<nettime> Vint Cerf and the Myth of the Internet Engineer

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

Dear nettimers,

I do not want to respond to technology as right/enabler question.  
Internet as a human right? How about a car, fridge, water? We know  
that debate. Others on this list can reply to these circular arguments  
in a much better way. What stroke me in this text is Vint Cerf's  
heroic emphasis on the figure (Gestalt) of the engineer as civic  
worker. Interesting to relate this to Ernst Juenger's Der Arbeiter...  
What is left out here is, of course, that these engineers are not  
autonomous agents but employees of large corporations such as CISCO,  
Microsoft, SUN and Google, assisted by mostly American (and some  
European) academics and 'governed' by US-controlled agencies such as  
ICANN. Apart from this blind spot of Cerf and his buddies, known for  
decades, it would also be interesting to inquire if today's IT workers  
are in fact still engineers in the classic sense. I just heard on the  
radio here in the Netherlands a plan of the Technical University Delft  
to cut back their engineering studies. On average students study there  
for a period of seven year. What? Seven years? That's unreal, utopian,  
so 70s and 80s! Obviously most IT programmers do not study seven years  
anymore. Maybe they should... My thesis would be that there is a huge  
army of programmers now, globally spread from Nigeria to India to  
Romania, China and Brazil that study max. 3 years and purchase  
commercial certificates from the above mentioned firms. Do they  
consider themselves engineers?

Geert

> Internet Access Is Not a Human Right
> By VINTON G. CERF
> Published: January 4, 2012
>
> FROM the streets of Tunis to Tahrir Square and beyond, protests around
> the world last year were built on the Internet and the many devices
> that interact with it. Though the demonstrations thrived because
> thousands of people turned out to participate, they could never have
> happened as they did without the ability that the Internet offers to
> communicate, organize and publicize everywhere, instantaneously.
>
> It is no surprise, then, that the protests have raised questions about
> whether Internet access is or should be a civil or human right. The
> issue is particularly acute in countries whose governments clamped
> down on Internet access in an attempt to quell the protesters. In
> June, citing the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, a
> report by the United Nations’ special rapporteur went so far as to
> declare that the Internet had “become an indispensable tool for
> realizing a range of human rights.” Over the past few years, courts
> and parliaments in countries like France and Estonia have pronounced
> Internet access a human right.
>
> But that argument, however well meaning, misses a larger point:
> technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a
> high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it
> must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy,
> meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience.
> It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted
> category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For
> example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a
> living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a
> living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to
> have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.
>
> The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes
> that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like
> freedom of speech and freedom of access to information — and those are
> not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular
> time. Indeed, even the United Nations report, which was widely hailed
> as declaring Internet access a human right, acknowledged that the
> Internet was valuable as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.
>
> What about the claim that Internet access is or should be a civil
> right? The same reasoning above can be applied here — Internet access
> is always just a tool for obtaining something else more important —
> though the argument that it is a civil right is, I concede, a stronger
> one than that it is a human right. Civil rights, after all, are
> different from human rights because they are conferred upon us by law,
> not intrinsic to us as human beings.
>
> While the United States has never decreed that everyone has a “right”
> to a telephone, we have come close to this with the notion of
> “universal service” — the idea that telephone service (and
> electricity, and now broadband Internet) must be available even in the
> most remote regions of the country. When we accept this idea, we are
> edging into the idea of Internet access as a civil right, because
> ensuring access is a policy made by the government.
>
> Yet all these philosophical arguments overlook a more fundamental
> issue: the responsibility of technology creators themselves to support
> human and civil rights. The Internet has introduced an enormously
> accessible and egalitarian platform for creating, sharing and
> obtaining information on a global scale. As a result, we have new ways
> to allow people to exercise their human and civil rights.
>
> In this context, engineers have not only a tremendous obligation to
> empower users, but also an obligation to ensure the safety of users
> online. That means, for example, protecting users from specific harms
> like viruses and worms that silently invade their computers.
> Technologists should work toward this end.
>
> It is engineers — and our professional associations and
> standards-setting bodies like the Institute of Electrical and
> Electronics Engineers — that create and maintain these new
> capabilities. As we seek to advance the state of the art in technology
> and its use in society, we must be conscious of our civil
> responsibilities in addition to our engineering expertise.
>
> Improving the Internet is just one means, albeit an important one, by
> which to improve the human condition. It must be done with an
> appreciation for the civil and human rights that deserve protection —
> without pretending that access itself is such a right.
>
> Vinton G. Cerf, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and
> Electronics Engineers, is a vice president and chief Internet
> evangelist for Google.


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org