Slashdot Log In
World Without Walls
from the The-New-Architecture-of-the-Net dept.
The citizens of the Net and the Web live in a world without walls, denizens of a new kind of social geography. Much more than technology, this is the stunning new reality of networked computing.
We go online so often, to so many different places, and browse and download so freely, it's sometimes easy to take our own culture for granted.
But this world without walls increasingly is colliding with the off-line place, the one that's criss-crossed with walls. As these two very different countries interact, the issue of walls and boundaries becomes more intense, even bitter. And the stakes become bigger, for politics, business and for nearly every powerful institution.
The Net is entering its second generation. People who grew up on take for granted their freedom to say what they want, go where they want, download and retrieve what they want. They have little experience with walls. As the Net becomes more central, lucrative and culturally powerful, the outside world is thundering online like a great, frenzied herd. And they're throwing up walls like mad.
Just as furiously as they want to put their walls up, many of us resist. This profound difference puts the Net at odds with most of the important institutions, traditions and instincts in the world.
Walls and institutions, from Congress to Wall Street to the White House, are almost synonymous. All of these places have walls around them, usually thick and heavily-guarded. Walls are the boundaries in our culture that protect institutions and define them. There are walls around schools, stores and, in the legal and copyright sense, ideas and words. Walls are the social and cultural architecture, prevalent in almost every part of life.
The architecture of the Internet is different from conventional ideas about building things. It takes information from almost all institutions and industries - music, journalism, government, the stock market - and absorbs them into a new world, one designed specifically without walls. No wonder conflicts are inevitable.
The Web has its own architects, and they're building very different kinds of structures, as Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville point out in their astounding new book, "Information Architecture for the Web," from O'Reilly Publishers.
"From clay tablet scribes to medieval monks to the folks who organize your daily newspaper, information architects have contributed in subtle but important ways to our world. Information architects have balanced the whims of authority with those of unforgiving users of every stripe, while forcibly fitting their efforts into the constraints of the available information technologies," write Rosenfeld and Morville.
These new technologies, and the architects designing them, are creating kinds of communities that have never been seen in the world before. Hundreds of new websites - this one, for example (Slashdot) - are constructed by architects to work without walls. Not only is the source code that makes them work freely distributed, but they are conceived to be continuously and inextricably linked to other structures, to work in a bottom-up way, rather than the other way around.
To the institutions of the off-line world, day-by-day confronted with the emerging power, reach and influence of the Internet, this flies in the face of the very way in which their world has always worked, and needs to work if they're to survive.
Without walls, there's no secretary, security guard, voice-mail or letters column to hide behind. It's harder to own, license and patent things, even harder to charge for them. Online, we write in immediate proximity to the praise and the criticism, insulated from neither. Online, we can travel freely and quickly, from place to place, from the house next door to the other side of the world. It's different.
In many ways, the issue of whether all these walls can or should come down - or whether we need to erect more - is a civil conflict. In pits one generation against another, one sensibility against another, one experience against another. It is the primary divide between the digital culture and un-wired, neo-Luddite encampments in media, Academe and politics.
Struggles about walls and the Internet are erupting constantly, online and off. The increasingly public and politicized rebellion against Microsoft by Linux and other open source and free software advocates is one of them, as is the challenge to the music industry from MP3 music software. Microsoft's ubiquitous software programs are a series of information walls; people pay tolls to cross over them from the outside world to the Net. Linux seeks to knock the wall down so that people can move about freely. Microsoft, true to the culture from which it came, wants to keep them up.
Earlier this month, Website designers from all over the world were angered when they discovered that Microsoft had received a U.S. patent covering a fundamental technology - "cascading style sheets" (templates that reduce the cost of developing Web sites) - that had been adopted by the World Wide Web consortium, the non-profit group working to standardize the Web.
The new wall-less world challenges entrenched power everywhere it goes. With so much information available online, the role of teachers is under pressure, as well as that of the journalists. Voters have the electronic means to make their opinions known instantly, as they did during the Monica Lewinsky scandal - a source of real and evident unease to political figures.
Institutions use walls to preserve their places as arbiters of culture, civics and the political agenda. Yet when Congress dumped Kenneth Starr's report on President Clinton into the culture without walls last fall, it spread to tens of millions of people; many believe that the possibility of removing the President from office ended that way. One kind of wall had collapsed.
The primary response to the wall-less world has been to try to build some. Congress has passed not one but two noxious and blatantly unconstitutional "decency" laws aimed at putting up barriers to the Net's free speech. The issue of whether or not to tax E-shopping has to do with walls. So do the widespread efforts to build walls around adult content sites. Corporations coming online constantly throw walls up as toll barriers - USA Today's reviews of books can't run on Amazon.com, for example, since USA Today has an "arrangement" - a wall -- with Barnes and Noble's Website.
A whole industry of censorship technology has sprouted around the demonstrably false idea that the Internet is too dangerous for children. Millions of noxious blocking software programs have been sold that neither protect children nor guarantee decency, and every one of them is a wall.
The late Jonathan Postel, often called the Father of the Internet, and one of the engineers and scientists who designed it, sensed that the Internet had the potential to become a culture very different from other powerful new media - telephones, radio, TV - which were, from the first, commercialized and corporate. Although his vision almost literally made the Net as free as it is, he's almost known, online or off.
The laws of a capitalist culture are relentless: anything that's powerful and in widespread use is always - always - ultimately acquired by profit-making institutions. In our time, these institutions are of a size and scale even the Robber Barons of the last century couldn't have imagined. So their ability to acquire whole chunks of industry and culture are unprecedented. Nobody will ever know how many smaller entrepreneurs, companies and individual enterprises corporations like Disney, Time-Warner-Turner, Microsoft (or Wal-Mart) have been engulfed and devoured.
One reason the Internet has grown so rapidly - approximately 80 million Americans now have access to it at home, school or work - is that people like Postel created its infrastructure out of the sight and consciousness of business, government or media. It was growing before big corporations were even aware of it.
There should be statues of Postel on the tops of computer monitors. He released the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) specification (RFC 354) in 1972, when he was editor of the Request for Comments.
Postel and his fellow designers saw an opportunity to create a revolutionary new kind of networked communications system, one which depended on the freest possible exchange of information. It's no accident or small matter that domain names and Net protocols and e-mail are free. It's the deliberate absence of walls that makes this so. This ethic marked the Internet from the beginning, and platoons of hackers and cypherpunks and Libertarians have battled furiously to keep the culture free.
Compare that with what happened to TV, which was only a couple of years old before it was regulated by the federal government, then licensed to three network moguls for nearly half a century. The sad fate of TV - until zappers, satellite and cable technology liberated it somewhat - is really a story of regulatory and corporate walls fencing off a medium that was also conceived as a revolutionary communications tool but became something else, although its inevitable fusion with the Internet may yet allow it to fulfill it's original promise.
Because politics, media and business were so slow - perhaps too short-sighted -- to sense the potential reach of the Net, however, they left it alone, permitting a culture of unparalleled freedom and diversity to grow and spread. Although the equipment used to get onto the Internet is sometimes cumbersome and expensive, the Net itself was specifically designed to be wide open, a global network without boundaries or borders. Any company will have to fight very hard, as Microsoft is learning, to conquer cyberspace, or to contain even a large slice of it. Microsoft's mythic "Halloween" document, written by an employee in response to the spread of Linux and other open source software, included ideas about how to change domain configurations to close off parts of the Internet so that companies like Microsoft could charge for access more readily. The proposal was never seriously considered or adopted by the company, but it's very existence was revealing enough.
These kinds of conflicts are erupting everywhere, all the time. This week the four major television networks said they planned to sue DirecTV, the leading satellite TV provider, to force it to stop carrying their programs. The networks decision came after an announcement by DirecTV on Tuesday that it planned to evade a court-ordered cutoff of network programming by supplying network signals directly rather than through another company.
And earlier this week, the Sony Corporation said it plans to propose a new copy protection method that would enable the recording industry to sell music "safely", both on line and in digital formats like CD's and audio DVD's.
The liberation of music online is one of the most visible and comprehensible of the battles about walls. Music lovers by the millions have used new technologies to buy songs and music they like. New artists have found new ways to make people aware of their music. The record industry, which for years got people to buy music they didn't want in order to get the music they did, is scrambling to get some walls up again. But it may be too late. Millions of music fans have been politicized by MP3's, and are now quite used to getting all the music they want for little or no money. They may use even newer technologies to fight back.
Thanks to this history, much of the world's stored information on the planet is now free as well, for the first time in history.
In fact, Net and its subset the Web have spawned a culture with a visceral dislike of walls. The wall-busting nature of the Net has unified, even defined many of the sub-cultures that thrive here -- hackers, nerds, geeks, OSS guerrillas, cypherpunks, programmers, developers, gamers.
The idea of a society without walls is one of the very few nearly universal values in this complicated and diverse realm. The early hackers made it nearly a religion to break down walls wherever they find them. Although companies have gotten much more sophisticated at keeping the hackers out, the hacker ethic still runs powerful and deep.
The idea of a wall-less society exists in opposition with almost everything about the way that other society has been constructed. If anybody can get in or out of crucial institutions at will, or communicate with one another at no charge, or access tons of information for free, then how can political institutions regain control, media organizations maintain their influence, the increasingly large and repressive corporations that dominate American life keep their primacy?
If the MP3 player is a lethal wall-killer, so are audio and video streaming programs that let people anywhere listen and watch to programs almost anywhere else in the world. Walls have collapsed all over Academe. As reports and studies that used to be filtered through committees and take years to be shared with colleagues are now transmitted on the Internet in hours or days. Researchers and scholars can share their work openly with one another, and according to publications like the MIT Technology Review, are changing the nature of research. Term papers and theses are posted on the Web and shared, a frightening idea to many academics, a stirring one to others.
Disney's skillfully designed new portal, Go.Com, is a case study in a giant corporation's wall-building instincts. The site seeks to be self-contained, rather than promote linkage to other places, as so many Websites do; it's about keeping people within a particular entity. So Disney has acquired sports, news and entertainment sites at great cost to keep people within Go.com's boundaries, a clear step towards wall-building.
Microsoft's on-line Slate magazine tried for a year to get people to pay to subscribe - subscriptions are, in media terms, the embodiment of walls --, foregoing the very openness that makes the Web unique in media. A failure, the magazine reluctantly decided to offer itself for free once more. It's primary competitor Salon, understood from the outset that success depending on avoiding, not constructing, barriers.
The open source and free software movements are perhaps the biggest wall-crushers on the Net at the moment. Last week Business Week declared that Linux was Microsoft's "Vietnam."
The idea between Linux and other free software systems and programs is that there should be no walls separating the systems that run the software on the Web, any more than there are walls keeping people on the Net from e-mailing one another.
Beyond the intensely ingrown community of free software advocates, though, it's caused shock and consternation.
"Why should software be free?" Edward J. Zander, chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems, asked New York Times reporter Amy Harmon in a story on OSS. "Why should I give away what I pay millions of dollars to develop? Why doesn't General Motors give its cars away for free? Why don't you give me your newspaper for free?"
Good questions, and exactly the ones the chief operating officer of a giant computer software company should be asking, and the country should be talking about. The values of the rapidly ascending Internet suggest that companies may need a more nuanced response when it comes to existing online - such as perhaps giving some things away free some of the time, or charging less for the things they do sell, or selling them in different ways: giving consumers more power in terms of customization -- choice, design, price and quantity.
And hardly anyone on either side of any wall is taking up Zander's elemental question: What would happen if cars were free? If information is? And what would happen if software were free?
Perhaps we'll know soon enough. Increasingly, thanks to Linux, BeOS, open source and free software, it is. ***
As the Internet enters its second generation, it seems clearer all the time that the world without walls and the world with so many are going to continue to collide head-on, like tectonic places shifting before an earthquake.
Technological historians have written that periods of great technological, scientific and artistic advance - the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, The Industrial Revolution - have usually been followed by periods of repression and religious upheaval as institutions and powerful forces fight to regain their eroding dominance, and re-assert their historic right to define morality, control human behavior, and set the agenda. Perhaps the House Managers were more significant than anybody realized.
Will businesses and institutions really sit back in bemused silence while the citizens of the World Without Walls grab all the culture and information in the world for free? Will a society built on the model of power that flows from the top down watch quietly as the world without walls creates a never before seen many-to-many society, one where citizens have as much say as members of Congress, and as quickly? Where people can make their own media, listen to their own music, buy their own stock, punch through taboos about sex, alter business models of and free speech, alter models of purchase and consumption?
In "Web Architecture," the authors acknowledge the anxiety new kinds of information structures causing. "Many librarians [libraries are poignant invocation of a culture with walls, struggling to co-exist in a new culture without any] have responded slowly to new information technologies like the Web. Some librarians feel their value as professionals will be diminished as "virtual libraries" supplant those filled with physical books and periodicals. Many librarians fear that the public will bypass them and go directly to the source via the Internet," wrote Rosenfeld and Morville.
But the truth is, they argue, that skills in information organization and access are more, not less, necessary, in an age when information seems to be exploding everywhere.
Will teachers continue to try and compete with interactive technology by standing in front of computer and Net savvy captive students for hours with pointers and chalkboards? Will colleges overlook the fact that techno-jobs are so numerous and lucrative that growing numbers of kids are foregoing degrees to grab them? Will political parties turn the other cheek as the kind of Net campaigns that bring renegades and outsiders like Jesse Ventura into a political process dominated for years by a handful of rich contributors, journalists and political leaders?
Nobody knows. The history of technology is that its consequences are unpredictable.
Engineer Samuel Florman wrote that technology is inherently tragic, in that it represents the best of the human spirit - the desire to improve the world - and the worst -- a tendency to screw it up.
But technology is also inherently political, and computing, and according to scholars like Douglas Robertson of the University of Colorado, one of the pivotal developments in human history.
Thomas Paine, the American revolutionary and author of "Common Sense," saw the Monarchies who ran the world in his time as suffocating walls around the free movement of ideas and information. They stifled human spirit and individual liberty, he argued. In pleading with his fellow citizens to join in a revolution and knock them down, Paine wrote that "we have it within our power to begin the world anew."
So, it seems, do we, even as we have barely begun to acknowledge it.
mailto:jonkatz@slashdot.org
general motors (Score:3)
Well in a lot of those cases, that's what they're doing. General Motors in a certain sense does give away their cars. When I spend $20k on a car, I'm paying a few hundred dollars for the labor of the people assembling the car, a big chunk of money for the cost of parts that are made by the company (frame, body, etc), and a significant chunk for parts made by outside part manufacturers.
Now I've bought my car, its completely open to me. State inspections ignored, I can take all the body panels off my car and tape cardboard spraypainted with fleckstone paint onto it. I can take the engine out and put another in, or rework how the engine works. I can do anything I want with it.
So what's the money paying for? Its for the parts, the time of the people assembling it and part of the profit goes to the company that developed it. If I really wanted to, I could buy the repair manual for the car, go out and buy one part after another and build it from the ground up. Happens all the time with hotrods and restoration cars. The design of the car is completely open. If I want a new cam for the car, I can buy one from the company that made it, but I can also take calipers and such, measure it, and make one myself if I've got the facilities for it or pay someone else to.
So compare that to open source. Sure I can go download all the parts of a Linux system and put it together myself, piece by piece. The manufacturing and materials cost of a piece of software is very low, so they're a lot cheaper than car parts, but those are essentially why they're cheaper. The first Linux system I used was built just that way. But now I tend to use RedHat linux. They build my "car" for me, and I can change it once I get it to how I'd like it to be.
And they sink a lot of money into developing new parts for the "car". I can buy a later model of the "car" if I want or I can aquire the parts and put them on myself.
My point is that the open source concept isn't *that* alien to business -- lots of them have been doing it all along, when you remove costs of materials and manufacturing from the equation. I don't need to go to Ford to build my own Mustang if I've got a good machine shop, skills, and time.