-Caveat Lector-
By David Weir
Dec. 30, 1999 | WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In the past year, this city has emerged
as the nation's "most wired," in that it has the highest per capita Internet
usage in North America. More people now work for the high-tech industry
around here than for Uncle Sam.
But for those of us who live in the Washington area, it's easy to see
certain contradictions between the two cultures represented by .gov and
.com. If the web is home to individualist geeks and would-be entrepreneurs,
Washington plays host to the two-degrees-of-separation-from-real-power
crowd.
Those are the folks who are just that close to this or that senator or
inhabitant of the White House or well-known media personality. The shared
assumption inside the Beltway is that the exercise of power through these
established channels still matters -- a lot.
Maybe so. But this faith in traditional, derived power adds an almost quaint
air to the nation's capital at the millennial moment. Such beliefs evaporate
the further away from Washington one travels, of course, and are downright
rare by the time you reach Silicon Valley, where increasing numbers of
congressmen seem to be showing up these days, hands outstretched. The irony
in this is that the belief that government's day is coming to a close, that
a rapid transformation of society is occurring via digital networks, has
been an article of faith among the digerati for years.
Even the justice department's aggressive counter-attack via the anti-trust
suit against Microsoft has failed to change many minds in the wired world
about government's waning power. The only difference is that now tech money
flows into the lobbyist firms clustered along K Street like champagne at an
election party. As a line item, you might call it "insurance."
As a direct result, however, Congress has suddenly reversed its traditional
antagonism to high-tech and Internet issues (remember the Communications
Decency Act?) to grant tax breaks for ecommerce and for R&D, to limit
liability for stock volitility and Y2K computer failures, and to grant more
job visas for immigrant workers. The war on encryption is virtually over,
with the defeated National Security Agency in disarray, as Seymour Hersh
documented recently in the New Yorker.
The fact that the new tech-friendly policies are furthering the development
of a networked economy that undermines the traditional centralized authority
of the nation-state itself is rarely mentioned. But if this era does indeed
herald "the end of big government," as Bill Clinton famously noted a few
years back, where will that leave Washingtonians, the custodians of the old
company store?
Perhaps the biggest public policy question facing our society as the
millennium turns is barely being discussed inside the United States, though
it hangs over everything here just like those winter storm clouds that hover
but never seem to burst, and that is: "What's the new role for government?"
In order to find a substantive discussion of this issue in the past year,
you would have had to travel quite a ways beyond the Beltway -- over to the
great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy, where near the end of
November there was what was called the Third Way Conference. President
Clinton was there, along with other nascent globalists like Tony Blair
(Britain), who's just learned how to send e-mail; Gerhard Schroeder
(Germany); Lionel Jospin (France); and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil).
Clinton and Blair, bouyed at home by their robust economies, argued for a
new role for government -- empowering citizens through universal education
and access to technology so all can participate fully in the new economy.
They consider their philosophy "progressive governance," i.e., not strictly
a public sector nor a private sector option, which is to say, a Third Way.
France's Jospin worried out loud: "I see that we have a new economy but it's
not going to sweep away history, it's not going to sweep away the various
social groupings and it must not sweep away the nation-state. I'll accept a
networked economy but I don't want a world dominated by networks, because
that will be run by the private sector."
Clinton later agreed with Jospin's position: "We'll say yes to the market
economy, but no to the market society." He went on to say that "what we're
striving for is to replace a divided way of looking at politics and talking
about our common lives with a unifying theory."
--
He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or
who is against it. -Henry George
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