Bridge over the Millennium:
From Information Revolution to Information Renaissance
Samuel A. Guiberson
ABA's
Law Practice Management Magazine, November
1997
This is not the year
of the millennium. We have a couple years until we get there. Why, then, is
now the time to start talking about millennial change? Because millenniums
don't come along every day. We lawyers need some time to mull this over.
At
the last turn of the millennium, there seemed to be an even division between
those who believed the world was ending, and those who thought it was just beginning.
What could be worse than starting too late and crossing over the great divide
without any grasp of what we are gaining, and what we are leaving behind?
The Technology
Revolution
Of all times to be
alive, what time could be more glorious than a time of technological revolution?
Do you remember the first time you saw a personal computer? We stood before
it in awe and anticipation, trying to imagine all the great changes this machine
would bring. This homely box with a too-small screen and a pipsqueak processor
made us feel large.
The excitement wasn't
about computer codes or keyboards, monitors or megabytes, it was about the potential
the computer represented. It wasn't just another microwave oven to cook the
same old recipes more quickly, it was a brain appliance that created a new chemistry
of thought. Anybody on the planet with a lick of sense had to be excited about
the changes these computers would bring.
From the beginning,
computers challenged us to find new ways to do our work. Remember why it was
called a microcomputer? It was the first computer that wasn't the size of a
room. You no longer needed IBM's resources or a corporate financial structure
to do computing. It did not require an organization to maintain it.
It could
be owned, operated, and made productive by a single person. We had a transformation
technology by the tail.
This was a moment
of human liberation: political, economic and individual. It was as if our whole
species had grown a new limb, as strong as our arms and legs, but for our minds.
More than just a change in the technology people use, it would be a technology
that changed people.
The exhilaration
of what could be done with this new machine was all about the person who had
one. Like childhood, it was all about me and my computer.
It was
about the changes I was going through, my work, and what I
could do now that I couldn't do before. It was about personal change
and personal potential.
Then along came networking
and the adolescence of the personal computing revolution. We became inclined
to do things together, transitioning from computing with a personal focus, to
computing with a group focus. Having raised our expectations of what we could
accomplish by ourselves, we now looked to what we could do with computers as
part of a group.
Organizations were
affected. Raising consciousness with computing wasn't something you did while
staying up late eating pizza and drinking Jolt cola. It was an attitude you
took to the office. Networking computers changed the relationships between workers,
between workers and organizations, and ultimately changed the organizations
themselves.
Suddenly, the most
productive and competitive offices weren't being managed from the top down.
Networking brought a more cooperative, information-rich way of decision making, no need for filtering and fidgeting from middle management.
We were propelling
ourselves on a wave of technology with a sense of jubilation. The electrons
were jumping. We had accepted the notion that we were going to live the rest
of our lives in a kind of social, technological, and intellectual tumult.
We
formed our career strategies around the reality that nothing will ever be the
same, and that the only constant would be constant change. From the boardrooms
to the mailrooms, a technological revolution was afoot.
Then came the Internet:
maturity and social responsibility meet the computing revolution. By the middle
90's, it wasn't me, me, me, the mantra of the 80s. Nor was it just
networking with the group as it had been in the early 90s, sharing and leveraging
the power of collective intellect with our co-workers. Suddenly, we were gifted
with the intellectual resources of strangers. Everybody had input, everybody
could get the output, regardless of age, nationality, geography, or prosperity.
It was the ultimate
breakdown of the status hierarchies around which societies and economies had
been structured. Much more than an information highway, what we were growing
was a global information organ with millions of donors.
That was a big step.
So big, in fact, we assume we have reached the ultimate frontier. We assume
that, unless we start trading email with extra-terrestrials, there is simply
no larger vision to which we can aspire.
No sooner did we
make this transition from individualization to socialization, to globalization
of computing technology, than our dreams became banal. Let's face it, you don't
see many people with a wondrous state of awe in their faces like you used to
see when each new generation of technology came along. There is not that "WOW"
factor that was so much a part of computer chatter just a few years ago.
Are we getting too
sophisticated, or are we just numbed by a change rate so dramatic that we fail
to absorb the experience, can't find time to reflect on the possibilities, and
thereby fail to comprehend them? Does blame for this blasé attitude fall
upon the technology that now passes for new? Have we reached a plateau in the
inventive cycle where what is new is truly devoid of "WOW?"
To find answers to
these questions, we need to pause in this first blush of computing maturity
and consider what shape our future will take. We don't have to guess the specific
futures of specific technologies. We must decide what future we want with the
technology in our future. We must learn how to sustain a computer revolution
until a computer renaissance takes root.
From Revolution
to Renaissance
The Renaissance that
began early in our millennium was a 200-year period in European history when
the age of enlightenment and the modern world began. It combined a new sense
of inspiration in the arts and sciences with a respect for the classical culture
of the Greek period. It was also a period of profound and constant change.
Through our technology
revolution we have set the stage for a new renaissance, one perhaps even more
profound than the last. Today, elementary school children wake up, eat their
corn flakes, read email from the French kid they met in the "Save the Antarctic
Penguin" chat group, check out their favorite Web site in Senegal, and
download the latest snapshot from Mars. This is not just a minor change in the
way children learn. This is the evolution of our species. It's like when reptiles
learned to fly.
Sustaining
Revolution: Those of us who have been inspired by the technology
of our time believe that there is more to it than the technology itself.
We
are battling for a vision of what humanity can become, not just over what the
next technology will be.
The Founding Fathers
understood very well that a revolution is not won once, it is won in every day
one lives. A revolution can go sour quickly: they don't always have happy
endings; it is not a foregone conclusion that this one will. The reason why even so charismatic
a set of changes as computing has delivered to us remains at risk, is because
we are no longer inspired to imagine how it can make us better. In our minds,
computer technology has lost its alchemic properties to make changes we believe
are good. Without seeing in technology a means to be what we want to be, computer
magic becomes just so much commercialized intellectual property.
We must save our
revolution by reinvigorating it with the same creative energy that shaped the
Renaissance. The computer revolution has lost its idealistic context.
We have
been so caught up in the technology that we have lost our bearings as to the
purposes to which it should and should not be put. If we dont decide as a global
community that technology is not only a thing of value but a thing of values,
then the technology that could have been a means to a greater civilization will
become but a means to a greater commercialization. Only the perpetuation of
our idealism for technology's power for positive change can protect us.
Counterrevolution:
The potential for our society to be reformed by computing technology into
a vastly more egalitarian and libertarian culture is a poison pill for the status
quo. It should be no surprise that there is an old guard vested in an authoritarian,
elitist hierarchy managing commerce, government, information and culture.
What
may be more surprising is that the counterrevolution is already
underway. It is a quietly titanic struggle for the cultural, mercantile,
and political turf of our time. That conflict does not turn on whether technology will transform
every aspect of our experience, because both sides know that it will. At stake
is the destination to which that change will take us.
Wresting control
of the computer revolution will require no more of our adversaries than stripping
us of our belief that we live in an extraordinary time. If they can make us
think secularly about the spirited change all around us, that it is not a human
transformation in progress but that it is--figuratively and literally--just
business as usual, then the revolution will have been co-opted. The new renaissance
will have been put on hold, awaiting a generation of perhaps another millennium
that will have more courage and more consciousness than our own.
Without the idea
that technologically generated social and economic change has a higher purpose
than stuffing an electronic advertisement into every electronic mail box, we
benefit no more from computers than a sleeping dog benefits from being quietly
tied to a shorter chain. Our best protection is the preservation of our idealism,
the rekindling of that lost enthusiasm for the possibilities of the new, the
resurgence of "WOW." Without a liberating philosophy behind liberating
technology, the net result is but a networked form of slavery.
A
Beta Renaissance: What we need to seize hold to and never surrender
is the "beta concept," the concept that the present is an experiment
in The Future. The term beta is borrowed from the software industrys
practice of giving us experimental versions of programs for the purpose of creating
a better product. Inherent in this beta-making practice is the recognition that
the creative process is always in transition, working out defects toward
perfection.
It was this same beta concept that guided us in our romance with the technological
innovations of our time. What was lost as this technology became ubiquitous
was the sense that it has an ethical purpose. That purpose is no less than the
liberation of humankind from ignorance, poverty, and oppression.
Potential for
a new renaissance is present only if we act upon the promise of our computer
revolution. A higher purpose is what makes this technology
revolutionary--that
is what distinguishes it from the electric toothbrush, the whitewall tire and
the microwave oven. We infuse the computer with an ethical dimension.
It is up to us to use our machines to revolutionize ourselves.
A
Beta Platform: Those of us who have become committed to this technology
as a way of life, as a way of working, as a way of seeing the future, need to
become part of a beta politic, the body politic lobbying for a renaissance
time in the Digital Age. Our task as citizens of this new age is to abandon
our adolescent focus on products and accept the adult responsibility of principles.
It is up to us to preserve that from which we have taken great profit. Like
American revolutionaries of another time, our calling is the establishment of
a nation without boundaries for the preservation of digital liberty, digital
equality, digital fraternity, and digital privacy. These are the four planks
of the Beta Platform.
Digital liberty.
We must not allow our freedom to be compromised merely because it is expressed
through new and unfamiliar technologies. Those rights, which existed before
computing and digital technology became the primary media of communication,
must be translated into a new vocabulary for the Digital Age.
Digital technology
does not set limits upon human liberty, it defeats them. The freedoms of speech
and of association we are afforded by the use of these technologies are far
more expansive than ever before, yet we naïvely assume that individual freedoms
need new limits now that they are technologically enhanced. If we accept restraints
based upon the premise that technology makes us "dangerously" free,
and that we therefore require less liberty than the technology will allow, each
wave of new technology will make us less free. Digital liberty is not liberty
as we have known it, but liberty as we deserve it. It cannot be defined
by the limits of technologies of the past, present, or future. Technologies
are fixed; liberty is unfettered. Freedom is too precious to obsolesce.
Digital equality.
We now live in a world where a few people have $18 million jet planes and a
lot of other people run around naked carrying sticks and stabbing at frogs.
This division in our species is equally profound in terms of the levels of technological
sophistication between the computerized elite and the rest of the planet.
If
that disparity persists, we will completely disenfranchise, disorient, and disconnect
our society from within itself, and from the computer-illiterate
world. We cannot abide such profound divisions between cultures with digital
technology and without and still survive. The accelerated growth of human intellect
in a Digital Age exponentially multiplies the gross inequities between the world's
rich and poor that haunt us today. If profoundly greater information, wealth,
and educational resources come to the "Digital haves" without flowing
to the "Digital have-nots," future generations will not be wondering
whether dolphins have a language; they'll be wondering if people who don't have
computers do.
Digital fraternity.
We must protect the advances we've made through computing technology that
have allowed people to collaborate and work in less rigidly structured work
places. Our business organizations are being made more hospitable and rewarding.
The trend in our business culture toward being inspired by data, and away from
being subordinated by data, must not be reversed. There is now more democracy
in the digital workplace; we should let it be.
Fraternity also speaks
to responsibility on the Internet. Economic as well as political forces are
moving to exploit the open frontier of the great electronic marketplace for
ideas. Businesses want to push Internet content at us like broadcast television
rather than allow us to elect what content to take, as we do in a library.
If
I know anything as a parent, it is that I would rather have my children grow
up in a library than in front of a television.
This trend toward
commercialization in digital culture is not a healthy one. The Internet cannot
be reduced to a giant roadside stand; it is a fragile instrument for teaching
and learning, and if we allow it to be corporatized, it will not survive as
an eminent cultural and educational resource. If this global library for all
human knowledge and art is reduced to a high-bandwidth "million burgers
sold" sign, I'd say we have lost the digital revolution.
Digital privacy.
Our digital privacy is already being encroached utterly and astonishingly.
Do not let corporate America steal our privacy by tracking our electrons, or
allow governments to steal it in the name of protecting us from someone else's.
Just because the Internet embodies the best and the worst of our speech, from
our greatest literary inspirations to our rawest depravities, it does not require
that it be policed out of existence.
We are becoming the
willing victims of our own total immersion in digital surveillance. Our choices
in electronic commerce, entertainment, and personal interests, and the pattern
of our movements through the electronic world are the most intimate reflection
of our private identities.
Our Digital
Duty
Let us not go quietly.
Use the power of the purse to disavow those services and products that do not
respect your digital privacy. Use the power of your vote to resist aggressively
all legislation that would deprive you of your digital liberty. Let the way
we develop the Internet forge digital fraternity.
When we acknowledge
that technology can promote human virtues, we must also acknowledge that it
falls prey to human vices. If you believe as I do that at the end of our millennium
we have it within our reach to become a changed species, then we must all make
this belief part of our day to day practice: to think ethically as we act digitally.
The bridge over the
millennium that can carry us from a digital revolution to the greatest renaissance
in human history is not technology. Technology has afforded us no more than
an historic opportunity. Our bridge to a different century and to a better world
is our will to use technology to make it so.
It has been a great
run this last twenty years from the birth of the PC to the evolution of the World
Wide Web. It has been a great childhood. It has been a great adolescence.
And
it can be a great and gifted maturity if we are prepared to accept the responsibility
we have as the American generation which promulgated digital technology served
as its advocates, and sponsored it across the world. It is not our destiny to
preside over a failed revolution. It is our calling to build a Digital Renaissance.
We are so close to a great uplifting of humankind through technology that it
would be unbearable, inexcusable, and unexplainable to our children if we fail.
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