Forecasting the Digital Age

Dear Esther,

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Let's see ... Because of the Net, a new, decentralized world order will emerge in which well-informed, responsible, creative, empowered, and activist individuals with "good" goals will replace the self-interested and rigid organizations of the "old world." It will also be harder to escape the "truth" (although your choice of examples does not particularly help your case). Do I have this right?
My problem with this utopian picture is that it requires a new human being to make it happen. Indeed, you all but concede the point with phrases such as "my fervent hope is" and "I have to believe that." Do you really think that the lifers, timeservers, get-along-go-along pencil pushers, and conformists who make up an embarrassingly large part of the work force are suddenly going to rise up, start thinking for themselves, and embrace real risks? When voters start demanding that politicians eliminate middle-class entitlements, I'll be more open to this vision of the future. For every closet entrepreneur suffocated by corporate life, there are probably 50 people dreading downsizing and yearning for a return to the days of paternalistic employers who provided job security, free time for leisure, and a steady income. Being part of a herd does, after all, provide the illusion of safety.
I agree that the Net optimizes what Lewis Mumford called humanity's "extrasomatic intelligence." People all around the world now have access to vast arrays of information, if not the "truth." But, there's the rub. In recent years, we have seen powerful evidence that information is less important than the beliefs, biases, and patterns people impose on the facts and opinions they receive. Thus, blacks and whites, equally saturated with information about the O.J. trial, came to strikingly different interpretations about the "truth" of what he did or didn't do.
Don't you also find it interesting that the most paranoid and delusional groups in America are some of the most enthusiastic users of the Net? In the United States, paranoia, belief in the paranormal, and the embrace of extremist faiths is rising even as information technologies proliferate. Access to information did not dissuade members of the Heaven's Gate cult from mass suicide. Instead they used their Web site to disseminate their loopy message to like-minded Netizens before they headed off to their rendezvous with the alleged spaceship trailing behind the Hale-Bopp comet.
Information technologies offer no guarantee that the messages transmitted will be well informed or sane. Keep in mind that information technology proved crucial to the Rwandan genocide, as Hutu extremists exhorted villagers through radio to take up arms and kill the Tutsis. A herd with a beef is a mob. Information technologies can amplify the power of a mob.
All the aspects of the Net--putting people in direct touch with suppliers of information and goods, allowing people to make investment decisions or purchases on impulse, empowering individuals to disseminate a message--magnify the impact of ideas, feelings, and moods. Understanding the future impact of the Net, then, is to some degree a question of understanding human nature. The seemingly harmless notion that technology will make us better people than we have ever been before might turn out to have dangerous consequences.
There is one area in which I agree with you wholeheartedly: The Net is eliminating the middleman in many aspects of life. But, here again, can we really say that this process of disintermediation is an unalloyed good? The eliminated middleman is an editor, or salesclerk, or investment adviser, who used to supply perspective, judgment, and the wisdom of experience to those seeking information, making purchases, and considering investments. And of course we should keep in mind that every middleman eliminated is a person who lost his job and will make fewer purchases. Similarly, I cannot fathom why businesses of all stripes are rushing to embrace a technology that will crush their profit margins and cannibalize their traditional retail sales. Where this will end only knows God.
The Net is here, probably for a good while, and it will have good, bad, and surprising effects on life. One can focus on its enabling and liberating potential, but what we have seen more of so far is the Net's potential to amplify instabilities in the economy and society.
Back to you.

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