The Internet of Us (18 page)

A third way that the Internet has democratized knowledge is by making what is known more
transparent
—particularly with regard to information held by governments. The most obvious and controversial example of this is WikiLeaks, a nonprofit organization that publishes news leaks and classified governmental information online. Its disclosure of videos and documents related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2010 and 2011 caused a worldwide uproar. Supporters defended it as a tool for exposing the important facts that are relevant and needed in order for citizens
to make informed democratic decisions. Critics denounced the organization as putting the lives of soldiers and diplomats at risk. Of course, both of these claims can be true—and whether or not WikiLeaks is ultimately beneficial or harmful, it is just the most visible example of the use of the Internet to enforce or encourage transparency. From revelations of NSA spying to videos of police mistreatment, the Internet can be used to shine a light on all sorts of activities, arguably empowering citizens.

So there is no doubt that the Internet has changed how we distribute, produce and reveal knowledge, and in many ways for the better. But using the language of “democratization” to describe these changes obscures as much as it describes. It ignores the fact that these changes aren't necessarily leading to more democratic ways of organizing our information society.

Epistemic Equality

Changes in how knowledge is distributed, produced and revealed indirectly affect the politics of knowledge—who gets to count as a knower and why—because they directly influence the
economy of knowledge
. By the economy of knowledge I mean, roughly, the structure of relations that divides epistemic labor and governs its exchange. The simple fact is that not all changes in the economy of knowledge—even those that can be legitimately described as “democratizing”—are leading
societies
to become more democratic.

Begin with a familiar economic bedtime story. Once upon a time, if you wanted a new chair, you either made it yourself or you went to a specialized craftsman. That craftsman would make
the chair, but in turn received his materials and tools from still other craftsmen, and they in turn from others. In this way their labor—and expertise—was divided. No one person was responsible for the chair. A group—or a network of individuals, all of whom had some specialized knowledge—created it. Then (according to the story) one day the Industrial Revolution came, and the expansion of capital, and the invention of large machines to mass-produce chairs, allowed factories to create chairs without having to employ legions of expert furniture-makers. This lowered the price, despite the fact that the chair you bought from the factory was also produced by a network—indeed, an even larger network—with more specialized nodes. Some nodes were responsible for raw goods, as before, some for transportation, some for building special machine parts, and some for operating the individual machines that jointly produced the parts that another node would assemble into the chair. Then, one day (again according to the story), the global economy was born. And the network responsible for the chair you bought at Walmart got even bigger. It stretched across the globe, with the factory making the chair—or the iPhone on which you shopped for it—now in China, where the workers would be so specialized that some were hired simply for the size of their hands, and could be paid so little that the price of the products back home in the West could be cheaper than ever, despite the distance each product had to travel in order to find its way to your home.

Just as no one person can build everything, no one person can know everything. As a result, societies have always divided not only manual labor but intellectual labor between highly skilled laborers and expend significant public resources on training
and rewarding those with such skills. That's precisely the way we still organize the medical, legal and scientific professions, for example. There is a network of knowledge, but it is a network in which the individual nodes are sources of expertise, and hence have a better chance of passing on good information and weeding out the bad.

The increasingly networked nature of knowledge challenges this model of the economy of knowledge. Indeed, the bestselling economist Jeremy Rifkin thinks that we are seeing the emergence of a new world order and the death of capitalism. We are instead, Rifkin suggests, seeing the rise of the Collaborative Commons:

The IoT [the Internet of Things] enables billions of people to engage in peer-to-peer social networks and cocreate the many new economic opportunities and practices that constitute life on the emerging Collaborative Commons. That platform turns everyone into a prosumer and every activity into a collaboration . . . allowing social capital to flourish on an unprecedented scale, making a shared economy possible.
⁵

As a result, Rifkin argues, the Internet of Things and the networked nature of our digital form of life are moving us toward “the zero marginal cost society.” In turn, that challenges the central capitalist tenet, that increased human productivity requires increased human labor. “The traditional dream of rags to riches is being supplanted by a new dream of sustainable quality of life”—a life where we can spend more time engaged in pursuits
that interest us, such as making music, cooking better food and thinking about philosophy.
⁶

Rifkin thinks the same revolution is happening at the level of knowledge—perhaps especially there, since the wide availability of knowledge is the fuel powering the rest of our economy. But while Rifkin's collaborative vision might be appealing, the death of capitalism—and exploitative versions of it—is hardly near.

Take crowdsourcing as an example. Instead of an economy of skilled laborers that require resources to train, equip and compensate, crowdsourcing makes it possible for companies to distribute and generate knowledge without the expense of hiring those experts. This isn't necessarily more “democratic.” But it is more capitalistic. Even some of the most active workers for Amazon's Mechanical Turk can make very little, two to five dollars an hour. This may seem reasonable if you think of such laborers as amateurs—doing such work in their “spare time.” But as Brabham has convincingly argued, the idea of the “amateur crowd” is largely a myth. Turkers working for Amazon are generally highly educated professionals working in areas of the world where financially rewarding employment for those skills is significantly less than elsewhere (hence the attraction of Turk). In the case of InnoCentive, while it may be that nonspecialists are better solvers in many cases than those who self-identify as specialists in an area, this should not be taken to mean that the solvers are amateurs. Far from it: they are typically professional scientists. As Brabham sums it up: “these so-called amateurs are really outsourced professionals, and the products and media content that we are sold are not much different than the old products.”

That's a key point.
Crowdsourcing is really a type of outsourcing
.
And outsourcing knowledge production is as profitable as outsourcing anything else. It is simply a mistake to think that such outsourcing is making knowledge production more democratic. Indeed, the opposite seems to be the case: outsourced knowledge producers such as crowd workers are professionals without the protection of a profession—without, in short, basic labor rights. Crowd workers don't own what they produce. Indeed, as Brabham notes, in some cases, designers working “on spec” give up the rights to their designs, thereby forfeiting any future income from their intellectual labor. This is a win for the companies that employ such labor, but it hardly seems a win for democracy. With a large enough network, it doesn't matter if the individual nodes themselves have rights. If you have enough people, you still get similar results, and at a low wage. Cheap labor, good enough results. It is enough to make Sam Walton smile.

In short, the globalization of the economy of knowledge may be having some of the same effects as the globalization of the economy generally. One of the worst consequences of an unfettered, deregulated global economy is gross income inequality. This phenomenon isn't simply a matter of some people making more than others. It concerns a structural fact: that only a few control half of all global resources. It is part of a larger pattern of financial injustice But the unfettered global economy is not only increasing economic inequality, it is also encouraging
epistemic inequality
.
⁷

To understand what I mean by epistemic inequality, let's think first about the value of equality itself. Equality, like liberty, is a core value of democracy, but it is often misunderstood. When
we say, with Locke and Jefferson, that all persons are “created equal,” we aren't saying that we want everyone to be exactly the same, that we don't want diversity in abilities or talents. What we mean is that we are equal in our basic rights as individuals and, in particular, equal in having a claim on access to various resources. Thus the value of epistemic equality: the idea that
all persons have a basic claim to the same epistemic resources
. An epistemic resource is a structure or institution that provides information and at least the basis for knowledge. Thus, epistemic inequality is the result of an unfair distribution of structural epistemic resources.

The most obvious example of an epistemic resource is education. The United Nations holds education to be a fundamental human right. Arguably it is a basis for many other rights, or at least necessary for one to fully enjoy those rights. Without a basic education, people are unable to fully participate in contemporary societies (or almost any society): it is difficult to hold a job, access healthcare or make informed democratic decisions.

The rise of Web 2.0 has made the Internet a similar epistemic resource. Thus the UN has argued recently that preventing access to the Internet is itself a violation of fundamental rights. According to a UN special report, societies have an obligation to recognize the “unique and transformative nature of the Internet not only to enable individuals to exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression, but also a range of other human rights, and to promote the progress of society as a whole.”
⁸
Consequently, blocking that access is harmful. The concept of epistemic equality allows us to explain that harm directly. Removing access to the Internet, whether by criminalizing
participation in online activities or explicitly blocking content, is wrong simply because it is an infringement of epistemic equality.

Epistemic inequality increases between groups when there is unequal access among those groups to epistemic resources: libraries, the Internet, education. The most obvious, and urgent, reason for this is poverty. Epistemic resources like libraries and Internet access come after food, shelter and health; without the latter, the former are unnecessary. This is a simple point but one often underemphasized. The set of digital human beings is not equivalent to the set of human beings, period. Most people on the planet are not participating in the Internet of Things, and many have never participated in the glories of Web 2.0. The Collaborative Commons is a first world dream. That doesn't make it a bad one. But predictions of the death of capitalism ignore the fact that much of the human population is exploited for its labor in order to make the 3-D printers and iPhones that we enjoy so much. And that fact isn't going away in a world where the black carbon soot emitted by small cooking fires is still a contributing cause of climate change.

Another cause of epistemic inequality is closed politics. A political society that is, roughly speaking, “open”—one that has a diverse and independent media, that protects freedom of information and communication and that exercises little government censorship—is apt to be more epistemically equal than one that is not as open. It is an ongoing question to what degree any society is truly open. But one thing is clear: the more closed a political system happens to be, the more apt the people in charge are to keep the epistemic resources to themselves. And as we saw in
the last chapter, the more tempted they will be to abuse those resources at the expense of average citizens.

Even in societies that are relatively open in the political sense (that is, to the degree that political rights of expression and communication are protected), epistemic inequality can occur simply if the Internet is not relatively free and open. This is a third obvious cause for a rise in epistemic inequality. Because even if legally you can access whatever you like on the Internet in a given society, access is unequal if its cost is prohibitive or stratified by levels of service.

This is why the battle going on over Net neutrality is so important.
It is about epistemic equality
. Net neutrality is the idea that governments and Internet service providers should treat the information flowing through the Net equally. In particular, companies shouldn't be allowed to charge more for certain types of data. The argument on the other side is based on free market economics: when demand for a certain kind of traffic—say, Netflix or HBO GO—skyrockets, access to those services should cost more. At heart this is a debate about how to see the Internet. On one side are those who define the Internet as something that can itself be owned and profited from. On the other are those who feel it is an epistemic resource, like education or public libraries. In that case, if you start limiting access, you not only contribute to epistemic inequality, you contribute to inequality, period.

Issues around Internet access are also why, as Rifkin himself acknowledges, we should worry about the monopolization of the Internet. “What does it mean when the collective knowledge of much of human history is controlled by the Google search
engine? Or when Facebook becomes the sole overseer of a virtual public square, connecting the social lives of 1 billion people?”
⁹
What it means is that the gatekeepers are back, and this time the gates, while now small, enclose more. And that, if we are not careful, could ultimately mean less epistemic equality.