WELCOME, TRAVELER, TO THE Technorealism Web site (www. technorealism.org). Here is a document hoping to establish ""a more nuanced and useful way to think about the changes that are occurring in computing and communications.'' At first blush, it seems a welcome balm to the confusion of the digital age. Don't listen to the ""pundits, politicians, and self-appointed visionaries'' who try to convince you that technology's all-encompassing swath is either good or evil, it says. We can get through this--by thinking critically, by acknowledging the continuity of history, by rejecting the overly simplistic misconceptions by which the media present the shattering effects of the information revolution.
Cool premise, big promise. But a sad thing happens when that same critical scrutiny is applied to Technorealism itself--a fast-cooked movement introduced earlier this month by 12 editors and writers. What pledges to be new and useful is somewhat of a hedge, and something of a redundancy. Though well-intentioned, Technorealism is dangerously close to what it warns against: another Internet hype.
This movement began at a Greenwich Village bistro (Les Deux Gamins) where author David Shenk dined with fellow technology writer Andrew Shapiro. Shenk expressed frustration that talk-show hosts assumed that since he was critical of certain aspects of the Internet, he must be a foe of progress. Shenk thought there should be a term for people excited about the information revolution but wary of its darker implications. People who approached complex technological issues not with a Panglossian overenthusiasm, and not with a deluded nostalgia for the good old days when chips were something produced by buffaloes--but with rationality and proportion.
Shenk and Shapiro, with the help of author Steven Johnson, set out to define this new school of cyberthought, which aspires to ""expand the fertile middle ground between techno-utopianism and neo-Luddism.'' This is a strange ambition, since the so-called middle ground between those wild extremes probably includes all but perhaps a few hundred people on the planet, not counting those in mental institutions. The founding statement consists of eight vague principles. Most are self-evident: ""Information is not knowledge.'' Who says it is? ""The Internet is revolutionary but not Utopian.'' Does anyone think that the spam-infested, porn-saturated, privacy-threatening Net is a problemless community? Even the authors admit that the document, which underwent a review process by nine cofounders, is a bland work of committee writing.
Nonetheless, a publicity campaign geared to the document's March 12 Web-site debut drew national coverage. And last week Technorealism had a coming-out party of sorts, when its founders tried to explain the movement at panel discussions at the Harvard Law School.
It was there that Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig cheerfully prodded the Technorealists to come up with something more than platitudes. Lessig noted that Technorealist principles like ""Wiring the schools will not save them'' really didn't say anything--even access activists don't claim that the Internet will singlehandedly solve our education problems. Lessig wondered if the Technorealists were really proposing that we shouldn't wire the schools. After much cajoling, he got one to say it straight: no, we shouldn't.
But as Andrew Shapiro explained to me later, that shouldn't be taken as an official Technorealist stance. Another movement loyalist might reach a different conclusion. The important thing was to consider the issue Technorealistically: mindful of history, free of cant and prejudice.
Certainly it is a fine idea to discuss technology from an open-minded, common-sense, critical perspective. Motherhood, apple pie and long battery life are good things as well. The difference is that such universally acknowledged positives don't usually stir the souls of free-thinking individuals, at least not to the point of having them offer their names and reputations to public manifestoes. Which raises the most interesting question concerning Technorealism: why have some of our brightest young cyberwriters burst forth in unity to promote this vapid, muddled treatise?
I think that it's partly a generational thing. The founders are mostly between 25 and 35, fed up with the overly hyped enthusiasms of boomers who brought a '60s-style advocacy to technology. Also, lurking behind the tentative prose of the Technorealist document is a wonkish-liberal aversion to some of the unyielding free-market theories rattling around Silicon Valley. But the timid Technorealists don't dare to pin down exactly how government might regulate the market; with typical delicacy, they just intone that ""government has an important role to play'' and encourage more discussion--as if that debate weren't already raging furiously from Washingtons on two coasts.
Individually the Technorealists may be passionate about living in an era marked by technological change, but collectively their battle cry is somewhere between a shush and a snore. They shy away from hyperbole, but the information revolution is itself a hyperbolic phenomenon. They are eager to assure people that traditional means of policymaking can help manage the changes that technology brings. But since no one knows the extent of those changes, such assurances are baseless. How ironic to declare yourself a realist in a field that literally remakes reality. And ultimately, how futile.