Individualism on the Net Analysis/Commentary Andrew L. Shapiro's recent book, The Control Revolution (1999), discusses many sensitive issues facing institutions and individuals in cyberspace. Shapiro has fears. He fears that institutions will filter out positive, but marginal voices, or that demagogues and firebrands will cause confusion rather than stir debate. He wants society to enforce balanced regulation of the Net, a system of checks and balances, opportunities and constraints. What Shapiro tends to overlook is that the Net, like society itself, might present only its sunny side to our view. Like a "collective unconscious," there might be more than meets the eye in the words and pictures of the Net. Perhaps the best illustration of what a collective unconscious might look like is Thorstein Veblen's view of society as an institution with its root interests at heart -- interests by no means benevolent. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899, Veblen argues that the upper classes have an "invidious" (treacherous) interest in protecting, promulgating, and otherwise advancing their power, sometimes by subterfuges as opaque to the practitioners as to the persons on whom they are practiced. These subterfuges, transposed into our own times, might well make up the natural inheritance of our triumphant middle classes. Shapiro, himself a member of a cultural elite, seems to stake his reputation on making sure that the face of the Net presented to the public is its sunny side -- a sunny side embodied in the politics of power and policy, and conflict between "American individualism" and the "American institution," and other treasured myths. The defense of the individual is a highly-polished gem, worn as gems are usually are, Veblen remarks, for beauty or status. As for institutions, defending them is moot in a complex society, and radically criticizing them is as futile as fighting City Hall. In a sense, Netizens assent to contradictory messages, to the implicit acceptance of marginals, while expressing an open disavowal of them. Institutions seldom approve of marginal voices or feather their caps of with commercial rewards or leadership. Rather, they are tolerated begrudgingly, rancorously, since free speech allows only a few discordant tones in the sunny-side chorus. In a real revolution rather than a "control revolution," the sunny side would undergo change. This hasn't happened because the issues at the base of society's unconscious haven't been plumbed. Possibly, these issues aren't the sunny-side chorus of "family," "community," "subsistence," "proliferation," and "self-love." Perhaps they are "meaning," "freedom," "fulfillment," "understanding," and other values that hold little weight to the man in the street or the institutional cog. Hopefully, society will progress -- something neither the under-educated specialist nor the machinist of institutional power is likely to foresee. Who says leaps, suggests Shapiro, says dewy-eyed utopianism (notice the verbal bludgeon), or worse yet chaos. Here, we must look to marginals in any revolution and ask -- are they really lemmings? And has progress never been known to leap? Shapiro sugar-coats his progressivism with a conspiratorial look over the shoulder at the barbarians in tow, at the hordes of skeptics who question the established political and institutional evangelism. His complicity makes a mockery of his otherwise clear-sighted analyses. September 15, 1999