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CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE  2001

CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE 2001

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Subject:

[CSL]: The Bandwidth Dilemma

From:

John Armitage <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

The Cyber-Society-Live mailing list is a moderated discussion list for those interested <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Tue, 6 Feb 2001 08:03:50 -0000

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (237 lines)

[Hi folks, Geert is looking for a publication outlet for this piece in the
UK. If anyone has any ideas or would like to publish it somewhere please
contact Geert on the email below. Best, John.]
===========================================================
From: geert lovink [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2001 1:04 AM
To: richard barbrook; matthew fuller; John Armitage; Pauline van Mourik
Broekman
Subject: The Bandwidth Dilemma
===============================================

The Bandwidth Dilemma
Internet stagnation after Dotcom.mania
By Geert Lovink

England has got its own breed of internet visionaries and Charles Leadbeater
is one them. He is promoter of "the ignorance economy"(1), author of "Living
on Thin Air: The New Economy"(2), advising the Blair government in
e-commerce matters and a consultant at the technology venture fund Atlas
Venture. In the New Statesman of January 15, heralding the "second coming"
of the internet, he states that "the internet is not finished. We are merely
seeing the end of the growth of the first internet."(3) What a relief amidst
all the NASDAQ doom and gloom. It's the kind of salvation we expect from a
practicing priest of organized optimism. However, such escapes into bright
futurism are the easy-way-out. The dilemma between the populist  text-based
"back to ascii" position versus the post-literary, high performance
streaming media is real. A uneasy choice which the IT-industry may struggle
with, way after the future.

Against historical commonsense Leadbeater, a former Financial Times
journalist, dates the "first internet" from 1996 to 2000. Forget the
twenty-five years or so year before the world wide web took off. Leadbeater
is well aware of this forgery. He deliberately rewrites history, provoking
the ascii/linux believers by saying that the internet was born out of the
dotcom spirit of e-commerce. What Leadbeater is pushing is what we may call
New Voluntarism. Forget the hackers story of Internet rooted in
military/academic informatics. Internet was born out of the Will to
eBusiness. Shopping and entertainment are the true nature of humankind. They
are the one and only source, engine and destiny of the Net.

Unlike most New Economy prophets Leadbeater lacks sympathy for the geniality
of technology and its code magicians. What he is saying, and what many of
the failed dotcom entrepreneurs would think in secret, is that internet
should shake of the yoke from technology. Applications and protocols which
once pulled off this incredible global computer network were now stagnating
its further development. How this liberation could be achieved is another
matter.

According to Leadbeater the "first internet" failed because the
technologists and geeks, in the end, triumphed over the CEOs and their
managers and usability html slaves. Early online business pioneers were of
good will, ready to serve their first customers. But the general audience
got scared off by geekish hocus-pocus. Consumers, terrified by the
complexity and clumsiness of this hyped-up yet incredibly self-referential
environment simply left, way too early, never to come back again. No Super
Bowl-style "offline" advertisement could seduce people to type in the domain
names, however genius its name. The initially overprized stock values of
internet startups, based on presupposed continuous turnover growth lost its
potential customer base. By early 2000 the IT-goldrush, faced with market
saturation, flipped into a downward spiral. The absent clicking and sticking
cyber masses had triggered off the first internet recession.

See here the conspiracy theory of the New Economists: blame it on the geeks.
In Leadbeater's words: "The page-based internet is boring. People want
genuinely interactive experience, with drama, excitement, games and jokes.
The first internet spent little on content and charged nothing for it. The
result: hosts of bored consumers using a medium designed for geeks and
nerds."

What Leadbeater is trying to sell is dreamware, this time not developed by
Californian anarcho capitalists but big media business, AOL-TimeWarner
style. "The net will prosper when it is no longer the preserve of geeks, and
when the speed of connections and size of bandwidth are secondary to the
quality of the experience it delivers." How the news and game entertainment
industry will reach supremacy while simultaneously pushing the borders of
technological know-how remains unclear. In any case, the taming of geekdom
is on the agenda of the virtual class--not anymore the Microsoft case. The
paranoia for monopolies has shifted to a diffuse fear for over-development
in technological directions without markets.

The playful collaboration of technologists and venture capitalists has come
to an end. Online creativity has shifted to other levels to express itself
and moved, for example, to peer-to-peer networks and open source software
development.  Decentralized gift economies which are much harder to
economize compared to the heydays of webdesign and the following
portalization of online content and services.

Looking down on the primitive, pre-historic past before e-commerce, the
first internet was "accessed through cumbersome personal computers and
narrowband telephone lines that allowed you to download limited amounts of
information," Leadbeater writes. "Its basic currency is information, mainly
in text form, and searching for it is frustratingly slow and chaotic."

As an Online-Uebermensch, just returned from the future, so kind to share a
few of his thoughts with us earthlings, Leadbeater has no mercy with the
clunky functionality of pre-millennial technology which still surrounds us.
"The web pages on which the text is displayed are dense and dull; they
deliver none of the excitement of a good television advertisement. They
rarely make you laugh, intentionally." Someone must have fooled Leadbeater.
Those funny Americans perhaps? Anyway. He is really disappointed. "The
internet was supposed to be immediate, personalized, interactive and rich in
content. It turned out to be slow, dense, clunky and boring."

A brief look into the political economy of bandwidth could help. The
question of internet speed is and will always be determined by economics and
(cyber)geography, as the maps show,(4) not per se by the technology used at
the consumer's end. Speed on the internet is moody and in constant flux, not
only depending on one's investment in hardware, locality and available
connectivity. Speed is subjective and cultural experience. A whole range of
unknown factors can bring the undisturbed surfing to a sudden halt. A broken
deep-sea cable, a crucial land cable destroyed by a tractor, the US
Eastcoast suddenly switching on their terminals or one of the main switches
of MCI, AT&T, NTT or BT, gone down for a few seconds. Over the years,
bandwidth suddenly has grown, however, this progress has been too slow for
users to notice. The arrivals of ten of millions of newbies has eaten up new
capacity with recent signs of a drop in bandwidth capacity due to
overpricing; a "lack of demand" as the business press calls it.(5)

Instead of analyzing the present, Leadbeater rushes back to the future. "The
next internet will be accessed everywhere, anytime, not just through hefty
computers." Charles' future is going to be a Walhalla of access:
"Telecommunication links will be wireless as well as well as landlines, and
they will be broadband." He is promising nothing less than paradise on
earth. "The second internet will be more interactive; games and animation
will become commonplace." In short: "The second internet - wireless,
ubiquitous, fast, rich in quality entertainment, drama and quality - will
transform how we live, vote, shop, save, communicate and learn."

Apparently Leadbeater has not read the "13 things to know about
broadband."(6) But he is well aware that he cannot deliver his technotopia
overnight. "The components of the next internet will not come together for
another three years." Now, that's interesting. Three years is almost a
lifetime, measured in internet time, specially if we remember the
acceleration of the technological boom during the roaring nineties. The
three years in which the web established itself (1994-1997) and the even
less then three years boom to bust period of dotcom.mania (1998-2000). But
let's suppose Leadbeater is right here. It may indeed take many years until
broadband and cable modem will have penetrated Western households deep
enough to create a critical user mass. Crucial time the internet business
community and most users don't have. We can read alarming editorials on the
portal pages of www.streamingmedia.com about the impact the bandwidth
stagnation has on drying up net.radio and video businesses. Only those with
long term strategies will survive.

A similar situation with the rapidly emerging peer-to-peer networks. Napster
has been build up by university students, using campus hard disk space and
connectivity. Napster, the revolt of the music-loving consumers turned mpeg3
pirates has a majority of 56K modem owners as its constituency, mainly
interested in downloading, not exchanging files. Peer-to-peer networks will
only take-off when the majority of its users has a permanent, open
connection to the Net.  Until then the uploading-downloading ratio will
remain unbalanced. Clerics of professional positivism will point at the ever
bright future, showing  growth figures of the diminishing bandwidth divide.
An ever-growing amount of users may or may not yet have plenty bandwidth
under their fingertips. The question is when? Streaming media producers and
users demand broadband NOW. Not next year or in a decade. Telcos worldwide
are reluctant to roll out broadband, deliberately delaying the upgrade of
their networks to DSL levels. Investments in high performance flatrate
access is not generating that much more cash, to the present infrastructure
and revenue streams.

The future is taking revenge on those who have, either mentally or
virtually, already arrived there. It is disappointedly empty and lonely out
there: promising but without customers. Those who do not want to turn into
bandwidth optimists have the option to go  a few steps back and return to
the productive atmosphere of low-tech tinkering. The choice between the
conceptual cave of 3D streaming images and a retrograde ascii-code
fundamentalism is becoming more and more attractive - and uncomfortable.
Where should projects and networks go? Stay within the grey 56K world wide
wait mainstream? Go avant-garde, requiring DSL, ending up in the sovereign
atmospheres of the happy few? Jump back in history and muck around with
linux code or WAP for tiny mobile screens? You chose. Of course we want
everything, but that's a too easy excuse.

What we see here is a return of a similar dilemma back in the early nineties
between offline multimedia 3D-interactive television/virtual reality and the
real existing cyberspace, internet, about to make its significant yet
aesthetically disappointing quantum jump from Unix kernel to hypertext
transfer protocol (HTML).

Collaborative filtering sites such as slashdot, plastic and the vines face
the same dilemma. Apart from problematic editorial policies and the
unresolved question of ownership over  collaborative text databases there is
the issue of those, living outside of access oases, not being able to
contribute to important debates which are increasingly being held
exclusively on web forums. Exchange of opinions on the internet is gradually
migrating away from e-mail-based newsgroups and mailinglists towards
websites. The web is undermining the presumably democratic and equalizing
character of e-mail.

It is a false but nonetheless real choice which is on the table. The Net is
developing in possibly conflicting directions. The image of a harmonious
convergence of webTV, PC and handheld devices does not exist in a world
where there can only be one Big Next Thing at the time.

------
1. "Capitalize on the Economy! We've had knowledge management. Now it's time
for ignorance management." http://www.mgeneral.com/3-now/00-now/100003cl.htm
2. Review of Living on Thin Ignorance Air:
http://www.spikemagazine.com/0100livingonthinair.htm
3. Reprinted in The Australian Financial Review, 19 January, 2001. Original
available at www.newstatesman.co.uk (warning: complicated procedure to
download content).
4. http://www.telegeography.com/Publications/tg01.html From the
Telegeography 2001 report: " International Internet bandwidth is growing
faster than international Internet traffic, however. In the past few years,
tremendous physical infrastructure builds began to come on-line. Because raw
bandwidth does not translate immediately into Internet capacity, however --
it must first be lit, sold, deployed, and integrated into data network
operations -- the numbers showed what, to casual observers, appeared to be a
mismatch between physical capacity and Internet capacity. See also
www.cybergeography.org, the site for the book Mapping Cyberspace,
www.mappingcyberspace.com and Brian Carroll's project
www.architecturez.com/ae/.
5. "Bandwidth Narrows: Pan-European telecom carriers are having to curb
their ambitions in a year that analysts predict will be the start of the
communications shakeout. Last week, FirstMark, Viatel and GTS (Global
TeleSystems) all announced they would cut their European operations. A glut
of bandwidth, a lack of demand and the bottleneck of the "local loop" to
homes and offices, meant a reversal of fortunes last year. And to add to
their woes, share prices were badly hit in the tech slump and extra
financing became hard to come by."
http://tm0.com/sbct.cgi?s=87827715&i=295870&d=932825
6. 13 Things to Know About Broadband by Gerry McGovern, fist published in
his "New Thinking" electronic newsletter, then published in Steven Carlson's
NowEurope newsletter which was forwarded on May 13, 2000 to the nettime
mailinglist (www.nettime.org). On January 13, 2001 David Garcia forwarded
"13 reactions" of John W. Patterson to nettime in response to Gerry
McGovern.

************************************************************************************
Distributed through Cyber-Society-Live [CSL]: CSL is a moderated discussion
list made up of people who are interested in the interdisciplinary academic
study of Cyber Society in all its manifestations.To join the list please visit:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html
*************************************************************************************

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