Wake up: politics is in your face again. Hothouse cybersalons are busy incubating Information Age Manifestos, Magna Cartas, and Ultimatums. Congress is being congratulated for mandating sweeping FCC regulations in areas they don't understand - like multimedia networks. And a traveling band of bureaucrats is holding town meetings to drum up support for the War on Info-Poverty and to collect ideas on how to soak us all to pay for desperately needed Info-Stamps.
It is as Terence McKenna said: "The 1990s are just like the 1960s - only turned upside down." Now the hippies are the fat cats with fat bank accounts and even fatter appetites for talk-show fame. Just as flower-child Hillary wants to "fix" health care by running it from the basement of the White House, the Teflon Vice President, Al Gore, along with his Deadhead staff, wants to install his digital command center in the attic. Wait until he gets every school kid to join his Save-the-Environment-Youth-Corps and sends them out to take water samples to post on the Internet. (And you thought D.A.R.E. was frightening. ) The Merry Pranksters go to Washington, indeed.
Haven't we learned anything? The job of career politicians is to get reelected - not to shrink government. Replacing Big Steel with Big Silicon doesn't change anything - it's still the same political system. Remember Clinton's promises to "reform" political contributions and ethics rules? Remember what happened to those promises?
Putting a Pink Floyd groupie on the FCC doesn't mean they'll back off and leave Howard Stern alone now. In our zeal to make our technologies and our digital culture mainstream, we've fallen into a trap - a very old trap. We've become co-opted. We've forgotten why we mistrusted government in the first place. We've fooled ourselves into thinking that we've won and that the "good guys" are fondling the levers of power now. We've become cyberdupes.
This administration plans to take over the network that our lives depend on. They say, "Sure, we'll let private enterprise build it. But in exchange for our generously granting construction permits, we want to control it." It's called Industrial Policy, and it doesn't work. This policy is going to be shoved down our throats - unless we stop it. That's right, we're the ones who have to stop it.
Why would anyone even consider allowing an assault like this on the Net? Why, it's all in the "public interest," of course. In speech after speech, Gore and Commerce Secretary Ron "no-ethics-violations-here" Brown hammer away at the coming tragedy of the information have-nots. "We'll never make it to the 21st century unless we bring all the citizens of this great land with us," say the pious digicrats. Do they ever spell out what an information have-not looks like? Or which new networked services are vital to democracy? Or why intervention is needed to make sure we make it safely to the millennium? They're still studying the matter.
This isn't a liberal versus conservative thing. Or even a left versus right thing. This doesn't fit any of the traditional categories, sects, "isms," or schisms. As befits the development of a profound new medium, we're beginning to write a completely new chapter in political history. Never before has a group of citizens with such global awareness, depth of experience, media sophistication, and healthy skepticism been handed such a massive opportunity. Without any official proclamations, we're already in the information age. We're no longer at war, and we live in a networked economy. The left-wing is dead. The right-wing is dead. Ideology is dead.
In place of the stale, 19th-century pre-cyber age ideologies that still provide coinage for "the system" (how could anyone still be proud to be identified as a socialist or a Jeffersonian or a libertarian?), proto-movements are beginning to form to tackle the far more radical politics of cyberspace. Take, for instance, DigitaLiberty. Still building momentum, DigitaLiberty attacks Clipper as a last ditch IRS assault on cybercommerce. Far from society protecting itself from porno-smuggling-kiddie-grabbing-terror-toting hairballs, DigitaLiberty pegs Clipper and its kin as frantic steps to back up tax collection in the metaverse. Think about it. When "the system" loses its legitimacy, just how many taxes do you plan to pay? What would a cyber age "nation state" look like (with 20 percent of its current tax revenues)?
Or, take the example of drafting a "Statement of Principle on Cyberspace and the American Dream." By asking "Is cyberspace the next frontier of American entrepreneurship...or just a sandbox for second-wave bureaucrats?" George Gilder, Esther Dyson, Alvin Toffler, and dozens of others are trying to craft a platform for the politics of post-industrial society. Barbra Streisand wasn't invited to comment.
The EFF isn't part of these new politics. When it abandoned its initial grass-roots strategy, it abandoned the chance to build something vibrant outside of the current system. The EFF has become the system - complete with back-room deals and clouds of doublespeak.
When the House recently passed its telecom reform act, EFF praised it for "dramatically enhancing Americans' access to multimedia information sources." The bill, however, doesn't actually enhance access to anything (except policy-wonking by committee) - it mandates an open-ended series of reports on the open-ended topic of "open-platform services." EFF's open-platform policy triumph created a nightmare - an open door for federal industrial policy intervention into information markets.
