I think it would be appropriate to reflect today on the last great test of free speech in this country, the Vietnam War. Americans exercising their right of free speech by protesting the war brought down the President after whom this complex we're in was named. One week from today will mark the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war, and a few days after that, as I understand it, Robert McNamara will be here in this very auditorium explaining how the war was a tragic mistake, and admitting that the people who protested the war were right after all. The ghosts of the Vietnam War still haunt this building, as they do so many other places in this country. So we might ask ourselves today, as part of our discussion about free speech, would cyberspace have helped end the war?
There are people who would answer yes to this question, and they would say that the communication made possible by nation-wide computer networking would have helped circumvent and expose the lies our government and much of the news media were telling us about the war. One can imagine the Pentagon Papers being posted to the net anonymously, and made available to everyone at some gopher site or on a Web page. The National Mobilization Against the War might have been able to use the net to get its message out to millions of citizens much more easily and more cheaply than the ways it did nearly thirty years ago. You might imagine a Web page with dynamic graphics showing how we dropped three times more explosives on Southeast Asia than all the powers dropped in all the theaters of World War II, something most Americans still don't grasp.
But the current gestalt of cyberspace raises some doubts in my mind about the utility of the net for such purposes.
First, the right of free speech entails far more than just being able to say whatever you want wherever and whenever you want to say it. The most important purpose of a right of free speech in a democracy is to allow people to stimulate collective action, to persuade others to act in concert against some perceived wrong or injustice. This is why free speech is attached to the democratic ethos in our country, rather than simply to an anarchic ethos of negative freedom, to "anything goes." American values are largely indebted to John Locke, who insisted on the right of rebellion asa basic assumption about where power should reside. But a right of rebellion doesn't mean atomized, solipsistic individuals spouting off about their pet peeves. It means focused and disciplined collective action aimed at a collective end. In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt attributed the rise of the Nazis in Germany to the atomization and private preoccupations of Germans during the Weimar period, and the corresponding atrophy of the public sphere of action. According to Arendt and others, not only is an atomistic, self-regarding, largely privatized society infertile ground for democracy and free speech, it's actually vulnerable to demagoguery and authoritarianism. Hannah Arendt said, in her own way, that people have to get out of their houses and work together as an ongoing, permanent responsibility to protect democracy against totalitarianism.
This means that free speech should be backed up by what might be called body power, or the literal physical threat of organized collective action. For example, despite many books and news reports and other sources of information on the subject of segregation in the South, most Americans only took notice of the civil rights movement when hundreds of thousands of people packed the Mall in Washington, D.C., and were thrilled by the public oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr. It's unlikely that Dr. King could have had the same effect on the nation's conscience by posting his "I Have A Dream" speech to the Internet. Likewise, Robert McNamara says in his new book how shaken he was by looking out his Pentagon office window and watching a man burn himself alive in protest against the war. This raises the question, if you'll pardon a pun on such a grim subject, whether McNamara would have been similary moved by flames in his e-mail.
The sheer noise in cyberspace makes it difficult for people to be heard, regardless of their cause or their rhetorical skill. The chief feature of Internet communication is endless equivocation, and the terabytes that build up on every conceivable subject from every possible point of view dilute the potential of free speech in this medium to something that falls below Avogadro's number, where reactions can no longer take place. There is very little evidence that the millions of people on the Internet and other computer networks can be engaged to do something significant, because everyone is so dazzled by the ephemeral quality of the words and pictures and ideas they see before them. This feature of electronic communication makes one wonder whether anything that's ever posted in cyberspace will imprint history like the words of the Gettysburg Address or the heroic exclamations of people in the fire of a crisis. Talk is literally cheap in cyberspace.
What's troubling about what I see in cyberspace is its hall-of-mirrors quality -- it's beginning to look like an electronic funhouse where we can escape the aggravating and stubborn problems of our communities and our nation. Some net enthusiasts, like the editors of Wired magazine, think that cyberspace is a real place to live and work and play -- I've even talked with people who wish that they were machines so that they could leave the real world completely behind. This attitude, which the press seems to find titillating, threatens to elevate communications technologies to superiority over basic human values, such as when net enthusiasts in this country congratulated Chinese and Russian democrats for their use of e-mail and faxes instead of for their courage. The free speech displayed in Tien-An Mien Square and outside the Russian parliament was not remarkable because of the technologies used but because it threatened to topple tyrannies. I think some Internet gurus frequently see things backwards, perhaps the result of viewing them exclusively through a computer screen.
To me, a disturbing vision to contemplate is one in which the current, predominant culture of cyberspace is overlaid against the turbulence about the war in Vietnam. I fear that if we'd been yakking in cyberspace then the way we do now, we might have been preoccupied with the character and future of cyberspace, the way we seem to be now, while our government continued to slaughter its young men and innocent people of other countries. That is, we might have neglected the power of free speech in the real world, where it matters most, in favor of free speech in a virtual world, where it matters least, even though I believe free speech should never be abridged anywhere. It's unfortunately not difficult to imagine a trendy hothouse culture of individualist, libertarian net surfers like we have now oblivious to a national tragedy that resulted in a long black wall of dead young Americans. This would have been a double tragedy: not only would the war have gone on as it did, but the democratic potential of a new communications technology that might have helped prevent it would have been squandered, as I think it largely is now.
Even more disturbing, however, is the realization that this hypothetical thought-experiment about cyberspace and the Vietnam War actually is going on now, because there is a war going on in our own country these days. It's a war-zone in our inner-cities, in some cases our suburbs, the product of intolerable inequality and a culture of violence that threatens to tear us apart. African-American leaders in this country have said, repeatedly, that the crisis in black America is the worst they have faced since slavery. The sons, grandsons, and nephews of the men who disproportionately died in Vietnam are now disproportionately dying on our own city streets. Young children in large American cities are sixteen times more likely to die of violence than children in Belfast during the worst period of Irish violence, and in some U.S. cities the child mortality rate is greater than in Bangla Desh. We're turning into a hyper-violent Third World country at the same time we're supposed to be celebrating the bright dawn of the "Third Wave" information society. Some veterans, both of the Internet and the military, sometimes wonder what we have wrought, and what we fought for.
I think the fact that a major medium of citizen communication, one that is the subject of hyped-up articles every day of the week, is so palpably disengaged from this crisis is a national disgrace. If one were in a cynical mood, one might suspect that all the attention paid to cyberspace these days is precisely aimed at keeping our minds off this horror and shame, to divert our freedom of speech to a realm where it will do no harm or good and threaten no one, and keep us entertained while vital parts of our nation sink further into hell.
Nealry all our communications media today are saturated with and debased by hype, trivia, sleaze, and celebrity-worship. It's unsettling and discouraging when we're forced to champion freedom of speech by defending multi-million dollar advertisers, mercenary spin-doctors, pornographers, bigots, companies that market mayhem and gore, or professional boors like Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. When we talk about freedom of speech today, I think we need to turn our attention away from all the fashionable, distracting cyber-jargon and back to the basic terms of freedom, justice, equality, social responsibility and civic virtue. We need to reconnect public communications media with the public interest. And I think this is best done on the concrete streets and in the real communities of our nation, rather than in "virtual communities" or on some abstract, artificial "superhighway."