Wild Wild Web: What the history of the Wild West teaches us about the future of the Digital Society by Tim Cole

Author:Tim Cole [Cole, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Forsthaus Verlag
Published: 2018-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4: GAFA must help itself

Technology is morally neutral until we put it to use. Gerd Leonhard, Futurist

Commons is a word used to describe the cultural and physical resources accessible to all members of a

society, resources such as pastures or woodlands in

England before most of it was enclosed in the 18th

and 19th centuries. Today, the “knowledge commons” is defined as shared resources which enable the

distribution and communal ownership of informationnal resources and technology. Instances include open source software like the computer operating system Linux or the free encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is

based on a model of openly editable content, thus

combining the collective intelligence of its users.

If the internet is indeed a cooperative institution, then things like solidarity and partnership become at least as important as connectivity. Robert Metcalfe, an internet pioneer and the inventor the Ethernet, in an essay written in 1980, described what he termed the “network effect”. According to Metcalfe, the benefit of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users. Theodore Vail, the CEO of Bell Telephone, argued back in 1908 that, in the end, a monopoly would benefit customers of long-distance services.

When Alexander Graham Bell’s patents on the telephone expired in the mid-1890s, thousands of local telephone companies cropped up, resulting in ridiculous scenarios where the same house might be served by multiple telephones, and where competing companies would deliberately rip up each other’s lines in an effort at sabotage. Vail believed a unified, high-quality network could only be achieved if the entire nation's telephone infrastructure was under the control of a single firm. Preferably his own.

As the technology scholar Tim Wu points out in his study of the information industry, The Master Switch, running long-distance phone lines exclusively meant being able to combine those operations to create a “powerhouse of distance communications.”

Vail summarized his vision with a slogan he

introduced in 1908: "One Policy, One System, Universal Service." AT&T, the successor to Bell Telephone, was destined to become an important exception to the rule that monopolies were inherently evil.

The network effect as demonstrated by the example of a telephone network The invigorating feeling of setting off on an exciting journey that John Perry Barlow, a cyberlibertarian, songwriter for The Grateful Dead, and the author of A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace and his many friends shared in the early days of the internet is reflected in the name of the organization they created, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Barlow envisioned the internet almost as a new nation-state, a digital utopia free from the

imperialistic hierarchies and rules of the physical world. He proudly proclaimed that “we are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force or station of birth” — a place where, he continued, “your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.”

Like the early settler crossing the Great Plains they, too, were

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