What the
Internet cannot do
08-17-2000
![[Cover Image]](20000819issuecov.jpg)
“IT
IS impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should
longer exist, while such an instrument has been created
for the exchange of thought between all the nations of
the earth.” Thus Victorian enthusiasts, acclaiming the
arrival in 1858 of the first transatlantic telegraph
cable. People say that sort of thing about new
technologies, even today. Biotechnology is said to be
the cure for world hunger. The sequencing of the human
genome will supposedly eradicate cancer and other
diseases. The wildest optimism, though, has greeted the
Internet. A whole industry of cybergurus has enthralled
audiences (and made a fine living) with exuberant claims
that the Internet will prevent wars, reduce pollution,
and combat various forms of inequality. However,
although the Internet is still young enough to inspire
idealism, it has also been around long enough to test
whether the prophets can be right.
Grandest of all the claims are those
made by some of the savants at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology about the Internet’s potential
as a force for peace. One guru, Nicholas Negroponte, has
declared that, thanks to the Internet, the children of
the future “are not going to know what nationalism
is”. His colleague, Michael Dertouzos, has written
that digital communications will bring “computer-aided
peace” which “may help stave off future flare-ups of
ethnic hatred and national break-ups”. The idea is
that improved communications will reduce
misunderstandings and avert conflict.
This is not new, alas, any more than
were the claims for the peace-making possibilities of
other new technologies. In the early years of the 20th
century, aeroplanes were expected to end wars, by
promoting international communication and (less
credibly) by making armies obsolete, since they would be
vulnerable to attack from the air. After the first world
war had dispelled such notions, it was the turn of
radio. “Nation shall speak peace unto nation,” ran
the fine motto of Britain’s BBC World Service. Sadly,
Rwanda’s Radio Mille Collines disproved the idea that
radio was an intrinsically pacific force once and for
all.
The mistake people make is to assume
that wars are caused simply by the failure of different
peoples to understand each other adequately. Indeed,
even if that were true, the Internet can also be used to
advocate conflict. Hate speech and intolerance flourish
in its murkier corners, where governments (as France is
now discovering) find it hard to intervene. Although the
Internet undeniably fosters communication, it will not
put an end to war.
But might it reduce energy consumption
and pollution? The Centre for Energy and Climate
Solutions (CECS), a Washington think-tank, has advanced
just such a case, based largely on energy consumption
figures for 1997 and 1998. While the American economy
grew by 9% over those two years, energy demand was
almost unchanged—because, the CECS ventures, the
Internet “can turn paper and CDs into electrons, and
replace trucks with fiber-optic cable.” No wonder one
enthusiastic newspaper headline begged, “Shop
online—save the earth.”
Sadly, earth-saving is harder than
that. Certainly, shopping online from home is far less
polluting than driving to a shopping mall. Ordering
groceries online, and having them delivered, means that,
if the logistics are handled efficiently, one truck
journey can replace dozens of families’ separate car
trips. Reading newspapers, magazines and other documents
online is more efficient than printing and transporting
them physically. Yet doing things online is more
energy-efficient only if it genuinely displaces
real-world activities. If people shop online as well as
visiting the bricks-and-mortar store, the result is an
overall increase in energy consumption. Thanks to the
Internet, it is now easy for Europeans to order books
and have them extravagantly air-freighted from America
before they are available in Europe. And it is more
efficient to read documents online only if doing so
replaces, rather than adds to, the amount of printed
bumf.
Furthermore, as more and more offices
and homes connect to the Internet, millions of PCs,
printers, servers and other devices gobble significant
quantities of energy. Home computers are becoming part
of the fabric of everyday life, and are increasingly
left switched on all the time. One controversial
assessment concluded that fully 8% of electricity
consumption in America is due to Internet-connected
computers. The construction of vast “server
farms”—warehouses full of computers and their
attendant cooling systems—has contributed to the
overloading of the electrical power network that has
caused brown-outs in Silicon Valley.
Let them do e-mail
What about the belief that the
Internet will reduce inequality? According to a study
carried out by America’s Department of Commerce,
households with annual incomes above $75,000 are more
than 20 times as likely to have Internet access as the
poorest households. Bill Clinton, struck by the
“digital divide” between rich and poor, argues that
universal Internet access would help to reduce income
inequality.
But, as the cost of using the Internet
continues to fall (services offering free access are
becoming the norm, and a basic PC can now be had for
little more than a video recorder or a large
television), the true reason for the digital divide
between rich and poor will become apparent. The poor are
not shunning the Internet because they cannot afford it:
the problem is that they lack the skills to exploit it
effectively. So it is difficult to see how connecting
the poor to the Internet will improve their finances. It
would make more sense to aim for universal literacy than
universal Internet access.
Yet, even in the more ludicrous claims
for the Internet, there may be germs of truth. This open
network, so hard for governments to control, may indeed
help to give more power to individual citizens and
encourage democracies. As democratic governments rarely
fight each other, that might promote peace. As for the
environment, the Internet will allow many pieces of
machinery to be monitored and tuned more precisely from
afar. That will promote energy efficiency. Taxing or
merely measuring pollution will be less expensive and so
easier for governments to undertake.
Even inequality may, in some cases, be
reduced thanks to the Internet. A computer programmer in
Bangalore or Siberia can use the Internet to work for a
software company in Seattle without leaving home, and
can expect to be paid a wage that is closer to that of
his virtual colleagues at the other end of the cable.
The effect is to reduce income inequality between people
doing similar jobs in different countries, but to
increase the inequality between information workers in
poor countries and their poorest compatriots.
The Internet changes many things. It
has had a dramatic impact on the world of business.
Firms can now link their systems directly to those of
their suppliers and partners, can do business online
around the clock, and can learn more than ever about
their customers. Economies may be more productive as a
result. For individuals, e-mail has emerged as the most
important new form of personal communication since the
invention of the telephone.
The lesson of history
The extent to which the Internet will
transform other fields of human endeavor, however, is
less certain. Even when everyone on the planet has been
connected to the Internet, there will still be wars, and
pollution, and inequality. As new gizmos come and go,
human nature seems to remain stubbornly unchanged;
despite the claims of the techno-prophets, humanity
cannot simply invent away its failings. The Internet is
not the first technology to have been hailed as a
panacea—and it will certainly not be the last.
© Copyright 2000 The
Economist Newspaper Limited. All Rights Reserved
Related Links:
Visit the MIT pages of Nicholas
Negroponte (this site includes all his monthly
columns in Wired from 1993 to 1998) and Michael
Dertouzos.
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