Ricci Street < Port 80 < Lighthouse || search | sitemap | help gazette | theater | bistro

|

Magna Carta other pages visions of the future this page learn more

The Magna Carta of 1215 (right) guaranteed basic civil rights and political rights that are the bedrock of Western Civilization. In the mid-1990's, some folks who have thought deeply about the future -- Alvin Toffler (far left), George Gilder, George Keyworth, Esther Dyson (near left) -- put together a magna carta for digital civilization. It's similar to what many organizations do when they adopt a vision statement. 

Here's the Preamble but you must go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's web site to read the rest, Cyberspace and the American Dream. Even better, go to Feed magazine's expanded version, The Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age. It is especially valuable because the text links to other experts who disagree completely and express their disagreement very cogently. 

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 massed 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.

Property Rights

Clear and enforceable property rights are essential for markets to work. But in the new cyberspace environment, we find a new kind of property. It's made out of bits rather than atoms.

The property that makes up cyberspace comes in several forms:

atoms - wires, cables, computers, routers, and other hardware
forces - the electromagnetic spectrum
bits - intellectual property -- the knowledge that dwells in and defines cyberspace

Atoms can be in only one place at a time, so possession, if not ownership, is clear. But bits are different.

Intellectual Property Rights Statement | Information made of bits should be free.

Competition

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. ...

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.

Competition Statement | It is in the interests of shareholders to encourage dynamic competition.

Freedom

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. 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. 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, the one we grew up in, 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"

assume ownership over the broadcast spectrum and demand massive payments from citizens for the right to use it

prohibit ("regulate") entrepreneurs from entering new markets and providing new services

influence which political viewpoints would be carried over the airwaves

These and literally thousands of other infringements on individual rights now taken for granted make no sense at all in the Third Wave, a global market made of bits traveling at almost the speed of light.

Freedom Statement | National governments have every right to prohibit entrepreneurs from entering new markets and providing new services in cyberspace.

Learn more

"The Shape of Things: Exploring the Evolving Transformations in American life" by G. A. Keyworth, II in People and Society in Cyberspace from The Progress and Freedom Foundation. Keyworth is one of the Magna Carta authors.

For more than two hundred years, industrial economies were characterized by one overarching feature--the accumulation of barriers to new entrants.

excerpt from "The Economy of Ideas" by John Perry Barlow in WIRED 2.03

Information is the pitch, not the baseball, the dance, not the dancer.

"Utopian Visions of Cyberspace," by Laura J. Gurak, in the May 1997 issue of Computer Mediated Communications (CMC). The article begins:

I'm sure many of you have seen the recent television commercial from one of the major telecommunications companies touting the magical ability of the Internet to banish all social ills. "There is no race," someone claims, as a montage of faces flash by. "There is no gender," says yet another bright-eyed Internet believer.

 What to do

Are these guys blowing smoke? Or is this actually happening? To the extent that it does happen, what will it mean for your job? If you knew for certain that it was going to happen, how would you educate your children differently? At the Bistro, you can talk about it.