Jimmy Wales, Susan Crawford, and Internet Stewardship
BY Nancy Scola | Monday, June 7 2010
Via Twitter, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales responds to law professor, thinker, and former Obama administration official Susan Crawford's critique that I wrote about here, that it's no longer "appropriate or sufficient" to dodge the tech world's policy and political battles -- among them net neutrality and increasing broadband access through more government involvement -- with the excuse that "I make websites," a line that Wales employed at PdF '10 as he begged off policy questions directed his way.
"My response to Susan," wrote Wales in a tweet directed to me, "is 'I make websites is not a sufficient excuse to pretend to expertise I do not have'. :)"
Crawford vs. Wales, to get dramatic about it, is a debate that has been a long time brewing, and there are those among us (okay, me) who see progress in the possibility that it might move to the front burner. The tech policy battles that take place in DC often boil down to tech interests pitted against one another with civic/advocacy groups often counting on friendly business interests standing up for their views in that forum; for example, you see how groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge have found a powerful ally in Google in the net neutrality battle, at least until the last month or so. But it's probably fair to say that technology and media hasn't developed the sort of grassroots base that you might expect, given how enmeshed technology and media are in the lives of a huge percentage of the American people. There are few things of political consequence that we have more day-in-day-out experience with than technology and media, and yet many of us regularly beg off their political implications. That's not to say that the "grassroots" is going to come down any particular way on these policy debates, but there has been the sense that these aren't even grassroots debates to be had.
Wales' argument -- that making a successful career off of engineering websites doesn't necessarily qualify someone as a net neutrality or broadband expert -- makes some intuitive sense. But there's another way to look at this. And that's that what Crawford and others are calling for isn't really "expertise." It's stewardship. One doesn't have to be an environmental scientist to feel a sense of concrete responsibility for the earth. Making an existence out of the earth's bounty is reason enough for the average human to feel some sense of duty towards the world we live in. The related argument when it comes to the Internet is that those of us who rely upon the Internet's bounty should feel some comparable sense of stewardship, particularly when the Internet is threatened.
Anyway, it's a fascinating debate. Let's keep having it!