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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 2, NUMBER 9 SEPTEMBER 1995
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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: A historical perspective on cyberspace Sundry concepts and practices of democracy
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Welcome to TNO 2(9).
This month's issue features an article by Langdon Winner about the historical precedents for the United States' current public debate about the future of telecommunications technology. He observes that decisions about technology aren't just about the machinery; they're about the whole way of life -- both the daily practices and the conceptions of ourselves as individuals and as a country -- with which the machinery is deeply intertwined.
And there's more. The recommendations this month range from pop music to hard-core economics to Rambo studies, and this month's wish list tries to imagine how the Web might become part of our lives in ways that really matter.
My commentary on Ralph Reed's quote is long enough this month that I've formatted it as a separate article (the first one).
A footnote. Conservative legal scholars and radio rhetors have convinced many Americans that a liberal cabal has effected a sort of coup d'etat by interpreting the Constitution in an overbroad fashion that does not accord with its letter or original intent (two different ideas frequently blurred together), and it has become common to hear people growling dismissively that "I can't find that in the Constitution". So it's an interesting exercise to find all of those passages of the Constitution that have been interpreted overbroadly in order to protect property rights. Take, for example, Article I, section 8, clause 8, the Patent and Copyright clause, which states: "The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their Respective Writings and Discoveries." Note what is not included here. As Miller and Davis point out in their summary of intellectual property law,
Pursuant to the constitutional clause, Congress adopted a copyright statute in 1790 and ... has substantially revised or rewritten the copyright law four times -- in 1831, 1870, 1909, and 1976. As new forms of expression became commercially important, the copyright law was revised or rewritten to protect the exploitation of those technologies. In 1802 Congress added prints to the works subject to protection. The 1831 law added musical compositions to protected subject matter and the 1870 revision added such things as paintings, statues, and other fine arts to the list of copyrightable works (Miller and Davis, "Intellectual Property", pages 283-284).
What gives Congress the power to pass such laws? The answer, of course, is that emerging technological changes required that the underlying motivation of the relevant Constitutional language be extrapolated to fit the new conditions. But that whole theory of Constitutional jurisprudence is now going out of style. Justices Scalia and Thomas, if they are true to their philosophy, will vote to strike down copyright protections for paintings at their first opportunity. (Heck -- the framers knew all about paintings. If they meant to include them they'd have mentioned them explicitly. While we're at it, where does Congress get off permitting copyright of fictional works? They clearly bear no relationship to the framers' stated intent to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".) If they have any guts then they'll also vote to strike down copyright protection for literary works that are only realized in electronic form, which are only "Writings" in a modern, figuratively elaborated sense of the term that differs radically from the meaning that the word "Writings" had for the guys who wrote the Constitution.
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Ralph Reed on the skills of democracy.
In his capsule guide to democracy, Ralph Reed mentions the necessity of training. He thinks it is important to conduct actual formal lessons in democratic practice: organizing events, listening to people's concerns and issues, running meetings, framing issues, building coalitions, writing opinion pieces, working with the press, speaking in public, resolving conflicts, and so forth. Of course, many amazing people have improvised their own perfectly workable -- even brilliantly innovative -- ways of doing these things. But nobody is born with such skills and most of us will never invent them from scratch. Therefore, if you want to build a coherent political movement then you need to provide people with training.
In Reed's world training is often spoken of in terms of "leadership", and organizations such as his invest real effort and resources in the whole process of leadership training: identifying promising activists, getting them hooked up with networks of movement supporters, involving them in internships and other sorts of apprenticeships in the concrete activities of political work, sending them to training schools, placing them with suitable positions (whether paid or volunteer) in the movement's network of organizations, connecting them to steady sources of information (especially the facts to help support current movement arguments and case studies of effective tactics by other movement activists), and keeping in touch with them for the long haul. The money that goes into these activities could otherwise have gone into more immediately urgent issue-driven work, but these organizations have made a conscious choice to invest in the future by devoting significant resources to training even if that means losing some fights in the short term.
I emphasize all of this so strongly because the world of Internet and telecommunications activism places so little emphasis on training. Wowed by the technology, impressed by our new power to communicate instantly and cheaply with like-minded folks throughout the world, we often neglect to build the larger and more complex skills within which any given technology is simply one piece, one tool, one resource. In short, there's a big difference between forwarding e-mail and building a political movement around your values. This talk about politics can seem old-fashioned in the libertarian environment of the net, but my concern is that it will stop seeming old-fashioned once the half- a-dozen seriously authoritarian bills now steaming through the US Congress become law and suddenly the wolves are at the door.
We don't have to let things get that far. Some extraordinary schools, like the Highlander School, the Midwest Academy, and the Organizing Institute, are keeping alive the skills of democracy that promote liberty and justice for all. At the CPSR Annual Meeting last year we had some two-hour workshops on political skills. And such workshops are frequently run at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conferences as well. What's the next step?
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Who will we be in cyberspace?
Langdon Winner Department of Science and Technology Studies Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute langdon_winner@mts.rpi.edu
[Adapted from an address given to the Conference on Society and the Future of Computing in Durango, Colorado, June 1995. A longer version will be published in The Information Society's special issue about the conference (volume 12, number 1).]
Viewed at a distance, Americans must sometimes seem compulsively restless as we continually reinvent ourselves. The propensity to personal and social reinvention goes back to our earliest days. The colonists' successful war against King George III was also a revolution in political culture, one that overthrew monarchy as a tightly woven fabric of human relations.
The leaders of the uprising, the founding fathers, built political, legal, and economic institutions based on models adapted from the ancient republics. Individual liberty and consent of the governed were now the guiding principles, but political institutions were to depend upon the guidance of a small group of enlightened, virtuous men. It did not take long for this republican conception to itself be challenged by rules, roles and relations far more democratic in character. By the early nineteenth century, Americans were busily affirming that the promise of the country was for the mass of common working people to achieve material prosperity and genuine self-government (Wood).
In sum, a lifetime that stretched from 1750 to 1820 would have undergone three radically different ways of defining who a person was in the larger order of things. Times of rapid transformation, then, are not new to us. Today's zealots for the information age and cyberspace often insist that we are confronted with totally unprecedented circumstances that require rapid transformation of society. Perhaps so, but we Americans are past masters in reinventing ourselves and sometimes proceed thoughtfully to good effect.
Since the middle nineteenth century, episodes of social transformation have focused as much upon people's relationship to technological systems as they have to political institutions. To invent a new technology requires society to invent the kinds of people who will use it, with new practices, relationships and identities supplanting the old. We who care about the future of society, therefore, need to go beyond questions about the utility of new devices and systems, beyond even questions about economic consequences. One must also ask:
1. Around these instruments, what kinds of bonds, attachments and obligations are in the making?
2. To whom or to what are people connected or dependent upon?
3. Do ordinary people see themselves as having a crucial role in what is taking shape?
4. Do people see themselves as competent to make decisions?
5. Do they feel that their voices matter in making decisions that will affect family, workplace, community, nation?
These issues about selfhood and civic culture should always be addressed as technological innovations emerge. If we limit our attention to their uses and market prospects, we ignore their most consequential feature, the conditions that affect people's sense of identity and community.
These questions arise forcefully with the digital transformation of a wide range of material artifacts interwoven with social practices. People are saying in effect: Let us take what exists now -- bank tellers, music recordings, teachers -- and restructure or replace it in digital format. Many preexisting cultural forms have suddenly gone liquid, losing their former shape as they are retailored for computerized expression and opening the way for new patterns to solidify. This is vast, ongoing experiment whose ramifications no one fully comprehends.
The process has generated waves of enthusiasm from entrepreneurs, organizational innovators, artists, and others. The old bromides of Alvin Toffler's simplistic wave theory of history, almost forgotten until recently, have been revived by the right wing manifesto, "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age". (Dyson, et al) Such millennial expectations, often arise during times of technological and social change, and they are accompanied by all kinds of "mythinformation" -- for example the assumption that information machines is somehow inherently democratic (Winner, 1986).
Along with the excitement come misgivings. Digital liquification is also liquifying economic structures, educational institutions, and communities. Whole vocations -- secretaries, phone operators, bank tellers, postal clerks -- have been abolished or drastically reduced. The level of real wages for much of the population has declined -- including the wages of technical professionals (Bell) as firms lay off high salaried managers and technical staff and hire younger, cheaper workers right out of college. Informated knowledge bases permit firms to experiment with audacious programs in restructuring and reengineering.
Business gurus -- Tom Peters, Daniel Burrus, Michael Hammar, James Champy, and the like -- prefer to see these upheavals as an exhilarating challenge. Thus, Peters advises people in the throes of career change to embrace "perpetual adolescence" (Peters, 301). Other observers describe these developments as potentially a disastrous "end of work" and "end of career" for much of the population (Bridges, Rifkin, Glassner). Whatever the case, basic conditions of human identity and association are being redefined. Who will we become as such developments run their course? What kind of society and political order will emerge?
Perhaps we should consider historical chapters in which technological transformation involved profound alterations and momentous choices for self and society. Several recent studies have explored what is distinctive about human selfhood in modern, industrial society. Diverse scholars -- David Hounshell, Terry Smith, Jeffrey Meikel, David Noble, Adrian Forty, Ruth Schwarz Cowan, Dolores Hayden, Roland Marchand, David Nye, David Harvey, and others -- have looked at the first half of twentieth century America, noticing such developments as the Ford assembly line, scientific management, and infrastructures for electricity, water, transit, telephone, radio, and television, and asking how they achieved the form they did, how the populace received them, how the consumer economy came to be equated with the good life, and how advertising, industrial design, public relations, and education helped shape public opinion and channel social development.
These authors have found that power to decide how technologies were introduced was far from evenly distributed. Those who had the wherewithal to implement new technologies often molded society to match the needs of emerging technologies and organizations.
Social control was most overt in workplaces, where employees were often seen as malleable, subject to the routines and disciplines of work. This attitude was clearly displayed in the paternalism of F.W. Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management. "In the past the man has been first"; Taylor explained, "in the future the system must be first" (Taylor, 7). As the industrial workplaces were organized, people were mobilized not only for productive tasks, but for fairly stable, predictable, reproducible identities as well. Virtues appropriate to the development of machines -- productive order, efficiency, control, forward looking dynamism -- became prevailing social virtues as well (Smith).
Industrial leaders like Henry Ford, Henry Luce and Alfred Sloan tried to mobilize people not merely as producers, as consumers as well. By the 1920s corporate planners offered images and slogans that depicted identities, attitudes and lifestyles that could guide people home life and leisure. Industrial design, advertising, and corporate sponsored journalism and public education combined with industrial planning to promote a series of social role identities in photos, newspaper and magazine articles, and school text books (Marchand). In Michael Schudson's apt summary, "Where buying replaced making, then looking replaced doing as a key social action, reading signs replaced following orders as a crucial modern skill" (Schudson, 156-157).
Historians Roland Marchand and Terry Smith note the widely displayed tableaux vivants of modern life, combinations of advertising text and photography that from the 1920s to 1950s depicted:
the executive in the office tower; the worker in the clean, well-organized factory; the housewife in her appliance filled kitchen; children surrounded with goods for the little ones; the automobile driver speeding along a wide open highway.
These images projected novel possibilities for living in modern society. They told a story in which people's orderly role in production was to be rewarded with an equally orderly role in consumption. Of course these efforts did not completely determine people's lives. But the experience of societies such as those of contemporary Europe where consumerism does not yet dominate understandings of self, family and society helps us appreciate the artificiality of these strategies of social control. The advertisements and tableaux vivants always depicted the future as something whole and inevitable. People were to be propelled forward by larger forces into a world that rational, dynamic, prosperous, and harmonious.
Those making choices about social priorities and investments had no desire to make the planning of sociotechnical innovations more inclusive. The broad umbrella of "progress" enabled economic and political elites to defuse public criticism. During the 1920s through the 1950s there were almost no popular forums in print or elsewhere in which the meaning of the new technologies and their consequences could be discussed, criticized, or debated.
The ultimate promise of modern society was held to be individual, material satisfaction. Missing from the picture was any attention to collective goods and problems. Thus, buying and driving this automobile would give the driver and family members a sense of thrill and belonging. The automobile was always shown on highways miraculously free of other vehicles, well-paved roads that seemed to extend infinitely. As a 1930s ad for ethyl gasoline proclaimed: "There's always room out front" (Marchand, 362).
Another key finding concerns the design of artifacts. Looking at the novelties that bombarded them, everyday folks were apt to find the transformations complex and confusing. Design thus often concealed the complexity of devices, systems and social arrangements, making them appear simple and manageable -- thereby rendering them less intelligible. In advertising as well, extremely simple solutions were proposed for complicated, real world problems. Eventually some of those problems -- congestion, pollution, urban and environmental decay -- emerged as difficult issues, made even more vexing by having been ignored for decades.
As we ponder horizons of computing and society today, it seems likely that American society will reproduce some of the basic tendencies of modernism.
-- unequal power over key decisions about what is built and why; -- concerted attempts to enframe and direct people's lives in both work and consumption; -- the presentation of the future society as something nonnegotiable; -- the stress on individual gratification rather than collective problems and responsibilities; -- design strategies that conceal and obfuscate important realms of social complexity.
Such patterns kind persist because the institutions of planning, finance, management, advertising, education, and design that originally shaped modernity are still powerful. Occasional calls for resistance and reform have mostly been neutralized or absorbed: the push for ecological limits is repackaged as "Green consumerism" and demands for participation in workplace decisions rechanneled to become "empowerment" through the use of personal computers. Possibilities for self-conscious social choice and deliberate social action are often sidetracked to become obsessions with the purchasing and possessing of commodities.
It is doubtful, however, that today's information systems will simply reproduce the terms of previous decades. Many of the "modern" forms of selfhood and social organization seem ill-suited for conditions that increasingly confront Americans in the workplace and elsewhere. For example, the focus of personal identity upon holding an job seems a relic of the industrial past (Glassner). Much blue collar and clerical work is now temporary. Even well educated technical professionals must now define themselves as contractors able to move from project to project among many organizations. The assumption in computer-centered enterprises is no longer that of belonging to any enduring framework of social relations. How people will recreate selfhood when everyone is expendable, could become a more serious issue than even the decline of real wages.
Another crisis concerns where and how people will experience membership. For modernism the prescribed frame for social relations was that of city and suburb. But today, for significant parts of society, attachment is no longer defined geographically at all. Many activities of work and leisure take place in global, electronic settings. The symbolic analysts of today's global webs of enterprise are shedding traditional loyalties, leaving everyone else to suffer in decaying cities (Reich). Such attitudes are found in 1990s cyberlibertarianism as represented, for example, in "Cyberspace and the American Dream" and in much of the hyperventilated prose of Wired magazine. These authors fiercely desire market freedom and unfettered self-expression with no sense of owing anything to geographically situated others. Valued now are protean flexibility, restless entrepreneurialism and a willingness to dissolve social bonds in the pursuit of material gain. Of course, this breast-thumping individualism conceals many social conflicts. Many of those enthralled with globalization as the wellspring of economic vitality also bemoan "the weakened family", "collapse of community", and "chaos of the inner cities", failing to notice any connection.
Many, of course, expect that people will use the Internet to forge new social relationships and identities, including ones that might bolster local community life. But right now it's anyone's guess what sorts of personalities, styles of discourse, and social norms will ultimately flourish in these new settings. Will digital media sustain healthy attachments to persons both near and far away? Or will distance foster insouciance, resentment and mutual contempt? Mid-1990s Internet news groups, for example, certainly do not resemble the kinds of interpersonal respect, civility and friendship that traditional, geographically based communities require (Winner, 1995).
We can predict, though, that American society will continue to exclude ordinary citizens from key choices about the design and development of new technologies, including information systems. Industrial leaders present as faits accomplis what otherwise might have been choices open for diverse public imaginings, investigations and debates. In magazine cover stories, corporate advertising campaigns and political speeches, announcements of the arrival of the Information Superhighway and similar metaphors are still pitched in the language of inevitability. Here it comes: the set-top box!
People doing research on computing and the future could have a positive influence in these matters. If we're asking people to change their lives to adapt to new information systems, it seems responsible to solicit broad participation in deliberation, planning, decisionmaking, prototyping, testing, evaluation and the like. Some of the best models, in my view, come from the Scandinavian social democracies where social and political circumstances make consultation with ordinary workers and citizens a much more common practice than it is in the United States (Sandberg et al). Such models have been seldom tried in the United States.
Yet even the modest forms of citizen response found in the tightly controlled contexts of market testing are revealing. The American public never warmed to the enormous push for HDTV in the 1980s, for example. More recently, companies hyping interactive TV have found that "consumers yawned in the face of its most hotly promoted applications -- movies-on-demand and interactive home shopping" (Caruso). What seems to excite people -- as socially concerned computer professionals have long anticipated -- are open architecture networks of many-to-many communication in which people can produce information products with a distinctive personal stamp. Corporate designers have gone back to the drawing boards, setting aside the push for set-top boxes, and are now perfecting cable modems (Caruso).
Yet many leaders in the computing and telecommunications industry still seem intent on enforcing corporate closure on information systems, capturing those markets, and placing their distinctive brand on people's lives. As Caruso observes: "the telephone companies..., preparing [their own] networks and services, agree that fiber co-ax is the right design". How reassuring; evidently the "right design" is headed our way and again we have not had to lift a finger.
But why should we settle for effrontery so blatant? Research developments in computing ought to involve the public in activities of inquiry, exploration, dialogue, and debate. Here computer professionals could exercise much-needed leadership. We can pretend to follow "where the technology is taking us", to social outcomes "determined by market forces", but the fact is that deliberate choices about the relationship between people and new technology are made by someone, somehow, every day. Professionals with insight into the choices that matter must express their knowledge and judgments to a broad public. Otherwise they may find themselves employed as mere ranch hands, helping fit the citizenry with digital brass rings.
As the twentieth century draws to a close, it is evident that, for better or worse, the future of computing and the future of human relations -- indeed, of human being itself -- are now thoroughly intertwined. We need to seek alternatives, social policies that might undo the dreary legacy of modernism: pervasive systems of one-way communication, preemption of democratic social choice corporate manipulation, and the presentation of sweeping changes in living conditions as something justified by a univocal, irresistible "progress". True, the habits of technological somnambulism cultivated over many decades will not be easily overcome. But as waves of over-hyped innovation confront increasingly obvious signs of social disorder, opportunities for lively conversation sometimes fall into our laps. Choices about computer technology involve not only obvious questions about "what to do", but also less obvious ones about "who to be". By virtue of their vocation, computer professionals are well-situated to initiate public debates on this matter, helping a democratic populace explore new identities and the horizons of a good society.
References
Trudy E. Bell, Surviving in the Reengineered Corporate Environment: the Freelance Engineer, IEEE Power Engineering Review, May 1995, pages 7-11.
William Bridges, Jobshift: How to Prosper in a Workplace Without Jobs, Addison-Wesley, 1994.
Denise Caruso, Digital commerce: On-line browsing got you down? Don't get mad, get cable, The New York Times, 5 June 1995, page D3.
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, Basic Books, 1983.
Esther Dyson et al, Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age, Release 1.2, Washington: Progress and Freedom Foundation, August 22, 1994.
Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire, Pantheon Books, 1986.
Barry Glassner, Career Crash: America's New Crisis and Who Survives, Simon & Schuster, 1994.
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell, 1989.
Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities, MIT Press, 1981.
David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Jeffrey L. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939, Temple University Press, 1979.
David F. Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism, Knopf, 1977.
David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940, MIT Press, 1990.
Tom Peters, The Pursuit of Wow!: Every Person's Guide to Topsy-Turvy Times, Vintage Books, 1994.
Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism, Knopf, 1991.
Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1995.
Ake Sandberg, et al., Technological Change and Co-Determination in Sweden, Temple Univ. Press, 1992.
Michael Schudson, Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion, Basic Books, 1984.
Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry Art and Design in America, University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, Harper & Brothers, 1911.
Langdon Winner, "Mythinformation," in The Whale and the Reactor, University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Langdon Winner, Privileged communications, Technology Review, March/April 1995.
Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Knopf, 1992.
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Wish list.
I have two wishes this month, one serious and one not. I find that the wish list generates more correspondence than the rest of TNO put together, and that the more plausible, near-term sorts of wishes generate the most -- often of the form, "here's something that already exists that's sort of like what you want". I will eventually get around to summarizing this correspondence in TNO's follow-up department. In the meantime, I have resolved to make my wishes more speculative. The point is not necessarily to suggest tomorrow's products but to stimulate thinking both about the technology and about wishes themselves.
The union movement is starting to face up in a serious way to the global integration of the economy. Computer networks should obviously help with this process, for the same reason that they help industry globalize in the first place. E-mail is the simple place to start; it should provide a straightforwardly useful tool for making contacts among union people in different countries. It hardly solves all of the problems of cultural differences and so on, but it does help. What help could move advanced network technologies provide?
Let me sketch a scenario. It may not be entirely plausible, but perhaps it will help stimulate thinking. Imagine a WorldWide Web application that maps out the global flow of manufacturing parts and components. The system would maintain a database that could be edited from anywhere in the world. (One would need suitable version controls and the like to make it open but still resist sabotage.) People who work in a given plant could create entries for the parts that their plant takes in, including identification of each supplier. Standard part numbers could be used, building on conventions already used in employers' own systems. When a contract negotiation approaches, special effort could be put into mapping the upstream and downstream flow of parts. This map could be annotated with useful information, like whether the plants providing or using the parts are union shops, in which case contact information could be provided for local officers and stewards. When a supplier's shop is non-union, the map could provide contact information for knowledgeable union people in the same geographic area, or for organizers who have tried or are now trying to organize that shop. This information could obviously be useful in establishing relationships up and down the stream of production, as well as alerting union members to look out for poor quality in parts coming from non-union shops.
Such a system could have a broad range of uses. The pages that represent particular plants could be annotated with background information about history, financial information about the firm, pictures of local working conditions, documentation of the lives of the employees, contacts for cultural activities and exchanges, and so on. Globally agreed standards for working conditions could be established and applied, and suitable measures (perhaps from 1 to 10) could be attached to each plant. A web crawler could then continually traverse the map, comparing these numbers and calculating various measures of the resulting products. A product that was all-union from start to finish along all supply chains might receive a 10; a product made primarily with prison labor in China might receive a 1. The map could also provide raw material for excellent multimedia presentations about where various products come from and the conditions under which they were made.
My second wish is for a life-expectancy server. You would call up a Web form that asks for a batch of demographic and lifestyle information, and it would tell you in statistical terms how much longer you have to live (for example, "at the rate you're going, you have 17.3 +/ 3.1 years left"). It could even offer a commentary about how much the outcome would change if you gave up smoking, moved to the country, carried a gun, improved your relationships, and so on. Once all that information was stored, you could then have a continual update on your life expectancy delivered to the bottom of your computer screen, with the seconds ticking off. Of course, a prediction down to the seconds would have to ignore the error bars, but it would be a graphic reminder nonetheless. The seconds might tick at different rates, or they might even tick backwards as updated predictive information becomes available or as you pass major milestones for various types of risks. When you updated your web page to indicate that you've changed a risk factor, the time remaining at the bottom of your screen would change accordingly. (By the way, I've heard of novelty clocks that work this way, but they didn't take so much information into account, and they didn't automatically benefit from advances in actuarial prediction.) Some technical issues do arise; privacy, for example. You wouldn't want to include any personal identifiers on your web page, and you'd want the information sent to your screen through a cryptographically protected channel that disguised your identity. It might even be a nice demonstration of the power of such methods.
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This month's recommendations.
Charles T. Clotfelder and Michael Rothschild, eds, Studies of Supply and Demand in Higher Education, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. I think that the professoriat needs to wake up and get ready for a political, economic, and technological revolution in the way that universities operate. I plan to write about this in future TNO's, but for the moment let me recommend that you go off and read this volume, particularly the editors' chapters. The neoclassical emphasis on supply and demand curves for human capital hardly begins to reckon with the phenomenon of credentialism, whereby the economic value of a diploma depends in large part on the reputation of the institution as opposed to the direct utility of the learning one acquires there. But it's important to be aware of the development of economic discourse about universities -- because economics will be the primary legitimate way of talking about education before you know it.
James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America, New York: Hill and Wang, 1994. An amazing book about the paramilitary culture that erupted in the United States after the end of the Vietnam War. Gibson traces the construction of masculine identity through movies about war and the actual experience of war, documenting the sudden, extreme change in each at the end of Vietnam. The new cultural forms, shaped by Rambo and Chuck Norris and Soldier of Fortune magazine, are expressed in everything from "paintball" war games to the militia movement to new patterns of mass murder. Although clearly not a member of the new subculture, Gibson is remarkably sympathetic to the men whose evil experiences led to it, and he is quite unimpressed with the gun control advocates who oppose them. It's too bad he didn't wait another year to finish his book so that he could cover the most recent developments; in any event it's required reading for anybody with an interest in the development of the extreme right and the new politics of guns and violence in the United States.
Brad Miner, ed, Good Order: Right Answers to Contemporary Questions, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. According to its cover blurb, "Whether you are a conservative gearing up for the next election and want the right ammunition, or are undecided and want to know where conservatives stand on the key issues of our time, _Good Order_ is the right book to discover the Right's best ideas." Get it? Right:right::left:wrong? Okay. Although I've read a great deal of conservative literature, I figured that this volume, which presents itself as "the agenda for today's conservative", might give me a sense of closure -- a sense that I can explain what the current American conservative movement believes. Did it? Well, I can certainly recommend this book to liberals who have been in denial, shuddering in horror when those talk radio shows come on and instead getting all their news about conservatism from Planned Parenthood. The book is not just a philosophical statement, of course, but an instrument for the consolidation of a political coalition. Cultural and economic conservatives are both accommodated, with some acknowledgement of tension but little attempt at intellectual reconciliation. This shows up clearly in the book's deep ambivalence about democracy, freedom, orthodoxy, and reason, all of which can be found both celebrated and cautioned against in its introduction and thirteen chapters. The book's organizing theme, for example, is "order" -- and not, say, "liberty" or "freedom" or "choice". An early quote from Evelyn Waugh happily asserts that class divisions are inevitable, and the book's front cover consists of a strangely cropped picture of a smirking geek in a suit and tie, looking quite pleased at the idea of a divinely ordained social order in which he's on top. Quick personal responses to some of the individual authors: G. K. Chesterton (writing on religion and society) is a fabulous writer of the old school; Richard John Neuhaus (religion and the state) is a calculating sophist of the new school; James Q. Wilson (community and crime) is sensible enough so long as he keeps this "order" thing within bounds, which he mostly does; Carol Iannone (feminism) is a maliciously unfair hack polemicist; Richard Weaver (private property) is downright archaic in his conservative anticapitalism, and I congratulate the editor for having the guts to include him; George Gilder (economics) is always fun to read precisely because of his habit of taking a single simple idea and extrapolating it to the moon; Charles Murray (welfare) has a gift for intertwining good sense and dangerous nonsense so tightly that one despairs of ever separating them; Russell Kirk (Constitutional jurisprudence) would have a weak case, except that I've never heard a liberal really explain what's wrong with it; George Will (term limits) is a smart guy and fights fair; Thomas Sowell (education) never fails to make me feel like I've been kicked by a mule; and the late Allan Bloom (sex) just seemed to make things up, driven by obsessions I can't quite understand. You may have different views. The important thing, particularly for people who do not share conservative values, is to read the stuff and learn how to argue with it. I don't just mean convincing yourself that it's confused or rolling your eyes and exchanging of-course-we-know- what's-wrong-with-that looks with your friends. I mean actually learning to argue with it in public. I'll bet you'll find this a lot harder than you think -- and that you'll be better for it.
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Follow-up.
As you might expect, several computer scientists responded to my article in TNO 2(6) announcing the death of their field. Some were upset, even to the point of nastiness, by the "political" tone of my list of "imperatives" for the field. I'll admit that I could have framed that article in a way that did not directly offend the value-neutral conception that the field of computer science has of itself. But I don't feel bad about this because I don't think that computer science is value-neutral, or that it ought to be. Another point of frequent comment was my assertion early on that industry not academia drives the research agenda in computer science. Some argued that the customers of the computer industry drive the research agenda, since they're the ones making choices and spending money after all. But I think it's important to see that this does not follow, in two senses. The first is that customers, individually and as a whole, have varying degrees of understanding of what they are buying and the consequences of technology for their lives, and many serious chronic problems with computers are only now being sorted out because customers have learned enough by now to know what they can get. But even if we grant that the market just gives customers what they want, there still remains the question of who in practice articulates the concepts and strategies for developing the technology. When an industry is organized on a strictly cost-competition basis, or when it has limited economies of scale, companies cannot afford much R&D and the intellectual initiative will probably pass elsewhere, usually to universities. On the other hand, neither of these has never been the case in computing, and I was inaccurate in suggesting that the initiative in computer research ever lay wholly in universities. The military, for example, has always been an important player as well. All I meant was that the initiative has shifted to industry to a much greater degree, except in theoretical areas.
Web picks:
The AFL-CIO's successful Organizing Institute is on the Web at http://www.aflcio.org/orginst/
And LaborNet is on the Web at http://www.igc.apc.org/labornet/
Factsheet Five, the magazine of 'zines, is on the Web at http://www.etext.org:80/Zines/F5/
The EFF net culture pages can be found at http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture/
UCSD's Connect program has an interesting page about its programs for local business at http://darwin1.ucsd.edu:8000/connect/
AlterNet has a good index of information about the far right on the web at http://www.igc.apc.org/an/
A good source of racism information is http://www.almanac.bc.ca/
And Douglas Giles' amusing "GOP In-Fighting Update" can be found at http://www.webcom.com/~albany/infight.html
Hippest site on the web: http://www.suck.com/suckreviews/
-------------------------------------------------------------------- Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucla.edu Department of Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles +1 (310) 825-7154 Los Angeles, California 90095-1520 FAX 206-4460 USA -------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1995 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- ```