Beware of Geeks, Bearing Gifts

"For my part I entertain a high idea of the [their] utility... I consider such vehicles of knowledge more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry, and ameliorate the morals of a free and enlightened people."

That's George Washington on the newspaper in 1788. It could as well be Paul Wells on the digital media in 2006 (though Paul Wells' prose style is considerably more punchy than old Georgie's, and that's a good thing.)

I only have a small quible with Wells' characteristically intelligent and prescient account of how we're all freer with the Net. And it goes like this:

Are consumers really the beneficiaries of the shift of power and influence to the digital domain? Or, perhaps the more pertinent quesiton might be: are citizens (yes there's a difference, Maxime Bernier) are truly empowered by the Internet Age.

The problem with the Internet, like any other media (or human activity for that matter), is that its adepts still exist in a series of concentric circles, much like Dante's famous Nine Circles of Hell. The Internet does not through its intrinsic formal nature necessarily promote intelligent debate, discussion and engagement any more than a newspaper or a magazine does - it just structures debate (or lack of it) in a different way.

What the Internet does do is present the potential for infinite choice, just as it presents the potential for consumer empowerment. The problem here is that both of these things are, thanks to the power dynamics of the "real world," illusions.

If as Paul Wells writes, "no fact is necessarily obscure" on the Net, then therefore every fact is potentially obscure - insamuch as if anything can be brought to light and the light that shines is finite, something else will remain in darkness.

This is the problem: believing in their unlimited ability to choose, net-izens either ignore the necessity of making choices (be it good, moral, immoral, whatever) in their digital content, or proclaim that all choices are equally good/bad/interesting/disinteresting, which is essentially the same contention. Why? Read on...

The phenomenon of apparently unlimited choice would be insidious enough,but it is symptomatic of a larger danger. Broadband internet costs money, as do modems, routers, monitors, webcams and the rest of the Web's physical paraphenalia. If all the moving and shaking in political circles is on the Web, it simply means a new kind of literacy and illiteracy in society; a new kind of elite exclusion; a human wolf in new pixellated clothing. So without realising, net users are directed and their activities proscribed by the same old actors: the rich (how many cool startups are now owned by Google?) and the powerful (sayonara Alliance Atlantis: hellow Global).

I'm not saying that the forces at work here are at all different from any that have shaped human history. But nor can I call all this citizen or even consumer choice. I call it rule by a class who only needs to type to control, a new paradigm in which all the old evils (greed, power, lust, and shortsightedness) will persist, and even thrive in ways which we as a species are quite unprepared for: a digitarchy. Paul Wells is right about one thing: the biggest danger would be to ignore what is going on.