Bubbles (RCAH 292)

Now Serving Sad Face

The immediate concern I have with John Eger's theory of creativity and economy is its unwarranted optimism. The idea that humanity is naturally progressing to a new era of prosperity and creativity, and that the United States' massive job losses due to outsourcing can be saved by Silicon Valley, seems to be evoking the blind and historically embarrassing predictions of the enlightenment. It was once popular to assert that the industrial revolution would eventually lead to a utopian world, where automation and mass production would provide enough for everyone. We've certainly seen, particularly after World War Two, that there is no magic pill for the timeless ills of society (especially poverty), with which we can passively sit back and watch things fix themselves. The best and most significant contribution to any solution is active, human effort to pursue not only prosperity, but also justice.

Admittedly, this isn't a fair evaluation of Eger's entire piece. He does argue that cities who want to compete in the new internet-economy will have to invest in educating its citizens about the internet, as well as stimulate creativity and civic pride. I couldn't agree with him more, and the abundance of data he provides makes for strong evidence. But he fails to address the very real roadblocks that exist, other than the obvious commonly-entrenched opinion that the arts have no value. Nowhere in his article does he consider the raging debate over who will provide internet service in the United States, and how that service will be provided. Many cities that have attempted to provide free municipal wireless internet have met stiff and pervasive resistance from telecomm giants, who obviously have an interest in keeping the internet private. One such case is the city of Philadelphia, and the result was that "the governor of Pennsylvania last week signed into law a controversial bill that includes, among myriad items, a provision giving incumbent carriers the ability to prevent cities from creating and charging for municipal Wi-Fi networks." The bill was strongly advocated-for by Verizon, who agreed to allow the city of Philadelphia's municipal Wi-Fi to move forward in exchange. The result was that the rest of the state was doomed to remain under the heel of privately-controlled internet.

And the term "privately-controlled internet" takes on another meaning altogether when we consider the fading of net neutrality (which I'm not going to waste space explaining; if you don't know about it yet, that really is your problem and you should go here immediately). With the FTC more or less controlled by telecomm giants ("I . . . question the starting assumption that government regulation, rather than the market itself under existing laws, will provide the best solution to a problem," says FTC Chair Deborah Platt Majoras, utilizing the terminology of Comcast, AT&T and Verizon), net neutrality is not being enforced. ISPs are already moving on that information, with Comcast blocking bittorrent traffic (much of which is wholly legal, such as an employer distributing information to employees, or software developers distributing patches to their customers).

None of this is mentioned by John Eger; his article was so dearth of anything regarding net neutrality that it almost seems I've gone off-course in evaluating it. But I haven't, because if telecomm giants can control what consumers access on the internet, there can be none of Eger's creativity. All the excitement over user-created content, the sort of "internet populism" that fuels optimistic arguments such as Eger's, fails to recognize that without net neutrality, the internet will slowly grow more like television, with content regulated by the gate-keepers at large media corporations. And to the extent that the internet is influenced by the United States, this will have repercussions around the globe.