Let's just dip our fingertips into this brimming cornucopia of digital bounty, shall we? Government abuse of confidential files. Software piracy on pirate bulletin boards. Canadian judicial gag rules on cases flouted by people on the Internet. The CIA, the NSA trolling the Internet for anything they might find useful. The French secret service bribing and supplying money to the Chaos Computer Club. Cryptography scandals, just no end to those; crypto has more scandals and screw-ups and bonehead moves than a 24 hour festival of the Three Stooges.
Oceans of money sloshing around. Telephone companies buying cable companies, software companies buying cellphone companies, computer companies buying parts of the radio spectrum. Internet startups offering voice phone software, telephone companies offering Internet hookups. Software patents, algorithm patents. Computer search and seizure practice. Spamming scandals, virus scandals. Poisoned JAVA applets - bad applets - rotten applets.
I've watched this stuff going on for years now. A pattern is emerging. It's amazing how little is ever decided, how little there is to show at the end of the day. Everything is temporary, all band-aids and toothpicks. Every once in a while there's a solemn edict from on high, something like America's Communications Decency Act, a ridiculous gesture with absolutely no connection to reality. Quite often some small and innocent person is inconvenienced, insulted or even crushed by the blind mechanisms of the powers-that-be, but that changes nothing. Events that might become case law or policy are treated merely as traffic accidents on the Internet. "What, they arrested him? Too bad! What, they might arrest me too? Ha ha ha! Forget it!"
People who like computers are really smart. They're bright, imaginative and inventive people. They also work hard, they are quick studies and they tend to have quite a lot of money and to deploy it with gusto and relish. Despite these manifest virtues, these bright, inventive computer people are some of the worst organizers in the world. They can't organize a bridge party without wanting to change the cards half-way for a colorful graphic-intensive Tarot deck. Everybody wants to be the symbolic analyst, nobody wants to empty the ashtrays and make the hors d'oeuvres. They're hungry all right, but they don't want to fill the sink, roll up sleeves and do the dishes. Too slow, too dirty, too analog. Can't we just order Chinese take-out and have it faxed in?
Instability is the congenital disorder of the lords of the Information Society. It's their version of the mark of Cain. Even the pathetic brainwashed victims of corrupt Christian televangelists can out-organize computer people. They don't want to build their own system, fill the potholes and root out the sewers. They want to hack the old system overnight and scamper off with unearned rewards. That's why Ross Perot, a textbook case of a megalomaniacal computer tycoon, thinks he can make himself President by skipping any actual political career and making gestures on a TV talk show.
Computer activists react in deep existential horror at the thought of political scutwork, patiently testifying to subcommitees, lobbying legislators. Actual politics is beneath them. They want to sit down at the console, hit alt-control- F2 and have a law come out. The price of liberty is said to be eternal vigilance - but that's a pretty steep price, isn't it? Can't we just automate this eternal vigilance thing? Maybe we can just install lots of 24-hour networked videocams.
The Information Society is not at all a friendly environment for the knight in gray flannel armor, the loyal employee, Mr Cog, the Organization Man. This guy is dwindling like the bison, because we can't be bothered to support him and yet we still want his territory. We don't want to guarantee this guy anything, because we probably won't be around ourselves when he needs us. We Information Age types lack the patience for actual corporations, so we prefer nice, flimsy, gilded-pasteboard virtual corporations. In virtual corporations, there are no corporate power pyramids and no lines of accountability. That's exactly why people like virtual corporations in the Information Society - amazing stuff happens and huge sums change hands, and yet no one can be held responsible. Your average high-tech start-up is one of those decentralized, empowered, Third Wave organizations. Something like a mafia. Not the old-fashioned mafia where people swore loyalty till death, though. No, it's new and postmodern, like the Russian Mafia.
It's the Silicon Valley ethos. People in Silicon Valley prefer to work for a company for two years and then bail. They don't want to creep up dull and tiresome corporate ladders. I don't blame 'em, because I sure never did it, but they have developed a hack for this. They place their bets on a bunch of different start-ups, and then have one hit big and dump a load of cash in their laps. The idea of being morally, fiscally and socially responsible for your professional activities over a twenty or thirty year period is completely anathema to Silicon Valley people, to electronic frontier people. They really do have a frontier mentality - a brave, optimistic, can-do, strip-mining, clear- cutting mentality. They don't eat what they kill.
People as bright as really bright computer people just can't stand to do boring things for a long boring time. They fear and despise concepts like political party discipline, institutions, armies.
That's why the Internet is not at all like an army. An army is a vast machine for forcing somebody's unwilling flesh into the meatgrinder. It gets results by forcing results with blood and discipline and bayonets. The internet is a vast machine for finding somebody else to write your term paper for you. It gets results by mechanically sifting through enormous heaps of useless gibberish. You pay your money and you take your choice.
The Internet is out of control. No one is responsible for it. This is its most charming aspect. It's that sense of wizardry, that dionysian quality, the spontaneous way it accretes, the way it spreads on the wind all over the place, much like bread mold. People really enjoying watching phenomena that are out of control, especially when they're at a safe distance, like behind the glass of a computer screen. It's a fine spectacle, a truly noble spectacle, a 105% genuine vision thing, one of the very few aspects of contemporary society which isn't transparently motivated by bald greed and ruthless opportunism. People lean on the Net and believe in it with a conviction all the stronger because there is so little else left for them to believe in. They don't mind that it's out of control, when the things that are in control are commonly bent to such sordid ends.
Of course, living in a way which is genuinely out of control is a rather different business. People like to be out of control for, like, the space of a Mardi Gras weekend. After that they want a back rub and some money. They start looking around for their house shoes. If they can't find them they start getting anxious. And justly so.
People in the Information Society are adaptable and fast on their feet. They're all road warriors with laptops. They don't need a big clunky ranch house with a white picket fence; they're living out of the back of a Ferrari. Which is very cool. Unless your grandmother loses her ranch house because the entire economy has downsized and devolved into a viral mess. Then your grandmother decides that she has to move into the back seat of the Ferrari with you. Then you and your fleet-footed highly wired lifestyle look a tad less cozy. It becomes a tad hard to tell the jetsetters from the gypsies in that situation.
All this free-floating anxiety you've been feeling suddenly comes home to roost. Who's logging those frequent-flyer miles, and who's merely homeless? It's great to cut fine distinctions between the keyboard punching virtual class and the rust-belt lumpenproletariat, but a real no-kidding aristocracy has a host of ways to tell Us from Them. The Information Age doesn't have that, it moves too fast for elegant manners. In the Information Age, you can be a physicist with four post-docs and still drive a cab. It's market-driven this and market driven that, market-driven dog and market-driven cat. In the Information Society, the invisible hand of the market isn't a human hand. It never was, but now its nature is obvious. It's some kind of spastically twitching titanium-coated manipulator.