Smart about "Cyberspace," less so "the American Dream"

I found "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" (hereafter "Cyberspace") to be very uneven in its understanding of the relationship between technology and society.

Particularly intriguing to me is the recurrent theme of diversity and how inevitable it seemed to be in 1994 that "diversity within a broad framework of shared values" would represent the Third Wave economy.

Clearly the authors have a very broad definition of diversity. Diversity here is the opposite of "mass culture -- of everyone watching the same sitcoms on television." It is represented in "the creation of 'electronic neighborhoods' bound together not by geography but by shared interests."

If the amount of time I spend listening to niche comedy and culture podcasts or following the rabid Hamilton fan community are any indication, then so far so good.

But our more culturally immediate conception of diversity (i.e., of race, of sexual orientation, of gender identity, of socioeconomic status, of geography both regionally and globally)—and particularly an awareness of how power, privilege, and access are unequally distributed across these spectra of difference—provides a lens into how the "Cyberspace" authors thinking goes off the rails. (Or at least into how the history went off the rails so enthusiastically laid by the authors' thinking.)

Drawing an explicit connection to Bruce, I think the authors fail to consistently consider how we "encode social relations into our technologies," particularly when we make them in the first place. Who makes the media and the technology matters for how it will be used and by whom.

The larger and more diverse (in the authors' generic sense) the media ecosystem, the more that access to financial and social capital, high levels of education, etc. seem to give some creators a major competitive advantage over others. Those advantages have the potential to simply reproduce existing inequalities.

Plus, if we do not have a very diverse (in our second sense) group of people making the media and especially the platforms, the biases of the makers we do have tend to become systematic biases. (For a good discussion of this phenomenon in the sharing economy, check out the "You Can’t Code Your Way Out of Racism" episode of Still Processing, which discusses Airbnb's recent announcement of new anti-discrimination policies.)

The authors' argument for the way toward a perhaps utopian Third Wave economy thought a lot about the fiscal and regulatory involved. But I don't see much evidence of a sophisticated social and cultural understanding. Obviously, this is something of an argument from silence, since socio-cultural diversities don't seem to be top of mind for our authors. But in some sense the point is that we're quite unlikely to get anything but silence on this issue.

Let me end with one last quotation:

Turning the economics of mass-production inside out, new information technologies are driving the financial costs of diversity -- both product and personal -- down toward zero, "demassifying" our institutions and our culture. Accelerating demassification creates the potential for vastly increased human freedom.

A fair summarize of the critique I'm trying to get at here is that I believe this statement is only true for those whose social standing afforded them such freedoms in the first place.