Hubert L. Dreyfus - On the Internet. A Review
What happens when an old philosophy professor goes online? The results could be invaluable but chances are considerable he or she misses the [1]point Berkeley professor Hubert L. Dreyfus centers his study On the Internet around an unfortunate misunderstanding that with the Net, we will soon leave our bodies behind.
For Dreyfus, Internet equals Hans Moravec plus Max More times John Perry Barlow plus Ray Kurzweil, yet doesn't make clear why exactly this faction would have the legitimate position to define what the Internet is. He then sets out to deconstruct this presumably dominant Platonic wish to leave behind the body, without analysing in detail the specific political, economic and cultural agenda of this tendency and its relationship to different new media discourses.
Dreyfus confuses very [2]particular extropian cyber dreams of "disembodiment" with the Internet as such. No Internet agency promises "that each of us will soon be able to transcend the limits imposed on us by our body." There may be many competing ideologies fighting over the hegemony of the Internet discourse such as pragmatism, communitarianism, and liberalism but none of them promise that cyberspace will bring the super- and infra-human. Instead, people argue over globalization and the disappearance of the nation state, but Dreyfus carefully routes around such economic and political themes.
The mantras of becoming virtual
According to Dreyfus "life in and through the Web may not be so attractive after all." He is not alone in this judgement. After an initial period of curiosity and excitement, Dreyfus' reassessment of the Internet coincides with the hangover of post-bubble period. In such a cultural climate a conservative backlash can easily gain popularity. It may be liberating relief for some that there is more to life than the Internet, but such a truism can hardly be the foundation for a philosophical investigation.
It seems tempting to mix up popular culture motives of virtual reality with the rather dull Realpolitik of network architecture. So why can't philosophers make the distinction between substance and appearance? The advertisement is not the product, no matter how hard public relations managers may repeat New Age mantras of becoming 'virtual'. Body politics may have been significant at some point but can nowhere near cover the variety of all too real issues the Internet as a global medium faces. The Internet is not in need of 're-embodiment' but cries for a strong coalition, able to update and defend core values such as openness and access. For instance, philosophers are in great need to help define the underpinnings of open source and free software such as 'freedom' and 'property'. Many can't hear the simplistic talk of 'free' as in 'free beer' anymore. Or was it 'free speech'? Is [3]geek culture really as dazed and confused as it seems or is there more significance behind the Richard Stallman-Eric Raymond [4]controversy? This would be an ideal case of techno-philosophy that wants to do a proper study of mankind online.
Dreyfus develops his version of 'net criticism' in four different fields:
In principle such topics could be relevant, yet they do not address contemporary concerns. As a conscious outsider Dreyfus gets stuck on the surface level of yesterdays mythologies. There is no mention of pressing issues such as free vs. proprietary software, domain name politics, dangers of corporate takeovers, cryptography and censorship, the 'digital divide' or intellectual property. The control over the network architecture must have been too mundane for Dreyfus.
In response, the same could as well be said of Dreyfus' main preoccupation: the body. Internet critics had looked into the mythological disembodiment dreams of 90s cyberculture. At the times this particular science fiction futurism was used to popularize and electrify the yet unknown 'cyberspace'. There had been a lot of speculations about 'virtual bodies'. However, by 2001, the year Dreyfus' pamphlet appeared, the excitement and curiosity for the disembodiment had faded away. From early on there had been thorough (feminist) 'embodiment' critiques of the male dreams to leave the 'messy' body behind, none of which Dreyfus mentions. In the meanwhile a whole range of artist practices had been developed which left the Extropians tendency far behind, developing a critical 'body politics' within the virtual arena.
The nihilist medium
Not surprisingly Hubert Dreyfus outs himself as a cultural pessimist. To be more precise, he is a media ecologist comparable to Neil Postman, George Steiner, Peter Handke and others. The deluge of meaningless information disgusts media ecologists. Nonsense should be banned (not filtered). It is the high task of sovereign intellectuals to rule what can, and should not enter the media archive. Media ecologists dream of an authoritarian enlightenment regime in which chatting and rambling are serious offences. Along these lines, Dreyfus denounces the World Wide Web as a nihilist medium as he complains:
| "Thanks to hyperlinks, meaningful differences have been leveled. Relevance and significance have disappeared. And this is an important part of the attraction to the web. Nothing is too trivial to be included. Nothing is so important that it demands a special place." (p.79) | ||
There is no mention here of users and groups creating their own meaning and context on the Net. Dreyfus apparently never heard of mail and web filters. As a small child, wandering around in the library, touching the shelves, Dreyfus is overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of accessible information that doesn't make sense to him: "One can view a coffee pot in Cambridge, or the latest super-nova, study the Kyoto Protocol, or direct a robot to plant and water a seed in Austria."
In fear of the Digital Commons
With J.S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, Dreyfus fears the tyranny of the Digital Commons. The origins of media are traced back to Soeren Kierkegaard's 1846 "The Present Age." (cf. Dreyfus' Lecture: [5]"Kierkegaard on the Information Highway"
Kierkegaard, a 19th-century christian philosopher, blames the 'levelling' of society to the public ("everything is equal in that nothing matters to die for it"). What he, and with him Dreyfus really fears and disgusts, is democratic nothingness. The public and the press, these days renamed in 'the media' and 'the Internet' should not be allowed to celebrate radical uselessness. Instead the elites should restrict the public sphere and direct the masses towards progress, war, socialism, globalization, or whatever is on the agenda.
| "Kierkegaard would surely have seen the Internet, with its websites full of abonymous information from all over the world and its interest groups that anyone in the world can join without qualifications and where one can discuss any topic endlessly without consequences, the high-tech synthesis of the worst features of the newspaper and the coffeehouse. (...) In news groups, anyone, anywhere, any time, can have an opinion on anything. All are only too eager to respond to the equally deracinated opinions of other anonymous amateurs who post their views from nowhere (...) No experience or skill is required to enter the conversation." (p.78, 79, 120) | ||
Who will decide what is sense and non-sense? Internet enthusiasts point at the crucial difference between old media, based on scarcity of channels, resources and editorial space and the Net with its infinite possibilities of parallel conversations. For the first time in media history the decision over the sense/nonsense has been moved from the medium and its editors to the individual user. Dreyfus doesn't mention the opportunities and problems that come with this important techno-cultural shift. In the end this debate is about freedom of speech. Dreyfus doesn't want to openly raise the sensitive topic who is going to judge content. Censorship should probably come from within the Self, as voluntary self-restraint over the daily information intake and production.
According to Kierkegaard and Dreyfus as well, salvation can only come from the "religious sphere of existence", experienced in the real world. If a pure and unmediated world ever existed (or should, in the form of "reality parks"), one has to doubt. 'Real' and 'virtual' are becoming empty categories. A call for a return to the 'real' can only be nostalgic and makes itself irrelevant, as it is runs away from the present fights over the future of the global network architecture. What is needed is a radical democratization of the media sphere.
There is no reality behind the virtual, no bodies left, outside the machine. The Internet has by now become an invisible part of everyday life, comparable to the vacuum cleaner. As Manuel Castells points out in The Internet Galaxy, there is no return possible to an era before the network society: The Network is the Message.
Hubert L. Dreyfus, On the Internet, London/New York: Routledge, 2001. 136 pages, Euro 15,91
Links
[1] http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/rtf/dreyfus_cv_5_00.rtf
[2] http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/co/2041/1.html
[3] http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html
[4] http://www.openresources.com/documents/index.html
[5] http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/lecs/kierkegaard.html
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