The Future of the Internet

I just finished reading Eaarth by Bill McKibben, and found it to be fairly good. It wasn't enjoyable reading, as the topics it deals with - global warming, peak oil, etc. - are very distressing, but the book is honest.

Except for the last two-thirds of the last chapter. The last chapter is devoted to what might be done in the face of the impending catastrophes that await us, and it starts out with some fairly sensible ideas about food. After that, it moves on to energy, but the ideas presented are fairly unimaginative (being mostly what environmentally minded liberals have been promoting for decades - more windmills and conservation, less coal burning) and make no serious effort to rethink the basic idea of our modern energy system, which is based on electricity on demand from a plug in the wall. The energy ideas are ultimately unworkable.

What really stuck in my craw though, was the next section, which touted the internet as necessary and desirable to keep at all costs, primarily as a way to deal with the fact that modern Americans feel it is necessary to be continually entertained. Ultimately, McKibben is making an argument that the internet is necessary and therefore must be kept because of his own particular biases about what constitutes a good life and a world he would like to live in. This is in spite of the fact that the internet meshes very poorly with the logical conclusions of the rest of his book. If ever there was a technology that depends on a stable electrical grid, the internet is it, and a stable electrical grid is something we just aren't going to have as the Long Emergency winds on.

Quoting McKibben:

Which is why, if I had my finger on the switch, I'd keep the juice flowing for the Internet even if I had to turn off everything else. We need cultures that work for survival - which means we need once more to pay attention to elders, to think hard about limits, to rein in our own excesses. But we also need cultures that work for everyone, so that women aren't made servants again in our culture, or condemned to languish forever as secondary citizens in other places. The Net is the one solvent we can still afford; jet travel can't be our salvation in an age of climate shock and dwindling oil, so the kind of trip you can take with the click of a mouse will have to substitute. It will need to be the window left ajar in our communities so new ideas can blow in and old prejudices blow out. Before, you had to choose between staying at home in the place you were born, with all its sensible strictures, and "going out in the world" to "make something of yourself." Our society - restless, mobile, wasteful, exciting, and on the brink - is the product of that dynamism. We can't afford to indulge those impulses anymore, but it doesn't mean we need to shut ourselves in.

Ultimately, in book that does such a good job of coming to grips with the future we may end up getting, this last section about the glories of the internet is a rather astonishing failure of imagination.The existence of the internet has no bearing on whether women are equal citizens or whether we have an open or a closed society; remember, most of the significant gains of the women's rights movement were made before the invention of the PC, and the largest curtailment of civil rights that we have endured in our history has all come since 9/11/01, in an era when the internet permeated every aspect of life.

If we can't imagine a culture that can preserve our most cherished values into the future without depending on something as tenuous as the World Wide Web, then we are in a sorry place indeed.