Dissecting Tech Manifestos

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

For this episode of the Tech Policy Press podcast,I had the chance to speak to Chris Anderson, Ph.D., a professor of sociology at the University of Milan who is leading a course on tech manifestos and their evolution, inviting his students to dissect the language for what it can tell us about politics and power.

Documents such as A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace and A Manifesto for Cyborgs have given way to more vacuous statements from billionaires, such as Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook manifesto, Building Global Community. These days a lot of Silicon Valley’s leaders don’t have much in the way of ideas, but they do have a lot of money, so either way they can push whatever agenda they may have on the rest of us. From promises of abundance delivered by artificial intelligence, to a 'global community' convened on social media platforms, to reimagined economies or even a new world order built on the blockchain, tech manifestos remain important, since they often signify large amounts of capital are about to be deployed to try to manifest someone's new vision.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Justin Hendrix:

Chris, tell me a little bit about your research practice. What do you look at and what is your expertise?

Professor Anderson:

So probably the thing that anyone who asked you what my research expertise would say is that I study journalism and I study the news. And I think that's fair and that's true. But the trick is I've never been a journalist. Many people who study journalism have been or are. So I am interested in journalism, I am interested in news, but I'm mostly interested in news and journalism as an institution that makes knowledge, that creates knowledge for how people know things. And in the case of news and journalism, what it does is it makes knowledge about current affairs, current events and society at large.

So I think of studying journalism just like you might study science, or you might study libraries, or you might study sociology, or any institution that creates knowledge. And so to me, that's what I study, and I just so happen to do it through the lens of news and journalism.

Justin Hendrix:

Of course, I suppose through that lens you have a particular interest in not only media, but also media and technology and the role that technology plays in our lives and in the world. And I have of course followed your research and followed your writing, but was struck this summer when you tweeted the syllabus of a course that you're teaching this fall on tech manifestos. So how did you come to teach an entire course on tech manifestos?

Professor Anderson:

I just started this new job, as I said in the bio, at the University of Milan. And being that it's in Italy and I don't really speak Italian much at all and I have to teach classes in English, one of the classes that they gave me was this class with the title, the very sort of meaningless title I have to say, called Languages of the Media. That was the title of the class, Languages of the Media. And the main thing about this class is that it's taught in English.

For the purposes of giving it to me, that's its sole distinguishing feature is that it's one of the few undergrad classes at Milan that's taught in English. But I kind of decided to take the title seriously and start to think about how might we think about this idea of the relationship between media and language. And what is a language of the media? And also what might be useful for Italian students to learn in ways that will both help them think critically and also join if they wanted to join industry someday, what might also be useful for them? Because that's the thing about these common classes, you always have students who want to be critical thinkers, but you also have students who just want to get jobs.

So I thought, what is some of the most interesting language about technology and about the media? I can't remember if I had been reading a manifesto or why I thought of this, but I was like, man, what if we did a whole class on analyzing and reading manifestos, primarily though not only technology manifestos? So we read some other fun ones as well, but what if the centerpiece of the course were these tech manifestos? And then I sort of thought, you can learn all sorts of stuff about the media that way. You can learn why does Mark Zuckerberg feel the need to write a manifesto? Why should he care about needing to put his thoughts that way? What is it about technology? What is it about the internet? What is it about digital media that leads these billionaire capitalists to want to sound like Carl Marx, and write these things that sound like radical manifestos?

So that was the starting point. From there on it was sort of off to the races and trying to figure out how to teach a class like that. But I guess I do think that understanding the technology manifesto as a thing and as a genre teaches us an incredible amount about the media world we live in.

Justin Hendrix:

So I see on the syllabus that you do spend a bit of time on the history of tech manifestos. Now this is a relatively short podcast, but can you give us the kind of canned or brief history of the tech manifesto?

Professor Anderson:

The very canned history,... and so I'm right in the middle of this now, and we just read John Perry Barlow's Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace, which is partly an answer to your question. So I think, look, the history of these tech manifestos is sort of the history of the internet in some way to be very, very blunt about it. You begin with stuff like the Hacker Manifesto and these very early, very alternative, very subaltern, very fringe communities writing manifestos about technology and the role it played in their lives and what technology did for them.

The second stage is, you see people like John Perry Barlow and The Cluetrain Manifesto, Dave Weinberger, who were continuing the manifesto style and are still writing it from very much an individualistic perspective. A bit more web 1.5, 1.0 to 2.0. So it's a bit more tied into the world of commerce and into the world of business than stuff like the Hacker Manifesto was, right? So that's phase two.

And then by phase three you have this sort of genre where this style and this type of rhetoric is now being, as I said earlier, embraced and repurposed by the heads of these gargantuan, potentially very evil, or some people see them as evil companies. So that's the history of the internet. You go from hackers as these sort of renegade people living on the fringe to sort this middle period, John Perry Barlow says people of the world have nothing to do with us, leave us in peace, you'll never regulate us, don't pass laws about us, there's no reason, you have nothing to do with us, go away. To Mark Zuckerberg saying, well, the purpose of Facebook is that we want everyone to be in a community. And that to me is the history.

Justin Hendrix:

Is there a kind of, I guess pre-history rooted maybe more in science fiction or other utopian sorts of visions of the future?

Professor Anderson:

I mean, there's always been this really neat relationship between utopias, SciFi, and technology. And I do think that there's a total connection there between these scientific visions of the future and the need to write a manifesto in order to embody that vision in words.

Manifestos are a lot like science fiction in a sense, is that they're calling into being a world that doesn't exist but could. And what manifestos do that SciFi doesn't is that, so there's this philosopher, JL Austin who has this idea of something he calls the speech act. And the speech act means if you speak it, it is an act itself. By speaking it, you do an action. So the traditional idea of this is a wedding. You say I now pronounce you man and wife, and that's more than just words. That creates a legal change in the actual world. People are now married by speaking who weren't married before.

This relates to manifestos because what manifestos are, they're gigantic speech acts. The idea is if you say it loud enough and in a particular rhetorical style, you by speaking will make that world, you will create that world through your own speech. And that's a lot like SciFi. That's the way that SciFi and science fiction and utopian writing in general has always operated. So I do think that there's a connection between the manifesto and the idea of writing about technology more generally. There's a reason why we have tech manifestos and not necessarily, I mean we have some conservation manifestos I guess, but not... There is a radical environmentalist manifesto, but the genre differences are not quite the same.

Justin Hendrix:

I see on your syllabus that people are reading, in fact, Mark Zuckerberg. Are there some other kind of key manifestos in addition to John Perry Barlow that you're exposing your students to, including some contemporary ones?

Professor Anderson:

So they're definitely reading John Perry Barlow and that Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. They're reading Mark Zuckerberg, as you said, the Facebook manifesto. In terms of stuff about the internet and about technology. They're reading Dave Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto. They're also reading something by Sheryl Sandberg, actually they're reading the Lean In manifesto, which is not really about technology but is obviously by one of the co-founders of Facebook, the Lean in Manifesto.

They're reading Donna Haraway in the same week, and Donna Haraway is famous for writing something called The Cyborg Manifesto, which is a key document in sort of third wave feminism saying, Donna Haraway has this great line where she says she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess, which means very much part of today's debates about gender and the social construction of gender. So they're reading that, they're actually reading that the same week they read Sheryl Sandberg, so that should be fun.

And then they're reading some much more historical ones. So they're reading The Port Huron Statement by Tom Hayden and crew. I think that will be fun for them to read. Probably the most edgy and avant garde manifesto they read was by this woman Valerie Solanas called The SCUM Manifesto. The SCUM Manifesto is famous because Valerie Solanas is known best for having shot Andy Warhol, and not killing him, but nearly killing him. And then they made a film about this, and this was a sort of key counter-cultural moment in the seventies. I read The SCUM Manifesto fully for the first time a couple weeks ago when I read it with my students and, man, it is one of the funniest things I ever read. I got to say, and purposefully so. I mean, there's a lot of debate about whether Valerie Solanas meant that thing seriously or as a satire, and it is one of the funniest laugh out loud pieces of writing I've ever read.

So we're discovering all sorts of stuff in here, all sorts of fun stuff for them. And again, it's the languages of the media, which means that the language is really fun and we can really stop and enjoy that language.

Justin Hendrix:

If there is one term or theme that seems to run through the syllabus, at least as I see it, it is bullshit. So what is the relationship between tech manifestos... Well, maybe it's evident, but what is the relationship between tech manifesto and bullshit?

Professor Anderson:

I don't think it is evident necessarily. I mean, if it is, I'm trying to keep a question mark for my students for as long as I can. So for me, the key theme of the class, there are two themes. Number one, are tech manifestos all just bullshit? And two, are political manifestos all just bullshit? And if one is and one isn't, why are there differences? Is it just that we so happen to like the politics of political manifestos and not the politics of tech manifestos? Is it just that we like what one is saying so that's not bullshit and we don't like the other one so that is bullshit? Are these all just bullshit? That's the underlying theme of the class.

And to understand that we have to have a very kind of technical definition of bullshit, which this guy Harry Frankfurt gives us in this amazing little book called On Bullshit, which basically starts by saying there's more bullshit... I'm not going to get the quote exactly right but he basically says, we live in a world where there's more bullshit than ever before. Why? And he wrote this in the nineties-- this was well before Trump, well before social media, well before everything else. But he's trying to understand why there is so much bullshit and that requires him first to define it, and the way he defines is amazing. It's not lying. So that's the thing about bullshit, it's not lying, it is speech without caring whether you're lying or not. So a lie is a lie. There's the truth, you say something else knowingly, that's a lie. Bullshit is you speak without caring whether what you say is a lie or the truth.

And that's what Harry Frankfurt says is growing, and that I think is the thing that's really relevant to our current political situation right now, this question of the relationship between politics and bullshit. Then that gets into all sorts of other questions, is there more bullshit because of technology? Is there more bullshit because there's social media, we all are just sort of yapping all the time? So we could go a lot of directions with that question. But yes, that is the underlying theme. And the thing I really want my students to think about is are manifestos all just bullshit? And if so, what does that tell us? And if not, why not?

Justin Hendrix:

It's kind of extraordinary to go back to the Facebook manifesto, which now is what, more than five years old, and look at some of the language in it and think about kind of what we've learned about Facebook's actual effect on society versus what Mark Zuckerberg put down in his 5,500 word manifesto. It's almost as if it came out at the beginning of the tech clash. It's like it sort of marked itself a kind of turning point. But all of these things that he's saying, this idea that Facebook has a real opportunity to help strengthen communities and the social fabric of our society, the idea that what it's doing is helping us come together online as well as offline, this notion of a global community at which you've already kind of called out as bullshit, it's really quite an artifact when you think about it. As much or more so perhaps than Barlow's manifesto. I might catch some guff from this, from some listeners. Barlow's manifesto perhaps has had maybe more influence, but in some ways Zuckerberg himself is a far more influential character than John Perry Barlow.

Professor Anderson:

Yeah. I think it's interesting to compare the two. I think you're absolutely right about Zuckerberg. Historically, Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto is far more important, and I'll explain what I mean. Historically, I think you're right. That is the wedge, that is either the last hurrah of an original idea of tech and what it could be, or it's the first truly bullshit statement of the tech clash. Either way it's a hinge moment, and he clearly wrote it knowing what was coming. I don't think he could have written that without some idea of what was about to happen or from some sort of defensive posture. It wasn't really written I don't think as a full fledged, this is the world we want to see. I think there was some element in there where he kind of knew what was on the horizon, and this was almost like a preemptive sort of declaration of principle. And in terms of a historical document, I think you're right. I think that that's an incredibly important document.

And I think it's so hard to read. I mean, I was talking about Solanas being fun to read, it's really, it sounds like it was written by Mark Zuckerberg, let's just leave it at that. But I do think that historically it's really important. Since you brought up the comparison, I'll just say I think Barlow's is less historically important because it was less influential, but it might be sociologically more important. And what I mean by that is why would anyone in the world out there at this point still think that Twitter should be a place of free speech? Why in the God's name, after everything we've seen, would you have these characters out there who still think that-

Justin Hendrix:

Of complete free speech?

Professor Anderson:

Of complete free speech. That's what I mean. People like Elon Musk, and I don't know if Kanye West, what he's talking about, but there are these characters running around who on some level, it's not just they're conservative, it's not just that they want to make money, it's not just that they're lying. I do think that people do genuinely believe that we should have these tech spaces of complete and utter free speech.

And John Perry Barlow's document is why. That's why. Maybe that didn't cause it, but that represents that belief that we can have these worlds where we can say whatever we want and there will be no consequences to us, and not only that, but it will make the world better. I think that document will have a very, to use the words of another tech guru, I think that will have a very long tail, that document. I think that document will, the ideas of that document will be around for a very, very, very, very long time in the way that Zuckerberg's ideas to the degree he has any may not be, if that makes sense.

So that to me is the distinction. I mean, I think that cyber libertarian idea, which is almost totally discredited now by all mainstream commentators, is still a real idea. Maybe a bad one, but it's a real idea. And I think that it will be back. I said this to my students, at the end of the day, I said 20 years from now, there'll be a backlash to the backlash and you will definitely have this, again, this idea,

Justin Hendrix:

I'm not sure we'll have to wait 20 years. There are elements of the 'Californian Ideology' running through a lot of what we see coming out of people like Keith Rabois, Peter Thiel, others like that. And they've taken it to a much darker place in some ways. So I don't know if you have to wait those decades.

Professor Anderson:

No, and it's also an open question. I mean, I hate to get all generational on you, but I mean, what does Gen Z think? There's a lot of muttering in the people who talk about generations in these very sort of general ways that there's this idea that Gen Z has different ideas about identity and speech and sort of fun and pranks on the internet than maybe the current dominant discourse does. So maybe there'll be a lot of Gen Z characters quoting John Perry Barlow soon. I wouldn't say that, I don't know enough about it to say for sure, but I wouldn't discount that as a possibility.

My students seem to really like Barlow, I have to say. They were kind of into it in a way they definitely weren't about either Zuckerberg or Valerie Solanas. They kind of were like, "Oh wow, yeah, we can go online and be ourselves and be whoever the hell we want to be and say whatever we want." I think that must have seemed like a real utopia to them, because that's totally different than any internet they know now. So they heard that and they were like, oh wow.

Justin Hendrix:

I wonder if it matters at all that John Perry Barlow himself was a kind of warm and engaging and fascinating person, whereas Mark Zuckerberg to some extent seems like literally everything that he produces is a kind of public relations labored effort to communicate with others.

Professor Anderson:

It's hard to imagine, I'll just say this, it's hard to imagine Mark Zuckerberg writing Grateful Dead lyrics. Let's just leave it at that. That is something I cannot imagine. Look, say what you want about the old internet, and lots of people have said very bad things about it and accused people like me of nostalgia for it and this that, the other thing. But whatever else you want to say about it was more fun. It was certainly more fun than whatever we've got here.

Justin Hendrix:

I remember that when Zuckerberg published his manifesto in 2017, that Zeynep Tufekci compared it to Barlow's. But she pointed out that interestingly, the thing that was most significant about Zuckerberg's manifesto was not really what was in it, but all the things that he left out, all the things that were unsaid, all of the sort of things that were literally happening in the world, even as the kind of reality had begun to sink in, was simply unaddressed.

Professor Anderson:

No, that's a really good point. I'd actually forgotten about that piece. I need to, now that you mentioned, I need to go back and look at it again. Zuckerberg's manifesto was written when... So John Perry Barlow said, look, governments and corporations, you have nothing to do with the internet. We built this ourselves, get out. And Zuckerberg is the most sure fire manifestation that that was wrong. Zuckerberg is a creation of corporate America and the lack of government regulation. So to the degree you see the lack of regulation as government action, he is the perfect mesh of government and corporate world.

And yet he wrote about all of this as if what John Perry Barlow said was still true. So he has this remarkable ability to write as if The Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace was a true description of reality when he in fact is the pure example that it's not at all. So I mean, yes, that's absolutely right. I mean, John Perry Barlow could at least kind of log onto Usenet or whatever and still feel like what he was saying kind of seemed real to his lived experience. Zuckerberg, he has no such excuse.

Justin Hendrix:

I'm sure that before he died, Barlow said many things about Facebook, but I would reckon it would be the opposite of the web that he imagined certainly back in the days of the declaration.

Professor Anderson:

Definitely.

Justin Hendrix:

But let me switch gears with you slightly. One of the things that's happening right now, or at least it seems to be, is that there are certain tech figures, and Elon Musk is one of them, Zuckerberg is now one of them, there are many others, who have gained so much wealth and capital-- I think of Marc Andreessen-- that their kind of manifesto thinking, they have enormous amounts of capital to wager against or to invest in making that manifesto real. At what point are they kind of prosecuting their manifestos with all that capital? And it seems to work. I mean, we've seen entire markets shifted based on manifesto language around things like the shared economy or what have you.

Professor Anderson:

The emergence of a manifesto I think is the sure sign that something's going to happen in tech capitalism. If you want a clue that somebody is going to be doing something somewhere, wait until the manifesto kind of comes out. Maybe they don't use the word manifesto, but when that document... I mean look at crypto, and I should caveat this by saying I know nothing about this. To me crypto seems crazy. To your listeners, I know literally nothing about this topic, so this is to me just an example. But crypto is one of the things that's the most saturated with manifesto language. I mean, I think there's manifesto language all over crypto. And so I think with that level of disruption and that level of going after a particular system, it needs to be accompanied by the verbal groundwork to lay the ground verbally for big moves. You know what I mean?

It's interesting, because people who believe in economics or people who were skeptical of language would say that none of this is necessary. You don't need to have a crypto manifesto in crypto, just do it. Just who cares what you have to say? But clearly these people doing this disagree, for whatever reason. And this is not a class where I interview manifesto writers, but I would love somebody to do a study and talk to these people and ask them generally, what are you doing with this? Why do you feel the need to write this? And even if they're totally full of shit, what they said would still be interesting. I would love to know what people think they're up to when they write these things. So yeah, I think that when a manifesto appears, that's a sign that there's going to be market movement somewhere.

Justin Hendrix:

Is there a sense that we spend so much time or pay so much attention to these tech manifestos because it feels like the only place where we can really contest what's actually going on, what the rules are for society? It just strikes me that maybe there's some connection back to how broken our politics are in so many democracies, and whether this sort of contested space of how tech will work and how it will relate to society, and crypto's a good example because you've got these socialist utopian kind of visions and individuals trying to advance that particular point of view. But then you've also got these staunch libertarian or even further right kind of characters who see a very different future.

Professor Anderson:

I think that we live in the most discursive world, I mean I'd say I've ever seen, but every day it's more discursive. The struggle around meaning and language is real, and it takes up an immense amount of time of people who care about politics. Now, I don't know if it takes up the time of your average man or woman on the American street. A lot of people debate this. But people do go up all the time about woke... People, your average Americans have plenty of things to say about woke, people being woke. I mean, they don't know what that means, but it seems to bother them.

But we live in a world where almost all politics is linguistic. Not really, but it's like the iceberg has flipped. It's like the top of the iceberg is huge, and it's all words. And the bottom of the iceberg is institutional, economic, political politics, and that's very tiny going on below the surface. And that's not the way that an iceberg should be. And iceberg should be with some talking at the top, and then below the surface there are all these institutions and economies and power structures that sort of determine the way that things are.

So maybe manifestos are just part of that. Maybe they're part of that larger linguistic struggle that's happening right now about seemingly every aspect of American politics. For sure. It is a 100% of the time, seven days a week, 24 hours a day linguistic struggle to define terms. That's certainly not good and that's not my idea of what politics should be, but Donald Trump is evidence that if we don't take it seriously, we sort of concede the field to the enemy. Because a lot of people looked at Trump in 2015 and they said, oh, he's just words. He's just rhetoric. He's just this postmodern man kind of trying to create reality with his bluster and his bullshit. And he did. He did, and he does to this day. Donald Trump has nothing but discourse. He has no power other than his mediated image. I exaggerate a bit, but he's like the worst nightmare of postmodernism come to life. No one I think would've thought it would ever really get like that. So yeah, and manifestos are part of this struggle I think.

Justin Hendrix:

I'm going to ask you a last question. One of the things that I'm interested in, particularly around tech policy and language, is the way in which certain terms migrate into law or migrate into policy. And we're seeing this now, of course, very much so with people attempting to kind of think through ways to regulate artificial intelligence or to stipulate rules around platform transparency or around content moderation. And there are certain terms, I mean artificial intelligence is itself perhaps the best example, that have now been essentially codified into law. And I suspect that if we went back in time, there might be some connection between the way that industry invested in that term and the way that we kind of think of it today, what it means, what it contains, what it doesn't.

Professor Anderson:

I think that's absolutely right. That's a great insight. Law is dead language. Now, lawyers wouldn't like me to say this, because for them law is a living thing, but law is freezing language so it has a specific meaning that can be adjudicated in a supposedly fair way. Law freezes linguistic meaning, and policy sort of freezes it more, right? That's what policy does.

I don't know enough about the relationship between policy and discourse. That's just not something I know enough about. I do think that these manifestos and the discourse that surrounds them do ultimately provide the metaphors by which we understand what technology is and what it can do for us. Is the internet a homestead? Is the internet a walled garden? Is the internet an information super highway? Is artificial intelligence natural language processing? Is it machine learning? Is it what they meant by artificial intelligence back in the 1960s? What is it that we mean by artificial intelligence?

And I think that the metaphors we use to talk about these very abstract things do eventually become part of the policy world. Maybe the problem is that by the time they get there, that discourse has already moved on, and that's a problem. John Perry Barlow was right about that for sure, that cyberspace moves a lot faster than real space. Whatever else you want to say about it, that is I think, true. And by the time that world catches up, that technology world is already at least one step, if not multiple steps ahead already. And that's a big problem, and I have no idea how we deal with that.

Justin Hendrix:

What do you hope your students will take away from this? If one of them comes back to you in five or 10 years time, maybe they've gone to work for a tech firm, what do you hope they'll say to you?

Professor Anderson:

I hope that they will say that they got a sense of how politics really works. That politics is as much about rhetoric and language and speech and ideas as it is votes and voting, and the legislature or the parliament or whatever. I think that by and large, even now in the 21st century, when young people hear politics, they think voting and they think what people in government does. And politics is language. Politics is speech, politics is metaphors, politics is visions of how things ought to be. And I hope that they'll learn to be understanding of how politics works in that way.

And the other thing I hope is just that they'll learn to identify bullshit when they see it and not trust it. I want them to learn to be skeptical but not cynical about the world. That's my wish for every student I've ever taught since I started teaching. Be skeptical about the world, but don't be cynical about the world. And if you can manage that, you're producing good citizens. And I think that as teachers, that's what we all should be up to.

Justin Hendrix:

Chris Anderson, thank you very much.

Professor Anderson:

This was great. I'm really glad we managed to find the time to do it. Thank you so much.