This Week's Clue: Values Coming Together

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 18 of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of April 23 30.

Enjoy.

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There is a direct link between the values underlying modern software development, modern business practices, modern academic practices, and modern politics.

If you follow the threads you can be current in any of these subjects.

In all these areas it is the values made possible by the Internet which are ascendant.

• In software they call it open source. (That's Richard Stallman at right.) Rather than keeping code secret, and forcing people to license it under terms that don't even require that it work, companies publish the code publicly and sell support. In return communities contribute improvements, the product gets better faster, and the best contract, the GPL, assures the program's creator they benefit from all those improvements.
• In business practice they call it the Economics of Abundance. The agents of the seller are no longer the masters of the market. Now it's the agents of the buyer who are most important. Newspapers fade, Google rises. And those who take this lesson forward will rise to the top of the business heap.
• In academic practice, which until recent decades prided itself on the free sharing of knowledge, there's growing pressure to return to that practice. When the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation insisted on the sharing of AIDS knowledge as a condition for grants last year, this was an important turning point. The wholly-proprietary model of university research, which grew many colleges into multiversities over the last decade, is under threat.
• In politics I call this the Internet Thesis. It is the real power behind the Obama candidacy. He doesn't lean against the old Thesis of Conflict, as Hillary Clinton does, and he doesn't face it head-on, as John Edwards does. He simply denies it exists, talks about consensus, and millions of people understand.

All these trends are connected by what Al Gore once called the “Information Superhighway.”

In some ways it was a great analogy. The Internet over the last decade has become essential infrastructure, as important or more important than railroads, air routes, highways or ports. When the roads are jammed you can telecommute. Our needs for warehouses are going down, thanks to the Internet, and containerization is moving to the consumer market, thanks to the Internet. Change moves faster-and-faster, faster-and-faster, not just because of Moore's Law but because of the Internet, which embodies the possibilities of that Law.

 

In other ways Gore's analogy fails. Because the Internet is more than an economic event. It is the supreme cultural, political and intellectual event of our time.

 

When we look back on this era, I believe, historians will see an intimate connection between the rise of the Internet and the Global War on Terror. The GWOT was a reaction, by both the West and the Muslim World, against the accelerating modernization the Internet made possible, and which it makes economically necessary.

 

But the Internet's power cannot be denied. The oil producing world continues to flail in economic misery, the United States falls further-and-further behind in the economic race, both dragons are locked in mortal combat while the rest of the world races ahead. Europe races ahead. China races ahead. India races ahead. Even Latin America is racing ahead.

 

Terrorism really has nothing to do with the present conflict. It is a war of reaction, against the 21^st century notion of constant, accelerating change which the Internet makes necessary. Rather than deal with intellectual ferment, or academic sharing, or business change, or open source, the forces of reaction kill people, and in killing terrorize the rest of us into killing as well.

 

This is the true mark of a global political thesis expiring. As I've written in my Internet Thesis work at DanaBlankenhorn.com, every generational thesis in American history has died in violence. The same is true on a worldwide basis. Mass industrialization at the start of the 20^th century led to two World Wars. The birth of modern science, known as the Enlightenment, gave birth to countless wars, and eventually to new types of war, in Crimea and here in America. The Renaissance also brought war in its wake.

 

When an old order faces extinction it always lashes out in bloodshed. That's what Bush's war really is, not a struggle against Islam but a struggle by both Islam and militant Christianity on behalf of the old order, the unchanging, the immutable, the industrial, the proprietary.

 

All are threatened by the rise of the Internet.

 

And the way to win this struggle is to stop the killing and fight the intellectual, economic, and moral battles the Internet makes possible. Until Americans and their government engage in the real struggle of our time, the Age of the Internet and the War Against Oil, we're headed for the exits, and the fate Latin America's generals gave that great continent throughout the 20^th century.

 

Stop fighting the war. Use the Internet. Fight the war against the war. It's the only way to win.