3. The authoritarian net 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 Ellen Ullman: Sadie, you say that computing does reproduce the old paradigms of work but also changes the way things are done. I'd like to look a little further at that point, especially as it concerns the Internet. I'm constantly amazed that the popular imagination has seized upon the Net as some harbinger of a brave, new freedom, or at least a metaphor for it. On the surface, the Net does seem democratic and multivalent -- the whole notion of "each user a publisher," and so forth. But I must say that -- internally, in the technical configuration -- the Net represents a return to the most restrictive, authoritarian model of early computing: the control of the central server. When I watch users try the Web, it slowly becomes clear to me that this part of the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer. Think about it. In your six-pound laptop resides more computing power than once fit on whole floors of buildings. But when it's connected to the Net, what is it doing? Waiting for each screen to come down the line. I once told a consultant friend that I thought the Net was a plot by corporate central MIS to regain control of the desktop. He scoffed at first, but after working on the Net for a year or so, he called me and said, "You know, I think you're right. They just want to control what everybody has running." Strangely (or not so strangely), the structure of the Net -- everything of interest on the server, the user waiting for a chance to talk -- reproduces the sort of computing system women have been working on for years as clerks. I'm exaggerating to make a point, but I can't resist saying it: The Net is a pink-collar terminal with prettier pictures and better sound. Laura Miller: There's some truth to the idea that the Web limits the degree to which the user -- the surfer -- can shape or use the data at hand. It's also been championed as a medium that makes the Net accessible to all sorts of people -- many of whom are women -- who found telnet and FTP daunting and overly technical. It's a lot like the difference between the old command-line DOS OS and the Macintosh graphical user interface. The Web has helped many new users leap over their impression that accessing the Net requires membership in a mandarin group of people with years of technical training and orientation. That's a democratic effect, but its price seems to have been that users' involvement with their computers is more passive. More people have access, but their experience is more limited and controlled. (Unless they're publishing on the Web, which is another matter entirely.) Sadie Plant: I don't disagree at all with these comments about how the Net is actually developing -- like any emergent phenomenon, it's the ambivalent result of tendencies pulling in very different directions, some trying to maintain the old routines, others making new modes of connection and communication possible. The guy who said, "They just want to control what everybody has running" is absolutely right. But the question is, obviously, what can be done to counter this, or rather what tendencies are already in motion which do counter this? It has to be remembered that insofar as there were deliberate intentions behind the development of computing in general and the Net in particular, they were solely concerned with command, surveillance and control. If this had worked, we'd be living in an absolutely authoritarian global state by now, and we're not. Again, yes, there are plenty of interests in this direction, but there are also potential and actual disruptions of such controlling tendencies. The Net is only interesting to the extent that it's part of these disruptions. If or when it becomes a corporate mall, then it won't be interesting at all. I also agree with the point that there are many current attempts to confine users to preprogrammed packages. But this is a little like the supposed backlash against feminism -- not a sign of paralyzing defeat, but on the contrary, evidence that there is something there which needs to be contained, recuperated, confined, packaged and sold yet again. Power always wants to reproduce itself and its strategies -- the trick is to get in its way. The notion that the Net is a brave free adventure is absolute bunk, and I've tried to ridicule this in my book. Any more thoughtful engagement with these issues makes it clear that the Net doesn't provide new freedoms for individuals at all; the whole notion of individuality is brought into question instead. Nor does it encourage democracy as we've known it in the modern West -- after all, our notions of democracy are crashing round our ears, partly because of the (again possible, potential, as well as actual) tendency of electronic communications to override national boundaries with huge implications for fiscal policy, trade, etc., but also because the ways in which technological changes creep up on us make it clear that we're not, and never have been, freely choosing the directions in which our cultures develop. Ellen Ullman: Well, if I were nit-picking, I'd have to say that it's true that early computers were first used to calculate shell trajectories (still an engineering 101 assignment), but the Internet we are all trying to salvage was actually created in a fortuitous, serendipitous cooperation of government infrastructure project and individual free-for-all. The Department of Defense built it, then let scientists across the country talk to each other, more or less openly. Maybe this is why we are all having such a battle over what the Internet means and where it should go. For a brief moment, its very structure seemed to contain a delicate balance between collective and individual authority. My biggest concern is the way computing culture is spreading outward. What began as a back-room operation created by a weird breed of human called the programmer is now a nearly intimate part of life in the developed world. Like it or not, programmers are re-creating the world. With every new version of an operating system, browser or application program goes an assumption about how human beings understand their existence and how they wish to organize it. These assumptions are not easily recognized or understood, yet they operate anyway, and powerfully. The explicit logic and structures of a computer system can't help but become implicit ways of being. The only course, I think, is for us to understand the embedded logic and the demimonde from which it came. And then to ask ourselves, is this what we wish to be? Laura Miller: We've taken a pretty wide detour from our initial topic. Is there something that really needs to be said about women and computers, something that doesn't apply equally to many men? Sadie Plant: Here are some points I'd really like to see raised: There's nothing peculiarly masculine about new technologies, which, if anything, offer a great deal to women and everyone for whom access to information and means of communication were severely restricted in the past. This is not only the case in terms of the immediate functions of computers, but also because of the extent to which, for example, new conceptions of the human and its place in the world have emerged amidst these technological changes. The traditionally masculine notions of man as the author, creator, originator of "his" machines are eroded by the emergence of machine intelligence; as is the old insistence on definite boundaries between different genres, disciplines, modes of expression and art forms. There has also been a crucial shift away from the old notion of large-scale, top-down, centralized organization to the molecular, the microscopic and other microprocesses, and small-scale, piecemeal engineering. This too coincides with and encourages the undermining of -- or at least unprecedented pressure on -- all notions of centralized authority and, with them, the old patriarchal cultural structures which once made women the "second sex." To confine discussions of women and technology to the obvious issues of who's making what and working where is to miss all this. It would also be good to reference the rich history of women's involvement in the emergence of the new technologies, not least because any women feeling they are coming to it late can see the extent to which they've always been involved. And also because it does any remaining boys who believe it's all in their hands good to know that a young woman (Ada Lovelace) was the first programmer. A COMPUTER IS NOT A METAPHOR DETAIL OF ILLUSTRATION BY BART NAGEL