MI. The “First Generation” of Cyberspatial Theory

Tim May is an advocate for an idiosyncratically American construal of the political term “libertarianism.” By this term he would mean to denote not the socialist sensibility or syndicalism once more typical of its European usage, nor even the civil libertarianism to which the whole bland spectrum of conventional American political discourse is ostensibly committed at least in principle, but the advocacy of an idealized all-encompassing re-writing of society in the image of an “unfettered” laissez-faire capitalism of a kind that has no historical realization (and which is happily unlikely to manage one any time soon).

May’s commitment to this market libertarianism, however marginal in its extremity even in the 1990s era of American neoliberal and neoconservative market-oriented foreign and domestic policy discourse, was anything but idiosyncratic in the company of the early enthusiasts and popular theorists of emerging digital networked information and communication technologies. May’s market libertarianism located him in fact quite solidly within the steadfast market-anarchist mainstream of what Lawrence Lessig has described as “first-generation theorists of cyberspace.” Indeed, it went so far as to land him in 1993, together with fellow Cypherpunk Eric Hughes, on the cover of the second issue of what Paulina Borsook has dubbed the definitive “guide for the perplexed” of the so-called digital age, Wired magazine.

The “first-generation” of popular cyberspace writing is an era the beginning of which I would locate in 1981 with the publication of the novella True Names by Vernor Vinge. Vinge is a Hugo Award winning science fiction novelist and a professor of mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. Together with William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace” and penned the novel Neuromancer and a number of other definitive texts in the “cyberpunk” genre , Vinge created the most persistently influential fictional imagination of cyberspace in literature in True Names (even if he has not garnered as yet, perhaps, a mainstream recognition quite comparable to Gibson’s). Certainly Vinge’s conjuration in True Names of fantastic immersive virtual worlds inhabited by pseudonymous real-world individuals provided a deeply compelling iconography to which both written and filmic science fiction, not to mention the “non-fiction” of popular science writing, corporate futurism and public relations, all have continuously recurred since. Tim May, for one, has been especially insistent in remarking his own indebtedness to Vinge.

And now as for the proper end of the “first-generation” of writing on cyberspace? I can think of no better marker than the publication of Lessig’s own book Code and Other Laws of Cyberpace in 1999, which in discerning and designating the “first-generation” of cyperspatial theory in the first place more or less inaugurated its second-generation.

Early in his book, Lessig tells a tale in broad strokes that frames the problems and assumptions of this first generation of cyberspatial theorists and activists in polemical terms directed to a second generation: “In the spring of 1989, communism in Europe died… [and t]hose first moments after communism’s collapse were filled with antigovernmental passion –- with a surge of anger directed against the state and against state regulation.” Lessig goes on to note that “[a] certain American rhetoric supported much in this reaction.” This was the “rhetoric of libertarianism[:] Just let the market reign and keep government out of the way, and freedom and prosperity would inevitably grow…. There was no need, and could be no place, for extensive regulation by the state.”

That the actual outcomes in the immediate aftermath of those historical moments turned out in fact to be devastatingly otherwise than the various market enthusiasts claimed to expect is the bleakly familiar story. Of course, he writes, “things didn’t take care of themselves. Markets didn’t flourish. Governments were crippled, and crippled governments are no elixir of freedom. Power didn’t disappear -– it simply shifted from the state to Mafiosi…. The need for traditional state functions –- police, courts, schools, health care -– didn’t magically go away. Private interests didn’t emerge to fill the need. Instead, needs were unmet. Security evaporated.”

Although it is commonplace for market libertarians to affirm their anarchism as a badge of honor, it is difficult to imagine they would glimpse in the conditions that prevailed in this era the realization of many of their hopes. But “anarchy” remains by far the best word to describe these conditions and Lessig mobilizes the term strategically here. He writes that, “[a] modern if plodding anarchy replaced the bland communism of the previous three generations: neon lights flashed advertisements for Nike; pensioners were swindled out of their life savings by fraudulent stock deals; bankers were murdered in broad daylight on Moscow streets.” In short, “[o]ne system of control had been replaced by another, but neither system was what Western libertarians would call freedom.”

It is a too familiar story and even a conventional diagnosis by now. Where Lessig’s lesson acquires its notoriety and flair is in its subsequent application to a different coterie of market libertarian intellectuals: “At just about the time when this post-communist euphoria was waning – in the mid-1990s – there emerged in the West another ‘new society,’ to many just as exciting as the new societies promised in post-communist Europe.” This “new society” Lessig is describing, of course, was the endlessly elusive phenomenon called “cyberspace.” He continues on, “[f]irst in universities and centers of research, and then within society generally, cyberspace became the new target of libertarian utopianism. Here freedom from the state would reign. If not in Moscow or Tblisi, then here in cyberspace would we find the ideal libertarian society.”

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