Tom Friedman Forgets to Read Evgeny Morozov

In his latest op-ed piece in the NY Times, Tom Friedman is shocked - shocked! - to find that Facebook and Twitter alone are insufficient to establish a democracy or a functioning civil society sector in Egypt. Tom should have read Evgeny Morozov's "The Net Delusion" before expressing his surprise publicly. Morozov steadily, consistently and completely demolishes the notion that the Internet is inherently democratizing - for many of the same reasons Friedman ignores. The distributed architecture of the Net is wonderful - until you hit a national firewall - eg, China, Iran, North Korea. Going gaga over tech's ability to mobilize people quickly ignores the facts of power on the ground (witness Iran's abortive "Spring") and downplays (dangerously so) the ability of the state to control the physical space as well as cyberspace. Moreover, building democracy is a process, not a result - it is the messy clashing of interests, making of tradeoffs and hopefully insuring some levels of freedom while actually trying to govern societies that have been closed to people participation for years. Democracy doesn't sprout up overnight (how many former Soviet Socialist Republics are truly democratic? Is Hungary backsliding on its democratic underpinnings?), it is a hard slog through muddy terrain and must be defended constantly. Tom, read Morozov's book. It's disheartening but utterly convincing. Then you (of all op-ed writers) won't be surprised when Egyptians of many stripes give up on their Facebook/Twitter-induced "revolution". To quote The Who: "meet the new boss, same as the old boss". The Net doesn't change that.

The advantages of NOT being a digital native

People in their 20's and younger are the so-called "digital natives", those who have grown up in the tech age and for whom "being digital" (as Negroponte put it) is simply part of their nature. Those of us "of a certain age" look at digital natives with a combination of wonder and skepticism, amazed at their physical skills of digital multitasking while remaining dubious of their actual accomplishments. I have taken well to tech for a person of "that certain age" who is not an innovator on the tech adoption bell curve but I am in no way envious of the digital natives. In fact, I think it should be the other way round. Being an "analog native" means that I recall well the pre-digital era and its difficulties - bulky, time consuming physical research methods, large, heavy media storage units (they were called LPs), overseas news coming in three days late on newspapers sent by air freight - ie, the bad old days. Every time I pick up my iPod Classic, which holds over 1100 of those LPs and CDs and is barely over half full, every time I access the Net and have instant news from all over the world in several languages (instead of listening to shortwave radio broadcasts in my room), every day when I see Moore's law mean that paperless can really mean paperless (and more room in storage closets) I am thankful for the ability to contrast the digital age with my analog upbringing. I am no cyber-utopian by any means; I prefer to think of myself as a tech connoisseur, one who appreciates the subtlety and grandeur of technological possibilities in the digital age. Sorry digital natives, but you can't do that - insufficient contrast. You just don't know how lucky you really are.

Is Tim Wu's The Master Switch Inevitable?

Tim Wu's The Master Switch is a great work of history;  the real question is - is its predicted outcome inevitable? Wu traces the development and ultimate consolidation of a number of information industries - telegraphy, movies, radio, television, telephony - from a dispersed group of competitors to a small group of oligopolists or a single monopolist. Wu calls this pattern of development the "Cycle" and then, of course, applies these historical findings to the newest information industry/infrastructure, the Internet. Wu draws parallels but not conclusions - he's far too cautious an academic for that. Yet the conclusion seems inevitable - that despite its distributed architecture, we are subject to (and may be already seeing the rise of) Net oligopolies. No, this is not about outright state intervention in Net access (e.g., the "Chinese Internet"), though that possibility remains strong in certain societies (witness the attempts of repressive governments to censor or block Twitter and Google). Rather, it is about the importance of the Net to both day-to-day life and to political and self expression, and the threat to that posed by emerging oligopolies. One need not look far to see emergent oligopolies (can one imagine a viable competitor to Facebook in the pure social sharing space, despite the IPO flop? Or a serious competitor to Google in search/traffic metrics?) and oligopolistic behavior (eg, device manufacturers prohibiting jailbreaking even by knowledgeable hackers). Yet we are not yet at the point of the three television networks of the 1940's controlling all the flow of televised data and we may well never be - because of the distributed nature of Net architecture, because of the (still) varied ways in which it can be accessed, because of the diligence of certain parties in exposing this danger (eg, Wu, the EFF),and because of the constitutional nature of the protection of speech (even though the Net is essentially privately-owned and controlled, though government (ARPA) invented - sorry Al Gore). Wu is right to raise these concerns and to show that in industry after industry involving data, this "Cycle" has run its path. It may be frightening to rely on antitrust enforcement as a real backstop, since its enforcement varies from administration to administration - but it is a strong tool. What remains to be seen is the level of political will to enforce it should further consolidation in pipes (mobile operators, satellite, cable, et al.) or further strengthening of the competitive position of dominant incumbents (like Google and Facebook) prove anti-competitive. The distributed architecture of the Net standing alone will not save it from oligopoly or restriction. It is incumbent upon us the users - and our legal system - to guard carefully, having been properly warned by Wu. History is not destiny, unless we allow it to so become.

By way of introduction.....

"technology" and "limitations" in the same sentence? I'd argue that one is impossible without understanding the other. The world at times seems to be divided between cyber-utopians and cyber-cynics; I wish to tread a more independent middle path. I'd like to explore how a variety of forces - physical, social, economic, regulatory and just-plain-human, affect and at times limit our ability to maximize technological progress and benefit. As a tech lawyer, I'd like to show how the legal system, by nature conservative and reactive, is actually shaping the contours of tech development. It's no accident that some of the best thinkers on the impact of tech on society, Yochai Benkler, Tim Wu and Lawrence Lessig, are all professors of law. There is more similarity between an algorithm and a chapter of the Code of Federal Regulations than first meets the eye. I'd like to explore the works of some great thinkers (and doers) about tech and society, behavioral economics and code, to come to a holistic consensus on the roles and interactions of tech, law and human cognition. Sound like your cup of tea? Read on.