roundtable: Making cyberspace work for humanity

roundtable: Making cyberspace work for humanity

Making cyberspace work for humanity

Vigdor Schreibman - FINS (fins@access.digex.net)
Wed, 24 May 1995 09:52:16 -0400 (EDT) 

Date: Wed, 24 May 1995 09:52:16 -0400 (EDT)
From: Vigdor Schreibman - FINS <fins@access.digex.net>
To: Vigdor Schreibman - FINS <fins@access.digex.net>
Subject: Making cyberspace work for humanity
Message-Id: <Pine.SUN.3.91.950524095107.12179D-100000@access5.digex.net>


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FINS SPECIAL REPORT                                            May 24, 1995
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MAKING CYBERSPACE WORK FOR HUMANITY
Trust & The Three I Economy
By Vigdor Schreibman

	If you are in a business where you must control the behavior of people,
such as shaping the news to suit advertiser priorities or producing
exploitive infotainment programming to build readership of the products of
the info "wasteland," I'd advise you not to try to do it in cyberspace.  At
least not the old fashioned way.  The big key to anything that works well in
cyberspace is not control but *trust*.  So says Charles Handy (a fellow of
the London Business School in London, England), in an article on "Trust and
the Virtual Organization," published in the May-June 1995 issue of Harvard
Business Review. 

	According to Handy, organizations that are fit for virtual reality had
better learn the new rules of trust, which: is not blind; needs boundaries;
demands learning; is tough; needs bonding; needs touch; and requires leaders.
Moreover, the materialists in this civilization should start reprogramming;
what works best in cyberspace is something else, says Handy, "An economy that
adds value through information, ideas, and intelligence--the Three I Economy
--offers a way out of the apparent clash between material growth and
environmental erosion.  Handy explains how this new economy works:
     Information, ideas, and intelligence consume few of the earth's
     resources.  Virtuality will redesign our cities with fewer
     skyscrapers and fewer commuters, making a quieter and perhaps a
     gentler world.  Our aspirations for growth in a Three I Economy
     would increasingly be more a matter for the mind than the body. 
     The growth sectors would be education in all its varied forms,
     health care, the arts and entertainment, leisure, travel, and
     sports.  As the economic statistics show, the new growth is already
     happening, and the organizations that deliver it tend to be small
     groups of colleagues united by mutual trust.  Small, growing
     companies often serve today's young people, who aspire to better
     music systems and computers rather than to faster cars or flashier
     clothes.  The younger generation also relishes employment in the
     new and freer organizations.

	What this all could mean for self-governance, Wharton business scholar
Russell Ackoff said it best some years ago: "In a world where growth is
limited by finite resources, citizen participation in governance is the key
for humanity to the meta-ideal of "unlimited development" and "unlimited
progress toward . . . omnicompetence."  Indeed, "To make participative
planning possible is to make an art of living," according to Ackoff. 

	Some business organizations get the message of virtual reality and some
do not.  Celebrity-based talk Internet versus Net-based genuine dialogue;
Interactive television to deliver fabricated programming "content" based on
gratuitous violence versus interacting with other real people, their own home
page, and their own catalogues of goods.  Even libraries must make a crucial
choice for the big payoff that is possible in cyberspace.  The challenge is
between highly federalized, impersonal digital libraries that offer only
"high-tech" and "low-trust" (e.g., the Library of Congress "THOMAS" server)
versus highly localized, electronic information partnerships that offer
"high-touch" and "high-trust" (e.g., the GPO Access system connected through
depository libraries "gateways" located in each electoral district of the
nation).

	The US Congress fails the test of cyberspace flat out.  Talking up a
storm over the benefits of "competition" they are planning telecommunications
reform bills [S.652; H.R. 1555], which mandate non-competition between the
biggest potential competitors--cable and telephone.  Among those so-called
benefits of "competition" will be guaranteed higher prices for cable
television operators to enable their high cost junk bond capital expansion,
and skyrocketing residential telephone bills to enable corporate centers of
power to bypass payment of their equitable share of local exchange network
costs.  Then they are also planning a major, multi-billion dollar give-away
of the broadcast spectrum to improve the profits of television broadcasters;
the same undeserving mob that has filled the airwaves with harmful and
exploitive programming to maximize profits without ever defining or
fulfilling their "public interest," trustee responsibilities.

	This is not one of your traditional sectoral development plans for a
merely limited economic plunder.  By those means they intend to radically
transform the whole global civilization.  Its a mega-corporate free ride, and
political outrage, largely bereft of social and ecological responsibility.

	To their credit, an opposition of sorts has begun to form, led by the
Clinton administration a few members of Congress from both major political
parties, together with leaders of the public interest community, but the
opposition is only fragmented and luke warm.  We are not firmly reaching for
the glorious purposeful possibilities of cyberspace that clearly exist, only
locked in a death battle with opportunistic mega-corporate realities.  In the
end, citizens must compellingly tell the people's representatives in Congress
to do what is right or we are all going to get what we deserve for failing.

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