Cyberselfish by Paulina Borsook, Little, Brown, $14.99, ISBN
0316847712
THE Internet is home to all manner of people and politics. Surely, no single
way of thinking can dominate? Prepare to be unpleasantly surprised, says Paulina
Borsook in Cyberselfish, as she takes a long look at what’s going on in
cyberspace. The unquestioning assumption that government is bad, free market is
good sometimes seems to be an orthodoxy. For example, if you join in discussions
on the Internet, you may be confronted by gung-ho gun fans. Gun control, they
argue, is just government’s way of maintaining a monopoly on force. Some have
real-world influence. Many declare that they are libertarians.
What’s one of those? In the US libertarians are free marketers to the bone:
all government is an affront to them. A synonym for their flavour of
libertarianism would be anarcho-capitalist: no ruler, freedom for capital. In
Britain, it’s different. Those fleeing the general anathema aroused by the word
“anarchist” may call themselves libertarian-socialists and be understood.
Britain and the US are, as ever, divided by a common language.
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And this is the first difficulty with Borsook’s Cyberselfish,
subtitled “a critical romp through the terribly libertarian world of high-tech”.
The Silicon Valley culture she mingled with, one of belligerent individualism,
is overwhelmingly an American phenomenon.
She infiltrates the world of Californian high-tech, and finds its population
“suffering geek rage” at incomprehensible arts types with their “squishy
emotions”. So disconnected do they seem from others that they are lost
solipsists—those who believe that there is no reality but their own
perceptions. As a woman, she is appalled at some geeks’ alienated anger against
women.
She entirely fails, however, to make the most obvious observation. Obvious,
that is, to a non-American. These anarcho-capitalists are taking the dominant
politics of the US to their logical conclusion. Ronald Reagan’s presidency set
the seal on the notion that the free market is the only source of goods and
services worth having. The role of government has been eroded until its only
functions, it seems, are law and war. If that. Take this a step further.
Reaganomics needs solipsists of the highest order: you have to be pretty immune
to other people’s points of view to cut back, for example, funding for
education. And if you looked for a scientific model that reflected these
ideas—or the nature of the “rational economic actor” in the discipline of
classical economics—you’d have to reach back to the 17th century: Newton’s
planets rolling in solitary splendour or Boyle’s particles in an ideal gas.
If you looked to modern science for inspiration, you could not claim the
strict determinism of a Newtonian world view. Instead, the body politic would
seem a complex network of power relations between individuals. Such a view might
seek to understand how cooperation and mutual aid emerge in such networks, that
they may be fostered.
This metaphor for society would be utterly unlike the libertarianism Borsook
describes. But it would resemble the socialist anarchism of, say, Peter
Kropotkin (Fields, Factories and Workshops, 1898). It’s on the Web,
too.
