All of a sudden, governments are falling over themselves to get onto the World-Wide Web. The White House got there in late October, just before the UK Government's Open Government page. The Japanese are there, in English too. Even the US Central Intelligence Agency put up a Web page in November.

The United Nations offers a whole range of information services. There you could find the UN official statement on the bombing of a rebel Serb airfield in Croatia, when the dust had hardly settled. It may have been an anodyne piece of officialese -- but it was still the raw material of the news, available to the well- connected member of the public before most journalists.

While the UN is demonstrating the changing relation between readers and news, the CIA can offer little more than its World Factbook. This is a quick reference for the world as seen from Langley, Virginia -- but not earth-shattering revelation. Her Majesty's Stationery Office can provide only instructions for placing orders (on paper) for publications (on paper).

Immediately, governments have run into two of the favourite topics of discussion and argument among Netizens: freedom of information, and whether information should be provided cost- free.

"Information wants to be free", cry the Netizens. Twenty per cent of the people commenting on the Open Government page ask for an on-line Hansard. "They feel it's their information, that they've already paid for it," one civil servant notes.

But "make it pay" is official policy. And the higher up you go, the less comprehension there is of questions like "what is the marginal cost of my accessing your Web page?" (The perils of having all your pronouncements available for free-text searching -- with personal U-turns mercilessly exposed -- may not even have occurred to some.)

The political sub-culture which has grown up on the Net rather enjoys watching such senior government people squirm as they realise how little they understand the future.. The oxymoron "anarcho-capitalist" used to refer to a few on the wacko fringe of US politics. In the 90s, it's the norm in Usenet news, the position you don't need to explain. And its assumptions -- minimal government interference in everything, from sex to income to the Net itself -- are spreading. It has very American origins -- but there is also a reverse osmosis, as Americans discover that there are literate people out here in the Rest of the World.

Most of the people involved in debating, describing and discussing the "net culture" seem to students, entrepreneurs, freelances or others who can enjoy the best of "slackerdom" -- working at what you enjoy, or only enough to support doing what you enjoy.

The clear consensus is that the new communications technology facilitates such styles of work. Within organisations, it flattens hierarchies as everyone seeks to communicate directly with the most relevant person. It assists the process of distributing work, as it becomes possible -- at least for the increasing number whose raw material is information -- to become "teleworkers", anywhere within reach of a decent phone connection. (We should, though, beware of freelance consultants prophesying a future in which everyone is a freelance.)

The recent International Federation of Journalists conference entitled "The Future is Freelance", for example, was not merely self-serving self-reference. It reflects the reality of the publishing industry, in which the typical start-up project employs two accountants on staff, an editor on a one-year contract and a host of freelances. The new work (not jobs) being created by the new technology is following the same pattern.

This changes the whole concept of work for those involved; and it challenges all shades of political thinking.

Libertarian socialists may marvel at the amount of spontaneous mutual aid involved, and the implicit internationalism. But they should ponder what on earth a trade union of teleworkers might look like.

The Conservative Party would rejoice if it knew about the extent of propaganda for self-reliance. But it ought to panic when it finds out about the threats to its social policy.

Key to this is stable suburban home-ownership -- the ghettoisation of the Tory vote as much as of an underclass -- and on the industrial discipline imposed by the burden of mortgages -- as on the Nottinghamshire miners in 1984. It will encounter some difficulty when the majority of professionals are teleworkers, liable to up sticks to somewhere more interesting and, as freelances, denied mortgages anyway.

European Social Democrats, with their philosophy of regulated capitalism expressed through the Social Chapter, may think they have problems with the UK government. But the whole concept is far more effectively challenged by the fact that freelance workers are exempt from rules mandating health and safety standards or against sex and race discrimination.

There are intriguing possibilities in the opposite direction. There are editors with whom I have communicated solely by electronic mail, by whom I am judged solely on the basis of my words, and for whom I might as well be a Chinese woman using a more profitable name.

This fluidity of identity is probably the very favourite topic of discussion in the more philosophical corners of the Net. For the present, its wider implications belong to speculative fiction. But the fluidity of information is already affecting us. It has always been possible to manipulate images, but new technology makes it practicable on a large scale. Sixty years ago it took Stalin's re-touchers a day or so to remove Trotsky from each photograph. Now it takes just a few minutes to, for example, make a famous murder suspect look subtly "blacker". Within a decade or two it will be possible to manipulate video in real time: adding, removing and altering characters in live footage -- purely to enhance the power of presentation of the news, of course.

No-one has suggested a model of democracy which does not depend on an accurately informed people. If there are not strict codes to distinguish between the virtual and reality, democracy is in trouble.

Are these concerns only for the future? The future keeps arriving faster than anyone expects. Are they concerns only for an elite? Netizens do tend to see themselves as an elite, living the future now. But will they be a self-perpetuating elite? Here we come back to the present with a bump. The hardware of the digital superhighway -- optical fibre -- isn't due to arrive in many poorer parts of the country for years. While governments tiptoe onto the Infobahn, they need to make sure that all their citizens can reach it.

home

Written:
30 November 1994

An edited and doubtless thus improved version of this article appeared in the Guardian OnLine section.

This version is © copyright 1996 Mike Holderness; moral rights are asserted.

Those URLs (as they were then):

White House

UK

Japan

CIA

UN

Mike Holderness is a technology writer, a member of the National Union of Journalists Digital Media Working Group and, er, a freelance consultant.