"The best way to predict the future”, the US computer scientist Alan Kay
remarked in 1971, “is to invent it.” Pre-emptive description, however, ranks
second best. The chief identifying criterion of the future is that it
continuously steps back from us, making nothing about it, strictly speaking,
true or false.
That malleability constitutes a great attraction to an author. The future’s
other broad appeal to a writer, particularly an ambitious one, is that he
can actually influence it. Try as they might, historians can’t (responsibly)
change what happened. Futurists, however, try all the time to change what
might happen. While many “cyberphilosophy” volumes purport to describe how
the digital revolution will alter such familiar areas of life as politics,
religion, ethics, art, law and romance, one can often spot a finger on the
scale attempting to affect the results.
It comes as no surprise, then, that two Professors of Law, Daniel J. Solove
(author previously of The Digital Person: Technology and privacy in the
information age, 2004) and Jonathan Zittrain, both see storm clouds in the
future of the digital revolution, if not a reign of terror, or that both
have a dog in this fight of how things should turn out. Both of their new
books, excellent and ultimately upbeat in their separate but related
missions, will increase our literacy in their complex yet still intelligible
fields.
The Future of Reputation: Gossip, rumor, and privacy on the internet
concentrates on the clash between free expression and privacy on the
internet. Solove thinks that digital communication adds new worries to
traditional concerns. His book, he writes, examines “how the free flow of
information on the Internet can make us less free”. “As social
reputation-shaping practices such as gossip and shaming migrate to the
Internet”, he asserts, “they are being transformed in significant ways.
Information that was once scattered, forgettable, and localized is becoming
permanent and searchable” as “chatrooms, online discussion groups, and
blogs”, as well as social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook,
continue “proliferating at a breakneck pace”. Thanks to innovations such as
YouTube, it now seems “foolish deeds are preserved for eternity on the
Internet”. Growth in the permanence and availability of private information,
aided by mass linking, is one of Solove’s concerns. Blogs expanded from
“about 50” in 1999 to “approximately 50 million” by July 2006. Also waxing
is the problem that such information can be of “dubious reliability”, “false
and defamatory”, or “true but deeply humiliating or discrediting”. The
internet “makes gossip a permanent reputational stain, one that never
fades”. Add to that another difference: “Traditional gossip occurs in a
context, among people who know the person gossiped about. But the Internet
strips away that context, and this can make gossip even more pernicious”.
These are gloomy trends. But since Solove, like most Anglo-American law
professors, thinks through case studies, The Future of Reputation also
offers an eye-opening, entertaining tour along with its sombre philosophical
atmosphere. A famous case on the internet was that of the “dog poop girl”,
which illustrates several of the “Generation Google” phenomena that disturb
Solove. A young woman’s small dog fouled a South Korean subway train. When
other passengers asked her to clean it up, she “told them to mind their own
business”. Someone took photos of her and posted them on a popular blog.
Criticism of the girl, and attacks on her, quickly followed. Widely known as
“dog poop girl” before long, she discovered that her personal information
was being sought and distributed. Soon she became national news. Publicly
shamed and embarrassed, the girl “dropped out of her university”. “Whereas
before”, Solove observes, “the girl would have been remembered by a few . .
. now her image and identity are eternally preserved in electrons. Forever,
she will be ‘the dog poop girl’; forever, she will be captured in Google’s
unforgiving memory; and, forever, she will be in the digital doghouse”.
Solove gives many other examples: a thirty-four-year-old American professional
who cannot escape his juvenile criminal record; “Little Fatty”, a “pudgy
sixteen-year-old in China”, whose plump countenance began to get posted
everywhere in ways that left the boy “humiliated”; Jessica Cutler, the
twenty-five-year-old staffer to a US Senator who lost her job after her
lascivious blog became public; Laura, a student who sought to plagiarize a
paper on Hinduism, then ended up the subject of a mass net conversation on
appropriate punishment for her misdeed. While Solove concedes that some
enforcing of social norms by internet shaming can have “benefits”, he points
out that net shaming, unlike legal sanctioning, “occurs without any formal
procedures, investigation, or direct feedback to the accused offender. As a
result, Internet shaming can readily get out of hand”. This is especially so
given the burgeoning of sites that now invite shaming of others for
activities such as miserly tipping (“BitterWaitress”), making crude remarks
to women (“Holla Back NYC”) and cheating on one’s lover (“Revenge World”).
As Solove puts it, “The Internet is bringing back the Scarlet letter in
digital form”. Is there a solution? Solove, unlike Zittrain, thinks the
answer lies mainly in improved law, in “recognizing a new and broader notion
of privacy and by reaching a better balance between privacy and free
speech”. We must “protect privacy to ensure that the freedom of the Internet
doesn’t make us less free”. That means splitting the difference between
regulatory and absolutist approaches to free speech. While Solove recognizes
that “there is a limit to what law can do”, he believes it is an “instrument
capable of subtle notes”.
Zittrain, by contrast, is a Romantic about the “Live Free or Die” ethos of
original internet culture, while doubling as a superb technical master of
its legal and manufacturing history. He is concerned that regulators,
manufacturers and frightened citizens may converge to snatch technological
freedom from internet culture. In Zittrain’s view, the hallmark of both the
internet and the personal computer has been their “generative” quality, an
openness to change in some respects by anyone with access to them. That
quality has produced unexpected good things like Google and YouTube, Instant
Messaging and search engines, and unexpected bad things like “viruses, spam,
identity theft, crashes”, not to mention worms and “botnets”.
On the whole, Zittrain thinks, we’ve done well. Yet too many people have
forgotten that the freedom of the internet is largely a happy accident. In
some of his best passages, about how the PC eclipsed the mainframe, and how
the internet left controlled environments like AOL in the dust (if not
buried), Zittrain vaunts the benefits of freedom. The accelerating problem
he sees, however, is that negative upshots of internet freedom, such as
viruses and spyware, are driving ordinary internet users – those with no
special desire for inventive interactivity with their devices, who “see
themselves only as consumers whose participation is limited to purchasing
decisions” – to demand devices that offer the reliability and security of
appliances. Welcome to the brave new “present” of iPods, iPhones, Xboxes,
and TiVos, devices that don’t permit end-users to program them, but remain
under the control of their corporate manufacturers. The internet’s “sea
change” will come, Zittrain cautions, with “control over the endpoint”,
because if you “lock down the device . . . network censorship and control
can be extraordinarily reinforced”. Zittrain thus confronts the same
freedom-versus-loss-of-control issue as Solove, but in a wider sphere – net
technology itself. True to his net Romanticism, however, Zittrain sees
solutions not primarily in law. Rather, he looks to the original
“communitarian” ethos of the net. Whereas Solove hopes for legal doctrines
that carefully balance between privacy and free expression, Zittrain calls
on community cooperation of the sort one sees in Wikipedia. Just as
“neighbourhood watch” programmes staffed by citizens protect neighbourhoods,
Zittrain believes more “netizens” need to enlist in the fight against
internet gangsterism.
He also urges technical solutions. We need better PCs that use “wiki”
technology, to provide histories of documents that enable them to be
examined and corrected. He suggests “virtual machines” on PCs that would
allow users to divide safe and risky activities. He imagines a Manhattan
Project-type commitment of internet players to defeat bad guys who drive the
growing public wish for locked-down, “tethered” devices that bar third-party
or user tinkering, but provide security.
Both Zittrain and Solove exhibit a common trait of technologically oriented
futurists: they tend to assume current values and a wish to preserve them in
the face of fresh logistical forces. That’s often a reasonable assumption.
Several recent privacy crises in cyberspace – such as when many young
Facebook users objected to the site’s compiling and exploiting their
individual purchases for marketing purposes – indicate that today’s internet
users treasure the same traditional privacy values that Solove does.
Zittrain, too, could doubtless find many young whizzes who want cyberspace
to remain as wild and woolly as promised in the early days, before the
subject became so complex (and buttoned down). At the same time, however,
Solove’s examples, such as Jennifer Ringley, the twenty-year-old student who
opened her whole life to regular webcam monitoring in 1996 and didn’t shut
down until 2004, remind us of truths more explored by Frankfurt School
philosophers than American futurists – that technology also changes our
values, or at least adjusts them. The iPod, for instance, pressures us to
tolerate forms of distraction formerly considered rude, such as the teenager
who makes her purchase without removing her earphones.
Both Solove and Zittrain deserve Kierkegaard’s accolade, that to occupy
oneself with the future is “an indication of man’s nobility”. Like many
“cyberphilosophers”, they are discovering the future in the present with
less wonted gloom and doom – and more incisive solutions – than many
traditional literary and humanistic pronouncers on the subject.
Daniel J. Solove
THE FUTURE OF REPUTATION
Gossip, rumor, and privacy on the internet
247pp. Yale University Press. £16 (US $24).
978 0 300 12498 9
Jonathan Zittrain
THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET
And how to stop it
342pp. Yale University Press. £20 (US $30).
978 0 300 12487 3
Carlin Romano, Literary Critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer and
Critic-at-Large of The Chronicle of Higher Education, teaches philosophy and
media theory at the University of Pennsylvania. He is completing a book
entitled America the Philosophical, about the role of philosophy in American
culture.
