The vision of personal liberation via interactive technology proclaims that more choice is always a good thing. The Net allows individuals to make decisions that were once largely made by others: what news and entertainment we're exposed to, how we learn and work, whom we socialize with, and even how goods are distributed and political outcomes are reached. The appeal of all this, as a hacker once explained to author Steven Levy, is clear: "You could be God."
The real revolution of our time, then, is not just a communications revolution or an information revolution. It is a control revolution - a radical shift in who makes choices about information, experience, and resources. Increasingly, we will.
But can the pendulum swing too far? Enthralled as we should be with the idea of taking power from corrupt politicians, price-inflating middlemen, and sensationalistic media conglomerates, the free-market ideal of individual empowerment has its limits. Not just from the perspective of democracy or society at large, but from the self-interested view of each netizen.
Start with commerce. The promise of friction-free capitalism, with its circumvention of brokers and distributors, is that consumers will have unlimited opportunity in the marketplace. The bounty of limitless choice sure sounds good, but the more we take on the duties once performed by intermediaries - say, screening for quality - the more burdened we will be.
Next, take news. Personalization lets us choose what we read, hear, and watch. But, while bypassing established editors and producers may give us coverage more to our liking, we must be extra vigilant to ensure the information is accurate. The more we try to manage the flow of raw facts, the harder this will be. And as we narrow our horizons, we may deprive ourselves of opportunities - to learn and to earn.
Finally, politics. Using new media to organize or to influence elections and legislation is liberty incarnate. But when it comes to deciding complex policy questions, do we really want lawmakers to defer completely to the choices we make by push-button voting online? Who among us would have the patience, let alone the expertise, to scrutinize, say, a thousand-page budget bill before an online referendum - when these votes might occur weekly or even daily?
Even putting aside questions of the individual versus society, living well in the digital age means more than having complete dominion over life's decisions. Rather, freedom is a balancing act that requires knowing when to relinquish authority - to other humans, not agents or bots. Too much control prevents us from seeing possibilities beyond our immediate desires. Too much order stifles the healthy chaos, the restlessness, of a truly open mind.
The new individual control makes each of us, in a sense, CEO of a personal corporation called Life. We're free to make choices about every detail. But as any seasoned executive will tell you, the boss who refuses to delegate will be not only unhappy, but unproductive. Political representatives, cultural gatekeepers, and commercial middlemen can make awful decisions on our behalf - but their judgment is generally pretty decent, and is almost always more reliable than what we could come up with in their absence.
Real individual power, then, means knowing when to make choices yourself and when to trust others to make them for you. As we enter an age of limitless options, we should remember that some degree of freedom from choice can be as liberating as choice itself.
Andrew L. Shapiro (ashapiro@interport.net), a Fellow at Harvard Law School's Center for Internet & Society, is working on a book for The Twentieth Century Fund on the politics of new media.
IDEES FORTES
Freedom from Choice
