Net Ecology Day
I'm proposing a Net Ecology Day. And it has to be visual, so that people understand the differences between hierarchies and networks and get the chance to care collectively about the health of this network of networks.
It's my belief that the ecology of the net is deeply threatened. It's not just the attacks on P2P networks or government thoughts about requiring authentication as a condition of online life — although these developments and others give rise to concern — it's about what seems to be a general sense that the net is a dark and dangerous place. A seedy place. A place that needs to be constrained.
This overall reaction to the net provides breathing room for all kinds of initiatives, ranging from the FCC's broadcast flag rule to ISP gags required by national police. But very few people are paying attention to the overal ecology of the net.
Earth Day came into being because Sen. Gaylord Nelson became concerned in the 60s that no one was paying attention to the environment. He wanted to “shake up the political establishment and force [the] issue onto the national agenda.” He wanted “to show the political leadership of the Nation that there was broad and deep support for the environmental movement.” He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
On April 22, 1970, twenty million Americans took to the streets to demonstrate for a healthy environment. Since then, Earth Day has become a global phenomenon, mobilizing hundreds of million of people in support of environmental issues. Not all these people would support everyone else's issues, but once they had Earth Day they could support the collective activity of worrying about the environment. As Sen. Nelson puts it:
Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself.
Now we have a new environment — the internet — that is under attack. Not everyone will support everyone else's issues. But we need to draw attention to the threat in some shared, ritualistic, visual way that will cause a shift in perception. We need an Earth Day for the internet. And we're in luck: the internet is particularly good at organizing itself.
Here's the suggestion for how this could work: The central problem that we need to solve, the central complacency we need to overcome, is the general feeling that someone is (or should be) in charge of the internet. We need to show the difference between networks and hierarchies.
What if, on one day a year, we globally built a picture of links together? Each person could put a dot on the global page, identify it, and then draw a line to something online that they care about. I bet the result would be a very interesting and dynamic network diagram that we could animate. You'd see the thing pulse and change, as some links became thicker through popularity and clusters connected all at once. Then, for one day, people could post this living, animated network diagram on their page or blog. Very zippy. We could make it possible for people to show “their” part of the network — what they had decided was important. (There are, to be sure, a few hurdles to overcome, but don't bother me with your petty technical difficulties (PTD)).
Then, by contrast, we could provide a “movie” of an animated hierarchy plodding along. Blump, blump, blump. Frozen and boring.
With these two pictures, one of them built in real time, collectively, by people around the world, we could see the difference between a network and a hierarchy. We wouldn't need permission to do this. We'd just need a good symbol and a good PR campaign. Just one day a year. In the fall.
If anyone is worried about the ecology of the internet, we need to reach the world to explain why we're worried. It's not enough to reach a few classrooms. We need a dynamic picture that, like early religious icons, can transmit ritualistically the meaning of the internet to a network-illiterate world. Religions figured this out long ago. Truth is transmitted to our successors through ritual and music and pictures, not just the written word.
Of course, this idea of net ecology is not a religion, it's a science. Or is it?
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