etopia

     a new millennium?

The famous Being Digital (New York, Knopf 95) by guru Nicholas Negroponte in his role as cheerleader for the emerging "global infospace" - a sort of one-man National Office for the Information Economy - offers vision without analysis, slogans without detail. Most people just can't help being analogue, but the book's useful for focussing attention on 'bits rather than atoms'. 

However, he's less zany than other gurus. Start off by savouring John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (DIC) 

... Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind....  I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back further.

Esther Dyson, interim chair of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN) and the thinking person's Don Tapscott, is famous for her ode to cyberspace Release 2.1: A Design for Living in the Digital Age (London, Penguin 98). 

It's provocative but perhaps best read in conjunction with some of the less polemical studies and with books such as resisting The Virtual Life: The Culture & Politics of Information (San Francisco, City Lights 95) edited by James Brook & Iain Boal, The World Wide Web & Contemporary Cultural Theory: Magic, Metaphor, Power (London, Routledge 00) edited by Andrew Herman & Thomas Swiss and Digital Mythologies: The Hidden Complexities of the Internet (New Brunswick, Rutgers Uni Press 00) by Thomas Valovic. There's a broader perspective in William Akin's Technocracy & the American Dream (Berkeley, Uni of California Press 77) and Howard Segal's Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago, Uni of Chicago Press 85).

     delirium

Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth & Alvin Toffler collaborated on the 1994 Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age (Dream).

It's another digital manifesto built around notions of the Third Wave - part Robert Heinlein, part Daniel Bell, a dash of Henry Ford and some spice from Porat, Machlup and Weber - in which technology drives an information society free from traditional economic, political and cultural constraints. People, it seems, like information, "just want to be free". 

We suggest instead Christine Borgman's First Monday article on The Premise & Promise of A Global Information Infrastructure, drawn from her recent From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access To Information in the Networked World (Cambridge, MIT Press 00), and The Social Life of Information (Boston, Harvard Business School Press 00) by John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid.

Kevin Kelly's New Rules For The New Economy (New York, Viking 98) applies the Third Wave mantras to the 'new economy', something explored in our Economy guide. It builds on his Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines (London, Fourth Estate 94) and Michael Rothschild's Bionomics: Economy As Ecosystem (New York, Holt 95), which explore biological models for the information economy and networks. 

The latter was entertainingly if a tad ungenerously eviscerated by Paulina Borsook in Cyberselfish. Another critique's offered by Michael Surmin's ISOC paper on Wired Words: Utopia, Revolution & the History of Electronic Highways.

Instead try Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Boston, Harvard Business School Press 99) by Hal Varian & Carl Shapiro, an excellent introduction to the 'new' economy, or Geoffrey Mulgan's Communication & Control: Networks and the New Economies of Communication (New York, Guilford Press 91).

     add bandwidth and stir

George Gilder's new Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionise Our World (New York, Free Press 00) is arguably the high point of techno-delirium. 

Gotta problem? Just add more bandwidth. Kids don't learn? Get them online. Government doesn't deliver? Information technology and privatisation to the rescue. TV puts you to sleep? Job's boring? Worried about the mortgage? Don't worry, Gilder has the answer in the wacky Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media & American Life (New York, Norton 94) and Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics & Technology (New York, Simon & Schuster 89). 

Similar snake oil was peddled in the 1880s when the first electric power networks spread. Turn instead to Jock Given's lucid The Death of Broadcasting: Media's Digital Future (University of NSW Press, Sydney 1998), Bruce Wasserstein's Big Deal (New York, Warner 98) and Bruce Owen's The Internet Challenge To Television (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 99).

Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (London, Secker & Warburg 94) and Virtual Reality (New York, Summit 91), pushes the digital democracy barrow: out there on the frontier a sort of digital jeffersonian democracy of hardy yeomen will emerge, free from big government and big business (and without, it seems, those pesky injuns). 

There's more value in High Noon On The Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues In Cyberspace (Cambridge, MIT Press 96), edited by Peter Ludlow, that starts to explore questions neglected by the technolibertarians.

Back in Washington Peter Huber argues that regulation's irrelevant in the best of all possible digital worlds, one fit for dot com heroes. He's best known for his 288 page love letter to the US Federal Communications Commission - Law & Disorder In Cyberspace: Abolish The FCC & Let Common Law Rule The Telecosm (Oxford Uni Press 97). The evil FCC, it appears, has

protected monopolies, obstructed efficient use of the airwaves, corrupted common carriage, mispriced services, curtailed free speech, weakened copyright and undermined privacy. Large bureaucratic entities like the FCC can never adjust quickly enough to such rapidly changing technologies

Our advice to clients is not to hold their breath waiting for the FCC, and its local counterparts, to disappear.

     bring in the clones

Far far below the digital stratosphere other new economy enthusiasts have been busy. The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity (New York, Perseus 99) by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden & Joel Hyatt offers a vision of the coming golden age with the  suspension of the business cycle and atrophy of traditional states. 

If you want more, turn to The New Renaissance: Computers & the Next Level of Civilisation (Oxford, Oxford Uni Press 98) by Douglas Robertson: with a chip or two you'll be a Leonardo in your own lunchtime.

Albert Borgmann's Holding On To Reality: The Nature of Information At The Turn Of The Millennium (Chicago, Uni of Chicago Press 99), Francis Fukuyama's triumphalist The End Of History (New York, Free Press 92) and Virginia Postrel's hayekian tract The Future & Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise & Progress (New York, Free Press 98) are other works in the same vein. 

In contrast, Manuel Castell's neomarxist three volume The Information Society (Oxford, Blackwell 99) tries, with some success, to tease out the antecedents and consequences of living in that world. 


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