I am forwarding a post from another list that seems relevant to futurework. arthur cordell ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 16 Nov 1997 20:52:47 -0800 From: Brooks Jordan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [isg] Contribution from Harlan Cleveland #2 The following is excerpts from Harlan Cleveland's "Leadership and the Information Revolution." Section 1 is from pgs 15-16 and Section 2 from pgs 8-9. Section 1 In my opening comment last Sunday, I suggested that information will be playing the prima donna role in economic history that physical labor, stone, bronze, land, minerals, metals, and energy once played -- and that this would require us "to revise all sorts of assumptions we have treated as 'solid' [because they had to do with things] but now turn out to be fragile and flawed." The trouble seems to be that we have carried over into our thinking about information (which is to say symbols) concepts developed for the management of things -- concepts such as property, depletion, depreciation, monopoly, market economies, class struggle, and top-down leadership. The same is true of much of our inherited thinking about privilege, discrimination, equity, and fairness. This is, I know, a pretty comprehensive list of crumbling concepts, but I mean quite literally what I'm saying. For a start, it helps to stop treating information as just another thing, a sort of commodity with pseudophysical properties, and look hard instead at what makes it so special. For information, the product of human brainwork, is fundamentally different from all its predecessors as civilization's dominant resource. 1. Unlike tangible resources, information expands as it's used. Information tends toward glut, not scarcity. Our common complaint about information is not skimpy rations but overload. 2. Information, as it expands, is less hungry for other resources than were the earlier engines of economic growth. By and large, the higher the tech, the less wasteful of energy and physical raw materials. Computers, for example, get smaller, more powerful, and use less electricity all at the same time. A friend in the aluminum industry has charts and calculations to show that "the smarter the metal, the less it weighs." Not "the limits to growth," but something more like "the growth of limits," is the essence of modern economic history. 3. Information is substitutable. It can and increasingly does replace land, labor, and capital. Information workers, using computers hooked up to worldwide telecommunications, don't need much real estate to do their work. Robotics, automation, and computer/communication office systems displace not only factory and agricultural workers but whole levels of middle-management work as well. Any machine that can be put to your use by computerized communication doesn't have to be in your own inventory. 4. Information is readily transportable at, almost, the speed of light-and evidently, by telepathy or prayer, much faster than that. Hence the passing of "remoteness," which becomes more a matter of personal choice than geography. 5. Information is porous, transparent. It leaks; it has an inherent tendency to leak. The more it leaks, the more we have, and the more of us have it. The straitjackets of government "classification," trade secrecy, intellectual property rights, and confidentiality of all kinds fit very loosely on this restless resource. 6. Information is shared, not exchanged. It may look like an exchange transaction when someone buys a book, a magazine, a software program, a symbolic artifact, or permission to access a database. But what is being bought or sold is the delivery mechanism; any message delivered is also retained by the seller, who shares it with the buyer. Section 2 These six simple, pregnant propositions, multiplied and spread around the world and down the generations, are bound to provide new answers to some of the biggest "why" questions about the exciting times just ahead of us. For example: · Why, in our communities, our nations, and our world, nobody can possibly be in general charge -- of anything. · Why diversity, more and more, will be the law of life and of leadership on this planet. · Why people will just have to find ways to be different, yet together -- not only in Bosnia and the Middle East, but also in Washington and Tokyo and New Delhi and Rio and Berlin and thousands of other mixed up places. · Why we'll have to change our ways of thinking about work -- and probably even chop away the linkage between "working" and "making a living." · Why the rapid globalization of ideas and markets will require new policies and international agreements for governance and business, for art and science, for culture and communication. · Why, since information can't really be "owned" (only its delivery system can), the phrase "intellectual property" is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. · Why the new fairness revolutions -- claims by smarter disadvantaged majorities around the world -- cannot longer be denied. · And why, more and more, the followers everywhere so often get to the policy answers before their leaders do. --------------------------------------------------------------------- IPTS/JRC Mailing list service - European Commission Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] for assistance if needed
