Talk:Case for Progress in a Networked Age

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search


Steven Johnson disputes Evegeny Morozov's interpretation of his book.

"STEVEN JOHNSON:

Anyone worried that Chris Hughes’ ownership of The New Republic would turn the venerable publication into a vehicle for Internet boosterism will be delighted to read Evgeny Morozov’s new essay, “Not By Memes Alone,” running this week in the first official issue of the Hughes reign. Morozov’s essay is ostensibly a ten-page dismantling of my argument for “peer progressive” politics in Future Perfect, and like almost everything Morozov writes, it’s a smart and entertaining piece. He has a very astute riff on the dangers of what he calls “solutionism” in my work, and rightly observes that Future Perfect contains very little discussion of struggle or conflict—both of which strike me as being important critiques of the book.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the essay is a screed against what Morozov calls the “quasi-religion” of “Internet-centrism,” a movement that won’t be content until every institution is reinvented as a decentralized network fashioned after the Web or Wikipedia. This is not a new theme for Morozov, but it’s the first time he has targeted my work as a proponent of this dangerous new faith. I have to admit, everything that Morozov says about the dangers and limitations of the Internet centrists seems utterly convincing to me, and if I ever get a chance to meet some of these cultists, I will be sure to persuade them of the error of their ways. But using Future Perfect as a launchpad to renounce Internet centrism is a strange choice, since the book actually goes out of its way to avoid that kind of naive techno-determinism. This forces Morozov to do a number of awkward and misleading moves to make the book sound more doctrinaire than it actually is.

Some of those moves border on factual errors. Start with Morozov’s treatment of New York’s 311 system, which I endorse in the book as a successful example of decentralized peer networks being used to solve complex social problems. Morozov observes:

But Johnson is completely blind to the virtues of centralization. In discussing 311, he lauds the fact that tipsters calling the hotline to help create a better macro-level view of city problems. But this is a trivial insight compared with the main reason why 311 works: Mayor Bloombergs decision to centralize—not decentralize—previous models of reporting tips... Johnson’s Internet-centric worldview is so biased toward all things decentralized... that he completely misses the highly centralized nature of 311.

Here’s me from the chapter on 311 in Future Perfect:

It should be said that 311 is not a purely decentralized system. There are both literal and figurative headquarters, where the call center is located. In this sense, it is a hybrid form, somewhere between the pure peer network and the older state model. The 311 service vastly increases the number of participants in the system, and gives them the opportunity to set priorities for the city’s interventions. But those interventions are still triggered via a top-down mechanism. To a certain extent, that top-down element may be inevitable.

I think Morozov may be confused about the meaning of the word “completely.” Or perhaps this is just some kind of auto-correct mistake: where he typed “completely blind to,” he meant to type “is perfectly aware of and openly acknowledges.”

In another section, Morozov writes: “For all his talk of political philosophy, Johnson makes no effort to ask even basic philosophical questions. What if some limits to democratic participation in the pre-Wikipedia era were not just a consequence of high communication costs but stemmed from a deliberate effort to root out populism, prevent cooptation, or protect expert decision-making?” And yet half of one chapter is devoted to the problems with direct democracy, including an extended discussion of the way the founders framed those problems in the Federalist Papers. Morozov is free to disagree with my answers, but it is simply incorrect that I “make no effort” to ask the questions.

But enough about Morozov ignoring my words. The most revealing omission in the review revolves around his words. Future Perfect has a chapter called “What does the Internet want?” which Morozov predictably enough invokes as a telltale sign of Internet centrism:

The totalizers would happily follow Johnson in seeking answers to questions such as “So what does the Internet want?”—as if the Internet were a living thing with its own agenda and its own rights.

The problem with this diagnosis is that the chapter is explicitly about the difficulty of imagining the Internet as a unified positive force. It points out that decentralized architectures can be used to build terrorist networks as readily as crowdfunded charity initiatives. Consider this crucial passage from the chapter:

Perhaps it was a mistake to treat the Internet as a deterministic one-directional force for either global liberation or oppression, for cosmopolitanism or xenophobia. The reality is that the Internet will enable all of these forces—as well as many others—simultaneously. But as far as laws of the Internet go, this is all we know. Which of the numerous forces unleashed by the Web will prevail in a particular social and political context is impossible to tell without first getting a thorough theoretical understanding of that context.

You’d think that Morozov would want to mention that passage from “What Does The Internet Want?"—if only because the words were written by Morozov himself, in his earlier book Net Delusion. I quoted them at a very prominent early place in the chapter, precisely to make it clear that easy generalizations about the “logic” of the Internet were prone to failure. The whole chapter is a meditation on avoiding the pitfalls of naive tech essentialism; its answer to the question “what does the Internet want” is: “a lot of contradictory things.” But Morozov is so keen to denounce Internet-centrism that he doesn’t even seem to notice when his own words are being invoked enthusiastically as a critique of Internet-centrism. Now, it would be perfectly reasonable to argue that my critique doesn’t go far enough, or that I’ve misinterpreted Morozov’s position, or invoked it in bad faith. But instead, Morozov just charges ahead as if I haven’t engaged with his argument at all.

The argument that Morozov wants to make here is that we Internet-centrists (a group that apparently also includes Clay Shirky and Yochai Benkler) begin with our one true devotion to TCP/IP, and then conveniently backfill a history of lower-tech antecedents in order to justify our love, as Madonna might say. You wouldn’t suspect it from Morozov’s review, but the discussion of the Internet makes up only a fraction of Future Perfect’s content. He does manage to allude to my section on participatory budgeting in Brazil, but the book also includes long riffs on the prize-backed challenges offered by the Royal Society of the Arts in the mid-1700s; the “democracy vouchers” solution for campaign finance; the extraordinary rise in aviation safety over the past thirty years; the internal organization of corporations; childhood malnutrition in Vietnam, and so on.

These stories hail from very different historical and conceptual frames, but they share two important qualities: they are all directly related to the peer progressive worldview, and they have nothing to do with the Internet, or computers in general.

I can understand why Morozov wants to see Internet-centrism in my work: He’s built his career around debunking that belief system, after all. And yes, I’m glad the Internet and the Web were invented; I think that the world is, on the whole, better off for their existence. I would be surprised if Morozov doesn’t feel that way himself. But Future Perfect goes to great lengths to separate the promise of peer networks from some naive faith in Internet liberation. The main lines of its argument arose in part out of two book-length studies of peer collaboration in the 18th and 19th centuries: The Ghost Map and The Invention Of Air. My last book, Where Good Ideas Come From, ended with a survey of hundreds of peer-produced innovations from the Renaissance to today. The deep roots of the idea date back to reading Jane Jacobs on the “organized complexity” of the city in my twenties, which ultimately led to my arguments for decentralization in my 2001 book Emergence. I’m giving Morozov the benefit of the doubt that he just hasn’t bothered to read any of those books, since he doesn’t mention them anywhere in the review. But if you added up all the words I’ve published on peer network architecture, I wager somewhere around 90 percent of them are devoted to pre-digital forms of collaboration: in the commonplace book or the 18th-century coffeehouse, or urban neighborhood formation, or the traditions of academic peer review, or in the guild systems of Renaissance Florence. If Morozov were only a little less obsessed with the Internet himself, he might have some very interesting things to say about that history. Instead, he has decided to reduce that diverse web of influences into a story of single-minded zealotry. He’s like a vampire slayer that has to keep planting capes and plastic fangs on his victims to stay in business.

The point I tried to make explicit in Future Perfect is one that I’ve been implicitly making for more than a decade now: that peer collaboration is an ancient tradition, with a history as rich and illustrious as the more commonly celebrated histories of states or markets. The Internet happens to be the most visible recent achievement in that tradition, but it is hardly the basis of my worldview. And there is nothing in Future Perfect (or any of these other works) that claims that decentralized, peer-network approaches will always outperform top-down approaches. It’s simply a question of emphasis. Liberals can still believe in the power and utility of markets, even if they tend to emphasize big government solutions; all but the most radical libertarians think that there are some important roles for government in our lives. Peer progressives are no different. We don’t think that everything in modern life should be re-engineered to follow the “logic of the Internet.” We just think that society has long benefited from non-market forms of open collaboration, and that they’re aren’t enough voices in the current political conversation reminding us of those benefits. For peer progressives, the Internet is a case-study and a role model, yes, but hardly a deity. We would be making the same argument had the Internet never been invented." (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112336/future-perfects-steven-johnson-evgeny-morozov-debate-social-media)