net.wars. - book reviews

Reason, June, 1998 by Nick Gillespie

by Wendy M. Grossman, New York: New York University Press, 236 pages, $21.95

Near where I grew up in New Jersey lie the ruins of a 19th-century Fourierist settlement, a utopian experiment devoted to communal living that lasted about a decade before the participants realized that they simply couldn't bear the sight of each other anymore. My friends and I would ride our bikes past the historical markers and the old foundations and crack jokes about the folly of building paradise in New Jersey, of all places.

The utopian impulse is, of course, one of the bedrock elements of American history and culture. In a real sense, evocations such as John Winthrop's dream of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a "city on a hill" helped create and sustain America, both as an actual historical place and as an imagined location where human beings would somehow be freed from the failings and imperfections they evidenced all too abundantly elsewhere in the world.

Utopias always fail to deliver fully on their promises - and their dismal success rate in American settings has energized memorable fictional treatments ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1852 novel, The Blithedale Romance (which details the author's disheartening experience with the famous Brook Farm commune in Massachusetts), to F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 book, The Great Gatsby (which in its final passages turns to a compelling meditation on the unfulfilled potential of the New World), to Arthur Penn's wonderful 1969 film Alice's Restaurant (which is very loosely based on the Arlo Guthrie song and takes place at a fractious hippie commune). Different schemes fail for different reasons, but one of the main causes is that utopias are typically envisioned as complete, perfect just-so situations; as total, fixed end-states rather than as continuing processes of social evolution, adjustment, and change.

This isn't to say that utopian communities yield no benefits: They provide larger society with all sorts of models, examples, and possibilities for human interaction. The perfect union is perhaps impossibly elusive, but to the extent that America has delivered on its utopian promise, it remains inspired by the pursuit of, to echo the Constitution, "more perfect" unions. That recognition of process, built into the United States' founding document, underwrites whatever success the American "experiment" has enjoyed. Indeed, what my adolescent friends and I failed to recognize was that we were living in Utopia, or at least its kissing cousin - a voluntary association that benefited those who participated. Few of us were natives to either my hometown or even New Jersey. Our parents had moved there for basically the same purpose: the opportunity to build a better life. (For similar reasons, so too would I and most of my friends leave the area in a few years.)

Such an appreciation for process, for the pursuit of "more perfect" social arrangements, informs Wendy M. Grossman's net.wars, a nuanced map to the latest "place" to inspire grand utopian thinking: the Internet, that ethereal and increasingly important worldwide network of computer networks. In exploring the unfolding of cyberspace, particularly "the Net's convulsions over the years 1993 to 1996, as it tried to assimilate huge numbers of new users who didn't share the culture that had been developing over the previous decade," Grossman charts its customs and practices, engages the attitudes of its advocates and its critics, and suggests some of its more likely developments. She also documents how many of the same foibles that disrupt and undermine "real" human communities have been uploaded into our virtual ones, how Net users are groping toward ever-more complex interactions, and how cyberspace is structured to encourage such efforts.

An American journalist living in London, Grossman brings a wealth of professional and personal experience to the material - and a clarity of style and analysis that is a welcome relief from both the hyperbolic prose of many Net boosters and the overwrought jeremiads of cyberphobes. In a characteristic passage, for instance, she writes, "Journalists who don't use the Net themselves routinely make such egregious technological and cultural errors that you can only compare the results to what would happen if they were assigned to write about the interstate highway system based on their experiences at sea.... [I]f the police told you that prostitutes routinely and openly solicited truckers and other visitors to roadside rest areas and that therefore they were risky places for families to visit, you would probably believe them and write the story....At the same time, after a while it's easy to lose perspective and forget that behavior which is common and tolerated on the Net seems shocking to newcomers."

Grossman also shares a widespread, perhaps even modal, mindset among longtime Net users. While cybergurus such as John Perry Barlow, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a cyberspace-oriented civil liberties group, have characterized the Internet as populated by "50 million screaming libertarians," the reality is more complicated and ambivalent. There is no question that in many ways, Net culture parallels much of libertarianism: It is individualistic and tolerant of diverse lifestyles and ideas, comfortable with rapid technological and sociological innovation, and intensely suspicious of government intervention in speech and privacy matters.