The marketing of new technologies often proceeds through the creation of terror. Military weaponry offer the easiest example: the image of the bloodthirsty, subhuman injun - nazi - jap - commie - arab - nigger have always validated the need for bigger, faster weaponry. If necessary, we can internalize the threat and make it part of ourselves, with a war on drugs authorizing military maneuvers against oneΓÇÖs own population. The best ad campaigns offer both threat and cure.
But war pigs are easy examples. What I really want to write about here is the Internet as a marketing theme, a place where the mildly discontent can buy into a safe counterculture and where the mildly paranoid can find diffuse demons to battle. IΓÇÖm not talking about online malls and global shopping centers, but the imagery of cyberpunk. Central to the image (and the ad) is a shadowy figure hunched over a keyboard in front of a glowing screen. This is just narrative foreshadowing.
The scary part lies in virtual space, inside the machine: a cross between the Pentium flythrough ads and the grainy, black-and-white Gulf War nosecone cameras homing in on their targets. The cameraΓÇÖs-eye view sweeps over wildly colored terrain, zips in and out of enormous pink pyramids and matte-black obelisks. And every so often, a charge arcs out to touch a structure in the landscape, rearranging flows of data from one point to another or prying open secret hiding places. ZAP, funds are electronically transferred from a corporate retirement fund to a Swiss bank account. ZAP, a thousand credit records are scanned, copied, maybe rearranged for the hell of it, then used to buy an entire truckload of home theatre equipment.
The scam works well from two sides: be terrorized or be terrorist. Terrorists exist by creating a general atmosphere of fear. The cyberpunk gains most of their power not from stealing material things, but by drawing on the overall cultural paranoia.
What is important is not that there really are digital terrorists lurking in the corners of every networkΓÇö only that people are able to imagine themselves in the positions of terrorized or terrorist (or both). In the space of this panic operates the enormously profitable information marketΓÇöhardware, software, Internet providers and online services, books, movies, conferences, popular magazines and academic journals, television shows, and social xenophobia.
Essentially, the threat becomes so powerful and generalized that it can be articulated against any area of the market.
This isnΓÇÖt to say that cyberpunks and hackers donΓÇÖt exist, donΓÇÖt try to break into corporate systems or crack e-mail accounts, or donΓÇÖt spawn net and workstation viruses. But these few occurences are used to generate a terrified market many magnitudes above the actual threat. The threat then recursively encourages segments of the population to exert power over other segments by taking on (weakened) images of the threatening image: youth defy authorities. Face itΓÇökids donΓÇÖt get their noses and genitalia pierced simply because they (and their friends) think itΓÇÖs coolΓÇöthe reason they think itΓÇÖs cool is because it alarms their parents.
But itΓÇÖs still relatively safeΓÇöif you really wanted to terrorize your parents, you do something to get your face on surveillance camera stills on the six oΓÇÖclock news. Cruising the net is counter- culture, but in a relatively authorized way. (WiredΓÇÖs home
page advertises Volvos.) There are millions of kids whose greatest crime has been to download masturbation material from the alt.wanking.fantasies (did you ever wonder why most commands in newsreaders can be executed with a single hand?)ΓÇöbut these users still revel in the idea of being a hacker. Sure there are wonderfully fantastic exceptions where some kid guesses the password to a bankΓÇÖs system or finds a backdoor in the icehouse around a military computer. But thereΓÇÖs hardly enough to merit the kind of paranoia weΓÇÖve built up around these few cases (and even forgetting for the moment that often the monetary value pegged on these crimes is itself a scam, with companies claiming that corporate data was valued at millions of dollars when in fact the data was never used or was already available publicly through other channels.)
Phone companies value ΓÇ£piratedΓÇ¥ long distance calls according to rates that they would charge you and IΓÇöbut what was actually stolen? Not much. I feel a more real and productive terror in the image of legions of fifty-year-old over- privileged white men with fax machines, press conferences, and teams of aides in the burbs of DC openly shredding civil rights, environmental regulations, and public (but not corporate) aid programs. That image, however, wonΓÇÖt sell a lot of hardware, software, or services.
Although futurists talk frequently about the network as the home of an egalitarian, democratic society, weΓÇÖre not going to start heading in that direction until we rid ourselves of the sense that the net is an outlaw place to be tamed, regulated, divided up, sold, rented, and civilized, the way that U.S. settlers tamed the uncivilized lands and its inhabitants in the last few centuries.
The vague (and sometimes over- whelming) sense of fear created by this whole dispersed advertising campaign sort of mirrors that westward expansion, especially when you listen closely to the branch of futurists patronized by Newt Gingrinch and his ilk, who capitalize onΓÇöand multiplyΓÇöexisting social problems with one hand and offer hightech, new-world- future solutions with the other. In this rhetoric, cyberspace becomes the new frontier, hackers the uncivilized and wildly dangerous injuns (who might not just steal our womenfolk, but our credit records as well).
One of the important things to recognize is the way that people who talk about the Internet resort always to metaphorsΓÇöapart from the untamed and lawless frontier or the crime-ridden back alley, we frequently see terms relating to web, information superhighway, global village, (inter)national town hall. The difficulty of any of these formulations comes when we accept it at face value, because itΓÇÖs alluring or threatening (or both). Even the positive metaphors can blind us to the potential for oppressive uses.
The ΓÇ£global village,ΓÇ¥ for example, connotes cozy, warm, inclusive conversations but hides or downplays the fact that most of the worldΓÇÖs population has never been connected or even heard of the Internet. The net is big, but it leaves a lot of people out. ThereΓÇÖs a lot of positive potential in the net, not merely in terms of monetary gain. The net literally networks people, opens lines of communication. We can use the net to construct lines of paranoia, separation, and colonialism, or lines of connection, discussion, and inclusion. We need to think more carefully and critically about what metaphors and activities weΓÇÖre willing to buy into.
