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Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age

by Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler

Release 1.2, August 22, 1994

This statement represents the cumulative wisdom and innovation of many dozens of people. It is based primarily on the thoughts of four "co-authors": Ms. Esther Dyson; Mr. George Gilder; Dr. George Keyworth; and Dr. Alvin Toffler. This release 1.2 has the final "imprimatur" of no one. In the spirit of the age: It is copyrighted solely for the purpose of preventing someone else from doing so. If you have it, you can use it any way you want. However, major passages are from works copyrighted individually by the authors, used here by permission; these will be duly acknowledged in release 2.0. It is a living document. Release 2.0 will be released in October 1994. We hope you'll use it is to tell us how to make it better. Do so by:

Sending e-mail to mail@pff.org
Faxing 202/289-8928 or calling 202/289-6079
Sending POM (plain old mail) to 1301 K Street Suite 550 East, Washington, DC 20005

(The Progress & Freedom Foundation is a not-for-profit research and educational organization dedicated to creating a positive vision of the future founded in the historic principles of the American idea.)

Preamble

The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth -- in the form of physical resources -- has been losing value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.

In a First Wave economy, land and farm labor are the main "factors of production." In a Second Wave economy, the land remains valuable while the "labor" becomes massified around machines and larger industries. In a Third Wave economy, the central resource -- a single word broadly encompassing data, information, images, symbols, culture, ideology, and values -- is actionable knowledge.

The industrial age is not fully over. In fact, classic Second Wave sectors (oil, steel, auto-production) have learned how to benefit from Third Wave technological breakthroughs -- just as the First Wave's agricultural productivity benefited exponentially from the Second Wave's farm-mechanization.

But the Third Wave, and the Knowledge Age it has opened, will not deliver on its potential unless it adds social and political dominance to its accelerating technological and economic strength. This means repealing Second Wave laws and retiring Second Wave attitudes. It also gives to leaders of the advanced democracies a special responsibility -- to facilitate, hasten, and explain the transition.

As humankind explores this new "electronic frontier" of knowledge, it must confront again the most profound questions of how to organize itself for the common good. The meaning of freedom, structures of self-government, definition of property, nature of competition, conditions for cooperation, sense of community and nature of progress will each be redefined for the Knowledge Age -- just as they were redefined for a new age of industry some 250 years ago.

What our 20th-century countrymen came to think of as the "American dream," and what resonant thinkers referred to as "the promise of American life" or "the American Idea," emerged from the turmoil of 19th-century industrialization. Now it's our turn: The knowledge revolution, and the Third Wave of historical change it powers, summon us to renew the dream and enhance the promise.

The Nature of Cyberspace

The Internet -- the huge (2.2 million computers), global (135 countries), rapidly growing (10-15% a month) network that has captured the American imagination -- is only a tiny part of cyberspace. So just what is cyberspace?

More ecosystem than machine, cyberspace is a bioelectronic environment that is literally universal: It exists everywhere there are telephone wires, coaxial cables, fiber-optic lines or electromagnetic waves.

This environment is "inhabited" by knowledge, including incorrect ideas, existing in electronic form. It is connected to the physical environment by portals which allow people to see what's inside, to put knowledge in, to alter it, and to take knowledge out. Some of these portals are one-way (e.g. television receivers and television transmitters); others are two-way (e.g. telephones, computer modems).

Most of the knowledge in cyberspace lives the most temporary (or so we think) existence: Your voice, on a telephone wire or microwave, travels through space at the speed of light, reaches the ear of your listener, and is gone forever.

But people are increasingly building cyberspatial "warehouses" of data, knowledge, information and misinformation in digital form, the ones and zeros of binary computer code. The storehouses themselves display a physical form (discs, tapes, CD-ROMs) -- but what they contain is accessible only to those with the right kind of portal and the right kind of key.

The key is software, a special form of electronic knowledge that allows people to navigate through the cyberspace environment and make its contents understandable to the human senses in the form of written language, pictures and sound.

People are adding to cyberspace -- creating it, defining it, expanding it -- at a rate that is already explosive and getting faster. Faster computers, cheaper means of electronic storage, improved software and more capable communications channels (satellites, fiber-optic lines) -- each of these factors independently add to cyberspace. But the real explosion comes from the combination of all of them, working together in ways we still do not understand.

The bioelectronic frontier is an appropriate metaphor for what is happening in cyberspace, calling to mind as it does the spirit of invention and discovery that led ancient mariners to explore the world, generations of pioneers to tame the American continent and, more recently, to man's first exploration of outer space.

But the exploration of cyberspace brings both greater opportunity, and in some ways more difficult challenges, than any previous human adventure.

Cyberspace is the land of knowledge, and the exploration of that land can be a civilization's truest, highest calling. The opportunity is now before us to empower every person to pursue that calling in his or her own way.

The challenge is as daunting as the opportunity is great. The Third Wave has profound implications for the nature and meaning of property, of the marketplace, of community and of individual freedom. As it emerges, it shapes new codes of behavior that move each organism and institution -- family, neighborhood, church group, company, government, nation -- inexorably beyond standardization and centralization, as well as beyond the materialist's obsession with energy, money and control.

Turning the economics of mass-production inside out, new information technologies are driving the financial costs of diversity -- both product and personal -- down toward zero, "demassifying" our institutions and our culture. Accelerating demassification creates the potential for vastly increased human freedom.

It also spells the death of the central institutional paradigm of modern life, the bureaucratic organization. (Governments, including the American government, are the last great redoubt of bureaucratic power on the face of the planet, and for them the coming change will be profound and probably traumatic.)

In this context, the one metaphor that is perhaps least helpful in thinking about cyberspace is -- unhappily -- the one that has gained the most currency: The Information Superhighway. Can you imagine a phrase less descriptive of the nature of cyberspace, or more misleading in thinking about its implications? Consider the following set of polarities:

Information Superhighway     /     Cyberspace

Limited Matter               /     Unlimited Knowledge
Centralized                  /     Decentralized
Moving on a grid             /     Moving in space
Government ownership         /     A vast array of ownerships
Bureaucracy                  /     Empowerment
Efficient but not hospitable /     Hospitable if you customize it
Withstand the elements       /     Flow, float and fine-tune
Unions and contractors       /     Associations and volunteers
Liberation from First Wave   /     Liberation from Second Wave
Culmination of Second Wave   /     Riding the Third Wave

The highway analogy is all wrong," explained Peter Huber in Forbes this spring, "for reasons rooted in basic economics. Solid things obey immutable laws of conservation -- what goes south on the highway must go back north, or you end up with a mountain of cars in Miami. By the same token, production and consumption must balance. The average Joe can consume only as much wheat as the average Jane can grow. Information is completely different. It can be replicated at almost no cost -- so every individual can (in theory) consume society's entire output. Rich and poor alike, we all run information deficits. We all take in more than we put out."

The Nature and Ownership of Property

Clear and enforceable property rights are essential for markets to work. Defining them is a central function of government. Most of us have "known" that for a long time. But to create the new cyberspace environment is to create new property -- that is, new means of creating goods (including ideas) that serve people.

The property that makes up cyberspace comes in several forms: Wires, coaxial cable, computers and other "hardware"; the electromagnetic spectrum; and "intellectual property" -- the knowledge that dwells in and defines cyberspace.

In each of these areas, two questions that must be answered. First, what does "ownership" mean? What is the nature of the property itself, and what does it mean to own it? Second, once we understand what ownership means, who is the owner? At the level of first principles, should ownership be public (i.e. government) or private (i.e. individuals)?

The answers to these two questions will set the basic terms upon which America and the world will enter the Third Wave. For the most part, however, these questions are not yet even being asked. Instead, at least in America, governments are attempting to take Second Wave concepts of property and ownership and apply them to the Third Wave. Or they are ignoring the problem altogether.

For example, a great deal of attention has been focused recently on the nature of "intellectual property" -- i.e. the fact that knowledge is what economists call a "public good," and thus requires special treatment in the form of copyright and patent protection.

Major changes in U.S. copyright and patent law during the past two decades have broadened these protections to incorporate "electronic property." In essence, these reforms have attempted to take a body of law that originated in the 15th century, with Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, and apply it to the electronically stored and transmitted knowledge of the Third Wave.

A more sophisticated approach starts with recognizing how the Third Wave has fundamentally altered the nature of knowledge as a "good," and that the operative effect is not technology per se (the shift from printed books to electronic storage and retrieval systems), but rather the shift from a mass-production, mass-media, mass-culture civilization to a demassified civilization.

The big change, in other words, is the demassification of actionable knowledge.

The dominant form of new knowledge in the Third Wave is perishable, transient, customized knowledge: The right information, combined with the right software and presentation, at precisely the right time. Unlike the mass knowledge of the Second Wave -- "public good" knowledge that was useful to everyone because most people's information needs were standardized -- Third Wave customized knowledge is by nature a private good.

If this analysis is correct, copyright and patent protection of knowledge (or at least many forms of it) may no longer be unnecessary. In fact, the marketplace may already be creating vehicles to compensate creators of customized knowledge outside the cumbersome copyright/patent process, as suggested last year by John Perry Barlow:

"One existing model for the future conveyance of intellectual property is real-time performance, a medium currently used only in theater, music, lectures, stand-up comedy and pedagogy. I believe the concept of performance will expand to include most of the information economy, from multi-casted soap operas to stock analysis. In these instances, commercial exchange will be more like ticket sales to a continuous show than the purchase of discrete bundles of that which is being shown. The other model, of course, is service. The entire professional class -- doctors, lawyers, consultants, architects, etc. -- are already being paid directly for their intellectual property. Who needs copyright when you're on a retainer?"

Copyright, patent and intellectual property represent only a few of the "rights" issues now at hand. Here are some of the others:

Ownership of the electromagnetic spectrum, traditionally considered to be "public property," is now being "auctioned" by the Federal Communications Commission to private companies. Or is it? Is the very limited "bundle of rights" sold in those auctions really property, or more in the nature of a use permit -- the right to use a part of the spectrum for a limited time, for limited purposes? In either case, are the rights being auctioned defined in a way that makes technological sense?
Ownership over the infrastructure of wires, coaxial cable and fiber-optic lines that are such prominent features in the geography of cyberspace is today much less clear than might be imagined. Regulation, especially price regulation, of this property can be tantamount to confiscation, as America's cable operators recently learned when the Federal government imposed price limits on them and effectively confiscated an estimated $___ billion of their net worth. (Whatever one's stance on the FCC's decision and the law behind it, there is no disagreeing with the proposition that one's ownership of a good is less meaningful when the government can step in, at will, and dramatically reduce its value.)
The nature of capital in the Third Wave -- tangible capital as well as intangible -- is to depreciate in real value much faster than industrial-age capital -- driven, if nothing else, by Moore's Law, which states that the processing power of the microchip doubles at least every 18 months. Yet accounting and tax regulations still require property to be depreciated over periods as long as 30 years. The result is a heavy bias in favor of "heavy industry" and against nimble, fast-moving baby businesses.

Who will define the nature of cyberspace property rights, and how? How can we strike a balance between interoperable open systems and protection of property?

The Nature Of The Marketplace

Inexpensive knowledge destroys economies-of-scale. Customized knowledge permits "just in time" production for an ever rising number of goods. Technological progress creates new means of serving old markets, turning one-time monopolies into competitive battlegrounds.

These phenomena are altering the nature of the marketplace, not just for information technology but for all goods and materials, shipping and services. In cyberspace itself, market after market is being transformed by technological progress from a "natural monopoly" to one in which competition is the rule. Three recent examples:

The market for "mail" has been made competitive by the development of fax machines and overnight delivery -- even though the "private express statutes" that technically grant the U.S. Postal Service a monopoly over mail delivery remain in place.
During the past 20 years, the market for television has been transformed from one in which there were at most a few broadcast TV stations to one in which consumers can choose among broadcast, cable and satellite services.
The market for local telephone services, until recently a monopoly based on twisted-pair copper cables, is rapidly being made competitive by the advent of wireless service and the entry of cable television into voice communication. In England, Mexico, New Zealand and a host of developing countries, government restrictions preventing such competition have already been removed and consumers actually have the freedom to choose.

The advent of new technology and new products creates the potential for dynamic competition -- competition between and among technologies and industries, each seeking to find the best way of serving customers' needs. Dynamic competition is different from static competition, in which many providers compete to sell essentially similar products at the lowest price.

Static competition is good, because it forces costs and prices to the lowest levels possible for a given product. Dynamic competition is better, because it allows competing technologies and new products to challenge the old ones and, if they really are better, to replace them. Static competition might lead to faster and stronger horses. Dynamic competition gives us the automobile.

Such dynamic competition -- the essence of what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction" -- creates winners and losers on a massive scale. New technologies can render instantly obsolete billions of dollars of embedded infrastructure, accumulated over decades. The transformation of the U.S. computer industry since 1980 is a case in point.

In 1980, everyone knew who led in computer technology. Apart from the minicomputer boom, mainframe computers were the market, and America's dominance was largely based upon the position of a dominant vendor -- IBM, with over 50% world market-share.

Then the personal-computing industry exploded, leaving older-style big-business-focused computing with a stagnant, piece of a burgeoning total market. As IBM lost market-share, many people became convinced that America had lost the ability to compete. By the mid-1980s, such alarmism had reached from Washington all the way into the heart of Silicon Valley.

But the real story was the renaissance of American business and technological leadership. In the transition from mainframes to PCs, a vast new market was created. This market was characterized by dynamic competition consisting of easy access and low barriers to entry. Start-ups by the dozens took on the larger established companies -- and won.

After a decade of angst, the surprising outcome is that America is not only competitive internationally, but, by any measurable standard, America dominates the growth sectors in world economics -- telecommunications, microelectronics, computer networking (or "connected computing") and software systems and applications.

The reason for America's victory in the computer wars of the 1980s is that dynamic competition was allowed to occur, in an area so breakneck and pell-mell that government would've had a hard time controlling it _even had it been paying attention_. The challenge for policy in the 1990s is to permit, even encourage, dynamic competition in every aspect of the cyberspace marketplace.

The Nature of Freedom

Overseas friends of America sometimes point out that the U.S. Constitution is unique -- because it states explicitly that power resides with the people, who delegate it to the government, rather than the other way around.

This idea -- central to our free society -- was the result of more than 150 years of intellectual and political ferment, from the Mayflower Compact to the U.S. Constitution, as explorers struggled to establish the terms under which they would tame a new frontier.

And as America continued to explore new frontiers -- from the Northwest Territory to the Oklahoma land-rush -- it consistently returned to this fundamental principle of rights, reaffirming, time after time, that power resides with the people.

Cyberspace is the latest American frontier. As this and other societies make ever deeper forays into it, the proposition that ownership of this frontier resides first with the people is central to achieving its true potential.

To some people, that statement will seem melodramatic. America, after all, remains a land of individual freedom, and this freedom clearly extends to cyberspace. How else to explain the uniquely American phenomenon of the hacker, who ignored every social pressure and violated every rule to develop a set of skills through an early and intense exposure to low-cost, ubiquitous computing.

Those skills eventually made him or her highly marketable, whether in developing applications-software or implementing networks. The hacker became a technician, an inventor and, in case after case, a creator of new wealth in the form of the baby businesses that have given America the lead in cyberspatial exploration and settlement.

It is hard to imagine hackers surviving, let alone thriving, in the more formalized and regulated democracies of Europe and Japan. In America, they've become vital for economic growth and trade leadership. Why? Because Americans still celebrate individuality over conformity, reward achievement over consensus and militantly protect the right to be different.

But the need to affirm the basic principles of freedom is real. Such an affirmation is needed in part because we are entering new territory, where there are as yet no rules -- just as there were no rules on the American continent in 1620, or in the Northwest Territory in 1787.

Centuries later, an affirmation of freedom -- by this document and similar efforts -- is needed for a second reason: We are at the end of a century dominated by the mass institutions of the industrial age. The industrial age encouraged conformity and relied on standardization. And the institutions of the day -- corporate and government bureaucracies, huge civilian and military administrations, schools of all types -- reflected these priorities. Individual liberty suffered -- sometimes only a little, sometimes a lot:

In a Second Wave world, it might make sense for government to insist on the right to peer into every computer by requiring that each contain a special "clipper chip."
In a Second Wave world, it might make sense for government to assume ownership over the broadcast spectrum and demand massive payments from citizens for the right to use it.
In a Second Wave world, it might make sense for government to prohibit entrepreneurs from entering new markets and providing new services.
And, in a Second Wave world, dominated by a few old-fashioned, one-way media "networks," it might even make sense for government to influence which political viewpoints would be carried over the airwaves.

All of these interventions might have made sense in a Second Wave world, where standardization dominated and where it was assumed that the scarcity of knowledge (plus a scarcity of telecommunications capacity) made bureaucracies and other elites better able to make decisions than the average person.

But, whether they made sense before or not, these and literally thousands of other infringements on individual rights now taken for granted make no sense at all in the Third Wave.

For a century, those who lean ideologically in favor of freedom have found themselves at war not only with their ideological opponents, but with a time in history when the value of conformity was at its peak. However desirable as an ideal, individual freedom often seemed impractical. The mass institutions of the Second Wave required us to give up freedom in order for the system to "work."

The coming of the Third Wave turns that equation inside-out. The complexity of Third Wave society is too great for any centrally planned bureaucracy to manage. Demassification, customization, individuality, freedom -- these are the keys to success for Third Wave civilization.

The Essence of Community

If the transition to the Third Wave is so positive, why are we experiencing so much anxiety? Why are the statistics of social decay at or near all-time highs? Why does cyberspatial "rapture" strike millions of prosperous Westerners as lifestyle rupture? Why do the principles that have held us together as a nation seem no longer sufficient -- or even wrong?

The incoherence of political life is mirrored in disintegrating personalities. Whether 100% covered by health plans or not, psychotherapists and gurus do a land-office business, as people wander aimlessly amid competing therapies. People slip into cults and covens or, alternatively, into a pathological privatism, convinced that reality is absurd, insane or meaningless. "If things are so good," Forbes magazine asked recently, "why do we feel so bad?"

In part, this is why: Because we constitute the final generation of an old civilization and, at the very same time, the first generation of a new one. Much of our personal confusion and social disorientation is traceable to conflict within us and within our political institutions -- between the dying Second Wave civilization and the emergent Third Wave civilization thundering in to take its place.

Second Wave ideologues routinely lament the breakup of mass society. Rather than seeing this enriched diversity as an opportunity for human development, they attach it as "fragmentation" and "balkanization." But to reconstitute democracy in Third Wave terms, we need to jettison the frightening but false assumption that more diversity automatically brings more tension and conflict in society.

Indeed, the exact reverse can be true: If 100 people all desperately want the same brass ring, they may be forced to fight for it. On the other hand, if each of the 100 has a different objective, it is far more rewarding for them to trade, cooperate, and form symbiotic relationships. Given appropriate social arrangements, diversity can make for a secure and stable civilization.

No one knows what the Third Wave communities of the future will look like, or where "demassification" will ultimately lead. It is clear, however, that cyberspace will play an important role knitting together in the diverse communities of tomorrow, facilitating the creation of "electronic neighborhoods" bound together not by geography but by shared interests.

Socially, putting advanced computing power in the hands of entire populations will alleviate pressure on highways, reduce air pollution, allow people to live further away from crowded or dangerous urban areas, and expand family time.

The late Phil Salin (in Release 1.0 11/25/91) offered this perspective: "[B]y 2000, multiple cyberspaces will have emerged, diverse and increasingly rich. Contrary to naive views, these cyberspaces will not all be the same, and they will not all be open to the general public. The global network is a connected 'platform' for a collection of diverse communities, but only a loose, heterogeneous community itself. Just as access to homes, offices, churches and department stores is controlled by their owners or managers, most virtual locations will exist as distinct places of private property."

"But unlike the private property of today," Salin continued, "the potential variations on design and prevailing customs will explode, because many variations can be implemented cheaply in software. And the 'externalities' associated with variations can drop; what happens in one cyberspace can be kept from affecting other cyberspaces."

"Cyberspaces" is a wonderful pluralistic word to open more minds to the Third Wave's civilizing potential. Rather than being a centrifugal force helping to tear society apart, cyberspace can be one of the main forms of glue holding together an increasingly free and diverse society.

The Role of Government

The current Administration has identified the right goal: Reinventing government for the 21st Century. To accomplish that goal is another matter, and for reasons explained in the next and final section, it is not likely to be fully accomplished in the immediate future. This said, it is essential that we understand what it really means to create a Third Wave government and begin the process of transformation.

Eventually, the Third Wave will affect virtually everything government does. The most pressing need, however, is to revamp the policies and programs that are slowing the creation of cyberspace. Second Wave programs for Second Wave industries -- the status quo for the status quo -- will do little damage in the short run. It is the government's efforts to apply its Second Wave modus operandi to the fast-moving, decentralized creatures of the Third Wave that is the real threat to progress. Indeed, if there is to be an "industrial policy for the knowledge age," it should focus on removing barriers to competition and massively deregulating the fast-growing telecommunications and computing industries.

One further point should be made at the outset: Government should be as strong and as big as it needs to be to accomplish its central functions effectively and efficiently. The reality is that a Third Wave government will be vastly smaller (perhaps by 50 percent or more) than the current one -- this is an inevitable implication of the transition from the centralized power structures of the industrial age to the dispersed, decentralized institutions of the Third. But smaller government does not imply weak government; nor does arguing for smaller government require being "against" government for narrowly ideological reasons.

Indeed, the transition from the Second Wave to the Third Wave will require a level of government activity not seen since the New Deal. Here are five proposals to back up the point.

1. The Path to Interactive Multimedia Access

The "Jeffersonian Vision" offered by Mitch Kapor and Jerry Berman has propelled the Electronic Frontier Foundation's campaign for an "open platform" telecom architecture:

"The amount of electronic material the superhighway can carry is dizzying, compared to the relatively narrow range of broadcast TV and the limited number of cable channels. Properly constructed and regulated, it could be open to all who wish to speak, publish and communicate. None of the interactive services will be possible, however, if we have an eight-lane data superhighway rushing into every home and only a narrow footpath coming back out. Instead of settling for a multimedia version of the same entertainment that is increasingly dissatisfying on today's TV, we need a superhighway that encourages the production and distribution of a broader, more diverse range of programming" (New York Times 11/24/93 p. A25).

The question is: What role should government play in bringing this vision to reality? But also: Will incentives for the openly-accessible, "many to many," national multimedia network envisioned by EFF harm the rights of those now constructing thousands of non-open local area networks?

These days, interactive multimedia is the daily servant only of avant-garde firms and other elites. But the same thing could have been said about word-processors 12 years ago, or phone-line networks six years ago. Today we have, in effect, universal access to personal computing -- which no political coalition ever subsidized or "planned." And America's networking menu is in a hyper-growth phase. Whereas the accessing software cost $50 two years ago, today the same companies hand it out free -- to get more people on-line.

This egalitarian explosion has occurred in large measure because government has stayed out of these markets, letting personal computing take over while mainframes rot (almost literally) in warehouses, and allowing (no doubt more by omission than commission) computer networks to grow, free of the kinds of regulatory restraints that affect phones, broadcast and cable.

All of which leaves reducing barriers to entry and innovation as the only effective near-term path to Universal Access. In fact, it can be argued that a near-term national interactive multimedia network is impossible unless regulators permit much greater collaboration between the cable industry and phone companies. The latter's huge fiber resources (nine times as extensive as industry fiber and rising rapidly) could be joined with the huge asset of 57 million broadband links (i.e. into homes now receiving cable-TV service) to produce a new kind of national network -- multimedia, interactive and (as costs fall) increasingly accessible to Americans of modest means.

That is why obstructing such collaboration -- in the cause of forcing a competition between the cable and phone industries -- is socially elitist. To the extent it prevents collaboration between the cable industry and the phone companies, present federal policy actually thwarts the Administration's own goals of access and empowerment.

The other major effect of prohibiting the "manifest destiny" of cable preserves the broadcast (or narrowband) television model. In fact, stopping an interactive multimedia network perpetuates John Malone's original formula -- which everybody (especially Vice-President Gore and the FCC) claims to oppose because of the control it leaves with system owners and operators.

The key condition for replacing Malone's original narrowband model is true bandwidth abundance. When the federal government prohibits the interconnection of conduits, the model gains a new lease on life. In a world of bandwidth scarcity, the owner of the conduit not only can but must control access to it -- thus the owner of the conduit also shapes the content. It really doesn't matter who the owner is. Bandwidth scarcity will require the managers of the network to determine the video programming on it.

Since cable is everywhere, particularly within cities, it would allow a closing of the gap between the knowledge-rich and knowledge-poor. Cable's broadband "pipes" already touch almost two-thirds of American households (and are easily accessible to another one-fourth). The phone companies have broadband fiber. A hybrid network -- co-ax plus fiber -- is the best means to the next generation of cyberspace expansion. What if this choice is blocked?

In that case, what might be called cyberspace democracy will be confined to the computer industry, where it will arise from the Internet over the years, led by corporate and suburban/exurban interests. While not a technological calamity, this might be a social perversion equivalent to what "Japan Inc." did to its middle and lower classes for decades: Make them pay 50% more for the same quality vehicles that were gobbling up export markets.

Here's the parallel: If Washington forces the phone companies and cable operators to develop supplementary and duplicative networks, most other advanced industrial countries will attain cyberspace democracy -- via an interactive multimedia "open platform" -- before America does, despite this nation's technological dominance.

Not only that, but the long-time alliance of East Coast broadcasters and Hollywood glitterati will have a new lease on life: If their one-way video empires win new protection, millions of Americans will be deprived of the tools to help build a new interactive multimedia culture.

A contrived competition between phone companies and cable operators will not deliver the two-way, multimedia and more civilized tele-society Kapor and Berman sketch. Nor is it enough to simply "get the government out of the way." Real issues of antitrust must be addressed, and no sensible framework exists today for addressing them. Creating the conditions for universal access to interactive multimedia will require a fundamental rethinking of government policy.

2. Promoting Dynamic Competition

Technological progress is turning the telecommunications marketplace from one characterized by "economies of scale" and "natural monopolies" into a prototypical competitive market. The challenge for government is to encourage this shift -- to create the circumstances under which new competitors and new technologies will challenge the natural monopolies of the past.

Price-and-entry regulation makes sense for natural monopolies. The tradeoff is a straightforward one: The monopolist submits to price regulation by the state, in return for an exclusive franchise on the market.

But what happens when it becomes economically desirable to have more than one provider in a market? The continuation of regulation under these circumstances stops progress in its tracks. It prevents new entrants from introducing new technologies and new products, while depriving the regulated monopolist of any incentive to do so on its own.

Price-and-entry regulation, in short, is the antithesis of dynamic competition.

The alternative to regulation is antitrust. Antitrust law is designed to prevent the acts and practices that can lead to the creation of new monopolies, or harm consumers by forcing up prices, limiting access to competing products or reducing service quality. Antitrust law is the means by which America has, for over 120 years, fostered competition in markets where many providers can and should compete.

The market for telecommunications services -- telephone, cable, satellite, wireless -- is now such a market. The implication of this simple fact is also simple, and price/entry regulation of telecommunications services -- by state and local governments as well as the Federal government -- should therefore be replaced by antitrust law as rapidly as possible.

This transition will not be simple, and it should not be instantaneous. If antitrust is to be seriously applied to telecommunications, some government agencies (e.g. the Justice Department's Antitrust Division) will need new types of expertise. And investors in regulated monopolies should be permitted time to re-evaluate their investments given the changing nature of the legal conditions in which these firms will operate -- a luxury not afforded the cable industry in recent years.

This said, two additional points are important. First, delaying implementation is different from delaying enactment. The latter should be immediate, even if the former is not. Secondly, there should be no half steps. Moving from a regulated environment to a competitive one is -- to borrow a cliche -- like changing from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right: You can't do it gradually.

3. Defining and Assigning Property Rights

In 1964, libertarian icon Ayn Rand wrote:

"It is the proper task of government to protect individual rights and, as part of it, formulate the laws by which these rights are to be implemented and adjudicated. It is the government's responsibility to define the application of individual rights to a given sphere of activity -- to define (i.e. to identify), not create, invent, donate, or expropriate. The question of defining the application of property rights has arisen frequently, in the wake of oil rights, vertical space rights, etc. In most cases, the American government has been guided by the proper principle: It sought to protect all the individual rights involved, not to abrogate them." ("The Property Status of the Airwaves," Objectivist Newsletter, April 1964)

Defining property rights in cyberspace is perhaps the single most urgent and important task for government information policy. Doing so will be a complex task, and each key area -- the electromagnetic spectrum, intellectual property, cyberspace itself (including the right to privacy) -- involves unique challenges. The important points here are:

First, this is a "central" task of government. A Third Wave government will understand the importance and urgency of this undertaking and begin seriously to address it; to fail to do so is to perpetuate the politics and policy of the Second Wave.

Secondly, the key principle of ownership by the people -- private ownership -- should govern every deliberation. Government does not own cyberspace, the people do.

Thirdly, clarity is essential. Ambiguous property rights are an invitation to litigation, channeling energy into courtrooms that serve no customers and create no wealth. From patent and copyright systems for software, to challenges over the ownership and use of spectrum, the present system is failing in this simple regard.

The difference between America's historic economic success can, in case after case, be traced to our wisdom in creating and allocating clear, enforceable property rights. The creation and exploration of cyberspace requires that wisdom to be recalled and reaffirmed.

4. Creating Pro-Third-Wave Tax and Accounting Rules

We need a whole set of new ways of accounting, both at the level of the enterprise, and of the economy.

"GDP" and other popular numbers do nothing to clarify the magic and muscle of information technology. The government has not been very good at measuring service-sector output, and almost all institutions are incredibly bad at measuring the productivity of information. Economists are stuck with a set of tools designed during, or as a result of, the 1930s. So they have been measuring less and less important variables with greater and greater precision.

At the level of the enterprise, obsolete accounting procedures cause us to systematically overvalue physical assets (i.e. property) and undervalue human-resource assets and intellectual assets. So, if you are an inspired young entrepreneur looking to start a software company, or a service company of some kind, and it is heavily information-intensive, you will have a harder time raising capital than the guy next door who wants to put in a set of beat-up old machines to participate in a topped-out industry.

On the tax side, the same thing is true. The tax code always reflects the varying lobbying pressures brought to bear on government. And the existing tax code was brought into being by traditional manufacturing enterprises and the allied forces that arose during the assembly line's heyday.

The computer industry correctly complains that half their product is depreciated in six months or less -- yet they can't depreciate it for tax purposes. The U.S. semiconductor industry faces five-year depreciation timetables for products that have three-year lives (in contrast to Japan, where chipmakers can write off their fabrication plants in one year). Overall, the tax advantage remains with the long, rather than the short, product life-cycle, even though the latter is where all design and manufacturing are trending.

It is vital that accounting and tax policies -- both those promulgated by private-sector regulators like the Financial Accounting Standards Board and those promulgated by the government at the IRS and elsewhere -- start to reflect the shortened capital life-cycles of the Knowledge Age, and the increasing role of intangible capital as "wealth."

5. Creating a Third Wave Government

Going beyond cyberspace policy per se, government must remake itself and redefine its relationship to the society at large. No single set of policy changes that can create a future-friendly government. But there are some yardsticks we can apply to policy proposals. Among them:

Is it based on the factory model, i.e. on standardization, routine and mass-production? If so, it is a Second Wave policy. Third Wave policies encourage uniqueness.
Does it centralize control? Second Wave policies centralize power in bureaucratic institutions; Third Wave policies work to spread power -- to empower those closest to the decision.
Does it encourage geographic concentration? Second Wave policies encourage people to congregate physically; Third Wave policies permit people to work at home, and to live wherever they choose.
Is it based on the idea of mass culture -- of everyone watching the same sitcoms on television -- or does it permit, even encourage, diversity within a broad framework of shared values? Third Wave policies will help transform diversity from a threat into an array of opportunities.

A serious effort to apply these tests to every area of government activity -- from the defense and intelligence community to health care and education -- would ultimately produce a complete transformation of government as we know it. Since that is what's needed, let's start applying.

Grasping the Future

The conflict between Second Wave and Third Wave groupings is the central political tension cutting through our society today. The more basic political question is not who controls the last days of industrial society, but who shapes the new civilization rapidly rising to replace it. Who, in other words, will shape the nature of cyberspace and its impact on our lives and institutions?

Living on the edge of the Third Wave, we are witnessing a battle not so much over the nature of the future -- for the Third Wave will arrive -- but over the nature of the transition. On one side of this battle are the partisans of the industrial past. On the other are growing millions who recognize that the world's most urgent problems can no longer be resolved within the massified frameworks we have inherited.

The Third Wave sector includes not only high-flying computer and electronics firms and biotech start-ups. It embraces advanced, information-driven manufacturing in every industry. It includes the increasingly data-drenched services -- finance, software, entertainment, the media, advanced communications, medical services, consulting, training and learning. The people in this sector will soon be the dominant constituency in American politics.

And all of those confront a set of constituencies made frightened and defensive by their mainly Second Wave habits and locales: Command-and-control regulators, elected officials, political opinion-molders, philosophers mired in materialism, traditional interest groups, some broadcasters and newspapers -- and every major institution (including corporations) that believes its future is best served by preserving the past.

For the time being, the entrenched powers of the Second Wave dominate Washington and the statehouses -- a fact nowhere more apparent than in the 1993 infrastructure bill: Over $100 billion for steel and cement, versus one lone billion for electronic infrastructure. Putting aside the question of whether the government should be building electronic infrastructure in the first place, the allocation of funding in that bill shows the Second Wave swamping the Third.

Only one political struggle so far contradicts the landscape offered in this document, but it is a big one: Passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement last November. This contest carried both sides beyond partisanship, beyond regionalism, and -- after one climactic debate on CNN -- beyond personality. The pro-NAFTA coalition opted to serve the opportunity instead of the problem, and the future as opposed to the past. That's why it constitutes a standout model for the likely development of a Third Wave political dialectic.

But a "mass movement" for cyberspace is still hard to see. Unlike the "masses" during the industrial age, this rising Third Wave constituency is highly diverse. Like the economic sectors it serves, it is demassified -- composed of individuals who prize their differences. This very heterogeneity contributes to its lack of political awareness. It is far harder to unify than the masses of the past.

Yet there are key themes on which this constituency-to-come can agree. To start with, liberation -- from Second Wave rules, regulations, taxes and laws laid in place to serve the smokestack barons and bureaucrats of the past. Next, of course, must come the creation -- creation of a new civilization, founded in the eternal truths of the American Idea.

It is time to embrace these challenges, to grasp the future and pull ourselves forward. If we do so, we will indeed renew the American Dream and enhance the promise of American life.

Recommendations to the European Council

Europe and the global information society

Members of the High-Level Group on the Information Society

Europe and the global information society
Recommendations to the European Council

On the basis of this report, the Council will adopt an operational programme defining precise procedures for action and the necessary means.

This Report urges the European Union to put its faith in market mechanisms as the motive power to carry us into the Information Age.

This means that actions must be taken at the European level and by Member States to strike down entrenched positions which put Europe at a competitive disadvantage:

Partnership for jobs

Our work has been sustained by the conviction expressed in the Commission's White Paper, Growth, Competitiveness and Employment, that "...the enormous potential for new services relating to production, consumption, culture and leisure activities will create large numbers of new jobs...". Yet nothing will happen automatically. We have to act to ensure that these jobs are created here, and soon. And that means public and private sectors acting together.

If we seize the opportunity

A common creation or a still fragmented Europe?

Time to press on

An Action Plan

New markets in Europe's information society

Chapter 2
A market-driven revolution

A break with the past

Two features are essential to the deployment of the information infrastructure needed by the information society: one is a seamless interconnection of networks and the other that the services and applications which build on them should be able to work together (interoperability).

In the past the political will to interconnect national telephone networks resulted in hundreds of millions of subscriber connections world-wide. Similar political determination and corresponding effort are required to set up the considerably more complex information infrastructures.

The challenge is to provide interconnections for a variety of networking conditions (e.g. fixed and new type of networks, such as mobile and satellite) and basic services (e.g. Integrated Service Digital Network - ISDN). Currently, the positions of monopoly operators are being eroded in these fast-developing areas.

Joint commercial decisions must be taken by the TOs without delay to ensure rapid extension of European basic services beyond telephony. This would improve their competitive position vis-à-vis non-European players in their own markets.

The European information society is emerging from many different angles. European infrastructure is evolving into an ever tighter web of networks, generic services, applications and equipment, the development, distribution and maintenance of which occupy a multitude of sources worldwide.

In an efficient and expanding information infrastructure, such components should work together.

Assembling the various pieces of this complex system to meet the challenge of interoperability would be impossible without clear conventions. Standards are such conventions.

Open systems standards will play an essential role in building a European information infrastructure.

Standards institutes have an honourable record in producing European standards, but the standardisation process as it stands today raises a number of concerns about fitness for purpose, lack of interoperability, and priority setting that is not sufficiently market driven.

Reduction in international, long distance and leased line tariffs will trigger expansion in the usage of infrastructures, generating additional revenues, and simultaneously giving a major boost to generic services and innovative applications

In most cases, the current unsatisfactory tariff situation results from the TOs' monopoly status and a variety of associated political constraints.

The introduction of competitive provision of services and infrastructures implies that TOs would be able to adjust their tariffs in line with market conditions. Rebalancing of international and long-distance versus local tariffs is a critical step in this process.

Market segments based on the new information infrastructures cannot provide an adequate return on investment without a certain level of demand. In most cases, competition alone will not provide such a mass, or it will provide it too slowly.

In addition, everyone involved in building up the information society must be in a position to adapt strategies and forge alliances to enable them to contribute to, and benefit from, overall growth in the field.

Since information infrastructures are borderless in an open market environment, the information society has an essentially global dimension.

The actions advocated in this Report will lead to a truly open environment, where access is provided to all players. This openness should find its counterpart in markets and networks of other regions of the world. It is obviously of paramount importance for Europe that adequate steps are taken to guarantee equal access

Towards a positive outcome

Chapter 3
Completing the agenda

Protection of intellectual property rights (IPR)

Privacy

Electronic protection (encryption), legal protection and security

Media ownership

The role of competition policy

Technology

Chapter 4
The building blocks of
the information society

The opportunity for the Union - strengthening its existing networks and accelerating the creationof new ones

Blazing the trail - ten applications to launch the information society

Application Two
DISTANCE LEARNING
Life long learning for a changing society

Application Three
A NETWORK FOR UNIVERSITIES AND RESEARCH CENTRES
Networking Europe's brain power

Application Four
TELEMATIC SERVICES FOR SMEs
Relaunching a main engine for growth and employment in Europe

Application Five
ROAD TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT
Electronic roads for better quality of life

Application Six
AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL
An electronic airway for Europe

Application Seven
HEALTHCARE NETWORKS
Less costly and more effective healthcare systems for Europe's citizens

Application Eight
ELECTRONIC TENDERING
More effective administration at lower cost

Application Nine
TRANS-EUROPEAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION NETWORK
Better government, cheaper government

Application Ten
CITY INFORMATION HIGHWAYS
Bringing the information society into the home

Chapter 5
Financing the information society - a task for the private sector

Chapter 6
Follow-up

An Action Plan - summary of recommendations

Member States should accelerate the ongoing process of liberalisation of the Telecom sector by :

Interconnection of networks and interoperability of services and applications should be primary Union objectives. The European standardisation process should be reviewed in order to increase its speed and responsiveness to markets.

As a matter of urgency the international, long distance and leased line tariffs should be adjusted to bring these down into line with rates practised in other advanced industrialised regions. The adjustment should be accompanied by the fair sharing of public service obligations among operators.

Public awareness should be promoted. Particular attention should be paid to the small and medium-sized business sector, public administrations and the younger generation.

The openness of the European market should find its counterpart in markets and networks of other regions of the world. It is of paramount importance for Europe that adequate steps should be taken to guarantee equal access.

Completing the agenda

The Information Society is global. Union action should aim to establish a common and agreed regulatory framework for the protection of intellectual property rights, privacy and security of information in Europe and, where appropriate, internationally.

Intellectual property protection must rise to the new challenges of globalisation and multimedia, and must continue to have a high priority at both European and international levels.

Without the legal security of a Union-wide approach, lack of consumer confidence will certainly undermine the rapid development of the information society. Given the importance and sensitivity of the privacy issue, a fast decision from Member States is required on the Commission's proposed Directive setting out general principles of data protection.

Work at the European level on electronic and legal protection as well as security should be accelerated.

Urgent attention should be given to the question of how we can avoid divergent national legislation on media ownership undermining the internal market. Effective rules must emerge to protect pluralism and competition.

Competition is a key element in Europe's strategy. The application of competition rules should reflect the reality of the newly emerging global markets and the speed of change in the environment.

Building blocks

Priority has to be given to the extension of the availability of EURO-ISDN, in line with current Commission proposals, and reductions in tariffs to foster the market.

The Council should support the implementation of the European Broadband Infrastructure and secure its interconnectivity with the whole of European telecom, cable television and satellite networks.

A European Broadband Steering Committee involving all relevant actors should be set up in order to develop a common vision and to monitor and facilitate the realisation of the overall concept through, in particular, demonstrations, and choice and definition of standards.

The provision and widespread use of standard trans-European basic services, including electronic mail, file transfer, video services, should be promoted by urgent and coherent action at both the European and Member State levels.

The Commission should initiate the creation of a " European Basic Services Forum" to accelerate the availability of unified standards for basic services.

Initiatives in the application domain are the most effective means of addressing the slow take-off of demand and supply. They have a demonstration function which would help promoting their use. The Group has identified the following initiatives :

The creation of the information society should be entrusted to the private sector and to the market forces.

The existing public funding should be refocused more specifically to target the requirements of the information society. At the Union level, this may require some reorientation of current allocations under such headings as the Fourth Framework Programme for research and development and the Structural Funds.

Follow-up

Given the urgency and importance of the tasks ahead, there must be, at Union level, one Council capable of dealing with the full range of issues associated with the information society. With this in mind, each Member State may wish to nominate a single minister to represent it in a Council of Ministers dedicated to the information society. The Commission should act similarly.

A Board composed of eminent figures from all sectors concerned, including the social partners, should be established by the Commission to work on the framework for implementing the information society and to promote public awareness of its opportunities and challenges. This Board should report at regular intervals to the institutions of the Union on progress made on the implementation of the recommendations contained in this Report.

postrOÆLXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXcate dLUrOÆLI»³ýt´+ëýd…cŽntry(šâƒÂmÔf!¿—iZž¥`GéÖ2³î¨œuãÔÎÄö0 A“url Nhttp://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/barlow_0296.declarationmime text/htmlhntt"28c9d4-1f2e-311c3f50"hvrsdata Date: Fri, 9 Feb 1996 17:16:35 +0100 To: barlow@eff.org From: John Perry Barlow Subject: A Cyberspace Independence Declaration Yesterday, that great invertebrate in the White House signed into the law the Telecom "Reform" Act of 1996, while Tipper Gore took digital photographs of the proceedings to be included in a book called "24 Hours in Cyberspace." I had also been asked to participate in the creation of this book by writing something appropriate to the moment. Given the atrocity that this legislation would seek to inflict on the Net, I decided it was as good a time as any to dump some tea in the virtual harbor. After all, the Telecom "Reform" Act, passed in the Senate with only 5 dissenting votes, makes it unlawful, and punishable by a $250,000 to say "shit" online. Or, for that matter, to say any of the other 7 dirty words prohibited in broadcast media. Or to discuss abortion openly. Or to talk about any bodily function in any but the most clinical terms. It attempts to place more restrictive constraints on the conversation in Cyberspace than presently exist in the Senate cafeteria, where I have dined and heard colorful indecencies spoken by United States senators on every occasion I did. This bill was enacted upon us by people who haven't the slightest idea who we are or where our conversation is being conducted. It is, as my good friend and Wired Editor Louis Rossetto put it, as though "the illiterate could tell you what to read." Well, fuck them. Or, more to the point, let us now take our leave of them. They have declared war on Cyberspace. Let us show them how cunning, baffling, and powerful we can be in our own defense. I have written something (with characteristic grandiosity) that I hope will become one of many means to this end. If you find it useful, I hope you will pass it on as widely as possible. You can leave my name off it if you like, because I don't care about the credit. I really don't. But I do hope this cry will echo across Cyberspace, changing and growing and self-replicating, until it becomes a great shout equal to the idiocy they have just inflicted upon us. I give you... A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions. You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose. In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us. You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat. In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media. Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. Davos, Switzerland February 8, 1996 **************************************************************** John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident Co-Founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow Message Service: 800/634-3542 Barlow in Meatspace Today (until Feb 12): Cannes, France Hotel Martinez: (33) 92 98 73 00, Fax: (33) 93 39 67 82 Coming soon to: Amsterdam 2/13-14, Winston-Salem 2/15, San Francisco 2/16-20, San Jose 2/21, San Francisco 2/21-23, Pinedale, Wyoming In Memoriam, Dr. Cynthia Horner and Jerry Garcia ***************************************************************** It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. --Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia postGéÖ2XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXcate šâƒÂGéÖ2 ®¬AïÐ´+ì? A.ntry(Á–Óý¶ÄÙÓ(´ONÕ²b¢ó_‹ p‘q¯²dûÖdurl >http://europa.eu.int/comm/dg05/soc-dial/info_soc/index_en.htmmime text/htmlhvrsdata Information Society

Preparing Canada for
a Digital World

FINAL REPORT OF
THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY
ADVISORY COUNCIL

COMPUTERIZED TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY

Frequently Asked Questions

It is not particularly odd to list common questions about technology and human responsibility. The odd thing would be to answer them!--or, rather, to propose a set of *canonical* answers.

The answers put forth here most definitely are not canonical. Think of this FAQ instead as a template, for which you must substitute your own answers. This is not to suggest a rootless relativism, but only to acknowledge what holds true in all matters of moral responsibility: every individual must knit his own pattern into the overall, harmonious fabric of truth, beauty, and goodness.

Portions of the following are adapted from the author's book, "The Future Does Not Compute -- Transcending the Machines in Our Midst," with kind permission of the publisher, O'Reilly & Associates. Other portions are adapted from a work in progress called "Daily Meditations for the Computer-entranced." Yet other portions are completely off-the-wall.

Technological Neutrality and Human Freedom
------------------------------------------

Responses to the Challenge of Technology
----------------------------------------

ANSWERS

We don't *have* to sleepwalk, but as one social function after another is transferred to the computer, the invitation is a seductive one, calling for the conscious exercise of personal responsibility in resistance to it.

In other words, the human being as a unique and incalculable individual begins to disappear between the cracks of automated logic.

There is no way to escape the difficult challenge of using technology responsibly, regardless of which technologies we choose.

By claiming to be master of all tools, the computer challenges us to contend for our own mastery on all fronts. Failing the challenge, we lose ourselves; rising to the challenge, we gain ourselves. The computer is our hope if we can accept it as our enemy; as our friend, it will destroy us.

In other words, as software advances, it is applied to more critical activities, where the risks are greater. The technical opportunity to become friendlier at one level is at the same time an opportunity to become unfriendly on a more decisive level. We must be more awake, more alert to our machine-transcending responsibilities, when dealing with the more advanced software, precisely because the advanced capabilities invite us to let go of yet higher human capacities.

The correlative act of responsibility is to bend our consciousness toward the speaker. Try to find a sympathetic connection with him, and to understand who is expressing himself in the words. Of course, it is a symptom of the information age that the speaker often cannot even be identified, and that most of the verbal flood inundating us hardly seems worth giving that sort of respect to. But it is far healthier to seek escape from the flood than to accept it with a habit of trivial regard. We end up trivializing each other, while worshiping dead words (called "information") that we pay no attention to.

The computer takes this much further, since its whole purpose is to bear our meanings and intentions with a degree of explicitness, subtlety, intricacy, and completeness unimaginable in earlier machines. Every executing program is a condensation of certain human thinking processes. At a more general level, the computer embodies our resolve to approach much of life with a programmatic or recipe-like (algorithmic) mindset. That resolve, expressed in the machinery, is far from innocent or neutral when, for example, we begin to adapt group behavior to programmed constraints.

So we meet ourselves--our deepest tendencies, whether savory or unsavory, conscious or unconscious--in the things we have made. And, as always, the weight of accumulated choices begins to bind us. Our freedom is never absolute, but is conditioned by what we have made of ourselves and our world so far. The toxic materials I spread over my yard yesterday restrict my options today.

The strict determinist's only hope for truth is the hope that the truth has wholly eluded us--that we stand subject to determination by powers we can never penetrate with understanding. In other words, it is the paradoxical hope that we can never know ourselves to be determined.

But it also needs saying that every act we undertake in the world, every reshaping of the stuff of the world, is a weight upon the future. Actions have consequences. The solvent dumped in my yard last year affects my gardening possibilities this year. Everything I do today constrains me tomorrow. The intelligent machinery we have previously programmed and set in motion continues to run on by itself according to those past determinations, binding us every more tightly and inviting us to abdicate our freedom in the current moment.

Moreover, we discriminate against each other quite as easily on the basis of belief and other intangibles as on the basis of appearance. As long as anything of the other person remains, there's something to discriminate against. If prejudice easily "disappears" across the Net, it is because the person himself easily disappears. But getting rid of the other person in this way begins to sound suspiciously like "termination with extreme prejudice."

It's true that the wounded soul may sometimes need shelter from the normal buffetings of life, and we sometimes hear that the Net provides such shelter. But we should at least realize that the shelter is a symptom of life not yet fully engaged rather than a testimonial to our grandest victories.

The error most people make here is to assume that strong emotion is a sign that people are making deep, human contact. The usual reality is nearly the opposite of this. I may react with explosive feeling when my car won't start on a cold morning, but this isn't a sign that I've got a good relationship going with the engine. If anything, my reaction makes it even more difficult to hear what the engine may be "telling" me. Much the same goes for the so-called Net flame. The flamer generally isn't communicating with anyone at all. He's completely wrapped up in himself.

One classic expression of psychological projection is head-over- heels infatuation. We need not be surprised, therefore, at the unsuppressed infatuational energy--the downright frenzy--amid which the Internet has burst upon the national scene over the past few years. It has not been a time of clear-sighted assessment.

A stance of responsibility can only resist these invitations to scatter ourselves in cyberspace. We must ask, "How can we recollect ourselves, find our own centers, and subordinate the online carnival--so far as we choose to deal with it at all--to our deeper, consciously pursued purposes."

There are, of course, class differences in this regard; some kids have readier access to computers than others. But the point is that this access is not necessary for primary school children in the first place. Certainly the software they learn today will not be the software they need on the job.

These, of course, are not the subjects that policy-makers are attending to in their mania to wire every classroom.

But the decisive point is this: the problems of education have never in recent history resulted from an information bottleneck. We were an information society long before the computer arrived; our problem has been coping with a surfeit of information-- selecting from it, evaluating it, making sense of it. The only way to make sense of information is to rise above it in the experience of meaning--a journey that requires imagination more than anything else.

But such arrangements do not make scientists into teachers. If one scientist can efficiently spread himself around a lot of classrooms, it is precisely because he doesn't really have to be there. It is no accident that robotics should be a common focus, because the real effect of these projects is to direct children increasingly toward instrument-mediated information. A thousand children cannot all interact with the scientist personally; what they can do is interact with software.

So the students come away with a few scattered, undigested facts about the operation of remote-controlled vehicles, and no knowledge at all about the more approachable engineering principles--including the principles of computing--upon which modern society is based.

It I need to find out whether she will become a good world citizen, don't show me a file of her email correspondence. Just let me observe her behavior on the playground for a few minutes- -assuming she spends her class breaks on the playground, and not at her terminal playing video games.

A high-school computer instructor wrote to me that "students who think it is cool to have a pen pal in Malaysia won't talk to the black students who locker next to them....I have run a telecom project for students in TAG classes for the last two years and I have yet to see any of the TAG students, who spent weeks `talking' with students in Kuala Lumpur, say so much as a word to the Southeast Asian students in the ESL program."

The crucial requirement for the child to develop a love for nature is not that he be exposed to novel, high-impact screen images, but rather that he actively discover within himself a connection to the phenomena he is observing. High-impact images create a hunger for "more and better," but, if anything, put the child at an even greater psychological distance from the natural world than before.

Educators are now subjected to an intense fear of being left behind, but are offered no coherent notion of what is ahead and why. Don't forget the earlier mania for computer-aided instruction, which died away with scarcely a trace. So, too, did the fad for computer literacy through programming in BASIC. Now it's the Internet. Have we this time learned something profound and new about the true nature of education?

While watching TV, we at least had to get up now and then and confront others, if only at the supermarket checkout stand. Increasingly, the computer enables us to reduce even this activity to a kind of passivity. The question of responsibility here: in what ways, and with what parts of myself, do I choose to engage the world and the rest of society?

Nobody seems to be listening. Yet Postman is right, insofar as information is thought of as something given, something we can "access," store, and process -- so far, that is, as we view it in the manner of a program. Meaning, by contrast, cannot be accessed. It can only be entered into -- and then only through the exercise of those neglected faculties standing at the opposite pole from our activities as information processors.

What we forget is that the arms race between the powers of information proliferation and the powers of information management is an endlessly escalating one. The logical finesse with which we manage information is the same logical finesse that generates yet more information and outflanks the tools of management. Software agents are quite as capable of mindlessly flinging off information as of mindlessly collecting it.

Surely there is only one escape from the mindlessness: to realize that the essential contest is not between information management and information inflation, but between the obsession with information (well managed or otherwise) and the habit of quiet reflection. It is not an overload of information so much as a deficit of meaning we suffer from, not a lack of proper filters so much as the loss of mental focus--an inadequate power of sustained attention to what is important.

But while everything is possible, not everything is equally easy. Restrict the internal communications of a corporation to wall- tapping, and competitive failure will be much more certain than the deepening of community. In general, the narrower the communication channel, the harder we have to work to communicate meaningfully.

The current upshot of the matter is this: in a society that has long been fleeing what vestiges of community remain to it, a medium that makes our exchange even more indirect and automated does not show much promise of improving things overall. If you want to avoid coming to terms with someone, will you typically find it easier to meet him face-to-face, to call him on the phone, or send him an email message?

Where, then, does the bad of the big bad wolf arise? Only from that same pattern of "innocent," half-awake behavior that is to be found in nearly every corporation. A System can only sustain itself in the presence of a drowsy people willing to be Systematized.

The beehive may give us a relevant picture. Its intricate (and subhuman) unity seems to arise from nowhere. "Even the queen bee cannot be regarded as the visible guardian and guarantor of the totality, for if she dies, the hive, instead of disintegrating, creates a new queen" (Herman Poppelbaum). There is no totalitarian center of the hive, and yet the logic of the whole remains coherent and uncompromising. It is an external logic in the sense that it is not wakeful, not self-aware, not consciously assenting; it moves the individual as if from without.

The apparently incompatible facts belong together. To adapt various family, educational, and communal functions to a faceless, unstable, unrooted, and unruly medium such as the Net is to guarantee rising demands for censorship, lest the existing institutions simply disappear into the anarchic cauldron of cyberspace. There is an indisputable validity to these demands, as also to the insistence upon their danger. And there is the expected technological arms race between would-be censors and would-be defenders of unbridled speech--an arms race that, unavoidable as it may be, tends more and more to destroy the kind of contexts where we can learn to combine freedom with respect for the other.

It is intolerable to have congressional representatives (of all people!) setting cultural standards of decency. But it is also intolerable to commit ourselves, our society, our children to a medium in which it is virtually impossible for cultural standards -- or anything recognizable as culture itself -- to arise at all. The Net is, in its fundamental manifestations to date, as corrosive of culture as anything yet conceived by man.

Imagine a school system where every parent supposedly had this right to choose a school, but where all schools were jammed into one vast, open, chaotic building, with teachers and students indiscriminately scattered around. If parents had little choice but to submit their children to such a system, then, far from being free and uncensored, it would actually force an ugly and artificial homogenization, removing all the freedom and diversity that should belong to education.

The fact is that freedoms are meaningless apart from cultural traditions, reasonably stable institutions, boundaries that allow the flowering of different value systems, places that overflow with the intensity of enfleshed human presence -- in general, apart from a real cultural topography that offers some predictability and constancy, as well as healthy evolution. But all these requirements are exactly what the Net tends to destroy.

Much good will continue to arise as governments increasingly respect human rights. But remember that something else has been going on as well: those various contexts in which a complementary weave of rights and responsibilities gave concrete form to our lives--contexts, for example, provided by family and local community--have long been eroding. As a result, we are being thrown back upon ourselves as isolated, self-determining, rights-bearing individuals, disconnected from any social matrix that would enable us to connect meaningfully and responsibly to our neighbors. We are bound to face many insoluble conflicts as unrooted individuals and groups bump into each other. There will be no pure solution to these conflicts from the side of free speech or the side of censorship.

What is discouraging is to hear the gurus of cyberspace beating the drums for freedom and fulminating against the evils of repressed lawmakers, while scarcely whispering a word about any new wellsprings of responsibility we might draw upon to give form and substance to our inviolate freedoms. If government is of limited help in this sphere (it is), and if the ever more weakened family and community no longer mediate a powerful sense of responsibility to us, and if the workplace is intent upon computing the bottom line as an end in itself, what sources can we draw upon? The question does not seem to arise, and many are willing to go the obvious next step, enshrining the anarchic individual adrift in cyberspace as the new ideal.

Privacy is inseparable from a certain willingness to lower one's eyes and to hold sacred what one knows about the other person. When it has become a mere drive toward anonymity, it necessarily vanishes as a meaningful standard for our life together, signaling instead our disconnection.

On the other hand, when the risk of the crime becomes too great, we have little choice but to minimize our exposure. As a society we may then start conceiving the challenge as a wholly technical one--how to wall ourselves off from each other, devise new alarm systems, beef up police forces, and so on. Actions of this sort may become necessary, but we should realize that they are signs of a losing battle and may actually worsen the underlying causes of the problems. Again (see question 38), the decisive battle is not the technical one.

Healthy public and private spheres exist only by virtue of each other, in a complex and delicate balance.

It is possible--although it will be a tremendous stretch--for us to extend our gestures of human respect to the abstract, placeless, and timeless data representations of other people. But it isn't conceivable that we will succeed in this greater challenge while failing the lesser and more familiar one. We cannot--as programmers, application users, corporate employees, consumers--enlarge our respect for persons to embrace data when we are forgetting what respect for persons means in the first place.

In fact, as long as we are driven to desire the latest technology for its own sake (which is very much part of the human side of the problem), memory improvements and all the technical innovations they stimulate can only worsen our situation: the pace of change accelerates, new inventions proliferate, and every cutting-edge toy we play with is now twelve months instead of twenty-four months away from the inadequacies of its obsolescence. Clearly this shrinking time interval tells us more about our prospects for satisfaction than does the increasing density of integrated circuits.

To believe, for example, that the automobile's (or the computer network's) ability to shrink distances has anything whatever to do with the varying sorts of inner distance and connection that community weaves between people is to have lost sight of community. Any technology in the hands of a people that has lost sight of community will prove an instrument for the destruction of community, simply because the destruction hinges in the first place on the lost sight, not on the technology.

In other words: technological pessimism is justified precisely to the degree we feel technological optimism.

OPP Working Paper Series 29
Digital Tornado: The Internet and Telecommunications Policy

The Working Paper is available here in Adobe Acrobat format so that when you look at it on your screen or print it out on your printer it will look identical to the FCC's original version regardless of the computer platform, operating system, browser, or fonts that you may be using.

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Fakultät 18 Chemie und Pharmazie München
Fakultät 18	Einrichtungen Telefon (nur Intranet)	Departments Chemie und Pharmazie	Studium	Cicum	Sicherheit	Lageplan (53KB)

13.00	Begrüßung durch den Dekan der Fakultät	Prof. Dr. H. Mayr

13.10	Experimental-Vorlesung Farbe in der Chemie	Prof. Dr. W. Beck

14.00	Laserspektroskopie und optische Manipulation einzelner Moleküle	Prof. Dr. C. Bräuchle

15.00	Gentechnik und Genom-Forschung Gewagte Lebendigkeit - Lebendigkeit wagen	Dr. H. Ibelgaufts




				Introduction Links Overview Documents Bibliography Book Reviews Newsletter Feedback

				Digital Documents Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age By Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth and Alvin Toffler, 1994 This libertarian statement represents the cumulative wisdom and innovation of many dozens of people. It is based primarily on the thoughts of four co-authors: Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth and Alvin Toffler. It exists in several releases, for it is a 'living' document, and it illustrates the American belief in the virtues of the digital networks. TOP Remarks on the Global Information Infrastructure By US Vice President Al Gore, International Telecommunications Union, March 1994 TOP Europe and the Global Information Society: Recommendations to the European Council - Bangemann Report By the European Commission, Brussels 1994 TOP Economic FAQs about the Internet By Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Hal R. Varian, 1995 Mackie-Mason and Varian cover the economic, institutional and technological structure of the Internet as well as some speculation on the future of the Internet. Questions and answers range from as simple as "What does 'speed' mean?" to as complex as "What non-price mechanisms can be used for congestion control?" One of the best available introductions to the Internet and Internet economics, this chapter includes a useful reference list as well. TOP Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace By John Perry Barlow, EFF, Feb 1996 TOP Green Paper - Living and working in the Information Society - People First By the European Commission, July 1996 TOP Economic Consequences of the Internet By Dr. Edward Yardeni, Chief Economist Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, October 22, 1996 Yardeni analyses in a short report the economic consequences of the Internet. In his mind they could be extraordinary. Inflation could drop to zero, global auction markets will emerge, consumers of tomorrow can easily and quickly find the lowest price for any good or service. TOP Preparing Canada for a Digital World By The Information Highway Advisory Council to the Canadian Government, 1996 The report sets out recommendations for an Information Highway strategy for Canada. TOP A brief history of the Internet By ISOC, 1997 This is an extensive history of the Internet written by some of its own pioneers. The authors conclude with some speculations as to where the Internet is headed. TOP Computerized Technology and Human Responsibility - Frequently Asked Questions By Stephen L. Talbott, Netfuture, January 30, 1997 TOP Electronic Commerce - OECD Policy Brief 1/1997 By the OECD, 1997 TOP Digital tornado: The Internet and telecommunications policy By the FCC, March 1997 This FCC staff working paper written by Kevin Werbach, Counsel for New Technology Policy, is one of the most current and useful references available on the questions the Internet poses for traditional communications policy. TOP The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980-2020 By Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, Wired magazine, July 1997 TOP The Social and Labour Market Dimension of the Information Society, People First - The Next Steps By the European Commission, July 1997 TOP The HomeNet Project - Research Reports By Robert Kraut, Carnegie Mellon University, August 1997 HomeNet is a Carnegie Mellon research project studying what people do with the Internet and how it affects their lives. Made up of over 100 Pittsburgh households representing a wide range of demographics, the HomeNet project provides participants with computer equipment, subsidized access to the Internet and training in using both their computers and the Internet. Through detailed, ongoing questionnaires and electronic data collection, Internet usage and its effects on participants' lives can be studied and analyzed in detail. TOP Survey Telecommunications: A connected world By The Economist, September 1997 TOP New Rules for the New Economy - Twelve dependable principles for thriving in a turbulent world By Kevin Kelly, Wired September 1997 TOP Attention Shoppers! By Michael H. Goldhaber, Wired magazine, Dec 1997 TOP The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net By Michael H. Goldhaber, 1997 TOP Internet Economics: An Annotated Bibliography By Dr. Bruce C. Klopfenstein, 1997 TOP Long Boom or Slow Bust? The FEED Dialog on the New Economy By Steve Gibson, Doug Henwood, Mark Stahlman, William Taylor, FEED, December 1997 TOP The Digital Age driven by the passion of Intel's Andrew Grove By Walter Isaacson, Time Magazine, December 1997 / January 1998 TOP Informations Technology Outlook 1997 By the OECD, Paris 1997 The report, prepared by the OECD Secretariat under the guidance of the OECD's Committee for Information, is the fourth in a biennial series designed to provide member governments with analysis of trends in the information technology industry and the impact of information technology on the economy. TOP Business-to-Consumer Electronic Commerce - Survey of Status and Issues By the OECD, Paris 1997 Electronic commerce between businesses and consumers is rapidly developing into a major economic activity. It may create new market opportunities not only in information and communications industries but in almost all industries involving commercial transactions with consumers. However, this raises many questions about existing forms of economic activity. In the light of rapid developments in technology and industry activities in the private sector, various groups of experts are currently discussing a number of issues concerning electronic commerce. This paper seeks to survey and analyze the issues in various areas of electronic commerce between businesses and consumers. TOP The European Information Society at the Crossroads FAIR Annual Report, 1997 The central concern of 1997 FAIR Report (funded in the context of the ACTS program of the EU) is that the pace of ICT technical innovation in the supply structure and the implementation of a regulatory framework moving towards increased competition and liberalisation are proceeding more rapidly than other necessary social and economic changes. TOP The Californian Ideology By Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. Barbrook and Cameron call this orthodoxy the Californian Ideology in honor of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless and unfashionable. The paper - devised at the Hypermedia Research Centre - argues for a more interactive future. TOP Technorealism By the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 1998 The authors state that over the past few years, as the debate over technology has been dominated by the louder voices at the extremes, a new, more balanced consensus has quietly taken shape. The document seeks to articulate some of the shared beliefs behind that new consensus, which the authors have come to call technorealism. TOP Encyclopedia of the New Economy By John Browning and Spencer Reiss, Wired 1998 To help inform the architects of this new world, Wired and Andersen Consulting have assembled this Encyclopedia of the New Economy. TOP Knowledge Management, Research Report 1998 By KPMG Management Consulting, 1998 There is little doubt that we have entered the knowledge economy where what organisations know is becoming more important than the traditional sources of economic power - capital, land, plant and labour - which they command. Knowledge management is the trendy discipline of capturing the knowledge-based competencies, storing and disseminating them for the benefit of the organisation as a whole. The KPMG report tries to find out what is happening in the business world. It provides useful concepts which can also be adpated to other sectors in the society. TOP The Emerging Digital Economy By the US Departement of Commerce, 1998 The report discusses the potential impacts of the information technology on the economy. It provides useful data on investments, productivity, products and prices in order to develop new indicators which determine how IT changes the economy. It discusses the pros and cons of a potential 'long boom.' TOP Towards 'digital intermediation' in the European information society By Richard Hawkins, Robin Mansell, and W. Edward Steinmueller, Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) of the University of Sussex, June 1998 A very good paper on digital communitites and its intermediaries. TOP Death of Distance By Francis Cairncross, 1998 Read "The Trendspotter’s Guide to New Communications: How will the death of distance shape the future?" which is a forecast about the important developments to watch. It is an extract from the new book by Francis Cairncross on the impact of digitalization on business, every-day-life and politics. TOP President's Information Technology Advisory Committee: Interim Report to the President By the National Coordination Office for Computing, Information, and Communications of the US, August 1998 A report released by the US President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, whose membership includes many of the nation’s top computing and communications experts, sets out a bold agenda for ensuring America’s leadership in the Information Age by expanding government investments in long-term research and development in technologies such as computers, networks, and software. TOP 1998 Digital State By the Progress and Freedom Foundation, 1998 Executive summary about how state governments are using digital technology. TOP The Economic and Social Impact of Electronic Commerce: Preliminary Findings and Research Agenda By the OECD, 1998 TOP How eCommerce Could Impact Europe's Future A report by Andersen Consulting, 1998 TOP Networked Computing for the 21st Century A report by the US National Science and Technology Council, Committee on Technology, Subcommittee on Computing, Information, and Communications R&D, August 1998 TOP Job opportunities in the Information Society: Exploiting the Potential of the Information revolution By the European Commission, November 1998 The report by the European Commission highlights the fact that an acute shortage of skills and an unwillingness to invest in start-up firms are shackling the EU's information technology industry and letting half a million potential jobs go to waste. TOP Report of Ireland's Advisory Committee on Telecommunications November 1998 A group of American Internet experts has suggested in a report that Ireland, host to many U.S. computer companies' European headquarters and major manufacturing facilities such as Microsoft and Intel, could easily catch up to the United States and lead Europe as an e-commerce superpower. TOP The Hi-Tech Gift Economy By Richard Barbrook of the HRC, published in First Monday, December 1998 Barbrook argues that the 'New Economy' of cyberspace is an advanced form of social democracy. TOP The Emerging Digital Economy II Report of the US Commerce Department, June 1999 TOP

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				The Project How We Want to Live Tomorrow and the Hoechst Triangle Forum set up by the Center for Applied Policy Research and the Hoechst Foundation initiates an intercultural dialogue on challenges of the future, and options and strategies for steering global change towards a sustainable world.




				Focus Goals and Structure Results Partners Contact Us Back to Project Background

				Focus The pace of global change is accelerating: New technologies, globalizing economies, demographic shifts, social mobility, migration, and global communication networks add up to a new quality and density of interpenetration and interdependence. As a result, the global social, cultural, and ecological environment will also change at a dynamic pace. Social systems are entering into a new phase of interaction and competition without losing their distinctiveness. World politics and world trade are being complemented by the emerging notion of a global village - however fragile and ambiguous that may be. While elites have begun to integrate across national or continental frontiers, the identity of most citizens continues to be defined in national, regional or local terms. Equally, globalization is not unrivaled, it is being opposed by decentralization and regionalization, and also by the threat of disintegration and fragmentation. Thus, the key parameters of social existence will change and current social institutions and patterns of social order will have to be rebuilt or adapted. Collective choices and preferences that are nurtured and protected within these frameworks will have to be replaced or shifted to new institutional settings. The attempt to steer these processes of change and build sustainable international structures is without alternative. Though of relevance in most parts of the globe, the level of affectedness, the awareness of the implications of global change, and the readiness to play an active role in change management are most pronounced in the three industrial centers of today's world: North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Here lie the sources of many of the issues on the future global agenda as well as the potential and resources needed to resolve them. Together, these three regions have the critical mass required to steer change and they offer the highest concentration of expertise and management potential. TOP Goals and Structure The Project 'How We Want to Live Tomorrow' and the 'Hoechst Triangle Forum' are designed to initiate and develop an intercontinental and intercultural dialogue on global change, challenges of the future, and options and strategies for steering global change towards a sustainable world. By bringing together interdisciplinary expertise and ideas from North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, it will seek to reconcile differences in defining patterns of social order, value systems, culture, and civilization so as to promote a new generation of answers to the issues of change. The project will attract high-profile personalities from the worlds of business, politics, society (i.e. culture, the arts, religion, philosophy, history) and the media. The findings of the project´s meetings and studies will be used to provide impetus to the debates in the Americas, Europe and Asia. At the heart of the project is the Hoechst Triangle Forum, an annual meeting of around 30 personalities who will discuss the issues and studies presented to them. Meetings will rotate between locations in the three regions, beginning with the first forum in Germany in the fall of 1999. Each forum will be prepared by Input Task Forces which will collect expertise from the three regions with regard to specific topics. The task forces will prepare the input for the annual forums by setting up project groups, holding regional conferences or conducting independent studies. Their results will serve as a platform for the Triangle Forum. TOP Results The results of each forum will be communicated in the form of memoranda which will present the outcome of the discussions. The impetus memoranda will be made available to business, political, and social elites and to the general public in North America, Europe and Asia. Communication, information, and feedback concerning the project will largely be Internet-based. The e-mail newsletter global_futures keeps readers up to date in the project. Additionally, it provides tips on projects, publications, and other information that provide special insight into the dynamics shaping our common future. Furthermore the so-called portals to the future will help visitors to conduct research on the Web. The Center for Applied Policy Research will continue to build up this project Web site giving access to the memoranda and materials and allowing a global dialogue on the project's agenda. Special sections will be created for expert communication. The results, proposals and recommendations of the project will also be made available in printed form. TOP Partners The project is being conducted by the Center for Applied Policy Research (CAP), a leading German think tank on international affairs based at Munich University , and the Hoechst Foundation established by Hoechst AG , a global leader in life sciences and industrial chemistry. Click here for further information on the project partners. TOP Contact Us For further Information please contact Jürgen Turek (CAP) Tel. +49-89-4904290 Fax. +49-89-49042929 E-Mail Note also the Contact Us section. TOP

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				Conference, September 8-10, 1999 Schloß Höchst, Frankfurt a.M., Germany Mission \| Program \| Participants Paper \| Online Forum \| Webcam

				Mission Listen to the Welcome Presentations: Jürgen Dormann, CEO Hoechst AG Werner Weidenfeld, Director of the CAP The Hoechst Triangle Forum is a high-level meeting of decision makers, scientists and artists from North America, Asia and Europe to address questions of global change. It is part of the project How We Want to Live Tomorrow which was jointly set up by the Hoechst Foundation and the Center for Applied Policy Research. In 1999, through three structured discussions, the Hoechst Triangle Forum addressed our ability to build a common, sustainable future. The results of five Input Task Forces and a discussion paper serve as an analytical framework and a starting point for the participants. As a follow-up, we expect to make known priorities and specific measures for governmental and other leaders to take to reach our goals. Program: In the first discussion, we addressed the challenges to governance posed by global changes at the end of the twentieth century. In the second, we set our sights on how the digital and biotech revolutions are likely to change developed societies. In the third panel, we discussed concrete measures that leaders can take to help reach a more desirable future. We have put a number of questions to the participants to give the debate additional structure: Common Currents of Power? The Future of Societies and Governance in the US, Europe and Asia What are the critical challenges facing governance in advanced industrialized societies? What are the key rules of the game in future societies, and which actors shape them? Who are the likely winners and losers, and why? Shaping Future Societies: Globalization, Digitalization and Biotechnologization What parts of life will be changed most by the new technologies? What social problems or conflicts will advancing technologies provoke? What can a technologically transformed society offer as solutions? How does globalization affect these technological dimensions? Responsibilities for the Future What concrete measures do we need to take now in order to reach the future that we desire? How can we organize social and generational contracts in a transformed society? From these questions, and from the dialogue that follows, the Hoechst Triangle Forum will help point the way to a sustainable future. We invite you to take part in the discussions through our online forum. TOP

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				Webcam Gallery Find a comprehensive picture gallery on the website of the Hoechst Foundation. Wednesday, 9-8-99 Castle Höchst Lounge Welcome Aperitif Garden Welcome Diner Thursday, 9-9-99 Introduction First Panel Second Panel Art by Jörg Frank Friday, 9-10-99 TOP

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				Welcome Presentation by Jürgen Dormann Click here to start the Real Audio File (9:05 min.) (Installation Guide) Welcome Speech In his welcoming address, the Hoechst CEO Jürgen Dorman discussed the reasons the Hoechst Foundation called the Hoechst Triangle Forum into being. He said that Hoechst is at the center of several processes and developments which will have a major influence on the future of the world. One of the world's main challenges in the future, he said, will be to develop an environmentally sustainable means of producing enough food. Aventis, the planned merger between Hoechst and Rhone-Poulenc, with its capabilities in key technologies and knowledge of global life sciences markets, can make key contributions to this objective. Mr. Dorman said the Triangle Forum was established so that tomorrow's thinkers and active members of society, both in cultural and scientific areas, can enter into a dialog about future issues. TOP

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				Welcome Presentation and Introduction by Prof. Dr. Werner Weidenfeld Click here to start the Real Audio file (15:12 min) (Installation Guide) Aims of the Forum Werner Weidenfeld, director of the Center for Applied Policy Research, who organized the conference, talked about the aims of the Triangle Forum. He said the main objectives were: 1) to find out what factors will shape society in the foreseeable future: 2 ) to address the driving forces of change; and 3) to come up with adequate strategies to cope with the changes. Mr. Weidenfeld said that the Triangle Forum was unique because representatives from three continents - Asia, American, and Europe - were taking part. He went on to discuss the main points of the discussion paper handed out to participants before the conference. The paper addressed such issues as globalization versus regionalization, and erosion of national states vs. internationalism, among other things. Weidenfeld said the conference was "just one segment in a permanent working process." TOP

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				Program Links lead to summaries of presentations and real audio files. September 8 Informal Welcoming Dinner Wiliam Drake, Jörg Frank und Moira Gunn. September 9 Welcoming and Introduction Mr. Jürgen Dormann Chief Executive Officer, Hoechst AG Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Hoechst Foundation Real Audio Presentation Prof. Dr. Werner Weidenfeld Director, Center for Applied Policy Research (CAP) Munich Real Audio Presentation Common Currents of Power? The Future of Societies and Governance in the US, Europe and Asia Hon. Boris Y. Nemtsov Former Governor Nizhni Novgorod Real Audio Presentation Prof. Dr. Benjamin Barber Director, Walt Whitman Center, Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Jersey Real Audio Presentation Mr. Ronnie Chan Chairman of the Board, Hang Lung Development Co.Ltd. Hong Kong Real Audio Presentation Shaping Future Societies: Globalization, Digitalization and Biotechnologization Prof. Dr. Michio Kaku City College of the City University of New York New York Real Audio Presentation Prof. Dr. Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker President, German Research Society Bonn Real Audio Presentation Meeting the Art of the Trilateral Dialogue Mind Your Step Mr. Jörg Frank Cologne Short Program Ensemble Modern September 10 Responsibility for the Future Dr. William Drake Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC Real Audio Presentation Mr. Zulkifli Bin Baharudin Nominated Member of Parliament Singapore Real Audio Presentation Dr. Maritta Koch-Weser General Director, World Conservation Union Geneva Real Audio Presentation Conclusion - Key Issues and Recommendations TOP

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				Participants Prof. Dr. Shlomo Avineri Professor of Political Science, Hebrew University, Former Director General, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Israel Mr. Zulkifli Bin Baharudin Nominated Member of Parliament, Vice President, Circle International, Singapore Prof. Dr. Benjamin Barber Director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy, Rutgers University, author of Jihad vs. McWorld, USA Mr. John Browning Contributing Editor, Wired, UK Dr. Olarn Chaipravat Director and Advisor to the Management Board, The Siam Commercial Bank, Thailand, Thailand Mr. Ronnie Chan Chairman of the Board, Hang Lung Development Co., previous Co-Chairman, Davos Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, Hong Kong, China Prof. Dr. Kriengsak Chareonwongsak Executive Director, Institute of Future Studies for Development, Thailand Mr. Jürgen Dormann Chief Executive Officer, Hoechst AG, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Hoechst Foundation, Germany Dr. William Drake Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC Mr. Jörg Frank Artist, Germany Mr. Michael Freitag Editor, Future Magazine, Germany Dr. Martin Frühauf Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Hoechst AG Dr. Moira Gunn Host of TechNation radio series, former NASA computer scientist, USA Prof. Dr. András Inotai General Director, Institute for World Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary Mr. Josef Janning Deputy Director, Center for Applied Policy Research, Munich, Germany Prof. Dr. Jin-Ho Jeong Professor of Global Competitiveness, FKI International Management Institute, South Korea Prof. Dr. Michio Kaku City University of New York, author of Visions: How Science will Revolutionize the 21st Century, USA Dr. Maritta Koch-Weser General Director, World Conservation Union, Switzerland Prof. Dr. Duckhwan Lee Professor of Chemist, Sogang University, South Korea Mr. Douglas Merrill Senior Research Fellow, Research Group on the Global Future, Center for Applied Policy Research Dr. Günter Metz Member of the Supervisory Board, Hoechst AG, Germany Prof. Dr. Eckard Minx Director, DaimlerChrysler Society and Technology Research Group, Germany Christiane Müller-Schüll Research Fellow, Research Group on the Global Future, Center for Applied Policy Research Mr. Toshiya Nakamura Kyoto News Agency, Japan Mr. Karl-Heinz Narjes Former Member of the European Commission, Germany Hon. Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov Former Governor of Nizhnii Novgorod, Russia Dr. Beth Noveck Director of International Programs, Yale Law School Information Society Program, New Haven, CT Dr. Friedmar Nusch Chairman of the Board of Management, Hoechst Foundation, Germany Dr. Thomas Paulsen Trend Research, Trend Research, HypoVereinsbank, Germany Ms. Joanne Perez Proprietary Trader, Banque National de Paris, France Dr. Andreas Pohlmann Member of the Board of Management, Hoechst Foundation, Germany Dr. Eckhard Polzer Former Chairman, Dornier Medical Technology, Germany Mr. Stefan Sattler Director of Culture Section, Focus Magazine, Germany Prof. Dr. Gregory Stock Director, Program on Science, Technology and Society, University of California, Los Angeles, CA Ms. Karin Truscheit Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany Mr. Jürgen Turek Director, Research Group on the Global Future, Center for Applied Policy Research, Munich, Germany Dr. Sarasin Viraphol Charoen Pokhand Group, Thailand Dr. Joop de Vries Executive Director, RISC - Futures, France Mr. Arnd Wagner Managing Director, Hoechst Foundation, Frankfurt, Germany Mr. William Wechsler Director for Multinational Threats, National Security Council, The White House, Washington, DC Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Werner Weidenfeld Director, Center for Applied Policy Research, Munich, Germany Mr. Robert Wilson Theater Director, USA Prof. Dr. Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker President, German Research Society, Germany Mr. Baiyi Wu Deputy Director, Research Department, China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies, China TOP

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				Future Societies: Principles of Order for the 21st Century Research Group on the Global Future Discussion Paper for the Hoechst Triangle Forum Schloß Höchst, September 8-10, Frankfurt, Germany Table of Contents I. Globalisation, Technological Innovation, and Social Change: Molding the 21st Century II. Compensation - The Dialectic of an Interregnum Globalisation leads to sharpening of cultural zones The decline of traditional belief systems provokes a search for new orientations The erosion of nation-states' problem solving abilities leads to the development of transnationally operating non-governmental actors III. Digitalisation and Biotechnology: Chances and Challenges for Future Societies Digitalisation The Development Differential of the Digital Revolution Digital Employment and Society Motor of a New Economy Ecological Prospects Potential in Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering Socio-political and Medical Justice Ethics of Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering IV. New Responsibility: Organising Sustainability Word-Download: German Version TOP

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				Overview Defining Characteristics Research and Commentary The Corporate World Setting the Rules Essential Reading Links

				Overview In the early 18th Century, few people anticipated the radical technological, economic, social and political transformations that the Industrial Revolution would bring. Yet the invention of the steam engine, the cotton loom and other mechanical devices inexorably altered the nature of life and work in our society. On the eve of the 21st Century, we stand once again on the threshold of a new era. We bear witness to rapid technological innovation, increased globalization of business and society, and unprecedented growth rates; factors that culminate in a "New Economy". Because policy decisions made today will undoubtly affect future growth and development around the world, it is important to understand the nature of this economy and the forces driving these transformations. We designed this portal to give the reader insight into the dynamic changes taking place in the world economy. Our goal is to encourage dialogue about key aspects of the "New Economy," to enable policymakers to make intelligent decisions for the future. Index Intro to the New Economy Defining the Characteristics of the New Economy Research and Commentary Leading investigators of the New Economy The Corporate World Real examples of the New Economy at work Essential Reading Key Articles and Books on theNew Economy. Setting the Rules for the New Economy Links to government entities, NGO's and financial markets. Links to Other New Economy Websites Newsletter Our newsletter global_futures will keep you up-to-date on the New Economy and other issues related to our common future. Read also past issues in our archives section. Feedback Please contact Douglas Merrill for feedback on this portal. Other Portals Visit also our portals on the digital world and on biotech issues. TOP

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				Introduction Link Overview Documents Bibliography Book Reviews Newsletter Feedback

				Introduction: A Portal on Biotechnology Human beings have been remaking the earth all through their history. After thousands of years of melting , forging or burning inanimate matter to create things, we are now able to reinvent the natural world at the most fundamental level -- the genetic one. Genetics and biotechnology offer a door to a new era of history. The sites that we have chosen for annotation should help you to follow the biotech revolution every step of the way. You'll find links, relevant documents and a list of interesting books in our bibliography section. Comments are gratefully welcomed. Our newsletter global_futures keeps you up-to-date on the latest biotech news. Take also a look at our book reviews. TOP Links on the biotech revolution Note that external hyperlinks will open a new browser window. Key Gateways to Specific Resources These comprehensive sites keep you abreast of the latest developments. They connect you with major universities, research centers and institutions which carry out work in fields such as biotech patents, genome mapping or bioinformatics. Biotech Companies Genetics and biotechnology have turned into big business. Global life-science companies are involved, as well as innovative start-up companies. Check out who's who in the biotech industry. Bioethics Since biotechnology touches upon all areas of life, ethical and societal implications are major concerns. Bioethics relate to a variety of issues, ranging from respect for human dignity to legal regulations and environmental questions. The sites mentioned here confront you with both questions and possible answers. Biodiversity The preservation of the variety in the plant and animal kingdoms is a worldwide concern. See what facets are embedded in the question of biodiversity. Cloning Ever since the lamb Dolly made it to the news, the issue of cloning, of humans in particular, has attracted broad public attention. Check the facts and take an unbiased view of pros and cons by surfing our selection of sites related to one of the hottest topics in discussion. TOP Biotech Documents Download selected documents related to the consequences of the revolution in biotechnology. TOP Bibliography Download a regularly updated bibliography on biotech thinking. See also our reviews. TOP Newsletter The links on this website will be visited regularly to collect useful information on the digital revolution. In addition, we analyze the contents of major international print media. Subscribe to our newsletter global_futures to receive monthly information about articles, websites, events, documents and books on future matters. Also check out past editions. TOP Reviews Read our reviews of books on the future - many of them dealing with biotechnology. TOP Feedback Contact us by e-mail if you would like to add a link, a document or a book to our web site. Ideas and questions are welcomed. TOP

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				Goal The e-mail newsletter global_futures keeps readers up to date on the work of the Research Group on the Global Future in the project How We Want to Live Tomorrow. Additionally, it provides tips on projects, publications, and other information that the Research Group believes provide special insight into the dynamics shaping our common future. For this purpose we regularly evaluate the websites of our portals to the future. We want to keep you up to date on future related issues of digitalization, genetics, economics and sustainability while saving the scarcest resource in an over-informed world - your attention. TOP Subscription Enter your e-mail address, select your choice and press the send button. Your request will be fowarded to majordomo@lists.lrz-muenchen.de. Subscribe global_futures Unsubscribe global_futures If you encounter any problems please do not hesitate to contact us. TOP Archives August 2, 1999 July 6, 1999 June 7, 1999 May 7, 1999 April 6, 1999 March 1, 1999 February 3, 1999 December 4, 1998 November 6, 1998 July, 1998 March, 1998 TOP

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				September 1999: Hoechst Triangle Forum (Conference) May 1999: Decision Makers 2010 (Conference) March 1999: Outlining the Future (Workshop) July 1998: Digitalization (Brainstorming) May 1998: Genetic Technology (Brainstorming) March 1998: Agenda Brainstorming (Conference)

				September 8-10, 1999, Frankfurt, Germany Future Societies Hoechst Triangle Forum High-Level Conference Mission Program Participants Discussion Paper TOP May 10-12, 1999, Frankfurt, Germany Decision Makers 2010 Defining Tomorrow's Agenda Conference Decision Makers 2010 provoked strong opinions among the thirty-one expert participants who debated the global future for three days in Frankfurt, Germany. Executive Summary Conclusions Program Participants Papers Books Download (Word-File): Program, Summary, Conclusions, Participants. TOP March 23, 1999, CAP, Munich, Germany Outlining the Future Perspectives on Societal Development in the 21st Century Workshop Our views and expectations for the future play as much a part in how we make decisions as external, objective conditions. The Center for Applied Policy Research convened Germany's leading future researchers to compare exactly these views and expectations. What are the most important questions for thinking systematically about the future? What are the consequences of increasing networking and biotechnologization? What are the values of today that go furthest to shaping the world of tomorrow? Executive Summary (English / German) Program (English / German) Participants (English / German) Download the program, the executive summary, the summary of presentations and the list of participants as a Word document. TOP July 13, 1998, CAP, Munich, Germany Digitalization Shaping the Future Brainstorming Digital processes are transforming the way people around the globe work and live; within Europe, Munich can rightly claim to be one of the centers of the new economy with its strengths in media, banking, and research. Our participants were all drawn from the local area, but they presented views that were far from parochial in character. Speakers considered the shape of an industrialized society after the digital revolution, with particular emphasis on likely economic consequences. Speakers at the brainstorming included Dr. Gabriele Hooffacker of Hooffacker & Partner, Prof. Dalia Marin of the University of Munich's Economics Department, and Warnfried Dettling, of DIE ZEIT. Additional guests represented multimedia companies, banks, economic research institutes and news agencies. Executive Summary Program Participants Download the executive summary, the program, a list of participants and a list of short biographies as a PDF-Document. TOP May 18, 1998, CAP, Munich, Germany Genetic Technology Shaping the Future Brainstorming Munich's biotech industry is one of the strongest in Europe, so the CAP didn't have to go far afield to find world-class talent for a brainstorming session on the social and political implications of genetic technology. Our participants presented views on how the industry was likely to grow in the next two decades, along with longer-range ideas on the types of developments that society should expect from biotech. Speakers at the brainstorming included Dr. Bernd Kirschbaum of Hoechst Marion Roussel's Center of Applied Genomics in Martinsried, Dr. Boris Steipe of the University of Munich's Genetic Research Center, and Dr. Reiner Anselm of the University of Munich's Institute for Systematic Theology. Dr. Paul Ulrich Unschuld of the Institute for the History of Medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich provided particularly provocative cross-cultural commentary based on his extensive experience in China. Executive Summary Program Participants and short biographies Download the executive summary, the program, a list of participants and a list of short biographies as a PDF-Document. TOP March 23-24, 1998, CAP, Munich, Germany How Do We Want to Live Tomorrow Trilateral Agenda Brainstorming Conference Twenty-five forward-looking thinkers - from the Co-Chairman of the Davos World Economic Forum and a contributing editor to Wired magazine to the Secretary General of the German Catholic Bishops' Conference and a fellow from Resources for the Future - convened at the Center for Applied Policy Research in Munich to consider the question of how we want to live tomorrow in an interdisciplinary and intercultural fashion. Executive Summary Program Participants Download the executive summary, the program, a list of participants as a PDF-Document. TOP

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Future Societies: Principles of Order for the 21st Century

Research Group on the Global Future

Table of Contents

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AKTUELL am CAP...

Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age

Preamble

The Nature of Cyberspace

The Nature and Ownership of Property

The Nature Of The Marketplace

The Nature of Freedom

The Essence of Community

The Role of Government

Grasping the Future

Recommendations to the European Council Europe and the global information society

Europe and the global information society Recommendations to the European Council

Chapter 1 The information society - new ways of living and working together

A revolutionary challenge to decision makers

What we can expect for...

The social challenge

Ending monopoly

Enabling the market

New basic services are needed

Application One TELEWORKING More jobs, new jobs, for a mobile society

Regulatory Framework

Financing

Author - Industry Canada

Publication Date - 1997-10-08

Internet Histories:

COMPUTERIZED TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY

Frequently Asked Questions

ANSWERS

Publications and Press Releases from the HomeNet Project

Contents

Change Happens

A Feudal Hope

The New Natural Economy

A Driving Force

Illusory Attention

The Effect of the Audience

A Miniature Working Model

A Material Economy Falls Victim to Its Own Success

It's Not for Productivity

A Point Worth Repeating, Though Not Too Often

Material Things Reinterpreted

Money and Attention

Business as Performance

Further Expectations

Advice for the Transition

A Closing Scenario

The End

The Author

Future Societies:
Principles of Order for the 21st Century

Recommendations to the European Council
Europe and the global information society

Europe and the global information society
Recommendations to the European Council

Chapter 1
The information society -
new ways of living and working together

Application One
TELEWORKING
More jobs, new jobs, for a mobile society




				Key Links to the Future Digital Portal Biotech Portal New Economy Portal

				Key links to the future For a quick overview, visit a carefully compiled selection of websites on the global future. TOP Portals to the future The future is knowledge management. Our portals will hyperlink your attention to many different matters, forces and persons which generate on a global scale our common future society. Start with digitalization. Computer chips are the foundation of the global networks. TOP Proceed with biotechnology. The future offers promising benefits, at the same time ethical and societal consequences must be addressed. TOP Go ahead with the new economy. The foundations of the global economy are changing radically. TOP

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				Latest Book Review Information.Macht.Krieg Ars Electronica 98 By Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schöpf (eds.). Springer Verlag, Wien New York 1998, ISBN 3-211-83192-4 English Edition: Gerfried Stocker, Christine Schoepf (ed): Info War. Vienna: Springer, ISBN 3-211-83191-6. Reviewed by Christina Teuthorn. Computer screens are the modern battle fields, future soldiers store deadly ammunition - knowledge, information, data - on the motherboard and launch deadly weapons with a mouse click. The arsenal ranges from computer viruses to worms, trojan horses, logic bombs or nano machines. Cyberwarriors, webterrorists, warbots, and Big Brother's eyes are Info War protagonists, whose language, Pentagonese, is hard to decipher: 21CLW, C3I, C4I2, OOTW... ...continue to read here. TOP Recent Reviews Die Organisation des Wissens By Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi. Why Things Bite Back By Edwar Tenner Globalisierung By Alain Minc The Future and Its Enemies The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress By Virginia Postrel Banker to the Poor By Muhammad Yunus Life on the Screen Identity in the Age of the Internet By Sherry Turkle Die Zukunft der Menschenrechte (The Future of Human Rights) By Gunnar Köhne (ed.) Burn Rate How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet By Michael Wolff The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest By Po Bronson The Biotech Century By Jeremy Rifkin Visions How Science will Revolutionize the 21st Century By Michio Kaku Pax Democratica A Strategy for the 21st Century By James Robert Huntley Global Public Policy Governing without Government? By Wolfgang Reinicke Wirtschaftskummerland? Wege aus der Globalisierungsfalle (Economic Worryland? Paths Out of the Globalization Trap) By Warnfried Dettling The Lives to Come The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities By Philip Kitcher City of Bits Space, Place and the Infobahn By William Mitchell What will be How the new world of information will change our lives By Michael Dertouzos The Diamond Age By Neal Stephenson TOP

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				Center for Applied Policy Research (CAP) How to find the CAP Hoechst Foundation

				Center for Applied Policy Research Research Group on the Global Future Grafinger Strasse 2 81671 Munich Germany Tel +49-89-4904290 Fax +49-89-49042929 Web site: http://www.cap.uni-muenchen.de E-Mail Check also the Project Partners page and the Project Team section. TOP How to find the CAP Arrival by airplane: From Munich airport take the line S8 (local train) to the station 'Ostbahnhof'. Take the southern exit (Friedenstrasse) and turn right. At the next corner (Grafinger Strasse) you find the OTEC-Office building where the CAP ist located in the first floor. Arrival by train: From Munich's main station (Hauptbahnhof) take any S-Bahn (local train) to 'Ostbahnhof'. Take the southern exit (Friedenstrasse) and turn right. At the next corner (Grafinger Strasse) you find the OTEC-Office building where the CAP ist located in the first floor. TOP Hoechst Foundation Altes Schloß Höchst Höchster Schloßplatz 16 65929 Frankfurt am Main Germany Tel +49-69-30582948 Fax +49-69-30523497 Web site: http://www.hoechst-foundation.org TOP

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				Introduction: A Portal on Global Digitalization The future will be formed by many factors. Economic dynamics, political conflicts, environmental questions and technological innovations interact in complex ways. In this portal section of our Website we have chosen the digital revolution as a pilot theme to give deeper insight on one key part of the future. All the links, books, documents and information in this section are reviewed thoroughly to provide you with knowledge - and not to overload your mind with pieces of information. We focus on the interaction between digital technologies and the conditions of the human life in the future. TOP Links on the digital revolution Note that external hyperlinks in the different Links Overview will open a new browser window. Consultancy and Market Research These sites usually serve to introduce the firm and provide marketing information to the general public. We scan these sites regularly to look for reports of special interest, which we bring to the attention of our newsletter subscribers. Cyberspace, Culture & Visions Where the digerati are pushing the boundaries of the new medium; the coolest sites we can find. Governments & Governance The official future. Some of them are interesting, some of them are merely definitive. Setting the standards and making the rules. Interest Groups & Think Tanks Online advocacy, political organization and proposals that are on their way to becoming policy. Real world politics in cyberspace, with real world interests and biases as well. News Services & Online Magazines Selected online versions of print media, some exclusively online services, with a strong emphasis on business and technology reporting. Universities & Research Centers Looking beyond the technology to its interaction with society and with individuals. Interpreting the consequences of the digital revolution. TOP Digital Documents Download selected documents related to the digital revolution. TOP Bibliography Download a regularly updated bibliography on digital thinking. Links lead to online extracts, reviews and presentations on the Internet. See also our reviews. TOP Book Reviews Read our reviews of books on the future - many of them dealing with the digitalization of the global societies. TOP Newsletter All the links on this website will be visited regularly to collect useful information on the digital revolution. In addition, we analyze the contents of major international print media. Subscribe to our newsletter global_futures to receive monthly information about articles, Websites, events, documents and books on digitalization matters. Also read past editions of the news on the wired world. TOP Feedback Contact Patrick Meyer if you would like to add a link, a document or a book to our web site. Ideas and questions are welcomed. TOP

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				Center for Applied Policy Research University of Munich, Germany The Center for Applied Policy Research (CAP) at the University of Munich has been set up to bridge the gap between social science and politics by applying concepts, methods and findings from the social sciences to policy issues on the European and international agenda. Thus it makes use of scientifically founded analyses and strategies to develop solutions for political problems in Europe and Germany. Especially nowadays, were the political debate on key foreign policy issues is increasingly suffering from disorientation with the social sciences lacking the practical experiences to retard this trend, the Center organizes the scientific expertice and developes problem solving for today's politics. The research groups at the CAP and their various projects combine international and interdisciplinary analyses with policy recommendations and communicate these to the relevant decision makers and to the public. In many projects the research fellows of the CAP work together with leading European social scientists. Within the past 15 years of experience, the Center has established a network of highly qualified social scientists for whom the CAP provides fora for expert opinions and functions as a consultancy to policy questions. The CAP is headed by Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Werner Weidenfeld. TOP Hoechst Foundation Frankfurt, Germany The Hoechst Foundation was established in 1996 as a charitable foundation of Hoechst AG with cash assets of DM 100 million. The overriding goal of the Foundation is to promote international, forward-looking, and interdisciplinary projects. In line with Hoechst AG's long history of cultural promotion, the Hoechst Foundation supports cultural initiatives in a broad sense. "We must assume the most open interpretation of culture possible," commented Jürgen Dormann, Chief Executive Officer of Hoechst AG, on the establishment of the foundation. "Museums and galleries, concert halls, places of worship, and libraries are no longer the only places where culture is nourished and flourishes. We are interested in both artistic interpretations of familiar aspects of different cultures and in models that illustrate how we want to live in the future." The projects promoted by the Hoechst Foundation are to transcend frontiers: not only those between people from a wide variety of countries and cultures but also frontiers between different academic disciplines. That is why in addition to art and culture, research projects in the natural sciences and humanities, especially those that pursue an interdisciplinary approach, are further possible areas of promotion. The Foundation will also promote social policy and charitable initiatives and projects set up by religious organizations. Since the Foundation aims to promote a wide variety of new ideas and initiatives, the scope of potential activities is not restricted. The Hoechst Foundation is primarily interested in finding and selecting major projects of international significance that correspond to its aims in a unique way. The Foundation will support them so as to ensure their lasting development. At the same time, the independence and innovative ability of the people involved should be preserved - which is why funding from the Foundation will be granted for a limited period of time. TOP

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