Archives: Expert Predictions

When all is said and done, is there a new politics emerging in the Net/cyberspace/digital culture? Short answer: Yes, if by “new politics” one means an increased visibility for certain strains of ideology, like libertarianism, that have not generally made it through the mass media’s bozo-filters. Libertarianism – with its zealous advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism, deregulation, and privatization – is a ready-made “killer app” for high-tech start-ups, would-be millionaires, and the rest of the “don’t tread on me” cybercrew. Mix this in with the current impatience toward half-failed liberal solutions and mammoth government and we may see some unusually radical proposals enacted in Washington.

Where is the place for politics in this brave new world, when leaving the Net becomes as unthinkable as giving up breathing? … As the warp and the woof draw ever tighter, the feelings of claustrophobia and manipulation that result may indeed trigger a new politics in the midst of digital culture: the networked equivalent of the Branch Davidians, where the ultimate political gesture is one of withdrawal and self-marginalization.

Futurists make much of the collapse of time and space that is being ushered in by world telecommunications and the microchip … The new political infrastructure of the Net is as handy to Shell Oil as it is to a bedroom publisher of politically incorrect zines. Cyberspace is full of armchair mavericks and eccentric ideologues. But despite originality and political diversity gyrating on the Net, the onrushing logic of the integration of the world economy and world politics into a single unified whole may overshadow these distinctions, just as the boundaries between nations are becoming anachronistic in the face of the “global marketplace.”

The Internet’s decentralized, cooperative structure has been, ironically, the closest thing to a functioning large-scale anarchist society that human culture has yet seen. Not surprisingly, having tasted such virtual freedom, many participants are reluctant to surrender their elbow room. But that seems to be the direction things are going, with global forces at work that dwarf the self-conceptions or ideological intentions of any one group of individuals. This is the politics of historical currents and technological momentum, not of net-surfing soapboxes.

Net or no Net, the odds are against the Libertarian Party, or any other third party being the vehicle for a new politics. Hostile state electoral rules and pervasive media skepticism almost assure defeat. Besides, even if elected, a third-party president, unaccompanied by a supporting wave of third-party congressmembers, would be even more thwarted than Bill Clinton.

Given half a chance, the electorate would love to ditch the old left/right horseshoe match and take on some new paradigms altogether … Some techno-optimists, entranced with the rapid expansion of cyberspace, are convinced that the rough contours of the future can be spotted in the shadowy forms dancing across their computer screens. The pounding drums of cypherpunks, Usenet orators, civil-liberties activists, and venture capitalists, all undulating together in the flickering RGB glow, seem to whisper alluring promises of power, privacy, and pluralism in the politics to come.