interfiction
Version
09-07-96
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 95 04:38 MET
X-Sender: pit@uropax.contrib.de
To: if@duplox.wz-berlin.de
From: Pit Schultz
Subject: Review of PFF meeting "CYBERSPACE AND THE AMERICAN DREAM II"
DOCUMENT TITLE: Web Review: Who speaks for cyberspace?
NEWT GINGRICH'S FAVORITE THINK TANK HAD A CYBERSPACE POLICY
SUMMIT THAT -- INSTEAD OF ITS STATED GOAL OF NAVIGATING A NEW
COURSE FOR A NEW COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY -- LEFT CORPORATE SPONSORS
PUZZLED AND UPSET AND OBSERVERS CONCERNED ABOUT THE GROUP'S ARROGANT
ATTITUDE TOWARD THE CITIZENS OF CYBERSPACE.
BUT "CYBERSPACE AND THE AMERICAN DREAM II," THE SECOND SUCH MEETING
HELD BY THE WASHINGTON-BASED PROGRESS AND FREEDOM FOUNDATION (PFF),
WAS IMPORTANT NONETHELESS -- IF ONLY AS AN OFFLINE EXERCISE IN POLITICS
AND THE ATTEMPT TO STAMP GINGRICH'S NEW LIBERTARIANISM ON THE FUTURE
OF CYBERSPACE.
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While PFF president Jeffrey Eisenach may have been pleased with the
conference's emphasis on core Libertarian values like cutting government
regulations and unleashing the free market, he couldn't have been
happy with the reaction from the summit's corporate sponsors.
The sponsors were looking for a conference that would define a
telecommunications policy agenda to carry to Congress. What they got was
characterized by conference attendees as "vaporware" and "cyberbabble,"
occasionally veering off into the bizarre.
[I]
Speaking only on condition of anonymity, one corporate representative
told Web Review that the conference moderator, PFF senior fellow
Michael Vlahos, was "not impartial, was awfully biased. He had a
clear point of view and would not call on certain people." Said a
second sponsor: "The panel had a total lack of realism."
Christopher C. Quarles III, manager for emerging markets at AT&T,
which paid a $25,000 sponsorship fee, said: "AT&T was looking for
something different than what I saw." Referring to the panel members,
he added: "If these people are opinion leaders, maybe I'm stuck in
a Second Wave paradigm but...There was lots of support for my point
of view."
[I]
What drew the sponsors (including America Online, Microsoft, Prodigy,
Compuserve, and the Center for the New West, as well as AT&T) and
national media coverage more usually associated with political conventions
(C-SPAN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles
Times, The Wall Street Journal, and dozens of regional papers) was
PFF's linkage to Gingrich.
"The speaker is making a full-court press to wrestle the cyberspace
mantle away" from the Clinton Administration, "if he hasn't done
that already," said Brian Ek, Prodigy's director of public relations.
[I] The representative of another corporate sponsor, who also demanded
anonymity put it this way: "This is the Progress and Freedom Foundation
-- they are players because of Newt. They are riding the high tide
and money is coming in from all over."
Clearly, what these corporations were looking for was a conference
that would communicate their issues to the Republican-controlled
Congress. "They [PFF] have promised for two years [since an earlier
summit in Atlanta] that they would come up with a set of principles...the
infrastructure owners were there to see what this means to our businesses,
" AT&T's Quarles said.
While Eisenach claimed, in a post-conference interview from his Washington
office, that the objective of the summit was not to "illuminate policy
issues" but rather an "early and seminal gathering of a new tribe,
" PFF conceded to the sponsors in a morning-after meeting that it
would create a statement of principles and a legislative agenda.
The meeting ended in agreement that the sponsors supported the creation
of an "information caucus" to do formal "bridge-building" to Congress.
The PFF also faced criticism from attendees for its "arrogance" in
hand-picking the leaders of cyberspace without asking its citizens.
For example, here's a snippet from the PFF's promotion for the conference:
"The cyberspace community talking to its leaders to frame the debate."
The PFF meeting issued no document to be ratified by "cybercitizens"
(although its [*]MAGNA CARTA FOR THE KNOWLEDGE AGE appeared on the
Net before the summit began). In fact, if you asked around the Web
or logged onto the summit's noticeably quiet [*]INTERACTIVE SITE
you'd find that that this was a conference in search of a constituency.
[I]
PFF, the conservative think tank founded in 1993 by Eisenach, invited
the panel of information and policy "experts" and a smattering of
futurists, visionaries and free-lance pundits to its cyberspace summit
in Aspen, Colorado, August 21 and 22 to discuss "the nature of property
and freedom, the essence of community, the way of the marketplace
and the role of government," in the digital age.
The 25 invited panelists were a strange set of bedfellows. They included
John Perry Barlow, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder
of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and futurist Stewart
Brand, winner of the National Book Award in 1972 for the Whole Earth
Catalog and once-advisor to California Gov. Jerry Brown. They sat,
with panelists from Microsoft, America Online, and Sun Microsystems,
at the same table with George A. Keyworth II, chairman of the PFF
board and former science advisor to President Reagan, and Alvin Toffler,
eminent futurist. Panelists also included writer and EFF director
Esther Dyson, who recently interviewed Gingrich in a story for Wired,
which was represented on the panel by managing editor Kevin Kelly.
[I] During the hours of discussion in the day-long meetings at the
Ritz Carlton, amid about 200 attendees (who paid either the $895
corporate or the $295 nonprofit rate) there were neo-Libertarian
calls for the dismantling of the federal government, and something
else: language that sounded uncomfortably close to that of the right-
wing militias. Some panelists talked about "the old order determined
to crush our community" and ranted about the impending conflict between
the citizens of cyberspace and everyone else that would "end with
blood spilled on the borders."
Communities, panelists mused, will become self-contained city-states,
each with their own rules and not "tyrannized by majority rule,"
with the only law the market-driven economy. Intellectual property,
Dyson said, "will lose value...the value will be in who has it and
access to it."
[I]
If any message emerged from the conference participants, amid the
clicking of keyboards on dozens of laptops and the eerie whine of
modems connecting, it was that abolishing government was a good thing,
since "it's an obsolete technology," according to panelist Eli Noam,
an economist at Columbia University and "completely clueless," according
to Barlow.
But if you listened closely to the short-on-constructive-details
posturing, what you might really have been hearing was the shift
in the wind of Internet politics firmly toward Gingrich's brand of
Republicanism. Judging by the rhetoric around the conference table,
it's a shift toward a politics of intense deregulation in a world
characterized by "benign" market forces.
[I]Though the PFF presents itself as a futurist, Third Wave think
tank, time and again, PFF panelists at the conference emphasized
classic Republican policies based upon the standard that the least
government is the best, deregulation is cool, and free markets should
do their thing.
So if cyberspace should be a free market paradise unencumbered by
government regulation, what if any cyber-safety net will be put in
place? Eisenach said it's not an issue of the have's and have-not's
but the "have's and want-not's." Barlow responded: "...Trying to
throw money or hardware at the unwired is a waste." On the other
hand, Bill Burrington, America Online's director of public policy,
called such discussions absurd. "There will be an incredible class
of people that just won't have [access to technology]. It behooves
the entire industry to get involved."
[*][I]"Cyberspace is a community in formation," Eisenach claimed,
"it is not a community yet." Dropping the names of Madison and Jefferson,
Eisenach invoked the Founding Fathers first meetings as the role
model for the PFF summit.
[I]
In interviews with corporate sponsors, however, Constitutional conventions
and emergent communities were not on anyone's mind. At a meeting
the morning after the summit, participants told Web Review, some
sponsors were concerned and puzzled over the purpose and the results
of the conference. Within diplomatically-couched praise for the "thoughtful
discussions," were complaints that the summit was too futuristic
and theoretical.
Some of the sponsors would only allow themselves to be quoted without
attribution. One sponsor who attended the morning-after meeting said
"AT&T was really steamed, especially when (one panelist) said telephony
is dead." Another corporate representative said "Some of the panelists,
although great theorists and futurists, just don't have a clue,"
(panelist John Perry) Barlow, he's cool and he's hip and all the
'60s stuff, but he doesn't reality-test."
[I]AT&T's Quarles said the corporations were not complaining about
the cost of sponsorship. (AT&T ponied up $25,000; other sponsors
refused to say what they paid to get their logos on the program.)
"We were looking for something different...the participants need
to understand that their freedom (in cyberspace) is brought to them
from heavily regulated infrastructure," Quarles said.
Ek, of Prodigy, said he came away from Aspen saying: "Hey, folks
let's get on with it. I felt the ball could've been moved further...(we)
did not get any action plan...it was long on theory and short on
action...(the panelists) have a long track record, but the mix has
to be different to move it to the next concrete action level."
AOL's Burrington represented a corporate sponsor and was also one
of the summit's panelists. He did not attend the morning-after meeting,
but said in an interview: "I felt that some of the points I made
(during the conference sessions) fell on deaf ears." He added: "I
would have liked to have seen...more practical points. And I heard
the same complaint from many in the audience, that it was too heavy
on theory and impracticalities."
Even more troubling, many of the sponsors said, was the rhetoric
from Barlow, whose comments seemed to many to echo the philosophies
of right-wing militias -- that government is illegal and violent
conflict is inevitable. "The border (between cyberspace and the offline
world) needs protection and blood will be spilled..." Barlow said.
One corporate representative said PFF "wants to be seen as this hip
think tank because Cyberspace is sexy and hot and hip, but most of
what went on at the conference ended up with some kind of government
bashing -- no matter what we talked about."
One PFF official told a sponsor: "If I had my way we would have no
government except for national defense."
[I]A more cautious tone was expressed by the only elected official
on the panel, Representative Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.), who when elected
in a special 1993 vote became the first research physicist ever to
serve in Congress. He was re-elected in 1994. Ehlers, to whom many
on Capitol Hill look for leadership on scientific and technical issues,
praised the conference for exploring "theoretical issues not likely
to be explored in congressional committees."
Ehlers said given "foolishness" like the Exon bill, he understood
why many of the conference participants "don't want congress meddling
in Cyberspace in any way...but what bothered me were the comments
that government was clueless, irrelevant and obsolete."
"I told Eisenach that it would have been helpful if the panel had
more hardware and software industry represented, as well as perhaps
input from government regulators that are involved day to day...and
more members of Congress instead of the predominance of writers on
the issue..."
Ehlers cautioned the panelists during the conference that just because
Cyberspace is different than real space "cultural ethics still apply...If
it wasn't for agreed-upon codes of behavior, things like the Civil
Rights Act would not be enforceable...By and large, government works
because the underlying morality of the people is what law depends
upon."
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Rocky Mountain Hype?
If you didn't make it to Aspen last month for the conference, take
a few minutes to share your thoughts on the PFF, cyberspace, and
libertarian politics, and let us know [*]what you thought of this
article.
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[*] David Hipschman is a contributing editor for Web Review.
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[*][I]
[*]Copyright © Songline Studios, Inc., 1995.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
# Pit Schultz Kleine Hamburger 15 tel +49 30 695 33 81
# pit@contrib.de 10117 Berlin fax +49 30 229 24 29