The technological issue upon which progressives and libertarians have worked together most harmoniously has been privacy … Little purpose is served by ignoring the considerable philosophical differences that underlie coalitions about issues like the Clipper chip. Indeed, exploration of these differences will be important in extending political cooperation to new realms, for example in building the community networking movement, which will someday become big enough to have political enemies who seek to stifle or digest it through regulation, most likely under the guise of deregulation. On the other hand, new conflict will most likely arise as each side explores and develops its particular model for organizing people around technology issues.
Predictor: Agre, Phil
Prediction, in context:The August 1994 issue of The Network Observer, an online newsletter, carries an article titled “The New Politics of Technology in the U.S.” by Phil Agre, TNO editor, who was, at the time, working in the Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. Agre writes:”It’s time for people engaged in technology activism on the net, at least within the United States, to realize that they’re really a coalition of two groups with different underlying philosophies: progressives and libertarians … At the most recent Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in Chicago, I saw several liberal speakers unnecessarily piss off the libertarians in the audience by presupposing that everyone in the audience agreed with their own agenda, vocabulary, and values. The point isn’t that the two sides should agree about everything, since that won’t happen. The point is that they should work together when they can through a conscious coalition, and then only disagree when they can’t … What unites these movements is the notion of political empowerment – the idea that people’s interests lay in organizing themselves into specifically political movements for redress of social grievances, whatever their particular grievances might be … The technological issue upon which progressives and libertarians have worked together most harmoniously has been privacy. Each movement has its own pictures of oppressive invasions of personal space that might be facilitated by technology … The Clipper chip has been a tremendously productive issue in this regard, since it provides an extremely unusual alliance of everybody from the ACLU to the captains of industry … Little purpose is served by ignoring the considerable philosophical differences that underlie coalitions about issues like the Clipper chip. Indeed, exploration of these differences will be important in extending political cooperation to new realms, for example in building the community networking movement, which will someday become big enough to have political enemies who seek to stifle or digest it through regulation, most likely under the guise of deregulation. On the other hand, new conflict will most likely arise as each side explores and develops its particular model for organizing people around technology issues.”
Biography:Phillip E. Agre was an associate professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been the author of research studies on the Internet. He edited The Network Observer, an online newsletter on Internet issues. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Global Relationships/Politics
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: The Network Observer
Title, headline, chapter name: The New Politics of Technology in the U.S.
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/tno/april-1994.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Guarino, Jennifer Anne