Читать книгу Regulating Platforms - Terry Flew - Страница 13

In his three-part documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, the filmmaker Adam Curtis developed an account of the influence of libertarian ideas on both US public policy and US digital culture (Curtis, 2011). Curtis points out that the objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand has been one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century, and that one of the places where her works have been particularly influential was among the emerging class of computer scientists, entrepreneurs, and investors in the Palo Alto region of California, south of San Francisco. In this region, Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged was the second bestseller, after the Bible. Palo Alto was going to be at the heart of what we now know as Silicon Valley: a cluster of technological corporations established within proximity of Stanford University that include Apple, Google, Facebook, PayPal, Hewlett-Packard, and many others (Porter, 1998).

Rand’s appeal to the emergent entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, argued Curtis, was her commitment to a radical individualism and to the proposition that personal prosperity comes – and can only come – from free individuals who apply their talents and accumulate wealth, while they are protected by constitutionally guaranteed property rights – including the right to control their own intellectual property. In her 1943 novel The Fountainhead, the architect-hero John Galt proclaims: ‘Just as man cannot exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right to property’ (Rand quoted in Streeter, 2011, p. 140).

The influence of Randian ideas on the development of internet industries and cultures is an important one. It is a marker of the degree to which the internet developed in the double context of a capitalist economy and a liberal ideology, strongly stressing the role of the individual entrepreneur as the wellspring of economic progress. From this perspective, various forms of public interest regulation were seen as inhibitors to innovation; and it was through innovation rather than through welfare or regulation that all would ultimately benefit from the trickle-down effect. The period from 1980 to the present has been described – although not without contention (Flew, 2014b) – as an era of neoliberalism, characterized by ‘new political, economic and social arrangements within society that emphasize market relations, re-tasking the role of the state, and individual responsibility’ (Springer et al., 2016, p. 2). Critics of internet policies during the 1990s such as Robert McChesney argued that the deregulatory policies of the period rested upon a particular mythology of the free market as ‘the most rational, fair, and democratic regulatory mechanism ever known to humanity … No debate is necessary to establish the market as the reigning regulatory mechanism, because the market naturally assumes that role unless the government intervenes and prevents the market from working its magic’ (McChesney, 1999, p. 136).

At one level, it is not surprising that powerful interests would advocate for minimal government controls. Economic power correlates with political power and the power to shape public ideas, and the period from the 1990s to the present day saw Apple, Alphabet (the name of Google’s parent company), Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and other information and communication technology (ICT) companies become the world’s most powerful brands and most highly capitalized organizations. But I would argue that it is insufficient to see the discourse of what I will term the libertarian internet simply as the ideological manifestation of the rising power of digital technology companies – ‘big tech’, as they came to be referred to by their critics, whose voices have grown far more prominent in the 2020s (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Keen, 2018; Orlowski, 2020; Teachout, 2020; Warren, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). At the same time, as I will explain below, libertarian ideas developed alongside a complementary communitarianism and was accompanied by the idea that the digital abundance that new technologies afford can create a new age of sharing and a new form of gift economy – one that maybe transcends the old world of proprietary systems and intellectual property (Barlow, 1996b; Rheingold, 1994).