杏吧原创

Collective Intelligence: Mankind鈥檚 Emerging World in Cyberspace by Pierre
L茅vy, Plenum, New York, 拢16.90/$27.95, ISBN 0306456354

THE NET has become our symbol for the future. Like clocks, steam engines and
nuclear power for earlier generations, this icon of technology encodes our
current period of rapid social change. In Collective Intelligence,
Pierre L茅vy provides a French vision of what will happen when everyone
can participate within cyberspace.

Up until now, because the Net was mainly developed in California, it is not
surprising that our view of the digital future has been dominated by gurus from
this state. So far, the Californians have proved to be better at making virtual
machines than social analyses. Some of their cyber-theories promise not just the
invention of synthetic life, but even immortality through uploading our brains
into cyberspace.

But lurking behind this techno-mysticism is something much more sinister. In
Wired magazine, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly and other ideologues
assert that the Net is the sort of unregulated marketplace up to now found only
in economics textbooks. Instead of supporting a caring society, they hope that
technological progress into the 21st century will inevitably lead back to
19th-century tooth-and-claw capitalism. Their utopia looks like most other
people鈥檚 dystopia.

L茅vy鈥檚 book is important because it advocates an alternative future
for the Net. As a French intellectual, he doesn鈥檛 accept free market dogmas.
This approach is not simply morally preferable. It is also a precondition for
any coherent analysis of what鈥檚 really happening in the Net.

Contrary to the predictions of Wired, it has proved difficult to
create a profitable digital economy. While existing products can be promoted or
sold online, most Net users are reluctant to pay for visiting Web sites鈥攐r
even to click on the advertising links placed on them. Why can鈥檛 the
cybercapitalists easily turn the Net into another commercial medium? Because the
entrepreneurs were the last people to arrive in cyberspace. Originally invented
for military purposes, the Net was quickly hijacked by academics and amateurs as
a cheap鈥攅ven free鈥攎ethod of distributing information and
communicating with colleagues. Within cyberspace, most users participate in
discussions or publish their work for the pleasure of others recognising their
efforts. When Net enthusiasts proclaim that 鈥渋nformation wants to be free鈥�, they
mean it literally.

L茅vy claims that the Net is a qualitatively new way of living. In the
tradition of French philosophy, in general, and Deleuze and Guattari in
particular, he explains this with a grand abstraction.

Four types of social spaces have emerged. Back in the distant past, we
wandered the open space of the Earth as nomads. With the emergence of
agriculture, we then built the fixed space of the Territory. For the past couple
of centuries, increasing numbers of us have survived within the industrialised
space of the Commodity. Now we are witnessing the emergence of a fourth way of
living: the space of Knowledge formed by cyberspace. Once everyone is wired up,
we will come together as the 鈥渃ollective intelligence鈥�: an inclusive society
born out of the Net. Cyberutopia is imminent.

L茅vy鈥檚 visionary anthropology is diametrically opposed to that of the
Californian ideologues. Instead of forming a perfect market, the Net opens the
space of Knowledge, completely distinct from the space of the Commodity. When we
are online, we want to learn, play and communicate with one another rather than
to make money. Above all, we want to participate within the 鈥渃ollective
intelligence鈥� because we suffer from individual alienation caused by capitalism.
Like many of the West Coast gurus with whom he takes issue, L茅vy can
become mystical about his vision of cyberspace. Inspired by Islamic theology, he
says in one chapter that the 鈥渃ollective intelligence鈥� is rather similar to
God.

This disguises, however, a specific form of politics. Nearly thirty years on,
L茅vy still champions the most radical demands of the New Left of the
Sixties. Back then, these revolutionaries believed that replacing governments or
nationalising industries would change very little. Instead, they thought that
the ills of modern society could be cured only by everyone directly controlling
their own lives. In the industrialised countries, this was prevented by the
professionalisation of politics and the passivity of watching television. The
New Left therefore demanded the simultaneous creation of direct democracy and
interactive media. Once people were no longer represented by others, everyone
would be able to participate in the running of society. According to
L茅vy, the Net is about to realise this 1960s revolutionary dream. What
proved to be impractical in the past is now possible with new digital
technologies. Once we all have access to cyberspace, we will be able to
determine our own destiny through a real-time direct democracy: the 鈥渧irtual
agora鈥�. According to L茅vy, cyberspace is the online version of a hippie
commune.

While emphasising the Net鈥檚 noncommercial aspects is preferable to
Californian free market platitudes, this New Left cybertheory has its own
problems. Above all, the formalist method of French philosophy obscures as much
as it illuminates. By abstracting too far into theory, L茅vy avoids
examining the messy nature of human activity.

For instance, there is no clear separation between the Net and the rest of
industrial society. Over the past few centuries, the development of both the
market and the state has only been possible through constant improvements in the
technologies of physical and symbolic communication. The Net is created out of
the convergence of already existing industries: telephony, media and computing.
If the Californian ideologues think that the Net can only be a market, then
L茅vy makes exactly the opposite error.

Despite its noncommercial aspects, the Net isn鈥檛 a world completely separated
from moneymaking. By ignoring the world of work, L茅vy crucially cannot
explain why the Net was developed as a hi-tech gift economy in the first place.
Invented by scientists, this technology was originally designed to facilitate a
specific way of working. In their specialist fields, the direct application of
markets hampers research. Instead of trading with each other, scientists 鈥済ive鈥�
articles to journals and 鈥減resent鈥� papers at conferences.

杏吧原创s are no more moral than anyone else. In their professions, the gift
economy is adopted because it is a more effective way of working. When the Net
expanded beyond its founders, its users unconsciously adopted this scientific
behaviour. Although commercial interests are using the Net, many others have
discovered the benefits of working within the hi-tech gift economy. Rather than
forming a 鈥渃ollective intelligence鈥�, cyberspace is facilitating new types of
collective labour.

Despite these faults, L茅vy鈥檚 book is still a useful corrective to the
free-market orthodoxy: better overemphasise the role of the gift economy than
ignore it altogether. However, both the Californian and French visions of the
digital future share a common vice: the desire to impose a rigid model on an
evolving social phenomenon. The Net precisely encourages the hybridisation and
intermixing of different ways of behaving. If we really want to comprehend the
digital future, we will have to move beyond the abstractions of both California
and France.