Some of my colleagues – Joi, Rebecca, John Gage, Dan Gillmor, Noriko Takiguchi, Martn, and Marko Ahtisaari – just presented the work we’ve done over the past day and a half. It’s been interesting to watch the reception – we’ve gotten half a dozen of the routinely positive comments one might expect, and two very precise critiques.
One came from Benjamin Barber, author of “Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age”, who gave a wide-ranging critique of the cyberoptimism of the panel. His argument, as I understood it, is that the very architecture of the Internet has social “bugs” that we failed to address. He asserts:
The internet is horizontal and privatized, which means that it’s highly segmented. Most people talk to people like themselves, and as a result, debates are often infantile and puerile.
There’s no source of authority on the net, so it’s hard to tell gossip from fact and lies from truth.
The fact that the Internet is unregulated means that it’s a monopolistic enterprise, dominated by corporate interests, notably media, hardware and software monopolies.
One third of the net’s search engine hits are for pornography
Virtual relationships are different – and not as important – as real ones.
It’s hard for me to dispute most of these points. (I’d love some data on the 1/3 search hits = porn stat…) But this strikes me as an overview that focuses on fear, rather than on hope. What’s so wonderful and complicated about the ‘net is that it includes fearsome monopolies and creative open source developers, porn and poetry, self-referential circle jerks and genuine dialogue across cultures and between borders. My interest is in focusing on the positive – especially on the dialogue – but it’s irresponsible to deny the negatives. But I don’t think it’s surprising that a group of people talking about the value of keeping the Internet open and accessible despite the threat of terrorists using it would focus on the positives, not the negatives.
A political science professor from Harvard, echoed later by Richard Barrett, who heads a UN monitoring team focused on Al Quaea, suggested that the panel had glossed over the challenges of fighting terror on the Internet. Given the proliferation of terrorist recruitment sites on the web – 4,000, by one count – don’t we have an obligation to do something? Shouldn’t we, for instance, prevent “known terrorists” from posting new web sites?
Martn had a great response: we’ve got to fight speech with more speech. Those sites are surely less effective in creating terrorists – on an internet filled with diverse voices – than madrasas, where the only voice a student hears is a voice of intolerance. If the internet is able to expand the universe of voices that madrasa student hears, isn’t that a powerful way to fight terror.
I offered my own answer to Barrett, who asked whether we shouldn’t take action against terrorist sites on the net, even if that action was only symbolic. I said that I thought the action would be only symbolic. A terrorist motivated to stay anonymous is going to figure out a method to remain unidentifiable even if we make strong efforts to associate IP addresses with human identities (more of this in an upcoming post). While we’re likely to have only a symbolic victory in keeping terrorists off the web, we may well eliminate the opportunity for people who legitimately need to be anonymous – from the human rights activist in China to the gay teen in Wyoming – to be so on the net.
I wish the conversation had continued – it’s useful for the cyber-optimists on the panel to hear the fears – some legitimate, some exaggerated – of the people who see the Internet as a scary place where bad people (both terrorists and corporate monopolists) can hide.
Some of my colleagues – Joi, Rebecca, John Gage, Dan Gillmor, Noriko Takiguchi, MartÃn, and Marko Ahtisaari – just presented the work we’ve done over the past day and a half. It’s been interesting to watch the reception – we’ve gotten half a dozen of the routinely positive comments one might expect, and two very precise critiques.
One came from Benjamin Barber, author of “Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age”, who gave a wide-ranging critique of the cyberoptimism of the panel. His argument, as I understood it, is that the very architecture of the Internet has social “bugs” that we failed to address. He asserts:
The internet is horizontal and privatized, which means that it’s highly segmented. Most people talk to people like themselves, and as a result, debates are often infantile and puerile.
There’s no source of authority on the net, so it’s hard to tell gossip from fact and lies from truth.
The fact that the Internet is unregulated means that it’s a monopolistic enterprise, dominated by corporate interests, notably media, hardware and software monopolies.
One third of the net’s search engine hits are for pornography
Virtual relationships are different – and not as important – as real ones.
It’s hard for me to dispute most of these points. (I’d love some data on the 1/3 search hits = porn stat…) But this strikes me as an overview that focuses on fear, rather than on hope. What’s so wonderful and complicated about the ‘net is that it includes fearsome monopolies and creative open source developers, porn and poetry, self-referential circle jerks and genuine dialogue across cultures and between borders. My interest is in focusing on the positive – especially on the dialogue – but it’s irresponsible to deny the negatives. But I don’t think it’s surprising that a group of people talking about the value of keeping the Internet open and accessible despite the threat of terrorists using it would focus on the positives, not the negatives.
A political science professor from Harvard, echoed later by Richard Barrett, who heads a UN monitoring team focused on Al Quaea, suggested that the panel had glossed over the challenges of fighting terror on the Internet. Given the proliferation of terrorist recruitment sites on the web – 4,000, by one count – don’t we have an obligation to do something? Shouldn’t we, for instance, prevent “known terrorists” from posting new web sites?
MartÃn had a great response: we’ve got to fight speech with more speech. Those sites are surely less effective in creating terrorists – on an internet filled with diverse voices – than madrasas, where the only voice a student hears is a voice of intolerance. If the internet is able to expand the universe of voices that madrasa student hears, isn’t that a powerful way to fight terror.
I offered my own answer to Barrett, who asked whether we shouldn’t take action against terrorist sites on the net, even if that action was only symbolic. I said that I thought the action would be only symbolic. A terrorist motivated to stay anonymous is going to figure out a method to remain unidentifiable even if we make strong efforts to associate IP addresses with human identities (more of this in an upcoming post). While we’re likely to have only a symbolic victory in keeping terrorists off the web, we may well eliminate the opportunity for people who legitimately need to be anonymous – from the human rights activist in China to the gay teen in Wyoming – to be so on the net.
I wish the conversation had continued – it’s useful for the cyber-optimists on the panel to hear the fears – some legitimate, some exaggerated – of the people who see the Internet as a scary place where bad people (both terrorists and corporate monopolists) can hide.