Extensive Empire and Self Government: The Jeffersonian Internet and the Long Crisis of Access

• In Event: Times of Crisis, Places of Utopia: The Technoscientific Making of United States Futures

Abstract

Thomas Jefferson’s ghost haunts the structure of the Internet. His name is invoked as a guide for Internet policymakers, an engineering ideal for network architects, and a rallying cry for digital activists. Historians have long located the Internet’s distributed, “Jeffersonian,” design as the product of crisis thinking. In response to specific Cold War fears of a surprise Soviet attack, the Internet’s emergent architectural schema, a distributed network, offered greater redundancies and therefore a type of security that a centralized network lacked (Abbate 1999, Galison 2001). Simultaneously, distribution responded to a fear of totalitarian control and political centralization; it offered a federated constitutional schema (Jasanoff 2003, Turner 2006, Post 2009). This Jeffersonian construction of the Internet was a response to imagined technological and political crises, and subsequently a utopian hope. This presentation takes up Jefferson in two forms. First, I trace his invocation over a quarter century of Internet policymaking. I look at Internet “pioneers” like Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Mitch Kapoor who, in 1993, argued that “life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community.” I also turn to Obama Administration policymakers who cited an approach to the Internet policy that acknowledged an essential role for federal regulation, an approach they referred to as “Hamiltonian” in reference to the constitutional models advocated by Alexander Hamilton (McCoy 1980). I show how the term “Jeffersonian” reflected both localized disputes over network policies, and national ideologies of freedom with respect as determined by, or in opposition to, the federal government. Second, taking up the recent literature in the history of American slavery, I suggest that a richer understanding of Thomas Jefferson and his political philosophy, offers a means to conceptualize, and critique, the current Internet. Jeffersonian yeoman republicanism has always been a complement, if not a synonym, for a system of plantation slavery. It is a mechanism of local rule that has undergirded America’s internal colonial project. In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson wrote, “I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self government.” Walter Johnson, and others, have referred to Jefferson’s vision as “slave racial capitalism” (2013, Beckert and Rockman 2016). Jefferson would call it, “an empire of liberty.” Access to the Internet, the very real questions of logging on, remain governed by this empire. Perhaps it is through this lens, that “life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted.”

Author

• Marc Aidinoff, Massachusetts Institute of Technology