INTERNET - APRIL 24, 2002

Author Caleb Carr argues the Internet underlies our undoing

By Bonnie Bucqueroux

INTERNET

THE WEB DOCTOR

In his book “Killing Time,” written in 2000, author Caleb Carr not only predicted an explosion of terrorism in the United States, but he also said that we would retaliate by waging war against Afghanistan. Events have made him look like a seer. Does the rest of the book offer an accurately dark portrait about the future of our Information Age?

Carr, an acknowledged expert in military affairs, surprised those who knew him as editorial adviser to The World Policy Journal and MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History when he wrote two best-selling mysteries, “The Alienist” and “The Angel of Darkness.” This latest book was expanded from a think-piece he did for Time magazine on the dangers of the near future. Among his influences, Carr cites “Silicon Snake Oil” author Clifford Stoll and doomsayer Robert Kaplan, both of whom no doubt darkened his already black world view.

The book falters as fiction, with cardboard characters and pedestrian prose. But Carr obviously cared most about issuing an apocalyptic warning that would spark debate, as cautionary tales such as “Brave New World” and “1984” did in the era when books still mattered.

Through Carr’s protagonist, Dr. Gideon Wolfe, we find that by the year 2024 the United States has brought the world to the brink of annihilation as the vanguard of unrestrained corporate greed that threatens to end human life on the planet. Wolfe ultimately joins a radical band of bungling geniuses bent on saving us from the rapacious trans-national corporations that have corrupted all of our institutions, from government to the no-longer-free-but-bought-and-paid-for press.

Carr also gives us the character of Col. Justus Slayton, a patriot turned cynic after the government that had sent him into battle then abandoned him, not to protect American ideals but to ensure market penetration. Slayton’s conversion to murderous rebel was cemented when his physician wife was killed by a worldwide bacterial epidemic triggered when HMOs pushed doctors to work faster and faster until they stopped washing their hands in-between patients.

‘Killing Time’ By Caleb Carr, $25.95 Random House hardcover, $7.99 Warner Bros. paperback

Slayton says: “ . . . our world had sanctified the goal not of success but of wealth. Not of sufficiency but of excess. And nothing has embodied and propagated that philosophy more than the Internet and all that has followed in its wake. All that mindless, endless marketing of useless goods to those who do not need them, who cannot afford them — until one day compassion is utterly destroyed by avarice gone mad.”

Carr rightly argues that new digital information technologies are dangerous in the wrong hands. Anyone with a copy of Photoshop or video editing software can alter perceived reality so seamlessly that we can never know — or prove — what really happened. He proposes a future where governments wage endless war as a result of such manipulations, aided by media giants who hold profit as their sole value.

Green Party candidate for Congress that I was, nothing makes my heart twitter more than a screed that could have been written by Ralph Nader. Yet blaming the Internet ignores the reality that the real problem lies in failing to demand institutions that we can trust. Governments will always be tempted to use the latest technologies to manipulate us. There were those who argued the infamous Zimmermann memorandum that forced President Wilson into World War I was a forgery. Lyndon Johnson didn’t need digital trickery to persuade Congress that the invented Gulf of Tonkin incident justified widening the Vietnam War.

Today our military was arrogant enough to brag that it was launching its new Office of Strategic Influence with the stated mission of disseminating misinformation abroad. Just this past week, government sources were quick to insist that Abu Zubaydeh, ostensibly the third-highest-ranking Al Qaeda member, revealed details about a planned attack against eastern seaboard banks. Is it credible that such a fanatic would sing like the proverbial canary while his Camp X-Ray underlings go on hunger strikes instead? And if he is talking, would he do so if we weren’t engaging in the torture we deny using? Believe the government’s line on this one and I invite you to bid on the bridge in Brooklyn I just listed on eBay.

Carr also underplays the role that the Internet could play in inventing an alternative future. Sites like AlterNet (http://www.alternet.org) challenge us to implement humanistic values that would allow us to address threats like global warming. On a much smaller and personal scale, I spent the past year harnessing the Internet’s power to educate people about the Balanced and Restorative Justice movement in Michigan (http://www.mibarj.org). Not enough to save the world, but a sincere effort nonetheless.

Carr’s book ends by asking us to think about what it would take to turn us from our current path – and whether it may already be too late. But the real issue isn’t digital technologies but a passive press and an apathetic citizenry. Maybe a rousing discussion on the Internet will help us find real answers in time before we reach the point of no return.

Bonnie Bucqueroux develops online training through her work at Michigan State University’s School of Journalism and in collaboration with her husband, Drew Howard, through his web development business Newslink Associates.