Nicey-Nicey
If you grew up in the 1950s,
as I did, it's nearly impossible to watch the rise of the Internet without
thinking back to the rise of television, way back when. A powerful new
technology occasioned an enormous amount of hyperventilation about the new
medium's potential as an agent of change--change (it almost goes without
saying) that would demonstrably improve the society. Television would be the
greatest educational force ever created. It would not just entertain but also
enlighten. High-mindedness would reign. Et cetera, et cetera.
Some five
decades have passed, and we know all about television now. We know, for
instance, that while television's effect on society has been large, it hasn't
been especially high-minded. Television has come to be much more about sweeps
week than about uplifting the culture. It seems fair to say that, in part as a
result of our experience with television, we tend to shy away from making
grandiose claims for new technologies anymore. We've become warier. It's been a
long time since we've fallen for the grand promise of a new technological
marvel.
Which is why the hoopla surrounding the Internet is so
bewildering. Where is all that hard-won cynicism that now marks the American
character? It vanishes as soon as the subject turns to the Internet and its
alleged power to transform our lives. Suddenly, we are innocents again, just as
in the 1950s, willing to believe just about any claim about the Internet's
promise. Not only can the Internet help free citizens from the tyranny of
oppressive governments, not only can it make investors wealthier and citizens
more active and students more eager to learn, but it can also enhance the
experience of watching a ballgame by allowing you to interact with a
commentator while the game is still going on! (I'm still trying to figure out
why anybody would want to do that.)
More
surprising yet, Internet proselytizing is often led by actual smart
people--people like Esther Dyson. Dyson is, without question, one of the
computer industry's Really Big Thinkers. She's on a first-name basis with all
the computer moguls. (In her acknowledgments she coyly thanks "all the Bills I
have known.") Her industry confabs drip with cachet. And her newsletter,
Release 1.0 , may well be the single most indispensable publication in
all of technologydom, full of insightful analysis and trend-spotting in the
best sense of the word. Her profile is high enough that the publisher felt
justified in putting her face on the cover of her new book, which is titled
Release 2.0 . (Dyson says that the paperback edition, when it comes out,
will be called Release 2.1 . Cute.)
Unfortunately, the sharpness that characterizes
her newsletter is nowhere to be found in her book. "I live on the Net," writes
Dyson--and it shows. For one thing, her prose more closely resembles a series
of e-mail missives than a rigorous argument. All that e-mailing she does
appears to have caused her to forget how to write more than four consecutive
paragraphs at a time. More crucially, her "design for living in the digital
age," as the subtitle puts it, comes across as a cross between New Age
philosophy and 1950s hyperbole. Critical thinking has been replaced by wishful
thinking.
What
Dyson essentially believes is that if we would just embrace the Net, we could
make the world a better place. Really. For instance, the Net will help create
wonderful communities of like-minded people whose interactions are spirited but
always fair-minded--just like Dyson's interactions with the Net communities
she's involved in. This will happen because people will gravitate toward
communities where they share interests and respect the views of others in the
community. (Dyson never quite gets around to explaining what happens to those
who tend to disrupt those nurturing Net communities.) She believes the Net will
allow "those who want freedom [to] be able to work on their own terms without
sacrificing as much as they must today." In other words, the Net will free
people from the need to work for large organizations in order to make a decent
living. In Dyson's view, this will be particularly good for obnoxious people.
"People who aren't much fun to work with will be able to become more
independent," is how she phrases it.
And on and on. The Net will foster truth-telling and fuller
disclosure in all sorts of areas. It will allow people to be anonymous when it
suits them and to be themselves when that suits them. If people's secrets are
somehow revealed on the Net, well, that could be good too. ("At the same time,
we may all become more tolerant if everyone's flaws are more visible.") And, my
personal favorite, Dyson believes that the explosion of Internet content will
somehow "bring back new respect for people, for personal attention, for
service, and for human interaction."
Underlying
all her prognostications on work, security, privacy, and so on is one central,
and rather circular, idea. If the Internet is going to live up to its
potential, says Dyson, we need to be nicer to each other. As she puts it, "One
purpose of this book is to encourage people to make the mainstream of
cyberspace nice enough that people will want to live their social lives there."
But she also seems to believe that if we would start spending more of our
social lives on the Net, that would help make us nicer, since the culture of
the Internet will inevitably foster "niceness."
Niceness, in fact, permeates this
book--everything Dyson says, she tries to say as nicely as possible. This is
true even when she's conceding that not everyone in cyberspace is as nice as
she is. "It may not be nice to say it," she writes at one point, "but people
are not all always nice, and therefore a little social pressure can be a good
thing." See how nice that was?
There are
two problems with this emphasis on niceness, one small and one large. The small
problem is that as virtues go, niceness is wildly overrated. Nice books, for
instance, are usually bland books--as this one is. More to the point, for
people who are trying to get something done, too much niceness is likely to get
in the way. Very few of Dyson's Silicon Valley CEO friends are "nice," except
maybe to her.
The larger problem is that the Internet is simply not going
to make us nicer people--nor are we going to become nicer just because we want
to see the Internet reach its full potential. The notion is ludicrous on the
face of it. No matter how much information gets loaded into it, the Internet is
never going to transform the dynamics of human behavior. At least not for the
better. In fact, the evidence thus far is quite depressing in this regard. As
anyone who has spent any time in a chat room knows, the bad tends to drive out
the good. Which, when you think about it, is pretty much the way it happens in
the offline world.
My own bet is that by 2004--a
year in which Dyson places many of her predictions--books like hers will seem
like artifacts from a more gullible age. We won't be making extravagant claims
for the Internet anymore, but will accept that it's just a tool--sometimes
extremely useful, sometimes not. Some of what is on it will be very good, a lot
of it will be junk. It'll be just like television. And no one will be
nicer.
