but they have to involve technical capacities of the net that have no precedent -- that make actions possible or practical that are seriously wrong and that were not possible or practical in the past. One such technical capacity might be strong cryptography, though that's a matter that's largely independent of the Internet. Some would say that another is the capacity to leave communicative materials such as texts and images in places where people can come and find them. Yet the vast majority of serious wrongs that can be undertaken in that fashion are illegal already because the same materials would be illegal to make available in any medium. Some legal issues are left over after all this whittling down, but they are primarily matters of jurisdiction and evidence -- hardly the stuff of moral panic.
The whole purpose of the CDA, then, is a bit of a mystery. This was entirely evident at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the CDA that I attended in January 1995 -- the one at which the presiding Senator of the majority party announced in his gravelly voice that Mr. Marty Rimm would not be appearing as a witness after all. The witnesses who did appear, all well-meaning and mostly very nice, recited a series of undeniable horribles, all of which involved activity that, notwithstanding the involvement of computer networks, was quite clearly illegal under existing law.
The bill that emerged from these hearings, moreover, is remarkably ill-fitted to the evils it seeks to combat. Above all it is straightforwardly unconstitutional, both for its vagueness and for its failure to employ the least restrictive means available for pursuing a compelling government interest. Any number of less restrictive schemes are available. It is very easy indeed to build a Web browser that will not display any page that does not certify compliance with this, that, or the other organization. Technically this is a no-brainer, and if necessary false claims of certification could reasonably be criminalized. Parents could choose which organizations reflect their values, and Internet content providers who want children to access their pages would be motivated to seek certification according to the standards and procedures that each organization establishes. Given these simple facts, the mystery of the CDA deepens. What is the problem?
Part of the problem is that the idea of the vast and unregulated Internet provides something for everyone. Cultural conservatives get a den of iniquity to combat, libertarians get to imagine a nirvana free of regulation and restraint, and liberals get to shudder at the idea of something being vast and unregulated. But I think the problem goes deeper that that, and if we really want to preserve those aspects of the Internet that really do hold significant promise for society then we need to be able to explain a lot better what they are. We can approach this matter in several ways, but I would like to approach it by asking, what is the specifically political value of the Internet? What does the Internet contribute to a democratic society?
I want to propose that the political value of the Internet lies in part in the powerful support it provides for the lateral institutions of society. Lateral institutions are those created by and for people who occupy analogous locations in society. Professional societies and support groups are examples of lateral institutions because they are composed of people in a common situation and provide a forum to share experiences, pool knowledge, shape strategies, and anticipate the future. Lateral institutions, both formal and informal, are crucial to the economic and political health of any society. Lateral institutions can be contrasted to hierarchies in several ways. Lateral institutions are compose of equals, or at worse newcomers and oldtimers, whereas hierarchies institute chains of authority and control. People are usually participants in several lateral institutions whereas hierarchies tend to lay their claims to the exclusion of other involvements and commitments. And whereas lateral institutions create a type of social capital in the form of far-flung networks of social relationships, hierarchies encourage an orientation to relationships up and down a ladder that create isolation and dependency.
It is commonly held that the Internet is relentlessly creating a decentralized society in which hierarchies break down. But the real picture is more complicated that this. The Internet can be used in a lot of different ways, and the Internet is hardly the only technology that is advancing at a rapid rate. The fact is that computer and communications technologies provide the tools for the strengthening of both lateral institutions and hierarchies. The genuine tension between these two principles of social organization will be negotiated on a variety of levels, not just as a matter of technological inevitability.
As a rough generalization, though, in the political realm technologies really are fitted to forms of social organization. The Internet is extraordinarily good at supporting lateral institutions. A large proportion of the discussion groups on the Internet, for example, particularly if we exclude Usenet and focus on Listservs, are precisely forums for shared thinking among members of lateral institutions -- people in common situations, common occupations, common difficulties, or whatever. Broadcast technologies, on the other hand, encourage hierarchy: they originate from a center, which creates or filters the contents, and they go out to a mass of otherwise unrelated people. The Internet knits people together in terms of their shared involvements in the world; broadcast disregards the particularities of people's lives and draws them into an abstract relationship with artificially constructed personae, be they movie stars or reporters or experts or radio announcers.
I should emphasize that my view of the political value of the Internet is controversial. It should be contrasted with two other views. One view holds that cyberspace is a wholly different realm from that of corporeal, territorial life, so that it makes sense to imagine cyberspace seceding as a sort of rebellious colony aboard a digital spaceship. Another view holds that the Internet is producing a society of pure individualism, a sort of beehive whose orderliness is entirely epiphenomenal, incapable of being shaped or regulated from the outside. I find these two views not only politically disagreeable but totally at odds with the reality of the Internet's complex intertwining with the rest of our affairs.
What does this mean for American society? In the 10th Federalist Paper, Madison argues that the republican form of government is an improvement upon majoritarian democracy on the grounds that it is better able to resist the evils of faction. This was very much a live concern in those days: the idea that an organized segment of the society might organize to illegitimately impose its way of life on the others. The two approaches to government, as he puts it, differ
... in the greater number of citizens and extent of territory which maybe brought within the compass of republican than of democratic government; and it is this circumstance principally which renders factious combinations less to be dreaded in the former than in the latter. ...
The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source.
It seems clear in reading this that Madison did not anticipate the rise of telecommunications, or at least the uses to which telecommunications could be put in constructing a political organization. The idea that a faction might coordinate its opinions and strategies across great distances never seems to have occurred to him.
These assumptions were challenged, obviously, by the rise of the mass media, through which political opinion could increasingly be shaped on a national basis rather than through the loosely coordinated debates of disparate regions. This development was gradual enough that each increment, for example that which followed upon television, can be put into perspective. I want to argue, though, that the last several years have brought challenges to Madison's assumptions that we are still underestimating. Emerging communications technologies -- not so much the Internet as the video downlink, the cheap VCR, the fax machine, and targeted mass mail -- have facilitated entirely new practices of political organizing. The elections of 1994, for example, demonstrated that hundreds of campaigns could be run in a tightly coordinated fashion by a disciplined organization that could send out practical and ideological materials to candidates and their staffs through a variety of media -- none of them remarkable in itself, perhaps, but revolutionary when employed within a coherent strategy.
The same holds true for other kinds of political organizations. Madison could not imagine a nationally organized religious sect degenerating into a political faction, but such a thing is altogether imagineable today. Those who find the phenomenon mystifying often do so because they cannot imagine religious people having their act together to employ modern technology, or else because they do not know very much about the practical work of political organizing.
It is here, I think, that we can find the larger meaning of several conflicts over the nature and meaning of the Internet. Those organizations that continued to promote Marty Rimm's research after it had been refuted, and who continued to promote a vague and unconstitutional law after less restrictive means were demonstrated and publicized, effectively discredited an important new set of political tools in the eyes of a large part of the citizenry, who have access to no other information beyond the hype about obscenity that spills out of your computer at the push of a button. The fundamental issue here is a conflict of social visions between hierarchical organizations seeking to trap people in a closed world of fear and danger and authority, and spontaneous associations, heterogeneous and dynamic, among people who share common life situations and get together of their own accord to make their own meanings out of them. The Internet is no more a guarantee of freedom than the video duplication machine is a sentence of authoritarianism. But communications technologies have political affordances, and if we wish to preserve the possibility of an open, tolerant, humane, pluralistic society then we must articulate and defend the political value of the tools that may yet make these ideals possible.
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Creating an Efficient Market on the World-Wide Web
Ramin Zabih Computer Science Department Cornell University rdz@cs.cornell.edu
Consumers often purchase mass-produced items that are available from many different vendors. These different vendors usually charge different prices. If it were easy to compare prices, consumers would benefit substantially, and every consumer could get the best price. This would create what economists call an efficient market. Until recently it was too expensive to make pricing information widely available. With the World-Wide Web, the cost of publishing information has fallen dramatically. Because of the Web, it may now be possible to create an efficient market for many mass-produced consumer items.
As an example, consider the market in computer peripherals (such as printers, modems, etc). In December 1995, the cheapest nationally advertised price I could find for the Hewlett-Packard HP660C printer was $330, while the most expensive price was $490. But it took many hours of reading advertisements to obtain this information. Several hundred vendors sell mail-order peripherals, and it isn't easy to compare prices.
Several efficient markets exist, including the stock exchange and the commodities market. Items on these markets (such as stock in Hewlett-Packard) are available for a single price at any given time, and that price is widely known. Consumers rarely benefit from these markets because they do not trade consumer goods.
The PriceWeb Experiment
Together with some friends at Cornell I have begun an experiment called PriceWeb (http://www.priceweb.com). PriceWeb is an attempt to create an efficient market in computer peripherals. For a given peripheral, PriceWeb's web site provides a list of nationally advertised mail-order prices, listed in increasing order. This makes it simple to find the lowest-priced vendor.
If PriceWeb becomes widely used, it will have a major impact on the way that computer peripherals are purchased. Mail-order vendors would have to charge a single, uniform low price, unless they can offer customers some additional value. Computer peripherals are sold with fairly standardized warranties and return policies; vendors compete primarily on price and availability. This makes product differentiation difficult.
In an efficient market, most vendors would have to lower their prices. Short term, PriceWeb works to the advantage of consumers and to the disadvantage of most vendors. But in the long term there are advantages for vendors as well. Consumers will be able to buy items without worrying that they are over-paying (this argument is similar to Saturn's no-haggling policy for new car buyers). And, of course, prices should fall. These effects should lead to more customers
An on-line service like PriceWeb could have additional advantages for vendors. For instance, sometimes vendors wish to clear out inventory by selling an item very cheaply. (See http://www.onsale.com for an example.) On-line pricing information can eliminate the delays involved in print media advertising, thus allowing vendors to more rapidly adjust their prices. Also, the Internet users who monitor pricing information will presumably be quite price-sensitive, so listing an item at a low price should generate a large response. These advantages to vendors have to be balanced against PriceWeb's negative effects on vendor margins. If the negative effects are larger, vendors will consolidate.
How much would consumers save in an efficient market? One might expect mail-order prices on peripherals to be nearly identical, but they aren't. The average price spread on items that PriceWeb covers is $130, and some items have large price spreads. For example, the HP OfficeJet is advertised for as little as $377 and as much as $769.
If the vendors wished to avoid an efficient market, they would have several options. For instance, each vendor could sell slightly different items. If every HP660C printer were significantly different from every other HP660C printer, it would be impossible to compare their prices. But this would increase manufacturing costs and confuse potential customers, thus reducing HP's market share. This effect is illustrated by the American automobile industry, which for years offered an enormous range of options, partly to prevent consumers from comparing prices. The Japanese offered very few option packages, which gave them a price advantage in manufacturing. In the computer industry, almost everything is mass-manufactured, due to extensive standardization (see TNO 3(1)for a discussion of the economic impacts of standardization). So this option is not viable, because of opposition from the manufacturers.
An efficient market could also be thwarted by punishing the lowest-price vendor. For instance, suppose that all the higher- priced vendors refuse to carry Hewlett-Packard printers unless the lowest priced vendor is forced to raise its prices. HP could in turn raise the price that it charges that vendor, or cut that vendor off completely. But this probably would not be in HP's interests. More importantly, such actions would violate a number of laws against price fixing, such as the Robinson-Patman Act (an excellent overview can be found at the Federal Trade Commission's web site in http://www.ftc.gov/opa/speeches/patman.htm). These laws make it illegal for a manufacturer to fix the price that vendors charge.
An on-line efficient market would also be easier for the Government to monitor. Price-fixing in efficient markets is more obvious than in markets with multiple prices. For example, suppose a vendor cut its prices below costs to drive rivals out of business, and then raised its prices. This pattern would be fairly easy to spot in an efficient market with pricing information available on-line. The recent SEC investigation of NASDAQ trading practices was motivated by an academic study of pricing trends in this market; if this data were not available electronically, anti-competitive behavior would be harder to detect.
Challenges
A number of challenges will need to be overcome in order to create an efficient market. One potential difficulty concerns updating price information. PriceWeb's information comes from printed national advertisements. In a market where prices change rapidly, advertised prices may be out of date before they appear in print. The obvious solution would be to use on-line prices from vendor's Web sites, but there are some obstacles. While a few vendors (such as Computability, http://www.computability.com) provide on-line pricing information, most do not -- in fact, surprisingly few vendors have Web sites. Also, a price that appears in a printed ad comes with legal protections against false advertising. These guarantees may not apply to Web-based advertising.
Even if most vendors put their pricing information on-line, it may be hard to compare prices. For instance, consider Andersen Consulting's BargainFinder (http://bf.cstar.ac.com), which helps consumers buy audio Compact Discs cheaply. BargainFinder queries 9 on-line vendors that sell CD's via mail-order. Unfortunately, 3 of these vendors currently block BargainFinder from accessing their sites. Because BargainFinder actively queries on-line Web sites, it exists at the pleasure of the vendors. In the short term, they may not wish to cooperate.
PriceWeb will need to become economically self-supporting, which is a challenge. On-line pricing information is what economists call a public good (like, for example, a lighthouse). It is notoriously difficult to get the beneficiaries of a public good to pay for it. In addition, the Internet's culture makes it hard to charge users for information. I believe that consumers will not use PriceWeb if they have to pay for it. Some companies think consumers will pay for such a service -- http://cybersave.com/shop.htm, for instance. If these companies are correct, they will create a market in pricing information. Mark Casson's chapter in Information Acumen (Routledge, 1994) discusses the effects on markets of information. An efficient market requires perfect information; as the costs associated with information fall, the market can become more efficient. Costs are associated with obtaining pricing information for computer peripherals. PriceWeb does not reduce the costs of obtaining the information, but instead collects the information centrally and makes it freely available.
PriceWeb might be viable simply because the cost of running the experiment is so low. Placing information on a Web page costs almost nothing, and the costs associated with gathering and entering data are also small. Even a small amount of revenue (from advertising, for instance) could make PriceWeb self-supporting. In addition, that PriceWeb could provide a number of services for vendors that would generate revenue. For instance, vendors could be automatically notified if a competitor beats their advertised price.
Will the Web Eliminate Retailers?
A web-based efficient market could also affect the relationship between vendors and manufacturers. Most manufacturers do not sell directly to customers, but via retailers. Retail stores carry products from multiple manufacturers, so a customer can compare products side by side. Manufacturers attempted to protect their retailers by various means; for example, the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price is usually quite high, so that every retailer can charge less than MSRP. Manufacturers protect retailers to ensure that retailers carry their goods. But with the growth of mail-order, the value provided by retailers could diminish. It may become profitable for the manufacturers to enter the mail-order business themselves. An efficient market could eliminate many middlemen.
An efficient market in consumer goods would have a substantial impact on society. For example, it could eliminate many retail stores in favor of mail-order vendors, who can locate in areas with low fixed costs. This could have massive consequences for many communities, which have downtowns built around retail shopping. Of course, consumers shop for other reasons than obtaining the lowest price. For some items (such as Tylenol), the savings may be so small that it isn't worthwhile to find the best price. However, large supermarkets spend a great deal of effort trumpeting small price advantages. It is possible that many shoppers are price-sensitive, and would prefer an efficient market. If the Web creates such a market, its impact on society will be far greater than any effects we have witnessed thus far.
While many retailers might disappear, some new businesses will also come into existence. For instance, it will become much cheaper to establish the kind of specialty businesses that traditionally only flourish in large cities. A business that only appeals to a small percentage of the population can flourish on the Web, because it can be easily reached by potential customers.
Conclusions
Several previous experiments in Web-based consumer empowerment have been similar in spirit to PriceWeb. One example is the BBN Auto Mechanics List, profiled by Rich Lethin in TNO 2(8), August 1995. This site lists local auto mechanics in the Boston Area. Besides providing names and addresses, it also includes customers' comments on their experiences with each shop. The comments are summarized by the moderator to provide an overall grade for the repair shop. A potential customer can view the comments of other customers, and can also add their own comments. Another example is http://thelist.com, which performs a similar service for Internet Service Providers. Like Consumer Reports, these sites focus on giving consumers useful subjective information.
The Web has made an efficient market in consumer goods possible, because it has dramatically lowered the cost of publishing information. Until recently, only big corporations or a few unusual individuals could reach a large audience. The Web has changed this, and we are just beginning to understand its implications.
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Wish list.
Lots of people assume that books will soon be supplanted by digital media. These people are not deterred by the simple fact that it is still physically painful to read a long text on a computer screen; they simply assume that all technical barriers will inevitably be overcome. But things do not necessarily work that way. For many purposes, for example, operating systems have gotten worse rather than better over time. And the price of personal computers hasn't gone down all that fast -- as the hardware speeds up, the software bloats. I wish that computer screen technology would improve enough that one really could read a long text confortably, given that my eyes already hurt from the relatively small amount of reading I do online. But what if that result is not inevitable? What if the technology exists in the laboratory, or in fancy niche applications, but no incentive exists to invest all of the money that would be needed to get the price down for the mass market? I hope I'm wrong.
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This month's recommendations.
Steven Curtis Chapman, Heaven in the Real World (Sparrow). To all of my liberal friends still slumbering through the collapse of their comfortable world, I heartily recommend this immensely listenable and strikingly reactionary record of conservative Christian soft rock. Its theses are simple and clear: that we are all no good but God loves us anyway and that is a miracle for which we should be grateful, and that society is decaying from a surfeit of relativism that can only be repaired through a return to absolute blacks and whites. Tolerance is denounced as a slogan and a fad and regarded as producing, by analogy to sin, a kind of enslavement. The freedom to choose one's own beliefs is equated with relativism. The songs make no concessions to crossover legitimacy. One of them constructs an extended analogy between religious conversion and Cortez's invasion of Mexico, and if that weren't odd enough, it also portrays the Mexicans, not Cortez, as a murderous, destructive enemy. (I would love to engage in detailed exegesis of the lyrics, but that would be inviting copyright problems.) The songs tend to be a verse short and padded out with extraordinarily well-produced theatrics. One, for example, opens up with a narrator recounting a morally troubling encounter with a hungry person -- a scene straight outta Phil Collins. "Oh my", I thought, "how will he resolve this? Will he call on his fellow conservatives to cease their excorations of the poor?" But no, he just wandered off into numerous choruses of hoping that God would teach him how to love, never returning to the guy with the cardboard sign. The thing is, I listened to the record easily thirty times before I began to notice any of this -- not because the lyrics were unintelligible but because the whole thing was so well done that it took real effort to keep the critical faculties engaged. I share a lot of the motivations that have sent so many people off to try regenerating our culture. But it worries me greatly when religious language is used to persuade people that they are no good, that somebody else knows God's intentions better than they do, that nonbelievers are slaves to sin and agents of decay, and that nobody else has any sort of values or conscience. In practice this message is only plausible when coupled with an inchoate picture of the outside world as morally corrupt and pervaded by supernatural evil. This is not salvation; nor is it the real world; nor is it the message of Jesus Christ. Taken too far it is precisely the enslavement to which it presents itself as the cure.
Turning Wheel: Journal of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, theme issue on Fundamentalism, Fall 1995. This issue includes eight fairly short but enormously humane articles about fundamentalism, Christian and otherwise, from a Buddhist perspective. Single copies are $5 postpaid from BPF National Office, PO Box 4650, Berkeley CA 94704, (510) 525-8596, bpf@igc.apc.org.
infoActive. Nonprofit organizations know in a general way that new communications technologies will enable them to completely change the way they do business, eventually reshaping all of their relationships: with members, donors, clients, press, and one another. This process is partly a matter of experience and know-how, but it's also going to require active participation in the policy process. InfoActive, a monthly publication on telecom issues for nonprofits, is a good continuing source of background information from a nonprofit perspective. Each issue is focused on a specific topic (kids online, privacy, intellectual property, cities, Washington politics, etc); the coverage is concise and intelligent and includes lots of pointers to useful resources. $35/year (8 issues) for individuals, nonprofits, and government; $100/year for for-profit organizations from Center for Media Education, 1511 K Street NW Suite 518, Washington DC 20005, (202) 628-2620, infoactive@cme.org.
Donald G. Dutton, The Batterer: A Psychological Profile, Basic Books, 1995. Some men beat up their wives or partners, going through a cycle of sudden extreme violence, profound contrition, escalating tension, and more violence. Having treated numerous such men the author explains in some detail how they get that way. The primary factor, he suggests, is suppressed anger and shame originating in severe emotional abuse by a father; the secondary factor is ambivalent attachment through a disturbed connection between the boy and his mother; and then the final factor that makes the cyclical pattern of shame and violence difficult to reverse is exposure to a culture that tolerates, rationalizes, and ignores domestic violence. Domestic violence has been going on for a long time, and yet it has taken until now for somebody to describe the phenomenon in clinical terms. Why? One answer can be found in Judith Herman's "Trauma and Recovery", which I recommended in TNO 1(1): victims of serious trauma can only articulate and legitimize their pain -- that is, they can only achieve public recognition that the trauma even happened -- when political conditions permit. In the case of domestic violence, men who batter only became a public issue when feminism made them into an issue. Then they could only become a topic of clinical psychology when many such men were -- unlike the old days -- actually arrested, actually treated as emotionally disturbed criminals, and actually ordered by courts to undergo treatment at the hands of psychologists who can treat batterers as wounded human beings without putting up with any of their self-serving bullshit. And this book only exists because the OJ Simpson trial forced domestic violence onto the media agenda long enough to convince a publisher to hire a writer to turn a clinician's prose into mass-market English. (I persist in regarding the circus of OJ Simpson's trial as overall a positive influence on society because of the many important conversation topics it provided.) Will all of this previously suppressed knowledge be driven back into the shadows by the current fashion for stigmatizing "victims" and all the nonsense about men as an endangered species? You can't return to the past without forgetting all the stuff that made us want to leave it behind. This book will make that forgetting harder.
The April 1996 issue of Upside magazine (recommended in TNO 1(6)) is a good overview of the Internet industry.
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Follow-up.
In TNO 2(5), I complained about the sudden decline of the New York Times' business section. After what seemed like a period of real confusion, the daily business section recovered reasonably well and the new Monday section on "the information industries" even became essential reading. The Sunday business section, though, went through a long, dark night that was still under way when I left for a few months overseas in the fall. The basic theme was a shift from serious reporting on industry structures toward a "lifestyle" orientation fitted to the demographics of their upscale readers. The format seemed to be: one serious but not very good article about some topic that is directly visible in the lives of their readers, together with a bunch of personal finance material of the sort that magazines like Money and Kiplinger's are already doing. For a while it was just awful -- imagine People magazine where all of the people happen to operate mutual funds. When I got back to the country in November, things seemed to have picked back up somewhat. Nonetheless I now spend at most a fifth of the time reading the Sunday business section that I did a year ago. At a time when everybody desperately needs to understand the massive global transformations going on in virtually every industry, this is a real tragedy. Perhaps readers in the Times' target demographic figure that they are immune to such things, and no doubt the top ten percent of them really are. But the rest of them -- the whole professional class that the right now refers to darkly as "elites", notwithstanding their supposed supremacy under the title of "knowledge workers" -- are headed for a fall, if they haven't already taken it, and I like to think that they would benefit from some serious analysis of what's about to hit them. I don't suppose that the New York Times would ever consciously set out to provide such analysis, but something would be better than next to nothing.
In my discussion of network economics in TNO 3(1) and TNO 3(2), I neglected to include this quote from Cristiano Antonelli, in the introductory chapter to his edited volume on the economics of information networks, cited in TNO 3(1):
The novelty of network economics is the general effort it makes to incorporate into the microeconomic tradition the study of consequences of externalities on the behaviour of agents who are strategically aware of the role played by externalities in their decision making (page 16).
Underneath the esoteric vocabulary here is a profound statement. The industry that is perhaps the most significant driver of global economic change in history does not come close to obeying the laws of classical economics, and it is extremely difficult to repair classical economics to fit the emerging reality. Yet most of our current public policy discourse about economy and society employs the simplest version of neoclassical economic rhetoric, which presuppose the whole long list of assumptions behind "perfect markets" in a whole long list of hidden or unexamined ways. Among the many pathologies that result is the insistence, among people who know enough economics to be dangerous but not enough to be useful, that the market dominance of Microsoft Windows ipso facto entails that Microsoft Windows is the highest- quality product in its category. This conclusion flies in the face of all evidence and reason. It satisfies the purest definition of dogma: the theory is no longer tested against the evidence provided by reality but is instead used a priori to define reality. Microsoft people often speak in terms of the "popularity" of their products, but this word is surely precisely wrong. Hardly anybody actually likes Windows, the way that many people genuinely like the Mac OS or IBM OS/2. They buy Windows because it runs on cheap open-standard hardware platforms and because more applications are available for it. These are real economic advantages, but in their origins they are nonclassical advantages that depend on market externalities. It's an urgent matter to understand the laws of economics, if any, that affect the emerging world of information technology. But before we can act on any of these hoped-for understandings, we're going to have to clear our heads and our language of the hidden assumptions of an outdated economic worldview.
My bibliography on the economics of standards also neglected to mention the work of Michel Callon. See, for example:
Michel Callon, Techno-economic networks and irreversibility, in John Law, ed, A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, London: Routledge, 1991.
Although much more abstract and intellectually demanding than the economic theories, Callon's analysis is also more sophisticated in sociological terms. He develops a difficult but powerful vocabulary for talking about the networks of people and artifacts that congeal over time into irreversible infrastructures and institutions. Irreversibility is a relative matter, of course, given that extreme contingencies such as earthquakes, wars, and profound technological changes can loosen the most entrenched sociotechnical network. But, at the risk of repeating the point once too often, the fact is that modern societies are full of phenomena that fly in the face of the "equilibrium" metaphors that are central to neoclassical economics and the world of political rhetoric surrounding the price system. Callon's theory provides the elements of an alternative, in which the economic phenomena of resource allocation and money are fully mixed in with a range of other phenomena grounded in the relationships between people and the intermediaries, particularly texts and technical artifacts, that organize so many of those relationships.
Web picks.
"Teaching Social Issues of Computing: Challenges, Ideas, and Resources", by Tom Jewett and Rob Kling, is on the Web at http://www.engr.csulb.edu/~jewett/teach/teach.html
Information on the bizarre case of Randal Schwartz, convicted of multiple felonies for actions taken as part of his work for Intel, can be found at http://www.lightlink.com/spacenka/fors/intro.html
Feed is a pretty good newsletter about politics and culture; its URL is http://www.feedmag.com/
Adbusters is now on the Web, disrespecting commercial culture and hyperlinking to the worst offenders and their e-mail addresses: http://hoshi.cic.sfu.ca/adbusters/Corporate/Autosaurus/welcome.html
A very interesting document from an Oklahoma anti-pornography group about prosecuting pornography on the Internet can be found at http://www.bway.net/~dfenton/noporn.html
"Making Intelligence Smarter: The Future of U.S. Intelligence, Report of an Independent Task Force Sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations" is at http://www.tc.umn.edu/~klp/CoFR.txt You know you're in trouble when a report on the CIA begins:
The U.S. intelligence community faces major challenges, including a widespread lack of confidence in its ability to carry out its mission competently and legally. One consequence of this perception is that reform of intelligence policy and capabilities will not be left up to the intelligence community itself. Other parts of the executive branch and Congress will certainly be involved.
Watch out for the words "confidence" and "perception". On the surface they might sound like they're acknowledging the problems with the intelligence community. But the point is to treat the perceptions as the problem. So far as this quintessentially establishmentarian report is concerned, we should be talking about broadening the powers of this "community", not about shutting the whole thing down. The President's Commission on the Future of Intelligence, composed largely of intelligence community insiders, is also certain to overlook the profound problems. For some details see http://www.fas.org/pub/gen/fas/irp/offdocs.html#aspin
Last November the Cross-Industry Working Team (XIWT) of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) held an informal workshop for industry research people on medium-term prospects for broadband access to the home. The workshop notes, available on the Web are a very good representation of industry's current thinking in this area: http://WWW.CNRI.Reston.VA.US:3000/ XIWT/documents/Workshop_Notes/IEEE-XIWT.html (I've broken the URL into two lines.) XIWT's executive director, Chuck Brownstein, formerly of NSF, is an interesting guy. He has a background in political science, so he is more reflective about the whole technology and policy process than many others.
The FCC Telecom Act page is at http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html
Information on the conference on Information Technology in the Human Services can be found at http://www.stakes.fi/husita.html
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Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucsd.edu Department of Communication University of California, San Diego +1 (619) 534-6328 La Jolla, California 92093-0503 FAX 534-7315 USA
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Copyright 1996 by the editor. You may forward this issue of The Network Observer electronically to anyone for any non-commercial purpose. Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.
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