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 LĂ©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’s dystopia.

Lévy’s book is important because it advocates an alternative future
for the Net. As a French intellectual, he doesn’t accept free market dogmas.
This approach is not simply morally preferable. It is also a precondition for
any coherent analysis of what’s 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—or
even to click on the advertising links placed on them. Why can’t 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—even free—method 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 “information wants to be free”, they
mean it literally.

LĂ©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 “collective intelligence”: an inclusive society
born out of the Net. Cyberutopia is imminent.

Lévy’s 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 “collective
intelligence” because we suffer from individual alienation caused by capitalism.
Like many of the West Coast gurus with whom he takes issue, LĂ©vy can
become mystical about his vision of cyberspace. Inspired by Islamic theology, he
says in one chapter that the “collective intelligence” is rather similar to
God.

This disguises, however, a specific form of politics. Nearly thirty years on,
LĂ©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
LĂ©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 “virtual
agora”. According to Lévy, cyberspace is the online version of a hippie
commune.

While emphasising the Net’s 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, LĂ©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
LĂ©vy makes exactly the opposite error.

Despite its noncommercial aspects, the Net isn’t a world completely separated
from moneymaking. By ignoring the world of work, LĂ©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 “give”
articles to journals and “present” papers at conferences.

ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´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 “collective intelligence”, cyberspace is facilitating new types of
collective labour.

Despite these faults, Lévy’s 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.

BACK in the Sixties when I was a kid, I used to watch eagerly the TV science
programmes hosted by James Burke, then devour the books accompanying the series.
Astounded by the technological marvels on offer, I believed that I would soon
live in a world of videophones, personal helicopters and fusion power.

By the time I became a teenager, however, the gee-whiz approach personified
by Burke was discredited. The arms race and ecological damage had inspired a
more sober understanding of the impact of scientific innovation on our society.
Instead of embracing new technology uncritically, commentators tried to educate
their audiences about the potential perils as well as the benefits of our
increasing powers over the natural world.

In recent years, the development of the Internet and other digital
technologies produced a revival of those hippy-dippy days. Once again we are
assured that scientists can solve all our social and existential problems
through the invention of better gadgets. Some people even proclaim that they can
beat death by downloading their brains into computers or turning themselves into
cyborgs. At such a moment of technological triumphalism, it is not surprising
that Burke is once again back in print with a new popular science book.

The Pinball Effect reflects the current enthusiasm for the Net by
attempting to imitate certain aspects of the Web and other modern hypermedia. In
the margins, there are hypertext links to other parts of the book. These connect
descriptions of one scientific innovation with others contained elsewhere in the
text to show, for instance, how the discovery of X-rays enabled other scientists
to develop the television set and understand the function of adrenaline within
the body.

According to Burke, this approach isn’t simply an attempt to ape the
technological capabilities of the Web in another medium. For him, the structure
of the book reflects a new form of analysis of technological advance. As its
title suggests, the book is an attempt to show that the inventions of scientists
are connected across time. In his introduction, Burke says that: “We all live on
the great, dynamic web of change. It links us to one another and, in some ways,
to everything in the past.”

So he uses his hypertext links to do more than just overcome the structural
rigidities imposed by the technological basis of the book, TV programmes and
other old media. Like postmodernist cultural theorists, Burke believes that
these digital techniques are a way of escaping from the tyranny of the “grand
narrative” of history. By enabling the reader to jump back and forth across
time, hypertext supposedly allows us a look at scientific innovation in new and
exciting ways.

Yet it is the use of hypertext links that is behind the book’s failure to
give a convincing explanation of technological development. It is not simply
because hypertext doesn’t work within the linear form of a book. Readers will
find it very inconvenient and confusing to keep jumping from page to page while
reading a text. Even if The Pinball Effect was produced as a Web site
or CD-ROM, it would still be flawed. For beneath the veneer of Net techniques,
the book is a simplistic rehash of the traditional view of scientific advance as
the product of geniuses and lucky accidents. All the research by historians
during the past few decades on the social, political, economic and cultural
influences is completely ignored.

Contemporary popular science books should be spreading the results of these
researches to a wider audience. But this book fails to do this. Far from being
innovative, the use of hypertext links by Burke becomes a way of talking about
scientific innovation without examining the contradictory processes underlying
the history of science.

Because it abandons the temporal dimension, the book resembles a Victorian
parlour game where two disparate events have to be somehow joined together by
discovering a series of bizarre connections. For instance, in one chapter, Burke
begins with a story about Sigmund Freud, quickly moves through snippets about
neurologist Jean Martin Charcot, mesmerism, phrenology, Jeremy Bentham and
theories of degeneration of the human species. The chapter ends with Captain
James Cook’s voyages and the origins of the Ordnance Survey maps.

In chapter after chapter, the reader is confronted with similar weird
juxtapositions of hard science, such as the invention of Bunsen burners, with
the unprovable, such as psychoanalysis, and the completely dubious, such as
phrenology. Deprived of linear time, you cannot make sense of the relative
importance of any of these scientific—and
pseudoscientific—developments. Far from elucidating the “extraordinary
patterns of change”, the book is more likely to confuse its readers with its
incoherent collection of anecdotes about various pioneering scientists.

This confusion is inevitable because, despite the claims of postmodernists,
the use of hypertext links in Web sites, CD-ROMS and elsewhere does not negate
the importance of linear time for the analysis of scientific innovation. Like
footnotes or references in conventional books, hypertext links are simply
practical tools to aid understanding. They are not the foundation of a
completely new epistemology.

The failure of books such as The Pinball Effect therefore tends to
reaffirm the modernist belief in the importance of the “grand narrative” of
history. In science as elsewhere, each generation builds upon the achievements
and failures of its predecessors. The growth in our knowledge and power over the
natural world is a cumulative process. Every new invention depends in part upon
the efforts of those who came before.

Crucially, the recognition of this temporal dimension undermines the
old-fashioned emphasis on hero scientists which The Pinball Effect
uncritically reproduces. While it is important to celebrate the creativity of
scientific pioneers, it is also necessary to realise that their individual
achievements took place within a wider social context.

For example, to invent the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee not only needed to
know something about the previous work of computer scientists, but also required
the help of many other people inside and outside the European Centre for
Particle Physics to turn his discovery into an everyday tool for work, education
and amusement.

In turn, the Web’s development was only possible because yet more people were
providing the labour that was needed to feed, clothe and otherwise provide for
those working on it. As with other technological advances, the Net was developed
within a historical and social context.

No one expects a popular science book to provide an exhaustive analysis of
scientific innovation. However, by avoiding both linear time and the wider
social context, The Pinball Effect does not even provide a satisfactory
introduction to the subject. Readers will have to look elsewhere if they wish to
understand the “extraordinary patterns of change” within science which have
shaped the modern world.

The most interesting contributions deal with an SF novel by William Gibson
and Bruce Sterling about an alternative Victorian era: the Difference Engine
successfully built, but only in this Victorian Britain as an integral part of
a social revolution.

In their essays, Tom Paulin and Neil Belton demonstrate how political
conservatism has encouraged a deep-rooted hostility to science. Despite being
the first industrial nation, science in Britain has been regarded with
suspicion by those in power. The Promethean powers of invention are feared as
levelling forces that could sweep away inherited privilege and deference.
Scientific procedures are far too rational and, worst of all, continental in
their precision.

Echoing the analysis of Will Hutton (author of The State We’re In) and
other “New Labour” gurus, Paulin and Belton believe that the relative and
absolute decline of British manufacturing industry has been caused by the
semifeudal political system defended by English conservatism.

Their contributions and other key essays champion a “republican science”
combining technical innovation with political change. Jon Katz, for example,
demonstrates the relevance of Tom Paine’s republican politics in the age of
the Internet.

This use of Babbage’s Difference Engine as the symbol of “republican
science” is not without difficulties. Simon Shaffer shows how Babbage promoted
the idea that the Difference Engine possessed “artificial intelligence”.
Babbage was attracted to this deception because it concealed the human labour
involved in the machine’s construction. He could never bring himself to
acknowledge his dependence on the skills of engineers. So, far from being a
model for “republican science”, the story of the Difference Engine could be
seen as a prime example of how archaic class prejudices accelerated the
industrial decline of England. Whether real or imagined, says Shaffer, we need
to free ourselves from all varieties of “Victorian values” if we are to
realise the democratic potential of scientific modernism.

Back in 1960, the word “cyborg” – cybernetic organism – was coined to describe the merging of technology with the human body. In a seminal article, reprinted here, NASA scientists Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline first used the term to describe the technological enhancement of the human body for space travel, proposing a combination of drugs and surgery to enable humans to survive in the harsh environment of outer space. Further articles describe how their vision has been partially realised in the US Air Force’s “expert computer systems”, which enhance the reaction times of pilots flying at supersonic speeds. And, as Les Levidow and Ken Robins’s examination of the Gulf War shows, American military superiority now depends in part on the deployment of these cyborg warriors.

But the cyborg is not solely a military phenomenon. Robert van Citters, Motokazu Hori and Eli Friedman claim in their essay that we have cyborgs among our close friends – or could be one ourselves – citing the implantation of artificial organs and reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilisation.

Yet, despite these introductory papers, The Cyborg Handbook is more interested in the cyborg as science fiction than as science fact. This book is a cultural studies text, not a scientific examination of the technological enhancement of the human body. In essays on characters from comics, the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the marketing of brain-mind machines and similar topics, the authors show how the cyborg has become a cultural icon. Drawing on the pioneering work of Dona Haraway, academic theorists try to reclaim the cyborg from the military-industrial complex. They assert that the cyborg fusion of technology and human can now take its place alongside transsexuality, tattooing, piercing and other forms of body modification celebrated by contemporary popular culture. Human-machines can be included within the rainbow coalition of women, gay men and lesbians, people of colour and others who reject the cultural conformity of mainstream America. The cyborg is now a postmodern cultural rebel, not a soldier.

But in her Manifesto for Cyborgs (unfortunately not included here), Haraway suggests that “we are all cyborgs”. People with pacemakers or clubbers taking recreational drugs could all be described as examples of the fusion between technology and humanity. Yet the universality of this vision of the cyborg challenges the dated postmodernist orthodoxy that dominates American cultural studies. In The Cyborg Handbook, Chela Sandoval answers Haraway, attacking her for not fully embracing “the politics of difference” which emphasises the separateness of the elements of the rainbow coalition. If the condition of every human inevitably involves some intimate relationship with technology, how can the cyborg be a subversive symbol of the marginalised?

Sandoval’s article is a classic example of how postmodernist ideology hinders social analysis. Determined to enclose the cyborg within the limitations of American “liberalism”, she and other authors in the book refuse to recognise that the myth of the cyborg is but the latest stage in the human desire for self-improvement.

Because of the parochialism of its predominantly American authors, The Cyborg Handbook will amuse and infuriate the European reader. It is still an important publication – if only for its ability to mix Clynes and Kline’s gung-ho vision of the cyborg with the postmodern feminism of writers like Sandoval. The cyborg is likely to remain one of our most potent symbols.

But now, with the convergence of telecommunications, the media and computing in the “information superhighway”, there is a means of countering such apathy and drawing citizens into the decision-making process.

Back in the 1960s, the Situationists and other New Left groups expounded the delights of a technological Utopia. Even then, these young revolutionaries were rejecting politicians whom they distrusted. They had the idea of people running their own lives through a hi-tech form of direct democracy – the electronic agora. It was this inspired vision that led activists worldwide to set up a variety of radical media, from pirate radio stations to the first hackers’ bulletin boards.

Now, in a bizarre twist, free-market zealots within the American Republican party are echoing such left-wing anarchism. Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House of Representatives, believes that the Internet will create “electronic town halls” where voters can participate directly in the political process. Fearful of big government, American conservatives hope that information technologies will help them to return to the simple days of the early Republic. Then, hard-working folk solved their own problems through public meetings rather than having to rely on the impersonal aid of the welfare state.

Whether from left or right, the new techno-utopians hope that the gulf between the electorate and their representatives can be overcome by connecting them electronically, or by bypassing politicians altogether. However, up to now, the reality of electronic democracy has been rather more prosaic. Soon after Bill Clinton was elected President, he set up a Web site for the White House where government decuments could be downloaded and e-mail transmitted. Soon other American politicians and foreign governments established their own Web sites to promote their views. Yet, in reality, these experiments have not lived up to the hype. Tapping furiously on a keyboard to your MP cannot replace decades of cynicism about the political process. More seriously, the membership of this embryonic electronic Net has so far been limited to a privileged minority of engineers, academics and professionals who have access to it.

Yet, even when the whole population is wired up, the Utopia of direct democracy will still face the most important obstacle of all: the problem of how large numbers of people can make, communicate and take decisions together. However good it is, such new technology cannot solve fundamental social and political problems by itself. Back in the 18th century, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau believed that democracy could only be created through a public meeting of all citizens, as happened in Swiss villages and New England towns of the period. With the emergence of modern nation states, it was no longer possible for every citizen to meet in one place at the same time. Even meeting in cyberspace has its limitations, it cannot entirely remove the problem of how large groups can successfully interact. As existing Net conferencing programmes show, it is difficult to hold a meaningful conversation if everyone talks at once. Unless an electronic agora consists only of a small number of people, some form of representation will have to be used to mediate between the different social, cultural and geographical groups wishing to share the decision-making. So, sadly, despite the dreams of the techno-anarchists, wiring up the country would not make professional politicians redundant.

Yet, despite its limitations, the Net can still improve the dissemination of political information and improve the accountability of elected representatives. The Zapatista rebels in the Chiapas region of southern Mexico, for example, have been using Web sites and newsgroups to rally support for their land reform struggle. José Angel Gurria, Mexico’s foreign minister, recently acknowledged the government had been forced into half-hearted negotiations with the insurgents only because of the power of public opinion mobilised by the Net. It is far more difficult for anyone in authority to look the other way when people suffering from economic exploitation and corrupt officials can themselves send news reports directly into the homes of the electorate.

Although not fully meeting the kind of direct democracy dreamed of by left or right-wing anarchists, this more limited version of the electronic agora will play a key part in revitalising our democratic institutions. But electronic democracy will only be useful as part of an overall modernisation of the political process – along with electoral reforms, protection of civil liberties, curbs on corruption and an end to official secrecy. Technology cannot cure political or social problems by itself, however it can be used to reinforce human solutions. Back in the late-18th century, republican philosophers called for the creation of an informed citizenry with the knowledge to make the political decisions affecting their own lives. Maybe, as we enter the 21st century, the Net will help to realise this democratic deal for the first time.