The leaders of such fiefdoms know that the game will eventually be up, but they don’t care. In such corporate cultures, it’s hard to escape the echoes, however faint, of Kim Jong-il and Saddam Hussein. Everything appears orderly inside—as long as the pace and vibrancy of a thriving world outside are not held up for comparison. One of Google’s current challenges is convincing content companies (e.g., television producers and networks) to allow Google to search their content. The pitch: you’ll be better off if more people can see what you have to offer. If they find it, the argument goes, they will buy, and everyone will be better off. eBay is the proof in the pudding. Millions of garages and basements were completely ‘off-line’ until it came along. Now they are, in a sense, transparent: open for commerce. Easy search and the flow of information equals tremendous value released—just as it does for people, money, energy and security”
And power. Greater egalitarianism in access to once closely guarded and specialized knowledge erodes barriers to entry, increases transparency, levels the playing field, spurs greater horizontal thinking and puts greater emphasis on performance rather than formal credentials.
Just ask Dan Rather.
“Content companies, (i.e., studios, publishing houses, record labels) sitting on digital assets are understandably wary. Theirs are not dusty basements, but going commercial concerns, threatened in the short term by too much openness. Opening up to the new means giving up something tangible—risking the stability of old business model, even if it’s not thriving as much as it used to. The Silicon Valley lessons of transparency and fluidity are starting to be understood at a gut level outside the technology industry, but it’s still hard for many to make that cognitive leap. Microsoft offered a decent but not exceptional operating system independent of IBM’s PC and it took off—90% market share. Apple bound its operating system to a single platform and got 10% share. Oops. The open-source software movement, exemplified by Linux, has become the ultimate borderless, fluid creation, achieving respectability and major market share at the expense of traditional closed-shop software development efforts in just a few years. Oops.
Virginia Postrel postulated in her first book that emergent politics may come down to conflict not between Right and Left but to Dynamists vs. Stabilitarians.
“There are also analogies and crossovers between the virtual and physical worlds in the battles over rule sets. For example, what is the meaning of copyright? How is it to be expressed and enforced in a transparent, ubiquitously networked world (at least the Old Core)? My clients in the publishing and media industries have been wrestling with this one for over a decade. The answers are only beginning to dawn. Digital rights management technology offers a partial answer, but it’s hardly the only one. Similarly, in the larger “meatspace” world, what do terms like ‘citizenship’ mean (national, corporate or otherwise) as Core rule sets expand and the movement of people, money and ideas become more fluid? Writer Neal Stephenson may have been on to something with his vision of voluntarily affiliation under the authority of non-geographic ‘tribes’. Millions of freelance contractors may be on to something too, but that’s a story for another day.”
Voluntary and virtual affiliations can be benign neutral or negative. When the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa sentencing Salman Rushdie, a citizen of Britain, to death for writing The Satanic Verses he was appealing to a transnational, voluntary affiliation of Muslims to carry out the sentence. It was a challenge not just to Britain’s sovereignty under international law but the legitimacy of the nation-state as a sovereign and to international law itself. It was a strident rejection of the global Westphalian Rule-Set in favor of a univeralist claim to dominion of an Islamist Sharia. Few in the West grasped the nature of the fatwa’s challenge at the time and still fewer viewed it as a forerunner of more challenges to come.
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