Jeff Jarvis's Blog, page 7

The journalism of expectations

Beside journalism’s addiction to prediction lies another comorbidity: its presumption to set expectations.

Of course, we are well familiar with this co-occuring condition in coverage of politics, where journalists think they bring value to public discourse — which they do not — when they predict who will win an election. In the process, they set expectations about what a candidate must do to meet the pundit’s definition of “winning.”

But we see these ailments strike other areas of coverage. Take the pandemic and the economy. There is much pearl-clutching right now about inflation. Journalists have set the expectation that prices should not rise in spite of the facts that: (1) we are in the midst of an earth-shattering pandemic, (2) this affects the availability of labor, which in turn affects both (3) wages and (4) the supply chain, which in turn results in (5) higher prices for now. Media says it is a political failure that prices are rising. This is what we call a media narrative.*

Yet the economy is otherwise miraculously healthy. Unemployment is at record lows. The stock market is at highs. Savings are up. In spite of the pandemic and thanks in great measure to the incredible gift that is the internet, industry continues with few issues while local schools and businesses are on the whole open. One might think that media’s narrative would be about how fucking lucky we are in this nation to be so well-equipped to meet this challenge. But no, that’s not media’s Weltanschauung. Media wear dung-colored glasses.

Imagine a different set of expectations. Over Christmas, our daughter gave us the wonderful gift of having all our families’ 8 mm film digitized and we went through many old photos and files, including those that accompanied my 95-year-old father when we rescued him from the petri dish of viruses and malign idiocy that is Florida and finally moved him to be up with us. In one of the boxes, we found my late mother’s World War II ration booklet.

And that made me think: If we are fighting a “war” against the virus — as another of media’s narratives would wish us to believe — then why did media not set expectations of war-like measures against it, including: (1) official rationing of scarce resources, (2) price-controls to tamp down inflation caused by the scarcity of certain commodities, (3) wage controls to hold back further inflation in a time of scarce labor, (4) easing of immigration restrictions to increase the labor pool, (5) government subsidies for employment and sick leave, (6) mobilization of industry to produce the scarce resources needed, (7) mobilization of federal and state forces to augment labor and enforce rules to protect us all in mandates to (8) get vaccinated and (9) wear masks and (10) in shutdowns to hamper the virus’ spread.

There are a few answers to that hypothetical. The first is that we did not need to resort to all those drastic measures because the economy is healthy, technology has enabled us to mostly continue work (indeed, becoming more productive), and science has given us the blessing of vaccinations that arrived with incredible speed and efficacy.

The second answer is that if media had set such drastic expectations then I believe the presidential election — focused on how little Trump did to protect us and how much he did to harm us — would not have been so “close” (another media narrative based on its own expectation). Then Biden would have had the political cover to more readily take the bold actions from the list above that we do need, such as mask and vaccination mandates and mobilization of industry to make vaccines, masks, and other vital products.

The third answer is that if expectations were so dire then the current administration would be judged against them and would look pretty damned good. Oh, but media hate that narrative. It would make them look biased. We don’t find solutions. We find failure. But that, of course, is the essence of media’s bias.

Instead, media set the expectation that Normal is a street just past the next corner and failing to drive us there in time for tomorrow’s news is failure.

One of my many heresies is that news- and media-literacy are bullshit. They are mediacentric skeins intended to protect media from their own failures and blame the public for them: You, the people we serve, are just too ignorant to understand what we tell you and let’s explain to you how we do what we do so as to avoid a discussion of why we should be doing something else.

This morning, I had a long discussion in DM with two people I respect immensely about local news. It made me think about how too often the discussion in journalism these days refuses to question its presumptions (its narratives about itself):

That hiring more reporters in newsrooms is the goal. (But who is to say that news as it was is news as it should be?)That local news is the highest virtue. (But how much do people associate themselves with geography versus affinity, interest, need, circumstance, and community now that the net allows them to connect in more ways?)That people should be expected to pay a high price for news. (When over the century of mass media, news was always cheap.)That news as it is is worth paying for. (So much is not.)

In the latest Reuters Institute survey of news leaders, I was heartened to see that 47 percent of respondents “worry that subscription models may be pushing journalism towards super-serving richer and more educated audiences and leaving others behind.” Amen.

Yet at the same time, 79 percent said getting audience revenue — behind paywalls — is a top priority. Almost a third expect to get “significant revenue from tech platforms for content licensing or innovation” — read, blackmail, obtained by journalism organizations cashing in their political capital through lobbying the politicians they are meant to cover so as to pressure new competitors to pay them baksheesh. That is pure protectionism. But that’s my narrative. Another 15 percent expect money from philanthropists and foundations. That is to say, they are confessing to a market failure — their failure to serve the market (not the market’s failure to serve them).

The survey reports that “publishers say the biggest barriers to innovation are the lack of money, due to wider economic challenges, and difficulty in attracting and retaining technical staff.” I’ve heard that for years — dare I call it another narrative? — and I disagree now more than ever. Innovation will not come from technology. It will come from realizing new ways to listen to and serve the public through the tools we already have. It will come from abandoning the journalistic prerogative of setting expectations for the public.

The future of journalism I wish for will come from divining means for the public to set their own expectations and judge journalism’s value based on how much we help meet them.†

* Please note that I use “narrative” throughout ironically and mockingly. See Jay Rosen:

Because used that way, The Media refers to a hate object, not to an actual institution, and because I usually have no idea what the referent for "the narrative" is. It reads as gibberish to me.

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) November 16, 2021

† See also Jay on how to cover campaigns through the citizens’ agenda.

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Web .0000012

I’ve been thinking about Matt Mullenweg’s response to Brian Armstrong’s response to Moxie Marlinspike’s excellent post about Web 3. I have some responses in return in this post based on a thread. tl;dr: I think Matt + WordPress provide much of the model Moxie seeks at the end of his post. 

People seem to be redefining Web 2.0 as Facebook, etc, that own data, but Web 2.0 at the time was platforms like WordPress, Odeo, Six Apart, Flickr, Technorati, and https://t.co/vlhR5g6fkg that had open data and interoperated. https://t.co/PXuZBaLbP2 https://t.co/KoDPTdZhN3 pic.twitter.com/sJJT8kyaJG

— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) January 9, 2022

First, let me say I don’t give a rat’s rump what is called Web 1, 2, or 3. They are all hubristic labels based on the ego of the present tense. This might be web .000002. As I often say, it’s 1475 in Gutenberg (Johannes, not WordPress) years. 

A key lesson I came to writing my book (still out with a publisher) on the (Johannes) Gutenberg Parenthesis is that it took a century and a half before groundbreaking innovation came *with* print: the newspaper, the modern novel, the essay (Montaigne), a market for printed plays. 

So what interests me about Web N is not what goes *into* it in terms of technological innovation — that will come — but more so what comes from invention *with* the technology, once the tech becomes easy, assumed, boring. 

What strikes me is that WordPress — blogging then — is a *with* not an *into* institution because it allows people to create WTF they want. It makes the technology easy & boring. It allows creators to surprise us with their creations for their own sake, not technology’s. 

Right there is a model for Moxie’s Web 3: ease. Creating NFTs: not easy, not cheap. Creating on WP: easy, cheap, thus fast and open. 

Of course, WordPress *is* a creation tool. There are others. But what sets it apart — what set it apart when it won out over Movable Type — is its open-source architecture decreed by Matt: The underlying code is open; anybody, including Matt, can build services atop it.

I remember when a Polaris VC scratching his head over Matt’s open-source architecture called me to ask whether it was insane to invest. No! I said. I explained why WordPress would win over Movable Type because of it. The software would spread and improve at the same time. 

In this structure, Matt merely has a first-mover advantage in building his services. This is why I am also excited by Jack Dorsey’s proposals for Bluesky, making the speech layer a commodity so innovators can build value-added layers we need (e.g., recommendation, authentication). 

So now (at last) to the point re Moxie: In the end, the post calls for:

 1) “We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure.”

In a sense, doesn’t WordPress at least display a model for meeting criterion #1 through open source: multiple instances create a sort of distributed architecture?

Moxie’s second wish: 

2): “We should try to reduce the burden of building software.” 

Here, too, doesn’t Matt’s WP at least demonstrate a model through its object/block-oriented creation tools (not of software, but of creation *with* software)? 

All this is to say that we’re not making a clean progression from Web 1–2–3 but instead trying to clean up what was done in Web .0000012. We return to Web 1 to deplatform it through a worldview that is already well proven: open source. I *know* that’s simplistic. 

My point is that it’s just as dangerous to think that Web 3 is an advance on Web 1 & 2 as it is to think that Medieval years were Dark Ages and that the Renaissance was progress and that we are modern. That’s the greatest hubris of all. Perspective matters. 

In writing about the Gutenberg Parenthesis, I learned the dangers of periodization, for in dismissing what came before, we lose the opportunity to build upon it. This is why I despise journalism’s conceit of the “first draft of history,” thus ignoring history. (By the way, from the MS:) 

The reason I’m thinking so much about this is that I’m teaching a course in Designing the Internet next month with Douglas Rushkoff. I’d love to assign Moxie’s post that launched a thousand threads, though I fear the technology might be intimidating to students.

Then I see that’s Moxie’s point: People don’t want to run servers. They don’t want to become fluent in something called Web 3. They want to build *atop* not *in* (that is, not in a walled platform). Making tech complex as a prereq is the equivalent of having to run servers. 

So I might well assign the post but also assign Matt’s thread because it brings historical perspective on the building of the web and demonstrates the whole point of the course: that students have the agency & responsibility to build the future of the net. 

Of course, Matt sums it all up better than I can: 

Anyway the most interesting conversation to me is how to make all the new stuff as user-friendly as possible without recreating the same centralized bottlenecks and gatekeepers.

— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) January 9, 2022

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Continua: Lessons from two books on books

All culture is conversation. — Neil Postman

Culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten.
— Jean-Philippe de Tonnac

I’ve spent the last few years working on a book about the end of the Gutenberg Age and the lessons we can learn from our entry into it. (It awaits a publisher.) In my reading, I very quickly saw that I would not be demarking eras—in fact, I warn of the perils of periodization, the hubris of the “modern,” the noxious journalistic conceit of writing “the first draft of history.” Instead, I sought continua across eras, for that is where the lessons lie.

I came to see that from the dawn of movable type, books were in conversation with each other: Luther conversed with the Pope in their books (and bonfires of them); Erasmus and his friend More held an ongoing conversation through theirs. With its mechanization and industrialization — with the birth of mass media — print lost the art of conversation. Now, in a connected world, we are attempting in fits and failures to relearn how to hold a conversation with ourselves. There is a continuum.

Among the delights of my research are the moments when I find books that I fancy are, whether they intend it or not, in a conversation with each other. Sometime ago, I found connections about cognition in Alex Rosenberg’s How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories and David Weinberger’s Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility. In another example, I constantly recommend to students that they read Charlton McIlwain’s Black Software with André Brock Jr.’s Distributed Blackness, for the first offers an oral history of the early attempts to create Black spaces online and the second is a sequel in time, analyzing the successful gathering of Black Twitter as a space for — in Brock’s delightful word choice — “jouissance.”

I just finished reading two new books by book historians I hold in the highest esteem and found connections between them.

Andrew Pettegree is the dean of book-history scholars. I have devoured many of his books — among them The Book in the Renaissance, The Invention of News, Brand Luther — and countless of his papers in the Brill series he edits and elsewhere. He and his colleague at the University of St. Andrews, Arthur der Weduwen, collaborated (for the third time) on a captivating new book, The Library: A Fragile History.

Matthew Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland, another book historian, focuses on more contemporary topics. Aging nerd that I am, I loved his last book, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. He has just written a new book, Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage.

I read these two books together. One could say that The Library is about the past and Bitstreams about the future. But no. Rather, between them they present a compelling continuum in their examinations of the processes of creating, editing, publishing (or today we might say sharing), curating, protecting, and losing what is written, said, or made.

The Library begins, of course, at the library of Alexandria. When Richard Nixon went to Alexandria, he asked to see the library, which is a punchline for a few reasons, one of which is that no one knows exactly where the library was. I was struck learning that scale was the Alexandrian library’s mission but also its curse, for the hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls collected there would have had to have been copied before crumbling every century or two. The more the library collected, the more impossible that would have become. “The sheer size of the Alexandrian library militated against its survival,” said Pettegree and der Weduwen. I’ve been thinking a lot about scale lately, about how mass became the mission of media with industrialization, about the benefit scale brings online (enabling more people to speak), and about the curse scale brings (curating and moderating — or, as some would wish, censoring — is an impossibility at scale). The pursuit of scale — and its perils — is not new; it is a continuum.

As The Library makes clear, the reflex to save books was not immediate, and when it began it was a pastime of the privileged. One of the earliest and greatest collectors was Columbus’ son, Hernando Colón. (See Edward Wilson-Lee’s The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.) Subscription libraries were a business model that would support much of publishing. When Benjamin Franklin and friends started their shared collection in 1727 it saved them money on their reading and established the Library Co. of Philadelphia. Public libraries followed and flourished, thanks in great measure to the support of Andrew Carnegie.

With mechanization — of presses, paper, and typesetting—books became so inexpensive that more could write them and anyone could buy them. That, though, frightened the elites — just as movable type had in its day and the internet does today: a continuum. For the masses could now read and, God forbid, learn and even speak. Pettegree and der Weduwen explore the moral panic brought on by the rise of fiction, the fear that it would corrupt the souls of especially women and children. Even to open the stacks to browsing was worrisome as surely readers without watchful librarians would gravitate toward dangerous tales. “Circulating libraries were denounced as purveyors of pornography and books of brain-rotting triviality.” Sound familiar?

The Library ends recounting wars against books: wars of banning and burning and wars that destroyed libraries, demonstrating just how fragile they have been. (On this topic, I also recommend last year’s Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge by Oxford Bodleian Librarian Richard Ovenden.)

As a bibliographer, Matthew Kirschenbaum seeks to discover, preserve, and study not just the product but the act of creation: the process. In Bitstreams, he begins by exploring the physical and digital archives of manuscripts of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The paper version was singed and almost destroyed in a fire in her home and so Kirschenbaum was permitted to view the remains on a screen. Also on screens, he delved into the contents of her outmoded plastic diskettes. That is how he reconstructs revealing moments of conversation between Morrison and her editor over critical choices of words. Next Kirschenbaum examines writing that was “born digital,” poetry written in Hypercard, and he finds that while the author’s words may be preserved, the choices and designs he made in fonts — the full experience of display — may be lost as machines and formats become obsolete. Many a bibliographer will argue that each copy of a book should be studied as a unique object rather than a copy for each one carries its own provenance and use and marks in the margins. (See Luther’s copy of Erasmus’ New Testament.) So, too, Kirschenbaum teaches that each bitstream — each representation of creation on different screens in different circumstances using different tools — is “never truly self-identical.”

The ultimate continuum I see in these books is about culture as conversation, to borrow from Neil Postman. For as a disciple of James Carey I see much of our world through the lens (the loudspeaker?) of conversation. Kirschenbaum writes about the processes of creation. Pettegree and der Weduwen write about the processes of selecting, saving, using, discarding, and destroying print in libraries. Together, they present an unbroken string from creator to reader, in the constant conversation of culture.

Libraries, then, can be as much about what is forgotten as what is remembered. In addition to everything else he does — which is awe-inspiring enough — Pettegree heads the Universal Short Title Catalogue, a grandly ambitious effort to create as complete a bibliography as possible of the first two centuries of print with movable type. This means tracking down not just books and artifacts in collections but also those that are lost to history, the ghost of their existence surviving only in references elsewhere or as lines in auction or estate catalogues. This struck me as a terribly depressing endeavor: finding that which cannot be found. But I was mistaken. When Pettegree and his USTC colleague der Weduwen presented their book in a conversation for the New York Public Library, I quoted Jean-Philippe de Tonnac (above) in a question, asking about the lessons they might recommend for the digital bibliographers of the future.

Pettegree answered that he and the USTC pay special attention to the “ugly ducklings” of print, the items that were so well-used in their day that they were worn to bits or that were so everyday that they were not valued enough to be preserved. For that tells us much about the choices that culture makes and the choices that make culture. “[N]o society has ever been satisfied with the collections inherited from previous generations,” Pettegree and der Weduwen write, adding that what they chronicle in their book “is not so much the apparently wanton destruction of beautiful artifacts so lamented by previous studies of library history, but neglect and redundancy, as books and collections that represented the values and interests of one generation fail to speak to the one that follows.”

The great and founding book historian Elizabeth Eisenstein (who along with Thomas Pettitt of Gutenberg Parenthesis fame and Pettegree himself inspired me to embark on my book project) was attacked by some critics — some out of sexism and jealousy, I think — for focusing too much on the fixity of print. They accuse her of not recognizing how books, especially in the early days of incunabula, were riddled with error, of unsure provenance, and changed often. They say that she projected latter-day views of print on the past. I say the critics are wrong. Eisenstein frequently addressed print’s malleable nature. In a conversation I had with her, she did boast on Gutenberg’s behalf that his Bible had already lasted longer than any digital format would, and she was right. Yet as Kirschenbaum argues, digital bitstreams can be resurrected: “[T]he immolated edges of a manuscript are gone forever, carbonized and vaporized in a flash; the bitstream, if fixity and integrity are maintained, awaits only the imposition of the appropriate formal regimen to cauterize its internal cascade of relational disarray and rememory its pixels all anew.”

We risk projecting our contemporary expectations of print’s fixity not only on early publishing but on the early internet, expecting that since digits are all but free everything can and should be saved. No. Culture is conversation and some conversation is meant to disappear in the sky like the hot air it is; some is worth remembering and repeating, teaching and learning, copying and remixing. The Library and Bitstreams make clear that observing what society and its institutions choose to remember will tell us much about what they value.

In a recent post, I discussed the case of Niccolò Perotti, who made what is believed to be the first call for censorship of print in 1470, beseeching the Pope to appoint learned censors to judge and fix printers’ formes before they were duplicated. What he was really calling for was not censoring at all but instead editing; he foresaw the need for the institutions of editor, publisher, and librarian to assure quality and authority in print.

The institutions created for the age of print are so far inadequate to the networked world with its abundance of wonderful conversation. We should not expect the net to be edited any more than we should expect a barroom argument to be. We cannot expect — though many do — Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to be cleaned and polished like a slick magazine. We should understand the net for what it is: conversation, process, sometimes a library, sometimes a stream of bits disappearing into the past.

What institutions do we need then? That is what leads me to teach this course alongside Doug Rushkoff, in hopes that students might tackle such questions as Pettegree, der Weduwen, and Kirschenbaum (and Rosenberg and Weinberger, and McIlwain and Brock) inspire. How do we find what’s worth hearing? What editing and moderation of the public conversation should we wish for, demand, or permit? What could digital librarianship accomplish? What will we save so it may be used, studied, and built upon in the future? How do we rethink our models of content, product, and property and our laws of copyright to support collaborative creation? (See my proposal for creditright.)

Kirschenbaum begins Bitstreams asking this lovely question: “What is textual scholarship when the ‘text’ of our everyday speech is a transitive verb as often as it is a noun?” At the end he wisely declares: “[A]ll the data dumps in the world — 365 days of diffs — won’t get us any closer to total recall. The future of digital literary heritage will be as hit and miss, as luck dependent, as fragile, contingent, and (yet) wondrously replete as that of books and manuscripts.”

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Disinformation is not *the* problem

Yes, disinformation is a problem. But by treating it as the problem, we can cause more: We give malign actors the attention that feeds them as we spread their messages. We defer facing society’s real ills. We ignore voices too long not heard. We present a distorted and dystopian view of reality. We delay building a better internet and society.

I’ve paid attention to disinformation myself. I’ve written about it and raised money to fight it. The war against disinformation is in good hands: see danah boyd’s Data & Society, Joan Donovan’s work at Harvard, the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder, Alex Stamos and Renee DiResta et al at the Stanford Internet Observatory, Claire Wardle at First Draft, and many more. 

I’ve come to see that the time has come to turn our monomaniacal media gaze to additional, more positive and perhaps productive strategies. Consider:

Ignore the trolls

Recently, Morning Joe began the day mocking “Dr.” and Trump lackey Rep. Ronny Jackson for tweeting that the Omicron COVID variant was a worldwide political plot. Joe Scarborough dutifully ridiculed the idiocy of it, and later that day Anderson Cooper did likewise. Thereby they gave Jackson precisely what he wanted: media attention and glory among his cult of anti-institutional insurgents for pwning the libs. 

Have we learned nothing in the last five years? Fascists will make up shit for the sake of making shit up so they have shit to stir. As I argued here, I don’t think even they believe most of it; they want us to believe they believe it. Their outrageousness is not news; it is a strategy designed to exploit the weaknesses in journalism to report conflict and the unusual. So stop. Ask whether there is any point, any value in repeating their lies and sick fantasies. If not, say nothing. Starve them.

In this time of abundant speech — which I celebrate, as so many communities too long not heard in mass media finally have their press — the key skill we must develop is not to point out or even debunk the bad but instead we must to learn to ignore idiocy as we amplify authority and wisdom. 

In 1850, just as steam-powered presses were enabling a flourishing of new publications, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine announced its intention to “place within the reach of the great mass of the American people the unbounded treasures of the Periodical Literature of the present day.” That is what we need now: not services that expose us to the worst of the web and humanity but instead services that find and share their unbounded treasures, which most certainly are there: talent, expertise, diverse lived experiences that deserve to be heard. Build that, please. 

Focus on society’s real ills

Underlying the moral panic about the internet and its agues is the assumption that if we could just turn off Facebook or Twitter, everything would be OK. That is to assume that society was just fine before new technologies came along. That, of course, is delusional blindness — blindness to the racism, inequity, misogyny, lack of empathy and understanding, greed, and hatred that have plagued this nation for generations and centuries. 

We hide behind many excuses to place blame on others, concocting syndromes like filter bubbles and echo chambers as classic examples of third-person effect: the assumption that everyone else is vulnerable to lies and hate but not us; we’re fine. Listen, please, to Michael Bang Petersen’s research, which finds that we do maintain echo chambers in real life and the problem is that the internet busts them, exposing people who already hate to the objects of their hate. Read, too, Axel Bruns’ exhaustive compilation of research in his book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which points to the conclusion that they are not. Let us ground our discussion of what’s wrong with society and the interventions we create in empirical research, not assumptions.

Before you cancel me or accuse me of canceling—which is the same thing — I am, of course, not saying that all of us are in every moment racist; don’t try that excuse. I am saying that if the last half-decade of insurgency and pandemic have taught us nothing else, it is that our society is infected with structural racism and inequity as well as hostility to education and if we do not address those causes every day in our journalism, in our teaching, and in our public discussion, then we are putting off the real work to be done. And then we are all to blame.  

Disinformation is real, yes. It is a tool of malign actors, true. But it is also an excuse to put off painful self-examination. 

Listen to the voices of experience

And how do we embark on that work? We need to begin by listening to those voices too long not heard who can tell us all about their experience of inequity, yes, but more importantly so we may include and value their contributions to our learning and public discourse. 

Last year, The New York Times crowned the heroes of COVID-19: all white men. Just today, the other Times, Rupert’s, featured data-crunchers as the “smoking-hot heroes” of the pandemic: all white men again. Oh, for fuck’s sake. Spend just 10 minutes scrolling through my Twitter list of 675 COVID experts and you will find countless women and women of color in science and medicine who are leading the war on the disease. 

Right under our noses are history’s greatest tools for listening — the internet and social media — and by concentrating only on their ills and woes, we forfeit the opportunity to hear those who enrich the public conversation. I’ve harped on this before: that journalism is the conversation and when journalists turn their backs on the voices they had ignored, they only extend the harm that journalism has done to so many communities and delay the reparations deserved. 

Journalism fancies itself a reflection of society but its mass-media mirror is cracked: it leaves out huge swaths of society; it presents a dark and dystopian view of the world but especially of life in those communities it fails to represent; it makes it money — just as the internet does thus far — on the corruption of attention and that colors its reality. We can build something better. 

Build a better internet and society

By concentrating only on the internet’s problems, the best we can hope for is a slightly less-bad internet. Or, if we mess up by intervening based on unfounded assumptions and fears, we can end up with a worse internet and society, one where our new freedoms are impinged upon to protect old, threatened institutions, like mass media. 

Instead, I want to see us take responsibility to build the internet and society we want. I’ve harped on this, too: We have time. The net is yet young. We still see its future in the analog of our past. We don’t know what it is yet. We — or more likely our grandchildren or theirs— will invent what it can be. Still, we should start now.

That is why I am teaching a course in designing the internet this spring, to convince students (actually, to have them convince themselves) that they have the power to take the net and make it theirs. This is not a technology course; it is most definitely a course in the humanities. I hope the students come up with audacious proposals for what the net can be, including ethical, moral, and regulatory regimes for what it should be. To build what they propose, we will need to shift resources and attention from exclusive attention on the net’s bad actors. That is why I write this. That is why I find myself drawn to others who want to talk not just about what’s wrong with the net but what can be built with it, by us, for us, humans. 

I will continue to support efforts to battle disinformation. But we must not stop there for there is so much more to be accomplished. 

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Studying the internet

This spring at CUNY, my colleague Douglas Rushkoff and I will teach a course in Designing the Internet.

Students will propose and design a feature of the net they want to see. Some might start from the entrepreneurial perspective: a product, service, feature, or company. But I hope students will radically broaden their perspectives to design more: perhaps a regulatory regime, an ethical regime, a research agenda, a covenant of mutual obligation with the public for technology and media companies, a design agenda for equity and accessibility, business models built to avoid the corruptions we know, curricula, a warning from the past (about technological determinism or manifest destiny), archival standards, a manifesto for an open net, a constitution … anything. (Note that I did not list a metaverse, but if the students want to go there, they can.)

In the first third of the course, we will offer many readings — including the likes of Vannevar Bush, André Brock Jr., danah boyd, Charlton McIlwain, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Andrew Pettegree, Kate Klonick, David Weinberger, Ruha Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Axel Bruns, James Carey, Dave Winer, Marshall McLuhan— and much discussion examining the net and how we got here: lessons for good and bad. We will invite guests from other perspectives and disciplines: anthropology, psychology, African-American studies, Latino studies, ethics, history, psychology, technology. The students will work on their proposals through the term and will present at the end.

Our idea is to demonstrate to students that they have the agency and responsibility for the future of the net. Because the course is being taught at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, I have a particular objectives for media students: to argue that the canvas for journalists and the service they provide is much wider than story-telling and publication. (I contend the net is not a subset of media but instead media are becoming — alongside so many other sectors of society — subsets of the network.) I also want to instill in journalists the reflex to seek out, learn from, and share work from academics who are researching key questions about the net and its impact — based on evidence. The students will find and share a work of research a week.

Doug and I come at this from different perspectives. I wrote the book What Would Google Do? Doug, a professor at Queens College, wrote the book Throwing Rocks from the Google Bus. Opinions may vary. But we end up on the same road: arguing that the net is not baked, that its present proprietors are not its forever owners, that we have the opportunity and responsibility to decide and design the net we want. We both want the net to be the province of humanity over technology. As Doug put it to me: “We just get there differently. I want less evil, you want more good.”

In the end, I believe that what we are examining is the future of society’s institutions, challenged and rebuilt or replaced in a new, networked reality. In my to-be-published (I pray) book The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I use this example:

The first recorded effort to impose censorship on the press came only about fifteen years after Gutenberg’s Bible. In 1470, Latin grammarian Niccolò Perotti appealed to Pope Paul II to impose Vatican control on the printing of books. His motive was not religious, political, or moral “but exclusively a love of literature” and a desire for “quality control,” according to Renaissance historian John Monfasani. Conrad Sweynheym, a German cleric who, it is believed, worked with Gutenberg in Eltville, and his partner, Arnold Pannartz, became the first to print a book in Italy, in 1465. Two years later, they moved to Rome, where in 1470 they published an edition of Pliny’s Natural History edited by Andrea Bussi. It was this book that set Perotti off. In his litany of complaint to the pope, he pointed to twenty-two grammatical errors in the book, which much offended him.

Perotti had been an optimist about this new technology of printing, having “once viewed as a boon to literature ‘the new art of writing lately brought to us from Germany.’” He called it “a great and truly divine benefit” such that he “hoped that there would soon be such an abundance of books that everyone, however poor and wretched, would have whatever was desired.” But the first tech backlash was not long in coming, for according to Monfasani, Perotti’s “hopes have been thoroughly dashed. The printers are turning out so much dross…. And when good literature does get printed, he complains, it is edited so perversely that the world would be better off not having the texts than to have them circulate in corrupt editions of a thousand copies.” Perotti had a solution. He called upon Pope Paul to appoint a censor, not to ban books so much as to improve them. “The easiest arrangement is to have someone or other charged by papal authority to oversee the work, who would both prescribe to the printers regulations governing the printing of books and would appoint some moderately learned man to examine and emend individual formes before printing,” Perotti wrote. “The task calls for intelligence, singular erudition, incredible zeal, and the highest vigilance.”

We might look upon Perotti’s call as quaint — not unlike Yahoo in the early days of the web thinking its librarians could catalogue every single noteworthy site anyone could ever make. The idea that a moderately learned if vigilant person could approve and correct all printing even out of Rome alone betrays a failure to divine the scale of printing to come. Yet one could say that rather than foreseeing the state censor, Perotti was envisioning the roles of the editor and publishing house as means to assure quality. He was looking to invent a new institution to solve a new problem, just as we must today. Fact-checkers engaged by Facebook and algorithms written at every internet company are inadequate to the task of assuring credibility of content, just as Perotti’s censor would have been. So what do we invent instead?

That is the question we will address in this course.

The course will be open to any CUNY graduate students from any discipline and, with approval, to undergrads and (if there is space) nonmatriculated members of the public (non-CUNY students can follow this link or DM me or Doug).

We hope this is a pilot for a much larger project in Internet Studies — perhaps a degree. We are also working with others on efforts to bring more attention to internet research: We plan to offer literature reads of prominent and current work to journalists and policymakers to inform their work with evidence (I’ll share a job posting shortly). And once COVID allows, we hope to bring together researchers to share perspectives on what we know and don’t know about the impact of the net, what questions we have yet to ask, and what data and access are needed to explore those questions. More to come, as I’m still raising funding for the work. (Disclosure: My school and center have received funding for scholarships and various activities from Facebook, Google, and Craig Newmark; I receive no remuneration from any tech platform.)

In the meantime, teaching this course alongside Doug will be a blast.

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God made a social network

Chapter 1

1 God made a social network. It was called Earth. Even She could not be certain what would follow.

Chapter 2

1 For the longest time, or so it seemed to the people of Earth, She allowed them to roam free, to explore, to commune, to be social.

2 Then She decided they required limits to test. She gave unto them Community Standards. Yet the people disobeyed. They fought. They told falsehoods. They shared graven images of themselves.

Chapter 3

1 The people divided into tribes and religions and parties and nations and they fought still. They waged crusades and shitstorms against one another. They fought wars of thirty and a hundred and many hundred years over Her.

2 They invented arrows and guns, compasses and clocks and used them not to protect but to conquer.

3 But the people also invented pictures and paints, alphabets and presses and made so many wondrous things with them: worshipful art.

4 Their scribes and their Pharisees are always blind to the wonder. They see only darkness and doom, for they believe that they — not I — shine the light.

Chapter 4

1 In the heavens, in the Senate of the Gods, Zeus called upon the Lord to smite Her social network, Earth, and to silence it with configuration errors, for it had become a cesspool that runneth over with hatred and heresy, bots and bile, corrupting the children of Earth to commit fakery and finstas.

2 And God spake unto him: “O, chill, Zeus. Enough of your panic! Have you no memory? Can you not see that this is what my people have done through eternity with all their tools and toys?

3 “At the moment of invention the people are amazed at what they hath wrought: proud and boastful. Then they wield their implements to destroy, to claim power for themselves over Me. They are corrupted. They sin yet blame their tools for their folly.

4 “Finally, they write their rules and build their institutions to live together in peace with themselves and their inventions. Give them time.

5 “Verily, they cannot see that the problem is not in their inventions or in their earthly corporations and the solution is not in their law-givers or self-anointed saviors but instead in themselves.

6 “They, like you dear Senator, must learn again and again that the path to peace, via struggle, is freedom. Remember well that I did not cut down the tree of knowledge of good and evil but left it standing so that the people may learn from it still.

7 “I prophesy that they will just keep screwing up and then they shall figure it out. They are human.”

Chapter 5

1 And God shrugged.

Here endeth the blogging of Her Holy Thread.

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Aftermath

Yes, 9/11 affected me.

Arriving on the last PATH train into the World Trade Center as the first jet hit, I witnessed the second jet’s impact and stayed to report. I still cannot bring myself to speak of some of what I saw. A block from the South Tower as it tilted, I ran, debris smashing the ground all around me, in the utter darkness of a man-made midnight. I emerged covered in the detritus of destruction, a gray statue in pulverized stone.

In the immediate aftermath, I was afflicted with a heart condition, atrial fibrillation, which I live with still. In the longer aftermath, I have had two cancers, a respiratory condition, and PTSD certified by the World Trade Center Health Program as related to 9/11. It affected my family in ways I leave to them to discuss or not; they are not public, like me. 

Yes, 9/11 affected us, though we are fortunate next to our neighbors who lost loved ones and to the victims of the two wars that resulted. 

Immediately afterward, I recorded my memories of the moment. On most every Jahrzeit of the event, I have written about my emotions, recalling, even delivering a sermon. 

As this twentieth anniversary approached — a number that seems distant yet immediate — I have been struggling to understand my emotions and their meaning. And I find myself thinking not of 9/11 but of the other tragedies in America that are not accorded the somber remembrance and reflection of that single September day, but instead become political pawns and media spectacles exploited according to the benefit of others. 

I think first of the 667,528 deaths due to COVID-19, thus far. On March 31, 2020, I suffered my worst breakdown since 9/11 as the toll of the disease passed that of the attack — 2,977 — for we could see the terror and tragedy yet to come. Where will we build the memorial to the — God save us — million we may lose in this country alone, almost all gone needlessly? I am permitted my anger still at the perpetrators of 9/11, but we are told not to scold the politicians, the Fox faces, and the everyday people who perpetuate COVID’s murders through their reckless, careless, self-centered, illogical, ignorant, callous, evil disregard and contempt for the lives and well-being of those around them, refusing even to get a shot and wear a damned mask. Instead of somber reflection, I see the disease and its impact treated as an asset to be spent as governors’ tributes to the Trump era, as content traded for attention to commentators, as a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of politicians and media barons around the world.

I think next of the victims and soldiers who fought and died in the two wars that my country justified from 9/11. The day after, I was angry. I wanted retribution. I am permitted that emotion still. But I am also deeply ashamed of believing George W. Bush and The New York Times not just about weapons of mass destruction but about the hubris of America’s belief in its virtue and its manifest destiny to build democracies. I am sorry.

I think then of George Floyd and Black Americans waiting 400 years for a global movement behind the simple, self-evident cause that Black lives matter. Where are our memorials in every city and town to the victims of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination, and injustice? Germany has memorials to its crimes, sins, and shame, one in the center of Berlin. Where are ours? Where is our somber reflection of our worst sin?

I think of January 6, another day in infamy, but this terror came from within. I am shocked that we could have commissions, legislation, government reorganizations, years of contemplation, and wars of revenge over the perpetrators of 9/11, yet we cannot bring those who inspired and caused the insurrection on our Capitol to justice. 

I think of women in Texas who are having their rights to their own bodies ripped away from them by men in power and a Supreme Court put in power by those who for all these years exploited 9/11 for their political gain. I think of the trans and LGBTQ people who suffer discrimination and abuse. I think of children and other innocents still dying because of this country’s insane love of guns as a sick symbol of freedom. I think of the children of Flint who do not have safe water to drink. I think of the incarcerated, especially Black men, still in prison for selling a commodity that is now legal in many places and of the countless other injustices there. I think of the victims of fires and storms, of climate change, the anthropocene disaster we refuse to take responsibility for. I think of the victims of opioids, victims of malpractice, victims of greed. 

I think of the old, white men — and I am an old, white man — who hold onto power and who would rather destroy the institutions of democracy than share their fruits with those who follow. 

Yes, on this day, I think about how 9/11 affected me all these years. But I also think of our profound inability to prioritize our concern about other tragedies in our nation, of our inability to be self-reflective regarding our own responsibilities and sins, of the other causes of justice and equity around us that are too easily lost by my colleagues in journalism in the breaking news of the moment. Now 9/11 brings all those failures of ours — and mine — into sharp relief. 

Yes, on this day, I always recall the lives lost. I thank the first responders whose faces I still remember as some guided us to safety and some ran toward danger. I reflect on the blessing I have to have survived. But the day would be lost were there not larger lessons to learn. I regret that we have learned too few. 

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Someone made my father sick

My 95-year-old, fully vaccinated, deaf, dear father is in the hospital with breakthrough COVID. Someone in Florida gave it to him. That someone — someone who works in a community serving the elderly and vulnerable — should have been vaccinated but was not. I am enraged at that someone, whoever it is.

My father has been isolated since the earliest days of the pandemic. He was obsessively careful. He did not go out at all. I ordered everything he needed with Instacart and Amazon, which is also how we knew he was fixing his breakfast and lunch. For most of the shutdown, dinner was delivered to his apartment. Then, a few weeks ago, the senior complex where he lives reopened its dining room. I was not terribly worried as I knew that 97 percent of the residents were vaccinated. What I did not know was that only 50% of staff was vaccinated.

My sister and I had become concerned about our father; versus a week before, he suddenly didn’t seem right. So we came to Florida on Tuesday. We found him exhausted in bed. He said he had no energy. He was short of breath. We called the EMTs, who found his pulse irregular and his oxygen low. Even so, we didn’t jump to assume COVID; worse, we feared some sudden decline with age. The EMTs took him to the hospital and we followed. After a short time, the ER doctor came and told us we had to leave immediately.

My father is almost entirely deaf now. He had only one hearing aid in and it was not working. Shouting accomplished only so much. So I asked for some paper and used a marker to write in large, blue letters: “YOU HAVE COVID.” He said: “How the hell?”

Someone gave COVID to him, someone who could and should have been vaccinated.

That was the last we have seen our father. He is now in the hospital’s COVID ward. We can’t visit him. Because he is deaf, we cannot talk to him; the phone is impossible (we got him a landline phone that transcribes conversation into text, but that is at home). I think now of all those scenes of people before the vaccine who were dying alone and isolated and my heart breaks again for them, and now for him.

It is hard to get updates about our father. The nurses are busy; they have to dress and undress in protective clothing each time they enter and leave a COVID room … which seems almost absurd as I write this in a state that is a COVID ward, where its nihilistic leader dismisses — no, fights against — masks, vaccinations, science, and sense. My Pa is on oxygen and the drugs they have — steroids, Remdesivir, anticoagulants — but they still have next to none to treat COVID. He is doing well, they tell me. They say he is smiling. I’m mostly concerned about his atrial fibrillation. (I know it is not a fatal condition as I got afib after 9/11 — but that means I also know just how much it can drain one’s energy.) I can’t get my father’s cardiologist to give me the courtesy of answering my call to discuss his condition. I am dependent on the advice of the experts I follow online; I am grateful for their generosity and advice. But I don’t know enough about what is happening right now in my father’s hospital room. Since his oxygen is stabilizing, he will probably be sent soon to whatever COVID rehab bed they can locate, then back to his continuing care facility, then home.

My sister and I are leaving Florida today because there is nothing we can do here and, frankly, because we are at risk in this place. One or both of us will return when he is back home and we can see him and hug him and help him. Since he cannot hear his caregivers in the hospital, I have been delivering letters to him, printed out in 36-point type to tell him what is happening to him, to tell him we are watching from afar, to tell him we love him, though that he knows. Somehow, I will figure out how to get these notes to him until we can see him.

Yesterday, we spoke with someone at his complex about his future care. We expressed utter dismay that half the staff there could be unvaccinated. How could anyone be so irresponsible when they are caring for old people? The people we were speaking with agreed. But they said that if they required the vaccine, in a tight labor market they’d end up short-staffed.

Excuses. Everybody is making excuses when they should be showing responsibility and leadership. We should be requiring vaccinations for the good of all. We should be shunning the people who refuse vaccinations. This is now their pandemic, the pandemic of the unvaccinated. They are ignorant, selfish, irresponsible, cynical, dangerous, deadly.

They gave our dear father COVID. Damn them.

Here is our father taking his responsibility to get his vaccination. And here is my dear sister’s post about all this.

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A thank-you note to the net

I want to say something unpopular and provocative: I am grateful for the internet, especially this year, most especially amid the pandemic that still engulfs the world.

In media’s telling — according to my sampling from just one newspaper’s and one magazine’s coverage of late — the net is singularly to blame for the polarization of society, a toxic ecosystem of hate, renewed racism, the deterioration of the public square, the destruction of democracy, a pandemic of disinformation, the rise of paranoid conspiracy cults, an increase of tyranny, the so-called surveillance economy, the death of privacy, the end of individuality, the twilight of free will, rampant harassment, sex trafficking, mental health morbidities, addiction to our screens, outright evil, and making us stupid. To journalists and lately politicians, nerds are now villains, algorithms are dark incantations, and Mark Zuckerberg is the folk devil. In their moral panic, media have made the internet the enemy.

But just try to imagine this last year without the net. Pause, please, to recall the privileges the net has provided, for thanks to it…

Countless people could stay employed who otherwise would have lost their jobs, as others did theirs. The world economy would surely have fallen into a severe and lasting depression.Many parents could work from home and care for — and sometimes educate — their children.Students could continue to study and learn with their teachers and classmates. Without it, they would have lost the year entirely.Families and friends could connect, talk with, and see each other to offer support and love for as long as they wished. I am old enough to remember long-distance rates and greedy telcos’ ticking clocks.Scientists and doctors could share research and data as never before due to the open information ecosystem the net provided with preprint servers, peer review via social media, and search. Their adaptability is a model for us all.Commerce continued. We could order anything from our homes, staying safer inside them.Telehealth allowed patients to receive treatment for their physical and mental well-being.Vaccination campaigns could be organized on the net.After the murder of George Floyd, and after the net made it possible to witness the crime, a movement rose across the country and around the world to foster a long-overdue racial Reformation in America.Deprived of the ability to ring doorbells, candidates and supporters could reach out to voters and defeat the most dangerous president in the nation’s history.We could entertain ourselves to pass so many lonely hours, watching movies, bingeing on series, reading books, playing games, collaborating on TikToks.And — thanks to Twitter, Facebook, Zoom, TikTok, Reddit, Discourse, Slack, Clubhouse, podcasts, and blessed blogs — we could converse.

Myself, I was able to teach online, to attend conferences around the world, to conduct my research from many libraries, and to learn from more than 600 scientists and doctors in the COVID Twitter list I curated. I was able to reclaim the three-and-a-half hours a day that commuting was eating out of my life, to be with my family, to work, to save money, to get groceries to my 95-year-old father in Florida, and to stay safe. I am grateful for all that.

I also was able to finish a manuscript of a book about the end of Gutenberg’s age, which has provided me with much perspective about our transition into the era that follows. Lord knows, the early days of print were disruptive, preceding the Reformation and Counter-Reformation (I believe we are witnessing a parallel struggle over race today), various wars (notably the Thirty Years’), the Scientific Revolution, and eventually the Enlightenment. I am not a technological determinist. Print did not make this history inevitable, nor did history make print inevitable. But it is clear that without print, Martin Luther’s reforms would not have spread with the speed and force that they did. (He might have ended up like his predecessor, Jan Hus, in ashes. Then again, without the scale printing provided to the business of indulgences, he also might not have had cause for complaint.) Without the net — specifically social media — #BlackLivesMatter would not have been able to mobilize with the speed and force we have witnessed; it would still be throttled by the limited attention rationed to it in mass media. As #BLM has demonstrated, the First Amendment nurtures not just speech but also the rights to assemble and petition for redress; on the net, the First Amendment has reached its fullest expression through the people, not the press.

Is the net perfect? Of course not. To hold it to that expectation is ahistorical and simple-minded. It is imperfect because we, its makers and users, are imperfect. Everything media object to in their bill of particulars against the net is the result of human failures, foibles, exploitation, and corruption, some within the big corporations, some without. Must the net’s current proprietors do a better job of recognizing, anticipating, and counteracting bad behavior and bad actors and protecting it and us from their manipulation? Absolutely. But if we concentrate our attention only on the worst, we will never build what is better; we will only lose playing catch-up to the villains among us.

As I say often, the net is still young. We have yet to understand what it can be and what we can do with it. Its current proprietors are maligned in media, though that is a fairly recent pivot from the utopian to the dystopian. (USC researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt pinpoints the date and cause of media’s shift). I also spent time during the lockdown, in a semi-sabbatical, working on a book proposal about media’s moral panic regarding the net, examining the legacy industry’s self-interest at work. I think it’s an important story to tell. But I also don’t want to make the mistake media make, obsessing on the negative.

In every panel and conference I watched during these Zoom Times, the starting point of the discussion about the net is what is wrong with it. The ideas that emerge in that context are then necessarily reactive, incremental, and often unimaginative: quick fixes and purported cures for what some say ails the net (though not us).

What interests me more is imagining a better internet and a better society with it. What if we instead allowed ourselves to start the discussion with what the net could be and what we could make with it? What if we raised our expectations to those heights? We have the perfect opportunity — and this is the perfect time — because we have before us, right in front of our Zoom-weary eyes, the amazing, even miraculous litany of what society managed to accomplish even during the dark and desperate days of a global pandemic, thanks to the net.

As a journalism professor, I’ve had the privilege and opportunity to start three new degree programs with my colleagues at the Newmark J-School, in entrepreneurial and engagement journalism and leadership. Thus I get to watch students when they have the space to reimagine and reinvent journalism. It is wonderful. But I have begun to see that I have been thinking too small. Journalism is just one sector of media and media are but one part of the net; every institution and industry requires similar examination and invention. I wish to work with other disciplines — anthropology, sociology, philosophy, psychology, African-American studies, Latino studies, gender studies, ethics, design, neuroscience, digital humanities, literature, history, law, economics, and the technologies — to provide students, scholars, and the people known as users the stage upon which to imagine and build a better net and a next society with it.

What if the starting point of our discussion was not what Zuckerberg did to disappoint someone this week but instead the example of what so many did with the net in a time of need: Teachers, students, technologists, companies, government agencies, philanthropists, doctors, scientists, parents, citizens accomplished so much. What if we set our sights not on giving a few malign fools too much attention for their idiocies but instead focused our attention on how brilliant people of good will could use new means to speak, assemble, and act and to build movements for racial equity, economic equality, climate protection, education, art, cultural understanding, civic participation, health….

I want to set students loose, knowing what we now know about what can go wrong, to design new functions, features, platforms, regulations, standards, companies, measurements, experiments, networks. More than that, I want to see them create what their imaginations allow with the technology, outside of it.

So I thank the net for what it made possible. I thank the people who had the vision to see what it could do and made it work for us in a time of crisis. I am eager to see what we can do next.

(Order the note card from BlissCollections.)

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Statement to the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust

I was called about possibly testifying to a hearing of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust regarding technology companies. That’s not happening but I decided to submit a statement to the committee. Here, minus my bio, is what I have to say:

Statement to the Subcommittee:

I write to the committee to express my concern about often well-intentioned but ill-conceived internet regulation, which could have deleterious effects on freedom of expression; which tends to protect incumbent media and technology companies at the expense of innovation and competition; and whose unintended consequence is frequently to grant internet platforms yet greater power. It is worthwhile to examine the effects of internet regulation elsewhere as it is debated here.

Consider, for example, Australia’s media code. The net result, according to the news site Crikey, is that the country’s existing media duopoly of News Corp. and the Nine Network will receive 90 percent of the money being paid by Google and Facebook, both of which are now in the position to decide which news organizations should receive support. Small news startups that might compete with the powerful incumbents receive no protection or support in the law. The Australian code amounts to a link tax — for those companies that link to news are required to pay for news — and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, testified to Australian legislators that such a precedent would “make the web unworkable around the world.” It would break the internet. I regret that in the end, Google and Facebook succumbed to what I see as corporate and political blackmail.

In Europe, various changes to copyright law — Germany’s Leistungsschutzrecht, Spain’s link tax, the EU’s Articles 15 and 17 of the its Directive on Copyright — amount to regulatory capture, for the large internet companies can afford compliance but I have spoken with smaller competitors for whom the expense and effort are crippling. Germany’s NetzDG hate-speech law requires Facebook to decide — in a private company rather than an open courtroom — what speech is manifestly illegal. Europe’s Right to be Forgotten court decision puts Google in the position of deciding what speech should be remembered or forgotten. The UK is considering regulation that would require platforms to take down “legal but harmful speech.”

Online speech is imperiled in many quarters. In Italy, Facebook was forced to reinstate a site for a neo-fascist group. Poland has announced a new law that would require platforms to carry all legal speech, a nightmare that would protect the worst of the net. I would remind us that compelled speech is not free speech. In addition, Singapore instituted a fake-news law, which puts internet companies in the unwanted position of being arbiters of truth. Similarly, India is enacting regulation that would require platforms to take down speech that is false or threatens national unity.

In the United States, Google’s recent announcement that it will forego ad targeting on the web based on third-party data was applauded by privacy advocates who have demonized web cookies as so-called “surveillance capitalism.” But this again amounts to regulatory capture as Google itself has plentiful first-party data about consumer behavior as well as the resources and technical means to innovate in advertising. Incumbent publishers, on the other hand, are stuck without their own first-party data or innovation. I know this because in my university center, I spent years trying to convince publishers to change their product and business strategies to prepare for this day. They generally insisted on relying on their dying print businesses and on third-party ad networks online, and now they are retreating behind paywalls. As a result, just when we need it most, reliable news is becoming a product for the privileged few who can afford it. According to Oxford’s Reuters Institute, only 20 percent of Americans pay for online news and it is a winner-take-all market with most people paying for only one subscription for news — almost two thirds of subscriptions go to just three publishers: The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Note well that most local newspaper companies in the United States are now controlled by hedge funds, which are not inclined to invest in innovation and which, by their nature, tend to sell assets and draw cash out of these enterprises. If there ever were an attempt to enact an Australia-like law here — if it could overcome clear First Amendment objections — any money resulting from it would end up in the balance sheets of hedge-fund owners and would benefit neither journalism nor innovation at legacy, local news companies.

Thus to grant newspaper owners an exemption from antitrust, as has been discussed, would be profoundly anti-competitive, for it would — as in Australia — entrench the interests of the largest companies on both sides of the table, media and technology.

Similarly, I argue that breaking up major technology companies is an emotional response to the discussion of technology and power. It would not meet the test of rectifying consumer harm, for users benefit tremendously from free, open, and inexpensive services. Also, there is considerable competition; note Microsoft’s role in this debate.

Instead, in both industries — technology and media — the best cure for concerns about size is to encourage and support entrepreneurship and new competition. In my university, I started a first-of-its-kind program in entrepreneurial journalism to teach journalists to do just that. I hope next to turn my attention to internet studies, to foster the design and creation of a next generation of the net: one built not just to speak but to listen, one designed to build bridges rather than battlements, one that protects the benefits of today’s historically unprecedented opportunity to hear voices too long not heard in mass media. There is much work to be done and much opportunity to create competitors to the present proprietors of the net and media. This is where we should focus our attention in policy.

The net is yet young. We don’t fully know what it is and may not for generations, even centuries. Note that the first newspaper was not published until a century and a half after Gutenberg introduced movable type. In my research for a book on the end of the Gutenberg age, I have learned much about the reaction to the introduction of printing. After initial and brief utopian glee at its prospects, authorities worried greatly about print’s power to spread the fake news of the day, to cause unrest (the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War), and to disrupt institutions. I have also learned that governments’ attempts to control printing and thus speech largely failed. In a prescient 1998 paper for the RAND Corporation, “The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead,” James Dewar argued persuasively for “a) keeping the Internet unregulated, and b) taking a much more experimental approach to information policy. Societies who regulated the printing press suffered and continue to suffer today in comparison with those who didn’t.”

In what I have said here, it might sound as if I oppose all internet regulation. I do not. I worked for more than a year with a Transatlantic High-Level Working Group on Content Moderation Online and Freedom of Expression, convened by former FCC Commissioner Susan Ness under the auspices of the Universities of Pennsylvania and Amsterdam. The group included many experts and luminaries, such as former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, former Ambassador Eileen Donahoe, former Estonian President Toomas Ilves, and former members of the European Parliament Marietje Schaake and Erika Mann. Our report recommended a flexible framework for internet regulation based on transparency as the basis of accountability as well as the establishment of e-courts to rule on matters of legality where that should occur, in public and in court.

To put this in my terms, I have long argued that both technology and media companies should make covenants of mutual obligation with their users and the public — not just rules for users but promises from the companies for what we may expect of them in building useful, respectful, and productive services and environments. In the model of the Federal Trade Commission, I would favor requiring them to provide data about their implementation and impact so as to hold them accountable to their promises. I also hope for a multistakeholder forum — of technologists, lawmakers, regulators, civil society, academics, and users — to grapple with new and unforeseeable problems, such as pandemics, and to exploit new opportunities.

Internet regulation should not be about punishing power or success but instead about creating the means to work together for a better internet, a better society, a better future.

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