- No Innovation Without Evaluation: To help reduce adverse social impact, the federal government should mandate evaluated social trials of alternative electronic services. Analogous to environmental impact statements, these trials should precede full-scale deployment of any major components of new information infrastructures.
- No Innovation Without Regulation: We should conserve cultural space for face-to-face social engagement, traditional forms of community life, off-screen leisure activities and time spent in nature. How about a modest tax on electronic home shopping and consumer services, rebating the revenue to support compensatory, local community-building initiatives?
- No Innovation Without Participation: A number of European nations are out-competing America in including lay people in technology decision-making. For instance, the Danish government appoints panels of everyday citizens to cross-examine a range of experts, deliberate among themselves and then publish their own social assessments of technological alternatives. Sweden, Norway and Germany have pioneered processes for involving workers directly in designing new production systems.
The Ghost in the Modem
For Architects of the Info-Highway, Some Lessons From the Concrete Interstate
By Richard Sclove (resclove@amherst.edu) and Jeffrey Scheuer
In keeping with the theme of this
issue, we offer you the following article as food for thought. This
article is one in an occasional series of E-mail postings on democratic
politics of science and technology, issued by The Loka Institute, and
is reprinted with their permission. Section headers were added here by
the editor.
This article was written by Loka
Institute members, and is reprinted from the Outlook Section of The
Washington Post, Sunday, May 29, 1994. Richard Sclove is executive
director of the Loka Institute in Amherst, Mass., a public interest
research organization concerned with science, technology and democracy.
He also directs the Public Interest Technology Policy Project at the
Institute for Policy Studies. Jeffrey Scheuer, a New York writer, is a
fellow of the Loka Institute, P.O. Box 355, Amherst, MA 01004-0355
Vice President Gore envisions the information superhighway as
the second coming of the interstate highway system championed by his
father, former U.S. Senator Al Gore, a generation ago. Let us hope that
the junior Gore is proven wrong. Rush-hour traffic jams, gridlock,
garish plastic-and-neon strips, high fatality rates, air pollution,
global warming, depletion of world oil reserves have we forgotten all
of the interstate highway system's most familiar consequences?
It's not that Gore's analogy is wrong, only that his enthusiasm is
misplaced. Comparing the electronic and asphalt highways is usefulbut
mostly as a cautionary tale. Building the new information
infrastructure will not entail the degree of immediate, physical
disruption caused by the interstate highway system. But sweeping
geographic relocations, and accompanying social transformations, seem
probable. And the risk of inequity in contriving and distributing
electronic servicesor, conversely, imposing them where they are not
wantedis clear.
Social Repercussions
Indeed, disparities in access to new information systems have already
begun to surface. A study released this past week by a group of public
interest organizations, including the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People and the Center for Media Education, notes
that low-income and minority communities are underrepresented in U.S.
telephone companies's initial plans for installing advanced
communications networks.
Unequal access is only the most
obvious among many social repercussions that may lie in store for us.
The real history of the interstate highway system suggests how we can
think about and control the vast implications of new technologies and a
new national public infrastructure.
It is widely assumed
that Americans' infatuation with cars led to the construction of
America's superhighways. But actually when Congress passed the
Interstate Highway Act in 1956, car sales were slack, and there was no
popular clamor for building a new road system. At the time only about
half of American families owned an automobile; everyone else depended
on public transportation. Congress was responding to aggressive
lobbying by auto makers and road builders, plus realtors who saw
profits in developing suburban subdivisions.
The Act's key
provisions included support for bringing freeways directly into city
centers and earmarking gasoline tax revenues for highway construction.
As the interstate highways were built, city and suburban development
adapted to the quickening proliferation of autos. Soon more Americans
found themselves forced to buy a car in order to be able to shop or
hold a job. The Highway Trust Fund, by assuring the rapid atrophy of
competing public transit systems, bolstered this trend.
Thus
the asphalt highwaysand the society around themare a reflection of
successful lobbying by powerful business interests and external
compulsion, not simply the free choices of consumers. There is no
guarantee that the process of wiring consumers and employees into the
electronic highway system will be different.
The effects
of the interstate highway system on American communities were profound,
especially in the cities. As historian James Flink notes, Ambitious
programs for building urban freeways resulted in the massive
destruction of once viable poor and minority neighborhoods. In other
cases, new highways encircled poor neighborhoods, physically
segregating minorities into marginalized ghettoes.
Gradually,
a black and Hispanic middle-class did emerge. Its members too fled
along the interstate to the suburbs, further draining economic and
cultural resources from the inner city. This contributed to the
emergence of a new social phenomenon: today's desperately deprived,
urban underclass.
Elsewhere the effects were subtler but still significant. The noise and
danger from growing numbers of autos drove children's games out of the
street, and neighbors and families off their front porches. Before
long, suburbs without sidewalks came to signal an unprecedented paucity
of local destinations worth walking to. Suburban housewives found
themselves leading increasingly isolated daytime lives at home.
Highways made shopping malls possible, enabling franchise and chain
store sales to boom. But this sapped downtown centers.
For
some teenagers and senior citizens, today's anonymous, consumption-mad
expanses provide a semblance of community space having swallowed up the
general store, the soda fountain, the Main Street sidewalk, and the town
square. There is ample danger of the new electronic technology
extending these losses.
Remember too that it is easy to
romanticize new technology. The popular arts glorified life on the
highway. People read Jack Kerouac's On the Road, watched Route 66 on
television, and recall the Merry Pranksters' psychedelic bus-capades
during the '60s. In fusing alienation and rebellion with youthful
exuberance, each of these foreshadows contemporary cyberpunk culture.
Yet real-life experience on the interstate is mostly banal and
uneventful. McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and Wal-Mart look about the same
wherever you exit.
Political Ramifications
There are also political ramifications of a vast new public
infrastructure. Interstate highways contributed to national and even
international economic integration. But while GNP soared, mom-and-pop
production and retailing declined. That meant greater local dependence
on national and global market forces and on distant corporate
headquarterspowers that communities simply couldn't control. The locus
of effective political intervention thus shifted toward more distant
power centers. But because those are realms in which everyday citizens
cannot be as effectual as in smaller political settings, democracy was
impaired.
If the growth of the highways is revealing, so
too is the opposition to freeway construction that emerged. As citizens
became more politically mobilized during the 1960's and early '70s,
opposition to relentless highway expansion arose from environmentalists
and from local communities, both rich and poor.
Transportation engineers reeled at the specter of upright citizens
rejecting their good works. Many current telecommunications engineers
and true-believing entrepreneurs are no less convinced of the unalloyed
beneficence of their art.
The importance of the analogy
between the information and asphalt highways lies in the political
procedures that create them. What if a wider range of people, including
non-car owners, had been involved in transportation planning all along?
Considering the alternatives envisioned by critics such as Lewis
Mumford, it seems likely we would have a smaller and different road
system today. As in Europe and Japan, there probably would have been
greater investment in public transit. Modern America might exhibit less
sprawl, less dependence on foreign oil, and more cohesive urban
neighborhoods.
Three Lessons
Three lessons for the construction of
the information superhighway suggest themselves:
Conclusion
The coming
revolution in information systems is going to change life for
everyoneincluding the multitude who, by circumstance or choice, never
use computers. It is imperative to develop mechanisms for involving all
segments of our society in designing, evaluating and governing these
new systems.
Data highway enthusiasts may see such
measures as wasteful obstructions of market forces. But what
entrepreneurs call red tape is really democracy in action.
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