Control and Freedom Control and Freedom Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics Wendy Hui Kyong Chun The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England ( 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail hspecial_sales@ mitpress.mit.edui or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Janson and Rotis Semi Sans on 3B2 by Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 1969– Control and freedom : power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics / by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-03332-1 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Optical communications. 2. Fiber optics. 3. Technology and civilization. I. Title. TK5103.59.C58 2005 303.48033—dc22 2004061362 10987654321 Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Interlude 31 1 Why Cyberspace? 37 2 Screening Pornography 77 3 Scenes of Empowerment 129 4 Orienting the Future 171 5 Control and Freedom 247 Epilogue 299 References 303 Index 327 Preface During the Afghanistan War, the second Gulf War, and the subsequent occupation of Iraq, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and politicians reminded us, ‘‘Freedom is not free.’’ This phrase, engraved on the Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C., would seem simply to say that freedom comes at the cost of soldiers’ lives and civilian sacrifices. Freedom is not without cost; someone has to pay a price. This phrase, however, is open to another reading: when freedom is conflated with security, freedom loses its meaning—freedom is no longer free. If freedom is reduced to a gated community writ large or becomes the ideological watchword of a national security state, then it can turn into nothing more than the partner of, or the alibi for, control. The very phrase ‘‘freedom is not free’’ can make freedom unfree when it calls on people to accept unfreedom as the cost of freedom. Free can also mean priceless, a gift. In English, the word free stems from the Sanskrit word for ‘‘dear’’ or ‘‘beloved.’’ The phrase ‘‘freedom is not free’’ should never make sense, for what is free should never be devalued. The value of freedom underlined by its etymology is erased when we shift the emphasis away from the action of giving some- thing freely—not in return for something else—to the economism or opportunism of a recipient, looking for a bargain, who refuses to acknowl- edge this liberality and thus literally cheapens this act. This cheapening of freedom is crucial to the conflation of control with freedom. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics examines ‘‘freedom’’ through the rubric of the Internet, more specifically, through its emergence as a mass medium. Emphasizing the roles of sexu- ality and race, this book traces the ways in which a technology, which thrives on control, has been accepted, however briefly, as a mass medium of freedom. Moving from utopian narratives about cyberspace to the | viii | | underlying hardware the Internet seeks to obscure (and about which we often forget), it traces the structuring paradox of information and commu- Preface nications: without control technologies, no freedom (of choice or move- ment). But the linkage is not an identity: freedom is not the same thing as control. Their conflation is a response to the failures of both liberty and discipline and marks a significant shift in the apparatuses of power: it is a response to the end of the Cold War and to the successes and failures of containment (in Paul Edwards’s words, its ‘‘closed world’’). This confla- tion of freedom with control also produces and is produced by paranoia, a paranoia that stems from the attempt to solve political problems techno- logically. To be paranoid is to think like a machine. In this book, I do not condemn the Internet—if anything, I hold it dear. Liking it or hating it, as such, is as pointless as being ‘‘optimistic’’ or ‘‘pessimistic’’ about its future. Rather, what we need is a serious en- gagement with the ways in which the Internet enables communications between humans and machines, enables—and stems from—a freedom that cannot be controlled. Because freedom is a fact we all share, we have decisions to make: freedom is not the result of our decisions, but rather, as Friedrich Schelling and Jean Luc Nancy have argued, what makes our decisions possible. This freedom is not inherently good, but entails a decision for ‘‘good’’—habitation and limitation—or for ‘‘evil’’— destruction. The gaps within technological control, the differences between technological control and its rhetorical counterpart, and technol- ogy’s constant failures mean that our control systems can never entirely make these decisions for us. Fiber-optic networks, this book argues, enable communications that physically instantiate and thus shatter enlightenment; they also link to- gether disparate locations that only sometimes communicate. We must take seriously the vulnerability that comes with communications—not so that we simply condemn or accept all vulnerability without question but so that we might work together to create vulnerable systems with which we can live. Acknowledgments I am very grateful to all those who have read and sponsored various parts of this book. I owe special thanks to Diana Fuss and Thomas Keenan, who oversaw this project in its first incarnations so many years and revisions ago; to Bruce Simon, who read and re-read numerous early drafts; to Richard Dienst, Wolfgang Ernst, N. Katherine Hayles, Peter Krapp, Alan Liu, Geert Lovink, Timothy Murray, Ellen Rooney, and Elizabeth Weed, who generously read and commented on later versions of the manuscript; and to Rey Chow, Laura Chrisman, James Der Derian, Madhu Dubey, Amy Kapcynski, Rachel Lee, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Margaret Morse, Lisa Nakamura, Julie Levin Russo, Marc Steinberg, Jeffrey Tucker, and Sau- ling Wong, who all read and offered critiques of portions of it. Their comments have immeasurably improved this book. I have learned much and received great support from my colleagues in the Department of Modern Culture and Media: Nancy Armstrong, Rey Chow, Tony Cokes, Mary Ann Doane, Lynne Joyrich, Roger Mayer, Ellen Rooney, Phil Rosen, Michael Silverman, Len Tennenhouse, and Leslie Thornton; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been an invaluable teacher. Liz Canner, Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Arindam Dutta, Maria Fernandez, and Natalie Jeremijenko are all fellow travelers, to whom I owe inspiration and good cheer. I am also grateful to my wonderful research assistants, Julie Levin Russo, Melanie Kohnen, Yumi Lee, and Michelle Higa, to Joy Simon, who sent me many pertinent articles early on, to Liza Hebert and Susan McNeil (the heart and soul of MCM), as well as the fantastic editorial machine at MIT: Doug Sery, Valerie Geary, and Deborah Cantor-Adams. Martha Fieltsch’s and Natalka Migus’s unfailing friendship kept me sane during the process of writing. Without the love and support of my partner Paul Moorcroft, this book would not have been possible. | x | | This book is dedicated to my parents Yeong Shik Chun and Soon Jom Chun, in love and respect. Research for this book was supported by grants, a fellowship and leave Acknowledgments from Brown University (in particular a Henry Merritt Wriston Fellow- ship)—I am grateful to Brown University for its financial and academic support. A fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University was crucial to completing the manuscript; fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) and Princeton University were crucial to its commencement. I am also grateful to Matt Mahurin for freely allowing me to reprint his photographs. A portion of the introduction has appeared in ‘‘Human-Mediated- Communications,’’ Reality/Simulacra/Artificial: Ontologies of Postmodernity, in English and Portuguese, ed. Enrique Larreta (Rio de Janeiro: Universi- dade Candido Mendes, 2003); and a portion of chapter 1 as ‘‘Othering Space’’ Visual Culture Reader 2.0, ed. Nick Mirzoeff (New York: Rout- ledge 2003)—both in altered form. An early draft of chapter 3 was pub- lished as ‘‘Scenes of Empowerment: Virtual Racial Diversity and Digital Divides’’ New Formations 45 (winter 2001); and an early, condensed ver- sion of chapter 4 in ‘‘Orienting Orientalism, or How to Map Cyberspace,’’ Asian American.net, eds. Rachel Lee and Sau-ling Wong (New York: Routledge 2003). Control and Freedom INTRODUCTION We have lived in, and still live in, exciting times, from the fall of the Berlin wall to the heady days of the dot-com era, from the events of September 11, 2001, to the ongoing turmoil in geopolitical relations. All these events have been linked to freedom: the triumph of the Free World, the free market, and the free circulation of information; threats to freedom from abroad, and the U.S. mission to spread democracy and freedom. All these events have also been linked to technology and networks: Eastern Europe’s collapse has been attributed to computer technology and broadcast/ satellite television; terrorist networks turn everyday technologies like air- planes and cell phones into weapons; the U.S. military’s and intelligence agencies’ control and communications networks are without rival, if not without fault. But what does it mean to attribute such causality to technol- ogy and link freedom to what are essentially control technologies? Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics responds to this question by revealing how power now operates through the coupling of control and freedom.