The Stock Market, Armageddon, the Net & OSS 28
It's easy to lose sight of how much fear new cultures like the Internet can generate, just how unnerved all the people Out There are about all the things people here are learning and doing.
Sometimes, as with the Communications Decency Act, or with journalist's obsession over computer hackers, or politicians' indignation about digitally-driven sexual imagery, the moral backlash is obvious.
At other times it's more submerged. Notice the panic hitting the business community in the weeks after Internet Christmas shopping surpassed expectations.
Or the zooming prices of Internet stocks - Amazon, Yahoo, Intel - which appear to have crazed investors and are pulling financial markets higher and higher, nearly by themselves.
If any response to new technology is more pronounced than fear, it's hype and greed. Amazon.com now trades for more than 50 times the price at which it went public in l997. Ebay, the auction house, is valued at 13 times what its investors paid four months ago. Yahoo is valued at about $39 billion, nearly 100 times its valuation when it first went public, more than Boeing or Anheuser-Busch. "I can't tell you what's going on," an unnerved Wall Street technology analyst told an online trading and financial news service. "I have no idea."
This skyrocketing new valuation of the Internet marks the advent of a new era for the online world. No longer perceived as the playground for cybergurus, hackers, college geeks or fuzzy-head academics, the Internet now has the full attention of decision makers in Washington and on Wall Street. Historically, that's never meant anything good.
This week, the press has been full of Armageddon-like reports of the end of off-line retailing, normal shopping and ordinary work. An NPR station reported that developers are getting nervous about building more malls, since national retailers are increasingly finding online sales easier and more profitable. CBS Radio reported that Land's End was closing some discount outlets, since it was more efficient to liquidate its surplus stock online, and laying off hundreds of employees.
In an editorial page essay headlined "What Will the Internet Economy Look Like?," the New York Times suggested the answer will be grim. Property values will fall as stores close, "creating a glut of retail space and falling rents as Internet sales represent transactions not made in stores." Thousands of jobs would evaporate with them, along with state and municipal budgets, deprived of sales tax revenues.
The stock market, warned the Times, hasn't yet anticipated the economic dislocations that would come along with an Internet economy. "A recession could easily result just from the upheavals created by filing retailers and plunging commercial real estate values."
The creators of popular culture are, inevitably beginning to express these fears about technology as entertainment. In movies like the "Net," the humans are portrayed as dangerously -even murderously-isolated by computer technology. In "Enemy Of The State" geeks are given their most powerful and evil starring role yet, as morally oblivious, enthusiastic manipulators of privacy-invading, freedom-depriving -- and also murderous -- government technology. Even "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" showed the Net as a super-highway for witches in the already vampire and demon-haunted town of Sunnyvale.
The history of technology suggests that periods of enormous technological growth, such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, are followed not only by periods of religious and moral upheaval, but also by periods of slower technological growth and greater stability, as humans try and digest the new things in their life.
But so far, at least, the Internet has defied history. No one imagined that the Internet would spring from ARPANet, or that the Net would give birth to the World Wide Web. Like that wretched rabbit, it just keeps on going and going.
The Internet is the first organic technological revolution, the first one that and self-replicates. The number of things that can be done on the Net and Web only increases each day, from e-mail to MP3's to OSS to Videostreaming, to intuitive search engines and voice recognition software. On the Net, it's impossible not to see a culture that, far from slowing down, is only beginning to grow. And most Americans aren't even online yet.
If history is any useful guide, it suggests not that the technological change brought about by computing will halt or slow, but that the fear and hostility it engenders will intensify.
Still, no technological or other force can meet the insanely over-hyped financial expectations suddenly surrounding the Internet. Drooling investors and manipulable business reporters ought to consider the history of technology - some of the hype will come true, but not nearly all of it. When the dust settles, most people will still shop in stores and malls, still want to get some pizza and see a movie afterwards, and still want to see most of what they buy before they buy it.
Life will continue in recognizable form, and lots of investors are going to get roasted alive. It would be almost unbelievably ironic if what brought the soaring stock market down wasn't the collapse of the economy, but the inevitable return to earth of extraterrestrial expectations about the financial performance of Net companies. Perhaps some of those fears about the Internet are justified after all.
One symptom of a profound stress affecting modern thought, writes political scientist and technology historian Langdon Winner, is the growing prevalence of the idea - seen almost daily in media and public perceptions of the Internet - of autonomous technology. This is the belief that somehow technology has gotten out of control and follows its own course, independent of human direction. That this notion is patently bizarre hasn't prevented it from becoming a central obsession of the twentieth century.
There are several important reasons why the Open Source Software movement is an idea whose time has come, and whose message needs to be spread beyond the brainy geeks inventing, improving and distributing it. The notion of autonomous technology is one of those reasons.
OSS promises to give individuals some sense of perceived and real control of their technology. It offers real security: it isn't an out of control force that threatens their way of life, but a vital new tool of technological empowerment, a means of feeling - and being - in control. Operating systems like Linux aren't something a corporation sells and that people use without ever fully understanding it. They represent, instead the rarest idea in all technology: an important tool that people built for themselves, and can improve collectively and for free. And that companies can use to understand and deploy new technologies efficiently and wisely.
As the Net continues to grow at as a rapidly evolving, sometimes even frightening engine of social, cultural and commercial change, so will the hostility of diminished, even endangered institutions in politics, information and commerce: politics, journalism, the music industry, institutional stockbrokers, to name just a few contemporary examples.
At such a time, and for all sorts of good and obvious reasons, people need to feel in control of their own lives. They need to answer yes to philosopher Paul Valery's elemental question about technology: "Can the human mind master what the human mind has made?"
you can e-mail me at jonkatz@bellatlantic.net
Yes, and...? (Score:1)
Economic Theory (Score:1)
Deal with it. --> good article though.
Re: no flames please (Score:1)
Even if Jon Katz is not a 'true nerd' himself, can he not appeal to nerds? Of course he has, he has proven that. If you don't like his articles, don't read them. Its easy to skip right over articles on
One of the important lessons of life is to deal with things you don't like. Theres lots of things I don't like (like Win95 @ work), but yet I'm able to deal with them.
Just a thought not a flame.
Historical perspective (Score:1)
First of all, I don't think the net is the most radical technology ever to be created by human society. Think of the dislocations the following inventions caused:
control of fire
the wheel
the steam engine
telephone
control of electricity
transistor
Every age likes to thing of itself as the "mostest" in human history. Fact is I don't think there are many things that were invented over the past 30 years that were truly dislocating. Email isn't a radical form of communication vis-a-vis alternatives that already existed. It amy be more convenient or faster, but it isn't a dislocating technology. The telephone was. We all think of the telpehone as something mundane, we take it for granted. But it was truly civilization changing invention.
Moreover, the fear of technology destroying its creator is not a twentieth century invention by any means. i would go back to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, but that's not going back far enough. She was certainly influenced by the myth of the Golem and many similar myths in many human cultures. Human society has always feared technology and change, no doubt going back to the days when humans first created tools.
Having said that, Jon is 100% correct in noting that the pace of technology ebbs and flows, and that in periods of rapid change fear and resentment (which often generates malicious mystical religious fervor) grow. The Open Source movement is a direct descendant of 18th century enlightment philosophy which believed that the spread of knowledge is the best way to allow human society to control its destiny. The American founding fathers were greatly influenced by this philosophy. It is no coincidence that the radical religious right tries to undermine the public school system, which should be the means of public enlightment (in the 18th century sense, not in the New Age sense).
Those of us involved in Internet technology should dedicate ourselves to use it as a tool for empowerment and education in the best sense of the word.
Net retailers are tapping agouraphobic market. (Score:1)
More depth, less filling.
Non-geek control (Score:1)
In a way, this is the strongest argument I've come accross for the idea that proprietary software is immoral, rather than simply practical (as ESR seems to argue).
OSS and autonomous technology (Score:1)
On the one hand, yeah, of course there are social constructs controlling the way OSS works. It's certainly not possible to equate gift culture with individual control or anything like that.
But this kind of thing has been going on forever -- cultures aren't individuals, they never have been and never will. Which also means that it's thouroughly wrong-headed to think that just because technology controls aspects of our lives that we've lost something. We might have, but that remains to be shown. My feeling is that what's necessary is responsiveness. If the culture (or in this case, technology) is responsive to the needs and desires of individuals in some reasonable proportion to the degree to which it controls the individuals (and it always will control individuals, though it can be very hard to decide how & to what degree), that's a good thing. Frankly, OSS seems to me to be more likely to be responsive in this way than more proprietary models.
veeery nice (Score:1)
Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from
grey skies. good! (Score:1)
Lack of focus? (Score:1)
Introduction to Risk: (Score:1)
For those of you who manifet more balls than the increasingly apocalyptic and generally squeamish Jon Katz, there's money to be made. Quite a bit in fact.
The SAS have it right - "He who dares, wins".
About time.... (Score:1)
Leilah
Race to the bottom (Score:1)
Wow. This sounds very hopeful, actually. Jobs evaporate all the time -- guess what, there are other jobs. The real good part is part where the net economy deprives governments of tax revenue. That part is real enough -- just look at the way that big manufacturers, for instance, play off states and locales looking for the best tax break package, bribes, etc. in order to move there.
If most commerce moves to the net, it still needs physical warehouses in real places, staffed by real people. Potential tax base. But these will be moveable in a way that your local Walmart isn't. And that means cash starved governments. A good thing.
on misplaced technophobias (Score:1)
contrary to what katz seems to be saying in the posting, it's not at all apparent that oss by itself is going to make technology any less frightening.
it's not the things we control (or think we control) that terrify us, but those that we can't control. software is something we (still) have a hold on - for example, there are always people capable of writing operating systems, and there will always be alternatives to windows. but it's things we have no control over - the tons of our personal information being stored in huge private databases, the increased reliance on systems that were explicitly not designed for mission-critical performance(*) - that are truly terrifying.
exactly because we have no impact on them, but they have a great impact on us.
---
(*) remember the problem with a paging network satellite from a few months back?
Sounds Familiar (Score:1)
You just described every episode of Star Trek that was ever made.
Sounds Familiar (Score:1)
You just described every episode of Star Trek that was ever made.
Hindsight is always 20/20 (Score:1)
I have utter faith in the human ability to act individually and as a group to make lives better. We've learned some pretty hard lessons since the Industrial Revolution, and we won't forget them any time soon.
Just because we have this ability (hackers especially!) to bring smiles to our friends and our family, doesn't mean that all of us choose to use it.
Until 1998, I had to be content with making sure my congresspeople were making the right decisions for me, and then I heard that Netscape was going open source. Now it's our turn, and we have control; we have that ability to make people look and say, "that's great! I can use that."
Go change someone's life today with what you can do :)
Hmmmm (Score:1)
I do think you're right that in-person shopping isn't going away anytime soon, since as you say, most Americans aren't on the Net yet. In any case, I think most people have a higher comfort level with buying some things (clothes, for example) in a store where they can examine and try on the merchandise.
Internet Stocks (Score:1)