The Ideaopolis

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Kevin Carey

Here is generous compensation for the disadvantages of the virtual world which I listed last week. In the general welter of bad news and pessimism which now generally passes for news and comment, I was cheered by a report that California will never vote Republican again. The core of the argument was that the industrial-academic complex of Silicon Valley, Stanford and Berkeley has created a new ideaopolis, that there will be many others and that those within them and influenced by them will remain or become socially liberal and economically compassionate. There was some evidence based on District returns in the 2000 Congressional and Presidential Elections but it was only a piece of wishful thinking. If our education systems have not saved us from callousness and coarseness in our discourse they are hardly likely to have a more beneficial effect on our voting and our actions.

Yet, on that reading we are irremediably doomed or, at least, those less well off are. Our plenty may be tinged with guilt and their poverty with righteousness but I know which combination most people would prefer. But are these interlocking antitheses inevitable? I think not. There is a germ of truth in the ideaopolis theory which requires detailed examination.

First of all, there is critical mass. It may be very difficult to gather a large number of like-minded -- shall we say good -- people in one place at one time but the constant cross-fertilisation of the Internet where people with common outlooks and interests support each other could be a powerful model.

How much richer might our culture have been if Proust and Henry James or Mahler and Ravel had been in the same group mailing list? How much richer still if the pre First World War Viennese coterie or the 1920s Paris cultural set had been able to supplement their arguing, drinking and campaigning with a constant stream of reminder and encouragement?

It might easily be objected that people with any kind of common interest or outlook can use the Internet for mutual reinforcement but there are two differences between progressives and conservatives, the generous and the greedy, which make the Internet much more natural for the former than the latter.

• Progressives are naturally fissiparous and disputatious and although this will likely flare now and again into hostility the advantages of common support outweigh this.
• Conservatives, on the other hand, already have very strong power networks so the impact of the Internet will be to narrow the effectiveness gap, not least because progressives have been early adopters and conservatives are late adopters.

  In a rapidly changing virtual environment that might even give progressives an edge. Perhaps more important, the Internet at its best -- when it's not simply another vehicle for promoting conspicuous consumerism -- relies upon trust and even the possibility of vulnerability. Contrary to the Robin Hood thesis, there's no honour among thieves. Some people naturally share, which is the quintessential ethic of cyberspace, while others draft contracts.

  A second major factor is the different model which most academics and progressives employ when thinking about their work. We tend to be Aristotelian, to think that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and in this fast moving world we think that tomorrow's idea is the only one worth pursuing. We are not defensive, we are not trying to conserve, we are not trying to hold back progress. We do not, like many major corporations, quite deliberately withhold new ideas and new devices because we have a warehouse full of old ones still to be sold. We recognise that in cyberspace it is creating critical mass that counts, our trusted friends passing us on to their trusted friends. The power networks, on the other hand, have a much tighter, narrower, sceptical view of trust. When a Swiss banker says that he is going to clean your clock before a deal is even discussed, let alone closed, you know the kind of milieu in which you are dealing.

  Though this is easy to exaggerate, the 19th Century political systems which most of us endure cannot survive new forms of decision making in which power is much more temporary and diffuse.

  Admittedly, lobbyists and PR companies will invent ever cleverer Internet tools to circumvent spam blocking filters but when most people are connected most of the time the game will be up for secret deals in what we used to call smoke filled rooms.

  A possible downside to this is that misinformation or simply garbled messages will lead to cyber hysteria as millions of people use their mobile connectivity to register protest and call for resignations. Mass movements have occasionally pitched good people out of power but bad people have much more to fear.

  Still, this is not a straight split between academics and idealists on the one hand and the whole of the business sector on the other.

  Entrepreneurs, by their very nature, get bored easily and want to cross-fertilise. In a world of change it is the flat-footed magnate, weighed down with assets and caution that will miss the next wave. Except in California where there has been a genuine understanding of the relevance of cyberspace to our future, most of the mess and the failure, the hype and the horror, has come from people using old models.

  MIT, honorary West Coast, has shown the way by putting all its course material online for free. You're only as good as your next product. Selling old stock will be out and with it will go the disproportionately clumsy idea of patent and copyright. The Human Genome copyright controversy was a crux issue and the free to air people have made too big a rent in the corporatist copyright tapestry for it to be convincingly restored.

  There will be new forms of trade in intellectual property but they will almost certainly revolve around one-off payments for state of the art information which will give yet another advantage to innovators over replicators. Nobody, however, could have lived through the 1980s without being deeply aware of the power of the major corporations not only to affect consumer behaviour but also to force governments to retreat over the regulation of commerce. The conservatives ultimately have two massive advantages: they own and control the telecommunications system; and they are defending what they have, which is always simpler than explaining the merits of the new Jerusalem.

  My intellect says that the ideaopolis will be a powerful force for change and that its effects will be almost entirely beneficial but the power of what is called the free market -- but which is actually a collection of monopolies and cartels -- is awesome.

  One of the disturbing phenomena of the Internet era is the way in which entrepreneurs have developed ideas and then sold them to bigger players. The outstanding question, then, is whether this new wave of innovation will be absorbed by the giants of international capitalism or whether it will engulf them. Ominously, the patronising indifference of the establishment to the Internet is rapidly changing to concern; this is something that it does not but must control. In the old world our resort would have been to resistance. Our best course now is to run, straight ahead, as fast as we can, so that they will never quite understand, never catch up.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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