The Future of the Internet

This week’s reading was The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain.

I could not help but feel from the very beginning that his comparison between the generative Internet versus the appliancized Internet was elitist rhetoric. Zittrain assumes the vast amounts of technical skill required to program at a fundamental level and criticizes consumer-based software as a tool of authoritarian control. While I recognize Zittrain’s point—that as we abstract the software development further and further from the producer and toward the end-user it becomes increasingly less configurable—I don’t find anything in the way of a solution. That doesn’t mean Zittrain’s call to arms is without merit; it means that he is circumventing the real debate: how much control we will allow the end user—by crying foul.

Obviously the answer is not to train the citizenry in web-based coding. Short of that, what can we do? Zittrain seems more inclined to pinpoint how a compromise will not work rather than consider what sort of regulatory measures, safeguards of industry, and legal restrictions might integrate “the Internet” into our daily lives.

I am not sure what to take away from this text. I understand that the potential for abuse is rampant; that seems to be the case in any adoption of new technology. I doubt any of us today would feel comfortable using a credit card in the late 1970s or early 80s. Did we need a Zittrain then to tell us that the solution was an individual-credit-based-liability system? No. We required intervention, standardization and penalties for laws that were violated.

While Zittrain raises a lot of interesting arguments, he seems to rejoice in throwing up his hands at the problem as though he has uncovered some fundamental fissure in our society. What really are his complaints? That what was once a hobbyist’s pursuit is now the avocation of the mainstream? That interconnectivity is lost on the amateur who fails to recognize the consequences of sharing data?

Zittrain raises interesting insights but seems satisfied to remain a classifier of “the good old days.” For those willing to give Zittrain the benefit of the doubt, I would ask they turn their attention to the three page introduction titled, Solutions. Herein, Zittrain outlines the apparent dilemmas faced by contemporary networks: as the medium becomes more mainstream, the requirement for standardization and ossification increases. Zittrain describes the future of the internet as follows: “Developments then take a turn for the worse: mainstream success brings in people with no particular talent or tolerance for the nuts and bolts of the technology, and no connection with the open ethos that facilitates the sharing of improvements” (150). Perhaps I am not as elite as Zittrain but the sharing of code seems to have begun in a substantial fashion in the 2000’s with the mainstreaming of Linux; hardly a system embraced by the average user.

Perhaps the most baffling exhortation is Zittrain’s insistence that we not adopt “a strategy that blunts the worst aspects of today’s popular generative Internet and PC without killing these platforms’ openness to innovation” (150). Precisely whom does Zittrain believe is developing the PC platform; developing popular websites? The greatest condemnation I can levy against Jonathan Zittrain is that he appears to have no faith in the organic, grass-roots organism that birthed the modern PC. He is quite ready to declare the Linux OS an endangered species only because he ignores how much innovation occurs outside the Windows Intel/Mac OS spectrum. In my opinion Zittrain describes a world that was never so ideal and contrasts it with a world that is not nearly so dire.