I am constantly bothered by how academics in the humanities and social sciences become infatuated with the Internet. If they have any opinion at all, they seem unceasingly to preach its virtues, while very often they cannot explain the technologies involved. They seize quickly upon the ease it affords in 'browsing', skipping from text to text, image to image, site to site: a library without musty shelves or strenuous climbing from stack to stack. Such browsing is essential to modern intellectuals who usually feel a personal compulsion, based on their social identity, to know something about everything. As Jacques Ellul argued three decades ago in his book Propaganda, the eagerness of such cognoscenti makes them particularly susceptible to certain forms of persuasion and delusion -- at least those concerning anything they find stimulating. Such intellectuals often sacrifice their critical faculties, which ordinarily they would apply with great rigour in their circumscribed disciplines, in order to appear 'in the know' (still very much a reason for their elevated status). This argument seems correct, when I hear them talk about the Worldwide Web, the face of the Internet with which most are familiar. Some immediately recognise the it as a means of putting into practice their text-oriented critical studies of the role of the reader in interpretation; others appear to regard it as the very announcement of the funeral of authorship, finally justifying their interpretative preoccupations to sceptical, linear-minded colleagues. assemblage has received submissions reflecting this general fascination with the Internet, which discuss in enchanted terms the non-material and kaleidoscopic realm of signification that it is presumed to be. Such portrayals, I suggest, can only be taken seriously by someone who has always been a 'front end' user -- an individual consumer of technology.

Needless to say, the Internet is anything but 'non-material'. Behind the front end there is a great deal of machinery: client-side software, modems, transfer control protocols, server bandwidth, ISDN lines, search-engine algorithms, and so forth. Much of this is produced by companies which are models of postmodern capitalism. Employing a small, highly specialised work force, they are paternalistically run or managed in teams, and contract labour on an individual, often interim basis, thereby effectively, when not overtly, preventing collective organisation. To be fair, one cannot not expect all intellectuals to indulge in a detailed understanding of computer programming and information technology, and I do not pretend to have a thorough knowledge myself. However, being unable to do so does not excuse an uncritical attitude toward the relevant technologies, any more than it excuses the willing mystification that blames 'malevolent' computers for simple, preventable errors. Furthermore, beyond the particular material mechanisms of the Internet, and the murmur of networked computers cross-checking each other's status (with infinite patience), there is a political and economic network of which most intellectuals, professional or not, are likely even less comprehending.

Bill Gates has become a popular symbol of both the power and evil motives of the computing industry, equally revered for his seeming godlike control of the forces of the 'cyber'-universe and reviled for Microsoft's flagrant efforts to create a monopoly and for his uncouth public behaviour. Caricatures of him appear in cartoons on Saturday morning television. He is someone whom the media would like us to 'love to hate' -- like the fictitious J.R. Ewing, tycoon of a 'second-wave' oil industry in the 1970s TV series Dallas, except that this 'third-wave' version is palatable to a cynical, 'ironist' turn-of-the-millennium generation. So why are we not occasionally mocking, even with irony, the director of Lucent Technologies or the board of MCI? After all, the US government sold the 'backbone' of the Internet -- its major high-bandwidth lines -- to the Commerical Internet Exchange, a consortium of such IT and telecommunications companies, which now are able to exact fees from smaller firms dedicated to specific services. Indeed, this sell-off of the Internet, as well as further attempts to privatise the means and costs of obtaining Internet addresses, was one of the early phases of a restructuring of the military-industrial complex; the Internet was, at its inception in the late 1960s, a US military endeavour designed to keep computers talking through a total nuclear war. The initial transfer of technology to universities and research institutions came with state-sponsored projects, and after the demise of the Cold War, the process accelerated and expanded. This process fits into a complex scheme of macroeconomic remodelling which includes further privatisation, multilaterial 'free'-trade agreements, increased public-private and state-university 'partnerships', and legislation favourable to mega-corporations and conglomerates, all advanced by the current administration in Washington and its clones in London and, lately, Bonn, among other wealthy capitals. The US, as a matter of industrial policy, promotes by these various means biotechnologies, novel industrial materials, and microelectronics and information technologies. The Digital Telephony Act of 1994 was not happenstance: it was an immense give-away that re-categorised the technology in order to deregulate it. Such economic restructuring is not without its contradictions. We may no longer have the legendary $400 classified hammers of Reagan-era 'milspec', but instead cheap, fast modems. However, now China and Pakistan too have bigger and more efficient ways of blowing up large parts of the globe.

There are other contradictions, more pertinent to academia and archaeology in particular. One result of technology transfer in the current neo-liberal political economy is the proliferation of Internet service providers (though there will eventually be market consolidation) and inexpensive, yet powerful, personal computers. assemblage provides one instance of how dissident and marginalised voices have been given an audience of possibly tens of millions, mainly in high-tech-blessed western Europe and North America, for immeasurably less cost than printing on paper a journal of its size for such numbers. Thus we, like the biggest IT companies, are 'content providers'. But this is no time to be smug. We are contending with the likes of Microsoft, America On-Line, and Infoseek, the last of which weights its search algorithms towards its sponsors. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to exploit the Internet in order to promote our discipline. Even so, if we believe in the general value of what we do, we must transgress traditional disciplinary boundaries using this medium; for, even if we remain a semi-publicly funded content provider, we surely will find ourselves crowded out, lost in the noise, like the 'community-access' channels on US cable TV. (I owe the analogy to a.h.s. boy.)

Archaeology is inherently political, as some of our most eminent theorists have been repeating for the last decade and a half. If archaeology is to realise its role and become relevant to broader social issues, as many argue it should, then archaeologists cannot simply steal away to some little corner of the Web and hope nothing predatory comes our way. Ideologies are clashing in the forum of the Internet, and its seems to me suitable terrain for ideological battles. assemblage has sought to wage these, in this issue, with articles on the maintenance of academic hierarchies, historical meta-narratives of the West, the archaeology of class , and nationalistic use of archaeological evidence and rhetoric . The theorists' point, I think, is not just that archaeology will inevitably run up against some contrary modes of discourse, but also that archaeology has described for itself a purview so problematic and challenging -- the development of human society, culture, technology, and signification, with unlimited perspectives on space and time -- that it has the potential to undermine radically widespread exploitative and totalitarian ideologies, as well as to alter our day-to-day existence. Elements of archaeological theory and 'fact' are employed, however mistakenly, by scholars and pundits. Moreover, the nationalistic, political, and economic uses of archaeology, about which some have warned us, have not happened only outside of our own society or in past episodes of totalitarianism, as one might gather from a survey the literature. Francis Fukuyama, who is celebrated for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), wrote an essay entitled 'Women and the evolution of world politics' for the October 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs, a bastion of neo-liberal thought. He is a former officer in President Bush's State Department and now a professor of public policy at George Mason University. In his recent essay, he argues patronisingly that, while the greater number of women statesmen is fair and, in some small respects, welcome, only tough, aggressive 'masculine' politics, which he sees embodied in such women as Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, will ensure the continuity of civilisation. He bolsters his argument with careful, but specious, use of primatological observation, ethnographic and archaeological accounts, and cognitive science, as well as putative behavioural 'bell curves' and normative assumptions about the adaptive value of 'male' conduct. These are all subjects which we, as archaeologists, should be well prepared to take on.

It will take more than just slick electronic journals and volleys of e. mail through discussion lists to enhance archaeology's role in the struggle for a more just society. Many double-plus good academics will have to get up from their view screens, forsaking, at least for the moment, the fascination of seamless transition from text to text and the warm glow of well crafted image maps. They will have to undertake to understand some of the complexity of the technologies involved, as well as their social ramifications, and they will have to organise together, both inside and outside the academy, to fight the wholesale 'televisionisation' of the Internet and the rubbishing of critical education for corporate ends.

Noam Chomsky drew a distinction between 'intellectuals' and intellectual 'technicians' in his famous essay 'The responsibility of intellectuals' (1966). Intellectuals, in brief, are persons who remain accountable to the communities of which they are a part, while trying to provide generally relevant and critical perspectives on the problems within and among these communities, expounding upon what they perceive to be the truth. Intellectual technicians, in contrast, are persons who apply some analytical or rhetorical skill repeatedly within discrete institutional limits, be they mindless bureaucrats devising income brackets for taxation or wily 'spin doctors' for the Monsanto Company. The generation of archaeologists coming of age today will be confronted, within its collective lifetime, with increasing complexity in the development of computing and communicational technologies, which will emphasise and bring to the fore the difficult interrelationships between humans and their tools. The primary responsibility of this cohort, as intellectuals, may well be stated in terms of choosing between whether to be a conscientious cyborg or a just another search engine.

Copyright © assemblage 1998