Recently we all got a good laugh out of a Newsweek article, “Hype Alert: Why Cyberspace Isn’t, And Never Will Be, Nirvana,” written in 1995 by the otherwise brilliant Clifford Stoll. Even Stoll himself seemed to get a bit of a laugh out of it after Three Word Chant disinterred it and Boing Boing broadcast it to its worldwide audience. But I am going to jump to his defense.
Many moons ago, I read Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg, the story of how he hunted a “spy” who tried to sell intelligence gained by exploiting security gaps in internetworked computers to the KGB. (The story of this “spy,” Markus Hess, is told in the excellent film 23.) Being a geek, I loved Stoll’s book, so I decided to read everything else by him that I could get my hands on. My local library had Silicon Snake Oil, his 1996 book that elaborates his argument in the Newsweek article. True, there are passages in the book which are just embarrassing with 20/20 hindsight. For instance, Stoll argues in the book that email communication is undependable and that postcards reach their recipients more quickly and reliably. He gives an account of an experiment he undertook to prove this to boot. Despite inherent weaknesses of email communication, this is of course utter nonsense.
But the main point of the book is the hype alert: technology cannot solve all our problems. Writing in the mid-1990s, Stoll was not only responding to the triumphalist information superhighway cant spurred on by then-Vice President Al Gore, but also to changing attitudes toward basic social goods like education. The idea that these goods should be provided in noncommodified form had been taking a beating for well over a decade at this point, but it took Clinton and Gore and their Democratic Leadership Council goons and other purportedly apolitical policy wonks to really transform the mindset across the political spectrum. Let’s call this the rise of wonkism. (Not coincidentally, the term “policy wonk” became an established part of the political vocabulary with the ascendancy of Clinton and Gore, making the front page of The New York Times for the first time in July 1992.) After the rise and triumph of the wonkists, the salient questions of public debate were rarely questions of politics—that is, of how the general set-up could and should be formed—but of policy, of how to solve problems within the given set-up. Derided now as “ideology,” wonkists regarded big questions as passé in the post-ideological age that the 1990s heralded. Instead, they valued the technical fix. A slightly different way to put this is that U.S. society transformed from a society of discipline into a society of control.
But what does all this have to do with Cliff Stoll? Stoll, in railing against “interactive libraries,” “multimedia classrooms” and “electronic town meetings,” insists that the technical fix will not save civic institutions, least of all schools. “Who needs teachers when you’ve got computer-aided education? Bah.” Curmudgeonly? Sure. But what has the last decade or so taught us? The technical fix, not so much in the shape of multimedia classrooms but as incessant standardized testing, really did zilch to save public education. On the contrary, it just exacerbated the crisis. In fact, the chief architect of this technocratic indicator-based policy now argues against it. Perhaps hiring more teachers and training them well would have been a better use for all that money than shiny new technology. And at the end of the day, that was Cliff Stoll’s point.
We should not be too smug. Sure, e-books are a reality, contra Stoll’s 1995 claim, as are virtual communities, useful reference sites, and more. But a little negative thinking, skepticism and, frankly, curmudgeonliness is needed in face of triumphalist proclamations that technological innovation suffices to build a good society and a more just world. Not just in the naïve post-cold war 1990s, but to this very day.
