Way-New Technopomposity
by Jon Katz
31 March 1998
As a general rule, whenever you encounter politicians talking about morality or writers publishing manifestos, grab your wallet and loved ones.
The history of the Net is filled with rich characters - geeks, nerds, mad scientists, poseurs, hackers, outlaws, cybergurus - all of whom ran completely wild before the immutable laws of politics, law enforcement, commerce, and media caught up with them and began to tame their wild frontiers.
As a latecomer to this culture, I found some of these free spirits genuinely stirring. I often think of those odd kids holed up in their bedrooms for weeks and months patching together a new culture with keyboards, wires, long distance codes, and phone lines.
Or of the outlaw hackers, of whom MIT humanities Professor Janet Murray wrote in her wonderful book Hamlet on the Holodeck: "The spirit of the hacker is one of the great creative wellsprings of our time, causing the inanimate circuits to sing with ever more individualized and quirky voices...."
But if much of the Internet was built around wires and code, an equal amount was built around pomposity and bullshit. The wired world has produced lavalike torrents of manifestos promising utopias, an end to poverty and ignorance, the collapse of government and media, a new kind of economy, and all sorts of memes and constructs.
Technopomposity has become a kind of technological marvel in and of itself. Consider John Perry Barlow's many thunderous declarations of independence or Nicholas Negroponte's predictions that impoverished children the world over would become so computer-enchanted that they would all learn to read.
Just last month, a conference in Washington pondered the mysterious Long Boom, a visionary millennial economic manifesto that set the academic world on fire when Wired published it last year. Then there are the "digerati" celebrated in John Brockman's book of the same name, one of technopomposity's most spectacular eruptions.
Mainstream journalism, which until recently viewed the emerging digital culture as some sort of highly communicable disease, has seen the light and now can't hype the Net enough.
Now, even as the echoes of the Long Boom begin to quiet, comes the latest technopomposity: technorealism, just a few weeks old but already spawning lots of fawning and its own day-long conference, at Harvard no less.
How fitting that this movement was born out of a writers' lunch in Manhattan.
According to The New York Times, it seems Andrew Shapiro, a fellow at the Harvard Law School's Center for Internet and Society, a contributing editor at The Nation, and a very smart writer on technology and politics, had lunch last summer in Greenwich Village with the equally talented author David Shenk (Data Smog).
They were commiserating over a shared problem that made them both unhappy.
"In writing and speaking," said The Times, "they spend a lot of time in linguistic contortions, trying to explain that they neither love nor hate technology."
How awful.
Their solution? They gathered a bunch of friends, and friends of friends, and christened themselves "technorealists," and on 12 March, issued their very own manifesto to counter-manifestos.
According to Shapiro, technorealism is an effort to find a middle ground between two virulent forms of Technopomposity: the utopian rhetoric emanating from Wired magazine and its contributors (of which I am one) and the rantings of the many luddites in journalism, academia, and politics, declaring that new technologies threaten the foundations of civilization.
It is a testament to the nature of the Web and to the susceptibility of mass media that this middle-way idea - which would have made a perfectly decent newspaper op-ed piece - suddenly morphed into a movement, a manifesto "released" to the world and the press and signed by a committee of some gifted, mostly younger writers, including David Bennahum of Wired and Spin; Brooke Shelby Biggs of The San Francisco Bay Guardian; Paulina Borsook, the author of Cyberselfish; Steven Johnson and Stephanie Syman of Feed; Marisa Bowe of Word; Mark Stahlman, author of the forthcoming The Battle for Cyberspace; Douglas Rushkoff, author of Cyberia; and Steve Silberman of Wired News; plus Shapiro and Shenk.
According to the Times, the technorealists have "taken as their adversaries" certain older digital writers and commentators including Esther Dyson, whom the mainstream media call the "Queen of the Digerati," and Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. These writers, according to the technorealists, take too black-and-white an approach to technology, while the younger, hipper, idealistic technorealists are, according to Shapiro, out to infuse cooler, more thoughtful grayness into the raging technology debate.
"Gray" is a good word for the emerging technorealistic ideology. From the manifesto's opening:
"Technorealism demands that we think critically about the role that tools and interfaces play in human evolution and everyday life.... Looking, for example, at the history of the automobile, television, or the telephone - not just the devices but the institutions they became - we see profound benefits as well as substantial costs. Similarly, we anticipate mixed blessings from today's emerging technologies, and expect to forever be on guard for unexpected consequences...."
As technorealists, promises the manifesto, "We can be passionately optimistic about some technologies, skeptical and disdainful of others."
We can all breathe a bit easier that these gray warriors are on guard, making up their minds on a case-by-case basis, sometimes in favor of technology, sometimes against it, although it doesn't sound like technorealism will drive Monica Lewinsky gossip off the talk shows anytime soon. Gray is not the media's favorite color when it comes to discussing technology, or anything else.
In addition to its broader declaration of principles, the technorealists also defined their fairly numerous principles: Technologies are not neutral; the Internet is revolutionary, but not utopian; government has an important role to play on the electronic frontier; wiring the schools will not save them, etc.
It's strange how quickly the technorealists have drifted into the hectoring cant that is the trademark of their supposed adversaries.
Consider this explanation of Article Five ("Wiring the schools will not save them."):
"The problems with America's public schools - disparate funding, social promotion, bloated class size, crumbling infrastructure, lack of standards - have almost nothing to do with technology. Consequently, no amount of technology will lead to the educational revolution prophesied by President Clinton and others. The art of teaching cannot be replicated by computers, the Net, or by 'distance learning.'... But to rely on them as any sort of panacea would be a costly mistake."
Where, exactly does this kind of gaseous assertion come from? None of the signees seems to have much educational expertise. The problem with education, as most educators will eagerly acknowledge, is that the quality of America's schools varies so widely that such broad generalizations are useless. Tens of millions of kids in wealthy suburban communities are doing just fine. In poor urban and rural areas, there aren't enough computers to even consider the issue of whether they can replicate the art of teaching. As to complex issues like "distance learning" or the teaching skills of computers, there has been little substantive study, and nothing like consensus on their effectiveness by seasoned educators, let alone a bunch of smart young cyberwriters lunching in San Francisco and New York City and cranking out manifestos.
Then there's Article Four: "Information is not knowledge." If we really live in a society where we don't know this, then the technorealists are doomed, along with the rest of us. Stating the obvious isn't useful. Yet the technorealists earnestly point out that "Regardless of how advanced our computers become, we should never use them as a substitute for our own basic cognitive skills of awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment."
But perhaps the most offensive principle of technorealism is Article Eight: "Understanding technology should be an essential component of global citizenship."
"Understanding [its] strengths and limitations, and even participating in the creation of better tools, should be an important part of being an involved citizen...."
When writers start declaring the essential components of global citizenship, new boundaries of technopomposity have been reached. This is as elitist as it is heavy-handed. It isn't the responsibility of utopians, luddites, or technorealists to lecture the world on the responsibilities of global citizenry. People should be as free to ignore or reject technology as to embrace it. The moral dilemma is to make this equipment equally accessible, not to presume it's good for everyone.
The principles of technorealism, though they tend toward the self-important, are quite sensible. But they are not exactly stirring, nor likely to send the masses out into the streets. It isn't clear why such moderate, even tepid, philosophical and political stands require a manifesto in need of fearless co-signers, let alone a conference at Harvard.
And it's complete with its own hype. In the days before and after the conference, the technorealists sent out a steady stream of email announcements heralding the wonder of technorealism and trumpeting the names of the eager new faithful rushing to sign up for the next thing - Cyber heavyweights like Kevin Kelly of Wired and writers like Mitch Kapor and Howard Rheingold.
Reading these articles, it's difficult not to feel some nostalgia for the early hackers, whose enduring principle - Information Wants to Be Free - seems a bit more exciting.
Anyone who speaks or writes about technology will always be pressed to take sides - as the manifesto repeatedly does - mostly because the nature and history of technology is so controversial and has always made people uneasy, from medieval times to Mary Shelley's to ours.
It's puzzling why these talented writers would need or want to subsume their own identities into some published declaration of groupthink. Why label oneself in any particular way in a culture that celebrates free and rationalist thinking, issue by issue? If a writer wants to be optimistic about some technology and disdainful of others, why hold a press conference?
Why not just go and write it? Almost all of the signees have outlets for their work.
Does every writer agree with every principle of technorealism all of the time? Are the signers permitted to depart from the manifesto, or do they need permission from the group?
Manifestos seem - at least to me - to take the responsibility for ideas away from each writer and hide it behind a label. It isn't the writer making an argument, but the technorealist, and it isn't the writer critics come after, but the movement. Labels and groups - witness Washington - are often the antithesis of the kind of thinking the technorealists claim to be advancing.
And why do emerging writers need to climb over the work and bodies of their predecessors? It isn't a savory start for a group with such lofty moral pretensions. The technorealists do a disservice to the writers who preceded them, many of whom, for all their faults, were pioneers exploring and defending a radical and embattled new culture.
Dyson, despite her preciousness, is no utopian. She has always written moderately and calmly about technology, a rational counterpoint to much of the hysteria. And the often incomprehensible yet indefatigable Barlow often wrote in fiery defense of the Internet in an era when its free spirits and inventors were under nearly continuous attack from journalism, politics, even law enforcement, when teenagers all over the country were getting their computers seized and were being tossed in jail by overzealous cops and prosecutors.
What this evolution from the early Net rhetoric to contemporary technopomposity really tells us is how radically the culture surrounding technology, and its relationship to the rest of the world, has evolved.
In the late 1990s, the Internet is losing its sting as a dread menace. Reporters, cops, politicians, quilters, and pet lovers are online in hordes. Like television, the Internet is now too familiar to seem dangerous. It's tougher for reporters to constantly sound the alarm about perverts and thieves on the Internet when they're getting email from their Aunt Lucille and their employers are investing millions in Web sites.
It's certainly true that America could use some rousing debates about technology and its impact.
If technorealism brings some moderation, skepticism, and intelligence to discussions of technology, good for it. But its manifesto, and the boomlet of media hype that followed, suggests that what's more likely is another round of technopomposity.
. . . .
Read the manifesto at Technorealism.org
