Cultural Agoraphobia




Over the last fifteen years, a group of scholars have finally persuaded economists tobelieve something noneconomists find obvious: “behavioral economics” shows that people donot act as economic theory predicts. But hold your cheers. This was not a vindication of folk wisdom over the pointy-heads. The deviations from “rational behavior” were not the wonderful cornucopia of human motivations you might imagine. There were patterns. For example, we weresystematically likely to overestimate chances of loss, and underestimate chances of gain, to relyon simplifying heuristics to frame problems even when those heuristics were contradicted bythe facts. Some of the patterns are endearing; the supposedly “irrational” concerns for distributive equality that persist in all but the economically trained and the extreme right, for example. But mostof them simply involve the mapping of cognitive bias. We can take advantage of those biases, asthose who sell us ludicrously expensive and irrational warranties on consumer goods do. Or wecan correct for them, like a pilot who is trained to rely on his instruments rather than his faultyperceptions when flying in heavy cloud.There is another kind of cognitive bias, one that the behavioral economists have not yet identified. Call it the openness aversion. Cultural agoraphobia. We are systematically likely to undervalue the importance, viability, and productive power of open systems, open networks, and nonproprietary production.
An Openness Aversion?
Test yourself on the following questions. In each case, it is 1991 and I have removed from you all knowledge of the years since then. (For some, this might be a relief.)You have to design an international computer network. One group of scientists describes a system that is fundamentally open: open protocols and open systems so that anyone could connectto the system and offer information or products to the world. Another group—scholars, businesspeople, bureaucrats—points out the problems. Anyone could connect to the system! Theycould do anything! The system itself would not limit them to a few approved actions orapproved connections. There would be porn, and piracy, and viruses, and spam. Terrorists couldput up videos glorifying themselves. Your neighbor’s site could compete with the New YorkTimes or the U.S. government in documenting the war on Iraq. Better to have a well-managedsystem in which official approval is required to put up a site, where only a few selected actionsare permitted by the network protocols, where most of us are merely recipients of information,where spam, viruses, and piracy (and innovation and participatory culture and anonymousspeech) are impossible. Which network design would you have picked? Remember, you have noexperience of blogs, or mashups, or Google; no experience of the Web. Just you and your cognitive filters. Imagine a form of software that anyone could copy and change, created under a license thatrequired subsequent programmers to offer their software on the same terms. Imagine legionsof programmers worldwide contributing their creations back into a “commons.” Is this anarchic-sounding method of production economically viable? Could it successfully compete with thehierarchically organized corporations producing proprietary, closed code, controlled by both lawand technology? Be truthful.
Finally, set yourself the task of producing the greatest reference work the world has ever seen.You are told that it must cover everything from the best Thai food in Durham to the annual riceproduction of Thailand, from the best places to see blue whales to the history of the Blue DogCoalition. Would you create a massive organization of paid experts, each assigned a topic, withhierarchical layers of editors above them, producing a set of encyclopedic tomes under rigorouscopyright and trademark? Or would you wait for hobbyists, governments, scientists, and volunteer encyclopedists to produce, and search engines to organize and rank, a cornucopia of information? I know which way I would have bet in 1991. But I also know that the last time I consulted an encyclopedia was in 1998. You? It is not that openness is always right. It is not. Often we need strong intellectual propertyrights, privacy controls, and networks that demand authentication. We need a balance betweenopen and closed, owned and free, and we are systematically likely to get the balance wrong.(How did you do on the test?) Partly this is because we still don’t understand the kind of property that lives on networks; most of our experience is with tangible property. Sandwiches thatone hundred people cannot share. Fields that can be overgrazed if outsiders cannot be excluded. For that kind of property, control makes more sense. Like astronauts brought up in gravity,our reflexes are poorly suited for free fall. Jefferson’s words were true even of grain elevators andhopper boys. But in our world, the proportion of intangible to tangible property is much, muchhigher. The tendency to conflate intellectual and real property is even more dangerous in a networked world. We need his words more than he did. Each of the questions I asked is related to the World Wide Web. Not the Internet, the collectivename for the whole phenomenon, including the underlying methods of sending and receivingpackets. Some version of the underlying network has been around for much longer, in one formor another. But it only attracted popular attention, only revolutionized the world, when on topof it was built the World Wide Web—the network of protocols and pages and hyperlinks that isso much a part of our lives and which arose only from Tim Berners-Lee’s work at CERN in 1991. My daughter will graduate from college in the year 2011. (At least, we both hope so.) She is olderthan the Web. It will not even have had its twentieth birthday on her graduation day. By Christmas of 2012, it will be able to drink legally in the United States. I wrote those sentences, but Ifind it hard to believe them myself. A life without the Web is easy to remember and yet hard torecapture fully. It seems like such a natural part of our world, too fixed to have been such arecent arrival, as if someone suggested that all the roads and buildings around you had arrivedin the last fifteen years.Some of you may find these words inexplicable because you live in a happy, Thoreau-like bliss,free of any contact with computer networks. If so, I take my hat off to you. The world of open skyand virtuous sweat, of books and sport and laughter, is no less dear to me than to you. Havingan avatar in a virtual world holds the same interest as elective dental surgery. I care about theWeb not because I want to live my life there, but because of what it has allowed us to achieve,what it represents for the potential of open science and culture. That, I think, is something thatThoreau (and even Emerson for that matter) might have cared about deeply. Yet, as I suggestedearlier in this book, I seriously doubt that we would create the Web today—at least if policymakers and market incumbents understood what the technology might become early enoughto stop it.I am not postulating some sinister “Breakages, Limited” that stifles technological innovation. I am merely pointing out the imbalance between our intuitive perceptions of the virtues anddangers of open and closed systems, an imbalance I share, quite frankly.In place of what we have today, I think we would try, indeed we are trying, to reinvent a tamer,more controlled Web and to change the nature of the underlying network on which it operates.(This is a fear I share with those who have written about it more eloquently than I, particularlyLarry Lessig and Yochai Benkler.) We would restrict openness of access, decrease anonymity, andlimit the number of actions that a network participant could perform. The benefits would beundeniable. It would cut down on spam, viruses, and illicit peer-to-peer file sharing. At the sametime, it would undercut the iconoclastic technological, cultural, and political potential that theWeb offers, the ability of a new technology, a new service to build on open networks and openprotocols, without needing approval from regulators or entrenched market players, or even theowners of the Web pages to which you link.Imagine, by contrast, an Internet and a World Wide Web that looked like America Online, circa1996, or Compuserve, or the French state network Minitel. True, your exposure to penis-enhancement techniques, misspelled stock tips, and the penniless sons of Nigerian oil ministers wouldbe reduced. That sounds pretty attractive. But the idea that the AOL search engine would bereplaced by Yahoo and then Google, let alone Google Maps? That new forms of instant messaging would displace Compuserve’s e-mail? That the Chinese dissident would have access toanonymized Internet services, that you might make phone calls worldwide for free from yourcomputer, or that a blog like BoingBoing would end up having more page views than manymajor newspapers? Forget it. Goodbye to the radical idea that anyone can link to any page onthe network without permission. A revised network could have the opposite rule and evenimpose it by default.A tamer network could keep much tighter control over content, particularly copyrighted content. You might still get the video of the gentlemen doing strange things with Mentos and sodabottles, though not its viral method of distribution. But forget about “George Bush Doesn’t Careabout Black People” and all your favorite mashups. Its controlled network of links and its limited access would never unleash the collective fact-gathering genius the Web has shown. For afee, you would have Microsoft Encarta and the Encyclopedia Britannica online. What about the“right-click universe” of knowledge about the world gathered by strangers, shared on comparatively open sites worldwide, and ordered by search engines? What about Wikipedia? I think not.The counterfactual I offer is not merely a counterfactual. Yes, we got the Web. It spread too fastto think of taming it into the more mature, sedate “National Information Infrastructure” thatthe Clinton Administration imagined. But as Larry Lessig pointed out years ago, the nature of anetwork can always be changed. The war over the control and design of the network, and thenetworked computer, is never-ending. As I write these words, the battles are over “trusted computing” and “Net neutrality.” Trusted computing is a feature built into the operating system thatmakes it impossible to run processes that have not been approved by some outside body anddigitally identified. It would indeed help to safeguard your computer from viruses and otherthreats and make it harder to copy things the content owners did not want you to copy (perhapseven if you had a right to). In the process it would help to lock in the power of those who had adominant position in operating systems and popular programs. (Microsoft is a big supporter.) Itwould make open source software, which allows users to modify programs, inherently suspect.It would, in fact, as Jonathan Zittrain points out, change the nature of the general-purpose computer, which you can program to do anything, back toward the terminal which tells you what functions are allowed. Think of a DVD player.Net neutrality, by contrast, is an attempt by the companies who own the networks to be allowedto discriminate between favored and unfavored content, giving the former preferential access.(One wit analogized it to letting the phone company say,“we will delay your call to Pizza Hut forsixty seconds, but if you want to be put through to our featured pizza provider immediately, hitnine now!”) Taken together, these proposals would put the control of the computer back in thehands of the owners of the content and the operating system, and control of the network users’choices in the hands of the person who sells them their bandwidth. At the same time, our intellectual property agenda is filled with proposals to create new intellectual property rights orextend old ones. That is the openness aversion in action.Now, perhaps to you, the closed alternatives still sound better. Perhaps you do not care as muchabout the kind of technological dynamism, or anonymous speech, or cultural ferment thatthrills the digerati. Perhaps you care more about the risks posed by the underlying freedom. Thatis a perfectly reasonable point of view. After all, openness does present real dangers; the samefreedom given to the innovator, the artist, and the dissident is given to the predator and thecriminal. At each stage in history where we have opened a communications network, or thefranchise, or literacy, reasonable people have worried about the consequences that mightensue. Would expanded literacy lead to a general coarsening of the literary imagination? (Sometimes, perhaps. But it would and did lead to much more besides, to literature and culture ofwhich we could not have dreamed.) Would an expanded franchise put the control of the stateinto the hands of the uneducated? (Yes, unless we had free national educational systems. “Nowwe must educate our masters” was the slogan of the educational reformers after the enlargement of the franchise in Britain in the nineteenth century. Openness sometimes begets openness.) Would translating the Bible from Latin into the vernacular open the door to unorthodoxand heretical interpretations, to a congregation straying because they did not need to dependon a priestly intermediary with privileged access to the text? (Oh, yes indeed.) Would TV andradio play into the hands of demagogues? (Yes, and help expose their misdeeds.)Openness is not always right. Far from it. But our prior experience seems to be that we are systematically better at seeing its dangers than its benefits. We need an intellectual movement, ahabit of mind, a framework of thought, to help us counteract that bias. Like the pilot in the cloudlooking at his instruments, we might learn that we are upside down.