[14486] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
FYI France: Geert Lovink & the return of Internet dreams?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jack Kessler)
Mon Sep 16 08:39:23 2002
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2002 02:03:08 -0700
From: Jack Kessler <kessler@WELL.COM>
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FYI France: Geert Lovink & the return of Internet dreams?
Geert Lovink is one of the impassioned voices of the Internet. In
his just - published book, _Dark Fiber : Tracking Critical
Internet Culture_ (MIT Press, 2002) ISBN 0-262-12249-9, he
contends that the new technology has been hijacked by a very old
combination of commercial operators. Although he is hopeful...
I thought it might be interesting then, here, to sit back for a
moment and consider where we are & where we are going, now, in
the Internet and "things online", at least from this Holland /
Australia / European / International point of view.
1) Lovink on The Dream
We have moved, Lovink says, from a "cyber - libertarian ideology"
to a mere process of dividing the audience share among a "small
group of converging conglomerates" -- this in an Introduction
which he calls "Twilight of the Digirati". There has been a loss
of innocence, he believes, due to the dotcom bust and several
other factors:
"... computer networks are no longer an insider's phenomenon in
the hands of a few academics and programmers, as was the case
until the mid 1990s. Software engineers no longer decide over the
future of the medium, not even over technical matters. Technology
standards have become economic and political battleground."
2) Dreams and Realities
Lovink is not the only one.
He had his start in the Amsterdam freenet -- a group which, like
The WELL, pioneered some of the earliest public access to the
Internet. The utopian, idealistic, perhaps naive idea, back then
-- the late 1980s, and early 1990s -- was that "information wants
to be free". Communities supposedly would form themselves
naturally, online, using the new digital information techniques.
These would be new communities -- people organized not by
physical location, or by income category, or even by language
grouping or national origin or other traditional restriction, but
more by personal interests and ability to contribute -- "On the
Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"... -- a new democracy, made
possible by the "value free" sophistications, and global reach,
of the new technology.
There were many famous names associated with this idea, which
became a broad based global movement: from Ted Nelson to Stewart
Brand and Howard Rheingold and John Perry Barlow -- early Apple
developers and XeroxPARC visionaries -- Minitel developers in
France, Fidonet pioneers everywhere.
It almost worked. It still might. But for now, at least, Things
Have Changed. The changes have been, basically, two: in the late
1990s the commercial world discovered the Internet, and in 2000
the bubble of interest and enthusiasm and financial reward built
from that initial commercial world discovery completely and
spectacularly collapsed. Now, amid the ashes, Lovink and many
others are wondering what sort of phoenix -- or rough beast
slouching toward Bethlehem -- is going to arise from the dotcom
ruins of the First Internet Phase.
E-publishing has been one of the most contentious areas of
Internet commercial development. It was very much part of the
original dream to incorporate texts into online communication --
the egg came before the chicken, in fact, as "command line" data
entry long preceded the Graphical User Interface to which the Web
now has accustomed all of us. "Memex" and "Project Xanadu" and
"The Paperless Library" were the dreams of some, the nightmares
of others.
In France no less than other places -- far more than most, in
fact -- all of these ideas were embroiled together in the
Internet and dotcom revolution of the 1990s. Today, with the
dissolution of much of that, and the very recent severe hardships
of giant European ventures such as Bertelsmann and Vivendi, and
Vodafone and now apparently even France Telecom, there is much
wondering over what directions all this will take now.
E-publishing has run its cycle from "cyber - libertarian
ideology" to "small group of converging conglomerates", in France
as it has elsewhere. Questions are being asked, now, in France as
elsewhere, about the path which all of this will take, in a post
- dotcom - bust and post - "9/11" security - and - censorship -
conscious world.
3) Beta Tests
Examples sometimes help -- at least to illustrate the ideas, if
not necessarily to suggest that the problems have been solved and
the question answered. The three which follow are from France:
a) http://www.planetexpo.fr
This site gives you a place to advertise your smallpress or self
- published book. For years, France has had its very
sophisticated Salon du Livre -- an annual gathering in Paris of
publishers, retailers, collectors, authors, librarians and
documentalists, the "who's who" of French publishing, and a
French answer to the enormous but somewhat unwieldy Buchmesse at
Frankfurt. But all this is only annual, and it is expensive:
fancy show booths and trips to The City and hotels and
entertainment do not come cheap, and the expenditure for only a
few days of exposure -- albeit to "the right folks" -- is not one
which budding or struggling authors or small presses and
bookstores easily can afford.
The idea of Planetexpo's founder, then, is to provide all of this
online -- to a far greater public, at far diminished price, on a
year - round 24/7 basis. Online, an author can show her texts to
anyone Ouebbing in at anytime from anywhere. The site does not
sell books, but links to the "exhibitor's" own site provide the
seamless interface, so beloved of Internet fans, for ecommerce.
Short of or perhaps beyond selling, then, the site also offers
"forums, chats, de'bats", other features -- the full panoply of
digital information - enabled context and discussion, allowing
authors to discuss things among themselves and with their reading
publics.
Interesting idea -- certainly appears to fill several needs, and
to do so economically -- some question whether "the right folks"
in fact would be reached by it, but then of course the
composition of "the right folks" can change over time...
b) http://www.00h00.com
This second site actually publishes texts -- both digital and
printed versions. Its very large and growing selection includes
classics, and modern works, and specialized literature of various
types -- professional publications, theses, academic works. As in
the case of the first site, Editions Ze'ro Heure / 00h00 offers
games, discussions, debates, personalized shopping, an attractive
and agile interface -- again the full Internet ecommerce panoply.
c) http://www.cytale.com/site/cybook/index.asp
This third site illustrates the ebook reader, and perhaps the
demise in France -- for now anyway -- of this particular approach
to the marketing and distribution of epublishing, via the
handheld electronic "reader". Cytale offered a Cybook -- 456
Euros plus 19.66 Euros per month for 12, or a minimum 700 Euros /
dollars investment...
Cytale just announced its bankruptcy: 2000 - 2001 losses of
8,754,758 euros, on sales of only 2,444 euros, or a grand total
of only four Cybooks sold.... bad price points -- too high -- and
so much for the greater profit margins theoretically obtainable
from electronics versus texts, profits which require sales to be
realized -- ebooks will just have to slog along at lower margins,
in France anyway...
* http://news.zdnet.fr/story/0,,t118-s2107849,00.html
* "Cytale de'pose son bilan," _Livres Hebdo_, no. 467, 26 avril
2002, p. 64.
4) Scenarios
So what is / is not going on, here? How is epublishing
progressing, or not, in the months since the dotcoms crashed, and
since the world gained a new awareness of a need for "security"
in things online? In France as, perhaps, elsewhere...
There are four possible scenarios, it seems to me: they each may
happen, at the expense of one another, or they may all be
happening together --
a) Scenario #1: Something New
The hope for a Paradigm Shift motivated the early visionaries.
They got more than they bargained for. The "information wants to
be free" idea was that the domination of publishing, by a few
increasingly large commercial firms in a rapidly shrinking
industry, might be broken up by the democratic chaos of the
Internet, so that new alternatives might form.
This was the basic hope which motivated all three of the examples
given here. Print publishing was dominated by larger and larger
firms, throughout the latter half of the last century --
industrial concentration was high and getting higher,
particularly in France where older and smaller firms were getting
bought up by large ones often not even in the industry -- minimum
print runs were climbing, so that anything under 3000 exemplaires
was considered too small even to consider. Thence, somewhat, the
idea of econferencing and epublishing and edistributing, for
small presses and even for publishing generally -- always with
the dream that the new paradigm, somehow, would be cheaper and
more efficient, friendlier...
The same dream, or fantasy, rules now in economics and global
business, ironically. As in publishing, Globalization ran afoul
of its old economics paradigm in the 1990s, so much so that
reformers such as Joseph Stiglitz and George Soros now are
calling for a new model -- something acknowledging market
imperfections, something which sees that policy can contain
feedback loops and be "reflexive".
The congruence of the two tendencies is not a coincidence. The
1990s were dramatic times. Much has changed, in the ten years
since. The changes, in each case, have been made to the same
"market mechanisms" which during the 1990s were allowed to govern
each -- both epublishing, and economic globalization. To some
extent the difficulties now, of both, are difficulties of having
relied solely upon "the market".
b) Scenario #2: Something Old
There is a conventional answer to these difficulties. Anything
new simply can be slotted into an older pre - existing category.
What librarians and lawyers do... So "planetexpo" can be seen as
nothing more than a telemarketing approach for an old - fashioned
vanity press; "00h00" as nothing more than book retailing; Cytale
and its Cybook nothing more than a particular retail product, a
handheld electronic gadget like an electric shaver or any other...
A certain type of mindset insists on seeing everything this way.
Globalization and all of its problems now, for example, is
labeled "nothing new", by some historians: the known world was as
"global" and much more closely tied together during the 1800s,
under British Empire hegemony -- they say -- or under the Hansa
or the Chinese Middle Kingdom or the medieval European manorial
system, and the Roman World was "global" for its time as well.
One great advantage of such a fitting of new wine into old
bottles is that this allows old conceptual tools to be brought to
bear on new problems. The old "vanity press" and "telemarketing"
literatures have much to teach the Planetexpo people about the
effort which they are undertaking online; traditional print
publishers can offer much to 00h00; electric shavers have to be
reasonably priced, and beautifully packaged, and must never --
never -- require any sort of monthly "subscription", as Cytale
might have learned from its consumer electronics industry
predecessors.
The old approaches overlook new aspects of the new problems,
however. Primary among these is the general institutional setting
in which epublishing and the Internet now are taking place. Too
much discussion of them views only two possibilities, for
example, for their sponsorship and regulation and general
management: either "government" or "business", or at most
combinations of just these two. So when a firm or organization
searches for support for the development of their particular
idea, the search too often goes simply either to "government" --
a grant of money, hopefully without too much regulation, from
some government department -- or to "corporate", either obtaining
support from a private commercial firm, or becoming a private
commercial firm themselves. There seems to be no other way...
"venture capitalism", invented for the purpose of funding the
dotcoms, would have been overlooked, and the initial stage of
Internet commercial development might never have happened...
Currently the leading theory on where all of this is headed is
derived from precisely such a conservative mindset. The financial
markets, in the US and overseas, all are betting heavily now on
increasing productivity gains, resulting from mainstream
industry's adoption, finally, of the Internet techniques
pioneered by the dotcoms -- the great hope of Alan Greenspan and
the "productivity paradox", realized at last -- big league
Corporate America, and some of Corporate Elsewhere, is all Going
Digital now. The financiers' hope is that AOL Time Warner, and
Mitsubishi -- and Walmart, Exxon, General Motors, BP, Royal Dutch
Shell, Citicorp, AXA, Carrefour -- now at last, in 2001 and 2002,
have developed Intranets and Internets and Extranets, just like
the little 1990s dotcoms which those big firms formerly reviled,
so that productivity gains finally will yield improving earnings,
by 2003 and 2004... We'll see...
c) Scenario #3: Something Changing
Things may simply be changing -- still -- of course. One lesson
taught, severely, by the dotcom bust -- probably still unlearned
by many firms -- was that information technology is highly
changeable. Just as any little dotcom startup which tried to
build its business model on Telnet and Gopher was overtaken by
the World Wide Web, so any firm now -- small or large -- which
tries to shift its model entirely to the Web may discover that
XML or VRML or LINUX, or some other and newer alphabet soup
buzzword, already has contributed an approach which will render
the Web, even the Web, irrelevant within another six months...
There is, on the other hand, the famous example of Microsoft,
which built an entire industrial empire on slightly outmoded
technology: neither DOS nor Windows ever was accepted as being
the best in its field, by experts, and yet both have dominated
commercially -- the economics terms include "critical mass" and
"market share", and both may be present and sufficient to allow
Corporate America to impose the Web, now that it is already in
place, even if something newer and better does come along.
d) Scenario #4: Something Entirely Different...
But, then too, Something Entirely Different just may have
happened...
The example comes from the current Soros / Stiglitz battling --
the two of them versus others -- over the New Paradigm which
international finance, economics generally, and Globalization in
all of its various forms ought to assume. Both Soros and Stiglitz
realize the limitations of the old model, and both now write and
speak eloquently about that: as experts, Soros having made so
much money working with it, and Stiglitz having demonstrated its
inadequacies convincingly enough to have won a Nobel Prize for
his efforts.
* George Soros, "Busted : Why the Markets Can't Fix Themselves"
The New Republic, Sep 2, 2002, ISSN 0028-6583
http://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=soros090202
* Joseph E. Stiglitz, _Globalization and Its Discontents_ (W.W.
Norton, 2002) ISBN: 0393051242
* plus many articles and interviews online by & of each...
Both believe that the international economy, and
international relations generally, are long overdue for an
overhaul or a new system to replace the Bretton Woods
institutions, which fell out of date a long time ago.
At the same time, international relations theorists such as
Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane have come to the realization --
much bolstered by dramatic proof offered at recent World Trade
Organization and Earth Summit meetings -- that the international
system of nation - states also is, after the 350 years since The
Peace of Westphalia, in need of a similar upgrade or replacement.
* Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye _Power and Interdependence_
(Addison-Wesley, 2000) 3rd ed. ISBN: 0321048571.
* (same) _Transnational Relations and World Politics_ (Harvard,
1972) ISBN: 0674904826.
A key element of their solution, in the political realm, is the
trans - national actor : the NGO / Non - Governmental
Organization, such as Amnesty International or Greenpeace or
Me'decins sans Frontie`res, able to organize and operate across
national boundaries, practically disregarding the policies and
antiquated bureaucracies and operations of nation - states -- as
so many of these trans - national NGOs demonstrated recently in
the streets at Seattle and Genoa, and at Kyoto and Rio and
Johannesburg.
If there is a role, then, for the trans - national actor in
politics -- for even the individual, like the lone woman in
Vermont who was able to engineer an International Land Mines
Treaty, receiving the Nobel Prize for that, despite the
opposition of her own national government, or of any group --
there now is a similar role in economics. Large "multi -
national" corporations long have been trans - national, in fact
-- circumventing or simply disregarding particular nation - state
policies and procedures. Now, international transportation and
communication and interdependence -- all of this greatly enhanced
by the Internet -- have progressed to the point where nearly any
sizeable commercial operation of any kind not only can but must
consider trans - national competition, and supplier and customer
sources, if it is to survive. Epublishers, as well...
Which brings up the possibility of the non - commercial trans -
national actor : the NGO in Lyon, interested in the environment,
which wants to contact a similar group in Leipzig before the
issue of building new dams to respond to the recent German
flooding gets finalized -- or a hospital in Texarkana, needing to
obtain information about West Nile Virus from clinics in Nairobi
-- or a university or its library in Nanjing, wanting to share
information and even establish joint programs with an institution
in Que'bec...
Well, isn't this the dream, again, of those early and
enthusiastic Internet pioneers -- of Fidonet, Minitel, XeroxPARC,
Apple, Barlow and Rheingold and Brand and Nelson -- and of Geert
Lovink? Wasn't that a fundamental idea of the earliest thinking
in John Quarterman's and originally William Gibson's "Matrix",
that private individuals would be able to use the new networked
information technologies to transcend some of the barriers which
surround them and hem them in -- tax laws perhaps, and criminal
laws on occasion, but also nation - state barriers and local
biases and preconceived notions derived from all sorts of over -
generalized and antiquated ideas? The trans - national actor: in
epublishing, Internet development, politics, other things...
Or is all this -- as The Who predicted so famously back in 1971
-- simply and yet again, just "meet the new boss, same as the old
boss" ?
Geert Lovink says that he is optimistic. I am beginning to share
his optimisim myself : although slowly -- glacially -- it has
been a long dark winter, recently, under the mixed promise and
threat of developments like commercialism and general public
access, and now the arrival of Infotainment and the rest of Big
Business online. But things may be getting better, with the trans
- national possibilities now out there at last.
As Lovink also says, in his book:
"There is no way back to the golden days of text - only ascii,
telnet, and pine. And there is more to say than the 30-second
pitch to a venture capitalist".
Anthony Giddens would say, "There is a need for a Third Way"...
You can say that again -- both of you can say both of those
things again -- while I was writing this piece, a publisher came
along via email and offered me the full text in ebook form of a
new author, and I previewed it and ordered it and paid for it and
received it, all online, during a short break between writing
these paragraphs --
_La Ge'opolitique d'Internet_, by Solveig Godeluck (La
De'couverte, 2002), who suggests in her Introduction the idea of
"a geopolitics without nation - states", one which will have
nothing to do with "structures of geopolitical conflict such as
war, separatism, or unifying urges such as the construction of
'Europe' or the Umma" -- and the site offers other articles by
her, interviews, discussion, debate.
Marketing, purchasing, and distributing this ebook -- from
France, which is about 5,580 miles away from where I am at the
moment -- all took about four minutes, without me having to leave
my office or really interrupt my work at all... and I'll be
reading the thoughts of Solveig Godeluck, on geopolitics and the
Internet, the moment I am done writing this...
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.sf.ca.us
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