Archives: Expert Predictions

Building the NII from the Bottom Up: A Strategy for Working Through Local Organizations

We need to adopt a strategy of working through and with grassroots organizations. An organizational strategy has many advantages. Organizations usually have greater financial resources than individuals, particularly low-income people … To include other populations, we need to work through the organizations that impact their lives … Organizations are multipliers. Training individuals helps individuals. Training people in an organization means that the skills are likely to be passed on to others … Rooting cyberspace in the social realities of neighborhood organizations increases the odds that the needs and priorities of those “have not” areas will be effectively aggregated and expressed. If we want to impact NII policy, we have to build a grassroots base as well as advocate at the federal level.

Building the NII from the Bottom Up: A Strategy for Working Through Local Organizations

While an estimated third of American homes have a computer, only about 3 percent are regularly online. In fact, as a result of price increases caused by deregulation, a growing number of Americans – up to 20 percent of some low-income communities – don’t even have home telephones. Even if the “NII access device” of the future is built into TV sets, cable set-top boxes, video game controllers, or other “everyday” devices, and even if they eventually drop in price, it will be a long time before the entire population will be able to afford them – if ever. In addition, no matter how friendly computers get, they will still require some level of skill and expertise … Social transformation requires social participation, and a totally market-driven NII is not likely to achieve it.

Building the NII from the Bottom Up: A Strategy for Working Through Local Organizations

The kind of future the NII helps shape depends, in part, on the visions it is intended to achieve and the strategies used to implement those goals. Industry spokespeople describe the NII as a vehicle for movies on demand, home shopping, and sit-com reruns, with the “serious” content provided by endless infomercials. Clinton Administration liberals stress the NII’s educational importance of allowing access to endless information, as well as its potential to spur private sector economic development. Many cybernauts are most enthused about the creation of virtual communities … To those of us who see the NII as a critical tool for the revitalization of democracy, the strengthening of neighborhoods, the release of grass-roots cultural creativity, and the revival of mutual aid, these visions are a painful warning of opportunities we hope are not yet lost.

Outsourcing and You

A recent Wall Street Journal article nicely illustrates the risks and benefits that come from the use of computer networks to create distributed labor markets … We might be looking at a future in which everyone on the planet is competing with everyone else in real time. Is this a happy planet? Is it really an efficient planet despite its ceaseless upheaval, given that people will still be trying to raise kids?

The New Politics of Technology in the U.S.

It is valuable to investigate the often tacit politics of a wide variety of emergent movements around technology. I have mentioned the community networking movement, which has extraordinary potential as both a political movement in its own right and as an infrastructure for democratic activity more generally. Another movement is the world of discourse in MUD’s and IRC and the like … As emergent forms of group activity and social imagination, they are inherently political at some level, in some way. Most likely they are internally diverse, in which case we can set about articulating points of agreement and disagreement, shaping agendas that afford shared action, and get about the hard work of building democracy.

The New Politics of Technology in the U.S.

Computer networks, it is held, are instruments of liberty that allow people to communicate laterally, thereby breaking down the hierarchies of governments and corporations alike. The resulting vision is actually similar to that of Adam Smith, who thought of the market as a vast network of artisans and entrepreneurs and who had little or no inkling of the large, bureaucratic corporation … The actual evidence, such as it is, points largely in the other direction: computer networks decentralize organization (in the sense of operational decision-making) while simultaneously increasing the power of corporate central management.

The New Politics of Technology in the U.S.

The technological issue upon which progressives and libertarians have worked together most harmoniously has been privacy … Little purpose is served by ignoring the considerable philosophical differences that underlie coalitions about issues like the Clipper chip. Indeed, exploration of these differences will be important in extending political cooperation to new realms, for example in building the community networking movement, which will someday become big enough to have political enemies who seek to stifle or digest it through regulation, most likely under the guise of deregulation. On the other hand, new conflict will most likely arise as each side explores and develops its particular model for organizing people around technology issues.

Networking and Democracy

It’s better to have overt censorship than to practice self-censorship, since the former can be openly argued against and resisted. I *do* think that it’s important to engage in cultural self-regulation of the net. The purpose of this cultural self-regulation is not to avoid official regulation from the outside, but rather to help preserve the net as a potential space for the rebuilding of democracy.

Networking and Democracy

The rapid expansion of computer networking provides us with a tremendously important opportunity to reflect on human communication and its place in democracy, and to build a network culture that provides everyone with the skills necessary to act as a fully drawn agent in society.

Networking and Democracy

We can see now, I think, the possibility of a renaissance of democracy enabled both by new communications media, most particularly computer networks, and by the renewed interest in practical communication skills. The skills of using the net to get things done in your own life and your own community are also the skills of democracy. We can use these skills to rebuild democracy, and to organize ourselves around the necessity of a democratic definition of the institutions of human communication.

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