The Cyclic Future

Even the most Phil K. Dickian futurist could not have predicted our current technotopia. We spend more of our lives digitized than we would probably like to admit. It is impressive, though, that Janet Abbate demonstrates considerable foresight in her reading of user innovation of the ARPAnet; you could argue that her analysis foreshadows the current Web 2.0 explosion of user-generated (and edited) content: YouTube, Facebook, Blogs, Flickr, etc. One significant aspect of her prediction does not line up, however. She explicates the most neglected element of the evolution of the ARPAnet, "During [its] first decade of operation, fundamental changes in hardware, software, configuration, and applications were initiated by users or were made in response to user's complaints" (Abbate, 83). This seems plausible enough, until we remember that the vast majority of users who even had access to the network at this happened to be the very developers of the infrastructure: programmers, computer scientists, and graduate students who only could afford access from the large institutions that paid the bill. Maybe her explanation is signified differently within the age of "peer production" and DIY technology, but I can't help but question the amount of "user" innovation when the user probably has, or is working towards a PhD in CompSci, as compared to Joe the Blogger sitting in his underwear in Iowa City. When the user is an expert, her claim seems less radical.

I must commend Abbate on her approach to historicizing an immensely technical narrative, and, from the limited reading I've done on the subject, her casting of a cyclic history of this phase of technological developments seems to align with other historians. My most salient example of this is a great essay by Thomas Streeter from Critical Inquiry called the "Moment of Wired" where he illuminates a dialectical relationship between the romanticized Wild West version of the Internet stemming from bored, pimply middle class slobs and grad students (those who had the technical proficiency to use the web in the early 90s) versus the commercialized version of cyberspace that emerges with the release of the first good web browser, Mosaic. Wired Magazine catalyzed this convergence by using the new glossy interface of a picture-capable web browser to sell the rebellious dream of the web back to a larger market than just the technogrunts who created the dream, and the infrastructure, in the first place. Streeter more realistically characterizes intellectual labor and consumption in his history of the Internet, which, admittedly, is not of the same time period. Abbate resists the temptation of heroicizing the creators of digital technology, but I think she is peremptorily seduced by the cult of amateur, which, by putting the power solely in the hands of the users, obscures the relations of production that produce new technology and technological practice.

She contextualizes the ARPAnet's "consumers" as "researchers who were to use it in their work", because she wants to privilege the innovation that occurs during the development of the technology, not only in the end product, but her division between user and researcher still seems like an imagined one (83). More than even her own oversight, we, as readers ten years later, cannot pigeonhole her brand of user innovation as user-generated content, or even open-source software save we misrepresent the economic conditions that continue to nurture our phenomenally exciting and profoundly alienating reliance of technological media.