Freedom & Control on the Electronic Frontier

The scene opens with slow-motion National Geographic-style images of Third World people and violent political unrest. It cuts to shots of White soldiers, First World governments, ancient architecture, corporate work, Buddhist monasteries and serene landscapes. All the while, a soothing and powerful male voice narrates:

"The revolution is in our destiny. This revolution, however, will not be fought with guns or swords. It will not be a war of words or of countries. This revolution will be about knowledge and access. About progress and opportunity. It would use information networks to make computing simple, more efficient and vastly more affordable... Where do we come in? We make the software that manages this information - that will enable anyone, anywhere to sit in the seat of knowledge. Oracle: enabling the information age."

In 1998 the utopian promise of the Internet was being aggressively marketed in North America. Oracle first broadcast the above "Revolution" advertisement (download here), and corporations like Cisco Systems ("Are You Ready?"), Microsoft ("Where Do You Want To Go Today?") and Nortel Networks ("Come Together") were following similar marketing strategies.

At the same time, the popular press focussed on issues of online privacy and hate propaganda. Libertarian positions on absolute freedom and (self) control of information clashed with legislative attempts to define and regulate problematic information.

If we follow Lessig (1999:4-8), we should not be surprised that cyberspace can be regulated by government. He conjures cybernetics - the root word of cyberspace - as the "vision of perfect regulation... a better way to direct" and he points out the contradiction in our "celebration of noncontrol over architectures born from the very ideal of control."

And he also introduces a temporal and transitional aspect - cyberspace is changing. The issues of freedom and control on the electronic frontier are being negotiated right now. Foundational values are threatened and new forms of governance are emerging.

"[T]he invisible hand of cyberspace is building an architecture that is quite the opposite of what it was at cyberspace's birth. The invisible hand, through commerce, is constructing an architecture that perfects control - an architecture that makes possible highly efficient regulation... Values that we now consider fundamental will not necessarily remain. Freedoms that were foundational will slowly disappear... In cyberspace we must understand how code regulates - how the software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is regulate cyberspace as it is... We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental, or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear. There is no middle ground. There is no choice that does not include some kind of building. Code is never found; it is only ever made, and only ever made by us" (Lessig 1999:10).

Lessig's message is crucial. Cyberspace is a spatial and temporal construct - a place - that we are always already building.

The Internet vs. The Web

In order to examine the building taking place, we need to make the distinction between two often-conflated terms: the Internet and the Web. According to MainNet's I-Net Guide,

"the Internet is a library of information. In simplest terms possible, the Internet is a collection of protocols and smaller sub-networks all joined together. Within these sub-networks, volumes and volumes of information is hosted. The World Wide Web is part of the Internet. The web is one way of accessing those volumes of hosted information. You could think of the web as a gateway to all of the information floating around in cyberspace. The Internet is information, the web is an interface."

Although the difference can be quantitatively understood in terms of hardware and software, qualitative differences emerge in terms of usage. The Internet began as packet-switching technologies within the late-50s American military-industrial complex (Abbate 1999). Until the early 1980s, the Internet served a largely research-based community, using e-mail and file transfer protocols (FTP). In 1984, the Domain Name System (DNS) was introduced and moderated newsgroups entered USENET (Hobbes 2000; Kitchen1998; Ward 2000). The 80s Internet was dominated by communities like the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL), Multi-User Dungeons/Domains (MUDs) and Multi-User Dimensions, Object Oriented (MOOs). These social spaces were self-regulated by codes of conduct, yet remained fiercely loyal to promises of disembodied communication, freedom and the politics of non-intervention (see Holmes 1997; Jones 1995; Jones 1998; Shields 1996). The founding communities of cyberspace valued the free sharing of information and open-source software, considering them to be integral to technological and social innovation.

Politics entered cyberspace in 1990 when the Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded. These libertarian positions were challenged in 1991 by the founding of the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) Association. In 1992 the World Wide Web interface was released, and in 1993 the Mosaic browser replaced the need for knowledge of programming code to access the Web - cyberspace became accessible to the layperson. By 1995, domain names were no longer free and the commercial promise of the Web was well underway. In 1996 the United States attempted to pass the Communications Decency Act - a sweeping proposal for Internet content regulation. And John Parry Barlow issued his infamous "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace."

By the late 1990s, the Internet had effectively shifted from its use by small, participatory communities to become, in public consciousness, the World Wide Web. And the Web is a qualitatively different social space from the Internet of communities like the WELL. Most importantly, the World Wide Web is proprietary - people own parts of it and they are not shared. Founded as a commercial venture, the Web has more in common with a shopping mall than with prior online communities. The potential for surveillence and control is considerably higher, and regulation has been built into the architecture.

Currently, there are four domains of law which apply in cyberspace: libel, slander, copyright (intellectual content) and property (DNS). One cannot defame another's character or actions in text or images; one cannot copy hardware, software or files without the author's permission; and one cannot access or alter domain content without the owner's permission. Additional regulations concerning hate propaganda and freedom of speech, child pornography and privacy of information are currently being negotiated internationally.

The Case of Hackers

In order to demonstrate how the values of the early Internet communities conflict with the values of the commercial and proprietary Web, this project will focus on the practice of hacking and the construction of the hacker in popular discourse.

If the hacker is understood as the archetypal cyber-citizen, transitions in the meaning and practice of hacking can, in part, be correlated with the larger shift from Internet to Web communications. These changes can provide a cautionary tale - of what we have already lost and what we may yet stand to lose in the digital revolution.

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