Ten Years Looking Back: Everything Changed Except Number 10

By Brian Boyko
The United Kingdom has a new prime minister. Gordon Brown, formerly the chancellor of the Exchequer, became prime minister when Tony Blair stepped down this Wednesday.
Tony Blair had been prime minister since May 1997. That’s just slightly over ten years in office. The United Kingdom has had one head of government for the past 10 years. That’s about par for political change.
Technological change, on the other hand…
1997 wasn’t when the Internet first started getting adopted by the mainstream, but it was still early in the formative years of the “ubiquitous Internet.” Back in 1997, most of us were still on dialup. The term “blog” hadn’t been invented, online gaming consisted of dialing directly into your friend’s modem to play some Doom, and the world had never heard of “kitty pidgin,” “all your base,” “Leeroy Jenkins,” or “the Star Wars Kid.” An ISDN line was considered “incredibly fast.”
In 1997, for example, a time which predates the original Napster, the record companies were still going strong and the RIAA was not an infamous household name. Today, in Rolling Stone, an article published recently states outright that the major record labels are terminal cases, and that there’s nothing at this point the record labels can do in order to recover – mostly because the record industry was unable to adapt to the changes of digital distribution.
There have been amazing changes in Internet and Network technology since Blair first took office from the day he left.
Netscape was separate from AOL until 1999, and AOL was separate from Time Warner until 2000 – an Internet service merged with one of the world’s biggest entertainment conglomerates. In 2001, the European Council adopts the first treaty addressing criminal offenses over the Internet. The U.S. Department of Commerce privatized DNS in 1998. A list of MI6 agents were released on a UK Web site in 1999.
The Y2K Problem. IPv6. SETI@Home and distributed/grid computing. Flash Mobs. Even The Guardian launched, in 2005, a “Blair Watch Project,” asking citizen-journalists to follow Blair, blogging and capturing his every move in mobile phone cameras, coordinated through the Internet.
In 1997, according to Hobbes’ Internet Timeline, there were 19.5 million hosts connected to the Internet. In July 2006, there were 439 million hosts. We have had revolution after revolution in the Internet sphere while politics remained more or less the same. Change in politics occurs slowly. Change in technology occurs quickly.
This is particularly important to realize that the elected officials, who change ever so rarely, are charged with regulating and stimulating the growth of this technology.
While some political candidates have turned to blogging and YouTube in recent elections, I’m not entirely sure that the candidates I’ve seen have really understood the technology in question. Often it seems that blogs are used for smear campaigns (when they can be incredibly easily fact-checked) or used for fundraising. Even in the rare times that they may be used to announce a policy platform or explain a candidate’s opinions about a news event, they’re often used for broadcasting a particular announcement, much like the “traditional” media, and it’s not often used for communication – and this is something that affects almost all candidates of almost all democratic nations of almost all political party and affiliation.
Allowing people to vote on your campaign song through YouTube does not a participatory democracy make.
And while it is outside our realm of expertise to suggest any particular policy, and it is certainly beyond our license as a technical publication to favor any candidates, the resignation of Blair and the retrospective over the past ten years leads us to conclude this: The people elected to office today will be determining policy for technology that we have yet to dream about. Yet, the only thing most people – and most geeks – really know for sure about the political stances of the current candidates on developments in technology is that, for some reason, Democratic candidates tend to use Linux and FreeBSD for Web hosts, while Republicans tend to use Windows Server 2003. Why? Who knows? Who really cares?
At any rate one thing is clear: We have reached a tipping point where it seems that politics simply cannot keep pace with the change in technology. The only thing that can really be done is to guide the officials we elect, through gentle but firm public pressure, to make the right decisions for the people when these issues – unknown of today – show up in the policies of tomorrow.