Date: Wed, 03 Aug 1994 14:28:08 -0800
From: nicka@mccmedia.com (Nick Arnett)
Subject: File 2--The Internet and the Anti-net

                       THE INTERNET AND THE ANTI-NET

                 Two public internetworks are better than one

                                BY NICK ARNETT



   Networking policy debates tend to paint a future monolithic
   internetwork that will follow consistent policies despite a number of
   independent operators. Although that's how the interstate highway and
   telephone systems -- favorite metaphors for network futurists --
   operate, historical comparisons suggest that it is probably not what
   the future holds. Two distinct, interconnected publicly accessible
   digital internetworks are likely to emerge, which is surely better
   than just one.

   One of the future internetworks will grow out of today's Internet,
   whose roots are in the technology and scientific/academic communities,
   funded by government, institutions and increasingly, corporate and
   individual users. Although the Internet will support commercial
   services, they rarely will depend on advertising. The other great
   internetwork will grow out of the technology and mass communications
   industries, especially cable and broadcast industries. The "Anti-net"
   will rely on advertising revenue to recoup the cost of the
   infrastructure necessary to create cheap, high-speed bandwidth. (I
   call this second network the Anti-net not to be a demagogue but to
   make a historical allusion, explained shortly.) All three communities
   -- technology, science and academia, and mass media -- will
   participate in many joint projects. The most successful new ventures
   often will arise from three-way collaborations; skills of each are
   essential to create and deliver network-based information products and
   services.

   The Internet community reacts with profound anger and resentment at
   Anti-net behavior on the Internet -- in net-speak, "spamming"
   advertising messages into hundreds of discussions. The outrage is
   based in part on the idealistic traditions of academic and scientific
   freedom of thought and debate, but there's more behind it. Anger and
   resentment fueled by the world's love-hate relationship with the mass
   media, particularly television, surface in many other contexts. Nearly
   everyone in the modern world and large segments of the third world
   watches television; nearly all think broadcast television is stupid,
   offering a homogenized, sensationalized point of view that serves
   advertising interests above all others. In competition with
   television's hypnotic powers, or perhaps simply due to the high cost
   of distribution, other mass media have followed suit.

   Idealistic defenders of the Internet's purity believe they are waging
   a humanitarian or even a holy war that pits a democracy of ideas
   against the mass media's empty promises and indulgences. Television
   and its kin offer the false idols and communities of soaps, sitcoms
   and sports. The mass media tantalize with suggestions of healing,
   wealth, popularity and advertising's other blessings and temptations.
   Internet idealists even question the U.S. administration's unclear
   proposal of an "information superhighway," suspecting that the masses
   will be taxed only to further expand the Anti-net's stranglehold on
   information.

   The same kind of stage was set 500 years ago. The convergence of
   inexpensive printing and inexpensive paper began to loosen the Roman
   Catholic church's centuries-old stranglehold on cultural information.
   The church's rise to power centuries earlier had followed the arrival
   of the Dark Ages, caused in Marshall McLuhan's analysis by the loss of
   papyrus supplies. The church quickly became the best customer of many
   of the early printer-publishers, but not to disseminate information,
   only to make money. The earliest dated publication of Johann Gutenberg
   himself was a "papal indulgence" to raise money for the church's
   defense against the Turk invasions. Indulgences were papers sold to
   the common folk to pay for the Pope's remission of their sins, a sort
   of insurance against the wrath of God. Indulgences had been sold by
   the church since the 11th century, but shortly after the arrival of
   printing, the pope expanded the market considerably by extending
   indulgences to include souls in purgatory. Indulgence revenue was
   shared with government officials, becoming almost a form of state and
   holy taxation. The money financed the church's holy wars, as well as
   church officials' luxurious lifestyles.

   Jumping on the new technology for corrupt purposes, the church had
   sown the seeds of its own undoing. The church had the same sort of
   love-hate relationship with common people and government that the mass
   media have today. The spark for the 15th-century "flame war," in
   net-speak, was a monk, Martin Luther. Outraged by the depth of the
   church's corruption, Luther wrote a series of short theses in 1517,
   questioning indulgences, papal infallibility, Latin-only Bibles and
   services, and other authoritarian, self-serving church practices.
   Although Luther had previously written similar theses, something
   different happened to the 95 that he nailed to the church door in
   Wittenburg. Printers -- the "hackers" of their day, poking about the
   geographic network of church doors and libraries -- found Luther's
   theses.

   As an academic, Luther enjoyed a certain amount of freedom to raise
   potentially heretical arguments against church practice. Nailing his
   theses to the Wittenburg door was a standard way to distribute
   information to his academic community for discussion, much like
   putting a research paper on an Internet server today. In Luther's
   time, intellectual property laws hadn't even been contemplated, so his
   papers were fair game for publication (as today's Internet postings
   often seem to be, to the dismay of many). Luther's ideas quickly
   became the talk of Europe. Heresy sells, especially when the
   questioned authority is corrupt. But the speed of printing technology
   caught many by surprise. Even Luther, defending himself before the
   pope, was at a loss to explain how so many had been influenced so
   fast.

   Luther's initial goal was to reform the church. But his ideas were
   rejected and he was excommunicated by his order, the pope and the
   emperor, convincing Luther that the Antichrist was in charge in Rome.
   Abandoning attempts at reform, but accepting Biblical prophecy, Luther
   resisted the utopian goal of removing the Antichrist from the papacy.
   Instead, as a pacifist, he focused on teaching and preaching his views
   of true Christianity. Luther believed that he could make the world a
   better place by countering the angst and insecurity caused by the
   Antichrist, not that he could save it by his own powers.

   Luther's philosophy would serve the Internet's utopians well,
   especially those who believe that the Internet's economy of ideas
   untainted by advertising must "win" over the mass media's Anti-net
   ideas. The Internet's incredibly low cost of distribution almost
   assures that it will remain free of advertising-based commerce.
   Nonetheless, if lobbying by network idealists succeeds in derailing or
   co-opting efforts to build an advertising-based internetwork, then
   surely commercial interests will conspire with government officials to
   destroy or perhaps worse, to take over the Internet by political and
   economic means. Historians, instead of comparing the Internet to the
   U.S. Interstate highway system's success, may compare it with the
   near-destruction of the nation's railroad and trolley infrastructure
   by corrupt businesses with interests in automobiles and trucking.

   The printing press and cheap paper did not lead to widespread literacy
   in Europe; that event awaited the wealth created by the Industrial
   Revolution and the need for educated factory workers. Printing
   technology's immediate and profound effect was the destruction of the
   self-serving, homogenized point of view of a single institution.
   Although today's mass media don't claim divine inspiration, they are
   no less homogenized and at least as self-serving. The people drown in
   information overload, but one point of view is barely discernable from
   another, ironically encouraging polarization of issues.

   Richard Butler, Australia's ambassador to the United Nations, draws
   the most disturbing analogy of all. Butler, a leader in disarmament,
   compares the church's actions to the nuclear weapons industry's
   unwillingness to come under public scrutiny. Like the church and its
   Bible, physicists argued that their subject was too difficult for lay
   people. Medieval popes sold salvation; physicists sold destruction.
   Neither was questioned until information began to move more freely.
   The political power of nuclear weapons has begun to fall in part due
   to the role of the Internet and fax communications in the dissolution
   of the Soviet Union.

   The truly influential and successful early publishers, such as Aldus
   Manutius, were merchant technologists who formed collaborations with
   the scientific/academic community and even the church, especially
   those who dissented against Rome. Out of business needs for economies
   of scale, they brought together people with diverse points of view and
   created books that appealed to diverse communities. The Renaissance
   was propelled in part by books that allowed geniuses such as
   Copernicus to easily compare and contrast the many points of view of
   his predecessors, reaching world-changing conclusions.

   Today we are at a turning point. We are leaving behind a world
   dominated by easy, audiovisual, sensational, advertising-based media,
   beginning a future in which the mass media's power will be diluted by
   the low cost of distribution of many other points of view. Using the
   Internet is still something like trying to learn from the
   pre-Gutenberg libraries, in which manuscripts were chained to tables
   and there were no standards for organization and structure. But like
   the mendicant scholars of those days, today's "mendicant sysops,"
   especially on the Internet, are doing much of the work of organization
   in exchange for free access to information.

   Today, the great opportunity is not to make copies of theses on the
   digital church doors. It is to build electronic magazines, newspapers,
   books, newsletters, libraries and other collections that organize and
   package the writings, photos, videos, sounds and other multimedia
   information from diverse points of view on the networks. The Internet,
   with one foot in technology and the other in science and academia,
   needs only a bit of help from the mass media in order to show the
   Anti-net how it's done.


     _________________________________________________________________

   Nick Arnett [nicka@mccmedia.com] is president of Multimedia Computing
   Corporation, a strategic consulting and publishing company
   established in 1988.

   Comments about this article e-mailed to [antinet@mccmedia.com] will
   be linked to a copy of this essay on Multimedia Computing Corp.'s
   World-Wide Web server: <URL:http://asearch.mccmedia.com/>

   Recommended reading: "The printing press as an agent of change:
   Communications and cultural transformation in early-modern Europe,"
   Vols. I and II. Elizabeth Eisenstein. Cambridge University Press,
   1979.

   Copyright (c) 1994, Multimedia Computing Corp., Campbell, Calif.,
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