Bandwidth and Bandwisdom
Excerpts from a presentation given at TechShow '99
Chicago, IL March 19, 1999
Samuel A. Guiberson
Bandwidth and Bandwisdom. Oh, for the days when to be "bandwide" was to be "bandwise." We only had to wait until the next day's technology emerged when all there was, all that we could imagine, could be pumped through the Internet wire. Bandwidth would bring us all the things we ever dreamed of. Technology was in control of the process of fulfilling our expectations for technology; it was at the center stage and it defined everything. They didn't call it the electronic frontier for nothing.
But if you think about it, there is still every bit as much land in the West as there was 150 years ago. But we don't call it a frontier any longer because a frontier an electronic frontier is not just a perception of limitless capacity; it is a decision made about its use. It is sort of like a zoning, a focus on what will be possible to do with a physical or virtual space.
The pioneer, this Western settler, like the Internet user, saw the electronic frontier, the Wild West, as an opportunity for self-fulfillment, openness. Wide-open spaces equal freedom to self-determine one's own intellectual growth, to exercise one's creative energies. The Internet, the Wild West, broke down the old hierarchies that created power over us; no pioneer would be limited by prejudice of class or nationality or politics. The king's foot was off our backs as soon as we went West.
Pioneer people, like Internet people, were drawn to the opportunities that set no limits on their seeking a future for themselves. In a society with open spaces the low ratio between acres and idealists that society, it kept the Internet society, at first, self-regulated. We had the perception that the Web the electronic frontier because it transcended the limits of physical space, was without boundaries. It could expand in every direction, and it would never, ever force us to compete against one another for the intellectual resources it contained. Yet even in the equally limitless frontier West, we had fiercely competitive battles over natural resources. gold, then grazing land, water, oil. And that competition for the ownership of the frontier's wealth ended the frontier, not because the West was overpopulated because there wasn't any more bandwidth, but because the physical had given way to the cultural shift. What people heard about the West, how the West was described began to change from a place where you could make a new start, build a new webpage, forge a new life, think of ways to do things differently than everyone else, find your dreams. It became, "go west young man to make money off all those rubes that went before you."
The cultural focus, you see, had shifted from self-sufficiency to "sell-proficiency." And I really believe I remember the first day that happened on the Internet. IBM ran a commercial in which they had a smart, studly, young, no-nonsense MBA-type with a major smirk, telling us that 'real businessmen don't let geeks design and install their business systems.' Never mind that those same geeks had invented, nurtured, and infused the Internet with concepts of use which changed the whole world. No, now the real men, the businessmen, were roosting on the Internet, turning all those virtual redwoods into lumber; after all, "scenery is for sissies." "Move out of the way techno-turkeys, leave the Internet to the grown-ups." And what was being said about the Internet changed. It wasn't about what we could put in it, the marvelous bounty of information and culture that could be transmitted effortlessly through it to every person in the world it was about how much could be made off the Web.
As the investment capital poured in, all you ever heard about was who bought what web company, who had how much market share. The only Internet news had become Internet commerce. And yet, in reality, there was not one less personal web page on the Web. In truth, there were thousands more. There was more knowledge, there was more art, there was more of what I call "information with culture" uploaded than had ever been uploaded before. But to the public through the eyes of the mass media, which influences everything they know or could remember about what the Internet represents, it was all about "e-commerce," not raising "e-consciousness." It was out of fashion to talk about electronic culture, it was in fashion to talk about money culture.
Some of us figured out then that the Internet Golden Rule, "upload and let upload," wasn't enough protection from the exploitation of the Web's greatest asset; which was and always will be idealism about what is possible. Bandwidth alone wasn't enough. We had worshipped bandwidth, and not been bandwise because, you see, we didn't realize it wasn't at all about how much bandwidth there was'how much information you could stick in the pipe and have it flow fluidly to the world, it wasn't about quantity, it was about quality. It wasn't bandwidth that mattered, it was bandworth.
We had just sort of unknowingly transferred from a bandwidth age, which is really a technology problem where technology dictates the limits of our imagination and idealism, into a bandworth age which is a problem of values. Just as Native Americans were so perplexed, I think we early Internet users were confused by the new settlers, manic obsession with gold colored rocks. Why would anyone forego the great hunt for buffalo or for bytes of knowledge that could nourish your family just to hoard gold rocks? We were involved in a great clash of cyber culture. They just wanted to make money off the Web, we just wanted to make the Web matter. They are winning.
There has been a kind of Doppler shift in the bandwidth of the Internet. We've moved in the culture from the blue sky end of the spectrum about human potential building, education and economic and technology democracy, to the solid green end of the spectrum where visionary thinking means being about to imagine that all of your Internet stocks will someday split, the counter-revolution I talked about that here last year, about sustaining the digital revolution until a digital renaissance could take hold.
Reflect for a moment just how revolutionary the Internet was, not only measuring it by what it did, but by what it undid. In one half a generation, the whole economic hierarchy of a hundred, really two hundred years of the entire Industrial Revolution was undone. It was no longer necessary to have capital to communicate. Where before there had been vast agglomerations of corporate money and power necessary to pay the front end costs of gaining access to the public, now was a low threshold of little expense that allowed every teenager to speak directly to every other human being on the planet's surface.
The notion that all that capital-intensive culture that could control access to information is not one that dies easily. Too much has been invested, and suddenly it was being eroded by the nascent power of the Internet as a democratizing, capital, non-intensive technology vehicle. Folks whose economic empires had been forged in top-down control don't like having the tree shaken from the bottom up by teenagers and techies. After all, a young kid can do anything with a computer and a modem that a giant corporation could do a generation ago. What can they do? They can get their words out to the market they call "it" a market, we call "it" people.
Now, I've got nothing against markets, because the Web did well to transform itself from high barrier market entries to low barrier market entries that was a great progress in world economy. But, you see, that market model,the low entry-level threshold market model, wasn't built on the power of capital. It could be built, if we choose to, on the power of ideas. Just turn on your PC, get online, and you have set up shop in every corner of the world for your intellectual property, or anything else you want to communicate.
This is very bad news for the big boys. The difference in the economic models pre-Internet and post-Internet is that one strives, that is, the Internet model, commerce, strives to make money with the Web, like Amazon selling books through a new vehicle, a new conduit for retail sales, as opposed to the old paradigm applied to the Internet model which is perhaps like the new Yahoo and AOL making money off the Web. You see, remember those folks that the cynical crowd went West to take advantage of? Access and content are being merchandised.
The portal concept is a good example of that. And I really think I know how they thought up portals. I think some TV ad executives were sitting around one day getting drunk, bemoaning the fact that there wasn't going to be any way to do TV marketing because nobody was going to be watching it anymore and they thought, "you know, they won't be watching their TV's, they'll be watching their PC monitors. Boing! What if we could transform PC's into TV's? And what if we could convert PC users," who are people who are active, proactively engaged in the choices they make about what they will seek out in the Internet using their personal computer, "if we could take those live minds and dull them down a little bit and turn them from users into viewers? Viewers! We know about viewers, we know how to sell to viewers."
This is, I think, what might be called the conversion of the desktop into ad space, you see, selling software was secondary. What you were really selling, what you could really make money doing, is selling the ad space of the desktop. It's not about browsers, folks, it's about whose web channel is at the top of the heap. Who has the best ad space on the desktop? Who do you route, shall we say, the neophyte Internet user to? They don't call them web channels for nothing.
What has been attempted is the counter-revolution: the reversion back to the old ways of mass marketing by co-opting the new technology into an old model of commercial enterprise. It is inherently condescending and patronizing to everybody who has a PC, I like to call it "Bob-think." I don't know how many of you remember that ill-fated attempt by Microsoft to help us. It sort of went like this: "Hi, I'm Bob. I was invented by computer programmers in Redmond. They know all about computers, they're smart. You just bought your computer, you're stupid."
And on that premise, you see the corporate relationship to the user was founded. "You don't know how to navigate the Web. We'll show you where to go, just follow our direction." It was like broadcast TV except, in a way, the crime that had been committed without our knowing was that marketeers had taken the greatest technological invention for the transformation of humankind, the personal computer, and paper-trained us to think of it as a channel changer; and the goal is not necessarily to sell you a TV or a PC, it is ultimately to sell your click.
The click is the unit of commerce. They will sell your click on what you are watching, sell your click to what you are eating, sell your click to what you are spending, sell your click to what amount you are borrowing, sell your click to how much you're breathing, sell your click to what you are buying, and sell your click to what you are thinking. They have turned a technology which is intrinsically liberating into a tool of mass control.
A well-known software corporation that will go nameless, I believe an executive, perhaps without checking with public relations, once said, "we want to collect a "vig" off every click." A vig of course being that percentage paid organized crime for its role in the transaction; which, as you know, of course is no role at all.
It seems to me that we've moved from a time in the Internet, a kind of virtual geographic scenery where we were like the great herds of buffalo running freely and majestically wherever we chose across a wilderness of resources, into a herd of cattle being wedged in single-file, nose-to-rump through the stockyards. "Follow this click to...." "Hi, you are pre-approved for a global premium platinum Visa card. Click only in this infinitesimal button only if you don't want to apply."
I have nightmares about being one of those cattle, being driven, resisting, through the maze of the cattle yard to my end; and that the last thing I hear before the ax falls over my neck is, "you've got mail!"
You know, we probably don't know and never will know what great advances in civilization have been squandered. It may well have been that, fifteen thousand years ago, some benevolent alien species came to earth, looked at us and took pity and said, "We're here to help you. We'll teach you all we know so you people, if we can call you that, can pull yourselves up by your boot straps" (or your thong straps or whatever would have applied); and our ancestors promptly ate them.
We don't know what great technologies have been misunderstood and underappreciated. It may well have been that on Easter Island some native found an antigravity device, used a stick and a couple of strings and, if you vibrated them at a certain resonance against a turtle shell, you could lift those monoliths right up and put them over here. But he was terminated with extreme prejudice and the secret was lost in some sort of monarchy dispute over succession, in which his tribe lost.
But we do know because we live in this time that the Internet is much more than a market, it is a miracle. So how do we prevent the Internet from shrinking down in history from a transforming technology, and a transforming technology is one which changes human civilization, to just dumbing down to another utility which only conveniences the civilization of which it is a part? It is beyond question that the Internet defines our future, that question is behind us. The question before us is, which future does it define?
Will there only be a bandwidth that is bought and sold for its market bandworth? Or will there be a bandwidth that is truly bandworthy, worthy of the genius of the limitless potential of this technology now deployed?
Bandwidth hasn't changed. The electronic frontier hasn't shrunk, we just haven't properly attended to it, we haven't nurtured it. We have been distracted, we have been mesmerized, perhaps, into dismissing what was fundamental in this technology; that is that the Internet is not just a cyber-resource to be plundered, it is a national, no, not national, it is a global treasure to be preserved, and it can be preserved only if we restore ethical and ecological use to the Internet.
Now, ethical use is expressed in business ethics, public opinion and legislation. Simply put, we should support laws and practices in business and commerce and in the professions which reassert and enforce that Internet users are not exploited in their use of the Internet; that they need not give up any form of personal information in exchange for access or service beyond that information which is essential to the performance of that service; and that the marketing of Internet activity, preferences, transactions, Internet use, behavioral patterns, be prohibited. Computer literacy, in truth, is the surest insulation against the dumbing down of the Internet. It is easy to exploit those who lack an education in the possible choices, and the more educated the Internet user becomes, the more skilled in its navigation, the more knowledgeable about how it works and what there is there, the less passive and dependent and vulnerable the public will become.
But truly, above all, we who care about this medium have to again seize the high ground. We have to establish a social project that is worthy of the Internet itself. It is possible to preserve the digital revolution until it becomes the digital renaissance only if we can invigorate again the word's imagination, if we can restore the bandwidth that is bandworthy, that values what is possible over what is a product.
To do that, we first have to think of the Internet as a living system. Really, that's not much of a reach when you consider that what it is today: a quivering membrane of all the knowledge, art, culture, science and language that exists in the world or ever has existed, which is growing exponentially by the day. It is as close to a collective human consciousness as we have yet attained.
And it has an ecology, an equilibrium, just like any other living system that has to balance consumption and restoration. We have to become Internet environmentalists and, in environmentalism, there is a concept called "wise use" which is the principal that the economic value of a natural resource is but one factor, not the only factor, in the calculation of that resource's best use. To measure its value, it has to be seen not only in its economic context but in its biological context. And I'd say to restore that equilibrium to the Internet ecology, we need to reserve and restore an equal share of bandwidth for electronic miracles just as we have preserved a bandwidth for electronic markets. To match to the scale of electronic commerce, in terms of capturing the imagination of the world, it will take a kind of global public good works project, a kind of "Marshall Plan" for the human mind; because this instrument we have, it has the capacity not only to retain and hold to it all the knowledge, culture, language, art, and science of which our world is possessed, but given the public will, it can teach it to anyone who seeks that knowledge. In our preoccupation with business uses for the Web, we have grossly underutilized its capacity to perform as a teaching and learning tool for the whole planet.
We are only one generation away from the ubiquitous airborne global Internet access from every part of the world. Isn't it time we begin to focus on what we have to say to each other? We did that with the PC. Remember, it wasn't about the hardware, it was about the kind of excited interchanges we had with each other, imagining, conjuring up what possibilities, how we could apply this tool, how it could change our lives, what we could we do in our work with it, what we could do in our personal lives with it? And then we went ahead in our offices and we combined together to reorganize ourselves around the principle of how we can share more information and build more efficient, more capable organizations that could leverage small, sophisticated, technologically capable groups against large organizations. We were excited not by the hardware but by the awakening mind. And then, of course, the Internet came and suddenly, we were gifted with the knowledge of strangers. And suddenly, we were thrust into a mindset that said, "what is possible? How we can we accomplish more with this? How can we make this make a difference?" And that alchemy, that crystallization of the energy human beings have to make things better for themselves, that pioneer spirit is what enlivened the technological age, what created the power of the personal computer. So why not take it one scale larger and think as a planet about how we can convey to one another our languages, our know-how, our sciences, our art, and our culture, down to the granular level? And by that I mean that there be no language that any other person speaking any other language could not learn, no technology, no common skill, no craft, from bricklaying to brain surgery,that the world would have in that humming ethereal membrane that circulates around it all the time and everywhere; the capacity to give any knowledge known to mankind to any individual.
It seems a grand dream, but I don't think it seemed any grander than the TVA did when they built the dams. But we are not just building a dam, we're building a river; a river of knowledge on which civilizations could be built. Just like the Fertile Crescent, civilizations form around the fertility brought by the river to the people. And that architecture which is technically and humanly, and perhaps politically possible for our generation would make as a monument to civilization, would make the pyramids seem like grains of sand.
We in our time could galvanize human culture to recognize the transformational potential of a global instantaneous technology and, for the first time, have no physical or economic barriers to teaching each other all we know. This kind of project could be undertaken on every scale. Individuals can consider what they can give to the intellectual commonwealth that would become the Internet. Businesses could imagine how they could contribute their know-how. Governments, foundations, all could be part of this great human enterprise. All can organize around the principle that technology has come to us, finally, that can create a global commonwealth of our collective knowledge.
It would be a grand, global enterprise worthy of the grand technology we possess to begin to write in this generation, and in all future generations, the great electronic world book. Our nation was greatly inspired by our commitment to lift ourselves up to other worlds. Why can we not be equally inspired to lift up this world?
Five generations ago, one of my forebearers was a wagon master. We've always been proud of the fact that one of our ancestors guided people from East to West as they worked their wagons in search of their own dreams, pursuing their own ideals, a personal fulfillment. And if you think about it, the World Wide Web, if you are a pioneer at heart, is a world-wide wagon heading always westward to an unlimited frontier. I know that that Old West wagoneer, that wagon master, would be infinitely proud if his children's children's children could become not wagon masters, but web masters bringing another generation of young and old pioneers toward a different kind of new territory, to reach their goals in a life rich in knowledge and in opportunity, the chance for us all to make our children wiser than we were.
If we can only inspire people to undertake great things with technology the pioneer spirit will be preserved. And that is a great tradition in American society; that is, to pursue against all odds, hardships, and obstacles the achieving of freedom of choice, self-reliance, and the opportunity to better oneself. All of those things were just beyond the horizon for the pioneers moving West. All of those things are just beyond our horizon, if we are willing to travel West with our imaginations.
It's up to us to guide the next generation, to shepherd them to a virtual promise land. It is up to us whether the technological miracle of our time, the capacity to truly, once and for all lift the human race up out of poverty, ignorance, illiteracy, whether that capability, that moment in history at this millennium (which may not again come to us for another millennium), this moment in this time in our lives, by our will, we can decide whether this genius technology will keep all those values dear and preserved, or be lost. That is your birthright as members of the Internet generation; and it is the choice too profound to let anyone make for us. Thank you very much.
Copyright 1999 S.A. Guiberson
