Timothy W. Luke

Department of Political Science

Virginia Polytechnic Institute

and State University

Blacksburg, VA

twluke@vt.edu

Presented at the annual meeting of the

the American Sociological Association,

August 6-10, 1999

ABSTRACT

This paper reexamines emergent new divisions, arising under digital conditions of production with the informationalization of economic and social life. Despite the claims of authorities, like Nicholas Negroponte or Bill Gates, about the replacement of "atoms" by "bits" in on-line utopias of abundance and equality created by "friction-free markets," the material realities of virtualization tend toward new arrangements in which bits are used to displace and dominate people and things. Questions of access to computing and communications machineries as well as the costs of access to computing and communications machineries as well as the costs and benefits of migrating to networks for commerce, education, administration, and communication all point to new racial, geographic, national, and class divides opening up in the virtual worlds of online economy and society. These points will be examined in the context of the USA in the global economy five years after the inception of the World Wide Web.

O. Introduction

The rapidity of change in the digital domains of the Internet is widely acknowledged. To write anything about their current mix of capabilities is a hazardous enterprise. Indeed, such writing seems doomed to lag far behind the event horizon where the latest actions are happening. These changes cannot be quantified easily, and many of their most characteristic qualities are ephemeral. So much of what is written about the Net must necessarily write instead on what already is written on the Net. No one really knows what all of its effects are. Consequently, most try to understand what many believe its effects were a year or two back or perhaps should be a year or two. Hence, these widely circulating beliefs now constitute quite a considerable stock of net effects in-and-of themselves. In these respects, this analysis does not differ a great deal from others, which have preceded its examination of inequality and the Internet.

In other respects, however, this exploration of computer networks, digital discourses, and online organizations departs broadly from other treatments of these issues. It rethinks some of the implications following from digital divides opening out in cyberspace. The use of the Internet plainly has grown tremendously over the past decade, rising from a few hundred thousand in 1991 to 143 million in 1998 to somewhere around 700 million by 2001. Nonetheless, almost 90 percent of all Net users live in rich industrial countries, 80 percent of all WWW sites are in English, but less than 10 percent of the world’s population speaks English or lives in the rich industrial countries (Washington Post, July 13, 1999: E2). For all of the talk about cyberspace as an egalitarian realm of free and easy access, there is a very rough reality of materiality in virtualization. Bits travel over wired and wireless networks. Their routers, pipes, and conduits are owned by a few, but sold, leased, or rented to the many. Getting into cyberspace costs money and time; in turn, inequalities of wealth and differences in status offline are reflected in the real inequities of some groups compared to many others in the online environment.

The digital divides represent clear disparities in computer use and Internet access, which can be seen in both comparisons of different social groups in the United States and between various other nation-states such as those done by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) in the U.S. Department of Commerce (NTIA, 1999, 1998, 1995). While some believe that there are no "haves" and "have-nots" in cyberspace, and that the real distinction should be made only between the "have-nows" and "have-laters," it would appear, in fact, that not having computers and Net connections closely parallels not having other types of power, status, and wealth. And, just as those who do not have many highly valued goods now are unlikely to get them later, it seems quite plausible that they too will not get more computers or connectivity at some unspecified later time. Consequently, the digital divide, like more enduring divisions in society between the powerful and powerless, the prestigious and the unknown, the rich and the poor, must be studied to discover some of its causes and many of its effects.

Most importantly, this paper explores the effects of networks on the economy, politics, and society by disputing the naïve instrumentalism in which most studies of this topic typically have been wrapped. That is, the Internet is simply a tool like any other, and it is used consciously, fairly, and rationally by autonomous human agents to serve the instrumental ends of its users. Thus, for those holding such views, economies, democracies, and societies online basically will be just like those offline except that their members will use e-mail, build webpages, and/or have online chat. Even though we know complex social systems with newspapers, televisions, and telephones are not like those without them, because of the new mediated technocultures such technics create, the naïve instrumentalism embedded at the core of too many contemporary analyses of the Net rehash reality in this unproductive fashion (Luke, 1989).

By rethinking how technologies have "anonymous histories" (Giedion, 1948) that significantly shape space, temper time, and package performance apart from any conscious intention of their users, this exploration of computer-mediated communications over information networks asks how individual and collective subjectivity changes in digital environments. In much more fundamental ways than many realize now, digital networks create new operational domains for economic exchange, political control, and social interaction that are far beyond the scope and method of how the territorial nation-state works now (Nye, 1996). For the NTIA in the United States, however, the digital divide is about who has access to new technologies, like telephones, computers, and the Internet, and who does not. The inequities should be seen, in turn, as "one of America’s leading economic and civil rights issues" (NTIA, 1999: 1).

In some manner, "netizenship" out on the Internet is potentially quite different than "e-citizenship," because the Net is much more than any single city, polis or state (Mumford, 1963). At the same time, however, the qualities of "online e-havior" may closely parallel those of "offline behavior" in many social and economic contexts. As the post-IPO Internet address retailer, Network Solutions, suggests in its many cable television ads, the Net’s bitscapes are today’s equivalent of the Wild West -- a telematic terra nullis in which anyone can grab their "dot coms" and get rich. This commercialization of cyberspace transforms its ones-and-zeros into a new type of hyperreal estate. And, the old interface values of disembodied subjectivity, distributed community, and cybernetic play celebrated by early adopters in the first days of the Net are rapidly being eclipsed by more familiar problems as inequalities in wealth, knowledge and power develop in the virtual markets of online e-commerce (Zuboff, 1988; Jones, 1995).

In many ways, the netizen increasingly is being reimagined: he or she is the operator who recognizes these shifts, leverages every potential for greater political power, and imagines how any online opportunity might provide them with economic profit. Despite all of the talk about the Internet now being used by everyone, U.S. Department of Commerce report recently found that only 32.7 percent of all Americans are Internet users, while 67.3 percent remain entirely offline (NTIA, 1999: 2). Moreover, the online bourgeois of digital bits increasingly appears to have interests, capabilities, and goals which appear quite antithetical to those commonly held by the offline citoyen of material cities. Indeed, the variable geometries of indefinite boundaries, open architectures, and unfixed locations online in the vast netropolis of "virtual life" starkly contradicts the fixed grids of definite boundaries, closed communities, and inflexible locations offline in every metropolis out in "real life." Without a reexamination of the rough realities of materiality in virtualization, one cannot fully assess the impact of these new digital technologies on our everyday lifeworlds (Ihde, 1990).

I. "Being Digital"

The emergent mythos of online agency in cyberspace might merely be the latest wrinkle in modernity. Once again, a fresh cultural complex, resting in a destructive new technics with its own unformed social mores, appears destined to bring yet another universalizing moral order, uniform vision of nature, and univocalized economic model (Jameson, 1992). Bits, like most modern things defined by commodified commercial operations, are privileged objects, which can go from anywhere to anywhere at anytime for anybody (Slouka, 1995). Yet, this omnipresence mostly ignores how much "anywhere" actually remains -- in world-systems terms -- a set of very limited venues, and most movements go from somebody at one privileged site to somebody at another.

The devotees of digitalization, like Nicholas Negroponte, oversell the positive aspects of telematic life as they underplay how many already existing social and economic inequalities will continue to be just as they are. Negroponte is obsessed with "being digital," which becomes a state of being that implies we shall all live in ways where making, moving, and managing "bits" will replace our many embodied forms of interaction conducted with, by and through "atoms." For Negroponte, "the change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable" (1995: 4), and digitalization ultimately means dematerialization. To mark this turning point in human history, he asserts "computing is not about computers any more. It is about living" (1995: 6). While this claim is in some sense true, there are questions: living how, living where, living for whom, and by whose leave?

Negroponte dismisses such worries about "the social divide between the information-rich and the information-poor, the haves and the have-nots, the First and the Third Worlds," because the "real cultural divide is going to be generational" (1995: 6) as "the young" integrate digital technology into their lives first. This glib rehash of 1950s froth about TV and kids, however, ignores the bigger questions about access, equality and distribution in the digiterati’s wired world. Like so many Jacobin revolutionists before him, Negroponte addresses a small, privileged, wealthy elite. He addresses them in terms of free, equal, and fraternal identity as "you, the reader," and presumes that as "I, the writer," he speaks to/for all of humanity, even though only 35 percent of American families owned computers, 50 percent of American teenagers had PCs at home, and 30 million people worldwide were surfing the Net five years ago (Negroponte, 1995: 5). By 1998 only 42 percent of all U.S. households had PCs at home, and Internet home access was still not common (New York Times, July 9, 1999: A12). In white households, over 32 percent had Net access, blacks had about 12 percent, Hispanics had 13 percent, and Asian households had 31 percent (Washington Post, July 9, 1999: A20). To these computer-savvy people, or "you, the reader of Being Digital," Negroponte may celebrate how computers are crawling "into our laps and pockets," so that "early in the next millennium, your right and left cuff links or earrings may communicate with each other by low-orbiting satellites and have more computing power than your present PC....Mass media will be redefined by systems for transmitting and receiving personalized information and entertainment. Schools will change to become more like museums and playgrounds for children to assemble ideas and socialize with other children all over the world. The digital planet will look and feel like the head of a pin. As we interconnect ourselves, many of the values of a nation-state will give way to those of both larger and smaller electronic communities. We will socialize in digital neighborhoods in which physical space will be irrelevant and time will play a different role" (Negroponte, 1995: 6-7). Despite tremendous ethnic, racial, and class disparities in computer use, Negroponte asks those who already are digital "to read yourself into this book" [Being Digital], just as you must with the digital revolution, so you will begin to "feel and understand what ‘being digital’ might mean to your life" (Negroponte, 1995: 8).

What it means for most in their lives now is quite clear: the digital planet is one in which 6 billion people, minus the 60 million or so already on the Internet, will be either snared into new worldwide webs of domination spun from those select digital neighborhoods where physical space is irrelevant and time plays a different role or they will be left on the only side that the Net has, namely, "outside." For those with info-cufflinks or cyber-earrings, personalized infotainment may turn their digital planet into a bevy of larger and smaller electronic communities. Nation-states might become more like museums as digital neighborhoods function as playgrounds for such web-wise interconnected selves to assemble ideas and socialize all over the world. For those 60 percent of American families, the other 50 percent of American teenagers without PCs at home, and over 5.96 billion human beings still living off-line, the digital divides will prevent them from living as ones-and-zeros. Being digital might mean one can become a digital being whose costume jewelry signs them on and off of rich cyberspatial telemetries projected from low-earth orbit satellites. But for the nearly 70 percent of humanity who still do not have plain old telephone service (POTS) on a personal/family/village level, promises about cyberchickens coming to roost in everyone’s informatic pots are alarming false promises.

In a very similar vein, Bill Gates openly admits that there are serious questions about "equity issues that will have to be addressed" (1995: 251). On the other hand, he also asserts "one of the wonderful things about the information highway is that virtual equity is far easier to achieve than real-world equity" (1995: 258). And, in his state of wonder, Gates makes a remarkable claim: "We are all created equal in the virtual world, and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world. The network will not eliminate barriers of prejudice or inequality, but it will be a powerful force in that direction" (1995: 258-259). This view, however, seems to suffer seriously from a Redmond shift. That is, Gates, like Negroponte, naively assumes everyone is as free, equal, and fraternal as he believes himself to be. Hence, everyone has, or easily can access, their own high-end workstation, big bandwidth net connection, unlimited network time, and sophisticated software resources. From that location, then, the digerati see a world of virtual equality, cyberliberty, and netcentric fraternity coalescing in those clouds of electrons charging to-and-from from each and every dataport. Unfortunately, this vision slides in and out of familiar Jacobin ellipses in which too much materialistic wherewithal is assumed to be present, constant, and limitless for all, because it is, by and large, for the speaker.

The possibility that others might not be so blessed is either an utterly implausible notion or even a sign of their unworthiness. This faith in friction-free markets is difficult to take seriously in light of 1998 figures on the net worth of Bill Gates’ Microsoft holdings, the Walton family of Wal-Mart, and the Sultan of Brunei. The net worth of these three households of $135 billion now equals the GNP of the world’s 43 least developed countries. Likewise, they and the world’s other 197 richest households now hold over $1 trillion in wealth, which is more than the world’s 1.3 billion poorest people (Washington Post, July 13, 1999: E2).

Digitalization, then, is doing much more than simply, as Negroponte (1995) argues, replacing "the manipulation of atoms" with "the management of bits" or getting involved in Gate’s (1995) "friction-free capitalism." To put another spin on all of this with terms taken from computer technology, manipulating atoms is one operating system with its own unique user interfaces, wide area networks, peripheral components, intelligent agents, and killer applications. While many forms of atom manipulation will not disappear, their workings are being displaced, disrupted, and disintegrated by the management of bits. This collision of a new online and an old offline machinic regime will have, and indeed is already having, tremendous implications for individual subjectivity and collective solidarity. Some (Ohmae, 1990) celebrate this borderless world, others see it as a creative chaos (Kelly, 1994), and still others fear its inhumane/unfair/antiegalitarian qualities (Virilio, 1997). Most importantly, the older embedded identities of territorial nationality at physical sites are being tested by newer user identities of telemetrical nodality generated for, by, and of the e-haviors fostered at digital cites.

While we may not stand at the end of history, we are experiencing the beginning of virtuality. The shape of things to come increasingly takes the form of electronic practices and things, ranging from e-commerce, e-documents, e-mail to e-privacy, e-society, e-work. What lies out on the road ahead, as Bill Gates reminds us, is, first, digitalization, and second, "a friction-free marketplace" (1995: 2-7). Still, the various forms of individual and collective "e-havior" taking us down this road in which "distance" allegedly "dies" (Cairncross, 1997) are not necessarily passing mileposts that mark our progress toward greater equality, broader efficiency, and wider prosperity. Whose advancements such progress may represent actually are much less clear than many believe. So "being digital" today often boils down to becoming wired to get hired and/or avoid being fired.

II. An "E-Havioral" Revolution?

At these intersections of network places and connectivity spaces, as Gergen claims, "our range of social participation is expanding exponentially. As we absorb the views, values, and visions of others, and live out the multiple plots in which we are enmeshed, we enter a postmodern consciousness" (1991: 15-16). Whether or not these e-haviors are postmodern perhaps is less clear, but sharply bounded personal identities and clearly bordered social communities of territorial citizenship, as they have been imagined in the past (Anderson, 1991), are increasingly in doubt on-line. Actually, the multimediations of the digital domain, as Deibert affirms, carry a functional bias toward decentered and fragmented identities, "and away from modern conceptions of the autonomous sovereign individual," in which cyberspace generates "a plurality of ‘worlds’ and multiple ‘realities,’ each of which is contingent on social constructions, or ‘language-games’ that constitute and orient the field of experience" (1997: 187). Offline nationality is not going away, especially for the immobile, pre-informational, poor. Online nodality, however, is arriving, particularly for the relatively mobile, informational, rich. And, here is where new e-haviors from netizens might enter the stage. As Carter (1998: 193) claims, "the rise of cyberspace is the apotheosis of the ideal (if it an ideal) of individualized experience ... the appeal of the cyberspace is to autonomy: we can choose our own experiences."

By moving into this plurality of worlds, everyone is told that he or she will be remade by globalizing/networking/computing practices. Therefore, rhetorics of life online in the netropolis promise everyone a modernized mode of living beyond ordinary politics:

These visions of a more authentic autonomy on the Net are precisely what most netizenship advocates celebrate: citizens of the world, not single nations; everyone is a compatriot, nobody is a foe; physical residents of one place, virtual fraternity in all places; not cultural paralysis, social revitalization everywhere; more democracy becomes possible, new tyranny is unlikely. The aura surrounding this transformation in the U.S. is one of exuberant optimism. A recent Yankee Group Research report, for example, put a very rosy spin on this change by finding that nearly one out of every three U.S. households will be online by 2000; and, it predicted, in turn, that two-thirds would be online by 2004. With close to 20 percent of U.S. PC sales below the $600 price point, many more households will soon make the transition to the Internet. Consequently, the Yankee Group also predicted that U.S. consumers would be spending $56 billion on Internet access services from 1999 to 2004 (San Jose Mercury News, March 26, 1999). When two-thirds of American homes are online, the proponents of netizenship see many more netizens actively joining their causes.

These changes, as Turkle suggests, point toward netizens "taking things at their interface value" in which "people are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real" (1997: 23). Therefore, the on-line emulations of territoriality, sovereignty or community, which are generated out of computer-mediated communications, mean that "programs are treated as social actors we can do business with, provided that they work" (Turkle, 1997: 104). If people treat computers "in ways that blur the boundary between things and people" (Turkle, 1997: 102), then all of those things and people, which once were regarded as having fixed boundaries and clear distinctions, begin to blur along many other historical boundaries. Telematic networks, while not quite political entities, are increasingly taken at their interface values as e-havioral containments of what is "the real" by nodes in the network.

While Turkle and others may continue to see the Net as the perfect environment for gender-bending games in odd little MUDs, the colonization of the WWW by commerce is giving the digital divides a very different look as the early adopters are displaced by just about everyone else. Only 14 percent of all households were online in 1996, 37 percent were by 1998, 50 percent will be by 2000 (Wall Street Journal, July 12, 1999: R6). While many continue to ask "what is in it for me" when they contemplate Net access and computer purchases, the big business sector is busy providing them with some answers: buying and selling almost anything. In April 1997, only 29 percent of Fortune 500 companies had websites that featured basic interactivity, e-commerce capability or automated services, even though nearly over 50 percent had "brochure ware" sorts of static displays. By April 1999, only 12 percent still had "brochure ware" sites, and 86 percent had rich interactive functionality (Wall Street Journal, July 12, 1999: R6).

Once companies open for business online, all sorts of people show up. On the consumer side, about 25 percent of all households with a net worth of $50,000 or less are online versus 48 percent of those with a net worth of $750,000 and up; but, 41 percent of the poorer households have shopped around and 38 percent have actually purchased something online, which compares closely with the 46 percent of shoppers and 44 percent of buyers of the richest online households. Online consumer sales were $3 billion in 1997 -- including $91 million on travel, $152 million on books, $63 million on groceries, and $2 million on toys -- and they should hit $12 million in 1999 -- including $4 billion on travel, $1.2 billion on books, $350 million on groceries, and $53 million on toys (Wall Street Journal, July 12, 1999: R6). And, on the business-to-business side, Internet sales were $18.5 billion in 1997, $43 billion in 1998, and should hit $110 billion in 1999 (Wall Street Journal, July 12, 1999: R6). A lot of e-havior, then, is being tied to moving, managing, and making money.

1. Online Agency as "Your:)Ware"

Rhetorics about the openness and equality of digital society, then, are fairly cynical. To get to these telematic sites, read their content, and participate in online events, the user can use a public access terminal at a local library or cybercafe. At home, however, he or she must invent $1,000 to $4,000 in a personal computer, network connections, and software. In addition, the user must maintain net connections, which cost anywhere from $20 to $100 a month plus telephone, hardwiring or cable costs. So, to speak plainly, there are very high entry costs imposed here in the form of machine ownership, network connectivity, software mastery, and sufficient time to attain e-havioral effectiveness. While the rhetoric recasts on-line organizations as a return to truly popular sovereignty, the reality is much darker, namely, such entities often are the ultimate gated community. And, their creators, supporters, and users rarely underscore this reality in their operations.

Once again, the Jacobin fallacy rests at the heart of the digital democrats’ musings. That is, those fortunate few, who are already well down Bill Gates’ road ahead, are online because they have the wealth, knowledge, and interest to be efficacious computer users. Those with good connectivity mistake their unusual good fortune as economic/political/social agents as being generally true of all other human beings everywhere at anytime. Espousing abstract universals, like "liberty, equality, fraternity," they particularize the realization of such principles as liberty for me and my identical friends as we work on our terms by enjoying the shared ways of all us who know whom we are.

On the other hand, the NTIA has suggested that the core of American telecommunications policy is "the goal of ‘universal service’ -- the idea that all Americans should have access to affordable telephone service" as measured by "telephone penetration," or "the percentage of all U.S. households that have a telephone on-premises" (NTIA, 1995: 2). While the NTIA’s 1994 study found that the poor in rural areas and central cities were among the lowest populations in terms of having home computers and Net connectivity, these groups were the most active users of on-line educational, employment, and government services (NTIA, 1995: 2). However, telephone service essentially was quite high, even for the poor in central cities (79.8) and rural areas (81.6 percent) of all households (NTIA, 1995: 2). Yet, computer use, Net connectivity, and household Internet access are still unequally distributed in the late 1990s.

"A government by the entire citizenry, electronically assembled," assumes everyone is equipped, able, and ready assemble electronically when we know that barely 45 percent of all U.S. households own PCs, not even 40 percent have Internet access anywhere, less than 25 percent have home Internet access, and fewer than 5 percent enjoy high speed/high-bandwidth connectivity. In the long run, these utopian pronouncements about the "death of distance" might prove to be true. At this time, however, connectivity is not evenly distributed, easily accessible, or effortlessly installed. Consequently, there are many deep digital divides separating areas with cheap, reliable, and flexible connectivity from those with expensive, unflexible, slow, and inflexible connectivity options, not to mention many places with no connectivity whatsoever.

The hyperindividuation of informational society recasts personal and social agency. With the pull of browsers, one can build their own quasi-social, ultra-selfish pastiche of fragments from the public sphere in which Lycos, AOL, Netscape or The Wall Street Journal will connect you only with the information that you have pre-selected as what you want to see. Nodalities assume the emergence of netizens, who work as free-lancers amidst social instability, perhaps beyond strong national ties, but laced together continuously just-in-time with others all over the world by networks of data. Whereas nations still mandated modes of civic behavior and thought, nodes presume an individual who operates "as actor, designer, juggler and stage director of his own biography, identity, social networks, commitments and convictions. Put in plain terms, ‘individualization’ means the disintegration of the certainties of industrial society as well as the compulsion to find and invent new certainties for oneself and others without them" (Beck, 1997: 95). In some sense, informationalization forces everyone to become an electronic existentialist as the more standard biographies of older industrial societies become chosen biographies, DIY histories, autogenic experiences out in the flows of capital, data, labor, and product. Beck observes, "to use Sartre’s term, people are condemned to individualization....whatever a man or woman was and is, whatever he or she thinks or does, constitutes the individuality of that particular person" (1997: 96).

The assumption of methodological individualism in online e-havior is now one of the most deeply embedded practices of this standardized technoculture. At the cybernetic interface, personal workstations, mainframe accounts, and network addresses all methodically individuate online interactions, and these realities are reflected back in everyday rhetorics of netizenship. Compaq sells itself as a new economy of scope standing by on-line 7x24x52, waiting to fill each individual’s "custom-built" machine order. "Get the technology," Compaq promises, "YOU WANT any way you want TO GET IT" (Businessweek, August 10, 1998: 14). Gateway 2000 matches Compaq’s pledge to individuals with its even more comprehensive "Your:)Ware" packaged suite of computer products, ranging from custom-made machines and software bundles to ISP connections and guaranteed trade-up programs (http://www.gateway2000.com). PeopleSoft realizes individuals must construct their own private enterprises, capital assets, and business communities, and now do it also increasingly on-line. Hence, it promises them continuous rationalization support for "your supply chain," because it is PeopleSoft’s promise: "We work in your world."™ (Businessweek, June 22, 1998: 83). As these individualized appeals suggest, netizens can do much more that merely pre-select those media services they want to consume. "In the online world," as Carter notes, "users may tailor not only facts but entire communities to fit their preferences" (1998: 195).

Individual identity in worlds managed by PeopleSoft, accessed through Your:)Ware, and sustained through e-business may become one of multiple personality (dis)order. On the one hand, a strongly centered nation-state can fragment into many decentered nodal webs, which might reorder the national character of homogenous political communities, and any given individual is condemned to constitute himself or herself out of activities, accesses, and assets opened to them online, which reshapes individual biographies increasingly around commercialized cybernetic consumption. And, on the other hand, real individuals offline become relatively more immobile, geographically more emplaced, and psychosocially more confined within boundaries that online e-haviors ignore. The welfare state’s experiments in conditioning people, as Beck claims, for "ego-centered ways of life" (1997: 97) pays off online in spades as particular persons morph their way through the day as multiple personalities.

The waning stability of uniform national identities in place is captured by Turkle’s endorsement of pluralized nodal identities online:

Virtual communities anchored to the e-haviors of online interaction provide Turkle with the new normative structures to enforce these normalizing expectations. Stable points of subjectivity are remixed as fluidized objects of ones-and-zeros. As De Kerckhove observes, all of these e-havioral traces are signs of nodality reshaping territory, identity, and power:

The recalibration of normalization to suit the flexibility and plurality of networks moves Turkle to see such e-havior "as a space for growth" (1997: 263). She recognizes, like Robert Jay Lifton (1993), the worth of a "protean self" for avoiding either "a dogmatic insistence on unity" or a "return to systems of belief, such as religious fundamentalism, that enforce conformity" (Turkle, 1997: 258). Popularizing these new ways of life -- tied to online e-haviors -- essentially turns offline subjectivity, taken in more common modes of conventional liberalism, traditional nationalism or religious fundamentalism, into a monopersonality disorder. The netizen’s digital being, which emerges in real life from virtual life, "is capable, like Proteus, of fluid transformations but is grounded in coherence and moral outlook. Thus, Turkle finds the new bottomline for online e-havior: "You can have a sense of self without being one self" (1997: 258).

IV. Cybercapitalists and Web Back Workers

Just as widespread motorization, whether it was through electric stationary units or gasoline powered automobiles, reordered the built environment, reconstituted industrial economies, reshaped social mores, and rearranged social classes a century ago, one sees computerization doing much the same today. Already industrial infrastructure has shifted as more Americans make semiconductors than build construction equipment, more work in data processing than in petroleum refining, and more make computers than fabricate automobiles (Tapscott, 1996: 9). Old mass production industries are shedding workers, and with massive numbers of their working men and women going by the wayside, the economy is becoming more and more stratified. The "successful fifth," or top 20 percent of households, which Reich (1991: 165-168) fills with symbolic analysts and Tapscott (1996: 33) finds have a net worth of $180,000 or more, now control 80 percent of all wealth. And, these rates of concentration are accelerating as Reich’s "routine producers" and "in-person servers" (1991: 164-170) often can not make this informational transition.

The digital divides mostly track race, class, and gender. Among white and black households earning over $75,000 a year, Internet use is 61 and 54 percent, but it falls to 17 and 8 percent respectively for white and black households making $15,000 to $35,000 a year (New York Times, July 9, 1999: A12). During 1994, 10 percent of black households owned a computer, while 27 percent of white households did. By 1998, these figures rose, but only 23 percent of black households versus 47 percent of white households owned a computer (New York Times, July 9, 1999: A12). Similarly, the single parent household often headed by a woman typically is half as likely to have Internet access if the family is white than a two-parent family, and the rates are much worse for minority single-parent households (New York Times, July 9, 1999: A12). All households with an income of $75,000 and up were more than 20 times as likely to have home Internet access than those making $15,000 or less (Washington Post, July 9, 1999: A20).

Not surprisingly celebrants for the virtual offices and factories being built online mostly are found among the cosmopolitan cadres of world class corporate management. Thurow’s observations on this point, as Tapscott notes 1996: 6), speak directly to the empty promises of equality in Gates’ friction-free marketplace.

Digitalization greatly enhances the opportunities of capital to water down the wage, speed up the line, or runaway with the shop, because the virtual workplace can seek, and will find, a mix of the highest skill levels with the lowest wage costs out on the Net.

As a result, Tapscott observes: "Millions of so-called virtual aliens are clicking away on key boards in Shanghai, New Delhi, and Hong Kong--fully networked and employed as members of the U.S. economy. Except that they don’t pay U.S. taxes or live in the United States" (1996: 6). The U.S. loses jobs that should/could/would pay $30,000 per year, but these off-shore "web back" workers also do not gain. This is not a uniquely American problem. Asea Brown Boveri, for example, pays German workers $30.33 an hour, and Polish workers $2.58 an hour. Since Polish workers also work 400 hours more a year than German ones, it is no surprise that ABB has added 21,150 positions in former CMEA countries as it has cut 40,000 jobs in North America and Western Europe (Thurow, 1996: 168). Of course, not all of these changes are related to informationalization, but digital means of reorganizing production in new transnational work collectives are greatly accelerating those changes that they do not cause.

This global problem rebounds similarly within single nations. As Andy Ross, owner of Cody’s Books in Berkeley, complains about Seattle-based book retailer, Amazon.com, competing with him in California and not paying any sales taxes:

Beyond white flight, cities and towns now face "byte flight" as their residents’ commerce flows everywhere, mostly unregulated and untaxed. The provision of public goods, in turn, will become much more difficult to sustain.

During the 1980s, as Thurow notes, all of the gains in male employee earnings went to the top 20 percent of the work force, and 64 percent went to the top 1 percent. If total incomes are factored into the mix, 90 percent of all income gains went to the top 1 percent. Not too surprisingly, the pay of the average CEO in the Fortune 500 increased from 35 to 157 times that of an average worker (1996: 21). As the U.S. Bureau of the Census records, real wages of full-time male workers from 1973 to 1992 fell 23, 21, 15 and 10 percent respectively for the bottom, second, third, and fourth quintiles of labor--only the top quintile gained, and its increase was 10 percent (1973, 1992: 137, 198). Even as real GDP per capita rose 33 percent from 1973 to 1994, wages for all non-supervisory (male and female) workers fell 14 percent, leaving the level of real wages where they were in the late 1950s (Council of Economic Advisers, 1995: 276, 311, 326).

Online workers are “a diverse group united by their use of state-of-the-art information technology to identify, process, and solve problems. They are the creators, manipulators, and purveyors of the stream of information that makes up the postindustrial, postservice global economy” (Rifkin, 1995: 174). At the same time, nearly one in five, or over 50 million Americans, are living in poverty, and according to 1992 figures over 40 percent of them live at the inner core of major cities (Rifkin, 1995: 177, 180). In many ways, digitalization has provided an extremely efficient means for virtualizing “the revolt of the elites” (Lasch, 1994). This emergent bit-based Gemeinschaft leads the severe restructuring of the atom-based built environments and social institutions of America’s once quite industrial Gesellschaft.

The infamous “secure community” in high-end suburbia with its own private schools, high walls, rent-a-cops, and restrictive covenants finds its secessionist logics followed further in this hollowing out of public spaces as its residents now can interact with one another mostly on the infobahn. These info-islands, in turn, have highly inegalitarian socioeconomic profiles. Twenty-seven percent of homes whose owners completed high school have PCs, while 63 percent of university educated households have them. And, 21 percent of households with incomes under $30,000 have computers, but 66 percent of those with an income over $70,000 have them (Tapscott, 1996: 34). At the apex of society, those who are most likely members of the world class, the just-in-time elite, or the cosmopolitan professional-technical classes -- making over $70,000 a year, having with a $180,000 plus net worth, and owning nearly 7 of 10 homes equipped with computers -- are dematerializing the once secure positions at the base of society still held by those who tend to be stuck-in-place -- making $30,000 or less a year, having barely 2 in 10 households with computers, and dancing around daily to evade the next corporate restructuring caused by the digitalization of their work.

Those who already have easy access to computers, often sing gloriously about "the Global Network," which forms out of the interconnecting tissue of Computers Everywhere (Cairncross, 1997). The Global Network is one form of cyberspace, "a place where one can travel electronically, projecting one’s being to any place on the planet. The Global Network is the ability to connect any computer to any other computer or connect any person to any other person. The Global Network is instantaneous communication anywhere -- by voice, video or data....The Global Network is instant feedback and instant gratification" (Schwartau, 1994: 54). While the celebrants accentuate how one can travel anyplace in cyberspace to connect to any computer or person with instant feedback and gratification, this statement ignores how few in number such anyplaces in cyberspace actually are. "Computers Everywhere" in reality is not ubiquity; instead it is far-flung inequity and widely dispersed inaccessibility. Computers do exist everywhere, but just not anywhere has computer access: it is tightly constrained by social class, income level, geographic location, educational attainment, and racial group.

Of course, many routers and relays potentially connect each node generally to the global infostructure to all the others, but funds, clearances, passwords, or connections are needed to make any particular actual transit. Many domains are firewalled against unwanted intruders in search of such instant gratification. Most of what is open is not worth browsing, much of what is worth time and effort to access is tightly closed, and almost everything that is available is difficult to use. Information flows have meaning as dividing lines between civilizations, peoples, or nation-states inasmuch as they become cultural/economic/political/social boundaries. Not having access to the Global Network, then, is as big a dividing line as any territorial border or ethnic difference once was. Beyond the obvious fact that most cyberspaces are Anglophone, consumer-centered, and highly "Americanized," complex encryption also freezes other inequalities into networks to protect informational values, deny access to cyberspaces, preserve financial power, dominate communication grids, or maintain class prerogatives. Defining the conditions of getting "access in" the Network that one already is "on" also is a much different kettle of fish than those posed to everyone who is totally "off" obtaining "access to" the Network in the first place, particularly given the endless campaigns by hackers, info-warriors, or phreakers to infiltrate closed cyberspaces. In digital domains, access to the Global Networks is worsening already existing offline economic, political and social inequalities inasmuch as the new digital culture simply makes them more embedded qualities of all systems in "Computers Everywhere."

V. Conclusion

The Net plainly is a collective enterprise. Even though it has been built by thousands to be used by millions, there is an impulse to attribute its powers to someone. New types of rule are being exerted through, within, and because of the technics that now shape the Net. Democracy cannot exert much leverage over it, because a common will expressed of, by, and for the people in an offline place only constitutes one collective choice that does not directly alter how the Net operates anywhere else.

The unfocused, and thusfar ineffectual, juridical inquisition against Microsoft being conducted by the Department of Justice and Senate Judiciary Committee in the United States underscores this reality. By and large, Microsoft’s initiatives can be explained as perfectly rational behavior in the global marketplace, and the Federal government mostly respects the deeper realities of online enterprises, namely,

On the Net, infinite numbers of economically guided actions are pursuing global, national, corporate, local, and personal monetary interests. These techno-economic dynamics, ironically and simultaneously, shield it from democratic legitimation, rob it of its non-political character, give it subpolitical powers, and lock it into profit-seeking games.

On one level, networks are representations of various rhetorical projects, like Nicholas Negroponte’s "being digital" or Bill Gates’ "friction-free capitalism," which dress cybernetic goods and services in the semantic costumes of more traditionally recognizible activities. These metaphors mobilize symbols to serve the rhetorical goals of their various creators; they rarely gain any purchase over real world phenomena. On a second level, networks are the physical infrastructure of chips and cables, routines and routers, modems and machines all stacked up upon themselves in closed worlds of code. Such assets cannot be discounted entirely in cyberspace, because without these components nothing would operate. And, on a third level, networks are institutionalized entities whose data-bound infostructure coevolves hand-in-hand with its machine-made infrastructure (Virilio, 1995; and, 1997).

Control over specific segments of capital, labor, knowledge, and communication turns sociotechnical systems, like the Net, into virtually quasi-sovereign entities with their own virtual assets to serve, protect, and defend that power. Portals accumulate it. Users access it. Infowar attacks it. Here is where bits reach out, touch someone, organize something, and then reconstitute both human acts and non-human facts in quasi-political clusters of intelligent artifacts (De Landa, 1991; Nye, 1990; Slouka, 1995). Who dominates whom, inside of as well as from the outside of which systems, are vital questions for any network’s creators and designers. Therefore, the inequalities they create are essentially new structures of power, status, and wealth, activated by the rulings of their operating systems in their users technics-bound access.

Technologies do not fall fully formed from the sky. They instead must become ready for business by enrolling users and advocates in new social movements to promote their utility, tout their necessity, herald their inevitability (Adas, 1989). Thirty years ago, ARPANet went live, linking only a handful of university research centers. Twenty years ago few believed every home should have a "personal computer." The technocultures of those times confined the Net to mostly small conversations between defense labs, and home computing existed as little kits for electronics hobbyists. Other technologies sustained different cultures for processing words, exchanging texts, sending messages, copying images, playing games, generating sounds, sharing discourses. All of those technics produced, and then reproduced, peculiar cultural communities around particular technological devices, which, in turn, often constitute today’s social movements of resistance against the further spread of computer-mediated communication. Television, radio, cinema, and print all have fostered certain transnational/extrastatal/nonterritorial forms of community, but the national infrastructures constructed for their use coupled with existing linguistic barriers rarely tested citizenship in the ways that the Net can (Harvey, 1989; Luke, 1989; Jones, 1995). Technics can redefine the acts and artifacts shared collectively in the life of specific human groups and communities, and telematic networks are now promoting very rapid forms of redefinition in their e-havioral forms of digital technoculture.

Living in telematic societies organized around digital networks requires a broad facility for coping with many different language games nested in new technocultures in which everything becomes ones-and-zeros. This struggle to reduce heterogeneous social, political, and cultural elements to fit the logics of techno-economic performativity is the form taken by domination today. Everyone is not equally prepared to manage,

The digital divides open where these operational conformities start and stop in economies and societies all over the world today. Politics in networked places, economics for connectivity spaces, and society in digital domains, as Lyotard suggests, are shaped by the answers to one question: "who decides what knowledge is and who knows what needs to be decided? In the computer age, the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government" (1984: 9). Whose government, for whom, where, when, and how are all intriguing questions, and their answers frequently mark the raw boundaries of inequality out along the digital divides.