Friends,
Below is my Los Angeles Times column for today, Monday, December 6,
1999. As always, please feel free to pass this on, but please retain
the copyright notice.
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Monday, December 6, 1999
DIGITAL NATION
A Classic Clash of Values in Seattle
By Gary Chapman
Copyright 1999, The Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved.
The protests and riots in Seattle last week during the World Trade
Organization summit jolted many Americans. Photo images of black-clad
and helmeted police lobbing tear gas at rioters in the center of an
American city clashed with the rosy nostrums of economic prosperity
endlessly repeated by our political and business leaders.
Aren't we all supposed to be celebrating affluence, peace and
technology at the end of the millennium? The protesters showed us
that not everyone is quite so content.
The regrettable violence and vandalism perpetrated by a handful of
those in the streets obscured the real issues the peaceful protesters
sought to raise. And the news media has in large part been of little
help in clarifying what's at stake.
Pundits mused over their surprise that any Americans cared about the
WTO and its agenda, or had even heard about the world trade body.
They shouldn't have been surprised, but most elite opinion-makers in
the U.S. don't go to union hall meetings, church basement gatherings
or the living room discussions of concerned citizens.
A myth rampant in the press is that the WTO's business is about
obscure and arcane details of world trade, a boring subject usually
reserved for economists, government ministers and academics.
But in fact, the protesters are astonishingly sophisticated in their
understanding of the most important issues facing the world's
population. This sophistication has come, almost miraculously, not
from academic research or ivory tower contemplation but from
street-level experience and democratic discussions across this
country.
The "new economy" of digital information technologies is caught up in
the controversy surrounding the WTO, obviously. In fact, there is, by
now, no other economy than the global system being reshaped by
computers and the Internet. That's part of the problem the peaceful
protesters were talking about.
For partisan advocates of the new digital economy, there is a utopian
promise unfolding around the world. The Internet promotes, they say,
an unprecedented level playing field that can be exploited by people
with intelligence and skill, without regard to economic background,
race, religion, ethnicity, geographic location or gender. This leads
to a new meritocracy based on individual value and contribution, a
historic improvement over previous ways of acquiring status and
wealth such as title, birth or inheritance.
The efficiencies fostered in the economy by new forms of production,
global integration, the "friction free" character of e-commerce and
other techniques will lead to cheaper goods, falling prices, a
greater distribution of wealth and a corresponding decline in the
desperation that has produced wars and other conflicts in the past.
This is the optimistic picture painted in a book released a few weeks
ago, "The Long Boom," by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden and Joel Hyatt
(Perseus Books), which argues that the digital economy will escape
the boom-and-bust cycles of industrial production.
Most important, say the "comp-utopians," the Internet and personal
computers free individuals from being simply tools of government,
corporations or other large institutions. The Internet fosters
freedom of thought and expression, individual confidence in forging
personal autonomy, and the economic means to live an individualized
life free of coerced conformity.
For all these reasons, they say, the information age is the dawn of a
new era in human potential. And anyone presenting obstacles to this
new potential -- such as trade unions, foot-dragging politicians,
Luddites and other doubters -- need to be, and will be, swept away.
The comp-utopians, say their critics, are blind to the realities of
contemporary economic relations and the true nature of the digital
revolution.
The critics, including the protesters in Seattle, point out that the
"new economy" is demonstrably worsening inequality, threatening to
develop a surveillance society, inexorably expanding the power of
large corporations and crushing all forms of cultural diversity and
authenticity. Instead of the utopia of individual freedom, they say,
we're seeing a "Disney-fication" of the world, a radical
transformation of the Internet from a medium of communications to
something that looks like the worst shopping mall, and a bland,
corporate entertainment culture that anesthetizes people into
debased, insatiable consumerism.
Furthermore, say the critics, the foundational premise of the WTO and
other advocates of globalization is unending economic growth and
consumption, with the single and unchallengeable model of the United
States as the paradigm that should be emulated around the world. This
points to environmental suicide. It's unthinkable that the billions
of people we expect to greet in the next century should all be
encouraged to strive for the American dream of a suburban house, a
car and everything that Wal-Mart or Sears sells. Under that model,
the human race would devour the Earth very rapidly, as we seem to be
doing already.
The prospect that every person on Earth should be turned into a clone
of the average American middle-class consumer is terrifying and
abhorrent to many people who treasure the diversity of human culture,
which is rapidly eroding.
When the promises of abundance and the easy consumer life are
combined with the realities of environmental constraints and
deepening income inequality, the critics say, we are setting
ourselves up for huge future conflicts, not sustainable world peace.
One op-ed columnist began a piece last week with the question and
answer: "Is there anything more ridiculous in the news today than the
protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle? I doubt it."
The question should have been, "Is there anything more serious in the
news today than the protests against the World Trade Organization in
Seattle?" I doubt it. What happened in Seattle was the most important
confrontation of values we've seen in a long time, and one that will
last well into the next millennium.
Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the
University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at
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