In the last decades of the twentieth centuryj information and communication technology spread beyond government and university settings on the promise of political empowerment. Ted Nelson, Stewart Brand, and the People's Computer Company reconfigured images of commuting away from IBM and its technocratic experts and toward the emancipation and empowerment of ordinary people.28 In the context of the San Francisco Bay Area's antiwar activism during the early seventies, they held up computers as the means to renew participatory democracy.29 This was the setting for Apple's presentation of its Macintosh computer as changing the world, as saving democracy by bringing technology to the people. In 1984, the company ran an advertisement with an image of a Mac next to a picture of Karl Marx; the slogan: "It was about time a capitalist started a revolution:' During the nineties AI Gore and Newt Gingrich promised ordinary citizens' access to government. They appealed to the possibility of town meetings for millions opened up by the Internet. Their rhetoric of democratization and education drove the Information and Infrastructure Technology Act, the National Information Infrastructure Act (both passing in 1993), and the 1996 Telecommunications Act.30 Networked communications technologies would ensure real political eficacy and gov-. ernmental responsiveness. ·Democracy would be enhanced as all citizens acquired the ability to ac:cess information and express their opinions.
This promise of participation was not simply propaganda. It was and remains a deeper, underlying fantasy wherein technology covers over our impotence and supports a vision of ourselves as active political partici;. pants. T� of the rhetoric encasing any new device, syste1:, code, or platform. A particular technological innovation becomes a screen upon which al sorts of fantasies of political action are projected�31
Peer-to-peer file sharing, especialy in light of the early rather hypnotic, mantra-like appeals to Napster, provides a clear example. Napsterdespite that fact that it was a commercial venture-was heralded as a sea change; it would transform private property, bring down capitalism. More than piracy, Napster was a popular attack on private property itself. Nick Dyer-Witheford argues that Napster, and other peer-to-peer networks, present "real possibilities of market disruption as a result of large-scale copyright violation:' He contends: "While some of these peer-to-peer networks-like Napster-were created as commercial applications, others -such as Free Net-were designed as political projects with the explicit intention of destroying both state censorship and commercial copyright. . . . The adoption of these celebratory systems as a central component of North American youth culture presents a grassroots expansion of the digital commons and, at the very least, seriously problematizes current plans for their enclosure:'32 Lost in the celebratory rhetoric is the fact that capitalism has never depended on one industry. Industries rise and fall. Corporations like Sony and Bertelsmann can face declines in one sector and still make astronomical profits in other ones. Worries about the loss of the beloved paperback book to unwieldy e-books weren't presented as dooming the publishing industry or assaulting the very regime of private property. 'Why should sharing music files be any diferent? "Sharing" at one level (files) enables ownership at others (hardware, network access).
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