Murray Leinster, and Cyber-Utopian Delusions

As I have remarked again and again Murray Leinster's 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" Leinster, in what may be one of the greatest realizations of the "extrapolation" from technological possibility to societal consequences that defined John Campbell's tenure at Astounding Science Fiction and Fact, absolutely nailed the Internet. That "A Logic Named Joe" is rarely even mentioned these days, and Leinster just about never given the credit due him (certainly in comparison to the encomiums showered on, say, William Gibson), says much more about the sensibilities of science fiction's tastemakers in an era of "literature envy." And indeed since belatedly discovering that piece of work it has been a touchstone to which I have returned again and again, not least when recently thinking about the politics of the Internet, and not least, where those who had "cyber-utopian" expectations for the Internet went wrong, the web in practice proving a far less "democratic" medium than they imagined.

Consider what some of us have learned the hard way. Where the address of the public is concerned it has been critical that the Internet is oriented to passive consumption of low-information content rather than complex, nuanced and/or interactive communication, which oriented it to conveying simple--ideally, already well-known and/or highly emotive--messages rather than the kinds of bottom-up communication cyber-utopians anticipated. Along with the gatekept, capital-advantaging, legacy media-dependent and relatively elite usage of this means of communication it was far less promising as a leveler that made everyone potentially a participant in some hyper-democratic high-tech agora than a more sophisticated variation of broadcasting--with this only becoming that much more the case in an era in which the extent to which the written word had a place online has receded amid a shift from blogging to microblogging and then vlogging, and of course, of censorship and ad dollar-driven "enshittification" fast moving us to the online version of the Maximum EraM.a<. In short, the Internet as we know it has worked as a refinement of television, just like we see in Leinster's description--and in all too many ways, that particular refinement of television that is the telescreen that George Orwell described, watching you as you watch it--all as Leinster's relatively centralized and controlled vision of the Internet seems to have got at the truth of how this system would work rather more than those who mindlessly repeated the "market populist" propaganda and Silicon Valley PR of the '90s.