All Steamed Up?

He's at Cannes. He's lampooning himself on SNL. He's on the covers of magazines. He's got a new book out, already well reviewed. Who is this rising media sensation, star of the global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the same old Al Gore you know and love and perhaps find just a bit, well, boring in his long-winded sincerity. He's being billed as Al Version 2.0, and already there's a growing media mythology about his return from the political wilderness, like MacArthur striding back up the Philippines beach.

Yeah, right—he's tanned, fit, rested, and whatever else you want to believe. But the truth may be that the world looks so much worse six years after the Florida recount debacle that Gore, upright and true to himself, seems like a breath of fresh Beltway air. Now hooked up with Apple, Google, and a sustainable-investment fund, he appeared prosperous and relaxed as we met recently in a Seattle hotel room. The kids are out of college, Florida 2000 is behind him, and he's free to concentrate on . . . politics? The environment? His movie? Or "the architecture of packet switching"? Let's just say he had plenty to say about all those subjects during our conversation.

Seattle Weekly: How was it that in the '80s and early '90s, leading up to your book Earth in the Balance, that "environmentalism" became a kind of a slur? A marginal, fringe, crazy topic?

Well, that's an interesting place to start, and a deep question. I think that happened at the same time that labor unions and consumer groups and public health groups and child advocates and others all suffered exactly the same fate. I personally think it's connected to a tectonic shift in the structure of the public forum. I think the nature of America's conversation of democracy changed dramatically a couple of decades after television asserted its dominance over print. The republic of letters was invaded and occupied by the empire of television. And the structure of the forum defined by the printing press was one with very low entry barriers for individuals, a multiway conversation with ideas that rose or fell according to [their merit]. John Stuart Mill said, "Every idea shall compete, and the truth shall emerge as the winner." [Laughs] And there was never a perfect age when that happened. But it is true that 500 years ago, when the medieval information monopoly that supported feudalism was destroyed, slowly, by the introduction of the printing press, that led to the Enlightenment and the enshrinement of the rule of reason—a new sovereign and respect for the best of evidence rule.

And when that happened, for the first time in history, knowledge became a source of power in the hands of the average citizen. Thomas Paine never went to school, didn't have a penny to his name, but wrote the Harry Potter of the 18th century [Common Sense], and helped to start the American Revolution. And when the entry barriers were so low that everyone could enter the fray, it became easier to use knowledge to mediate between wealth and power. And when new ideas were considered, they were judged against their effects on the masses of the literate, who could all have their say.

But in the early 1960s when the television became the source of information for the majority, for a couple decades after that, the TV news operations mimicked The New York Times, and The Chicago Tribune, etc. The struggle at the heart of Good Night, and Good Luck chronicles the point when that began to change, and entertainment values asserted themselves. Add in conglomerate ownership with a smaller and smaller number of owners, and then all of a sudden the fundamental nature of television began to be apparent: It is one-way. It's one-way. It's like the medieval monastic scriptorium. If you wanted to be a writer in the Middle Ages, you had to be a monk, and then you could copy a dead guy's book in a dead language. Now, if you want to be Thomas Paine on television, you can't. You have to go work for a studio, and then you play a bit part on a show about people eating dogs.

The Internet is changing all of this, and once again creating a multiway conversation with low entry barriers for individuals. However, due to the architecture of packet switching, it will not support mass distribution of full-motion video, which is essential to produce the quasi-hypnotic effect that television has. The average American watches television four hours and 39 minutes a day, up four minutes from last year. Most of the people using the Internet are watching television simultaneously. So television is dominant; it won't stay that way, but right now it is.

And because it is, it is far easier for interests that don't want environmental regulations, or an increased minimum wage, or enforcement of the wage-and-hour laws, or a national health care system, or a program for mental health in the country, or consumer protection, or whatever, to have a much larger influence on the nature of the conversation, and to marginalize those who say, "Hey wait a minute! Wait a minute! When in the course of human events . . . " [Laughs] and they don't get heard. Now I'm sorry to give you a mouthful, but . . .