In the days after legislators passed the Communications Decency Act, I received screen-loads of electronic mail decrying the foolishness of Congress. Most messages warned of impending doom. The Act "under the guise of protecting children from objectionable material on the Internet, will destroy the Internet as a viable medium for commerce, education and democracy," one widely distributed electronic alert explained. "This is our last chance to fight against the familitary. If we blow this one, the Internet will be one great big Disney cartoon!" read another. While pessimism and resentment colored many of these messages, others took the Act as a challenge, as the opening salvo in a virtual war of independence, rallying the troops. "I declare the global space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reasons to fear," exhorted one popular manifesto, appropriately titled "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace."
Written by John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author of several Grateful Dead lyrics, this Declaration is the latest permutation of a 30-year-old idea - that computers can lead to a kind of Utopia, a better future through symbiosis between man and machine. This idea, which was first articulated by J.C.R. Licklider in 1960 when he authored a paper titled "Man-Computer Symbiosis," has long since mutated into the core tenet of a nascent pseudo-religion of the Net, a religion that sees cyberspace as a transcendent medium which will usher in a Golden Age, an age where being digital frees the mind, allowing us to transcend the body and ascend to a higher plane of consciousness.
This is the governing philosophy behind Wired's editorial position. Usually, the Net as Nirvana is "cut" with more reasonable theories, such as information theory, evolution and free-market economics. But every now and then Wired pulls out all the stops and lays their philosophy out: "No ambition, however extravagant, no fantasy, however outlandish, can any longer be deemed as crazy or impossible. This is the age when you can finally do it all. Suddenly technology has given us powers with which we can manipulate not only external reality - the physical world - but also, and much more portentously, ourselves. You can become whatever you want to be." This was the "pull quote" at the front of Wired's October 1994 issue.
At first I perceived this kind of talk as a self-aware joke, a send-up on the digital hyperbole that grips us. Over time I came to recognize that this wasn't the case - this way of seeing the world is not a flash-in-the-pan fad, but a mutation of deep philosophical work pioneered by Norbert Wiener and carried forward by computer scientists. Wiener, who coined the term "cybernetics," postulated that the guiding principle which allows for life and organization to emerge is information or more specifically, the information contained in messages. Messages sent between everything, from atoms to galaxies, act as a governing mechanism, relying on feedback, or the response to the message, as a guide. Wiener's ideas fit nicely with the architecture of digital computers, since a computer is a simulating machine that processes information according to inputs coming in from the outside world. Different inputs lead to different outputs, which in turn can lead to different inputs; this kind of system matches Wiener's model of feedback. Once you accept that life arises out of information, it doesn't take much to make the next logical leap: computers might one day form their own species, a subset of the "machinic phylum" as theorist Manuel de Landa puts it.
While Wiener never liked this kind of thinking, and wrote a book titled God and Golem to warn against the fetishization and worship of the machine, his ideas were appropriated and fueled two approaches to understanding computers. One approach, pioneered by Marvin Minsky, saw the machine as protoplasm; here were the ingredients which, if organized properly, would bring to consciousness the computer - the key was figuring out what those ingredients might be. The second saw the computer as an accessory to thinking, existing in partnership with people. This vision was pioneered by J.C.R. Licklider and Douglas Engelbart in the early 1960s. Their work concentrated on finding the appropriate means to comfortably integrate computers in our lives. Computers were expected to handle repetitive tasks and free us to do what we do best: think. Much of what we see today is a manifestation of Licklider and Engelbart's philosophy. It was Licklider who, as director of the Information Processing Techniques office of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, seeded an entire generation of like-minded graduate students by funding the origins of ARPANET, Engelbart's work, and Project MAC at MIT, to name a few. In turn, these graduate students went on to inspire nascent companies like Apple and counter-culture theorists like Stewart Brand, bringing forward the dream of personal computing as a reality.
Brand, in one of these coincidences of history, had an office across from Engelbart's in Menlo Park. Engelbart, who needed to demonstrate to the world the first mouse, windows and icon-based computer system in the fall of 1968 (the now famous "mother of all demos" at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium), heard that Brand was good at organizing events using audio and video. This project was Brand's first introduction to computers as mind-expanders, and it changed his life. He went on to write seminal pieces for Rolling Stone and Harper's on the computer as a catalyst for a higher state of consciousness. What was once seen as an engine of a cold, calculating, bureaucratic system was being repositioned as a mind-expander, fantasy-amplifier and tool for thought by someone with excellent counter-culture credentials. The fusion of psychedelic '60s philosophy with information theory - where once peyote was a catalyst to insight, now the computer held that title - laid the foundation for today's vision of the Net as Nirvana.
It is ironic that the Communications Decency Act, a most un-spiritual document, should serve as the latest catalyst to spread this idea of digital bliss out into wider circles. When Internet users were asked to fight back, the safe reason was that the law violated our First Amendment guarantee of free speech. This was the point made in court, and the argument that a three-judge panel accepted. The more exciting, and important, argument (not made in court) was the second: the Net is a far better place than the hulking, gray world of "meatspace" - this fragile bloom must not be crushed by the rapacious hands of a decaying industrial age, a last spasm before the next age - the age of mind. Or as Barlow explains it, himself a former psychedelic hippie, in his Declaration: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone." Behind this florid rhetoric is the bogey-man of the twentieth century: clan loyalty.
When all else fails, rally the troops by calling on kinship: "You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions." The Wired Clan versus the Tired Clan. Clan loyalty refuses to go away, it just keeps popping up like a magic mushroom, and now it is entering cyberspace. Clan loyalty is also the dark side of religious fundamentalism, and fits comfortably with musings on digital Nirvana. If you do not see the Net as a nascent Utopia, the gateway to a worldwide revolution or the harbinger of better times, then you are a non-believer, fodder to be lumped with the neo-Luddites, federal government and anything else that questions enlightenment by modem.
The antidote to clan loyalty, mysticism and intolerance online is history. Wired scrupulously avoids any discussion of the origins of computer science or the intimate details of history, since history contradicts the evolutionary model of cyberspace. Evolution is destiny; history is design. In an evolutionary model, people are mere pollinators in a greater plan - in this case the relentless march of efficiency and improvement through competing systems. This undergirds Kevin Kelly's metaphor of the "hive mind" in his book Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (Kelly is executive editor of Wired). The system runs itself, and we are little bugs helping it along, dimly aware of its greater purpose. If it is our destiny to evolve with machines, to fuse with them and form a more evolved animal, then people who refuse this model at best deserve pity, at worst deserve nothing since they don't really count anyway; after all, they're headed in the same direction as the Dodo bird. To argue that people have any control over this fate is heresy, and history is the primary tool of the heretic. It should be wielded more often because history shows that none of this was destined - it was designed.
The history of computer science and the ideas behind computer science remain woefully untranslated, considering the important role computers now play in our lives. That's a pity, because the history of computer science refutes the prevalent myths surrounding cyberspace. Instead of an inevitable process of evolution, we find cyberspace was designed by the clear intentions of people. It was people like Engelbart and Licklider who labored, and funded, to create much of the world of interconnected computers and people that we now see. Re-reading Licklider, with his predictions of the year 2000, is chilling because he so accurately captures our present-day situation, postulating that communities of shared-interest will emerge and computers will become commonplace intimate objects, forming the equivalent of a worldwide electronic utility. More importantly, this was no coincidence. At one point Licklider controlled and allocated over half of America's expenditure on the research and development of computers consistent with this vision. When he set out to fund ARPANET, he called it "the intergalactic network." Somehow, these stories lay dormant, lost.
Licklider died in 1990, so we cannot ask him what he thinks about Digital Nirvana. There is, however, an antidote to amnesia: generations of computer scientists who witnessed what happened first-hand. Now is their time to step forward to demystify the mysterious, to retell their stories, before people really do start believing that technology, as Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, is "indistinguishable from magic."
David S. Bennahum writes about cyberspace for New York magazine, the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, The Economist and other publications; his book, Coming of Age in Cyberspace, will be published by Basic Books next year. davidsol@panix.com