Americans are suffering through our quadrennial presidential primary season, and many of us are already numb to its seemingly interminable existence. As if standing warily just inside the entrance to a long dark tunnel, we know that there are many months to go before we can, hopefully, give Bill and the Czarina the old heave-ho. I feel like I’m trapped in my centre seat at an inscrutably boring opera when all I want to do is visit the men’s room – urgently.
There must be some way to fast-forward through this depressing process. One of its worst aspects is that what might have been an interesting, provocative public debate about the role of government in the emerging networked economy has quickly and tragically disintegrated into the predictable, banal ba{BBle of name-calling and empty rhetoric we have come to expect.
Listening to Nixon/Reagan speechwriter-turned-millionaire TV talk-show host-turned rabid right-winger Pat Buchanan promising to build a wall along the US-Mexican border, as he was doing during the Arizona primary (the week this column was written), one might be forgiven for thinking that no-one else realises that the status quo is as dead as Bill’s moral compass. You can talk about protecting dead-end manufacturing jobs all you want; the real issue of the day is bandwidth.
More specifically, what counts is the difference that increasingly thick bandwidth capability, at ever lower costs, will mean to our personal and professional lives.
Investor relations officers: as the gatekeepers of financial information and the guardians of the resulting relationships between owners and the owned, perk up your ears.
Those media pundits could be having a much more fascinating debate, which has so far been lost beneath the television prattle of conflicting sound bites and gotcha print reporting. The debate could be concentrating on how democracy and economies, and yes, investor relations, are going to function when we’re all zip-zapping e-mails and using artificial intelligence to sift through vast reservoirs of electronic information.
We’ve read about the electronic town meetings usurping the traditional politicians, bringing us back, perhaps, to the pure, direct plebiscite democracy of the ancient Greeks, and all from the comfort of our living rooms. We know, too, that there is a subtle but real diffusion of cultural power away from Hollywood, New York and London now that anyone can throw up a Web page for a few dollars.
So what’s next: Direct control of multinationals by investors? Interactive analyst meetings on the Net? Indeed, why not have shareholders vote through the World Wide Web. Who needs fund managers? I can see it now: Tune into the (insert name of your favourite investor relations agency here, reader) Web page tonight at 8.00 and vote your shares. Should company A buy company B? Should CEO Bob get his bonus? Click here to toss the board out on their rear ends.
Well, maybe that won’t happen quite yet. But it could. The point is that much of what we take for granted about the interplay between individuals, government institutions and economic entities is certain to change in the near future.
Editorial space and my intellectual acumen, or lack thereof, prevent a thorough discussion of how information technologies will inexorably alter the way we relate to each other, to our sense of nation state and to the companies we work for and invest in.
Suffice it to say that there is plenty of fodder to digest. George Gilder, the prolific guru of technology’s catalyst of the new libertarianism, is perhaps the best known of those who argue that government will cease to have relevance in a world in which people and businesses can do for themselves or their neighbours what has taken a centralised power to accomplish – or more precisely to fail to accomplish.
Here’s just one of Gilder’s examples: As bandwidth incre-ases and the cost of producing and transmitting electronic information plummets, ‘the most deprived ghetto child in the most blighted project will gain educational opportunities exceeding those of today’s suburban preppie.’
Which means there may not be a lot of new jobs at the Board of Education.
The Gilder quote, incidentally, is lifted from a thoughtful analysis of his writing in the January 1996 issue of Wired, which prompted this month’s techno musing.
So are we heading to a future of true democracy for all? Of true shareholder sovereignty? Or only of chaos?
Who knows. But it’s worth pausing to ponder the impact that networked information has had in the corporate structure where, as has been well-documented, the traditional up-and-down command hierarchy is being replaced by information sharing and decentralised decision-making. Not to mention, of course, a lot of laid-off middle managers.
And we’re not just talking old Rust Belt manufacturing dinosaurs or north of England industrial fossils. Big change is coming to those who, on the surface, still seem to be riding the technology boom.
Consider Microsoft. What made Bill Gates a zillionaire, and Microsoft a de facto transnational government – controlling not necessarily what we think but how we process what we do think – was, of course, software. Like John D Rockefeller in an earlier age, Microsoft supplied the fuel that made the revolution happen in the first place. First for individual PCs, with DOS and later Windows, and then in the distributive computing environment with Microsoft Office and Mail and all the rest.
In any one niche, Microsoft had, and has, competitors galore. But no-one else has had the technical and marketing brilliance to combine them all with such synergy and efficiencies as Mr Gates and his Seattle minions have done.
But now even that may be challenged. It’s back to the future for computing, back to dumb terminals connected to a central repository of software, with the added element of, potentially, universal interactivity.
Except that this time around, the mainframe is not in some mysterious, off-limits computer room manned by the geeks speaking their private techno-ba{BBle. This time it’s the Internet. And anyone, anywhere can jump aboard.
A few weeks back, Oracle Corporation demonstrated the first of its new appliance-like computers that are basically designed just to handle communications and relatively simple computing functions, but without all the internal workings needed to store and manipulate huge quantities of data. Instead, your specialised software – say, a high-end economic modelling package – would be stored on the Web and you would rent or license it as you felt necessary.
Retail price for the hardware: $500. Compare that to the desktop in your office or the probably over-endowed gizmo you have at home to balance the domestic budget. IBM and others have similar products in the works, too.
AT&T announced recently, meanwhile, that it will offer low-cost Internet access to each of its 80 mn residential customers in the US.
All of which means that the networked economy is not fantasy. It’s here and it’s real. And it will propel us into a new era of individualism and mandatory self-reliance. We’ll do for customers what big government, big corporations, big unions and even big churches have done for us. Hierarchies are doomed.
But what has my blood boiling during this drawn-out election campaign season is that none of the established politicians criss-crossing the US, is even discussing any of this. Only political neophyte Steve Forbes is asking us to plan for the inevitable future. For the rest it’s a rehash of yesterday’s stale polemics.
Clearly, today’s politicians have forfeited their right to be taken seriously. The future is too important to be left to them. But hey, it’s going to happen no matter who is in the White House.
In the meantime, I need to find the mute control.
