Information Schminformation

Elian Gonzalez, metaphor for the new economy

Yes, Virginia, there is an information highway. Remember the information highway? For eons it seems—six months in Internet years — the Internet dangled the promise that we were going to cruise the information highway.

Now, the information highway cruises us. Dot-coms are hopping on the information highway to bring pet food, ghost-written celebrity biographies, and groceries to our very door.

Information doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Once upon a time, if you phoned for information, you’d get a telephone number. If enemies wanted information, you’d give them troop movements or swallow a poison pill. If you went to an encyclopedia for information, it would offer vanilla bean growth rates in Madagascar in 1937.

Information still includes this sort of thing — facts, I mean — but nowadays that aspect is synonymous with “data.” More often, information means anything that people will pay attention to. In the future (it’s hoped!), people will pay money for this.

But in the real world — or the Internet, as it’s called today — information is both a commodity and means of exchange.

We plug in numbers to log on, give up credit card numbers to access another set of numbers representing a product, and in return, receive a tracking number. Actual physical products are sometimes involved, but they seem like an afterthought — an embarrassing blot on the purity of the dot-com process.

Take Elian Gonzalez, for instance. Now that the whole flap is just another rapidly receding blip in the rearview mirror and before the next threat to the Republic lurches into our headlights, I thought it might be instructive to examine that saga as a metaphor for the Internet economy itself.

After all, Elian Gonzalez himself didn’t really matter — not in the public arena. His relatives, according to the “left” point of view, were using him as a virtual stake to drive into the heart of the dread Castro. His father, according to the “right,” was a puppet of Castro, a zombie doing his master’s bidding.

To the media, Elian was “Little Elian,” a ratings dream. Politicians swarmed around Miami like flies, searching in vain for the proper buzz. Do we side with the relatives, who want to give Little Elian sweets, puppies, and trips to Disney World until he bursts like an overfed goose? Or do we side with the father and doom the boy to a life of turnip rations, reeducation camps, and 17-hour speeches by boring, old, evil Fidel? The Virgin Mary appeared on a bank window, just blocks from Elian’s Miami home (or virtual prison, depending on your point of view). Manifestations of the Virgin Mary are a surefire indicator that cooler heads are not prevailing.

Then, federal agents staged a predawn raid/liberation, and the infamous picture of the agent grabbing/freeing Elian became a lightning rod for public opinion: To some, it’s evidence that the federal government is nothing more than a hotbed of jackbooted thugs. To others, it’s proof that the government can do something right after all (sometimes, if the wind is right). To the rest, it’s an excuse to make animations on the Internet showing Little Elian and the Feds swapping lines from a beer commercial: “Wazzup?”

After he was taken/rescued, rumors really started to fly. Was that really Elian? Or a double? Trick photography? Is Juan Gonzalez really his father? We demand DNA testing! Is Elian being drugged, tortured, or brainwashed in the retreat/ compound?

Certainly, Diane Sawyer claims to have asked the boy — off-camera — if he wanted to go back to Cuba, and he supposedly said, “No.” But what does that mean? I think of myself at six, growing up in North Dakota. If I’d just spent the last few months in Miami, basking in attention and receiving cuddly pets, cable television, and hugs from Goofy, I’d have said the hell with North Dakota, too.

The point is: Little Elian was just an excuse for an information exchange by self-serving special interest groups, paranoia-driven lunatics, pollsters, overenthusiastic elected officials, overcautious elected officials, mealy-mouthed elected officials, media wiseacres, smooth-talking psychiatrists, and pundits with ideological axes to grind. And what holds these disparate groups together? Propaganda, bald lies, and rumors. And what’s another name for that? That’s right. Information. That’s the future, you know. Or so rumor has it.