Fighting the last war

In most media criticism and in most discussions of the net that take place off the network itself, there is often a tremendous impression of fighting the last war. This phrase dates from analysis of military strategists, who often base their analyses on what happened during the last war and attempt to reason by analogy in to determine what will happen in in the next one. This works fine if the technology of war remains relatively stable, but fails badly in an evolving one. Hence the failure of the Maginot line in WWI, or the development of fission weapons during WWII destabilized strategists until the development of Mutually Assured Destruction scenarios. The next such threat is unlikley to come from, e.g., fusion weapons (developed after WWII), but more likely in information and biological warfare---yet until recently, most of the emphasis of the possibly-now-defunct Cold War was a classic example of fighting the last war, emphasizing nuclear weaponry as the threat and promise of salvation.

And so it is with the net. It became fashionable a few years ago to talk about the fabulous "500 channels" future of the information age---a fundamentally bankrupt analogy when confronted with the many-to-many, real-time, interactive, noncommercial (mostly, so far) nature of the net, something vastly different than the one-to-many, non-real-time (usually), commercial (mostly) nature of broadcast television.

Along with such talk came other bad analogies, such as Gore's horrid "information superhighway", a phrase universally despised and maligned by those who actually use the net, but which appears to have caught the popular imagination---people know what cars and highways look like, while most have not really figure out what the network is like yet.

Such flawed metaphors lead to flawed public policy. For example, there are numerous attempts to censor expression on the net, be it from the Scientologists, from misguided CMU administrators, FCC attempts to regulate the net as a broadcast medium, or misguided Congressional attempts to remove "indecency" (whatever that means) from the net (really, to remove any semblance of free political speech). (For a great deal of information related to public policy and the net, look here.) For an analysis of what's really going on politically in one particular arena---namely the great kiddio-porn scare---consult Pat Califia's Public Sex.)

Most of these attempts seem to ignore the fact that the net is, in fact, a global phenomenon and not a local one. This means that even national governments appear to be "local" in regards to the net, which makes enforcement of their "local" laws quite difficult. As John Gilmore once said, "The net treats censorship as damage and routes around it." This does not mean that, e.g., US federal government attempts to make life miserable for anyone in the US using the net for any potentially-controversial speech will have no effect, but their effects are necessarily highly diluted when one considers the international scope of the net and the potential for widespread cryptograpy to disguise the identity of those uttering the most controversial speech.

To drive this point home, consider the current debate over so-called pornography (itself a poorly-defined term, especially when viewed in a global perspective in which no one legal canon can possibly apply). In the US, depiction of children (or those who appear to be children) in sexual situations carries quite extreme penalties; leser panlties apply to things legally defined as "pornographic, but they ust pass a more-stringent court challenge. In Japan, on the other hand, depiction of children in such situations is relatively acceptable---but showing pubic hair of any sort carries large penalties. In the past, when Customs officials and the realities of hardcopy mail made widespread dissemination of tsuc materials in either direction acros national boundaries rare and difficult, this difference in cultures was less apparent. However, the US and Japan are only a couple hundred milliseconds away from each other on the net---and the consequent flow of these images in both directions forces consideration of the vast differences in social and legal climate between the two countries as far as what constitutes acceptable speech.

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Lenny Foner

Last modified: Wed Apr 3 01:18:30 1996