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Shape of Nets to Come

Richard Barbrook argues that a compromise between the academic gift economy and the interests of big business offers the most realistic future of 'Netutopia'.

In NMK's 2001 Christmas lecture, Dr Richard Barbrook outlined three alternate visions of the future of 'Netutopia'.

Richard Barbrook began his talk by surveying the dominant ideological currents of the last decade. The collapse of Stalinist communism across eastern Europe in 1989 gave way to a revived confidence in the vitality of democracy and power of global capitalism. Francis Fukyama’s ‘end of history’ pronouncement seemed to herald the triumph of capitalist liberal democracies and an end to mankind’s violent and fruitless quest for a socially-engineered utopia.

Within six years, however, the ‘end of history’ had already given way to a new utopian dream – Net utopia, a society shaped by the Internet, and inspired by the neo-libertarian ‘Californian Ideology’ of Wired magazine, the techno mystics of Silicon Valley and over-excitable venture capitalists. In Net utopia, society and even humanity itself, are transformed via digital communication technologies into wholly new modes of production, consumption and interaction.

Although avowedly futuristic in its outlook, much of Net utopia’s intellectual construction was already 30 years old, based upon Marshall McLuhan’s vision of the global village, Daniel Bell’s post-industrial society and Simon Nora’s work on telematics. In other important ways, it looked back slightly less further into the past, drawing heavily upon the myths and mantras of the 1980s Reagan-Thatcher era: the supremacy of the free market, off-shore banking, globalisation, heroic entrepreneurs, electronic money and friction-free markets.

The consequence of Net utopia was frenzied over-investment and a dot.com boom reminiscent of such earlier technology-led speculations as the railway mania of the 1840s and the radio boom of the 1920s. The result was predictable: the dotcoms proved they really were leading the way by being the first companies to plunge into recession, and the dramatic contraction in the technology stock markets was comparable with such colourful disasters from economic history as the Dutch tulip craze and South Sea Bubble.

But as with earlier economic crashes, speculative over-investment can create permanent improvements in the infrastructure, and the combination of long-term government investment and heady corporate capital has created a world which, by the end of 2001, had 474 million online, almost 1 in 12 of the global population. In the aftermath of Net Utopia, where is the wired world heading, and what kind of net are we facing? Richard outlined three possible nets, economic and social trajectories that could determine how many of us live and work in the future.

1. Monopoly.net

In this net, the amateurish enthusiasm that made the Internet possible is assimilated, bought and controlled by big business: Microsoft-NBC-Newscorp-Vivendi-Nokia-Sony-AOL-TimeWarner-BMG controls the net, with the support of G8-IMF-WTO-TRIPS, and new media follows the standard oligarchical model of traditional broadcasting industries. There is no longer any need to know how your computer works and interaction means no more than pressing different buttons and choosing from a restricted range of mainstream content providers and brand-owners. Intellectual property rights are aggressively protected and exploited, both through technical and legal means, the Open Source movement fails and the shareware culture of the net comes to an end, replaced by a digital update of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon – corporations and IP holders police the net, spying on your desktop.

2. Geek.net

Computer scientists built the net in their own image – as a system for enabling the academic gift economy. Whether it is a matter of writing an article for a journal, presenting a paper at a conference or uploading some new code onto a web server, valuable information is freely given and subjected to the peer review processes of evaluation, comparison and collaboration. This is, quite simply, by far the most effective method of making progress with any endeavour – open architecture and standards are the best fixes, proprietary hardware and copyright software are annoying technical bugs. And so peer-to-peer computing remains at the heart of the Internet, and the culture that fostered the free exchange of code comes to engulf all of the copyright industries, be it music, publishing or video. After all, if the US military couldn’t prevent the geeks from taking over the Internet, why did anyone think that the music industry would be any more successful?

However, Geek.net is not the shareware utopia that many think. In "The Shape of Things to Come" H.G. Wells envisaged a future ruled by an elite scientific priesthood – do we really want the Internet to be the preserve of smart young people from developed countries? And who will pay the piper when the music is free – Geek.net has no answers for the world’s creative producers.

3. People.net

The Internet inspires beautiful paradoxes and strange ironies – People.net celebrates and thrives on them. The question is not whether the Internet should be commercial or non-commercial, but rather what sort of mixed economy will emerge – it will be neither a freeware utopia, nor the closed leisure park of media conglomerates, but rather a messy compromise between private, public and community initiatives. This is People.net – not perfect, but improvable.

Since the Internet cannot be turned into a corporate monopoly, the corporation will just have to become more like the Net. Free software is fine, provided it can still bring income for companies and jobs for techies, as someone has still got to install, maintain and improve it. Hardware capitalism will continue to profit from software communism, and Sony Electronics will sell MP3 players even as Sony Music suffers at the hands of Napster. Copyright businesses will have to switch from developing products to processes, and learn how to sell commodities alongside gifts. Consumers, meanwhile, are already starting to enjoy relationships with the artist rather than a piece of plastic.

For People.net to blossom, however, there is plenty of work for us all to do over the next few years, and Richard finished his talk by outlining the developments, actions and fresh ways of thinking that he would welcome.

• More intelligent copyright laws, which take account of how media is actually produced and consumed in the digital world: what use is a piece of music, for instance, that can’t be used for DJ-ing, sampling or re-mixing?
• More sophisticated telecoms regulation – how can there be a mass market for e-commerce if the masses are not online? Regulating an industry on the basis of 19th century telephony isn’t the smartest method of managing the Internet, and there needs to be some public service goals for telecom regulation: unmetered calls, universal access and broadband for all!
• Education, education, education: the Internet was born in universities and libraries, and built to store, sort and disseminate knowledge. Every other function is just a plug-in. The educational ethos is at the heart of the Internet, and should never be over-ridden by commercial concerns.
• While TV enforces the passive consumption of content, the Internet encourages interactivity, creativity and collaboration. This means using someone else’s website, but also making your own, finding people to work with, and exploring the full potential of the technology.
• Don’t clog up your computer with bloatware, install something smarter and funkier. Discover what’s not in the manual and develop the next big thing.

Speaker Profile

Dr Richard Barbrook

Dr. Richard Barbrook was educated at Cambridge, Essex and Kent universities. During the early-1980s, he was involved in pirate and community radio broadcasting. He helped to set up Spectrum Radio, a multi-lingual station operating in London, and published extensively on radio issues. In the late-1980s and early-1990s, Richard worked for a research institute at the University of Westminster on media regulation within the EU. Some of this research was later published in 'Media Freedom: the contradictions of communications in the age of modernity' (Pluto Press, London 1995). For the last few years, Richard has been coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster and was the first course leader of its MA in Hypermedia Studies.

Hypermedia Research Centre: www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk

Cybersalon: www.cybersalon.org