The White House in the 1990s was extolling computer nets as a way to Bring Government Closer to the People. Americans could dial up “An Interactive Citizens’ Handbook” on the Internet, see a photo of a teenaged Clinton with JFK, and listen to Socks the Clinton cat meow. But could Clinton-Gore hear us? Just how “interactive” was the White House?
Clinton boosters formed a group called Americans Communicating Electronically to improve electronic contacts between mortals and bureaucrats. Al Gore, meanwhile, had flaunted his typing skills with the famous visit to CompuServe. But was electronic democracy truly alive on the Internet and other computer networks? Not quite. All the techish sizzle notwithstanding, Clinton-Gore might instead be giving us electronic oligarchy, especially if Republicans followed the horrible precedents that the White House was setting. Consider the dubious, somewhat Orwellian process that was shaping the National Information Infrastructure—the famous data highways and related endeavors.
So far Washington had not worked nearly as hard as it should to drive down the cost of knowledge for the average American. At the same time a network-hostile copyright proposal was delighting information monopolists and imperiling the ability of citizens to share electronic newspaper clips in even a limited way.
I testified at an official hearing on the NII in 1993, and what most struck me about Clinton-Gore was the chasm between words and deeds—the same mind-set that led to Oceania’s propaganda agency being named the Ministry of Truth. The gospel according to Al Gore was that people of all income levels would be able to travel the dataways. His musings later adorned the peach-colored newsprint of The Mini Page, a newspaper insert for children.
“No longer will geographical location, wealth, gender, or any other factor limit learning,” Gore reassured elementary schoolers. He told how “a child from my home town of Carthage, Tennessee, will be able to come home from school, turn on a computer, and plug into the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.” The NII would clearly be in the grand democratic tradition, small “d.”
The next day, however, the Washington Post carried news of a different stripe from Bruce Lehman, the Clinton-Gore commissioner of patents and trademarks, who chaired the NII working group on intellectual property. I learned that “because of the ease of digital reproduction, Lehman does not foresee that digital libraries will put copyrighted works within easy reach online the way they do books on a library shelf. Copyrighted digital materials are likely to be available only to subscribers—libraries, for example—who pay royalty fees, he said. People who want the material might have to go to their local library and use a computer there that would not allow them to copy or redistribute the work, Lehman said.”[[6.35]] A few months later Bruce Lehman would graciously tell the Wall Street Journal that, yes, he would tolerate children carrying home copyrighted CD-ROMs and floppies of electronic books.[[6.36]]
Compared to networked books, however, the CDs and the rest would be pathetic. Distribution over the Internet and other networks could be the cheapest way to get the material spread around, while assuring a wide variety of material for all. When William Buckley likened CD-ROMs to 78-rpm shellac records in the era of the Internet, he couldn’t have been more precise. And yet this was the future as envisioned by Bill Clinton’s intellectual property czar. So much for the well-informed citizenry needed for a Jeffersonian America. Lehman was beating the bushes for electronic oligarchy.
Once I had felt that the Clinton-Gore people might truly share my own egalitarian dreams. I’d thought that nonlobbyists like me stood a healthy chance. I had been writing about computers for close to a decade; earlier I had covered a poverty beat, and I knew how we could drive down the cost of small computers so that someday even Head Start kids could read electronic books on them. What better way to encourage democracy? The whole country, not just the elite, could grow up understanding abstract thought. Could the Constitution have been drafted by a mob of illiterate TV watchers?
Rather than letting Big Brother choose books for us, we could establish a democratic system with many librarians in many cities empowered to make acquisitions. Never would bureaucrats be able to do the equivalent of tweaking old copies of the London Times behind our backs. It would be too damn hard with so many librarians in so many locations, and with the same material reposing on millions and millions of tablet-style computers that individual Americans owned. My vision was one of electronic federalism, not of Big Brother policing our reading tastes. TeleRead wouldn’t undermine local schools and public libraries. Quite the contrary. TeleRead would buy affordable, sharp-screened machines for them, sending a signal to Silicon Valley and paving the way for similar computers to go on sale at the Kmart for $99.95 for anyone to buy.
Just as important, unlike the Postal plan mentioned earlier in this chapter, my TeleRead plan would let schools and libraries use the hardware without Big Brotherish restrictions. They could store whatever they wanted on their own computers for local people to dial up. And to make the national library more useful at the local level, they could add special, Web-style links designed for the people they served—not just for whole communities, but perhaps even for individual readers.