The Kinder Gap: Natural Law

The Revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The Revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The Revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner because,
The Revolution will not be televised Brother.
--The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Gil Scott-Heron)

I have lived on the net. I had a home on the outskirts of Freegate, a virtual city in Austin Texas. I bought it for ten dollars a month, and let it go at the press of a key on a computer keyboard. Virtual means that this town exists only on a computer. It takes up space on the hard drive of an IBM compatible computer, and its buildings can only go as high as the computer has memory. There is a Canadian on Freegate who uses his Freegate account--an account is space on a computer which is in the United States--to exercise Freedoms of Speech that his own country has curtailed. We are re-learning what the American founding fathers meant when they said that certain “truths” are “self-evident”; that some rights “flow from the creator”; and that governments cannot take away these rights: they can only suppress them.

There is no “where” on the net

The Internet is--or can be--a powerful tool for individuals. The Canadian example is particularly instructive. The Canadian government banned any discussion of a certain court case--the Homolka case. The mainstream media went along with the ban. A few individuals on the net did not. While their American counterparts were frantically typing in David Letterman’s Top Ten for net distribution, this small group of Canadian rebels gathered all the information they could find on the Homolka case and disseminated it to the rest of Canada--and did so, in Canada, from a computer in Texas. The Internet is playing havoc with our concept of “location”. Not only can netizens send mail to any Internet computer in the world, talk to anyone on another Internet computer, or exchange computer files with anyone on another Internet computer--they can use Internet computers throughout the world. While what Ahmed from Canada was doing shouldn’t be illegal in Canada, it is not illegal in Texas. Ahmed typed on a computer in Canada. But all the information came together in Texas, and was sent to Canada from Texas.

Where does crime take place? In the mind of the perpetrator or where the trigger is pulled? Canada never asked for Ahmed’s computer account. If they had, should our government have required Steve Jackson Games to turn over evidence for something that is not a crime in the United States?

Should is probably the wrong question. Governments do whatever they can get away with, and they’ll prosecute whether they have ‘jurisdiction’ or not. If Canada decides to prosecute Ahmed based on what Ahmed wrote in Texas, there isn’t a whole lot Texas can do about it, nor is Texas likely to care. The same problem is occurring within the United States as well. In 1994, the owners of the Amateur Action computer bulletin board were convicted of obscenity. Their conviction took place in Tennessee. The board is in California, where their computer files would probably not have been constitutionally obscene. Some pundits believe that if this conviction is allowed to stand, it will allow “small, conservative morality zones” to “dictate the legal availability of online information in communities across the country.” This is more pessimistic than necessary, I think. More likely, it will keep those morality zones out of the information age.

The Internet service providers for Morality, Tennessee, have what’s called an “Internet Protocol” address. Parts of the IP address identify whether or not the individual using that address is accessing the infobahn from whoever services Morality. Morality’s telephone numbers all begin with a certain six-digit sequence--their area code and local code. With ‘Caller-ID’, which tells the callee the telephone number of the person calling in, telephone-oriented information distribution sites can simply reject telephone calls from Morality. By checking the IP address, Internet sites can disallow connection requests from Morality. And, since people in California or New York can’t trust the ‘obscenity standards’ of Morality Tennessee, it won’t be just the naughty services who won’t let Morality residents in. Everyone who knows about Morality--from comic book sites to Usenet groups--will avoid distribution to the people of Morality. In fact, given the spirit of cooperation on the net, some group of people will probably come up with a list of all areas that censor information outside of their jurisdiction, and all information-age sites will automatically disallow connections or telephone calls from anyone matching an address or ID on that list. As a couple of netizens put it, “The Internet, you know, was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. Censorship is a bit less powerful than that.” The “Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it; it turns out to be practically impossible to censor material on the Internet effectively.” ^(?)

Attacking Morality’s citizens

Morality’s citizens, like Ahmed and his Texas computer account, will find it easy to get around that restriction, but once they do, they are the ones breaking the law. The people of Morality will not be able to do without the services of the information age, and Morality’s attempt at reigning in the evils abroad will have turned Morality’s citizens into backstreet lurkers on the infobahn.

How far Morality’s moral elite want to carry the war on information remains to be seen. We have similar laws for drugs and speeding--over a third of our population has used marijuana, for instance, and everyone with a driver’s license drives faster than the speed limit. ^(?) Certainly, the number of ‘dry zones’ that still exist in the United States sixty years after the end of alcohol prohibition indicates that Morality may be willing to carry it quite far indeed.

It will, however, be a fight against their own citizens. It will, like our current and past prohibitions, make the price of information within Morality rise. It will bring ‘information’ under the umbrella of the black market. And it will add one more reason to the long list of reasons that Morality’s citizens have for ignoring the law in general. But it won’t quench the thirst for information, nor stop the flow of information, whether that information is stock prices or the Usenet discussion group alt.sex.stories. They’ll eventually have to decide whether taking away the choice of their citizens to view or not view obscenity is worth trying to keep Morality in the stone age.

There is already a grey market in information. During the late eighties, Al Schweitzer ran an “Information Brokerage”, cajoling information about individuals from all the various financial and governmental records. He parleyed $5,000 in 1986 to $287,000 fifteen months later, and over a million in 1988. ^(?) He was arrested in 1989 “for allegedly trying to subvert an IRS agent.” The charges were dropped, but in 1991 he received a jail sentence for “attempting to compromise the Social Security Administration’s central computer.”

Despite the recent Justice Department crackdown, Schweitzer thinks the law has pulled its punches. “If the government actually wanted to put a stop to my industry,” he says, “it would have to indict every client who bought information from me. That’s fifteen hundred to two thousand people, including huge companies.”

Schweitzer understands that his business isn’t driven by supply, but demand. An FBI agent told him that the government’s objective in arresting him had been “cutting off the legs” of the “info-brokerage business”. Schweitzer recognizes that, though the government may put him out of business, others will take up the slack, and this will only drive up the price of “purloined facts”. The customers will not go away. The increased profits will only increase the money available for bribes and corruption inside the information storehouses of government agencies and consumer industries.

Morality, Tennessee may be the first step in having information topple drugs as the top supplier of corruption in law enforcement and government.

Social and legal borders

All of our laws today are built on jurisdiction. Jurisdiction is based entirely on physical location, where the crime occurred. What will jurisdictional boundaries mean when the infobahn is well in place? What is a “jury of your peers” if your peers are on the net, and your trial is two thousand miles from where you live?

Today, our national boundaries are social as well as legal. We consider ourselves Americans because all of our friends are Americans. When immigrants can maintain full contact with home, with their friends who have emigrated to other countries, what is the point of citizenship in the place where your butt happens to be planted? Is citizenship in the butt or in the brain?

Today, citizenship is clearly in the butt. You may long for the green grass of the motherland, but you are a citizen of the here and now. Immigrants break the majority of their ties with their home, and make their new country their home. And, in America at least, apply for citizenship to facilitate their new life. If the break is not made, the desire for a new citizenship will be lessened. Tomorrow, citizenship may well be in the brain. And perhaps it should be there. If home is where the heart is, why shouldn’t citizenship be in the same place?

Cultural Security Blankets

The international implications that computer networks have for the world go beyond the butt, the brain, and citizenship. Computer networks link the world together. They strike to the very heart of a culture’s identity. In Canada, where 70% of the people have heard about the infobahn, 60% feel that it is a threat to their cultural identity. They feel that the government should take action to preserve and protect that identity. ^(?) In the abstract for Computers, Telecommunications and Western Culture, my colleagues and I wrote:

Personal computers and the individualistic design of international computer networks are founded in Western concepts of democracy, interpersonal communication and freedom. The popular preference for personal computers rather than central computers mirrors a characteristically Western political and cultural emphasis. Nonwestern countries which wish to maintain cultural autonomy while importing Western technology and providing their citizens with access to international networks will need to provide this technology and access in culturally familiar forms. Joining the computer world thoughtlessly (or heedlessly) will either require adoption of Western style thought by the entire culture, or will provide the more Western-oriented members of the culture with a head start into the computer world over their traditionally-minded peers. The development of user interface technology that masks the inherent Western-ness of computer networks is necessary if the technology is to be integrated into a nonwestern culture, rather than integrating the culture into the technology.

There are two ways that the Internet will affect societies that adopt it. First, the very nature of the Internet is one of individualism. Is it possible for cultures to buy into an international computer network without also purchasing the cultural values of the network itself? And, second, the net is not a collection of computers. It is a collection of people. There is no question that a collection of millions of people is, in fact, a culture of its own, or at the very least a ‘subculture’ of some kind. The design of the Internet encourages end-runs around traditional authority. Everyone with an electronic mail address is accessible to everyone else with an electronic mail address, from president to peon. A member of the board waits in an electronic queue just as long as the stockroom worker. Their incoming electronic mail is equally important as well. The computer accepts each piece of incoming mail and each request for an information service in the order it arrives. It cares neither for the importance of the sender nor the recipient.

The chairman of Mitsubishi Electric America Inc., explaining why Japan is wary of the Internet, said, “The Information Highway is so tied to American culture that we can’t even understand what we’re getting into.” ^(?) The Internet encourages individuals to create their own peer groups and on-line communities. The Internet encourages individual freedom. The very idea of a personal computer reflects on the cultures that created it.

What must be scariest to nonwestern cultures is that freedom begets freedom. In the 1760s, the English colonies in North America were the most free of any empire:

But it was their very familiarity with liberty, with the rights of Englishmen, that led them so easily down the path to independence. In a sense the American Revolution testified to English success, not failure; it was the successful transmission of English ideas of liberty that made possible the Revolution. ^(?)

No doubt many in other countries--and in the United States--would like to avoid this type of ‘success’. The question is, can they do it without anchoring themselves in the past? Is it worth it to maintain your cultural identity at the cost of becoming lost to the rest of the world?

Baghdad doesn’t think so. The Iraqi government newspaper Al-Jumhuriya called the Internet “the end of civilizations”. They see it as an American war tool, allowing the Americans to “enter every house in the world. They want to become the only source for controlling human beings in the new electronic village.” (Associated Press, 2/17/97)

Baghdad would like to be a source for controlling human beings also. They don’t want to lose that power, certainly not on their own soil. The United States doesn’t want to lose that power either. The Clinton administration is willing to make outrageous efforts to control the new information medium. In arguing for the “communications decency act”, the Justice Department argued that we have to ban certain speech to protect the first amendment rights to free speech. Their argument was that people might not come on to the net because they might see something they disagree with; thus, disagreeable things have to be banned to encourage free speech. (Chronicle of Higher Education, 1/31/97)

Orwell was pretty damned smart after all.

American television advertising already invades other countries. American Internet advertising will be much more insidious. ^(!) American feminists have long been angry at the cultural values that Barbie instills in American children. What happens when Barbie goes on-line? We’ll find out: she already has. (Enter Barbie)

Barbie Online

The most popular doll in the world will debut in cyberspace, when Mattel puts the world of Barbie online. “The idea is to bring value to where children will be spending their time and having her add value to their time. Those children online or on the Internet will be able to interact with Barbie in very special ways,” says Mattel’s president. Mattel also plans a Barbie CD-ROM. ^(?)

If blond white women can get angry at the cultural values that Barbie instills in their children, what will swarthy veiled women think? To the cultural leaders of non-western cultures, On-Line Barbie--a scantily-clad anorexic woman with a big car--is likely to epitomize the dangers, if not the downright evils of western culture.

Cyberspace advertising will be completely different from television or print advertising. It’s been twenty years now since a program called Eliza pretended to talk to human beings from the cheap home computers of that era. Today, kids will be able to come on-line and talk with On-Line Barbie, On-Line Ken, and even her damned On-Line Car and believe they’re talking to a human being rather than a high-tech automated toy. The “math is hard” brouhaha will pale into insignificance when On-Line Barbie answers a little girl’s question with “I know math is hard. Let’s talk about lipstick.”

The goals of advertising

Back on the multi-media dark ages of Steve Jackson Games’ MetaVerse virtual city, one of the advertisers had a Foghorn Leghorn robot that would converse (stupidly) with players while it took down their orders on a notepad. On-Line Barbie will be (or should be) far more sophisticated than that. Advertising on the net can literally be programmed to react differently to each individual who comes to the advertising. On-Line Barbie will be able to detect the country the kid is ‘connecting’ from and speak in the native tongue of that country. She’ll be able to hawk herself in the native currency as well.

Advertising has one of two basic goals: it must either mold the product’s image to fit with the culture, or change the cultural values to fit the product. A hundred years ago, who cared about underarm wetness? Today, who doesn’t? Raise your hand, all one of you. Even back-to-nature types like me have special “natural crystal” anti-perspirant rocks, as if cavemen stuck crystals into their armpits in fear of the wet hair demon. The personal hygiene folks got in on the ground floor of mass advertising and changed our world. What will Barbie do to kids in other countries, from the ground floor of the Internet?

She’ll talk to them.

Language is a cultural medium

Here’s one for you: In a recent (1998) “Proceedings of the IEEE”, there’s a “retrospective” about someone who wrote a “computers of the future” article in 1962. They called it “amazingly prescient”, but I saw it as fairly mundane compared to Norbert Wiener and Vannevar Bush. They also print some comments from 1998:

Now when A. G. Bell invented the telephone, the remarkable thing of the invention was that it worked for communication in any language, for any purpose of communication for which one wanted to use it.

Even giving him crystal clear telephone reception so as to be able to transfer nuances of inflection--something which certainly was not the case at the beginning of telephone, nor for that matter today--the telephone supports a very limited form of communication. It supports only languages for which facial expression and body language are unimportant, and communications for which language alone transfers information. And adding in the limited inflection that can be transferred over telephone, and I would suspect that the telephone was a very Western, especially American and English, technology.

Which could be just a poor interpretation of the beginnings of a now mature technology, except for the parallels drawn on what we should do in the future of computing:

In a similar way, if we want to specify the procedure of intelligence in the brain, we don't have to specify the kind of needs, the kind of senses, and the kind of actions to be tried. We only have to specify an information input to the brain that represents the needs that are to be satisfied, a second input that represents the senses that facilitate this aim (enriches this information) in any situation that confronts us, and an output, which drives the muscles. They are all coordinated in a computer operation that accomplishes the purpose. This purpose is to carry out these muscular actions that silence the input of the immediate needs and give peace to the system.

The point being the creation of automated recognition of faces, speech, and situations of the level of what humans can recognize. But with the kinds of assumptions implied by the opening sentence, I would suspect that this perfect recognition would be most perfect when recognizing things the creator would recognize.

One of the biggest problems with the Internet, from the perspective of maintaining your own culture, is that everything is written in English. When a non-English-speaking culture comes onto the net, its members must learn English if they wish to mine the vast informational resources that it provides. Once a person learns English well enough to read the technical references available on the net, they’ve also learned English well enough to take part in Usenet discussions and read everything else on the net. I don’t see this as a bad thing. You, if you’re a cultural leader in another country, may well see it as undermining your authority; if you’re a cultural protector, you may see it as weakening your cultural values. If you’re a political dictator, you’re in deep, deep, trouble.

How does one solve this? The only real way to solve it, if you’re bent on entering the twenty-first century, is to ensure that your people don’t want to learn English, or that if they do, that they don’t want to take part in international discussions to the neglect of their local communities. Find out what the members of your culture want out of the net, and provide this, locally, in your cultural languages. Language translators, while primitive, do exist. Provide them. If some members of your culture seem interested in discussion, find out why, and do your damnedest to provide discussion groups within your cultural confines.

Networks can be created nearly at the drop of a hat. If your network doesn’t provide what your people need, they can, should they think of it, create their own network. Make sure that your network provides what they need. Ensure that it is much easier to converse and exchange information within your culture than with the outside world. But don’t make the connection to the outside so slow that people build alternatives outside of your control.

The keyboard itself is very nearly western. It is based on the English language, and the best attempts by manufacturers to escape the bonds of the alphabet have met with unwieldy successes at best. The keyboard is still the most effective way of ‘speaking’ to computers, but voice recognition and handwriting recognition are gaining ground with each day. If you can install computers without any keyboard at all, that recognize your own language and your own writing, you’ll have gone a long way towards preserving your cultural identity.

The absolute, most important thing to remember is that you cannot block the rest of the world out. You can only hope that the rest of the world isn’t as alluring as home. If the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, the fence ceases to be a barrier. At the very least, make sure that if individuals adopt western attitudes towards success that they do not then gain an advantage over their traditional peers: if “survival of the fittest” means that traditionalists will die out in a generation, your country will be westernized in a generation. In the end, for every choice that you make, be sure that the path of least resistance is a path through your own culture, and not someone else’s.

In Japan, Japanese women are braving the Internet so that they can shop in male-dominated automobile show-rooms without being intimidated by the whole male orientation of the scene. ^(?) They’re using the infobahn to overcome the sexism in their culture. Saudi Arabia has always been a fan of United States gadgetry, but they’re getting a bit worried about the net. “Because Gulf societies are so closed, the idea of a free exchange of ideas and information is very appealing to their nationals. The political graffiti you don’t find on the walls you see all over the Internet.” ^(?)

In cultures where a strong emphasis is placed on “maintaining a cultural identity”, we may well see those who aren’t satisfied with that cultural identity being the most active on the net. If there are subcultures of oppression in your society, you’ll need to free them.

Or suppress them further.

Laws and Society

There are state laws, and there are cultural laws, and there are natural laws. State laws are always the weakest, but those who create them often confuse them with the other two--even, in some cases, attempting to “redefine” natural laws. In the nineteenth century, some American legislators tried to change the value of pi, which is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Circles didn’t quake in fear at government interference, nor did they hire lobbyists to influence legislators in their behalf. But they retained their shape just the same.

Nearly one hundred percent of automobile drivers continue to drive beyond the speed limit, decades after the fifty-five mile an hour limit passed the United States Congress. ^(!) Over a half-century after marijuana, coca, and opium were prohibited, a third of Americans continue to admit to federal surveyers that they’ve used illegal drugs. Few paid attention to the laws against alcohol when they were prohibited. Laws cannot define societies any more than they can define nature.

Any government that decides it needs to regulate how the Internet impacts them will have to decide which effect they want to regulate, and how they plan to regulate it. Natural law says that they can’t stop radio waves. State laws vary from nation to nation, and a state’s power rarely extends far beyond the state’s borders. Social laws are defined by people, not by governments, even when those governments are, as in the United States, freely elected by the people.

Governments that confuse the extent of their power and ability will be ignored, at best, and laughed at--or opposed--at worst. All these laws do--whether they be prohibition laws or speeding laws--is engender contempt for laws in general. When a Secret Service agent says “we’re trying to get the word out to these knucklehead kids that using computers and color copiers to counterfeit money is against the law,”^(?) he’s missing the point. Those knucklehead kids know its against the law. But they also know that smoking a joint is against the law, and that their dads break the law every day when they drive to the office. They don’t care that it’s against the law.

But if all a government can create are laws, can local cultural identity be maintained in the face of a world-spanning net?

UFOs and the Internet

At the height of the UFO fad in the seventies, the United States federal government paid ^(?) a “thinker” to talk about this very problem: whenever a more advanced culture meets a less advanced culture, the less advanced culture loses its identity, to the detriment of its citizens. Even when the advanced culture doesn’t physically conquer, they culturally overrun the contacted culture.

The paper didn’t come to any conclusions about what to do, but it did note that one modern country managed to avoid that problem: Japan, when forced by the United States in 1868 to open up to the rest of the world, not only maintained its own culture, but became a world power in its own right, defeating Imperial Russia forty years later. It was called “westernizing” and “modernizing”, but it was really the maintenance of their own culture in the face of a technologically advanced culture. The writer recommended studying the process by which Japan succeeded where others had failed.

Traditionalists in other cultures might heed that writer’s advice if they wish to maintain cultural hegemony in the face of the Internet.

We’re going to find out soon how one attack works. There is a battle in Europe now for the hearts and minds of the European people. Compuserve, an American computer network provider, is one of the Yanks, and Europe On-Line is the defender. They’re emphasizing their use of local languages and their “profound and pervasive European national and local content”. Blah blah blah. ^(?)

China, instead, is trying to hold back the flood with a finger.

China Internet Corp. [will] act as the middle man for Chinese companies interested in business-related information and contacts. The company plans to translate selected business information and deliver it directly to corporate subscribers. In addition, foreign companies will be able to advertise their products and receive information on Chinese markets. “Our clients won’t be able to access information directly outside of China. The government doesn’t have to worry about us,” says China Internet’s CEO. The company anticipates 200,000 subscribers within a year, and more than a million by 1999. ^(?)

“The government doesn’t have to worry about us.” The China Internet Corporation knows exactly what the Internet is, even if they don’t realize that their approach is unworkable. It’s that old black market again. If the Corporation is successful, they’ll be creating a desire for information that they cannot possibly supply, unless they have multiple employees per customer. ^(!) China has already required that Internet users must be registered with the police. Control freaks in the United States must be salivating at the prospect.

Burma, on the other hand, wants to stop flow from any quarter. They’ve made it a crime, with a prison sentence of ten to fifteen years, to “send or receive information on such topics as state security, the economy and national culture.” (Financial Times 10/5/96)

There was a saying in Detroit in the twenties: liquor flows pretty easily through a dotted line. The “dotted line” was the border between Michigan and Canada, where a good amount of Michigan’s illegal booze was coming from. If dotted lines can’t stop alcohol, there isn’t a chance in hell they’ll be able to stop information. All they’ll do, like any other prohibition, is raise the stakes and raise the price. And Hong Kong may once again be the stuff of which gangster films are made.

Some of us have already forgotten that liquor flows pretty easily through a dotted line. Copyright foes on the net paraphrase that as “information wants to be free”. Author James Gleick ridiculed that as “gasoline wants to be free” (New York Times Magazine August 4, 1996). Gleick wants to maintain copyright laws because that’s where he makes his money. I’d like to maintain copyright laws for the same reason. But that isn’t the point. The point is, gasoline really does want to be free, no matter how much Gleick ridicules it. If we raise the price of gasoline to the point where it is cheaper to get stolen gasoline, we will do so. It happened in the seventies. And if the price of stolen copyrights drops so low that its easier and cheaper to get than legal books, we will break the law there as well. As a society, we don’t give a damn about copyrights or gasoline.

I said that laws don’t define societies. That’s not true. Laws define societies as law-abiding or law-breaking, and the more laws that cannot be followed, the more likely the society will view itself as a society of lawbreakers. Laws such as the “Communications Decency Act” aren’t just stupid, they cannot be followed. I have hopes that the net will finally force parents to teach their children how to change channels. Changing channels doesn’t require much in the way of motor skills--even two year olds can manage it. On the net it’s even easier. All it requires is parents who care enough about their children to spend five minutes a day and actually pay attention to them.

At the very least, laws of this sort will finally convince the few holdouts among our children that laws are meant to be broken. Those who weren’t convinced by the drug laws, who weren’t convinced by speed limits, will be forced screaming into lawbreaking by this law. And America will be firmly set as a society of lawbreakers.