These statements are not intended to be read as cheap-shot Euro-reflexive Yank-bashing, or any other kind. There are perfectly good reasons why American culture is the way it is, and while many of these ideas and phenomena seem ludicrous or even horrific to Europeans, they are by no means inexplicable. By the same token, those Americans who dream of hearing a red-blooded European roar of “Government — get the hell out of my way!” as the entire continent regears for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle are failing to take into account one simple fact: Americans and Europeans have had vastly different histories and different experiences, lead vastly different lives, and have been raised in cultures with vastly different aspirations.
The history of America — white folks’ America, that is — began with a revolution in which a new nation was brought onto being by force of arms, by gun and Bible. It has a written constitution and a commitment to ‘the pursuit of happiness’. And, the Kennedy assassination and the Nixonian embarrassment aside, America has enjoyed continuous political stability since the end of the Civil War. Furthermore, it has been a good many years since the boots of an invading army have trodden American soil, or since foreign weapons have fired upon American homes. By contrast, virtually every border in Europe has been redrawn, by force, during the present century. Every nation has at some point been invaded, been occupied, been conquered or — in Britain’s case — been bombed to the edge of extinction. The kind of political stability taken for granted by Americans has been a seemingly-unattainable ideal for most Europeans for most of this century. By contrast, contempory Americans live with a level of social instability which most Europeans would find unendurable. Europeans have had their continent battered flat for most of the century, and parts of it are still getting battered flat. What Europeans crave is not the lifting of the shackles of government so that those of us fortunate enough to run prosperous companies can go about our lucrative business without having to worry about damage to the environment, employee health and safety, and the iniquities of a minimum wage. People in Europe, even those who are not socialists and who vote for overtly socialist parties only in the direst emergencies, still have a healthy interest in freedom from poverty and disease, and a bit of peace and goddam quiet.
Britain had its fling with these radical-right nostrums during the megalomaniac Thatcher era, and its bumpy comedown under the brain-dead Major administration. As most British voters agreed the last time anybody asked them — during May’s local council elections — the national romance with cynical asset-stripping, voodoo economics (thanks, George), elitist-secretive quangocracy and authoritarian practice coated with libertarian veneer is effectively over. It would be a pity if the Internet — and the entire range of new media and new channels of communication which it heralds — were to come bundled with an inappropriate and already discredited ideological rhetoric. The Net as mass medium, rather than elitist toy, is a new game; a creative, technological and ideological blank slate upon which anybody can write. Socialists can love it with a clear conscience because it’s a service which is essentially free and — once the financial hurdle of hardware-and-account acquisition has been jumped — accessible to all. Libertarian anarchists of left and right alike can warm to it because it’s pretty much unregulated, while conservatives can march along under the banner of choice and efficiency. Plus the marginalised and deeply weird can dig it because their chance to communicate with a global audience is just as good as anybody else’s. It’s open to Zapatistas and Zappatistas alike; to Geek Girl’s Australian cyberfeminists and to devotees of the Playboy home page.
The Internet can truly be said to have ‘arrived’ when we no longer talk about it, but simply use it. And as we use it, all of us — wherever we are, whoever we are, whatever we are — will find new and distinctive ways for it to bring us together, as well as new ways for it to keep us apart. We will change it and, more to the point, it will change us. And, hopefully, we can change each other.
But if it simply becomes a medium by which a single set of values can be downloaded to all, then, ultimately, we’ll all be the losers.
Wired (unpublished), 1995
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