The future is Vinge’s and Maddox’s accounts together, not either alone. If we were only in for the dystopia described by Vinge, we would have an obvious and powerful response: Orwell gave us the tools, and Stalin gave us the resolve, to resist the totalitarian state. A spying and invasive Net controlled by Washington is not our future. 1984 is in our past.

And if we were only in for the future that Maddox described, many of our citizens would believe this utopia, not science fiction. A world where “the market” runs free and the evil we call government, defeated, would, for them, be a world of perfect freedom.

But neither story alone describes what the Internet will be. Not Vinge alone, not Maddox alone, but Vinge and Maddox together: a future of control in large part exercised by technologies of commerce, backed by the rule of law.

The challenge of our generation is to reconcile these two forces. How do we protect liberty when the architectures of control are managed as much by the government as by the private sector? How do we assure privacy when the ether perpetually spies? How do we guarantee free thought when the push is to propertize every idea? How do we guarantee self-determination when the architectures of control are perpetually determined elsewhere? How, in other words, do we build a world of liberty when the threats are as Vinge and Maddox together described them?

The answer is not in the knee-jerk antigovernment rhetoric of our past. Reality is harder than fiction; governments are necessary to protect liberty, even if also sufficient to destroy it. But neither does the answer lie in a return to Roosevelt’s New Deal. Statism has failed. Liberty is not to be found in some new D.C. alphabet soup (WPA, FCC, FDA . . . ) of bureaucracy.

A second generation takes the ideals of the first and works them out against a different background. It knows the old debates; it has mapped the dead-end arguments of the preceding thirty years. The objective of a second generation is to ask questions that avoid dead-ends and move beyond them.

There is great work out there from both generations. Esther Dyson, John Perry Barlow and Todd Lapin still inspire, and still move on (Dyson is editor at large at CNET Networks; Barlow now spends time at Harvard). And in the second generation, the work of Andrew Shapiro, David Shenk, and Steven Johnson is becoming well known and is compelling.

My aim is this second generation. As fits my profession (I’m a lawyer), my contribution is more long-winded, more obscure, more technical, and more obtuse than the best of either generation. But as fits my profession, I’ll offer it anyway. In the debates that rage right now, what I have to say will not please anyone very much. And as I peck these last words before e-mailing the manuscript off to the publisher, I can already hear the reactions: “Can’t you tell the difference between the power of the sheriff and the power of Walt Disney?” “Do you really think we need a government agency regulating software code?” And from the other side: “How can you argue for an architecture of cyberspace (open source software) that disables government’s ability to do good?”

But I am also a teacher. If my writing produces angry reactions, then it might also effect a more balanced reflection. These are hard times to get it right, but the easy answers to yesterday’s debate won’t get it right.

Footnotes