What to read about the Internet today, and how

Sometimes people ask me what to read about the Internet, about IT & Society, maybe about my own research area on the Internet in the Middle East. I usually recommend books not on the Internet but on Silicon Valley. Not for the usual reasons that it’s Everest, Mecca or Ground Zero for the Internet or IT, or for hero stories, but for  the more mundane reason that Silicon Valley is a place, a community, with a culture and, among other things, there is an extensive literature on it. It helps to be grounded, and it helps ethnographers even more to be able to study a community. It’s one of the ways we’re able to wrap things up in a discipline that seeks not the unit variable or linear causation but how everything is connected to everything else.  The Internet is not self-contained, but too much writing about it is overly self-referential, transcendental, confounding first encounter with first movers.  As with entering a foreign society, something anthropologists are familiar with, strangeness dissipates but wonder may not.  This isn’t a matter of putting the Internet in ‘its’ place, but rather a matter of looking at it in place, or amidst a local constellation of activities and actors instead of some total firmament.

Silicon Valley is not the social-historical or technical home of the Internet, although some key components were developed here and some notorious developments happened here.  It has, however, been the subject of some good books at what appear to be crucial junctures of the Internet’s history, or ‘conjoncture’ when structures meet and get reassembled with some new elements (the idea is developed in Marshall Sahlins’ Islands of History, 1985).*  Passing quickly to the computer age, there’s Fire in the Valley by Paul Freiberger & MIchael Swaine (1984) on the making of the personal computer. People in it speak highly of its accuracy in delineating their relations and the relations of their ideas. That’s one baseline of good ethnography, not reproduction but recognizability.  The other is finding recurring patterns (structures) and how they recur (structures of structures). That was the demonstration in the classic ethnography of The Nuer (1940) whose author found a similar structure over and over in land use, time-reckoning, kinship, politics, religion. That is, similar but not identical, and that’s what you find when you study communities, as opposed to single institutions (even ‘as if’ communities themselves), and The Nuer established the basic model of community study consisting of ecology, political economy, social organization and reproduction, cosmology.  Fire tracks ideas about and implementations that joined personal+computer through groups that formed around them.

On Silicon Valley, I sometimes recommend Michael Lewis’ The Next New Thing (2000) as a sort of biography of a single person that manages to tell the local history of the Internet when it went public with the World Wide Web.  Its focus is a group of people and a cultural attitude that took IT developed in the public sector as a utility into the private sector as a business.  A serious history might focus earlier when Silicon Valley really was a site of Internet development (Where Wizards Stay up Late, Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon, 1996, for example), or on the public sector which was its larger site (Inventing the Internet, by Janate Abbate. MIT Press, 1999), on CERN where the Web was invented or even on the team at the University of Illinois that created the graphical browser. But Lewis’ focus on Netscape localizes in Silicon Valley through a figure in whom business and computing imaginations came together in order to tell the story of the software platform of the dot.com boom. This is the geek+billionaire story, which involves two arcane communities that partly became one sociologically but also culturally through a good deal of imaginative work – in other words, cultural creation. Good stuff for anthropologists: in the jungle, we learned that animals are good to think with (e.g., Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 1962), and in Silicon Valley that it’s software.

For Silicon Valley’s own story as a place where people live with, not just for, technology, I usually recommend the actual ethnography of Jan English-Lueck’s Cultures@SiliconValley (2002).  It really is a community study, of the community around San Jose and including everyone, not just the techies or high-tech institutions treated analytically as a community. It’s based on a decade of fieldwork by a team of professors and students who range across the whole social scale and across all social activities to trace how IT comes to ’saturate’ all of life there, rather like cattle for Nuer even if they don’t herd.  ‘Technological saturation’ even re-denominates cultural difference from its typical American registers of boundaries into something like the popular postmodern brush-off of ‘whatever’, not as an organizing principle for social boundaries but into a resource that can be programmed. My students “totally get it,” as they put it. And that helps them get the more difficult theoretical points of how practice both generates and is generated by values.

Another author I recommend for “getting it” is Sarah Lacy, whose recent book Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good (2008) purports to be about the ‘rebirth’ of Silicon valley with the ‘rise of Web 2.0′ after the dot.com bust, which sounds like journalistic hype, and it is. But the book isn’t. It’s good ethnography for the same reason as these others in that it’s (a) about a place and (b) lines up a cultural sensibility with the social life that produces and is produced by it. The New York Times review of this book, by Katie Hafner, who co-wrote a popular history the earlier engineer-creators of the Internet (Where Wizards Stay up Late, Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon, 1996) that stands up with the first professional history of the subject (Inventing the Internet, by Janate Abbate. MIT Press, 1999), didn’t get Lacy’s treatment, or at least was cool to it, allowing as how it had some interesting insight into venture capital.

Well it might. Lacy was a Business Week tech-economy columnist covering Silicon Valley in what might have seemed the unpromising period after the dot.com bust in 2000. No new money, evaporating fortunes, and even the chroniclers were failing. Wired, the New Yorker of the tech set, shrank. Red Herring folded. Even the San Jose Mercury News cut back its coverage, which made it hard to follow the place from a distance. (I live and teach in Washington, DC, and do research on the Internet in the MIddle East, although my students’ interests are closer to home). So, too, the venture capitalists who were at a loss, and not only for something new to invest in.  They were also at a loss to understand another generation of developers and their seeming indifference to the boom-era venture capitalization model, even to finding them.  But Lacy wasn’t.  She was there, meeting a newly arriving set of actors, following their careers, learning what they thought, observing it acted out and then ‘coding’ that into software to support it. Anthropologists call this ‘participant-observation’, learning a way of life by learning how it’s lived. I can’t tell from the book if she has computer science training to ‘read code’, but she seems to understand people who write it and the conditions and values that they write into it. It’s like studying shamans. You don’t have to become one, but you typically have to be admitted to their modes of reproduction.

Her account is built around attitudes toward money, attitudes toward code, and attitudes toward social relations that densely interweave but basically resolve into two tensions. One is over ownership, a fierce feeling of ownership of software one writes and that it is not written to be sold quickly in the ‘flipping’ fashion of the dot.com boom but held close and privately, almost as part of the self. This is mysticism, but different from the others described by previous authors, and set in a different social context, which might account for Hafner’s cold review. The other tension is over what in an older language would be called ‘automation’. Software is imagined by engineers as machines that, in the fashion of machines, automate some process or action. The software-made-to-be-sold of the dot.com boom aimed to automate and thereby to extend business processes to the retail level. Amazon.com is the apodictic example, Pets.com the negative posterchild. But software identified as and identifying with the hocus-pocus of Web 2.0 (the concept of a marketing guru that software development had shifted from business processes to social ones) eschews ‘alienation’ both of selling out and of the removal of the actor in favor of a mythos of automating social relations, networking, interaction on the Web. The metaphor of choice is to create a ‘platform’, on the retrospective model of the browser as a platform for other applications (itself derived from the theory of software as a ’stack’) that, Lacy finds, inspired the Web 2.0 developers she interviewed.

Although she doesn’t cite it, this resonates with English-Lueck’s research on Silicon Valley that took in the whole population.  On that scale, and not just for tech workers, English-Lueck found a broad identification over and over with “the Valley” as a symbolic identity, even a somewhat mystical one, and that this identification extended to notions of “working for the Valley” instead of for particular companies.  Not literally, of course, as a Chamber of Commerce employee or in public relations, and English-Lueck related this to high job mobility.  But the sense of identifying less with companies – many of which have symbolically ’strong’ cultures and histories, such as Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Apple Computer or, now, Google – than with the place as ethos was present across all occupations and classes.  This mystification of place is like nationalism, of “imagined community” in the phrase of Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1983).  Failing to grasp these data beyond and around the job except as ‘externalities’ may may be why business correspondents can’t detect much ‘business sense’, even as that is understood in Venture Capital terms, among Silicon Valley’s newest generation.

Lacy seems innocent of this larger context and so not altogether convinced that the segment of people she writes about have a grip on reality, but not because they eschew the rounds of venture capitalising in which a partly developed idea is sold, developed a bit and sold again, and the process repeated until it collapses like a ponzi scheme. Instead, she presents them as visionaries, a creative segment of the ‘whatever’ generation following yuppy strivers and Gen X slackers. These are, of course, cliches, handy, good-enough for journalism but that usually do not stand up to serious scrutiny by professional sociologists. That may be beside the point here, because few Web 2.0 developers cast theirs as improvements on existing technologies or of existing cultures.  Instead, they brought a new sensibility, and Lacy provides enough description and ‘thick’ enough description to show how this current sensibility finds expression and is socially organized. Base and superstructure if you’re a Marxist; social system and cultural system if you’re a structural-functionalist, conditions and dispositions if agency is your thing theoretically. In other words, she doesn’t ask, or seem to worry, whether her informants, these new natives of Silicon Valley, its latest pilgrims to the liminal reaches of industrial capitalism, are right or even if they have an accurate view of the world. Their view is, phenomenologically speaking, their world.  What she describes is how they construct the world and proceed to code for it, how they construe social relations (mostly as interactions that they live) and similarly construe coding them.

She also understands how money works (magically) and, in thosel terms, seems to be describing a post-corporate world. Not non- or anti-corporate, but post-corporate, such as some sociologists try to capture in notions like The Rise of the Network Society (Manuel Castells, 1996) or as a new urbanism (Global Network Linked Cities, edited by Saskia Sassen, 2002) which foreground what economists call ‘externalities’ as the primaries of a new, emerging political economy marked by flexible accumulation in comparison to the centralising political economy of capital accumulation of the industrial period. This is treacherous ground, but it is met – and a unique segment of it is described – in Lacy’s book. In business terms, its markers are out-sourcing, supply chains and other divestment at the corporate level and, at the individual level, flexible employment, freelance work, ‘network values’, and what seem like gift economies for exchanging what conventional economics cannot recognise as goods and services or even as derivatives of those. To some, this is a sea change; to others, just another, higher form of capitalism. To me, it seems to be counterpart in the private sector to what I and my colleagues perceived in the NGO sector, which we called the rise of a post-democratic governmentality (Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global Civil Society, 2006) that consists of showing up, claims to participate based on expertise and universal values, assiduous reputation management, and highly unstable or constantly morphing forms manifest both in networks and in information technologies.

That’s another story. Lacy’s story is of a sensibility and a social structure that implements and is implemented by it through ‘coding’ or software programs such as MySpace, Facebook, Friendster before them and LinkedIn after them, YouTube, Flikr, so-called social-bookmarking programs that let people pick and compare favorites on the Web and the phenomenon of Wikipedia – generally what in other corners are called ‘peer-to-peer’ distribution (actually, organization) and ‘open source’ movements. Likely, her informants and maybe Lacy herself would object to these corporate-period comparisons as at least anachronistic, or equally to precedents for their work in ‘community informatics’, in ‘content-management systems’, and the like. Functionally, that’s what they’re doing but expressively not dressing it that way. But there’s more.

For instance, I’m writing this on a blog, which functionally updates the listserv, a technology developed in the early 1970s on the heels (on the ‘platform’) of e-mail, with some added ‘widgets’ for generating indexes, tables of contents, registering links, and professionally designed graphics. They automate what I had to do ‘by hand’. So to me, a blog is like a listserv, or its obverse the newsgroup; but the reverse is not true for people who were born after the listserv and who do not see blogs as improving on that model but instead see blogs as modeling something else, something in their experience, giving expression to a sensibility that’s theirs but not – let’s say – mine, rather as Lacy gives voice to an experience with the Internet that wasn’t contained in Hafner’s founders in a previous generation. From an anthropological point of view, Lacy is describing a native cultural system. Looking at it in Silicon Valley as a place, this is not generational succession in the sense of one generation building on another, although it may look like that to the older generation. It’s more like the waves of settlement and resettlement in successions of ethnic neighborhoods in industrial cities, like Chicago, which may have some bearing on Hafner’s there-goes-the-neighborhood review. These are different cultures – engineering at Stanford and SRI in the 1970s, programming in the 2000s – of work, worldview and social relations that connect practice and perception.

So, Lacy describes a network of people who know each other, not quite a community, more like a cohort, but with a palpable density of social ties, which she traces out – indeed, maps out as a social network with different kinds of ties (movements of people, money, ideas) – and then follows how those traces or kinds of ties slowly add up through shared reflexivities to a cultural system.  Lining them up with the dot.com generation earlier and the engineering wizards before them suggests several things.  One is that just as the engineering wizards failed to reproduce themselves and their culture as the Internet’s users and the Internet’s culture – to them, ‘newbies’ were a problem – so, too, did the dot.comers.  Another is that such failures were only partial: just as Lacy is able to draw the links of a social network linking Web 2.0 to the WWW before it, one could be drawn from the latter back to SRI and Stanford University’s engineering departments.

I find this interesting because Lacy’s is an account of developers. I study developers, in the Middle East, much more than I study users. Users are too amorphous, not a group and barely a category, depictable culturally (as value and behavioral profiles) but not so well socially except in the sociology of crowds, cohorts and like analytical constructions (e.g., Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, 2008). But the interesting thing about Internet developers is that they are its first users, which gave rise to the idea that users ‘develop’ the Internet – true enough when users were programmers but more problematic when they aren’t, or when their ‘programming’ is metaphorical, such as in the guise of ‘user-generated content’. The wizard generation conceptualised their programming as ’social engineering’, the dot.comers cast their automation in economic terms as ‘disintermediation’.  No clear cosmological re-presentation of Web 2.0 has emerged, except possibly that term itself; although ’social software’ has been floated and much discussed.  The sociologist of networks Barry Wellman speaks of ‘affordances’, and practitioners seem to be gravitating toward ’social media’. Here, the polysemy of concepts located in multiple communities is most apparent, from ‘programming’ itself to applications as ‘platforms’ for other applications.

Here, I don’t want to say that Lacy has written an anthropological book or even an ‘ethnography’ in the loose ways those terms can be bandied about. I do want to say that Once You’re Lucky has a density of description comparable to a few others on IT or Silicon Valley that an anthropologist can work with to grasp in the sensibilities and social relations she has indicated in a set of social actors, at least partly, a recognizable ecology, political economy, scheme of social relations and their reproduction, and their cosmological reflex. She does not so much build a story around these developers as elicit a story woven by them and in their practices and common cultural activity. As a first approximation, the account in this book is of writing a sensibility of social relations with family resemblances as interactive, tentative, multimodal and expressive into software that reifies particular inflections they have in a place and time as its social structure. She nails that down in her most nuanced account, which is of these software developers turning away from venture capitalists to retain ownership that isn’t just practical, it’s about identification with/through software, like Nuer with the cattle they herd. It contains a ‘primitive classification’ that can be traced in concepts and through parallel structures across multiple domains. In some ways, these actions may probe the social relations and their reflexive sensibilities for what some think is a new political economy (post-industrial in terms of economic organization, post-modern in culture, post-democratic politically) and a sociology of networks where showing up and knowing how matter but representation does not and is replaced by reputation-management. If this sounds familiar, then reading Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good provides an ethnography of IT from the inside, up close but not too personal to cloud the story; in this it joins a small number of other books on Silicon Valley that do likewise from different artifacts.

We know from STS (Science, Technology & Society) studies that people build their values into machines, before there are ‘impacts’ of technology (viewed as an independent variable).  We know that wizard engineers did that from the beginning and on the long slog through the public sector until the Internet was delivered over to commerce, where so did dot.com-ers.  From that, we know that socialization into an existing regime of practices and values is incomplete, the ‘newbie’ problem;  most comes before going on-line, and applying that, or building it in, re-socialises the Internet or makes it look like additional parts of the larger society.  We know that user communities expand outward from developers to those most like them;  we know these have first been professional and generational cohorts, but in time into more diverse actor networks; and we know that early among those are financiers and regulators.  Lacy seems to have intersected this process in the intersection of a developer cohort (generational and cultural) with the network-formation process.  She seems to have hit a context where the complementary additional actors were a residue of a previous ‘expansion’ generation not yet superceded or expunged from memory by the Next New Thing.  Absent a unified theory of this process – such as socialization of newbies failed to be, on the one hand, and cooptation theories fail to be, on the other hand – actor network theory captures the assembly phase of what community theory helps capture at the point of succession?

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* ‘Conjoncture’ is one of those French intellectual concepts less obscure in its original setting than when borrowed into other disciplines in the 1980s.  The French historian Emmanuel LeRoy Laudrie used the term to designate events or trends in contrast to long-term structures.  Sahlins’ usage refers to an event that exposes structure both to view and to risk, in which “Burdened with the world, … cultural meanings are thus altered” (1985: 138). Less poetically and more definitionally: “..the practical realization of the cultural categories in a specific historical context, as expressed in the interested action of the historical agents, including the microsociology of their interaction” (xiv) become evident, not self-evidence.

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