An Excursion on Internet Freedom

Oops! I thought a request for a 2000 character response wanted a 2000 word essay on Internet Freedom. It happens. More reading for you!

This morning, I saw a call for participation for an upcoming conference on Internet Freedom.  The call requested a description of my current or previous relevant efforts.  It put a 2000 word maximum on the answer.  That struck me as an excellent way to receive only serious applications with enough information to enable reasonable screening and selection.  I sat to begin work.  As I hit my 2000-word limit, I glanced back at the call for participation.  Turns out, it was a 2000-character limit.

That left me with both an unusable essay and an unfinished task.  Fortunately for you lucky people, I decided to post my essay here.  Still doesn’t solve my second problem, but at least I can knock the number down from two to one.

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I have been working, researching, and writing about life during the transition from late industrial age to early information age for over twenty-five years.  Four of my six general-audience books, several of my articles in scholarly publications, and many of my published columns have addressed aspects of this transition.  The current challenges surrounding “counter-misinformation” and censorship are manifestations of a common and predictable phenomenon.

I first laid out the underlying pattern in Digital Phoenix (MIT Press, 2005—though I wrote most of it in 2001).  That book used four front-page stories then considered distinct (Dotcom bubble, Microsoft trial, rise of Open Source, Napster wars) to highlight the interplay among new technologies, the businesses that deploy them, the laws governing those businesses, and the policy debates reforming those laws.

Drawing upon the experience of the music industry—the first old-world industry stunned to find that digitization had swallowed it whole—I showed that every industry to face that challenge would follow a similar path:

• New technologies would enable many new entrants to destabilize powerful incumbents and the expectations driving their oligopolistic control;

• Incumbents would fight back using all tools at their disposal, emphasizing their superior access to and command of lobbying and legal procedure;

• Governments would favor the predictable, controllable incumbents and work to restore their ex ante expectations, rights, and power;

• Technological innovation favoring openness would be driven underground, deprived of resources, and defamed, while technological innovation preserving the government/oligopoly partnership would expand.

I highlighted the importance of understanding this pattern to those of us interested in preserving freedom and innovation.  I deemed it entirely predictable that an initial exuberant round of “democratization” of production or distribution would lead to a backlash, strengthen the alliance of incumbent oligopolists and big government, and ultimately entrench a regime more oppressive than the one that preceded it. 

Central to that prediction was the observation that the mechanisms protecting incumbents—in all industries—included a combination of technological barriers and legal/regulatory constraints.  As the technological barriers weakened, the legal constraints would have to grow ever stronger to compensate for that weakness. 

That need for strengthened laws, in turn, would compel a propaganda campaign capable of changing public opinion.  Before regulators, legislators, or even courts could act successfully, a sizable swathe of the public had to be convinced that the newly freed industry posed a threat that only a restored oligopoly could address.  Once again, the music industry provided a clear example: In the late 1990s, when Napster first launched, perhaps 10% of the public thought that it was “wrong” to download music from a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) site without payment.  Within a decade, music industry advocates and government officials had inverted that ethical consideration.  (Note that the ethics of P2P downloads is distinct from considerations concerning the security of files downloaded from unknown sources).

At the time, I noted that the music industry is small and (much as people may love its products) relatively unimportant.  My call for action involved understanding the pattern well enough to arrest it and fight it effectively as the transition to information age subsumed industries of far greater importance, like agriculture, education, medicine, and media.

Needless to say, few heeded the warning or took the advice.  Perhaps worse, in an era that this pattern of liberalization, backlash, consolidation, and control has come to dominate, few appreciate the underlying structure.  That’s true even among those who see the consolidation and control phases unfolding in the industries or sectors they hold most dear.  The Liber-Net home page, for example, notes that: “In a strange twist, many of those who defended our digital rights now lead this new authoritarianism.”  Though the observation is indisputable, the characterization is flawed.  Their fall from grace is not a “strange twist,” but rather entirely predictable. 

Most people, including most technologists, most activists, most bureaucrats, and most corporate executives, are driven by self-interest rather than ideology.  When defense of digital (or other) rights bolster their professional standing, prestige, power, or bottom lines, they will be among the greatest defenders liberty has known; when enabling authoritarianism serves those interests most effectively, they will lead the charge ushering us into an authoritarian era.  They will, of course, tout whichever side they currently occupy as critical to serving the common good.  They will demonstrate even greater pride in touting their own worthiness—of the riches and power they’ve accumulated—for their consistent commitment to that common good.

The hardly-subtle observation that the best way to understand why a critical institution appears to have gone awry is to study the internal incentives driving those who work inside the institution forms the central theme of The New Civil War (RealClear Publishing, 2021—though drawing upon notes I’d been compiling since the early 1990s).  In that book, I took the position that the primary source of corruption in higher education is the incentive system generating venerated notions like peer approval and faculty governance—rather than the ideological politicization of selected disciplines and bureaucracies.  In fact, I showed how that politicization is a predictable and inevitable consequence of the underlying incentive structure—while drawing the primary examples from my own experience as an academic AI researcher from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s.

Taken together, these two themes highlight an approach that I consider critical if we are to preserve our freedom for the information age.  We must distil the patterns of conflict inherent in innovation-driven transitions, understand the incentives facing the various players, and realign incentive structures to favor freedom rather consolidation and control.

Perhaps ironically, the early thinker who best understood this phenomenon was Karl Marx—in the portions of the Communist Manifesto that Joseph Schumpeter credited as having inspired his own theory of creative destruction.  Marx noted that to survive, the bourgeoisie (i.e., capitalists) must constantly destroy and recreate the modes of production.  Marx also noted that though those already in possession of ample capital assets (i.e., incumbents) always oppose the destructive phase, they are uniquely positioned to dominate the recreation phase. 

Clayton Christensen put a late twentieth century twist on this observation when he identified the “innovator’s dilemma.”  Incumbent opposition to the destructive phase necessarily creates an opening for innovators viewing an industry or process from a fundamentally new perspective to set off on a trajectory that eventually overtakes (and thus destroys) the incumbent.  For Christensen’s innovators to prevail, however, they must forge alliances with well endowed capitalists—their investors, such as those in the VC or IB worlds.  Otherwise, they eventually follow the pattern long common in the consumer goods, consumables, and food spaces: Innovators compete to see whose product will succeed in a new niche market.  When one finally peeks above the crowd, an incumbent portfolio company (e.g., Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Colgate Palmolive, Heinz, LVMH) acquires it and absorbs it into one empire or another.

All of which is to say that there’s nothing new under the sun.  What we are currently experiencing in the “information provider” spaces of media, education, and propaganda is a predictable part of the same pattern that has befallen countless other industries—as the music industry exhibited so beautifully a quarter-century ago.  On-line bulletin boards, blogging, social media, and plummeting costs for the production and distribution of “content” destabilized these staid, comfortable, unexciting industries.  That destabilization had real costs—including the reduction in quality investigative reporting—but also produced many benefits, primarily in the “democratization” of the information space. 

Democracy, in turn, implies its own costs and benefits.  A democratic information space brings forth many fascinating opinions, uplifting messages, hidden truths, and synergistic communities that had long been cloaked in obscurity.  It also, however, empowers charlatans, hatemongers, and baldfaced liars.  It is thus fairly easy for those seeking to turn public opinion—and public ethical considerations—against the democratizing forces.  All that’s required is an amplification of the costs and a downplaying of the benefits.  The public will then clamor—quite predictably—for restored control.  To whom will they turn?  The incumbents, whose names they have long trusted, and who once established reputations as bold, democratizing, innovators.

I contend that it is impossible to overcome this pattern effectively without first identifying it and broadcasting it to the public.  People need to understand both that they are being manipulated and how they are being manipulated.  At the same time, long-term success is possible only if the incentives of those most committed to the fight are altered.

Along those lines, I was among the first to identify the ways that CDA 230 had corrupted the incentives internal to our public information space.  Stated simply, CDA 230 obviated a critical choice.  In the past, people providing an information space had to determine whether they were operating on the bulletin board/kiosk model or the newspaper model.  Under the former, the forum was open to all.  Anyone with any message could post.  On occasion, someone would come by to prune and clean the space.  Under the latter, clear editorial decision-making oversaw all material made public.  Because these models were so distinct, different legal regimes rose to govern liability for public-facing content. 

Early Internet properties began to blur longstanding distinctions.  CDA 230, written with an eye towards the technological and legal challenges of the mid-1990s, announced that Internet providers could exercise the tight content controls long associated with newspapers while still holding themselves out and functioning as bulletin boards.  Two decades later, advances in both technology and ideology showed just how deadly that combination could become: Oligopolists offering the few genuinely popular bulletin boards became local monopolists determining the “suitability” of individual public messages.  As in all such cases, government bureaucrats and oligopolists found agreement on ways to enhance the power of big government and big corporations at the expense of the general public.  Then, given that the industry over which they had agreed to share control involved the provision of public information, they used their own tools to convince the public that their actions served the public good.

Over the years, I have also studied and written about various other aspects of the challenges we are now facing during our collapse into an authoritarian information age.  Back in the 1990s, for example, I noted the aptness of the “global village” moniker, particularly as applied to the often-conflated issues of privacy and anonymity.  I noted how in global culture—the way that most people lived for thousands of years—privacy was scarce.  Everyone knew everyone else’s business, and anyone found to be harboring secrets was immediately distrusted and shunned.  New arrivals could be held at arms length for decades (or generations) before achieving trustworthy status. Only outlaws enjoyed any semblance of anonymity; localized trust was necessary for basic societal functioning. 

The historically recent emergence of enormous industrial age cities changed that calculus.  (Other than perhaps some imperial capitals scattered throughout history, London was the first city to reach and sustain a population over one million, and it did so only in 1810).  City dwellers found themselves surrounded by strangers whose lives and secrets were unknown.  As the possibility of localized trust declined, two phenomena emerged.  One was the transference of trust to professional intermediaries, like police, courts, and governments.  The other was respect for privacy among neighbors.  From a straight libertarian position, the first of these phenomena was a cost, the latter a benefit.

I posited—nearly thirty years ago—that the emergence of a global communications mechanism would shatter the technological barriers protecting privacy, threatening to usher us into the worst of all possible worlds.  The global village, I predicted, would reduce privacy and anonymity levels to those that had prevailed under village culture while strengthening intermediaries and enforcers in an attempt to maintain industrial-age levels of privacy.  That deadly combination explains large parts of what we’ve been seeing.

All told, the current challenges of information authoritarianism represent one more manifestation of the research agenda I set for myself in the 1980s.  I committed myself to understanding how the availability of abundant, inexpensive information could help individuals make better decisions, organizations devise superior strategies, and government craft beneficial policies.  By the 1990s, I’d augmented that agenda to consider the backlash.

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For more information about Bruce D. Abramson & American Restorationism, visit: www.BruceDAbramson.com

To learn more about America’s Spiritual Crisis and the new religion of Wokeism, see: American Spirit or Great Awokening?  The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024). 

To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see:  The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).

To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.

To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please e-mail me at bdabramson@pm.me.