"'I Make Websites' is No Longer Sufficient"
BY Nancy Scola | Friday, June 4 2010
Susan Crawford told the crowd assembled at PdF '10 this morning that the days of technologists ignoring the politics of the technology landscape are over. "The Jimmy Wales response [of] 'I make websites,'" said Crawford, "is no longer appropriate or sufficient."
Crawford's mention of Wales was in reference to what the Wikipedia founder had to say yesterday when asked during the morning conversation with PdF Founder Andrew Rasiej on where he stands on policy matters including broadband access and net neutrality. On government subsidies for high-speed Internet access, for example, Wales said yesterday, "It sounds an awful lot like a handout for companies that are already very, very, very rich," and then pled ignorance about all things policy beyond that. Crawford is a well-known thinker on technology policy who generally makes her living as a law professor but who in January wrapped up a one-year stint in the Obama White House as a tech expert with the National Economic Council.
In the earlier days of the Internet, said Crawford, government and politics were, if anything, an annoyance. "We could geek around it," she said of the the broader political world in which the Internet, no matter how amorphous, had to find its existence. "We could avoid." No more, said Crawford, who finished her talk by drawing a connection between the BP oil spill, the sparse handful of telecom companies who currently, and a century ago in America's past where people rose up against corporate dominance, back when the company in question was Standard Oil. Crawford called on the few hundred technologists in the audience to consider that the future of the Internet that they've come to embrace isn't guaranteed. She asked the crowd to make it their business to closely examine the pending Comcast-NBC merger that would further consolidate ownership over this county's media infrastructure.
"Don't high-speed, open Internet access for granted," said Crawford as she closed her talk, laying a mantle of responsibility on the crowd. As she finished, the crowd applause could fairly be described as 'spirited.' A few folks, in fact, even got to their feet -- though, as was noted by someone in the Twitter stream, standing ovations are made a little bit more awkward and even less likely by the fact that everyone's sitting in the crowd with laptops on their laps.
(Just a reminder that video of PdF talks will be archived online as soon as is possible. Yesterday's talks are already up on Civico.)