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More reviews by Peter Gordon
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Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion by Hal Abelson / Ken Ledeen / Harry Lewis
It's funny how the even the most seemingly innocuous byproducts of industrial and technological development can creep up and bite us somewhere unfortunate. Who'd have thought, for example, that carbon could cause worldwide climatic change? Mercury in the food chain, maybe, or even ozone: these are things that aren't really supposed to be floating about. But carbon dioxide is entirely natural and necessary: plants breathe it.
The byproduct of the digital revolution -- bits, those harmless 0s and 1s -- are also potentially life-changing and not always in positive ways. Hal Abelson of MIT, Harvard's Harry Lewis and Ken Ledeen of Nevo Technologies, the authors of a new book entitled BLOWN TO BITS: YOUR LIFE, LIBERTY, AND HAPPINESS AFTER THE DIGITAL EXPLOSION, note that while the "digital explosion" -- the conversion of just about everything to bits, the 0s and 1s of computer data -- has brought tremendous and almost innumerable advantages and benefits, it has also had a number of disturbing consequences, including threats to privacy and, ironically, free speech and innovation.
"It is now possible, in principle, to remember everything that anyone says, writes, sings, draws or photographs. Everything," they repeat. And not just that: "Global computer networks can make it available to everywhere in the world in the world, almost instantly."
And there's the rub.
Based on an undergraduate general education course and drawing on examples from China and Europe as well as America, Blown to Bits is a highly readable non-technical overview of this brave new digital world, covering intellectual property, encryption, privacy, wireless communication, licensing of radio spectrum, and how legislation and regulation, at least in the United States, have often ended up muddled and counter-productive. Balancing commerce, convenience, freedom and security isn't easy.
Readable it may be, but why read it? Because "right now," say the authors, "governments and the other institutions of human societies are deciding how to use the new possibilities... Everyone should know how the decisions will affect their lives, and the lives of their children and grandchildren who come after."
Asians have particular reasons to educate themselves on this subject. Digital technologies play an even greater role in the day-to-day life of much of Asia than in the U.S.A.: the idea that a cellular phone might not work in the subway would be greeted with incomprehension if not horror here.
A second reason is that while some Asian places have reasonably strong privacy regimes, Asia does not in general have a long history of strong legal and regulatory protection of what we might call informational rights. While this can be a cause for concern, it can also be an opportunity, for such protection can be drawn up with the new digital technologies in mind.
For example, copyright, and intellectual "property" in general, are concepts which, at least as commonly understood, are not best suited to a world where perfect copies can be made and distributed infinitely widely at essentially no cost. The result, say the authors, is "a nasty firefight filled with indignation, recriminations, and a path of escalating punishments and anti-competitive regulation in the name of copyright law. As collateral damage of the battle, innovation is being held hostage."
Asia is not obliged to accept conventional (i.e. mostly American) received wisdom on these various subjects. "Today's copyright law," the authors point out, is not an inherent right but "is the outcome of 200 years of wrangling, negotiating, and compromising." American law and American negotiators. It is open to question whether the result suits current conditions in, say, East Asia. Asian jurisdictions can go back to first principles, to ask what regulations are supposed to accomplish, in practice here in the still developing economies of Asia, and whether or not any given policy will in fact accomplish it.
These discussions, though, because they can be, and most often are, presented in highly technical language, can become hostage to special interests, whether corporate or political, who benefit from having the discussion go one way or another. Blown to Bits, by rephrasing the issues in non-technical language, and by making them interesting to the lay reader, places the discussion back in the public domain where it belongs.
Peter Gordon
08/09/2008
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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