The New York Review of Ideas » Reviews | June 2009
iPhone Nation
The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain.
By Derrick Koo
Zittrain’s solutions range from regulatory—modifying patent and copyright laws to allow greater innovation without fear of reprisal, while also better defining legal options for infringed parties, for example—to more user-oriented. Many potential abusers could be discouraged by the age-old social measures of embarrassment and exile, he says. Websites such as eBay and Wikipedia, with their rudimentary but effective user reputation systems, prove the power that social reputation can have in discouraging abuse.
Zittrain’s proposed solutions are optimistic in that they require the widespread adoption of new standards on the part of Internet users. Aside from the use of the law to guide companies’ and users’ behavior, he also proposes that social “norms” be better defined on the Web. One example could be to shift toward “unsheddable identity tokens,” instead of the disopsable psuedonyms that nominally identify Internet users today. Fewer people would be willing to flaunt the law without the armor of anonymity. Give users the tools to police themselves, Zittrain says, and they will do so better than any proprietary system of perfect enforcement.
Easier said than done, he acknowledges. The main issue: does anyone care? After all, the advantages of non-generative systems like the iPhone can be pretty self-evident. And pretty damn sexy, too.
The biggest shortcoming of Zittrain’s argument is that he may be preaching to the choir. He and his colleagues at the Berkman Center are writing volumes about the dangers of killing the open Web, but it seems like a debate taking place in the middle of an empty forest. If, in the end, they’re the only ones left singing generativity’s virtues, will anyone else realize what’s been lost?
For generativity to survive, says Zittrain, we’ll have to wake up to the dangers of losing it. We’ll have to learn generativity’s value and understand its shortcomings, and realize that it’s more fragile than we might think. We must balance a naïve sense of optimism in the good faith and creativity of humanity with a cynicism borne of the lessons that spam, identity theft, malware and other negative forces have taught us. And we must know that technology doesn’t have to be controlled by someone else—that we can be its creators, its guardians and its users. This is the other future of the Internet, says Zittrain, and it hasn’t slipped out of our grasp just yet.
But it’s looking more unlikely every day, with the relentless march of non-generativity and the lack of awareness on the general public’s part. For now, though, maybe I’ll hold off on buying that iPhone for just a bit longer. ♦