There is a remarkable article on Media Influencer about Sir Martin Sorrell, the CEO of WPP (a marketing communications company), in which makes a very perplexing assertion. He has described the internet, an overwhelmingly unregulated (i.e. not politically directed) social network, as ‘socialist anarchy’, adding “The internet is the most socialistic force you’ve ever seen”. Of course he is not the first person to make a preposterous conflation of those sort of terms, neither will he be the last spout such oxymorons. Sorrell is clearly someone who has little grasp of the meaning of the political terms he bandies about, which I find surprising considering the man is running a communications company.
Although the internet could be reasonably called ‘anarchic’ in the most loose sence of the word as it is largely unregulated by states (though that varies), the internet is not really ‘anarchy’ as national laws regarding defamation (etc.) are often invoked regarding conduct on-line… but the real absurdity is to describe it as ‘socialist’. Socialist? In what way is the internet being allocated to people via political direction? In what way is the internet being used to impose collectivism and politically constrain markets?
I can only speculate what confused reasoning leads Sorrell call the internet ‘socialist’. Perhaps because the web is extremely threatening to the business model of WPP and most other ‘marketing communications’ companies (threatening as in “you are going to be dis-intermediated and destroyed”), he might therefore see the internet a sort of virtual jacquerie, a horde of angry torch bearing peasants moving towards his corporate castle in a threatening manner, thereby deducing that anyone who destroys a company’s business model must be a ‘socialist’ because socialists want to destroy companies, right?
I am just guessing here of course, but perhaps Sorrell needs to read about capitalist ‘creative destruction’ and reconcile himself to the fact his industry is in the process of being creatively destroyed by capitalism. The reason sections of the economy go the way of the dodo is nearly always caused by people following eminently capitalistic and quite several (as opposed to collective) motivations in responce to changing conditions. The internet is the most individually empowering tool in human history and has nothing to do with socialism but rather a lot to do with creating dis-economies of scale and breaking the mass markets so beloved of large businesses into a mass of niche markets… the key word here being markets.
If you will remember, the internet was developed by the US government, not by capitalists. It is no more a product of the free market than interstate highways are. And yes, once the central government had, in a socialist command economy fashion, developed the interstate highways, capitalists found them useful also.
So what? The printing press was developed to print the bible… and?
So what? The printing press was developed to print the bible… and?
And if someone claimed they could see no connection between the development of the printing press and religion, that would be a silly claim, wouldn’t it?
Now suppose someone claimed they could see no connection between the internet and socialism. What would the merit of that claim be?
Amazing. The meaning of words may be arbitrary but that does not mean they are extensible and can therefore be redefined to mean whatever you want them to mean each time you use them. For meaningful communication to be possible, absurdities such as this really do need to be shown the red card. What does Martin Sorrell think people will understand by hearing the internet described as a “socialistic” force? It is arrant nonsense.
And if ever there was an example of unintended consequence, DARPANET -> INTERNET is it. People will look back at those who advocate central planning and political direction of an economy and see them as the “flat earthers” that they are.
Absurd (not to mention clutching at straws). But why stop there? Let’s go back to the invention of the telephone!
It reminds me of comical Muslim claims that theirs is the superior culture because the West use ‘Arabic numerical notation’ and rediscovered Aristotle via Muslim Spain.
The US government did not ‘invent the internet’ because darpanet is not the internet. Similarly the church did not invent printing (in the west), Johannes Gutenberg did and he did it in order to try and make money (none too successfully in his case, sadly).
The US government did not ‘invent the internet’ because darpanet is not the internet.
The central planning of the internet went far beyond ARPANET – UUCP, UseNet, TCP/IP, MILNET, CERN, the IETF, NIC, InterNic, and so on. If one opposes socialism in all cases then to be consistent one must argue that the development of the internet was a misuse of resources, and that we would be better off if it had not occurred as soon as it did.
Which would be kind of an odd argument to make for someone who simultaneously believed that the internet is, “the most individually empowering tool in human history”, wouldn’t it?
Does that kind of argument make Virgin socialist for bringing down British Airways a peg?
The government created the internet, but capitalism made it great…
http://blog.mises.org/archives/005174.asp
A great article that talk’s more about the topic
As usual you premise is mistaken. I have no problem with the ‘war socialism’ of WWII. I also have no problem with the idea of a state run military generally.
However you make the mistake of assuming that because the genesis of the internet was the government programme darpanet, that was the only way it could happen. The world we are in does have the state taking a huge chunk of resources that might be better directed privately and so we can never know for sure what would have happened if the state had not caused X to happen rather than allowing Y to develop naturally and driven by markets.
Maybe this is mistaken word choice. Sorrell makes some sense if “socialistic anarchy” actually means “social anarchy”.
However you make the mistake of assuming that because the genesis of the internet was the government programme darpanet, that was the only way it could happen.
I don’t believe a blanket assumption that “the most individually empowering tool in human history” would have developed in a free market if socialism had not done so first is warranted. That sounds like faith more than rationality to me. Since the internet for most of its life was closed to commercial uses, why did corporations not develop a similar system on their own instead of waiting for Big Government to open its network to them? It’s a classic example of a market failure known as a “missing market”.
If you would like to argue that liberty dictates that we accept non-optimal market outcomes instead of taking into account market failures, feel free to make that argument. But to make that argument while simultaneously celebrating the products of the command economy is poor argument.
Beacuse telco have been MASSIVELY regulated until quite recently. Duh.
I don’t think his use of the word socilist was correct. But then, the definition given in the post is way off anyway.
Socialism is a system of ownership, not of distribution and exchange. Socialism can exist (and does exist) within a market economy, and businesses set up on socialist models exist quite happily in the modern market economy. Corporatism and state planning != socialism.
Just because some socialists were also corporatist or utopian planners, doesn’t mean that all socialists think that way. If you want to use the word to insult people generally, feel free, but it devalues the argument if you use it in place of corporatist…
“Since the internet for most of its life was closed to commercial uses, why did corporations not develop a similar system on their own instead of waiting for Big Government to open its network to them? It’s a classic example of a market failure known as a ‘missing market'”
I’m sorry, but how long have you been using computers? Are you aware that there were BBS, commercial networks (Compuserve, AOL) and open networks (FIDONet) before the commercial internet? FIDONet in particular is a very good example. It was restricted to email and newsgroups, but its communication model was already internet-like, and would certainly have expanded beyond mail and newsgroups as communication costs dropped and always-on connections became more prevalent.
Sure, land, labour (i.e. you) and capital… and you cannot exchange those things freely if you do not own them, so it is rather disingenuous to say socialism is not also a means of exchange. Socialism is a total system of control no matter how it is dressed up. Modern socialism tends more to the more effective fascist approach of allowing nominal private ownership whilst regulating it so that the state is actually a super-owner (i.e. you may ‘own’ things just as long as you use them in accordance with the wishes of your political masters).
For sure and it does so by using force to make people do things they would not in fact do in a market economy.
Extremely happily! For example the BBC. They exist by using force to extract tax thereby freeing them from the pressures of supply and demand. Such businesses are very happy indeed. It is the people who would otherwise be their competitors and the people forced by law to fund them who are not quite so happy.
FIDONet in particular is a very good example.
I don’t think you have helped your case here much. FIDONet originally ran over the PSTN, and the reason the PSTN reached everyone was because someone in the government had decided that it should, and then subsidized and regulated the private sector to make that happen.
Again, a missing market example – had the government not made a command economy decision to increase the reach of the communications infrastructure, networks like FIDONet would have been much less useful, if they had even been constructed at all.
To describe the commercial system such as Compuserve as ‘like the internet’ is silly. Yes they were online information systems, but they failed precisely because of their poor engineering, closed nature, and shortsighted vision of their user’s desires.
I wouldn’t generally refer to the Internet as socialist in nature, but one could make some arguments for it.
The Internet succeeds because it forces compliance with global protocols. The RFC process is, if not socialist, at least heavily communitarian. It is interesting to note that in cases where traditional capitalist competitive innovation has occured, e.g. in the HTML standard, the result has been so technically and practically weak, that it’s been absorbed back into the centralised standards.
The Internet leverages the power of co-operation over innovation. Most of the Internet is very crude and simple. The web and email are crude simple protocols. They are effective not because they are sophisticated, but because they are universal and interoperable. Of course one of the reasons they are universal is that they are simple.
I much evidence that market competition leads to ever improving versions of things. I see no evidence that it leads to co-operation and interoperability. In this sense the Internet the triumph of conformance and co-operation over individuality and innovation, which I suppose you might describe as socialist.
I see no evidence that the Internet would have come into being entirely through the market. Microsoft were claiming they would create a proper commerical quality alternative to the Internet as late as the early 1990’s. AOL were still claiming to offer something better than the Internet well into this century. Given that such attitudes prevailed so long, even once the internet had been creatd and proved effective, makes me doubt that companies would ever have created it themselves.
Felix love, as some folk round here
know I’m Welsh.
But I do understand English.
Would you like to speak it?
Perry? I was talking about co-operatives and partnerships (like John Lewis). BBC is a state corporation and is therfore corporatist, you can describe it as a type of socialism if you wish, but it isn’t the only type possible. Kibbutz, co-ops, partnerships, etc are all types of socialism, all exist within markets, succesfully.
Corporatism can be socialist or capitalist, markets can be socialist if the business wants to organise itself that way.
Your description, and definition, of socialism is in fact a description of a sub-type, not of all types. Co-ops were mostly set up by people within markets and operate as freely operating, and competing businesses. They’re a type of socialism. But they don’t fit in with your definition at all.
JS Mill was a socialist 😉
Sorry but if you think the John Lewis Partnership is socialist, you are very much mistaken. Any form of ‘socialism’ that does not seek to use force to prevent private ownership is a social club, not a form of governance. A kibbutz is quite acceptable to me because you can decide to walk out and possibly even buy some property next door and compete with them. Alas state socialism of any sort uses force to stop that happening if you become too effective at it. Socialism is the most ironic of terms for it seeks to prevent social interactions and replace them with political ones.
Indeed he was, which is why I share Paul Marks’ contempt for him.
I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned Minitel yet. There’s a government Internet for you. 🙂
But all you see is what happened against a backdrop of government planning and regulation: what Bastiat described as “that which is seen”. For most of their existance telecommunications have been very heavily regulated so who knows what we would have had without those restrictions.
But that is all irrelevent anyway because it does not make the internet of 2006 ‘socialist’.
Who is this “we”? Non-optimal to whom?
Who is this “we”? Non-optimal to whom?
We means whoever is making decisions about the ground rules under which the allocation of resources in society is being made.
And, “an allocation of resources is optimal if there is no way to rearrange things that makes somebody better off without making at least one other person worse off”.
Free markets, meaning markets that meet a certain set of assumptions regarding competition, transaction costs, information availability, externalities, etc., lead to optimal outcomes. When those assumptions aren’t meet, there is usually a means by which some people can be made better off without making anyone else worse off.
But I do understand English.
Would you like to speak it?
I assume you are referring to PSTN, “public switched telephone network”.
You’re all talking rubbish – everyone knows Al Gore invented the internet.
I find many of the comments here just another example of why I usually refrain from commenting and forums. People try to make an argument just because they like the look of their own pixels, no matter how preposterous an argument they are making. It must be a Guy Thing. The fact that the internet allows people to do things without most of the regulations and political controls they would normally be subject to shows anyone with more than half a brain AND some common sense that it is about as far from being socialist or socialistic as you can get. If anyone thinks a bunch of individuals freely communicating without political control is socialist, then they are really not worth debating with because they are either idiots or trolls or both.
“If anyone think a bunch of individuals freely communicating without political control is socialist, then they are really not worth debating with because they are either idiots or trolls or both.”
Or desperate for any success to pin on socialism, no matter how remote and poorly supported by the evidence.
Note felix’ attempts to pin the supposed innovation by government as such (which is obviously hardly synonymous with socialism as such, to put it extremely mildly) and that marketroid’s search for publicity-generating buzzword of the day. internet = socialism preposterous? So what, as long as it can be spinned to socialism’s advantage?
And Gal’s thing is to scoff at Guy’s thing, but remember that among those preposterous Guy’s Things is the invention of the internet itself. 🙂
felix is begging the question, formulating the problem in such way as to get the desired answer.
The fact is, majority of technologies necessary for internet to happen have been invented in the private sector:
CPU
physical network layer (Ethernet and the early hardware network standards like IBM’s Token Ring or nearly forgotten Banyan networks)
mouse
graphical user interface
multi-tasking operating system.
So was UUCP is a private invention, by the way. So were the Novell networks, which were entirely private development. There’s nothing out there that would have prevented internet from becoming what it is A LOT EARLIER – had it not been for virtual government monopoly on the wide-area networks.
felix wishes to forget that telecom was deemed far too important to be owned by private hands, no sir. The very thought of privatizing the telecoms, gosh, was heretical. Are you insane? It’s like postal service! Only the government can run it! That was the mentality, that was the legislation, ownership, assets and the gold-plated, over-expensive technical solutions. I still remember that nauseauting feeling when reading the price lists of govt-approved telecom equipment. That network was totally government in everything, logical division, technological standards, accounting standards, and running anything in a different way was plain verboten.
All that govt did was indeed initiating TCP/IP work, and then Tim Berners-Lee inventing the precursor of HTTP in CERN.
Hypertext as such, however, was mostly private invention. Government has merely LET internet happen.
No, Perry, the telecom was not heavily regulated – it was frigging total monopoly that govt had on the telecoms, the Western countries being only slightly better off in this regard than the telecoms in Soviet Union. In US in 1950s and 1960s a subscriber had no right to connect his own telephone to the network – he was forced by law to rent one from AT&T! Now, forgive me for being blunt, but in the former commie countries we actually had more economic freedom in this regard, because nobody banned a subscriber from connecting his own telephone to the PSTN!
The hardware is the hard part. Protocols are icing on the cake, the easy and natural part to do once you have the hardware.
TCP/IP was largely complete by 1975. And there it lay dormant, until privatization of telecoms kicked in. Had we had private telecoms in 1970s, internet would have been exploding at the end of that decade, and not in 1990s.
If govt made internet operate, why didn’t it decide to do so in 1970s? Why wait 20 years?
Government, if anything, has DELAYED the development of internet: by keeping its dumb and heavy hand on the wide area networks and simply keeping it both legally and economically from operating. You can’t compete against virtual monopoly on the assets. It’s just not possible.
Last but not least, what’s this conflation of government with socialism, for crying out loud? What is it that you count on, felix – that people’s memories have degraded so much and their knowledge of ideas has eroded so much they would not notice such a ridiculous confabulation? Govt = socialism? Do you mean social democracy, or do you mean socialism as Marx meant it, or do you mean socialism as Trotsky meant it, or do you mean socialism in the American New-Dealish quasi-Keynes way, or do you mean socialism as popularly understood, that is freebies funded by the good government taking it from rich and giving it to its political benefactors?
Define socialism, define government, define ownership of wide area networks in context of both. For it seems by creeping around guts of such issues that definitions try to describe, you merely beg the question. It’s like Robert Solow put it, “you put the plum in the pie, stuck your thumb in, and say look what I have found”.
“We means whoever is making decisions about the ground rules under which the allocation of resources in society is being made.”
There’s no such thing as “allocation of resources in society”.
This phrase alone carries an assumption there is some pool of resources that are politically divided, given to some, and denied to some. Possibly arbitrarily or on basis on merit, but still it’s “one pot of resources” assumption. It’s an implicit assumption of process working in top-down manner.
In reality, individuals produce stuff and decide to pool it together or not, the rest of society per se having nothing to do with it. It’s working in a bottom-up manner, not top-down manner.
Redistribution is kind of oxymoron – you can’t re-distribute what has not been undergoing process of distribution earlier. It’s like asking to redistribute grass – grass grows, you decide to cut it or not, and that’s it.
Regarding optimum results or not: well… screw them.
Classical liberals like Adam Smith have indeed argued for free markets on grounds of social utility.
This is blog of LIBERTARIANS: we argue for private property on grounds of rights of individuals. Not on grounds of the greatest social utility ever. Sure, optimum results are nice. But good results will suffice, too. Whether markets deliver the best results you can ever have or merely good results or even plain average is not an issue of the highest priority.
Libertarianism doesn’t equal social utilitarianism.