In the endless prairie in which the strawmen crowd, thousands of acres are populated by the one of the laziest, and yet most excitingly topical sorts of strawman: the Internet Utopian.
The Internet Utopian has just read John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, a beautiful piece of rhetoric that articulates a vision for a society of the mind, out of reach of the most venal impulses of the “governments of the industrial world … weary giants of flesh and steel,” where freedom is more universal, and co-operation simpler, than at any time in the past.
The intermediate life-stage of the Internet Utopian is the startup person – hustling, greedy and grasping. The sort of person who’d create an auction site for parking places.
And the fully mature Utopian is a captain of industry, running one of the new internet monopolies, with hundreds of millions – billions! – of users ripe to be spied upon, manipulated, and sucked dry, all in the name of “disruption” and other empty buzzwords.
I have been among the Internet Utopians for most of my life. I read Barlow, dropped out of university, and became a software developer, then a web developer, then a startup founder. I’m here to tell you it’s time to torch the strawmen, burn down the whole field, and give Internet Utopians the credit they’re due.
Start with Barlow. He didn’t write the Declaration because he couldn’t imagine how the state could possibly coerce people through the internet. He wrote it in response to a series of hamfisted FBI raids and the warrantless seizure of a public electronic mail server. The Declaration isn’t a statement of immutable fact, it’s a call to arms – a description of what we should build, not what will come automatically.
But Barlow wasn’t finished. The Declaration was part of a wider political project, undertaken by Barlow, John Gilmore, and Mitch Kapor, who founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organisation which turns 25 this year (I’ve worked for them, off and on, for 14 years now). EFF’s mission was to use law, policy, markets, code and norms to insist that the liberties that mattered to us in the pre-internet world should remain intact as we moved online.
EFF has won a great many battles since then, as have its sister organisations, like the UK Open Rights Group, which I co-founded a decade ago.
Why do people work for these organisations? Because they are utopians. Not utopians in the sense of believing that the internet is predestined to come out all right no matter what. Rather, we are utopians because, on the one hand, we are terrified of what kind of surveillance and control the internet enables, and because, on the other hand, we believe that the future is up for grabs: that we can work together to change what the internet is and what it will become. Nothing is more utopian than a belief that, when things are bad, we can make them better.
The internet has become the nervous system of the 21st century, wiring together devices that we carry, devices that are in our bodies, devices that our bodies are in. It is woven into the fabric of government service delivery, of war-fighting systems, of activist groups, of major corporations and teenagers’ social groups and the commerce of street-market hawkers.
There are many fights more important than the fight over how the internet is regulated. Equity in race, gender, sexual preference; the widening wealth gap; the climate crisis – each one far more important than the fight over the rules for the net.
Except for one thing: the internet is how every one of these fights will be won or lost. Without a free, fair and open internet, proponents of urgent struggles for justice will be outmaneuvered and outpaced by their political opponents, by the power-brokers and reactionaries of the status quo. The internet isn’t the most important fight we have; but it’s the most foundational.
Internet companies are the same as every other kind of company. They’re transhuman organisms created by acolytes of the cult of fiduciary duty, legally enjoined from treating human beings with empathy, with the same relationship to humans that we have to our gut flora.
But internet companies are also different from other kinds of companies. That’s because much of what internet companies do remains esoteric and highly skilled. Internet companies are where de-skilling takes place, but the people doing the deskilling are, necessarily, highly skilled. Tech giants have such a tight labour market that they illegally colluded, forming secret no-poaching agreements to stop wages from being driven out of the stratosphere and into lunar orbit.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Adopting a corporate motto like “don’t be evil” attracts a certain number of highly skilled, difficult-to-replace key staff who sign on because they don’t want to be evil. Whether or not the top management believe in the principle (and whether, if they do, they’re willing to sideline it in the pursuit of profit), there are staffers who can’t be easily replaced who will make a lot of noise when the firm does something suspect. Some of them even quit, and often as not walk straight into another job – a luxury enjoyed by tech employees in white-hot labour markets.
This doesn’t make companies incapable of ignoring their employees (or their employees’ ethics). Companies can and do bulldoze their employees’ objections all the time. But they do it more in sectors where they can easily replace alienated staffers than they do in sectors where an employee who ragequits can leave you in dire straits.
That’s what Internet Utopians do: they create a normative discussion about the dangers of an “evil” internet and the power of a good one, in Silicon Valley and its many global offshots. This is necessary, but insufficient, to fixing the net’s woes.
Internet Utopians know this. That’s why they campaign for legal reform; that’s why they liberate data; that’s why they form mass movements to stop the drive to kill net neutrality or impose mass surveillance.
The questions of the day are “How do we save the planet from the climate crisis?” and “What do we do about misogyny, racial profiling and police violence, and homophobic laws?” and “How do we check mass surveillance and the widening power of the state?” and “How do we bring down autocratic, human-rights-abusing regimes without leaving behind chaos and tragedy?”
Those are the questions.
But the internet is the answer. If you propose to fix any of these things without using the internet, you’re not being serious. And if you want to free the internet to use in all those fights, there’s a quarter century’s worth of Internet Utopians who’ve got your back.