C.P. Snow. Wikipedia.
When C.P. Snow wrote his influential essay “Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” in 1959, he argued that the splitting of intellectual life into sciences and humanities was harming progress. At that time, the humanities, represented in the East Coast establishment in power in government and institutions, were overbalancing scientists. A cultural war was underway, with literary people finding the scientists illiterate, and the scientists finding those in power not fact-based in their thinking. At the 50th anniversary of the essay, people were still arguing about what he really meant.
Today, while the dichotomy in styles has persisted more than half a century later, the scientists are winning and in fact have converted what used to be called mechanics and engineering into a more vaunted "Internet science". They've also claimed that because everything is digitalized in every field, even the humanities, that they are now experts on everything.
A few literary people still protest that they find technology inhuman, but technologists on the far more popular and influential West Coast have mainly succeeded in discrediting the old philosophical style of reasoning as imprecise. They've also discredited the deliberation of law as "non-technical".
Whatever the outcome of the current raging debate around the Stop Online Piracy (SOPA) and related legislation, the rift between the two cultures is more starkly evident than ever as technologists have overwhelmingly taken over the public discourse through the very means by which the values of the humanities were supposed to be articulated: social media.
In their rage against the organic institution of Congress, the technologists – starting with the big IT companies like Google and their related sympathetic technical press and blogs, have all shrieked their dissent against SOPA as not only a blatant violation of the First Amendment, but a vandalous act by non-technical legislators ignorant about how technology works that will “break” the Internet. This last bit of fanciful imagery has to do with the arcane workings of the domain name system and how numeric addresses are blocked, and then circumvented both by countries like China and hackers using free software like Tor.
Even legitimate law-enforcement acts against established piracy sites are portrayed as harmful to a new security regime for the Internet, DNSSEC. Geeks routinely block malware sites, but disavow the same logic for pirate sites. It’s an ideological difference but one that technologists have tried to convert into a mechanical one.
For years, technologists told Hollywood and the music industry that their efforts to encrypt content online or create paid content models behind encrypted sites were fruitless – they would only be copied and hacked. Yet in today’s SOPA wars, the same hackers piously describe planned security encryption schemes will be threatened by any effort to control rampant copying. The technical specifics may differ; the logic doesn’t.
Most troubling, the SOPA opponents question the ability of the centuries-old organic judicial system as unable to cope with the seeming futuristic specialness of the technological artifact called “the Internet.” If there is even the most remote and unlikely possibility that a law-enforcer could in some exaggerated hypothesis shut down a whole website over one person’s infringing content, the geeks seize on this “edge case” (as they call such aberrations in their own mechanical systems) and present it as proof of SOPA’s unworkability. That the law itself contains complex definitions, remedies and defenses against such an absurdity; that the companies ought to be bound first and foremost by their own Terms of Service, forbidding copyright infringement; that customs agents would have to be guided by due process and the ability to “make their case” – none of these complex organic concepts outside the world of binary self-executing systems of code seem to be trustworthy to the technologists.
Accordingly, platforms like Tumblr have unleashed a propagandistic barrage on their millions of mainly teenage users, telling them that if they embed videos on their little blogs, the government may close down all of Tumblr, and cost their family a million dollar in fines (more edge-casing). The hysterical, decidedly non-scientific campaign has worked – millions of kids on Youtube and Facebook and other popular sites are now repeating and recycling this claim, and Tumblr fueled the insanity by forcing those who log on to the site to see it blocked briefly, with a bogus message purportedly from the future after SOPA, that Homeland Security has closed the site.
Technologists have seized control of the telegraph system, if you will, by controlling the very technology of discourse about technology itself. On mainstream news sites, you will join 500 or even 5000 other people vying for attention, all disappearing rapidly from the top view. In the Google search ranking system, the top, most influential news and blogs are those related to technology, where opinions come laced with obscenity and cat pictures and what has been dubbed the “LOLbertarian” perspective rules, trampling anyone raising legitimate concerns about the loss of livelihoods in piracy.
A technologist – or a 12-year-old with technical skills he acquires on the go online -- can make a viral video that will acquire millions of views, even as a reasoned legal argument in a respected legal journal languishes out of sight with only a few hundred clicks or – if it is in the bastion of Silicon Valley like Stanford University Law School – can enjoy viral popularity by relinking.
In debates in our still real-life rooted Congress, these propagandistic campaigns have had great sway. While the representatives of Silicon Valley’s districts in California have eloquently argued the technologists’ case, offering all kinds of amendments, it is never enough; on every form of technologist-controlled social media you can find, millions of people are openly scorning all of Congress as too stupid to understand the law they are trying to pass – and by implication, govern us all as we increasingly move all of our lives online.
What’s at stake with whatever version of SOPA or similar legislation is passed is whether or not complex legal arguments by seasoned lawmakers grounded in Supreme Court precedents and legal principles prevail over the human artifact of the Internet, or whether its technological creators triumph. The technologists have largely decided that content should be liberated to conceal and offset their own costs, and they prefer to maintain the rule of code-as-law and not the rule of law itself, using binary analogies from the arcane technological exigencies of their industry.
It may no longer be possible to speak of two cultures.
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