< Douglas Rushkoff >
they call me cyberboy
Originally published in Time Digital (1996).
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF is the author of best-selling books on media and society, including Media Virus!: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture (1994) and Coercion: Why We Listen to What They Say (1999), winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award for Best Media Book. He made the PBS Frontline documentaries Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and Digital Nation. He teaches at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and in Graduate Media Studies at The New School. His website is http://rushkoff.com.
NOT SO LONG AGO, I could freak people out by talking about cyberculture. It was fun. They’d laugh nervously when I’d say they’d be using e-mail someday. They’d call me “cyberboy” and mean it as an insult. I felt like a renegade.
However frustrating it was to be an Internet evangelist in the late 1980s, it beat what I’m feeling now having won the battle. A journey into cyberspace is about as paradigm-threatening as an afternoon at the mall. The Internet is better, bigger, faster, and brighter, but the buzz is gone.
I remember when following Internet culture or, better, actually participating in it, meant witnessing the birth of a movement as radically novel as psychedelia, punk, or, I liked to imagine, the Renaissance itself.
Here was a ragtag collection of idealistic Californians, bent on wiring up the global brain, one node at a time. Every new account on the WELL—the Bay Area’s pre-eminent online bulletin board, Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link—meant another convert to the great digital hot tub. The struggle of obtaining the computer, the modem, the software, the phone number and the appropriate protocol was a journey of Arthurian proportion. The community you’d find when you’d got there was as political, high-minded, and tightly knit as the Round Table. No wonder “universal access” became our Holy Grail.
Conceived on the bong-water-stained rugs of Reed College dorm rooms, the Apple personal computer bent over backwards to bring even the most stoned of us into the mix. The Macintosh soon became the central metaphor for our collective challenge to God himself. We held more than a forbidden fruit: we had the whole world in our hands. Access was power.
Our arrogance was matched only by our naïveté. Like hippies scheming to dose the city’s reservoir with LSD, Internet enthusiasts took a by-any-means-necessary attitude towards digital enlightenment. Getting a friend to participate in a USENET group was as rewarding to us as scoring a convert is to a Mormon.
And the beauty of it was that we were the freaks! Not just nerds, but deeply and beautifully twisted people from the very fringes of culture had finally found a home. We all had the sense that we were the first settlers of a remote frontier. We had migrated online together in order to create a new society from the ground up.
Cyberculture was hard to describe—and a good number of us got book contracts paying us to try—but it was undeniably real when experienced firsthand. It was characterized by Californian idealism, do-it-yourselfer ingenuity, and an ethic of tolerance above all else. You couldn’t go to a hip party in San Francisco without someone switching on a computer and demonstrating the brandnew Mosaic browser for the fledgling World Wide Web. The patience with which experienced hackers walked newbies through their virgin hypertext voyages would make a sexual surrogate ashamed.
Coaxing businesses online was simply an extension of this need to share. It was less an act of profiteering than an effort to acquire some long-awaited credibility. Somehow it seemed like the revolution was taking too long; so our best-spoken advocates loaded up their laptops and made presentations to the Fortune 500. Then something happened on NASDAQ, and cyberculture was turned upside down.
It should have come as no surprise that big corporations, whose bottom line depends on public relations, direct selling, and “staying ahead of the curve,” would eventually become the driving force behind cyberculture’s evolution. Once the conversation itself was no longer the highest priority, marketing took its place. Though the diehards protested with the fervor of Christ ejecting moneychangers from the temple, the Internet became the domain of businessmen.
To be sure, commercial interests have taken this technology a long way. Thanks to Internet Explorer 4.0, America Online, and banner advertisements, the holy grail of universal access is within our reach. But universal access to what? Direct marketing, movieson-demand, and up-to-the-second stock quotes?
Even if the Internet has not yet been rendered ubiquitous, it has certainly absorbed the same mainstream culture that denied its existence and resisted its ethos for an awfully long time. True, cyberculture has inalterably changed its co-opter, but in the process it has become indistinguishable from it as well.
Every day, more people conduct their daily business online. The Internet makes their lives more convenient.
I can’t bring myself to see mere convenience as a victory. Sadly, cyberspace has become just another place to do business. The question is no longer how browsing the Internet changes the way we look at the world; it’s which browser we’ll be using to buy products from the same old world.
The only way I can soothe myself is to imagine that the essentially individualistic and countercultural vibe of the Internet I once knew has simply gone into remission. Corporate money is needed to build the infrastructure that will allow the real world to get access to networking technology. By the time Microsoft and the others learn that the Web is not the direct marketing paradise they’re envisioning, it will be too late. They’ll have put the tools in our hands that allow us to create the interactive world we were dreaming of.
In the meantime, I now get paid for saying the same sorts of things that got me teased before. But I preferred tweaking people for free. That’s why they called me cyberboy.
< Douglas Rushkoff >
the people’s net
Originally published in Yahoo Internet Life (2001).
TO THOSE OF US who really love it, the Internet is looking and feeling more social, more alive, more participatory, and more, well, more Internet-y than ever before. This might sound surprising, given the headlines proclaiming the official bursting of the technology bubble. Likewise, analysts on the financial cable channels and the venture capitalists of Silicon Alley now shun any company whose name ends in .com and have moved on to more promising new buzzwords, such as wireless.
But the statistics fly in the face of conventional wisdom. In terms of real hours spent online and the number of people getting new accounts every day, Internet use is up. We spent an average of 20.2 hours looking at Internet sites in March 2001, up from 15.9 hours last year and 12.8 hours the year before, according to the latest data from Jupiter Media Metrix. More surprisingly, while countless dot-coms have gone under for failure to meet investor demands, e-commerce is actually up—it rose more than 30 percent compared with last year. More than 100 million Americans now buy goods and services online.
The Internet is more capable now than it ever was of supporting the vast range of individual, community, and commercial interests that hope to exploit the massive power of networking. Still, countless investors, analysts, and pundits have fallen off the Internet bandwagon.
Good riddance, I say. The experts jumping ship today can’t see the Internet as anything other than an investment opportunity that has dried up. Sure, the Internet made a lot of people money, but its real promise has always been much greater than a few upward stock ticks. If we can look past the size of our 401(k) plans to the underlying strength of our fledgling networked society, all signs are actually quite good. The Internet has never been in better health.
Maybe this kind of optimism requires us to look at the Internet less as an investment opportunity and more as a new life-form. That’s the way we used to see it in ancient times, anyway. Back in the 2,400-band, ASCII text era of ten long years ago, the Internet had nothing to do with the Nasdaq Index. Until 1991, you had to sign an agreement promising not to conduct any business online just to get access to the Inter
net! Imagine that. It was a business-free zone.
How could such rules ever have been put in place? Because the Internet began as a public project. It was created to allow scientists at universities and government facilities to share research and computing resources. Everyone from the Pentagon to Al Gore saw the value of a universally accessible information-sharing network and invested federal funds to build a backbone capable of connecting computers around the world.
What they didn’t realize was that they were doing a whole lot more than connecting computers to one another. They were connecting people, too. Before long, all those scientists who were supposed to be exchanging research or comparing data were exchanging stories about their families and comparing notes on movies. People around the world were playing games, socializing, and crossing cultural boundaries never crossed before. Since no one was using the network to discuss military technology anymore, the government turned it over to the public as best it could.
The Internet’s unexpected social side effect turned out to be its incontrovertible main feature. Its other functions fall by the wayside. The Internet’s ability to network human beings is its very lifeblood. It fosters communication, collaboration, sharing, helpfulness, and community. When word got out, the nerdiest among us found out first. Then came those of us whose friends were nerds. Then their friends, and so on. Someone would insist he had found something you needed to know about—the way a childhood friend lets you in on a secret door leading to the basement under the junior high school.
How many of you can remember that first time you watched that friend log on? How he turned the keyboard over to you and asked what you wanted to know, where you wanted to visit, or whom you wanted to meet? That was the moment when you got it: Internet fever. There was a whole new world out there, unlimited by the constraints of time and space, appearance and prejudice, gender and power.
It’s no wonder so many people compared the 1990s Internet to the psychedelic 1960s. It seemed all we needed to do was get a person online, and he or she would be changed forever. And people were. A sixty-year-old Midwestern businessman I know found himself logging on every night to engage in a conversation about Jungian archetypes. It lasted for four weeks before he realized the person with whom he was conversing was a sixteen-year-old boy from Tokyo.
It felt as though we were wiring up a global brain. Techno visionaries of the period, such as Ted Nelson—who coined the word hypertext —told us how the Internet could be used as a library for everything ever written. A musician named Jaron Lanier invented a bizarre interactive space he called “virtual reality” in which people would be able to, in his words, “really see what the other means.”
The Internet was no longer a government research project. It was alive. Out of control and delightfully chaotic. What’s more, it promoted an agenda all its own. It was as if using a computer mouse and keyboard to access other human beings on the other side of the monitor changed our relationship to the media and the power the media held. The tube was no longer a place that only a corporate conglomerate could access. It was Rupert Murdoch, Dan Rather, and Heather Locklear’s turf no more. The Internet was our space.
The Internet fostered a do-it-yourself mentality. We called it “cyberpunk.” Why watch packaged programming on TV when you can make your own online? Who needs corporate content when you can be the content? This was a world we could design ourselves, on our own terms. That’s why it fostered such a deep sense of community. New users were gently escorted around the Internet by veterans. An experienced user delighted in setting up a newbie’s connection. It was considered an honor to rush out to fix a fellow user’s technical problem. To be an Internet user was to be an Internet advocate.
It’s also why almost everything to do with the Internet was free. Software was designed by people who wanted to make the Internet a better place. Hackers stayed up late coding new programs and then distributed them free of charge. In fact, most of the programs we use today are based on this shareware and freeware. Internet Explorer and Netscape are fat versions of a program created at the University of Illinois. Streaming media is a dolled-up version of CUSeeMe, a program developed at Cornell. The Internet was built for love, not profit.
And that was the problem—for business, anyway. Studies showed a correlation between time spent on the Internet and time not spent consuming TV programs and commercials. Something had to be done.
Thus began the long march to turn the Internet into a profitable enterprise. It started with content. Dozens, then hundreds, of online magazines sprang up. But no one wanted to pay a subscription charge for content. It just wasn’t something one did online. So most of these magazines went out of business.
The others . . . well, they invented the next great Internet catastrophe: the banner ad. Web publishers figured they could sell a little strip atop each page to an advertiser, who’d use it as a billboard for commercials. But everyone hated them. They got in the way. And the better we got at ignoring banner ads, the more distractingly busy they grew, and the more time-consuming they were to download. They only taught us to resent whichever advertiser was inhibiting our movement.
So advertising gave way to e-commerce. The Internet would be turned into a direct-marketing platform. An interactive mail-order catalog! This scheme seemed to hold more promise for Wall Street investors. Not many of these e-commerce businesses actually made money, but they looked as if they could someday. Besides, Wall Street cares less about actual revenue and more about the ability to create the perception that there might be revenue at some point in the future. That’s why it’s called speculation. Others might call it a pyramid scheme.
Here’s how it works: Someone writes a business plan for a new kind of e-commerce company. That person finds “angel investors”—very in-the-know people who give him money to write a bigger business plan and hire a CEO. Then come the first and second rounds, where other, slightly less in-the-know people invest a few million more. Then come the institutional investors, who underwrite the now-infamous IPO. After that, at the bottom of the pyramid, come retail investors. That’s you and me. We’re supposed to log on to an e-trading site and invest our money, right when the investors at the top are executing their “exit strategy.” That’s another way of saying carpetbagging.
What’s all that got to do with the Internet, you ask? Exactly. The Internet was merely the sexy word, the come-hither, the bright idea at the top of the pyramid. Sure, there were and still are lots of entrepreneurs creating vibrant online businesses. But the Internet was not born to support the kind of global economic boom that venture capitalists envisioned. And by turning its principal use from socializing to monetizing, business went against the Internet’s very functionality.
People doing what comes naturally online—such as sending messages to one another—don’t generate revenue. The object of the game, for Internet business, was to get people’s hands off the keyboard and onto the mouse. Less collaboration, more consumption. Sites were designed to be “sticky” so people wouldn’t leave. And “information architecture” turned into the science of getting people to click on the Buy button.
Anyone logging on to the Internet for the first time in the year 2000 encountered a place very different from the interactive playground of ten years earlier. Browsers and search engines alike were designed to keep users either buying products or consuming commercial content. Most of those helpful hackers were now vested employees of dot-com companies. And most visions of the electronic future had dollar signs before them.
But the real Internet was hiding underneath this investment charade the whole time. It was a little harder to find, perhaps, and few in the mainstream press were writing about it anymore. Nevertheless, plenty of people were still sharing stories, e-mailing relatives, finding new communities, and educating themselves.
This is why so many of the business schemes were doomed to fail. The behavior control being implemented by more nefarious online merchants, the mercenary tactics of former h
ackers, and the commercial priorities of the Internet’s investors were a blatant contradiction of the Internet’s true nature. Sure, the Internet could support some business guests, the way a tree can support some mushrooms at its base and a few squirrels in its branches. But businesses attacked the Internet like men with chain saws. They needed to be rejected.
The inevitable collapse of the dot-com pyramid was not part of some regular business cycle. And it most certainly was not the collapse of anything having to do with the Internet. No, what we witnessed was the Internet fending off an attack. It’s no different from when the government abandoned the Internet in the ’80s, after scientists online began talking about science fiction instead of defense contracts. The Internet never does what it’s supposed to do. It has a mind, and life, of its own. That’s because we’re alive, too.
Now that the Internet’s role in business has faded into the background, the many great applications developed to make our lives better are taking center stage. They are compelling, and surpass some of our wildest dreams of what the Internet might someday achieve. This past spring, for example, as one dot-com after another was folding, M.I.T. announced a new Web curriculum. This leading university promised that, over the next ten years, it will carry online the lecture notes, course outlines, and assignments for almost all of its 2,000 courses in the sciences, humanities, and arts. Instituting a policy that would make an Internet investor shudder, M.I.T. plans to release all of this material, to anyone in the world, for free.
Or have a look at Blogger. It’s not just a website; it’s also a set of publishing tools that allows even a novice to create a weblog, automatically add content to a website, or organize links, commentary, and open discussions. In the short time Blogger has been available, it has fostered an interconnected community of tens of thousands of users. These people don’t simply surf the Web; they are now empowered to create it.
The Digital Divide Page 12