I did a quick burn tonight through the several chapters in The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, edited by Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss (New York: Routledge, 2000), that seemed like they might be useful. Not much that was new, really, but one semi-startling connection that I’ll save until last.
First, however, there were things like the insights Robert McChesney offers in his essay “So Much for the Magic of Technology and the Free Market”, such as the observation that the “market system may ‘work’ in the sense that goods and services are produced and consumed, but it is by no means fair in any social, political, or ethical sense of the term. . . In participating as capitalists, wealthy individuals have tremendous advantages over poor or middle-class individuals, who have almost no chance at all. . . It is unremarkable that ‘self-made’ billionaires like Bill Gates, Ted Turner, Michael Eisner, Rupert Murdoch, and Sumner Redstone all come from privileged backgrounds” (12). I’ve seen this before, of course, but McChesney places his observation very much in the context of the Web economy, and goes on to point out that “One of the striking characteristics of the World Wide Web is that there has been virtually no public debate over how it should develop; a consensus of ‘experts’ simply decided that it should be turned over to the market. Indeed, the antidemocratic nature of Web policy making is explained or defended on very simple grounds: the Web is to be and should be regulated by the free market. This is the most rational, fair, and democratic regulatory mechanism ever known to humanity, so by all means it should be automatically applied to any and all areas of social life where profit can be found” (7). His foundational point here is that “The Web utopianism of Negroponte and others is based not just on a belief in the magic of technology, but, more important, on a belief in capitalism as a fair, rational, and democratic mechanism that I find mythological. It is when technological utopianism or determinism are combined with a view of capitalism as benign and natural that we get a genuinely heady ideological brew” (7; link mine). Pretty much right up my alley; I strongly agree that the discourses of “the free Web” and “the free market” are almost inextricably intertwined, particularly in the minds of the wealthy cyber-libertarians like Negroponte for whom Wired Magazine is the equivalent of Better Homes and Gardens or InStyle or even Martha Stewart Living.
What I really liked, though, was the compelling demonstration offered by Andrew Herman and John H. Sloop in “‘Red Alert!’: Rhetorics of the World Wide Web and ‘Friction Free’ Capitalism” of the discursive connections between the dreams of bodily and material transcendence of difference offered by the Web and the dreams of “what Bill Gates calls the ‘friction-free’ capitalism of the twenty-first century” offered by the Web (86). While I’ve given some consideration to the fact that I’m able to resist giving visual cues about my physical appearance on this weblog, and while I occasionally enjoy the convenience of buying books (from indie folks like Eastgate Systems and Firebrand Books, publisher of the awesome work of Alison Bechdel, as well as — I admit it — from That Big One Which Must Not Be Named) and music (another admission of guilt: my recent guilty 99-cent indulgences at the iTunes music store include Rita Coolidge’s version of “Fever”, “La Raza” by Kid Frost, and Joan Jett’s incredible cover of “I Wanna Be Your Dog”) online, I’ve never considered what the two might have to do with one another. The connection Herman and Sloop draw may offer me another theoretical route into examining how technology itself may contribute to the dearth of discourse about class difference in computers and composition studies.
If I may add another perspective on class and the Web. The money people actually get involved quite late in the game. The Internet was designed and build by a rag tag group of techs, mostly working at universities and a few government and commercial labs. Until sometime in the 90s, non of the financial types, Bill Gates included really new what it was about, how it worked or had anything to do with the design of core practices and protocols.
As soon as it become economically significant, the money types are all over it, and to a large extent take it over. Most of the tech remains below the surface and behind the scenes, but one place where the action is surrounds the internet name space (i.e. where you “own” vitia.org and I own geraldgleason.com). It’s still very controversial in the tech world how things were handled with the establishment of ICANN (if I’ve got in right, something like Internet Committee on Names and Numbers).
They own everything simply because they already own everything, and actually, rapidly changing technology works to turn the class mobility shaker faster. You need some seed money even when starting in a garage, but there are success stories in every technology generation. New millionaires, not billionaires though.
Gerry, I gotta disagree. The Department of Defense, ARPA, and the NSF are hardly dime-store operations, and DARPA sending out 140 RFPs for contracts for the first nodes — to places like UCLA, Stanford, UCSB, Rand, MIT, Harvard, NASA, CMU — ain’t exactly rag-tag. The combination of “universities” and “government” has never equaled cheap, and the internet didn’t start in a garage. Money — a whole lot of money — was there from the get-go, and it was there because Sputnik scared Ike and the rest of us shitless.