-Caveat Lector- >From SalonMagazine.CoM The tomorrow tribe _____________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - <Picture: 21st Review Image>Virginia Postrel's "dynamism" manifesto reaches out to geeks. "THE FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES: THE GROWING CONFLICT OVER CREATIVITY, ENTERPRISE AND PROGRESS" | BY VIRGINIA POSTREL | FREE PRESS, 265 PAGES BY ETELKA LEHOCZKY | Find politics pointless? That's only natural. With a Rabelaisian burlesque spellbinding Washington's two political parties and nonplusing the rest of the nation, the time is ripe for someone to reframe the basic issues. And so along comes "The Future and Its Enemies," a clarion call for radical political and economic change. Well, radical in theory, anyway. Author Virginia Postrel's book is both a siren's song and an inspirational text, and in the style of such things she generally refrains from messy specifics. That's fine, really, because her target audience -- the brilliant, rebellious innovators of the tech industries -- is by and large perfectly satisfied to keep its head firmly in the clouds. Postrel's got the ideal message for them: that innovation would be spurred, naysayers foiled and progress hastened if we could just convince the fuddy-duddies to get out of the way. She calls this philosophy "dynamism," and she invests it with boundless possibilities. It's no surprise that Postrel should stress the transformative power of a few good ideas. As the editor of Reason, a libertarian magazine, she's accountable to a group that nurtures deep suspicion for any political action more coercive than a nice, rousing speech or, at the very outside, a majority vote. Of course, it's this penchant for angry but ultimately fruitless fulmination that has kept libertarians on the fringes of political discourse in America, influencing but never really determining the direction of public policy. Postrel aims to change all that by attracting some vital new blood to the cause. With "The Future and Its Enemies," she reaches out to a natural, but as yet rather hands-off, libertarian constituency: high-tech pioneers. Her lures are manifold. They include breathless paeans to any and all innovation, the requisite fond words for the miracle of the Internet and a light, pithy writing style that zooms past thorny contradictions to deliver quick, comfortable conclusions. But such gimmicks are by no means the whole story. Unlike many similar screeds, Postrel's is vibrant with genuinely remarkable new ideas. Her central thesis is solidly common-sensical. To replace the old liberals-vs.-conservatives dichotomy, she proposes a division between "dynamists" and "stasists." Dynamists, she explains, are those who embrace change. They fearlessly endure and even cherish uncertainty, adjusting to unexpected circumstances with speed and panache. Venture capitalists, biotechnologists, the execs at Starbucks and beach volleyball enthusiasts all fit into this category. Stasists, on the other hand, quail at the very notion of anything new. They try to organize developments into preexisting structures and keep them there -- even if it impedes progress and kills innovation. Would-be regulators of the Internet, opponents of genetic engineering and Hillary Rodham Clinton are all stasists. They're the titular enemies of the future. N E X T_ P A G E .|. Postrel's assiduous courtship of the geek set THE TOMORROW TRIBE | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - If this sounds a bit black-and-white, it is -- yet Postrel makes such simplicity palatable. "The Future and Its Enemies" is a scintillating manifesto that will inspire and invigorate those ready to hear its message, even as it infuriates those who aren't. Simultaneously clearheaded and effervescent, Postrel's prose is delightful to read. It bubbles with salubrious little maxims, the kind that reignite one's flagging sense of intellectual adventure: "Change and self-transformation are among the truest expressions of our enduring human nature." "Only people who know they do not know everything will be curious enough to find things out." "Beach volleyball is a technocrat's nightmare." Though she pauses to deal a few ritualistic swats to such standard libertarian scapegoats as compulsory public education and the Food and Drug Administration, Postrel doesn't dwell on them. Instead, her case studies tend to be engagingly wacky. She cites Vidal Sassoon, California doughnut shops, her 7-year-old niece Rachel, Wolfgang Puck's frozen pizzas, online chat rooms and role-playing games as examples of dynamism in practice. The last two examples are particularly telling, for they reflect Postrel's assiduous courtship of the geek set. Make no mistake -- this is the book's raison d'�tre, and it's responsible for both its peaks and its gulches. Leading the former category is "Fields of Play," a chapter on work as play and vice versa: Postrel has carefully observed computer programmers and noted their example; she's lyrical in her evocation of the high you get when you're up to your elbows in a complex, challenging project. Citing "the psychological need for novelty [that is] a fundamental characteristic of the human species," she crafts a rich, moving defense of open-ended brainwork. Just as striking is her relentless celebration of the Internet as a haven for "local knowledge." She targets technocrats who ignore specialized knowledge in their pursuit of overarching rules, acidly mocking Ross Perot's 1996 assumption that because he'd "spent the last 40 years designing, engineering, testing and implementing complex systems," he'd been effectively training to be president. Coming just a few pages later, her claim that because "computer programs are themselves strings of rules ... programmer[s have] a practical knowledge of rule structures," and thus are equipped to govern the Internet, is rather breathtaking. Yet she sticks to this claim, doggedly ignoring such glaring examples of Internet technocracy gone awry as the rising tide of spam, the Net's inability to protect copyrights and the continuing disarray of the domain-name registration process. There are other flaws. Determined to hold the reader's interest at any cost, Postrel foregoes philosophical subtlety. Doesn't everyone have both stasist and dynamist tendencies? Surely even Postrel herself cherishes some certainties; surely there are some institutions she'd like to preserve. Isn't dynamism sometimes a bad thing -- as when it spurs dangerous fads? The tech-stock gold rush exemplifies dynamism at its most pell-mell, and numerous observers fear its consequences. And doesn't stasis have some positive qualities? It could be argued that America's strong sense of tradition provides a necessary foundation for rapid political and economic change. But such questions are far from closed. They will no doubt be taken up at events like Reason's first annual Dynamic Visions Conference, held this past weekend. But more importantly, Postrel's ideas are far too interesting to dismiss with a few caveats. Her dynamist philosophy should provoke discussion for some time to come. SALON | Feb. 16, 1999 - - - - - - - - - - Etelka Lehoczky has written on politics and culture for Salon, Feed and Newsday. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! 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