Everything new is old again
At the seminar on the “Post-Bureaucratic Age” with David Cameron, I was very disappointed with Dave’s response to a question about the Digital Economy Bill. Instead of saying that Conservative Party policy would be to reduce copyright to its welfare-maximising level (of, say, 14 years) and leave copyright owners to use the court process to prosecute infringement, he waffled something about finding “common sense” balance when talking to the music industry. Why are the music industry’s opinions privileged?
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit.
[From Paleo-Future - Paleo-Future Blog - Robots Will Kill Music! (1930)]
Robert Heinlen wrote this is in 1939. How’s that for forward thinking? Or, more to the point, when you look at something like the Digital Economy Bill, how’s that for backward thinking? How can it be right that in 2010, politicians are prepared to even think about this “problem” at all? Reread that last sentence again.
Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit.
[From Paleo-Future - Paleo-Future Blog - Robots Will Kill Music! (1930)]
Hear hear. Unfortunately, it’s natural for the government to listening to the individuals and corporations who have been made rich by the existing structures rather than the diffuse collection of individuals and not-yet-existing corporations who will benefit from change. Which leads to a more general point: I was a little disappointed with the visions of a post-bureacratic age that were set out for essentially the same reason.
People, institutions and governments are always oddly backward-looking when they come to analyse technology-driven change and try to predict its impact. Hence the post-bureacratic age ends up looking a lot like the non-post-bureacratic age but with bit of mashup on top. I was imagining more radical proposals for the use of digital identity and digital money technologies to change the way that the state and citizen interoperate in the future, so I was genuinely surprised to hear panelists expressing reservations about providing the public with the data that they have already paid for. Peter Kellner, for example, seemed to imply that if you hand out public data (he was talking about MPs expenses) then people will act irresponsibly with the data, that people won’t be able to cope with it all. This is hardly a new perspective.
A respected Swiss scientist, Conrad Gessner, might have been the first to raise the alarm about the effects of information overload. In a landmark book, he described how the modern world overwhelmed people with data and that this overabundance was both “confusing and harmful” to the mind. The media now echo his concerns with reports on the unprecedented risks of living in an “always on” digital environment.
Well, we’ve heard this before haven’t we? But Conrad was well ahead of his time.
It’s worth noting that Gessner, for his part, never once used e-mail and was completely ignorant about computers. That’s not because he was a technophobe but because he died in 1565. His warnings referred to the seemingly unmanageable flood of information unleashed by the printing press.
Whether it’s musicians campaigning against recorded music because it will put musicians out of work or (as I imagine they did) Babylonian story tellers campaigning against the invention of cuneiform, throughout history we have always been wrong: call me a technological determinist or a digital utopian, but the lessons from history are that on the whole each information revolution has left us better off than before. Parliamentary democracy is better than constitutional monarchy which is better than feudalism which is better than tribalism.
Gessner, presumably, could see that providing people with more information and, even more dangerously, allowing them to use the technology of printing to produce pamphlets, tracts and then newspapers and magazines, would inevitably mean a loss of control. But that was a good thing. We moved from 16th century absolute monarchy to 17th century constitutional monarchy. That’s not to say that parliamentary democracy is the end of the road. We’re not going to end up with the political structures we have now but with a bit of Facebook thrown in, we’re going end up with new political structures that are better than the structures that we have now, structures that deliver a better quality of life.
So why the resistance? Well, suppose that the key impact of the new technology is to hollow out the nation state: the technology allows us to have a renewed localism combined with a new renewed regionalism (because the nation state is too big to deal with the small problems and too small to deal with the big problems) then it is precisely the machinery associated with the national state — MPs and parliament, for example — that will be steadily rendered redundant.
In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen megabytes [posted with ecto]