Those watchdogs of our civil liberties, the folks who bring you BoingBoing, point out this Austin café which has prohibited the use of laptops. Cory Doctorow takes us down the slippery slope to an Orwellian nightmare where we will not even be able speak will eating in a restaurant. If we do not stand up against these facists now, who knows where they will stop.
Indeed.
Some time ago, I wrote about a coffeehouse that decided to turn off its free wireless internet on the weekends in an effort to take back the space from students and professionals who sat hunched over laptops. The move was about restoring a sense of the shop being a Third Place (where people could gather and interact) and not about curtailing freedoms. And it is similar motivations that drive the restaurant in Austin, I suspect. Doctorow, living in his bizarre Leftist/Libertarian world, seems to believe that we have freedoms and that these freedoms are being stripped by the over-eager business owners. The first, glaring, problem is that the restaurant is a private business, and since there is nothing specifically in the Bill of Rights that confers to us the liberty to use our laptops wherever we please, that business has the right to set rules regarding its use. Second, Doctorow misses that might be the reason for the rule–that customers may have tired of listening to the tap-tap-tap of a keyboard while trying to enjoy a meal. Perhaps the owners were willing to tolerate some laptop use, but slowly, too many customers were tapping away. As with most limits on public behavior, this likely was born out of abuse.
It should also be said that Jacques Ellul is spinning in his grave thanks to this (non-) story. Ellul spent his life trying to explain that technology (Technique, to use his term) is, despite our best intentions, an autonomous force. Despite our attempts to mold and control it, Technique ultimately shapes and molds us. And here is Cory Doctorow, poster boy for Technique, fighting for our right to allow technology to encroach even further into our lives.
Posted on 13 March 2007