There are many fine histories of the postwar development of the computer and the construction of the Internet, such that it might appear almost superfluous to mention them as a prime determinant in the transformation of our understanding of the production and distribution of information. Their joint impact upon global communications and the control and storage of information conventionally makes reference to two principles said to be inscribed in the very technological trajectory of their development: Moore’s Law, which guaranteed that the per-unit cost of a calculation and/or memory unit was destined to fall exponentially over the horizon of its relevance [projected to continue to 2010]; and the so-called “end-to-end” principle in the packet-switching architecture of the Internet, where ‘all’ the coordination and control functions were supposedly relegated to the edges of the network, and the internal nodes of the Internet were deemed neutral with regard to simple routing functions. Both of these technological characteristics were rapidly invested with deep social meanings, which tend to persist down to the present in almost every modern discussion of the attributes of information. In short, digital technologies were thought to exemplify what it meant to think and communicate as a human being, or as one of the gurus of this movement put it, “The digital world is closer to the world of ideas than the world of things.” Yet, curiously enough, computer technologies simultaneously made it easier to conflate information with a thing, especially in formal models. In the case of Moore’s Law, it was frequently asserted that a consequence would be that costs of storage and communication would have fallen so dramatically that the marginal costs of any ‘piece’ of information being reproduced had to be very near zero, and hence information must be treated as “special” in comparison to other commodities. Since price could not be set to marginal cost (as in conventional neoclassical theory), some non-competitive remedy was generally prescribed: left-leaning commentators drew the inference that some system of state subsidies were required to guarantee sufficient knowledge generation; but in a twist, corporate commentators drew the conclusion that monopoly controls and pricing would become inevitable under those circumstances. In the case of end-to end packet-switching, Lawrence Lessig drew the inference that “Architecture is politics”, and that “end-to-end renders the Internet an information commons.” Popular pundits like John Perry Barlow converted the latter notions into even more dramatic claims concerning the democratic politics supposedly inherent in the Internet, such as “Information just wants to be free” and “the Internet treats censorship as if it were a malfunction and routes around it.”

Most assertions of pure technological determinism turn out to be flawed; and these particular claims were especially defective. While we shall observe all sorts of phenomena being attributed to Moore’s Law, the fact of the matter is that there has been no empirical demonstration of commensurate falling costs of research or learning activities, beginning with the famous dispute over the inability to observe productivity gains attributable to the computerization of all sorts of business activities over the course of the later 1990s. Hence the commonplace argument for the public good character of ‘information’ or ‘science’ is precariously perched on shifting sands. (The fact that non-economists have their own lay interpretations of the meaning of ‘public good’ just makes things worse.) As for the vaunted end-to-end architecture, the actual technical state of affairs in the infrastructure was never as clear-cut as the social analysts had wanted to make out. Where Lessig was correct, however, was his argument that after it was decided by the government to commercialize the Internet in the mid-1990s, with the prior military infrastructure split off into a parallel net, there would be pressure to change the internet architecture in the direction of enhanced control (and censorship) of what gets sent under what circumstances by telecoms, internet service providers and manufacturers of routers; and indeed, much of this deformation of the architecture has occurred in the interim. While the Internet could have potentially facilitated decentralized cooperative research, that didn’t happen until it was accompanied by enhanced political/economic control of the research process. The fact that Google could be denounced for cooperation with the Chinese government in censoring and otherwise reporting of websites in that country reveals that there never was any inherent or intrinsic political or economic order to the architecture of the Internet: what one finds there, by and large, is what was put there by intentional activities of the major players. Be that as it may, it nevertheless became commonplace to suggest that the Internet fostered and required certain political or economic reforms, especially when it came to institutions like the university.

The assertion has carried some gravitas because once communication architectures became congealed into certain network pathways, it becomes almost impossible for individual participants, like, say, individual scientists, to have substantial leverage to counteract the ‘impersonal’ pressure of the web. Yet, what at first seems a technological imperative often, upon second look, turns out to be the product of a hidden corporate imperative. This phenomenon is one aspect of what some have dubbed the rise of “the audit society.” One instance relevant to science policy concerns citation analysis when deployed as performance indicators for individual scientists, individual journal titles, departments, universities and so on. Just like the Internet itself, citation indexes started out as a neutral bibliographic tool to help researchers, but have ended up as a bureaucratic means of surveillance, evaluation and control. Most users don’t realize that the data are proprietary and completely defined and controlled by a single corporation, Thomson International, since 1992.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 8:11 am and is filed under Information technologies, Knowledge economy, The Viridiana Jones chronicles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.