Technology and Social Change, Or: Three Myths of XML

A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities -- Teaser of Tim Berners-Lee's Scientific American article, ``The Semantic Web,'' May 2001

...[A]pplying XML to the process of crafting legislation [has] ... the potential at least of transforming the basic relationship between citizens and their elected representatives. -- Alan Kotok, ``Can XML Help Write the Law?" May 9, 2001, XML.com

One of my ongoing projects is to write clearly about the social implications of computer technology, especially the Internet and the Web, both of which have been called revolutionary by their boosters. It always pays to be skeptical of words like ``revolution'' and ``revolutionary''; they can be said far more easily than they can be meant.

While computer technology might be used to aid radical social change, I have argued that it's always already embedded in very particular social and historical contexts, most often ones in which radical social change is unlikely. After all, technology doesn't fall, as if a gift of the gods, from the sky. Except in extraordinary circumstances, computer technology is developed and deployed by corporations, i.e., institutions fundamentally opposed to radical social change and, so, fundamentally committed to maintaining the status quo (or to changing it only to benefit their entrenchment and aggrandizement).

(The funding of computer technology is often provided by the public, especially in the case of the Internet, the Web, and much free software. The costs and risks of development are borne by the public; the profits, payoffs, and control of the technology are reaped by corporations and investors -- neat trick, huh? -- as part of the ongoing corporate assault on (the very idea of) public space.)

I have recently focused on two specific areas of computer technology: the Semantic Web and, one of its attending technologies, XML. In what follows I debunk three myths about XML and the Semantic Web by subjecting them to critical inquiry.

1. XML Information is Open and Free

The first myth is that information encoded in XML is necessarily open and free.

Many people who have been exposed to XML are prone to forgetting and, hence, obscuring the most basic fact -- XML is a tool for making data formats. I'm tempted to say it's just a data format, it's merely a data format. As the wider world goes, computer data formats aren't all that interesting or significant, nor are the tools for making them. Of course, XML is enmeshed in a range of assumptions, social practices, economic arrangements, and so on. But it's still just a (tool for making) data format(s). (In what remains, I will use ``data format'' as shorthand for ``tool for making data formats'' for the sake of economy.)

What words like ``open'' and ``free'' can mean when applied to a computer data format and what they can mean when applied to a social practice or political institution have very little in common. The intersection of these two ranges of meaning is practically nil. The myth isn't true for any public value of ``open'' and ``free'. But it arises precisely from the mistaken belief that the intersection is substantial and interesting.

When XML advocates, like those at the W3C, say that XML is ``open'' they mean, approximately, that it isn't a proprietary tool. In that sense XML (the specification plus its associated, standardized technologies) is open. But the openness of XML isn't, one might say, viral; it necessarily transfers neither to the data formats XML makes possible nor to the information that it encodes, both of which can be as proprietary and, hence, closed as anything can be.

XML's openness, in the first sense, means you can process XML created by Corporation A's tools with Corporation B, C, or D's tools. Or you can process your XML-encoded information with the tools written by, say, Lucy F. Hacker, an independent, free software developer who's written some nifty Perl XML libraries.

In this limited, technical sense -- the sense in which XML is just one computer tool among many, and one nearly identical (in relevant parts) to SGML -- XML is ``open'' and ``free'' and rather a decent evolutionary step toward interoperable information systems (which are the only sort worth having).

Calling public institutions, social practices, and economic arrangements ``open'' and ``free'' is akin to calling them democratic, egalitarian, and just. Whether or not any chunk of the world is democratic, egalitarian, and just can never be simply a matter of whether XML is used there. Adding XML to an undemocratic, inegalitarian, or unjust chunk of the world will rarely, if ever, make the crucial difference.

Thus to assume that because the government or some corporation uses XML makes that government or corporation democratic, egalitarian, or just (or only more so) is to assume mistakenly either that 1) ``open'' and ``free'' can mean the same thing when applied to social, political, and economic chunks of the world as they mean when applied to computer tools; or 2) that the chief impediment to some government or corporation becoming (or becoming more) democratic, egalitarian, or just is that some of its data is encoded in or by a proprietary data format. The first assumption is a conceptual error; the second is or rests on a factual one.

All of which is to say almost nothing, surely far less than needs to be said, about the fact, inconvenient as it may be to eager XML boosters, that the federal government uses SGML extensively and has for at least 20 years.

1a. XML Information Systems are Democratic

A variant of the first myth maintains that information systems that use XML are thereby more fitting in a democratic society or that they are thereby themselves democratic. In the best of cases, this myth arises from the conceptual or factual errors above. In the worst, it arises from intentional obfuscation.

1b. XML means Universal Access

Another variant is that XML's ``openness'' means that the information encoded by it is universally accessible in a socially helpful way. One may fall for this myth only by being ignorant of XML and computer technology generally; or by forgetting that in the US the most serious impediments to universal access to information are, first, the unyielding death march of privatization of the US's information infrastructure (which is a vital part of the corporate assault on (the very idea of) public space) and, second, the digital divide.

Several variants of this myth appear in Alan Kotok's recent XML.com piece, ``Can XML Help Write the Law?'', a report of a meeting which considered the use of XML in the information systems of the US Congress and the various information management agencies associated with Congress and the executive branch.

Kotok reports that, according to the head of the LegalXML effort,

...[b]efore the Web the average citizen had little or no access to laws and legislation, now much of that information is available for free or low cost. Lawyers may still use the Lexis and WestLaw databases for legal research, but legal resource sites and forums provide citizens with more legal information than ever. Publishers like National Journal and Congressional Quarterly also provide low-cost clipping and bill-tracking services with information that used to be the monopoly of lobbyists.

For many, perhaps most, citizens, access to laws and legislation continues to be, even in the age of the Web, exactly what it's been since the early 20th century: a matter of a visit to the local library. XML can do nothing to change that since many, if not most, people still have as their most reliable point of access to the Web the same local public library. Putting legal information in XML cannot do a single thing to remedy the problems of digital access in the US (and around the world).

What's most troubling about the conference Kotok reports on, however, is the way privatization of the national information infrastructure is simply assumed as unobjectionable and unavoidable. (If you're interested in the history of information infrastructure privatization, which gained real momentum in the 1960s, pick up Herbert Schiller's Information and the Crisis Economy or his Information Inequality or his Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression -- and if you're not interested in it, why not? You should be.) To be truly empowered, citizens don't need low-cost -- and the services of the National Journal, Congressional Quarterly, and daily access to SGML versions of the Federal Register are anything but inexpensive -- access to congressional and executive branch information. They need and deserve ``free'' information, which is to say, information they don't have to pay for twice.

One of the chief impediments to citizen empowerment vis-á-vis the information economy is privatization (including the total giveaway of the publicly-funded Internet infrastructure in the mid-90s), and there's simply nothing that any computer data format can do to prevent or ameliorate it. What's worse, given the present political climate, most government XML initiatives will be avenues for the further privatization of public information systems; privatization which is absolutely not politically neutral and which is ruinous for the health of American democracy.

2. Schemas are Magical

XML and schemas, in particular, are often the subject of magical thinking, which is precisely what causes the second myth about XML: ``If we can just create the right XML vocabulary or schema, then a vast range of problems will be solved.'' (I have discussed the politics of XML schemas and the Semantic Web at length in an essay for XML.com. I invite interested readers to take a look.)

Magical thinking about XML is rife, and comes in two forms (first put this way by my generous colleague Bijan Parsia):

First. The use of XML per se imparts any number of wonderful, often unsayable, benefits.

Second. The use of XML per se makes some things possible that otherwise cannot be done at all.

Magical thinking about XML occurs most often in the brains of programmers working with XML and their technical managers and marketers -- that is, people who stand to gain most if XML is magical or, perhaps just as well, if it's thought to be by enough of the right kind of people. Hence, one may understand the otherwise strange phenomenon of technical experts able to believe three absurd things before lunch about XML's capabilities and virtues.

Kotok's reporting of Patrice McDermott's (who's head of OMB Watch) interest in how the federal government might use XML gives a fine example of magical thinking about XML:

McDermott ... envisioned a standard government-wide XML vocabulary that would link legislative activities with government databases. This XML vocabulary would enable the public to see the relationship between legislative actions on one hand, with the actual results of those actions as expressed in government records, an idea that generated more than a little nervous laughter among the meeting participants.

... McDermott said that a standard legislative vocabulary would enable the public to link these statistics to legislators' committee or floor votes, as well as election-campaign contribution databases. That kind of machine-readable information would give the public much more power and add accountability to the political process.

Let's set aside the almost unimaginable scope of the project McDermott implies when she suggests that one could use XML to link legislative activity to its subsequent results in federal government databases and information systems. Let's also set aside the fact that if such a project could be accomplished, it could be accomplished without the use of XML. (Recall the second form of magical thinking about XML claims that things hitherto impossible became practical with it.)

I want to focus attention on the idea that there could be, as Kotok reports McDermott to have suggested, ``a standard government-wide XML vocabulary''. That I should have to remind the head of OMB Watch that the US federal government may be the most staggeringly complex human institution in the history of staggeringly complex human institutions is, well, staggering. The federal government's scope is massive.

The very idea that there could be a single XML schema covering every institutional information requirement of the US federal government is a perfect example of the second form of magical thinking about XML, namely, that XML makes possible things otherwise impossible. It does not. It cannot. And it never will.

(To understand why this is magical thinking, try to write in plain English prose -- or in any language of your choosing -- a nontrivial, interesting vocabulary for describing the information encoding requirements of the US federal government. Or, to make things easier, how about doing that for just the executive branch? Or, again easier, just the Justice Department. Take care that your head doesn't explode in the process.)

Of course even if such a schema existed, it's hard to see how it could help make government more accountable or transparent -- two improvements people ordinarily see as immensely difficult. I stress ordinarily because, except in the thrall of magical thinking, it's plain that McDermott's project faces numerous insuperable obstacles, most of which are strictly social in nature, some of which are technical in the sense that we just don't understand large-scale social systems, their relations, their causal connections, in any appreciably sufficient way. There is something indictably wrong with the marketing and evangelism of XML if or when it induces in otherwise rational people the kind of magical thinking on display here.

In fact McDermott's only rival as the canonical instance of the myth that XML is somehow magically powerful is the HumanML effort. (And McDermott's suggestion isn't really a rival since it's only a suggestion and not a full-blown project, as is the case with HumanML.) I cannot bring myself to call HumanML an actual development effort, given its absurd set of goals. As its founders and participants claim, HumanML

...has a goal of "enriching human communications and reducing human misunderstanding" through explicit mechanisms to represent paralinguistic features of human communication.

The HumanML specification will be built on top of current endeavors. Our focus will be to embed root human characteristics in our messages, and help bring humanity towards universal empathy. It will be a very interesting world in the future, where we finally begin to work together, with both universal knowledge, and universal empathy.

These are no longer flowery far-off aspirations. These are finally concrete attainable endeavors, now possible through XML (emphasis added)

Which desperately bespeaks the ancient human dream, as old as the first stirrings of civilization, of the perfect language, now rebirthed of technophilic parents. I'd suggest a careful reading of Umberto Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language if I thought it would help.

But, in short, one wonders what the HumanML folks think XML does that SGML (or any number of other, more powerful representational schemes) cannot do such that XML now, ``finally'', makes ``universal knowledge and universal empathy ... concrete attainable endeavors''?

Magical indeed.

3. XML is the Dog, Not the Tail

[M]achine-readable information would give the public much more power and add accountability to the political process. -- Alan Kotok, ``Can XML Help Write the Law?''

The final point here is larger than a myth about XML per se; it's a myth about technology in general and it rests behind various XML and Semantic Web distortions. Computer technology, including XML, reflects institutional and social structures far more often than it changes them. Technology is only possible within the context of the social and political practices that create, maintain, and extend it. And the social and political practices that constitute social institutions are the limits within which technology can mean or be anything at all.

Now the relationship is actually more reciprocal and dynamic than that. Technology can only give rise to new social practices that the larger social framework can accommodate. Technology alone cannot make a revolution.

The other facet of taking technology to be independent of the social context within which it always already operates is to misjudge its possible, practicable alliances and uses. The bad guys always have the newest, bestest, fastest, powerfulest stuff, and they always have more of it than anyone else. And even when things are more even, any tool can be used to impede social change as well as to foster it. Hence, even if XML had some property especially conducive of citizen empowerment, the forces that oppose such empowerment are free to use it too. Technology often amounts to a draw in social struggle. Like every other human tool, XML isn't immune to abuse or, as the boys in the Pentagon like to say, ``dual use''.

Most enthusiastic proponents of XML have the cart before the horse or, to mix metaphors, they have the tail, XML, wagging the dog, society and social possibility. Whether or not ``machine-readable information'' can ever do anything to empower citizens, or to reform a wayward, corrupt political process, will always be less a matter of the technology in question and more a matter of the kind of hard, real-world political and social organizing, the creation and maintenance of social practices and institutions, that have always been the real engine of beneficial social change.

Note: In the next article of this series I examine the tension between the Semantic Web's promise of perfect information filtering and the needs of democracy, by way of a review of Cass Sunstein's new book Republic.com.