Andrew,

You ask: “Have we changed the original question? Now it’s not whether we can save the Internet, but rather whether the Internet can save us.” Not me! You shifted the topic in this direction at the very beginning of our exchange when you wrote: “We are supposed to be discussing whether or not the Internet can be saved. But I’m not sure that this is a helpful way of thinking about the Internet. A better question is whether humankind can be saved.” Remember? As you say, the Internet is a mirror, but like all technology it is a magic mirror, a fun-house mirror. Instead of merely reflecting back our portrait 100-percent intact, it adds something novel to the image, so that we emerge altered. First we shape our technology, and then our technology shapes us. We are in this together. The technium is not an inert surface, but an active force in our lives. Our inner lives are shaped by our language and alphabet, by our tools of seeing, by our notions of law and justice—all of which we have invented; and, once invented, they push back against us. The Internet and other tools are saving us by allowing us to remake ourselves.

Into what? Great question! It’s the mega-question of the next several centuries. What are we? What can we be? What should we be? Every new technology we create, such as the web, forces another iteration of this refrain: Who then shall we be? To answer it we will dive deep into our natures, our traditions, and, most of all, into new technologies.

I don’t know who we are, or who we will be, but I am pretty sure the answer is not “professionals.” Professionals, as you argue in your book, are the chief solution to the messiness and corruption of values brought about by the untidy technologies of the web. In other words, the rest of us are the problem. In your last post you said (emphasis mine):

“Good digital citizens need to be nurtured by the state, by schoolteachers and university professors, by authoritative journalists, by parents, by peers, by fellow citizens, by both new and old media companies.”

Just to ensure that I’m not taking this sentence out of context, here is one from your book:

“Before the Web 2.0, our collective intellectual history has been one driven by the careful aggregation of truth—through professionally edited books and reference materials”

But now?

“Say good-bye to today’s experts and cultural gatekeepers—our reporters, news-anchors, editors, music companies, and Hollywood movie studios. In today’s cult of the amateur, the monkeys are running the show.”

“With the advent of the cult of the amateur, it has become increasingly difficult to determine the difference between readers and writer, between artist and spin doctor, between art and the product, between amateur and expert. The result? The decline of the quality and reliability of the information we receive, thereby distorting, if not outrightly corrupting, our national civic conversation.”

Wait, there’s more:

“Many unwise ideas—slavery, infanticide, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, Britney Spears—have been extremely popular with the crowd. This is why the arbiters of truth should be the experts—those who speak from a place of knowledge and authority.”

There are many problems with this old-fashioned idea that the “arbiters of truth should be the experts.” Just because it is an old idea, of course, doesn’t mean it is wrong. But it doesn’t address today’s big questions: Who is an expert? What makes a professional? And why should they be arbiters of truth? Is truth even something that can be arbitrated?

You single out the authoritative professional journalist as a key arbiter of truth and a necessary cultural gatekeeper protecting civilization from the barbarian hordes of monkey bloggers and intellectual vandals. So I wonder, Andrew, are you a professional or amateur? Are you one of our trusted arbiters of truth, having “years of formal training” in the field, a person with proper credentials, a person making his living in journalism and thereby qualified to arbitrate truth for the masses, or are you one of the monkeys, just another “dabbler” with a blog, a mere passionate amateur with something to say, like the rest of us?

In your book, there is no room for anything in between, so I’d really like to know, who am I speaking to right now? Professional guardian, or amateur troublemaker? If you are only an amateur, why should we listen to anything you say? If professional, then by whose authority? And if you are professional, aren’t you uneasy in declaring that the solution to our society’s problems is in letting you be the gatekeeper?

You don’t need to answer these questions, because I can illustrate the same point by directing them at myself. Am I professional or amateur? Well, I have earned a salary in journalism in years past, but I was working for a magazine that I helped to start, so I hired myself! I probably couldn’t have gotten a job elsewhere. I have no college degree in anything, no formal training, and I’ve never taken a journalism class in my life. I run a “monkey” blog and make more money from it than I do from books, so I’d be hard-pressed to say I am a professional. In the past years I’ve self-published most of my books (an indication of amateurism in your accounting), and yet in the media I'm billed as an expert, and I am listed in Who’s Who in America (credentials at last!).

I honestly have no idea if I am a professional or amateur, and frankly it doesn’t matter to me or, and more importantly, to anyone else. I know only this: I am not keeping the gate. Don’t follow me. Find your own path. Listen to me only as a fellow traveler. Believe what I say if it makes sense to you. That’s how the real world has always worked in any case, even in the days when “professional” was an honorific and a signal of status, like “Lord” or “Duke.” It is especially true now, when the rank of professional has been eroded by the ability of amateurs to master the most arcane field. In fact, in one of the few parts of your book where you report data, Andrew, you make this very important point:

“In January 2006, Edelman PR’s ‘Trust Barometer’ revealed a dramatic societal shift, in whom we trust, from traditional media, to trust in ourselves and our peers. In 2003, only 22 percent of American respondents reported trusting a ‘person like yourself or your peer.’ In January 2006, just three years into the Web 2.0 revolution, this had more than tripled to 68 percent.”

We’ve come to see that professionals are not the arbiters of truth. Even our own doctors (the apex of credential professional status) may not know as much about our own ailments as we acquire through our own research. Most working actors, photographers, and athletes are technically amateurs. Most inventors are amateurs. Amateurs have played and still play a key role in the natural sciences.

The mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson, who spent his whole life in academic institutions, and is a bona fide professional if there ever was one, writes:

“When we look at the wider society outside the domain of science, we see amateurs playing essential roles in almost every field of human activity. Amateur writers such as Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys do as much as the professionals Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky to plumb the heights and depths of human experience. In the most important of all human responsibilities, the raising of children and grandchildren, amateurs do the lion’s share of the work. In almost all the varied walks of life, amateurs have more freedom to experiment and innovate. The fraction of the population who are amateurs is a good measure of the freedom of a society.”

Amateurs have their faults. There is no better spokesperson for the ills of the amateur than you. I agree with you that amateurs on the web have brought us rumor, conspiracy, and narcissism run amok. Untrained enthusiasts are messy, imperfect, hard to control, unlikely to take the long view, and they gravitate to base instincts and appetites. The same faults plague democracy and free-market economies.

The argument against democracy is that if you let ignorant, untrained amateurs try to navigate the complex details of governance, you get dumb mob rule, the worst of crowd politics. That argument is accurate. You encounter similar problems when you run an economy by having ignorant amateur citizens decide prices, inventory, and future innovations. Letting amateurs run the media is equally messy. Amateurism is a terrible way to run these institutions—except in comparison to having them run by professionals!

As a father who is often uneasy with our ego-filling popular culture (we’ve never had broadcast or cable TV at our house; my kids have grown up without it), I sympathize with your long list of negatives. I don’t sympathize with your solutions about what to do about it (state intervention and more cultural gatekeepers) for two reasons. One, I find it very easy to turn off anything we object to. It’s not hard to unplug, stop driving, live simpler, go back to the land, get offline, or whatever. Two, I really do believe that most people are like me: a good person, eager to do good and help others if given a chance and the means to do so.

Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, says he built his empire on the belief in human benevolence, which many critics told him was utopian. He made his billions by building an auction system around the idea that total strangers could trust each other—including buying a car unseen—if you gave them the tools of trust and assumed the best at the start. You could fill a library with all the rotten scams that have been committed on eBay, but, in the end, there’s been more happy cases of trust between strangers than not. That’s why it’s still growing.

Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, who I don’t know much about, said a marvelously true thing: “There is more good than evil in the world—but not by much.” “Not much” is all we need. Only a few percent of the transactions on eBay are fraudulent, which means a much higher percent are benevolent. When we look around the web, we may find a lot of it objectionable. But more of it is wonderful. Even if 49 percent of everything made is horrible, that leaves 51 percent good. So long as we can create 1 percent more than we destroy each year, that 1 percent compounded over decades produces civilization.

So I am a 1 percent optimist. That differential is what moves us forward. Give me 1 percent more good than evil, and we can make progress, even if we sometimes have to look hard to find that one percent. I spend my days focused primarily on the 1 percent “not-much-better” because I think that is where we find God and holiness. I acknowledge the need to work on our weaknesses, which are often substantial (49 percent!). But for me, the Great Work being done by the web, and technology in general, lies in the holy 1 percent.

I appreciate your clarity in writing and your willingness to debate these ideas. Thanks for your gracious spirit, and thanks as well to our hosts at Jewcy.

—kk

The post The Mega-Question of the Coming Centuries appeared first on Jewcy.

From: Kevin Kelly To: Andrew Keen Subject: Out of Crap, Brilliance

Andrew,

Like you, I enjoy my self-image as a radical (though in my case it’s all talk). But the difference between our rhetoric—other than the opposing sides we represent—is that I have no animosity toward the other side. I love books, albums, magazines, movies, silver photographic prints, and all the rest of the analog world that I am supposedly trying to make disappear. And I do not “want to get rid of copies.”

As I write this I am surrounded by my two-story library of tens of thousands of books, albums, magazines, catalogs, and photographic slides, which I have spent my life enjoying and which I plan to keep enjoying into the future. I don’t need John Updike to remind me of the value and benefits of the old-fashioned paper book; I am in no hurry to see it go. But, more importantly, there’s really nothing I can do to prevent its slow replacement by digital and hybrid versions. In response to my “manifesto,” Updike issued a wonderfully lyrical call for book lovers to build a fortress to keep out the wave of digital change. It was beautifully written, sweet, nostalgic, and of course totally inept, because it is clear that a tiny fort of book lovers cannot stop the oceanic change swamping the analog world. And I am enthusiastic about digital technology simply because I believe that in the end writers, readers, and publishers will gain more from the change than they lose.

As new business models evolve, publishers/labels/studios will make more money—and more creative works—in this new regime than before. Everyone will benefit. Readers will have more choices in content. Authors/artists will have more opportunities to create than ever before. In 50 years people will marvel at all our hand-wringing and screams of bloody murder, because the creative outpouring that has just started online will produce a degree and volume of creative work that will dwarf the greatness of the last 50 years. Will there be crap? Of course there will be. Ninety percent of everything made is crap. And that is good. One of the reasons TV went stagnant while online bloomed is that there was not enough bad—I mean really bad—TV. Television and movies cost so much to make and distribute that the system could not generate really, really bad TV in the same way a web page, or even a book, can be really crap. Instead, the huge expense of producing TV and movies meant that the bad never had a chance. But neither did risky greatness, so all we got was mediocrity. We got middle-of-the-road TV, some shows better than others, but little of it either genius or total mind-numbing bad (and yes, I’ve seen daytime TV).

You don’t know crap until you’ve trolled the depths of the web and self-publishing. But now with the advent of YouTube, digital-video tools, and cheap DVD rentals and sales, really bad TV has been liberated! And in the midst of this morass of total crap comes the freedom and risk to make really great TV. I think it’s no coincidence that with the advent of the web, TV is now in its golden age. Shows like Lost, 24, The Sopranos, and The Wire will rank as this generation’s greatest cultural contributions. They will be taught in university courses in centuries to come.

The greatness of these long-form TV shows was unleashed by the digital technology that made re-watching important, time-shifting easy, audience infatuation contagious, and new complexity totally engaging. They are produced by professionals with big budgets, and more shows like them will continue to be made and watched by large audiences. But shorter, amateur-made films will also reach the heights of greatness, now that the tyranny of the mediocre has been broken by really easy-to-make crap. Two admissions: One, we don’t yet know how this bountiful new world will economically reward creators, and, two, the transition is likely to be ugly. The transition from the agricultural economy to the industrial was wracked with losses of livelihood, civil unrest, and bankruptcies, as well as fortunes and great uncertainty. Buggy whip–makers, who were real craftsmen, with real families, disappeared from the economy. Should we have stopped industrialization in order to save their jobs? Should we have stopped industrialization until we could explain to them how the new economy actually worked? I believe a better remedy would have been to accept their occupation’s demise and retrain them for
their future. We can each make our own list of the sins of industrialization, but by our very participation in this industrialized world, we acknowledge that the benefits of industrialization were worth the loss of the beauty of an agricultural economy. Unless you are living like the Amish (which you can choose to do), you’ve voted for the costly advantages of industrialization. We are making a similar vote today with computer bits. The web is all of 5,000 days old. It may take another few thousand days to figure out viable systems of law, business practices, and cultural norms that will reward audiences, creators, and the middle industries. Or it may take a generation. But that is still a relatively short time in the lifecycle of an economy. What’s the evidence that these new models will come? My expectations are largely the product of my own experience. While I am a published author, with commercial books still in print generating royalties, the majority of my income does not come from paper books. It comes from a plurality of sources: syndication rights, speaking fees, online advertising, direct digital sales, and associative marketing revenues on the web. Am I an exception? I don’t think so. The one thing I’ve learned is that whenever I think I am an exception, it turns out that I am only a little early and the rest of the world will soon be there to make it clear my ideas are not mine. My pattern will be ordinary. The principle that will ensure an income for the world’s artists and publishers, bands and labels, is that wherever attention flows, money will follow. If you are able to sustain the attention of an audience, and keep them interested over time, then money will flow to you. It will come both directly and indirectly (ads, sponsorship, middle folk), but it will come for two reasons. One, because we are bored and will pay for something that elevates us above life’s averageness, and, two, because we crave to connect with creators who elevate and equip us. We want to pay; just make paying easy, just, and beneficial. The funny thing about the supposed demise of high culture (authors and books, musicians and music, directors and films) supported by classic industrial economics is that we see the demise everywhere except in the statistics. There are more books, songs, films, etc., being made every year, and more artists, authors, and musicians working than ever before. Every bit of data I have been able to find points to yet more artists and more art in the coming years. It could be that this outpouring is a heroic last gasp before culture’s ultimate disappearance by digital technology, but I doubt it. Far more likely is that this outpouring is due to the peculiar and nearly metaphysical properties of digital technology, which has turned many millions of consumers into prosumers. You can call them amateurs, but I call them a miracle. During the 1980s and even into the early ’90s, I struggled to convince the heads of media companies that the participatory nature of the Internet was real. They were convinced that online enthusiasts like myself were exceptions. The Internet was a young male domain, they insisted, that would not appeal to females, anyone older than 19, or those living in the heartland. They were even more adamant t
hat “no one would ever get up from the couch to make their own videos,” let alone write text. The idea of millions of videos being made by the audience was absolutely unthinkable. It was impossible. My own experiences living online, prosuming media with many others, were declared an aberrant exception. My vision of a billion people owning computers, actively creating text, videos, and music in some kind of online network was dismissed as raving utopianism. Who can argue against the goodness of having a billion people get off the couches and start making stuff, even if 90 percent is crap? That means 10 percent is great. And not only is that 10 percent more than we had before, I will argue that eventually some of that 10 percent will be superior to the best we get from the established media industry. And even if the greatest is never made by prosumers, it is still wonderful they are off their butts and using the talents that God gave them.

—kk

NEXT: Not Everyone Can Be Kevin Kelly

The post The Internet is 90% Amateur Crap appeared first on Jewcy.

Andrew,

I’d hate this discussion to get bogged down in the gritty particulars of music copyright. It’s a very well-worn topic, and, like the abortion debate, there seems to be no middle ground.

A few years ago, before I wrote the infamous “Scan This Book” piece about copyright and books, I published another similar piece for the New York Times Magazine on the future of the music business. In it I outlined how technology has changed the business and the nature of music for the past hundred years, why it will continue to do so, and how people will continue to make music no matter what the business does. I suggested that the attraction of digital music was not just its supposed free-ness but also its liquidity—the ability to mess with, mash up, and manage the music.

Not much has changed since I wrote that article, except that some musicians have adopted my ideas on how they might make their living in the new copy-full world. The funny thing about all the dire predictions about the end of music is that there are more songs released and more musicians playing than ever before. Music is not dying, although the old business practices around it are. In other words, the establishment is changing. And change can hurt.

However, because this is a no-middle debate, I doubt you will be swayed by my arguments on how technology is forever changing the music business (emphasis on business). It is clear that this economic shift is very important to you; indeed, in your book, you attribute your epiphany (that amateurs are at the root of all Internet evil) to the demise and bankruptcy of the Tower Records chain store. When this corporate superstore fell, it felt like music fell, because Tower was the GM of indie music. It kept many small labels going. And if music-as-we-know-it shifts, our sense of self shifts with it. I understand that feeling of loss.

What I don’t understand is this remarkable statement of yours: “I don’t see anything gray about this…It’s people stealing music and movies from their rightful property owners.” According to your logic, the culprits undermining the goodness of the music-business-as-we-knew-it must be the “amateurs” unleashed by new technology. Because when people lose their jobs, who better to blame than people with no jobs? Setting aside that sloppy logic, I’m still baffled by your insistence on seeing black and white where gray reigns. If there were no uncertainty about the old business model, it would not be meeting a steady rising tide of widespread resistance.

Despite the misguided laws, draconian enforcement schemes, and high-priced lobbying financed by the status quo music, publishing, and broadcast industries, there is now more music (and text and movies) being shared than ever, as you admit. Indeed, many musicians (in contrast to music business owners) now also clamor for regime change in the music biz. I don’t believe your ignorance nor your absolutism are so great that you don’t see the inherent ambiguity in digital copyright. I believe that you see the gray, but find it more useful to ignore it and engage in polemic. And I think your absolutism is wrong. We can see the uncertainty in this realm by asking some simple questions:

· If I sing “Happy Birthday” in a restaurant at my kid’s party, am I stealing music?

· If I copy a song—from a CD I have purchased—onto my iPod, am I stealing music?

· If I download a song—found on a CD I have purchased—from a file-sharing network to put on my iPod, am I stealing music?

· If I copy a song—that I have purchased online—to a CD, am I stealing music?

· If I quote three bars of someone else’s song in my song, am I stealing music? Two bars? One bar? One note?

· If I quote three phrases from someone else’s book in my book, am I stealing words?

· If I read a book at a library instead of purchasing it, am I stealing the book?

· If I listen to music at the library instead of purchasing it, am I stealing music?

· If I listen to music—copied from a purchased CD and mounted on the server at work—instead of purchasing it myself, am I stealing music?

· If I listen to music—copied from a purchased CD and mounted on a file-sharing network—instead of purchasing it myself, am I stealing music?

You don’t even need to answer these questions. My point is made simply by the fact that when I show these questions to lawyers, musicians, business people, fans, amateurs, and pros, I get very different answers. There is no clarity. In the last hundred years the mass—the physical weight—of exported economic goods has dropped in proportion to their economic value. We make more desirable and useful things with less material. As goods have dematerialized, they have become more valuable. However, it is not the loss of mass per se that makes them valuable; it is the acquisition of intelligence, design, interaction, and ideas. We are embedding our creations with a bit of ourselves: some of our mind, some of the intangible spirit that makes us alive. So now, rather than having an economy governed by the movement and cost of matter, we have an economy that is increasingly governed by the movement and cost of ideas. But there’s a big problem with an economy of ideas. An economy requires a system-wide rule of law that will reward both innovation and the commons. Over many centuries we evolved a very good set of laws to govern property rights. We can all agree that the U.S. struck the right balance in the trade-off between protecting inventors, artists, and entrepreneurs for their risks in creation, while feeding their creations back to the commons as fast as possible for the benefit of society. That worked great for an economy run on matter—an economy in which it was very clear who owned what.
Ownership of ideas and digital copies is almost an oxymoron. As Thomas Jefferson himself noted, ideas are problematic because I can give you my idea and yet I still have it. Often my idea increases in value the more people share it. Who owns the idea in your head if I gain value from it? Can you return an idea? Even more complicated is the fact that any idea is valueless by itself; it only has value as part of a web of other ideas, which others may claim as theirs. Remove those supporting ideas and the new idea is empty.

We also admit that many ideas are unowned, or unownable. As we use high technology to generate and discover new ideas (combinatorial sweeps, etc.), it is becoming harder to distinguish between obvious and non-obvious ideas, between concepts and information that can be claimed by us, and concepts and information that have always been out there in the commons. Digital creations share some of these almost metaphysical qualities. They spin off copies all the time in the course of their creation, distribution, storage, transmission, and consumption. These copies have nothing to do with property.

In fact, the more one delves into the nature of property—how does one own a gene, say?—the more uncertain the fundamental notion of ownership becomes. Can one own a note of music, a particular sound? Can you own someone else’s rendition of your song? What does it mean to own it if everyone in the world is singing it in their heads? Do you own all of a song, or just parts of it? If you use computer software to create the music do the “owners” of the software own part of it? These are unanswerable in the generic, and, in many cases, unanswerable in the specific.

Anyone holding a gadget can see how it is transmitting not just electrons but also ambiguity. The paradoxes of information (what is information anyway?) buckle under the old rules, and everyone can smell this. The natural rules of ideas are not clear and evident.

Yet you cast it as an unambiguous black-and-white conflict, the good guys and the bad guys, angels on one side and the devil on the other. “When I look at today’s Internet, I see the eruption of rampant intellectual property theft, extreme pornography, sexual promiscuity, plagiarism, gambling, contempt for order, intellectual inanity, crime, a culture of anonymity, hatred toward authority, incessant spam, and a trash heap of user-generated content.” My goodness, what fundamentalism!

The problem with this good/evil absolutism is that it belittles the truly evil things we ought to be righteous about. Let’s start with unjustified war, ethnocide, and infanticide, as examples.

The second problem with this absolutist view is that it hurts your own agenda. I sympathize with some of your concerns, particularly with respect to “fragmenting the self into a series of invented beings.” Many people, myself included, would agree with you that our identities are turning into “a hall of mirrors.” It is becoming harder and harder to answer the once-obvious questions—what does it mean to be a male or female, an American, or even a human? But when you suggest that the students copying music online are “thieves” or “digital narcissists,” this is small-minded trash talk. Where does this impulse to degrade come from? When you suggest that the Internet has brought us a world of sin—that millions of ordinary people around the world who are pouring their time, energy, and creativity into building it (the fastest, largest human construction ever)—have really just sold their souls to the devil, almost no one believes you. Five minutes with any student who’s been blatantly downloading music will tell you that they are not cagey pickpockets but aliens in a strange land; not pirates, but lost pioneers; not devilish, but generous; and very aware of the karmic debt they intend to repay. And they will.

So when we can’t believe you on that trumped-up charge, it’s hard to take you seriously on the rest.

—kk

Next: The Cult of the Audience

The post Analog Fundamentalism, Digital Ambiguity appeared first on Jewcy.

Let’s begin where we agree.

You say: “We must resist the siren song of anonymity—perhaps the greatest of all digital curses.” I agree. I summarized my argument against anonymity when I answered the question, “What’s Your Dangerous Idea?”:

Anonymity is like a rare earth metal. These elements are a necessary ingredient in keeping a cell alive, but the amount needed is a mere hard-to-measure trace. In larger doses, however, these heavy metals are some of the most toxic substances known to a life. They kill. Anonymity is the same. As a trace element in vanishingly small doses, it’s good for the system by enabling the occasional whistleblower, or persecuted fringe. But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system…Like all toxins, anonymity should be keep as close to zero as possible.

You and I disagree on what to do about this toxin. Your solution to most of the corruptions online is very direct, very simple, and very clear: “We need laws, a series of social contracts, to constructively regulate our behavior on the Internet…. I’m not suggesting the imposition of draconian Internet laws. But I think we need some laws and certainly more aggressive social policing to control our worst impulses.”

Spam is a cancer caused primarily by anonymity. (In fact most of the failings you rail against in your book are rooted in anonymity rather than amateurs. It should be properly called “The Cult of Anonymity.”) If the senders of spam could be outed, they’d soon disappear. In my early frustration with spam I often thought we could eradicate it by outlawing anonymous mail. But I’ve hung around hackers long enough to know they would quickly hack a way around the law (impersonating and hijacking legit sources, say). I’ve come around instead to rely on technological means (spam filters, etc.), which have essentially removed spam as an issue for me.

Laws tend to try to remedy a problem by a global top-down solution. Technological solutions, on the other hand, tend to work more locally, more adaptively, and for that reason I believe they are more likely to create the change we wish.

Even a “social contract” is more top-down than may be useful these days. What form would it take? Peer pressure? Education in schools? Op-ed page editorials? I can’t imagine any of these being very effective in “curing” anonymity. But there is one very effective tool in diminishing anonymity: code. The folks who create online social systems and marketplaces can regulate the degree of anonymity by coding it in or not. Through technological means, we can tweak how much anonymity we have.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, has said that he regretted allowing anonymous book reviews, but it was too late to outlaw them when he realized the harm they could cause. So Amazon implemented a “true names” function, wherein reviewers willing to reveal their true names and be accountable for what they said would have more standing, a higher reputation and weight than a hit-and-run anonymous review. Those arenas where anonymity is kept microscopic by design of the system are the zones where civility reigns.

There is an immense difference between trying to regulate people’s moral behavior indirectly by design and code versus directly by law, and it’s the key difference between reformers and engineers. I suspect you are a reformer and I am an engineer.

Let’s take another corruption that upsets you: digital piracy. As you say, “I am in favor of laws that unambiguously punish digital piracy.” That word unambiguously is very telling, because if there is anything clear about copyright laws in this new Internet world, it is that not very much is clear and unambiguous. There are a lot of laws already on the books about copyright, but those laws have not stopped file-sharing, mashups, or even commercial counterfeiting.

Every survey of these behaviors show them steadily increasing. Some of these uses are blatantly illegal, but many are not blatant, stuck in a gray zone, awaiting clarifications of the law. For those who believe that they are on the wrong side of the law, there is a frustration at their ubiquity, and the primeval impulse is to want even more laws. Laws on top of laws—unambiguous laws. But there cannot (yet) be unambiguous laws because we haven’t yet as a society sorted the nature of property in this new realm. If the many laws existing have not stemmed the tide, more laws will not either. All that these unenforceable laws do is weaken respect for the law, which in the end is a far greater corruption.

The solution for the ambiguity of ownership in an idea economy will come as we develop further tools for
regulating people’s behavior, such as digital rights management technology, new instruments of property protection (between patents and copyrights), new methods of adjudicating priority, and new emerging societal norms for fair use. Only then can the law cement—codify—what technology and society allow.

Regulating morality by law has been a disaster everywhere it has been tried in the modern world. I have lived in some of those places, particularly Iran. Here the law unambiguously punished the sins you rail against: “pornography, illegal gambling, hubris, sexual promiscuity, contempt for meritocratic hierarchy, shameless narcissism, and political, sexual, and racial hatred.” And here is what I know happens when regimes like Iran try to regulate morality:

1) It is not very effective in the short term.

2) It is not sustainable in the long term.

3) The costs of laws, even when effective, are not tallied. That is, the psychological costs of regulating sins is very heavy. Ask any fundamentalist kid.

Like many places where morality is regulated by law, Iran is not a place conducive to innovation and change. And it is not just Islamic sharia. We see the same results in places where Hindus, Jains, Jews, and Christians try to make their usually well-intentioned preferences universal by mandating them with laws.

In short, legislating morality and civic virtue doesn’t work. And it particularly doesn’t work if your neighbors (next door, next city, next country) have a different regime. And it especially doesn’t work if there is not universal agreement on what the sins are, which is where we are right now.

Good character? Virtuous lives? Civic discourse? Public humility? I am all for them.

By regulation and social strong-arming? No way.

I am no anarchist. I think we need “some laws” as you put it. My problem with national laws for fixing Internet problems, at least in America in 2007, is that this is a very slow, overly broad hammer for problems that can be addressed faster and more effectively by rewriting, reinventing, and re-imagining the technological matrix that holds them. I think the laws that regulate our moral compass should be as few, concise, and minimal as possible. Like the Ten Commandments.

In the end I agree with you that to “save” the Internet we need to save ourselves. But I don’t believe we can save people by regulating them to salvation.

—kk

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