{"id":6235,"date":"2015-06-23T08:50:23","date_gmt":"2015-06-23T14:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6235"},"modified":"2015-07-26T15:17:01","modified_gmt":"2015-07-26T21:17:01","slug":"back-to-the-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6235","title":{"rendered":"When triumphalists fail, they fail triumphantly"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"paved\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Progress turns everyone into a nostalgist\u00a0sooner or later. You just have to wait for your own particular trigger<\/a> to come along \u2014 the new thing that threatens the\u00a0old thing you love.<\/p>\n

David Weinberger has a\u00a0new\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0c<\/em>alled “The Internet That Was (and Still Could Be).” It’s a tortured and ultimately dishonest piece\u00a0that calls\u00a0to mind some lines from a\u00a0great old Buzzcocks tune<\/a>:<\/p>\n

About the future I only can reminisce
\nFor what I’ve had is what I’ll never get
\nAnd although this may sound strange
\nMy future and my past are presently disarranged
\nAnd I’m surfing on a wave of nostalgia
\nFor an age yet to come.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Weinberger, coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto<\/em> and\u00a0author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined<\/em>, has\u00a0long\u00a0argued that\u00a0the “architecture” of the internet\u00a0provides not only a metaphor but an actual working model for a more perfect society. The\u00a0net was created with data-communication\u00a0protocols that enabled “packets of information [to be moved] around without any central management or control,” and that technical architecture, he contends, not only facilitates but promotes democratic values such as “open access to information” and “the permission-free ability to read and to post.” Spanning civil and commercial interests, the net is “an open market of ideas and businesses” that\u00a0provides “a framework for bottom-up collaboration among equals.”<\/p>\n

More than that, though, Weinberger saw a deterministic power in the networking technology. The “open” technical protocols of “the One True Architecture,” as he puts it, were fated to become\u00a0society’s protocols. He offered an “argument from architecture” positing\u00a0that the technology’s political and social values would by necessity become the values of its users:<\/p>\n

The Internet\u2019s architecture reflects certain values.<\/p>\n

Our use of the Net, based on that architecture, strongly encourages the adoption of those values.<\/p>\n

Therefore, the Internet tends to transform us and our institutions in ways that reflect those values.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the actual development of the web\u00a0frustrated that utopian dream. The Triumphalists were, Weinberger\u00a0now admits, naive and even delusional:<\/p>\n

\n

It is not enough for the Internet to succeed. It must succeed inevitably.\u00a0Or so many of us Internet Triumphalists in the mid-1990s thought.\u00a0For, if the march of the Internet\u2019s new values were not unstoppable, then it would surely be stopped by our age-old inclinations and power structures. The Net, as we called it then, would become just another venue for the familiar patterns of marginalization, exclusion, oppression, and ignorance.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019m afraid the argument for inevitability that kept me, and others, hopeful for 20 years no longer holds.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What the Triumphalists mistook for the one true\u00a0architecture was merely a foundation, it turns out, and that foundation\u00a0could support many different kinds of media structures with many different “values.” And so the net gave rise to, for instance, private content distribution networks, or CDNs, which, despite the underlying democratic protocols for information exchange, allowed big companies to\u00a0distribute their informational wares with greater speed and reliability than the rest of us could afford. On the net, as elsewhere in society, some equals turned out to be more equal than others. “The architecture itself has been distorted by the needs of commercial content creators and their enabling pals,” Weinberger laments. “Paradise has been well and truly paved.” So much for inevitability.<\/p>\n

And then there’s Facebook, the vast city-state, the virtual\u00a0Singapore, that sprawls\u00a0atop the net’s foundation like Smaug on the dwarves’ treasure.<\/p>\n

\n

Facebook is not ours. It\u2019s theirs for us to use. …\u00a0If the new prototype of the Internet is not the Blogosphere but Facebook, then the argument that\u2019s maintained me for 20 years has fallen apart. If users don\u2019t come into contact with the Internet\u2019s architecture, that architecture can\u2019t shape them. If they instead deal almost exclusively with Facebook, then the conclusion of the Argument from Architecture ought to be that Facebook is shaping the values of its users. And Facebook\u2019s values are not much like the Net\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Weinberger, like the other\u00a0Triumphalists, has invested much\u00a0intellectual and emotional capital into the net over the years. And now\u00a0he\u00a0arrives at his\u00a0moment of crisis: the dreaded moment when he has to\u00a0write off all that investment\u00a0and declare\u00a0bankruptcy.<\/p>\n

\n

And yet.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And yet?<\/p>\n

At the moment of accounting, Weinberger loses his intellectual nerve. Rather than offer a critique of the net as it is<\/em>,\u00a0he gives in to nostalgia for the net as it was and should\u00a0be<\/em>. He crawls back into the empty bank vault and searches in the dust for the bright, untarnished\u00a0penny that will redeem everything \u2014 or at least buy him a little more time. “The Internet\u2019s architecture still shows through many of the big corporate apps that are the Internet\u2019s new pavement,” he writes. And: “The Internet\u2019s architecture shines through the Facebook layer, as it does through virtually all Internet applications.” And:\u00a0“Those lessons of the Internet\u2019s architecture shine through the layers built on top of it.” The glimmers! The glimmers! And then the reversal: “The pavement is well penetrated by the Internet. Maybe ‘pavement’ isn\u2019t an apt metaphor at all. I\u2019m sorry I brought it up.”<\/p>\n

Well, that’s convenient. In the asphalt’s mirror, the Triumphalist’s failure is revealed to have an aura of triumph. What’s disappointing here is not Weinberger’s gobbledygook; it’s the self-justifying nature of\u00a0the gobbledygook.\u00a0He’s covering something up, and what he’s covering up is\u00a0his own role in subverting the values he cherishes. As Weinberger\u00a0makes clear, his\u00a0work, dating back to The Cluetrain Manifesto<\/em>, has argued that the “openness” of the net’s protocols would inevitably<\/em> dissolve traditional sources of economic and political power. Everyone on the net, whether an individual or a corporation, would inevitably<\/em> act as equals. Rather than pursuing their own interests, they would act as\u00a0the technology demanded. By suggesting that the net’s democratic future was a fait accompli, a technological necessity,\u00a0Weinberger\u00a0abetted the kind of commercialization of the web that he\u00a0now rues. The Triumphalists served as the flagmen for the paving crew.<\/p>\n

Given the opportunity to examine the role that technological triumphalism played in the development of the net, Weinberger instead resurrects that triumphalism in a ghostly form. \u00a0When he\u00a0claims that the “values” of an open\u00a0architecture remain alive, if\u00a0latent, in the closed architecture of Facebook, he’s giving himself a free pass. He concludes\u00a0his piece with what can only be described as a kind of cynical sunniness: “We can try to teach the young\u2019uns how the Internet works and remind them of its glory so that it can be as if they were present at the Revelation.” If the Triumphalists hadn’t been blinded by the Revelation, perhaps things would have worked out differently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Progress turns everyone into a nostalgist\u00a0sooner or later. You just have to wait for your own particular trigger to come along \u2014 the new thing that threatens the\u00a0old thing you love. David Weinberger has a\u00a0new\u00a0article\u00a0in\u00a0The Atlantic\u00a0called “The Internet That Was (and Still Could Be).” It’s a tortured and ultimately dishonest piece\u00a0that calls\u00a0to mind some lines […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6235"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6374,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6235\/revisions\/6374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}