One of the few writers on the web I routinely check out is David Pogue, a reviewer and technology columnist for the New York Times. With his easy, conversational style and his evident love for all that the world of consumer gadgetry has to offer, it’s little wonder that he works for the newspaper of record. Add to that the fact that he’s a musician, and I find myself cheering him on and “aw-right!”-ing most of his more philosophical pieces. He challenges the obsessiveness with which parents video or photograph everything their children do, while gleefully admitting that his children are the subjects of most every gadget he tests. When wading into the Mac vs. PC fray, he eloquently and intelligently points out that most people don’t want to tinker with their toys; they want things that work. It’s this ability of David’s to identify with most people that makes him such an enjoyable and valuable read.

But he does occasionally jump the tracks. A while ago, he wrote a very interesting piece about copyright morality and age. He recounts his confusion at a disconnect he experienced with his audience in a talk that he’s given many times. In this talk, he uses a fairly straightforward teaching tool, walking his listeners through the shades of grey that inhabit our moral choices, particularly as they apply to the technorati class’ favorite gremlin: file sharing. Not too surprisingly, most adult audiences obediently follow Pogue through the setup, becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the deepening levels of depicted depravity. This particular audience of youths, on the other hand, gave him almost no reaction at all through the entire scenario, to his incredulity and dismay.

The surprise, in a way, is that he was surprised.

Isn’t it a truism, after all, that the next generation is always a wayward threat to civilization as we know it? I mean, really. From time immemorial it has been the children who have challenged the status quo, who have created new and brazen forms of operating in the world. That the digital generation approaches life’s intrigues differently from their parents’ should be a comforting sign that all is right in the universe.

What Pogue is describing, however, is something more than all that. In a (slightly) more recent posting, he begins to flesh out some of this digital battleground, again puzzled by his interlocutors who do not understand where he’s coming from. As in most disagreements, he’s not doing much to understand where they’re coming from, and there’s the unfortunate rub. For in addition to your standard generation gap, this particular morality divide is pushed apart by the tectonic forces of economics and technology, forces that will eventually lead who knows where.

The issues of digital copyright and who pays whom how much for what in this increasingly networked world certainly don’t need to be revisited here. Suffice to say it’s all extremely complicated, no one’s right, and 100 years hence it won’t matter at all. These are the shell-games and the totems that we fixate on in avoidance of the real issues. There is a sea change afloat that has nothing to do with the internet or with digital media. We may be looking at a transformational moment, not unlike the invention of a new language, that’s been brewing for about a generation – since the ‘80’s in fact.

When I was growing up, Baby Boomers were in the middle of their triumphal rise. Real wages were at an all-time high, and my generation’s parents knew that they were on top of the world. As they enjoyed their wine coolers and mortgaged their way of life, our entire system was making a profound shift away from a productive economy and into a service economy. Productivity was no longer measured in “things produced” but in more arcane units of “value added”. And with this altered definition of productivity, we’d all taken the first steps away from the tangible, concrete value of goods towards a far more flexible and volatile market. Now that over two thirds of our entire GDP is in services, the potential for our sense of balance to be slewed completely is pretty high.

By itself, the service economy’s influence on our morality may be relatively mild, and it may even be beneficial. After all, so many of the intangibles that make life enjoyable are found in services, like having a good massage or paying someone else to change your car’s oil. And there is something profoundly rewarding about knowing that we are doing something for the benefit of other people. But mix this all up with that second great bugaboo of the ‘80’s, rampant consumerism, and things start getting funny.

What’s wrong with consumerism? it may fairly be asked. By itself, again, probably not much. The desire to purchase more and more and ever more goods (and services) is fairly benign, and in a functioning market, self-regulating – you can’t buy what you can’t afford. For the Boomers, these two aspects of our economy fed into each other quite naturally. There was a golden moment when access to purchasing power was matched by access to productive power, paid for by the power of services. No longer did we need to make widgets in order to buy doo-dads; all we had to do to buy our doo-dad was help someone out in some valuable way. Never mind where the doo-dads came from.

Children of the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, however, weren’t taught about the whole chain. More than any previous generation, I and my peers were protected from the evils of the workplace (and the world) as much as possible in the belief that what we didn’t know couldn’t hurt us. What may have started as a benign desire of our parents’ to protect their kids morphed into a full-on cultural phenomenon, where an entire generation came of age without a visceral relationship with the world and the way it works. Even if we knew some of what our folks did for a living, creating something of value was not the message that sank in. The media was working overtime feeding us a steady diet rich in over-sweetened images of wealth and luxury, generously salted with the story that work was meaningless bureaucracy that everyone hated. For the increasingly rare kid who actually ran a lemonade stand, the idea of making that lemonade from lemons was laughably absurd.

Fast-forward a decade, and all of these forces have become magnified. Through the 90’s the one-two punch of “individuality reigns supreme,” and “individuals have no value” did its damage to the psyche of that generation. An endless parade of marketing messages have hammered this bi-polar philosophy directly at the youth, targeting their hearts and minds and their parents’ pocketbooks and wallets. “Buy this!” and you will be making your individual mark on the world, just like everybody else. “Buy bulk!” turns each of you into mini corporations, maximizing your ROI by tapping into the anonymous power of the mass market. American exceptionalism being the prevailing mythos, we celebrated the entrepreneur while Wal-Mart made it clear that the little guy was expendable. The unmistakable fact is that the only way we can afford our free-spirited independence is because everyone else is buying it as well. Once college hit and (theoretically, at least) the parental purse-strings tightened, the deluge of easy credit offers easily perpetuated the cycle.

Enter the internet.

Before the bust, the dot-com boom had everyone a-twitter about the New Economy. Breathlessly, we were told about how everything was different: information is digital, value is what we make of it, and economic gravity has been repealed. It was the apotheosis of everything we had already been taught about money and “real jobs” being played out on and validated by Wall Street. The irony to all this is that the internet would never have existed if the market was all there was.

Consider how the internet came to be. As an interconnection of several networks, it inherited the characteristics of its forebears: principally ARPANET, but there were dozens, large and small. That alphabet soup of networks and protocols was cooked up in (often government-funded) university settings by researchers and scientists who trusted one another, making decisions and sealing deals on the merits of a phone call. They were all mutually invested primarily in facilitating free and easy access to the vast stores of information that their respective institutions housed. Revealingly, one internet developer said, “I saw it as a scientist; I didn’t see it as a human.”

The World Wide Web, built on the backbone of the internet, was even more explicit in its openness. Originally developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN for high energy physicists, the protocols and tools of the web were released into the public domain, partly as a way of encouraging widespread adoption. But there was an unmistakable synergy with the efforts of Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation. After all, they were both working in academic environments, engaged in synchronous efforts to develop the tools and structures needed for enriched academic research. In academia, knowledge, information is the lifeblood, the alternating currency upon which existence depends. And so all these founders very deliberately created an online culture that abhorred any restrictions on this flow.

This is certainly not the whole picture. Cisco Systems did not (could not) develop its routers and offer them for free, nor were the computers that hosted the internet even remotely cheap. But as long as all that fussy expense was handled by massive university budgets, it needn’t taint the pure and noble principles that appealed so strongly to that huge demographic just entering this new age and seeking to make its way. Already unattached to the concept of production, the internet released the tethers that held this generation to the service economy, promising a utopia of communal sharing wherein the global barriers of distance and language were instantaneously collapsed.

For those of us who fixated on our conception of ourselves as “individuals”, the tremendous opportunity to define our selves online was a true opiate. The internet and the web were further perfections of the message we had been taught so thoroughly – that we were mighty and unique individuals who only existed in an anonymously faceless mob.

Importantly, the market of money could never have managed what these visionaries and their generation of followers had achieved in their university sconces. Turning a profit on anything, at least in the conventional, short-term sense has long required maintaining control over whatever is being offered for that profit. But maintaining control and developing a de-centralized network that anyone can improve on are contradictory impulses, especially in a global business and regulatory culture that is based entirely on ownership. Ownership of goods, capital, and critically — ephemerally — rights is the direct currency that powers the world. It wasn’t until the late ‘90’s that transformers began to be invented to connect the world of the internet to the world of commerce, but by then, the cultural lines had been drawn and the trenches had been dug.

The idea of rights, it turns out, is the pivot point around which Pogue’s two audiences spin. For the older audiences, rights are a part of the vast business contract that society maintains with itself, one of the tools we have to ensure that producers are paid for their products. The new generation has learned to think of rights in the academic, philosophical sense that knowledge and people require free intercourse for their value to be realized. Neither of these interpretations is morally wrong, and in fact they are very self-consistent and stable systems for interacting with the world.

The problem is that self-consistency. During the gold rush for the web about a decade ago, the transformers that were built weren’t actual transformers so much as attempts to graft the direct current of business onto the alternating current of the web, without truly understanding the vast gulf of incompatibility between the two. Content, the product of considerable work, was hastily converted for sale on the digital bookshelves, without the realization that those shelves belonged to a vast lending library, not a bookstore. And at the other end, the very idea that content required work that demanded compensation was simply non-existent in the universe of the netizens, those youth who have been assiduously trained not to recognize themselves in the mirror of production and in turn validated by freedom-loving intellectuals buffered by academia.

Ironically, David Pogue himself straddles this line. While I certainly don’t know how the New York Times pays its staff, the fact remains that I did not pay to read his two articles, nor the myriad other essays and videos he produces as an (insulated) employee of a very large, profitable enterprise. Nor are you, gentle reader, paying to read this little essay, composed primarily in an open source browser on an open source blogging platform. It begs the question: where’s the line between a product that must be paid for versus a product that can be freely distributed? For Pogue, that line seems to lie where his relationship with the Times ends. My own example doesn’t even involve the internet, but the principle is, to me, the same (I generally expect to be compensated for singing, which is unfortunately surprising to many people).

Naturally, there are so many different facets to Pogue’s problem. All of them are at different angles to each other, and each can appear to be the most important in the world at any given moment. Much in the way that people themselves have been caught up in the whorl of collective individuation, the overwhelming complexity of any given scenario shows how far we have been blown from such wondrously facile notions as “free trade” and “monetary compensation”.

Morality is really the wrong lens through which to evaluate all of this. While I adamantly believe that there is such a thing as Right and Wrong, I as adamantly believe that neither of them exist in the world, except as frames within which our behavior can be understood. What all this internet kerfuffle does show, however, is that our social contract is indeed being threatened by transformative pressures. This is more than a generational mis-understanding, it’s a re-alignment of the most basic roles we all play in relation to each other. Fortunately, I have no idea where this will lead.

But I do want to find out.

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