isen.blog

When we presented our statement, Benjamin Barber, the author of _Jihad versus McWorld_ , shook things up by offering criticism of the statement's (indeed *our*) cyber-optimistic attitude. George Soros, who I had a word with after our flight from Madrid to JFK (on his private jet? No.) remarked that Barber's criticism "opened things up," and he wished he could have stayed to hear the resulting discussion.

Ethan Zuckerman blogged

[Barber's] argument, as I understood it, is that the very architecture of the Internet has social "bugs" that we failed to address. He asserts:

The internet is horizontal and privatized, which means that it's highly segmented. Most people talk to people like themselves, and as a result, debates are often infantile and puerile.

There's no source of authority on the net, so it's hard to tell gossip from fact and lies from truth.

The fact that the Internet is unregulated means that it's a monopolistic enterprise, dominated by corporate interests, notably media, hardware and software monopolies.

One third of the net's search engine hits are for pornography

Virtual relationships are different - and not as important - as real ones.

And Ethan observed

this strikes me as an overview that focuses on fear, rather than on hope.

Exactly. Barber was serving up cyber-pessimism as antidote to our optimism. Ethan continues

What's so wonderful and complicated about the 'net is that it includes fearsome monopolies and creative open source developers, porn and poetry, self-referential circle jerks and genuine dialogue across cultures and between borders. My interest is in focusing on the positive - especially on the dialogue - but it's irresponsible to deny the negatives. But I don't think it's surprising that a group of people talking about the value of keeping the Internet open and accessible despite the threat of terrorists using it would focus on the positives, not the negatives.

John Perry Barlow also blogged the exchange, writing

[Our statement] has just been strongly and rather surprisingly rebuked by my friend Benjamin Barber who laid out the usual older, indigerate stuff about how the Internet is nothing but the handmaiden of big media, scarcely better than television.

Indigerate, as in illiterate or intolerant, I presume. Afterwards, Barlow and Barber continued the discussion:



I actually agree that Barber names several critical dangerous tendancies. There's lots to be pessimistic about. But until Barber's dangers lock in, that is, as long as there's hope, I choose to be an optimist. If you can't be optimistic about the Internet as infrastructure for the human spirit, what else is there?

I wish we had another day for the cyber-pessimists (and there were a few others in the room) to talk to the cyber-optimists. If both sides brought the right attitude to the table, it could have been a learning experience for all. Barlow called our statement

So predictable as to be the equivalent of silence

Such a discussion might have provided the unpredictable element that Barlow was looking for.