An 'interesting' draft Tract

Comments on the draft Tract The Church and the Internet by the Society of Archbishop Justus.

In principle, Cybernauts and The Church and the Internet are two documents with fundamentally different aims. Cybernauts is a call for people to think about the ethical and spiritual implications of Computers, IT and the Internet. The Church and the Internet 'describes some of the ways in which the internet is having a profound effect on the people and structures of our church'. Far from being 'scornful' of the document, we welcome the fact that it has been produced as a direct response to our 'wake up call'.

However, Brian (the Author of the draft Tract) seems to think of it as a counterblast to Cybernauts and it is at least interesting to look at some of the ethical thinking that accompanies his exposition of factual ways in which the Internet can help the Church. Our key ponts of disagreement seem to be:

1. Technology is not inherently 'morally neutral' - although it can be morally ambivalent.

2. Cyberspace is a real social space.

Technology is not morally neutral

The most important insight of Cybernauts is that compters "are so terribly good and so terribly bad at the same time. Neutral they are not." This is not an orginal insight, but it is counter-cultural, especially for people living in what Naisbitt calls a Technologically Intoxicated Zone.

Brian begins "Technology does not change the world. It changes the possibility or price of things, and people then change the world. From time to time it is sensible for people to change what they do because technological change has made new ways better somehow than old ways. Historically there has never been an issue of useful technology not being adopted. If it is genuinely good, and you don't adopt it, your children or your grandchildren will. The question for us, and the subject of this document, is whether or not we, the boundary generations, should adopt this new information technology or just wait for our children and grandchildren to do it."

The slogan "Technology does not change the world. It changes the possibility or price of things, and people then change the world." is even more self-evidently false than "guns don't kill people, people kill people". In the first place, it is hard to imagine a defintion of 'world' where technology was excluded. The nearest I can see is if Brian means 'human relationships', although even then his assertion is untrue in simple respects, as anyone who has waited for a telephone to ring can testify. But to see that this assertion is logically unsustainable, consider the possibility that, due to a software error (Y2K?) a nuclear missile destroys New York. Of course the people who installed the missile system would bear some moral responsibility for installing such a 'fail-dangerous' device. But this decision could have been taken 20 years ago. It would have been the technology, without any human intervention that destroyed New York.

For another example, consider the gas chambers of Auschwitz. These could only have one purpose - mass murder. Are these morally neutral? A close associate of Brian's seems to think so. However even Brian doesn't really think that "technology does not change the world" since he writes elsewhere in the Tract that "the motor car is an important technology that has transformed society"

Good, Useful and Sensible

In order to have a sensible discussion of the Ethical and Spiritual implications of technology it is essential to consier the distinction between "good" and "useful" technology, and "sensible" vs "non-sensible" change. It is also worth considering the fact that even technologies which are good, useful and sensible will not be adopted unless the are also available, affordable, socially acceptable and free from effective competitors.

Historically there has never been an issue.

It is hard to see how anyone who has studied the history of technology at all could write "Historically there has never been an issue of useful technology not being adopted.". Whether to adopt 'useful' technolgies is often a major political and social issue, as the debates over Genetically Modified food and Human Cloning make clear. Fast Breeder reactors are clearly 'useful' but have not in fact been adopted on any scale, and appear unlikely to be adopted ever. There are also many examples of useful technolgies not being adopted by societies - the Incas never adopted wheeled vehicles even though they had wheeled toys, and the Chinese deliberately lost the technology of building ocean-going ships.

Cyberspace is a real social space

Brian was clearly upset at our reference to 'cyberspace'. In his original sad diatribe against Cybernauts he claimed "Possibly the worst part of this book is that its authors are quite serious in their use of the word "cybernaut". They think of you and me as cybernauts. Yes indeed, cybernauts. Like argonauts or astronauts." (and then went on quite falsely to say "There's a special helmet and uniform that I wear whenever I send email to my mother. I strap on my pentacorder belt and tighten my cybershoes before looking on the web to find out when a movie starts at the cineplex." - if you can't find anything 'idiotic' in what people have said, make up things that they don't say at all) Well, we do use the word Cybernaut 4 times, and although at one level it's a catchy title-word, at another level it's a serious point: we are all voyaging further and further into Cyberspace and many people appear to be quite unreflective anout the Ethical and Spiritual implications of this.

In his draft Tract he goes on against this point of view. "Is it a cyber-something? Fundamentally the internet is the thing that you get when you connect a large number of people together so that they can exchange information with one another, store it, and look at stored information. It isn't really 'cyberspace' or cyber-anything. It's relationships between people, and relationships between people and libraries of data. The word 'cyberspace' and other science-fiction terms are misleading, because they focus on the mechanism, the wires, the computers, the cyber stuff, and not on what the mechanism can do for you. If I send a note to my mother, you may be certain that I am thinking about her and about what I want to say to her, and not about the wires and machines that will carry my note to her home. " (Brian is fond of talking about emailing his mother - funny that according to his website she is not on line).

Now in the first place this description of the Internet is seriously out of date. e-commerce is about more than people looking at stored information, and there is a significant distinction between connecting people and connecting computers. (Think about e-mail viruses for example).

But secondly, cyberspace is not about wires and mechanism but about the real social space of interactions and information that happens, contigently, at the moment, to be instantiated with particular wires, fibers and computers, but where geographical location is largely irrelevant. As the draft Tract notes elsewhere, people interact differently in Cyberspace, and Cybernauts points out some of the more scary ways in which the boundaries between Cyberspace and humanity can be blurred.

We don't yet fully undersand the relationships between Cyberspace and other spaces of human interaction - but to deny its existence, misses the point.