Farewell Frontier: the

Internet as a Western

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Cowboys and Indians

The internet is a Western and there is going to be a showdown. Let me

tell you a story and explain why later.

A man rides into our town. There is nothing special about him
except that he is powerful through mastery of nature (in this case with
oratory - rhetorical gunslinging). He sees that the people of the town
are suffering, especially the weak. There is no authority to protect them
(or it is powerless). So he challenges the evildoers but they are many
and he is alone, so he builds a wall around the town to shelter the
people.
Some town folk, greedy or misguided, try to stop him. He
challenges them to a showdown and wins. He sets an example of
action and moral principle. The wall is built, the town is safe through
his action and moral principle, the man rides off. If at a later time, the
wall fails and the town is defenceless, well then, the town people were
weak or greedy. They didn’t follow the cowboy’s way. The cowboy is
Sheriff Conroy.
That’s not the movie you’re watching? Of course, if Marshall
Conroy didn’t earn his badge and doesn’t surrender it at the end, then
he is corrupt and must be serving the purposes of the greedy, the
ranchers or industrialists who want to monopolise resources and
prevent equal access to everything.
Then the town folk need a real hero or band of cowboys, to ride
out of the wilderness, to demonstrate their mastery of the nature of
technology, fight the evil doers and challenge or shame the marshall.
But how can we tell who is who if the cast are not wearing white
or black hats? Well, sometimes the cavalry will come to the rescue of
the good guys, usually at the expense of the indians. Google and the
US government have both appeared on the horizon of the Australian
internet filter debate. It appears that the cavalry are supporting the
‘intellectual elite’ cowboys and keeping the Electronic Frontiers open.

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 If the cavalry challenge Conroy, then perhaps he is now Indian
Chief Conroy, only he can’t stand in for wilderness. Quite the opposite,
he explicitly stands for the civilising of the wilderness but at the cost of
individual liberty, so this must be a liberal western, where the indians
are misguided civilisations rather than savages. Chief Conroy is trying
to protect his people but he is tragically wrong. That’s why the cavalry
oppose him.
Although govt to govt we are not likely to be drawing guns on the
streets of this showdown, I think we have every reason to recognise that
Google and the US Govt are the boss in this fight. No matter whether
the Filter goes ahead or not, they are immanently on the horizon. What
we are seeing is a single skirmish in a series of showdowns, not an
actual war. The town folk are confused because they don’t realise that
the internet is a western.
I can’t explain the Australian Internet Filter issue, or indeed the
history of the internet using other genres, which is why I want to
analyse the structure of the myth that does best describe ‘the internet’.
As Levi-Strauss explained, myths are cognitive attempts to understand
the world. So, to explain human actions, we must relate them to our
myths. (1966,1967)
The western has been the most popular of our cultural myths since
the ‘noble savage’ and the ‘frontier’ took hold of the imagination. It’s
the most enduring of our current myths although it can come in
wrapped in various scifi or romantic disguises. It is the myth of market
individualism, of rational capitalism.

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Is the Internet a Movie?

Since Aristotle, cultural myths have been examined using genre

theory. “A genre… defines a moral and social world” (Tudor 1974,
180) “Indeed a genre in any medium can be seen as embodying certain
values and ideological assumptions, genres are concerned to establish
different world views.” (Livingstone 1990, 155) from Daniel Chandler’s
‘Introduction to Genre Theory’(2000).
Northrop Frye defined genre as ‘the form of discourse which does
not require an author, a myth’. In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye provided
a combination of universal genres and modes as the key to organising
all of literature. (1957,1990)
Since then, genre studies have expanded, much like anthropology
and sociology, to include all aspects of popular culture. My thesis is
that the internet is a genre, not merely a medium for the creation of
new genres and transformation of old genres. The internet is populated
by actors and uses recognisable rhetoric and ideological discourses. As
Altman says, “..genres are regulatory schemes facilitating the
integration of diverse factions into a single unified social fabric. As
such, genres operate like nations and other complex communities.”
(Altman 1999).
This is compatible with the definition of the internet as a whole
new media environment from Hartley, Green and Lumby in
‘Untangling the net: the scope of content’ (2009). Genre or
anthropological studies examine the ritualized endorsements of
dominant ideologies. Decisions of a highly technical nature are
continually being made in governance, in any complicated financial
practice not just the internet. Democratic participation in this process is
mediated. Mediation occurs through narrative and discourse.
In this I am following the structural anthropological view of genre
as myth, with a ritual or ideological function, proposed by Northrop
Frye, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, Louis
Althusser, John Cawelti, Will Wright and Rick Altman. Implicit in this
is, that the genre is functional for society. It is an instrument of social

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control reproducing the dominant ideology.
In Myth Today, Roland Barthes describes the way in which reality
is molded into the service of an idea. A photograph can be a form of
speech, language or discourse. Describes myth as a ‘second order
semiological system’. However different the materials that constitute
the myth, ie. ‘the internet’, they are reduced to a ‘pure signifying
function as soon as they are caught by myth’. According to Barthes,
anything can be a myth, although not everything is. (1984)
It doesn’t matter that the internet is played out across a multitude
of different forms, issues or ‘movies’. The content may vary but it
predominantly expresses the nature of the internet genre itself, the
Western.
Myth is depoliticised speech. Perpetuating the anonymity of
bourgeois ideology. How myth works semiologically is exactly how
bourgeois ideology works. Which is why the dominant myth of the
rational industrial age is the Western, the myth of market individualism
and a secular society.

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Is the Internet a Western?

Bazin said, “The western was born of an encounter between a

mythology and a means of expression”. (1971. P. 142) The internet was
born when the mythology of the western met network technology, the
new nature, and the open frontier of information.
The mythic richness of the western is an extended riff on
masculinity and the market, individuals and social contract. In “The
Wild West: the Mythical Cowboy and Social Theory”, Will Wright
argues that the Western represents capitalism, white male supremacy
and the rationalist economy. It is an ‘origin myth of market
individualism’. (2001)
The rhetoric of the internet is full of analogies with the frontier and
the Western. Fred Turner elaborates on the connection between
technology and the ‘back to the land’ movement in ‘Where the
Counterculture Met the New Economy: The Well and the Origins of
Virtual Community’ (2005). However, I argue that Turner is wrong to
suggest that the New Communalists influenced the early ideological
development of the internet, much as Turner disagrees with theorists
like Barbrook and Cameron, who connect the peer-to-peer culture of
the internet as being influenced by the New Left movement, simply by
virtue of associating active politics with effectivity.
I argue that the mythology of the endless frontier of the internet is
as influential, if not more so, than the conscious politics of any group.
This isn’t simply because of the serendipitous positioning of Silicon
Valley in California, near the last outposts of the old frontier, or
because cattle rancher, John Perry Barlow, became the spokesperson of
the emerging internet.
As Wright says, ‘the cowboy represents the American idea, not just
American history’ (2001). The cowboy rides a horse and wears a gun.
He represents freedom and equality. The wilderness is dangerous
natural state. The cowboy brings a civil society forth based on market
relations in daily social life. The cowboy does not impose social
control, recreating a class structure because the frontier is open. The

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cowboy rides away or is free to settle. The necessities of the myth were
freedom and equality which are contradictory unless there is an open
frontier. Violence is accepted within a code of honour as a civil
necessity. The right to violence is individual, dependant solely on
mastery of nature, not socially determined. White male superiority is
implicit in social contract theory but explicit in the Western.
The quintessential Western is set in a short period from 1862 to
1889, between the creation of the Homestead Act at the end of the
Civil War and the settling of Oklahoma, the last ‘free’ land. Western
stories however apply from the early gold rushes, to the ‘noble savage’
of Rousseau and the romantics, from the more recent overrunning of
the Alaskan frontier, to globalisation, the space race, Star Wars and
StarTrek.
The myth of the Western originates in the theories of Hobbes,
Locke, Smith and Jefferson. As a political theory, it legitimised two
revolutions and the writing of the Constitution of America. As an
economical theory, Smith’s Law of Supply and Demand, appears to
explain the ability of non politicised society to maintain the ideals of
freedom and equality, of egoism through altruism.
Culturally, the American west merely provided striking visuals and
a rich source of narrative to illustrate the central drama of secular
civilization. America represented the ideals of the rationalists and
‘Manifest Destiny’.
Marx, Weber and Durkheim take issue with this agrarian ideal in
an increasingly industrial and urbanised society. Marx saw the market
creating class oppression through the division between workers and
owners. Weber saw the processes of rationalisation as separating us
from our social needs. And Durkheim believed that the bestowal of
ownership of private property beyond an individual’s life created an
inherently unequal social structure. But as long as an open frontier
exists somewhere, these problems can be escaped.
After the exodus to Alaska, America rushed to colonise the rest of
the world. Two World Wars later, as the globe became United Nations
and the rights of non white males increasingly recognised, the frontier
turned to space.

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 In the 60s we set out to boldly go where no man has gone before.
But then along came ARPAnet, the WELL and then the WWW and we
didn’t need to leave the couch to find a whole new frontier. The
internet has killed the space race.
The internet is the new western. And code is the wilderness. Jeffrey
Bleich, the US Ambassador to Australia recently said on the subject of
the proposed internet filter. “The internet needs to be free. It needs to
be free the way we have said the skies have to be free, outer space has
to be free, the polar caps have to be free, the oceans have to be free.
They're shared resources of all the people of the world." (Moses, 2010)
The internet was our open frontier. Our mythology determines our
governance. Cowboys bring about a civil society of free and equal
(white male) beings. They act with honor to impose laws by strength of
their ‘natural’ mastery. They do not impose social control or
monopolise resources. The hacker has mastered wild technology and
as such epitomises the only legitimate moral arbiter of a disordered but
rational post-industrial world.

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Hackers: Our Cowboy Heroes

Steven Levy in ‘Hackers: the Heroes of the Computer Revolution’

(1984) says that there is a "code of ethics" for hacking which, though
not pasted on the walls, is in the air:

• Access to Computers - and anything which might teach you

something about the way the world works - should be unlimited
and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
• All information should be free.
• Mistrust Authority - Promote Decentralization.
• Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria
such as degrees, age, race, or position.
• You can create art and beauty on a computer.
• Computers can change your life for the better.

Kevin Kelly recalled the original design goals for the WELL team.. “

1 That it be free. This was a goal not a commitment. We knew it

wouldn’t be exactly free but it should be as free (cheap) as we
could make it…
2 It should be profit making… After much hard, low-paid work by
Matthew and Cliff, this is happening. The WELL is at least one of
the few operating large systems going that has a future.
3 It would be an open-ended universe…
4 It would be self governing…
5 It would be a self-designing experiment… The early users were to
design the system for later users. The usage of the system would
co-evolve with the system as it was built…
6 It would be a community, one that reflected the nature of Whole
Earth publications. I think that worked out fine.
7 Business users would be its meat and potatoes. Wrong.” (Turner
2005)

The hacker’s code and the WELL’s modus operandi describe

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market individualism. In an information economy, the free flow of
information is the fundamental open frontier issue. This has been
recognised from the very early history of the internet.
‘A key to the rapid growth of the internet has been the free and
open access to the basic documents, especially the specifications of the
protocols.’ (Leiner, et al. n.d.)
The RFCs, or Requests for Comment, that became the standard for
internet communications about standards, even when snail-mailed, not
FTPd or emailed, circulated faster than traditional academic publishing.
RFCs were the mythic equivalent of Paul Revere’s ride, the Pony
Express, and the advent of the telegraph. The internet’s capacity to
promote information sharing has come about in large part through the
information sharing of the developers of the specifications for the
internet. It grew by its own design, in a circular reference!
The IAB (Internet Architecture Board) and Internet Engineering
Task Force, (post ICCB, the governors of the internet) did not design the
internet with a Western in mind. But the principles the Western
represents were an obvious influence. As the internet grew beyond its
research base in the early 80s into a broad user group with increased
commercial activity, it became increasingly important to keep the
standards process open and fair. (Leiner, et al. n.d.)

Stewart Brand also gave free accounts to journalists in the early

years of the WELL, and brought them together with DeadHeads,
excommunalists, silicon valley engineers and hackers from the first
hacker conference in early 80s. This guaranteed not only a flow of
interesting information and ideas. But it also meant that the early
publicity for the internet and networked computing was greatly
impacted by the rhetoric and concerns of the WELL, as described by
Howard Rheingold in The Virtual Community; Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier in 1993 and High Noon on the Electronic Frontier
by Peter Ludlow in 1995 and John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the
Independence of Cyberspace in 1996.

While the rhetoric leads many to believe the internet ethos springs
from either counterculture or the New Left politics, I believe that the it

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more truly represents the market individual myth at the heart of western
business culture. The counterculture was to returning to the agrarian
market ideal souped up on technology.

As such, our modern heroes are business men in technology,

individuals like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Loader in ‘Demystifying the
Electronic Frontier’ from The Governance of Cyberspace, draws
attention to some of the hidden conflicts in Barlow’s call for individual
freedom, freedom of speech and an emerging market place. Loader
points to speech being only free for the English speaker, and the world
becoming dominated by one culture, one market and multinational
corporations or MNCs. Ironically the largest MNCs to emerge in recent
times are the very software and computer companies that promised
freedom and equality. (1997)

These inherent contradictions in the Western or capitalist myth

were outlined in different ways by Marx, Weber and Durkheim.
Through analysis of their theories using Wright’s structural Western
analysis, three other hero types of the internet can be identified.

Marx’s revolutionary hero would be typified by Richard Stallman,

of the GNU project and initiator of the free software movement. Marx
substitutes history for nature, so the revolutionary hero is privileged by
his early awareness and skills to lead others into equality. The
revolutionary hero exerts social control to educate those who are
unequal through their inferior understanding. The revolutionary hero
seeks structural equality for all.

Malcolm describes the anarchy of the early internet as combining

coding and social coding to create the illusion of complete freedom as
an example to the rest of the world. Stallman created the Incompatible
Time-sharing System in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT partly to
set an example to the rest of the world of an open operating system
surviving with no bosses. (2008)

Weber’s charismatic hero, would be typified by Lawrence Lessig,

who fought Microsoft, and now Disney, ‘singlehandedly’. Weber

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believes that the bureaucracy and iron cage of rationalisation that is an
inevitable part of industrial civil society is the antithesis of the inherent
moral nature or goodness of individuals. Weber’s charismatic hero
must stand against group and class dynamics fighting for traditional
(tribal) values. The charismatic hero seeks to reinsert honour and fights
for legal equality.

Lessig is famous for his writings, including Code and Other Laws
of Cyberspace, and is a Professor of Law, who at one stage was
appointed a special master of the US Court in order to prosecute
Microsoft’s monopoly. As Weber’s charismatic hero is a cowboy’s
honour, it’s also apt that, in a global tradition, members of the judiciary
may be addressed as ‘your honour’.

Finally, Durkheim’s structural hero, which was never a person so

much as a faceless structural revolution, would be typified by Jon
Postel or Joyce Reynolds of IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers
Authority, who avoided the personal spotlight to tirelessly work behind
the scenes, transforming the actual structure of the internet into the
most open direction possible.

Postel is remembered not just for maintaining the entire internet

address system on a single text file but for structuring the RFCs which
formed the backbone of communication controlling the development
of the internet. RFC793, which Postel personally contributed, included
Postel’s Law; “be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you
accept from others”, which is not only applicable to the structure of
communications but Durkheim’s principle of inserting humanity or
good back into rationality.

Wright’s structural analysis also shows how the inherent

contradictions exposed by Marx, Weber, Durkheim, or Loader, can be
seen in how well a story fits the Western myth. Inverting roles or
changing the plot exposes the hegemonic hidden meanings. You don’t,
for example, see many black cowboys, or female ones.

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Hidden Meanings

The politics of globalisation and anti-colonialisation have laid bare

the whiteness of the cowboy myth. One way in which an open frontier
of abundent productivity can be maintained is simply by excluding a
large percentage of the population from having any rights to it.
Haraway and the early cybertheorists imagined the internet as “the
medium through which to explore concepts of emancipation,
empowerment and the transcendence of physical subjugation”.
(Haraway 1985, 1991)(Loader 2005) They dreamed of an imaginary
community and projected identity politics into a virtual ungendered
space. On the internet ‘no one knew if you were a dog’. In theory.
Adam Smith did not show how innate morality or goodness
worked in the secular society. Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ was always
somewhat mystical, transforming private egoism to public altruism. A
section of the population needs to maintain the goodness that allows
for the social contract to function, while another part of the population
preserves the strength and violence required to compete in the market
place, to achieve freedom and equality. Law and governance can
provide only a limited framework for the operation of civil society and
the maintenance of contracts. The social contract depends upon
altruism, which is in opposition to the other qualities required to
succeed in the market place.
The role of women in the comparatively recent history of rational
civilization, is one of necessary servitude in the myth of market
individualism. As long as women do not own property, do not vote and
do not really operate outside of the sphere of their husbands and
fathers, then it’s simple to separate masculinity and femininity into
opposing virtues, strength and goodness. The dyadic relationships
underpinning our civil society easily accommodate this split in
characteristics.
It becomes more difficult when the rationality of this implicit split
is questioned. We believe that, by reasoning, the rhetoric of equality
and freedom applies equally to all. While women and non-white

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populations have become comparatively recognised under law,
including democratic participation and property ownership, still some
things haven’t changed. Wealth is not common. And Westerns, for
example, do not work when a woman is the cowboy. Unless its a
comedy, like Cat Ballou.
I believe the underpinning ideology of market individualism
requires a more open frontier than is available with our always finite
virtual resources. They are limited and not free, so, therefore is
equality. ‘Symbolic violence’ is continually being done to protect the
illusion of freedom and equality. (Bourdieu 1990)
Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the business world and in
the Western. Robert Warshow says that ‘the Western maintains a ‘hold
on our imagination… because it offers a serious orientation to the
problem of violence such as can be found nowhere else in our culture’.
(1962:151) Similarly, the internet’s booming economy, sets a gold rush
scenario of a multiple small shootouts, escapes to the wilderness of
code and resistance to the law, in an expanding code of hyper or
heroic masculinity.
American irony depends on the ‘iron’ more than the ‘y’. The guns.
Who’s got the guns. The western is a perpetual negotiation of the
correct use of violence. In The Myth of Violence, Cawelti describes the
contradiction of America’s self description as ‘peace bringer’ and a
‘nation of nonviolent law-abiding people’, from a country built on the
constitutional right to bear arms and the rhetoric of manifest destiny
and market individualism. (1975)
As the US government overturned the only real internet revolution
within a day, when Jon Postel instructed 8 of the 12 regional root
servers to resolve to IANA rather than US Government controlled
servers. The US Government immediately intervened. Postel, one of the
founders of the internet, died of a broken heart 9 months later.

It is necessary to look at the symbolic violence being done in the Wild

West mythology and the stylized hand to hand combat of modern
business and the ways in which they are already inside the
construction of the internet, before we can move towards a future
direction that offers structural equality and freedom for more than a

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few.

Future Directions

As Pierre Bourdieu said, “Freedom is not something given: it is

something you conquer - collectively.” (1990, p. 15)
No one ever said there would be no casualties in the civilising
process. Genres and myths evolve over time. The post-globalisation
open frontier may not have been the internet, it may have been the
drug trade. If the internet is not an open frontier, then its genre will
change from western to gangster.
The gangster genre speaks about self-made wealth, corruption,
bureaucracy and the luck of birth or chance. This is perhaps not a myth
we want to hear yet. But if you google it, I bet you get Facebook.
Perhaps we can continue in our current path but certain issues are
clear; If the internet is controlled and monopolized, then it is no longer
an open frontier and the market must find a new frontier for innovation.
And, white male supremacy is implicit in the market myth.
Internet governance must take these things equally into account,
not remain focussed on national, transnational and property aspects.

“The principle source of conflict and resistance in the network society

is the contradiction between the placeless character of networks and
the rootedness of human meaning.” (Castells 1997 p124) (Barney 2005)

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