Civilizing Cyberspace

An Interview with Steven E. Miller

Steven Miller's 'Civilizing Cyberspace' looks like an official manual for net politics, published by big daddy Addison-Wesley. It covers all non-technical aspects, like democracy and free speech, online ethics, universal service, privacy and encryption, creating communities, intellectual property and citizen action. It is written for a broad audience - no academic obscurities here. Each section is illustrated by a interview with leading figures in the field. The book centers around the relationship between the government's agenda, the marketplace and the interest of the industries and the public interest. The state, capital and the public all have their own visions on the 'domestication' of cyber space (that's how I read the title at first). An Internet culture needs to be established, it's wild aspects have to be tamed. But Miller is no sociologist, rather a pragmatic activist, who sees that there is an urgent need to act. No gambling here with problematic notions like 'civilization' or 'the public'. It's time for positive models and getting our hands dirty.

Needless to say that this book only deals with the situation in the USA. However, it has a different agenda than the techno-utopian cyber visionaries that most Europeans associate with USA publications such as Wired. Steven Miller is currently on the board of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) which researches and presents a public interest perspective on the societal impacts and implications of computer technology. Organizations like these are still widely unknown throughout Europe, which is a good reason to push for broad Euro-American dialogue and direct contacts beyond the Wired circle. The interview was conducted in Munich, during the 'Internet & Politics' conference, on February 19, 1997.

How did your analysis of the net evolve after you finished your book in November 1995, and what have you been doing ever since?

Steven E. Miller: The basic political analysis that I laid out in the book still holds. However, things change so quickly in this field that I'd like to update whole chapters to deal with the Telecommunications Reform Act, corporate mergers and some of the new technologies.

I am still living in the tension between the humanistically possible and the terrifyingly probable. I still find too many people falling into the techno utopian fantasy that the technology itself will automatically make things happen for the good. But there is nothing inherent with the Internet that automatically leads to democracy. The Chinese are finding ways to harness the Internet by turning the entire nation into a closed system, an Intranet. Giving people online access may turn out to be a boobytrap for the Chinese government, but it is going to take a while. So the key is not trusting that the technology will give us the gift of a positive future, but to think about a political strategy detailing how to build organizations that begin to embody the positive future we want.

After spending two years living with the abstractions in the book, I felt a real need to get very concrete, particularly about universal service. How do we spread access, training and meaningful purpose, outside of the elite colleges and homes of the rich? I picked up on an idea that came out of California, from a guy named John Gage, called NetDay. I started an organization in Massachusetts, called MassNetworks, getting businesses to support volunteers who work with schools to build networks. My interest in focusing on schools partly comes from my belief that the consumerist model of a computer in very household will never happen. You've got to worth through mass organizations, local institutions, churches, girls and boys clubs, soccer teams or schools.

We worked with 400 schools in October 1996. Across our state, over 5000 volunteers came to the schools to help pull wires and set up computer systems. To get 5 computers in every class room, just in Massachusetts, could cost nearly a billion dollars. I don't see it happening, but I want at least make sure that kids whose families can't afford computers at home will at least have some access at school.

We worked with the trade unions -- the Electrical Workers Union pulled 30 miles of wires for schools in the inner-city of Boston, including some very low income areas. We created a partnership with 3COM, SUN, Lotus and IBM, another with the Bank of Boston. We got the teachers involved -- if they don't feel ownership of the whole effort they will say 'Thanks' and never use it.

Part of our goal was to help schools reconnect to their tax payers, to their community. We have to rebuild public trust in our public institutions. The conservatives have been successful in convincing people that the government can't do anything well and the only solution is to get rid of the government. It's true that the public sector does lot of things wrong, but it is one of the few collective tools we have available. If we give up on it, we are all left as individual consumers. As a citizen I want to work through collective institutions, because only in that manner do I have a chance of helping shape the economy and the marketplace in ways that serve all of us for the good.

In 'Civilizing Cyberspace' you refer frequently to the National Information Infrastructure (NII), Al Gore's plan from 1992. What happened with those plans? Have they been implemented or did they just disappear?

Steven E. Miller: In a certain way it is still there. Gore originally spoke about an updated Internet, which he called the NREN, the National Research and Education Network. However, as the election of 1992 came closer, his vision became more and more grandiose. So from a small academic network he started talking about a transformative technology that would be a motor for economic development. At some point it started to include television and telephone and cable television and wireless. It was to be a public infrastructure: just as the highways were build by the government, the information highway would be build by the government.

However, soon after Clinton and Gore got elected, they started calling it the National Information Infrastructure. But within months, as their political weakness became more apparent, they ran out of political steam. Essentially, the Republicans hijacked the vision and started pushing their argument about privatization and the market as the savior of everything. The vision of the NII, which I call cyberspace, turned out to be a series of strategies about unleashing the private sector. But what is a national infrastructure in that, besides a bunch of subsidies and deregulatory laws?

Ironically, they've now turned back to the original idea and appropriated funding to build that original, high speed education network, six or eight different universities that are connecting. The current idea is to build the NREN for the academic community, but as soon as the technology is shown to work they will spin it off into the private sector.

There is this notion of the public sphere within cyberspace as a third space, in-between state owned networks on the one side and commercial zones on the other. One could think of community networks, public terminals, bringing libraries on-line, free content and a reincarnation of public broadcasting. How is the current debate in the US about this idea of the public?

Steven E. Miller: The problem in the US is that on the national government level there really isn't much discussion anymore about public space. While the rhetoric proclaims boundless benefits for everyone, the actual policy is simply 'let the market go'. But in Europe you do have a chance to have the public sector either build or powerfully shape the infrastructure. Part of what you miss in Europe is the entrepreneurial part of the market. The US has lot of entrepreneurialism but no solid public core. What we both have to come to is a meeting ground. The role for the public sector is to shape the market so that the transmission system, the wires and the wireless, is solid and broadband, accessible and affordable for all. Where you want to have open competition is in the equipment and the switching protocols you use at either end.

The public sector should also subsidize and pay for noncommercial content. You can't leave the content sector up the private sector, because all they will give you is commercial manipulation. At the same time you can't leave it up to the state, because all that will give you is boring bureaucracy and safe conservatism. You need to figure out a funding mechanism, either through the tax system or through the commercial system, that diverts a steady revenue stream into independent community content creation. We cannot relate to this as individual consumerism, you need community organizations. So the challenge for all of us how to create a revenue flow that creates non-commercial content.

Creating a positive future is going to require a combination of different strategies, a hybrid. It is not private sector, it is not public sector, not community networks. We are going to have our hands very dirty and start struggling. Because experience has already shown that any pure method fails.

The inherent, pragmatic and radical net criticism we are trying develop deals with the ideological premises within the software and tries to understand the underlying political and cultural patterns. Could you tell us something about net criticism in the US from your point of view?

Steven E. Miller: There is a fine line you have to walk. In the US, net idealism is the dominant flavor. 'Let the market go and it will bring us the future. And the future will be wonderful.' When you critique that, you got to be careful not to let yourself become associated with the people saying that technology is all bad. What I try to do is imbed my criticism in positive formulations, how it can be a tool for community building, small scale economic development, democratic movements. It is not enough to say that Wired magazine is wrong. We should not cut ourselves off from the future.

There are many people who critique without rejecting the possibilities the net culture brings. Think of Gary Chapman, who used to work for the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and now works with the 21st Century Project out of Austin, Texas. Or a guy named Dick Sclove, who works for the Loka Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts. They both talk about democratizing the technology development process. Phil Agree, working out of the University of California at San Diego, has some of the most incisive critiques of how the conservative movement is using telecommunication as a tool for public relation and building a cultural movement. I think we have to do the same. There isn't a magazine set up to serve that and maybe there should be.

We found out that a net critique should also come with some ingredients for a political economy of the telecom business. Did you have the same experience?

Steven E. Miller: There are some many layers to the business. One layer is about the organization of production and we tend to forget this one, how giant corporations use computer networks to rationalize and restructure their productive methodology internally, so that they can have a greater span of control for their top managers, so that they can get rid of the middle layer of managers and push decision making down, without letting go of control . Or how they can transform their production processes, with parts in Malaysia, Japan, Brazil or the UK.

It is also a mechanism of coordination between corporations. EDI -- Electronic Data Interchange -- where they order and pay and talk to each other about buying and selling electronically. This is a driving force behind the industry. Ignoring this is a myopic short sightedness of the Internet community.

Instead, we are entranced by another layer. Telecommunications is also about culture. It is a culture industry, with movie stars. It's sexy and we like that. If we are doing a political economy of the culture industry we have to understand that it is not a product in the usual sense. It is about people's understanding of the world: what is real and what is desirable, what is possible and what is important. Similarly, telecommunications is about human communication and sociability. Who do we talk to, how often, about what. The technology impacts this, too.

There is something strange about the nature of information. You don't use it up. If I have an idea, you can have the same idea, but if I have a hamburger, you can't eat it also. How do you get unique profit out of the same information -- by creating barriers to usage through intellectual property. But at the same time there is what has been called the law of increasing returns. In heavy industry, profit margins of pioneering firms tend to drop over time as other firms develop their own technological expertise. In the information economy, the people who first establish a powerful and secure niche continue to enjoy high and growing competitive advantage. Those who are ahead become further ahead and their profit margins increase. This has profound implications for the international impact of the information economy and how Africa, South America and Asia are going to fit in.

The good news is that this field is evolving so fast that no one is quite sure how to put together a winning strategy that trumps everyone else. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being wasted on projects that are abandoned. The obvious one is the Microsoft Network, where they spent a lot of money and threw it all out. AT&T set up a whole network system, it's dead. And the company that bought it has just closed it. Business leaders aren't sure what to do, but they are scared to be left out. They are investing in everything that comes along. One might work and if they are not there first, they are lost.

I think that the underlying driver is the desire to create vertically and horizontally integrated marketing machine. Vertically, the idea is for one company to own the entire profit chain from idea to production, from distribution to sale, and even the reception of the product by the consumer. A model for that would be the cable television industry. The cable company controls the pipe to your house and because of this monopoly they have been able to extend their power back into the creating of content. So now they own the channels that they then carry. They also own the box that goes on your TV so that you can't get a signal from any place else. That's vertical control, from creation to reception.

There are two types of horizontal integration: one is within a particular medium. You have the cable giant TCI buying out dozens of dozens of othe r cable companies. This means that anyone who wants to have access to America has to go to them. Until recent, people thought that the cable industry would be so desperate for content that they would pay money to content providers of every type. Diversity would reign. What happened is the exact opposite, because the cable firms still control the gateway into the home, content producers now have to pay them for the privilege of being carried. The second horizontal integration would be the merging of different industries, where you have cable buying out telephone companies, or TV networks buying out movi e studios. The diving force is to gather together all various methods of transmitting images to the consumer.

We are now thinking how an update of the majordomo software for mailing lists should look like. A combination perhaps of the web with elements of the BBS in order to make threads and more complex forms of discussion visible. How does this compare with recent developments in the 'free' software branch in the US?

Steven E. Miller: There is not a long story to tell. Netscape and Internet Explorer have dominated people's visualization of what the web is. The people who tried to come up with alternatives have been marginalized. Allen Shaw from MIT, who works at the AI-lab, has been working with low income communities in the housing projects, trying to build an interface that allows women on welfare to run a local server. There is a group called TERC in Cambridge (Massachusetts) that has been putting together it's own version of interfaces that is mostly for school use. But I have not seen too many alternative approaches reach the mass market.

This defeat has to do with our success. When the net started it was a very small community. Hackers knew how to produce an interface for that community and it evolved and it grew. But now we want to expand to have non-hacker communitie s be part of the discussion. Most of the hackers have been seduced by all the money to be made by going into business. But even the ones who want to do good... how do we support them and integrate them into the new communities? You can't come up with an interface just out of your mind. An interface is a social interaction. It is not a gift, it is a joint creaton.

Steven E. Miller, Exec. Dir., Mass NetDay: netday@meol.mass.edu
massnetworks.org
Steven E. Miller, Civilizing Cyberspace, Policy, Power and the Infromation Superhighway, ACM Press/Addison-Wesley, New York, 1996.
ISBN 0-201-84760-4

published first via nettime-l www.desk.nl/~nettime/
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