Last week, he had an interesting and lengthy discussion about my contention that the network-neutral Internet as the actual contemporary progressive movement. See The Medium Is The Movement, Yes, the Medium Is the Movement, How Liberals Rule the Web and Putting Our Cognitive Surplus To Use for the four pervious articles in this discussion. In the comments to one of the articles, Glenn Smith made a valuable caveat (emphasis mine):
We shouldn’t make the mistake of investing new media with a teleological purpose. We still don’t know how mass produced books have altered the brain, though we know they ended the Medieval Church’s restrictions on Bible reading. We know history, but we know no ends.
This is a good point, since technology itself should be understood as value-neutral, and only the means to which technological advancement are utilized have cultural value. Even the Internet could be used in any number of ways, not all of which are progressive. For example, control over the Internet could be placed almost entirely in the hands of a few extant institutions with great power, such as the military, the government or large corporations. If that were the case, then the technology would serve the ends of those institutions, rather than take on a more progressive function.
This is why I think it is important to emphasize that the Internet, in and of itself, is not the progressive movement, but rather that only the current incarnation of the Internet–that is, a network neutral Internet–can be understood as the progressive movement. This is because it is only a network-neutral Internet that vastly reduces the cost of information, pluralizes the public sphere, and greatly expands the number of cultural producers. Those aspects of the current incarnation of the Internet are indeed progressive, but they are not inherent to the Internet itself. The Internet does not naturally decrease the cost of information for the public at large and allow the number of cultural producers to expand by several orders of magnitude. Rather, it only accomplishes those ends because powerful, extant institutions are not granted privileged space to control the Internet. In other words, we are operating in a value-positive Internet, and using that type of Internet to achieve progressive ends.
I have long argued that conservatism, as an ideology, stands for little else except the defense of powerful, privileged, status quo institutions. Within that framework, by destabilizing the long-term viability of privileged institutions of cultural production, the network-neutral Internet is inherently progressive. However, that is not a case of applying a teleological purpose to a new technology, because the net neutrality is a value-laden alteration of Internet technology. By not privileging any given network on the Internet, the new media has a built-in democratic component.
I should also note that equating the progressive movement with the cultural and informational democratizing effects of the network neutral Internet does not prevent the emergence of other progressive movements either now or in the near future. For example, the radical localism proposed in Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy would have a similar impact on our daily, individual relationship with cultural, economic, and governmental institutions. However, at this point, by far the most development and pronounced progressive movement is indeed the network neutral Internet. Other possibilities are out there, but for now this is where the progressive movement is headed. |
