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Spring '06 Perspective: The Web Undone |
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The World Wide Web is a vast porn delivery engine that happens to have some spare capacity available for email, information sharing, and various forms of e-commerce. Even the email component is largely used for porn, sent or advertised via spam. If you doubt the extent of pornography on the web, visit one of the sites that monitors search engine input. At http://www.infotiger.com/voyeur.html, for example, you can see in real time the search terms being entered by random users of Google, Altavista, etc. When I last looked, "Britney Spears nude" was a fairly frequent occurrence. There was also one "Madeleine Albright nude." Much of the rest was unspeakable. What's going on here? All that pornography may seem like a sad perversion of the web's original noble intentions. It does to me. And yet there may be something meaningful in the trend, something more than the surprisingly puerile desires of web surfers. First of all, the very illegitimacy of porn made it a perfect early adopter of the internet. We are all the beneficiaries of this early experience, since it led to the adoption of a standard for encrypted pages and secure credit card transactions. This facility was developed by and for pornography purveyors, but it is now used by all the rest of us for innumerable legitimate e-commerce transactions. Since the web is open, free, and unmanaged, it is a natural outlet for anything that isn't entirely respectable. And some of these less than respectable applications can nonetheless be viewed as healthy. Consider the very vital web humor magazine called The Onion. It is in deplorable bad taste; in fact it redefines the very notion of bad taste. It is simply too salacious for print. But it is also very funny. Then there is the strange web phenomenon of the Slytherins, tens of thousands of adolescent children who seem to need to associate themselves, via the web, with the forces of relative naughtiness at The Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry by becoming imaginary residents of Slytherin House, the rival to Harry Potter's own goody-goody dorm called Gryffindor. I'm not sure what this is all about, but it strikes me as a relatively harmless outlet for the kind of frustration with the established orders that can beset any normal human being at this complicated age. As porn goes, so goes the nation Like spam, pornography on the internet is something that could not have not happened. It was in the cards from the beginning. This has to do less with human perversity and more with the way the system is designed. The Internet can move information effortlessly, but it can't move stuff. It is useful precisely to the extent that what is being bought and sold is in the form of bits rather than atoms. And porn is a pure bit industry. When you buy a book from amazon.com, part of your transaction is bits (the order, the inventory inquiry, the hold, the payment authorization, the actual transfer of funds, the drop ship or fetch instructions etc.) and part is atoms (the book, which has to be lugged overland from wherever it is to you). The ratio of bits to atoms makes a transaction more or less a natural for the Internet. The unfortunate bit/atom ratio of the books business is the reason that Amazon, for all its promise, has a perennial problem making a profit. What profit it does make is always small compared to the cost of shipping. None of this applies to the porn business, where there are no atoms involved, nothing to ship, and so the margins and profits are huge. Can you imagine a variant of amazon.com that would be a pure bit business? That's easy; all it takes is for the book to be transmitted as bits instead of delivered as atoms. Selling e-books would be a pure bit business. There is a small amount of infrastructure needed before this will become common: the e-book reader. This would be a compact tablet computer, about the size of a book, that could hold and display and step through page images downloaded from the net. There are a few prototypes on the market today, and though none has yet caught on, expect that it will happen fairly soon. The impetus is enormous. It's not the book that will start the trend, since people can feel fairly petulant about anything replacing the book: "I like the feel of a real book. I like its smell." What will make reading machines common is the newspaper. Nobody likes the feel or smell of a newspaper. They are dirty and heavy and a bother to dispose of. The daily newspaper (or a whole passel of them) on your reader would be a marked improvement. When your reading machine downloads The Times and The Wall Street Journal each morning so you can take them with you on your commute, you've already got the necessary infrastructure in place for a few e-books. The trend will then be unleashed. My point here is that a commerce of pure bit products is unstoppable. It's already begun to happen. Consider the airline ticket. We tended for a while to think of it as a part-bit, part-atom product. We even went through a stage of ordering tickets on-line and then shipping them out via FedEx or mail. The e-ticket ended that. Today, an airline ticket (or a hotel reservation or a theater reservation or a cruise purchase) can be a pure bit transaction. When the commerce of pure bit products reaches its full potential we will look back at today's porn on the internet as not so much a perversion as a precursor of things to come.
Tom DeMarco Camden, Maine |
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