During one of Charles Lindbergh's barnstorming tours of the 1920s, an old
woman approached the aviator, seeking salvation. How much would it cost, she
asked, to fly her to heaven and leave her there?
The story seems quaint today because we know that airplanes offer no special
transcendence, no way of shedding our earthly burdens. But dreams like the
old woman's have a persistent appeal.
Since the earliest days of the industrial revolution, people have looked to
the latest, most impressive technology to bring individual and collective
redemption. The specific kinds of hardware linked to these fantasies have
changed over the years: steam engine, railroad, telegraph, telephone,
centrally generated electrical power, radio, television, nuclear power, and
space rockets -- all have inspired transcendental visions. But the basic
conceit is always the same: new technology will bring universal wealth,
enhanced freedom, revitalized politics, satisfying community, and personal
fulfillment. As historian Joseph Corn summarizes the "winged gospel" of
seventy years ago, "Americans widely expected the airplane to foster
democracy, equality, and freedom; to improve public taste and spread
culture; to purge the world of war and violence; and even to give rise to a
new kind of human being."
For the past two decades this recurring dream has focused on computers and
telecommunications. Again and again we hear of redemption supposed to arrive
through the Computer Revolution, Information Society, Network Nation,
Interactive Media, Virtual Reality--the label changes just often enough for
prophets to discover yet another world-transforming epoch in the works. Most
successful of the publications carrying the gospel today is Wired, a San
Francisco magazine that has quickly become America's guide to the digital
frontier. In brightly lit pages pitting neo-constructivist typefaces against
neon psychedelic graphics, readers find the latest info biz gossip, news of
computer innovations, and fawning reports about hackers, computer
entrepreneurs, media moguls, and cyberspace savants. During the two and half
years since it hit the newsstands, its phenomenal success has been measured
by both a rapidly growing readership and widespread emulation. Newsweek now
includes a Wired-like "Cyberscope" page; newspapers across the land have
begun offering lifestyle sections to help middle America get "plugged in."
Having spawned this new journalistic genre, Wired remains its most dynamic
source. Its editors and writers understand that what fascinates people now
are not merely dazzling breakthroughs in communications technology, but the
numerous cultural fashions that arise in their wake. Hence, the magazine
scrupulously reports trends in language, mood, gaze, posture, and
accoutrement that characterize digital vogue. What's hot and what's not has
become what's "Wired" and what's "TIRED."
For all of Wired's breadth and vitality, however, there is something sadly
missing. If readers pick up a copy hoping to find clear-eyed views of the
social prospects and drawbacks of our rapidly growing electronic commons,
they will be disappointed. Almost without exception, the magazine prints
only the sentiments of true believers, those convinced a digital
civilization will inevitably be superior to anything that came before.
Critics of computerization and its consequences have no place in its pages.
Dialogues between differing viewpoints are never sponsored. Major
controversies about the shape of institutions appropriate to information
society are simply shunted aside.
The magazine's underlying philosophy, one highly marketable in the 1990s, is
a kind of cyber-libertarianism. Computers and networks, it turns out, are
all about freedom without limits. A Wired world is depicted as a realm of
boundless creativity, self-indulgence, profit seeking, and free-floating
ego. A perfect mascot for this colorful ideology would be Peter Pan, a
little boy now seen flying through a Neverland of digital bits, a place
where he can do what he pleases and never grow up. As Wired arrives each
month, one braces for onslaught of an adolescent power fantasies.
This cyber-libertarian worldview draws heavily upon the fizzing bromides of
technological utopianism. As columnist Nicholas Negroponte enthused in a
recent issue, "I do believe that being digital is positive. It can flatten
organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize
people . . ." Speculations of this sort seem fresh and exotic until one
notices that they have been standard themes in technology hype for more than
a century and a half. Now, as in the past, the function of this beguiling
rhetoric is to sidestep questions about the real character of the
transformations underway. Who stands to gain and who will lose? How will
power be distributed in the new order of things? Will existing sources of
injustice be reduced or amplified? Will the promised democratization benefit
the whole populace or just those who own the latest equipment?
And who gets to decide? About these questions, Wired shows little awareness
or concern.
In fact, any suggestion that there are important choices at hand is greeted
with ridicule. In a recent issue, Kevin Kelly, Wired's Executive Editor,
comments upon an interesting poll printed in the October '94 issue of
MacWorld magazine. The survey found that what people want from the
information highway is to vote in elections, search reference books, take
courses, obtain local school information, obtain government information, and
other fairly sane purposes. But Kelly scoffs at these findings.
"Judging from what people really do once they get onto the Net, we just have
to flip MacWorld's list upside down . . . . What are people really going to
use the infobahn for? Sex, gambling, fun with role playing, sports, and chat
groups." This seems less a prediction than a commitment; Wired editors seem
eager to disparage uses of the Net beyond entertainment, consumerism and
vicarious satisfaction.
The one exception to Wired's consistent disregard of social questions is its
concern for individual privacy and data security. From its very first issues
the magazine has agonized about threats to freedom posed by computer
surveillance, new varieties of wire tapping, designs for the Clipper Chip,
and the like. Even these problems, however, are portrayed as the worries of
self-absorbed computer jocks whose only concern is to maximize their own
freedom. Wired's explorations of privacy never connect to any other
political concerns, for example the growing concentrations of corporate
power in telecommunications or the fate of workers displaced by electronic
innovation. One reads in vain for any sense of responsibility to local,
national or global communities.
Are the obvious gaps in the Wired vision of the information society mere
oversights or signs of an underlying credo? As noted in the February 6
Nation magazine, Wired is a contributor, along with conservative
foundations, military contractors, and drug companies, to the Progress and
Freedom Foundation, a think tank organized by associates of Newt Gingrich.
In Gingrich's view, the celebration of cyberspace is directly linked to the
attempts to repeal the New Deal and major social reforms enacted this
century. It is not clear how thoroughly Wired embraces the anti-government,
anti-welfare, anti- labor, anti-environment, anti-public education, social
Darwinist manias of today's Republican reactionaries. But the magazine's
tone of "me first" entrepreneurialism suggests a strong affinity with those
for whom the "future" looks like a return to the Gilded Age.
Because it consistently blurs the line between hype and reality, Wired has
already lost credibility among those who want a reliable view of the links
between computers and social life. Whatever its original promise may have
been, the publication has settled into a comfortable routine of celebrity
puff pieces, product announcements, and corporate PR. Selling glitz, glamor
and ideological vaporware, Wired joins a grand tradition in American
history, one that prefers fantasy over fact, illusions of a better world
over any conscious effort to create one.
Langdon Winner, author of "The Whale and the Reactor,"teaches science and
technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
� 1995 Educom.