Getting Our Priorities Straight

by David Brin (1997)

A few days ago John Perry Barlow, a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation published across the Internet a torrid manifesto called “A Declaration of the Independence Cyberspace”—his response to the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. With typically entertaining flair, he portrayed the issue in melodramatic terms, calling on all liberty-loving netizens to man the ramparts against dinosaurian governments preparing to trample electronic freedom. Among the Orwellian threats he decried was the V-chip, which enables parents to program their TVs, setting maximum acceptable thresholds to sexual or violent program content.

Getting past the theater and drama, isn’t it silly to see the V-chip as anything more than a convenient mechanism for TV owners to exercise market decisions? To portray it as Big Brother mind control patronizes the American public—and especially the countless kids who will inevitably use great skill to bypass the V-chip, anyway.

Other offensive aspects to the Telecommunications Act were as perniciously ominous as its opponents claimed. And yet the Act faded from our agenda as courts overruled parts of it, other portions were superseded in legislation, and large fractions proved impotent or unenforceable in the face of ever-changing technology. In retrospect, it’s hard to recall what all the fuss was about. The sole moment truly worth remembering was the wonderfully vivid “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which retains a certain timelessness as art.

Elsewhere I proclaim my respectful affection for Barlow and his peers, who are among the most creative, eccentric, and dynamic members of this civilization, both wired and unwired. Indeed, their basic instincts are correct—that the Net represents a fundamental enhancement of human freedom, with a transforming potential that is worth defending. Alas, I

would find their righteous oratory more convincing if they began by accepting a couple of basic facts—that the United States and Western civilization in general are right now pretty damn free, at least compared to any human society ever known, and that our institutions seem favorably disposed to the growth and promulgation of this new commons called the Net. Indeed, this new tool for independence by sovereign individuals is as emblematic of our new culture as Barlow himself, proudly rambunctious and almost completely out of control. Understanding why the Net came about and fit so well into our already existing culture is an essential prerequisite to defending it.

Of course, Barlow and others (such as the so-called cypherpunks) are behaving as they were trained to do by several generations of American propaganda. Go through nearly all of the most popular films and novels produced in the last forty years. You’ll find one unifying theme, one common message, pervading nearly every medium: that theme is suspicion of authority. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find more than half a dozen first-rank films in which even one large corporate or government entity is depicted doing its job honestly or well. More generally, public institutions are portrayed as flat-out evil, since this makes it easier for Hollywood directors to keep their protagonists in jeopardy for ninety minutes.

Make no mistake, I generally approve of this mythos (suspicion of authority), in contrast to the We’re-Great/Don’t-Question-the-Elders message preached by past cultures. In The Transparent Society (1998), I discuss how a special confluence of factors antiauthority indoctrination, copious education, and the delightful endorphin high of self-righteousness combine to foster the world’s first effective social immune system against tyranny and error. This new system, unleashing millions of bright and suspicious young minds to aim eager criticism at any elite, may be our one hope to thrive in the long term.

Nevertheless, it can grow a bit tedious when so few of these irate immune “cells” pause to notice or acknowledge how they suckled their toward authority from an early age. The ultimate irony of having been trained to be rebels and having their denunciations help prove the health of the overall system they denounce seems to escape them. This failure of perspective is especially telling in the way so many cypherpunks focus their ire at only one dangerous center of authority—government—while excusing or ignoring other ominous concentrations of power. True, any elite that has such a fantastic array of guns and prisons has to merit especially close scrutiny. (Even more would be better!)

Still, in the West it is not government but megacommercial interests that presently threaten to fence off vast realms of cyberspace. I’d feel better if the Internet’s self-appointed defenders felt obliged to guard all sections of the frontier and not just those facing their favorite and obvious foe.

Elsewhere, things are different. Witness a news item that lay buried deep below lurid stories about the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and Barlow’s riveting manifesto for Net independence:

*** GOVERNMENT ORDERS NET USERS TO REGISTER WITH POLICE. ***

Which government? What’s hidden in the asterisks? Where did the story originate? Here’s a clue: the policy affects over a billion people, far across the ocean. Nor will those people be the only losers if this policy is effectively carried out. It could manifest danger to our very lives.

In the West we have learned the hard way that criticism is the only known antidote to error (and the Net provides criticism a-plenty!). But throughout human history, nearly all ruling cliques cared much more about their own power than about the error-detecting benefits of free speech. Let’s put it in terms of memes. Our upstart meme of openness will win if it is allowed to infect the world’s populace. So the leaders of closed societies rationalize that they must “protect” their people against this infection. In contrast, we fully-infected carriers of the openness meme are driven to push it into closed societies, whatever their self-declared guardians say about it.

But there is a more powerful reason to oppose this knee-jerk, predictable measure on the part of an archaic old guard. That reason is the growing danger of war—yes, old-fashioned physical war. Dictatorships are notorious for making fantastic miscalculations and strategic blunders (witness the days leading to World War I or the German-Soviet non-aggression treaty). This is because ruling cliques like to operate in near isolation, quashing any voice that might point out flaws in their enthusiastic plans. In other words, suppression of criticism has always been a principal condition leading to armed conflict.

This will be much less a danger when all countries are fully enmeshed in the Net. Whether the resulting system resembles what we call “democracy” or has other, more Eastern flavors, a fully and openly wired society will acquire the sort of transparency that makes sudden, impulsive aggression much less likely and far more accountable.

Nor will the CIA be able to talk us into unneeded defense buildups, as they did during much of the cold war, if they lack a monopoly on information about foreign military capabilities. Rather, we’d all have access to the data on which to base informed, self-interested decisions. The important thing is to get our priorities right. Let’s worry about getting the world wired first, preventing war, and promulgating the cantankerous habits of mutual accountability so that they spread throughout a maturing Terran Civilization.

In contrast, it’s really rather tedious to hear all this moaning and complaining that the sky is falling because (for instance) parents may get to program filters on their home televisions instead of having to monitor the damned things in person, day and night.

How to Preserve Freedom in an Uncertain World

Let me conclude with a little parable, borrowed from The Transparent Society. This ancient Greek myth tells of a farmer, Akademos, who once did a favor for the sun god. In return, the mortal was granted a garden wherein he could say anything he wished—even criticism of the mighty Olympians—without fear of retribution.

I have often mulled over that little story, wondering how Akademos could ever really trust Apollo’s promise. After all, the storied Greek deities were notoriously mercurial, petty, and vengeful. They could never be relied on to keep their word, especially if provoked by censuring mortals. In other words, they were a lot like human leaders.

I concluded there were only two ways Akademos could truly be protected. First, Apollo might set up impenetrable walls around the glade,dense that even keen-eyed Hermes could not peer through or listen. Alas, the garden wouldn’t be very pleasant after that, and Akademos would have few visitors to talk to.

The alternative was to empower Akademos so that somehow he could enforce the gods’ promise. Some equalizing factor must make them keep their word, even when the mortal and his friends started telling bad Zeus jokes.

That equalizing factor could only be knowledge.

The roots of this particular legend permeate Western thought. In the days of Pericles, free citizens of Athens used to gather at the garden of Akademos, where individuals would freely debate issues of the day. That liberty lasted while Pericles was around to remind them of the contract they had made—a pact of openness.

Alas, it was a new and difficult concept. This miracle did not long outlive the great democrat. Outspoken Socrates paid a stiff price for practicing candor in the Akademos, whereon his student, Plato, took paradoxical revenge by writing stern denunciations of openness, calling instead for strict government by an “enlightened” elite. Plato’s advice served to justify countless tyrants during the following two and a half millennia, remaining influential almost to this generation.

But now, at last, the vision of Pericles is getting another trial run. Today’s “academy” extends far beyond the sacred confines of earth’s thousand major universities. Throughout the neo-West—and to some extent the rest of the world—people have begun to accept the daring notion that ideas are not in themselves toxic, at least not to those (from all social classes) who cultivate brave minds. Free speech is increasingly seen as the best font of criticism—the only practical and effective antidote to error. Moreover, it goes both ways. Most honorable people have little to fear if others know things about them.

Let there be no mistake: this is a hard lesson to swallow, especially since each of us (some with the best of intentions) would be a tyrant, if we could. Very little in our history has prepared us for the task ahead of living in a tribe of more than six billion equal citizens, each guided by his or her own sovereign will, loosely administered by chiefs we elect and by just rules that we made through hard negotiation among ourselves. Any other generation would have thought it an impossible ambitious—through countless ancestors sweated and strove to get us to the point where we can try.

Even among those who profess allegiance to this new hope, there is a bitter struggle over how best to protect it from the old gods of wrath, bigotry, conspiracy, and oppression—spirits who reside not on some mountain peak but in the hearts of each man or woman who tries to expand a little secular power or profit by suppressing others. Perhaps someday our descendants will be mature enough to curb these impulses by themselves. But meanwhile, a way is needed to foil the self-justified ambitions of those who would rationalize robbing freedom from the rest of us by saying that it is their right—or that it is for our own good.

According to some vigorous champions of liberty, the best means to protect our worldwide “academy” is obvious. Many “privacy champions” want to erect shields to put people on even ground with the mighty. According to this view, we must build walls to safeguard every private garden, so that freedom may thrive in each secure sanctum of the mind.

To this I can only reply that it’s been tried. And there is not a single example where a commonwealth based on that principle thrived. There is a better way—a method that is primarily responsible for this renaissance we’re living in. Accountability is a light that can shine even on the gods of authority. Whether they gather in the Olympian heights of government, amid the spuming currents of commerce, or in the Hadean shadows of criminality, they cannot harm us while pinned by its glare.

Accountability is the only defense that ever adequately protected free speech, in a garden that stands proudly with no walls.

I’m not the first to say this. Pericles, Bruno, Spinoza, Sequoia, and countless others gave openness a voice during their own dark epochs. Nor can I pretend to have offered anywhere near the scholarly eloquence that Karl Popper poured into The Open Society and Its Enemies (1950) during a period when it seemed all-too likely that our grand experiment would be destroyed, either from outside or within. During the dark early days of the cold war, Popper movingly praised those common folk who manage to transform themselves into citizens—independent, cooperative, and indomitable.

Writing about the “longing of uncounted unknown men to free themselves and their minds from the tutelage of authority and prejudice,” he posited hope in “their unwillingness to leave the entire responsibility for ruling the world to human or superhuman authority, and their willingness to share the burden of responsibility for avoidable suffering, and to work for its avoidance.”

Even when it comes to a more down-to-earth or popularized version of the same message, I am far from alone. Take for example the following extract from an article that appeared before my book went to press: With the coming of a wired, global society, the concept of openness has never been more important. It’s the linchpin that will make the new world work. In a nutshell, the key formula for the coming age is this: Open, good. Closed, bad.

Tattoo it on your forehead. Apply it to technology standards, to business strategies, to philosophies of life. It’s the winning concept for individuals, for nations, for the global community in the years ahead.

In their Wired magazine commentary, Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden went on to contrast what the world may look like if it takes either the “closed” route or an “open” one. In the former case, nations turn inward, fragmenting into blocs. This strengthens rigidity of thought, stagnates the economy, and increases poverty and intolerance, leading to the vicious cycle of an even more closed and fragmented world. If, on the other hand, society adopts the open model, then a virtuous circle turns cultures outward, receptive to innovation and new ideas. Rising affluence leads to growing tolerance, smaller economic units, a more open society, and a more integrated world.

Synergies like this underlie the movement for openness, in stark contrast to the zero-sum approaches offered by the devil’s dichotomies that call for wretched tradeoffs between pairs of things we cannot endure without. Those who favor an open society believe we can have both liberty and efficient government, both freedom and safety. In fact, we know that those pairs will thrive or fail in unison.

This confidence extends to the way we would envision developing the character and institutions of the information age, which until now have been “deposited like sediment” rather than sapiently planned. Making an analogy to the framing of the U.S. Constitution, Jaron Lanier called for a pragmatic mutualism of competition and cooperation as we design—and then redesign—the Internet to come:

Well-meaning and brilliant people with nasty, conflicting interests somehow created a collective product that was better than any of them could have understood at the time. . . . As in Philadelphia two hundred years ago, a collective product (the Internet) has to emerge that is better than any of them, or any of us, could achieve singly.

In such negotiations it is perfectly reasonable to “trade off” particular interests, negotiating a give and take of concessions from one group to the next. That is adversarial pragmatism, a form of accountability. But it does not have to entail accepting dour dichotomies about matters of fundamental importance.

If we are all doomed to be either courteous slaves or liberated barbarians, what’s the point?

In the long run, what use is a civilization unless it gently helps us become so smart, diverse, creative, and confident that we choose—of our own free will—to be decent people?

That is the point that I wish those irate heroes, those genuine Palladins of Western freedom—John Perry Barlow and his comrades—would try to remember. In the long run, independence and interdependence come down to the same thing. Only sovereign grownups can help each other grow and stay free.

IAAMOAC!

I am a member of a civilization. Try saying it aloud sometime. It is a mantra against the modern self-doped drug of self-righteousness. Compared to anything else human beings have done, it is the best civilization ever. It’s fun. It created the Net. It’s earned your loyalty a thousand times over.

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