Ethical Issues

“The conversion to digital technology means that every work of utility or beauty, every computer program, every piece of music, every piece of visual or literary art, every piece of video, every useful piece of information - train schedule, university curriculum, map, chart - every piece of useful or beautiful information can be distributed to everybody at the same cost that it can distributed to anybody. For the first time in human history, we face an economy in which the most important goods have zero marginal cost. And the transformation to digital methods of production and distribution therefore poses to the twenty-first century a fundamental moral problem. If I can provide to everyone all goods of intellectual value or beauty, for the same price that I can provide the first copy of those works to anyone, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything?”

- Eben Moglen, 2003

Moglen is of course overlooking some serious issues, the most important being that the distribution models he imagines assume universal access to computers and internet infrastructure. Internet access is overwhelmingly limited to wealthy nations or individuals with the means to acquire the necessary technologies. But as technology improves, and as FOSS helps make access affordable to more people, a movement towards Moglen’s utopian vision is beginning to happen. Cities and governments are beginning to provide free wireless access to citizens, libraries and schools are making the Internet a primary resource for students and local computer evangelists have begun guerrilla style broadband networks for their communities to help neighbors and friends gain access without monthly payments to the telecommunications industry.

So while many statements along the lines of Moglen’s digital ethics have been partially ignored because of the disparity of Internet access worldwide, they are not unworthy of consideration. What if the communications technology we have seen explode in the last two decades reaches a point where 95% of the information created on the planet is available to 95% of the population at a nominal cost? Is there a point where access to this global library of information may become an issue of human rights and not simply a commodity? Should a person have to pay to access information that may save his or her life if that information has no cost inherent in it’s duplication and distribution?

Another often overlooked concern in the world of computing concerns the physical manufacturing of the microchips and processors that provide the innards of todays computers. “Chips make me think of the eyesight of women in Singapore and Korea, going blind during the process of crafting the fiddly little wire,” says Susan Leigh Star, quoted as a chapter intro in Michael M. J. Fischer’s Worlding Cyberspace: Toward a Critical Ethnography in Space, Time and Theory (Fischer, 2003). Fischer provides a unique ethnography of cyberspace in which he gives focus to the practically ignored human and environmental contamination inherent in the creation of computer hardware. “Office use of software and terminals … is so far removed from the manufacturing of the chips in ‘clean rooms’ … that it is far too easy for many to forget the production processes when talking about cyberspace” (Fischer, 2003). His piece continues to document the severe toxicity of the chemical process of chip manufacturing, including the increased miscarriage and birth-defect rates in silicon valley and the subsequent changes made by companies in the way that workplace illnesses were recorded in order to lower the public realization of the problem (Fischer, 2003). Fischer’s expose´ is an important one whose subject matter is deserving of in-depth research and public dialogue as computing becomes an even greater part of personal lives and global interaction.