So it is that "the earliest claims of cyber-dreamers -- that the Internet will produce a shift of power away from political elites to ordinary citizens -- may well become a reality".

But what Manasian does not remark is that the "unexpected changes" produced by new technologies are always changes in which we meet ourselves. In particular, we meet the side of ourselves we invested in the technology when we created it, and the side we now exercise in using it. As I stressed over and over in The Future Does Not Compute, and have repeated in NetFuture, this double _expression of ourselves is where we must look if we want to assess the likely impact of a technology. Obvious as this may appear, it remains a truth that leavens precious little commentary today.

For his part, Manasian vests his hope in direct democracy, founded on a nationalized and Net-enhanced referendum system. The Internet will enable us to distribute information, conduct debates, and register votes on a continuing and nearly instantaneous basis. This will make our current system of national elections every few years seem like "a remnant from the age of steam, when most representative institutions were invented".

Perhaps the Internet will deliver the technical capabilities Manasian envisions. But his assumptions about the meaning and use of these capabilities are strikingly naive. He relies upon "an educated public for whom individual choice is an important value", and goes on to say: "It is hard to bribe an entire electorate, or even to mislead it for very long, if there is a free flow of information and open discussion".

But surely both our desire for choice and the mechanisms we use for exercising that choice are far less important than whether we base our choices on serious reflection or casual hearsay. As for misleading the electorate, the question is not whether a few spin doctors can control our access to information. Rather, it is whether we will find the spin doctors, with their slick production values, more entertaining than those who would require a little real intellectual work from us. It does no good to have gigabits of information if the discussion of this information (and therefore the information itself) is cheapened beyond repair.

And again: the nearly instantaneous recording of "votes" is something whose meaning we can already glimpse, thanks to the polling industry. Nowhere are the limitations of our quest for yes-or-no certitude more evident than here. It is notorious that the pollster's need for quantifiable and information-processable data requires us in our answers to falsify the complex truth of whatever insight we have. At the same time, our interest in the "definitive answers" yielded by the poll (who won?) displaces the kind of probing conversation that might have deepened our insight.

In general, we should ask ourselves: Did television, which increased the flow of information so dramatically, raise the level of discussion -- or even preserve whatever quality had already been there? Are we of the computer age becoming more capable of a sustained and coherent national debate? Are we training our young people to do a better job than in the past of avoiding distraction and penetrating to the heart of an issue?

I have no simple answer to these questions, but I am sure that no answers are to be found by talking about the mechanisms for mediating our exchange -- not unless we make this a way for talking about ourselves in that double-sided fashion I referred to above. And if we do take this latter approach, then the first thing we notice is the widespread and unrealistic projection of human hopes upon digital mechanisms. This suggests a rather pessimistic answer to our questions. When technology, conceived apart from the human being, carries our hope for the future, we have lost sight of the only work that could possibly realize the hope, which is the work we accomplish within ourselves. Yes, this work will be incarnated in technologies and institutions and the structures of community, but we are the agents of the work. Our fading awareness of the distinction between agent and result, so that we increasingly see machine activity as equivalent to human activity, may prove to be the one decisive legacy of the high-tech age.

The thought may sound crazy, but I assure you: once software makes possible the kind of voting system Manasian describes, you will find people writing software to make their choices for them and cast their votes. Eventually, the "referendum of the hour" will become a battleground for competing PR machines operating largely through automated computer programs. Serious discussion will take place elsewhere.

Ubiquitous Tyranny?

Finally, there is the question whether networking technologies serve or oppose centralized authority. "So far", writes Manasian, "the Internet has not proved as subversive to authoritarian regimes as expected". In fact, "it is not impossible that instead of undermining repressive regimes, the Internet could become the most effective tool of social control that autocratic rulers have ever wielded". Citing a recent study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Manasian offers this eminently sensible judgment -- a judgment of the sort you rarely heard when I was writing my book:

The political impact of the Internet varies from country to country, say the authors [of the Carnegie study], and depends more on social or economic circumstances and the government's own policies than on the catalytic effects of the Internet itself.

Manasian notes in particular the self-censorship exercised by Internet service providers, content companies, and users:

Although China has welcomed private investment into its telecoms infrastructure, it has carefully retained control over operating licenses and over the system's backbone. This allows the authorities not only to use sophisticated monitoring techniques, but to punish any firms that step out of line. Most, including many big western firms, have been eager to comply. Likewise, by occasionally cracking down harshly on individuals, the authorities have intimidated most Chinese into staying within accepted boundaries on the Internet. Chinese users never know who might be watching the way they use it, or when the axe might fall.

So far, this approach has been highly successful. The Falun Gong, the only direct challenger to the government's domination of public life in recent years, won a large following in the late 1990s by using email and websites, but today the group's dwindling membership inside the country communicates mostly by payphone, which is harder to trace than email.

Personally, I remain as noncommittal about the issue (formulated in this way) as I was in my book. I am convinced that in the long run the underlying evolution of human consciousness is making autocratic regimes less and less tolerable to the healthy human being. But whether healthy or unhealthy impulses will prevail in this or that nation in the short run -- who can say? In any case, insofar as the Internet does help to undermine tyranny in the long run, it will be because we refuse to participate in tyranny -- not because packet switching, redundancy and decentralized networks are inherently anti-tyrannical.

The important thing to realize, I continue to believe, is that our unhealthy impulses need not prop up centralized authorities in order to get us into trouble. The deeper threat today is found in the potentials for an unprecedented sort of distributed tyranny -- a tyranny with no one particular in charge. Those we like to point at as "responsible" -- politicians, corporate officers, bureaucratic functionaries -- tend more and more to be faceless instruments of "the System", with little choice but to carry out its dictates. But all the rest of us, too, find ourselves implicated, by a thousand connections, in the workings of the System as a whole.

Suppose I sat down and tallied all the implications of a trip to the store for milk -- from car and fuel use, to farming practices and genetic engineering, to the style of operation of retail, wholesale, and distribution businesses. I would find that virtually nothing going on in the world is more than a "degree or two of separation" from my casual trip. Altering any one of these connections hardly seems worthwhile -- the disruption to my own life would be so great, and the difference to the System so vanishingly small -- yet changing everything at once is impossible. So a kind of paralysis sets in, which is exactly what allows the ever more tightly woven web of automatisms embodied in machine and software to direct us according to its own, self-propelled logic. The aggressively universal ambition of all such logic is the tyranny I fear.

Finding Ourselves

If I were to try to encapsulate everything I've been saying within the briefest compass possible, I would offer something like this:

Our future depends upon our finding the proper balance and interplay of two "forces". One of these propels us to globalize, to extend our reach ever outward. As we move in this direction, the temptation is to ignore and dissolve local distinctions. A homogenization occurs, tending to cut us off from the relationships and communities in which we were formerly embedded. We gain universality, but it is increasingly the universality of atoms moving within a common void.

Digital technologies lend themselves particularly well to this one-sided temptation. The logic of universal connectivity, left to itself, says nothing about the individual character of what is connected; and the logic of programmed interactions says nothing about the meaning of our exchanges. We can implement and employ all this logic with a gratifying sense of "nailing things down exactly". (The rationally structured metropolis on a computer chip is wonderfully unambiguous.) As more and more of our social and entrepreneurial energy goes into the endless elaboration and refinement of such logic, we find it all too natural to ignore the disorderly or "merely poetic" domains of meaning upon which social health ultimately depends.

The second "force" moves us to intensify our individual lives, our communities, our rootedness in place, our experience of meaning, our commitment to the concrete and particular and distinctive. And what I want to say is that the trend toward global extension is pathological except insofar as it is united with -- and actually grows out of -- this second movement focused on deepening and intensifying the local.

The ultimate local focus is the individual, who is also the agent of both "forces". The healthy individual reaches toward ever wider community only because he reaches ever more deeply into his own center and source, where he finds not so much a universal logic as a universal humanity uniting him with all others. And, in the other direction, he strengthens his inner life because in embracing a wider community, he finds himself reflected in it and encounters there the challenge of his own destiny.

For what it's worth, all this can be taken as commentary upon a statement Samuel Taylor Coleridge offers at the beginning of chapter 13 in his Biographia Literaria:

Grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you.

Every age is out of balance one way or another, and our primary challenge today is not to expand infinitely but to "find ourselves in this infinity" -- an infinity that science first stretched before us in the objectified heavens, and technology now implements as a social reality of abstract, remote distances, universal logic, and the blind, LaPlacean necessities of "the System". There never was a fitter matrix for leveraging the System than the engraved procedures, the endless rows of microscopic cubicles, and the bland informational efficiencies of a silicon chip.

Every logic is abstracted from our thinking or speaking; every mechanism is abstracted from our behaving. I believe we have needed the comforting structure, the experience of clarity, that our externalized logics and mechanisms have afforded us -- but only as a confidence-building step leading to exploration of the deeper significance of our life together. This significance always lies "off-grid" in the sea of meaning from which all worthwhile logics and mechanisms crystallize and into which they must dissolve again in order to be revivified. The risk is that in our fascination with the certainties of the grid we will forget everything except square-cornered obedience to a dead logic -- forget that only by plunging into the reality between the lines can we gain a fresh draft of life.

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© 2003 by The Nature Institute.

Steve Talbott ( [email protected]) is the editor of NetFuture an electronic newsletter where this article originally appeared. .