The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [159]
Another reason why the future of a given technology is so hard to predict is that the disappearance of one set of intermediaries is often accompanied by the emergence of other intermediaries. As James Carey, a media scholar at Columbia University, observed, “as one set of borders, one set of social structures is taken down, another set of borders is erected. It is easier for us to see the borders going down.” We rarely notice the new ones being created. In 1914 Popular Mechanics thought that the age of governments was over, announcing that wireless telegraphy allowed “the private citizen to communicate across great distance without the aid of either the government or a corporation.” Only fifteen years later, however, a handful of corporations dominated the field of radio communication, even while the public still maintained some illusions that radio was a free and decentralized media. (The fact that radios were getting cheaper only contributed to those illusions.)
Similarly, just as today’s Internet gurus are trying to convince us that the age of “free” is upon us, it almost certainly is not. All those free videos of cats that receive millions of hits on YouTube are stored on powerful server centers that cost millions of dollars to run, usually in electricity bills alone. Those hidden costs will sooner or later produce environmental problems that will make us painfully aware of how expensive such technologies really are. Back in 1990, who could have foreseen that Greenpeace would one day be issuing a lengthy report about the environmental consequences of cloud computing, with some scientists conducting multiyear studies about the impact of email spam on climate change? The fact that we cannot yet calculate all the costs of a given technology—whether financial, moral, or environmental ones—does not mean that it comes free.
No Logic for Old Men
Another recurring feature of modern technology that has been overlooked by many of its boosters is that the emergence of new technologies, no matter how revolutionary their circuitry might be, does not automatically dissolve old practices and traditions. Back in the 1950s, anyone arguing that television would strengthen existing religious institutions was inviting ridicule. And yet, a few decades later, it was television that Pat Robertson and a horde of other televangelists had to thank for their powerful social platform. Who today would bet that the Internet will undermine organized religion?
In fact, as one can currently observe with the revival of nationalism and religion on the Web, new technologies often entrench old practices and make them more widespread. Claude Fischer, who studied how Americans adopted the telephone in the nineteenth century in his book America Calling, observes that it was primarily used to “widen and deepen ... existing social patterns rather than to alter them.” Instead of imagining the telephone as a tool that impelled people to embrace modernity, Fischer proposed that we think of it as “a tool modern people have used to various ends, including perhaps the maintenance, even enhancement, of past practices.” For the Internet to play a constructive role in ridding the world of prejudice and hatred, it needs to be accompanied by an extremely ambitious set of social and political reforms; in their absence, social ills may only get worse. In other words, whatever the internal logic of the technology at hand, it’s usually malleable by the logic of society at large. “While each communication technology does have its own individual properties, especially regarding which of the human senses it privileges and which ones it ignores,” writes Susan Douglas, a scholar of communications at the University of Michigan, “the economic and political system in which the device