And the second. M
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Roberto Verzola Sent: July 24, 2002 11:04 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [solaris]agriculture, industrial and information sectors My apologies if this piece comparing the agriculture, industrial and information sectors is too long. I am posting it because some wanted to see the piece. If you don't, just skip this message. Value-systems and the nature of goods by Roberto Verzola [This is the main text of a paper presented at the 11th Annual Conference of the Philippine International Forum, held in Cebu City on February 22-24, 1994. PIF is an organization of expatriates, many of them church-related, who work with Philippine non-government organizations. ] As some of you may know, I am an electrical engineer by training and a computer consultant by profession. I was also a social activist in the university, and I have remained so ever since. In the past few years, I’ve been involved in studying social issues relating to information technology and exploring the possibility that information technologies can be used for democratization and popular empowerment. Over the past 12 years or so, I have been working with computers practically on a daily basis. And when one works with computers—especially with computer software and data—one is working with practically pure information. It is in the course of my work with computers that I’ve gained a few insights about the nature of information. We know, for instance, that information is not matter. As the scientist would say, it has no mass and it doesn’t occupy physical space. It is intangible. In the past decades, scientists have been able to precisely define information. I will not go into this precise definition now, but let me just say that it is related to the concept of uncertainty: information is that which resolves or reduces uncertainty. What is very interesting to me is the fact that since information is non-material, it is very easy to reproduce. Sharing information with somebody else already reproduces information. Talking before you right now reproduces information many-fold. Broadcasting information over the radio or television can reproduce information thousands—even millions—of times over. Every time I copy a diskette, this quality of information reveals itself before me. Whether it is a conversation, a public performance, an electronic broadcast, or the copying of tapes and diskettes, it is clear that once information is generated, the cost of reproducing it eventually becomes negligible. Let me present this nature of information in a different way. When I let a friend copy a computer program, I do not lose possession of the program. I still have my own copy. Sharing one’s worldly belongings is difficult for many to do because to give away material goods is to lose possession of these goods. But sharing knowledge and information is the most natural thing to do, because we don’t lose them when we share them. Thus, it is most natural that computer users share programs among themselves. Sharing information freely comes naturally. How can one be so selfish as to deny a copy of a computer program from a friend if one won’t lose the program by sharing it? However, now comes the Business Software Association (BSA) and the government of the United States, asserting that copying computer programs is stealing, that for every copy we share, we are actually “stealing” hundreds of dollars from American corporations. This is quite a clash of values, isn’t it? Before I jump ahead of my story, let me state at this time the first major observation that came out of my twelve years of work with computers and information technology: it takes very little to share information, and people share information freely. This is true of knowledge and information we hold in our minds. It is true of music, poems, and songs. It is true of computer programs and computer data. It is also true of genetic information as contained in seeds, plants and animals. But this problem with the BSA and the U.S. government remains: they want to stop us from sharing freely. Instead, they want us to acknowledge the ownership claims that some have staked on information. These ownership claims are in the form of exclusive usage and copying rights, or intellectual property rights (IPR) -- their intellectual property rights. For those who might think the U.S. value system is the more “natural” system, let me tell you another story. This one comes from the Bible: When it was evening, his disciples came to him and said, “We are in a lonely place and it is now late. You should send these people away so they can go to the villages and buy something for themselves to eat.” But Jesus replied, “They do not need to go away; you give them something to eat.” They answered, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fishes.” Jesus said to them, “Bring them here to me.” Then he had everyone sit down on the grass. He took the five loaves and the two fishes, raised his eyes to heaven, pronounced the blessing, broke the loaves and handed them to the disciples to distribute to the people. And they all ate, and everyone had enough; then the disciples gathered up the leftovers, filling twelve baskets. Every time I share the contents of a diskette with a friend, I am always reminded of the miracle of the loaves. After all, knowledge is food for the mind. With it, we can feed thousands of families with knowledge, and we will certainly be left with more than what we started with. I have also confirmed that our Muslim and Buddhist friends are familiar with analogous stories in their own cultures. The message behind the act of sharing miraculous loaves of bread must be extremely important indeed, because the miracle occurs twice in Biblical passages. And how significant, too, that the world’s greatest religions would teach the same lesson through analogous parables. Given the issue of intellectual property rights, the first major question crops up: why is it, that some societies extol information sharing, while other societies stake monopolistic ownership claims on information goods? Why do rural folk exchange seeds freely, while corporations want monopoly rights over seeds through patents? Why does BSA and the U.S. government want to impose—as they’ve successfully done through the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) -- their value-systems concerning information over our own value-systems? This takes us to a parallel research I did, this time, on the U.S. economy. I thought that there must be something in the U.S. economy which was propelling the extension of highly monopolistic private property concepts to areas like information and life forms. The most important observation that emerged from my readings was this: the U.S. economy had undergone a fundamental change in the nature of the goods that it produces. A few decades back, U.S. products were industrial goods of the tangible, material kind—cars, television sets, and machineries, for example. The principal U.S. products today are fundamentally different; they are intangible, non- material products—books, software, video and audio tapes, databases, etc. Some products—like pharmaceuticals and biotechnology products—might be tangible, but much of their prices reflect the intangible content, protected through patents or copyrights. One of the first to make this observation was the American sociologist Daniel Bell, who, as early as the late 50’s, raised observations about the emerging “post-industrial” society in the U.S. Alvin Toeffler later popularized and expanded this concept through his works Future Shock, Third Wave, and Powershift. Marc Porat did a very detailed statistical study confirming the emergence of what can now be called the information economy in the United States. Today, we can state with certainty that the dominant sector in the U.S. economy is the information sector. It is responsible for the biggest share in the GNP, in U.S. exports, in employment, and in just about every economic measure one can use. It is a sector whose voice in U.S. government policies has become much stronger recently. Witness how the intellectual property rights issue has become the number one rallying cry of U.S. diplomacy all over the world. It is this fundamental shift in the nature of U.S. products, which has led to the emergence of a highly monopolistic ownership system over information goods. Let me go back to my first observation: it takes very little to copy information. We know, for example, how little it costs to copy a diskette. The corollary observation, however, is that if one can prevent others from freely copying information, such as those sold in diskettes or tapes, then they will have market value, and because the reproduction cost is minimal, the margins of profit would be extremely high indeed. It is the high profit margins derived from the sale of monopolistically- owned information products which led to the rapid growth of the U.S. information sector. With the growth of this sector, particularly because it controlled the media, came the increasing dominance of the value-system that supports monopolistic private ownership systems over information. Let me now summarize the fundamental difference between an industrial economy, as the U.S. economy was several decades ago, and an information economy, as the U.S. economy is today: an industrial economy produces tangible, material goods while an information economy produces intangible, non-material goods. Material goods require raw materials which are then transformed into finished prooducts by human labor. Information goods are mostly the result of mental work and, once created, may be reproduced at practically no cost. They may also be shared without loss. Having done this comparative study of industrial and information economies, I went further and did an analysis of an agricultural economy, likewise from the viewpoint of the nature of the goods produced. Here, I came to a somewhat different observation from what has traditionally been considered agricultural work. Traditionally, agricultural and industrial sectors were differentiated on the basis of land. Simplistically put, working the land was considered agricultural work; working with machines was considered industrial work. I realized that on the basis of the nature of the goods that they products, there was a clearer and much more insightful dividing line between the agriculture and the industrial sectors, just as clear and insightful as the material/non-material divide between the industrial and the information sectors. What is this dividing line? This is the line between the living and the non-living. In agriculture we find issues of birth, growth, reproduction and death. Here we grapple with the relation of human beings with nature and the rest of the living world. While the industrial sector involves the physical transformation of dead matter into finished products through the application of human labor, the agriculture sector involves the regeneration and the reproduction of life through the operation of natural processes. What a world of difference! Consider driving a nail into wood: to drive nail into the wood, one must hit it with a hammer. One must apply human or machine power on dead matter to transform it into a finished product. Consider the typical industrial operations: punching, drilling, boring, milling, grinding, melting, etc. Imagine the kind of value-system or—to use my preferred term—world-view, that will emerge when this is one’s activity eight or more hours a day, most days of the week. Consider, on the other hand, raising a crop. You water the plants; you give them tender loving care. You cannot even speed up the process. As the song goes, there is a time for everything under heaven. This is an entirely different value-system we are talking about. You can perhaps understand why I myself prefer to call the agriculture sector the ecology sector. Finally, in a roundabout way, I have come to the gist of my presentation. Based on the nature of the goods and services they produce, economies have three major sectors: the agriculture sector, the industrial sector and the information sector. In countries like the Philippines, the agriculture sector remains the dominant sector. In the NICs, the industrial sector has become dominant. In the U.S. and to a lesser extent Europe, it is the information sector which is now dominant. For each sector can be identified sets of value-systems or world-views. The agriculture or ecology sector promotes a world-view that reflects our relationship with nature and the processes of regeneration and reproduction of life. Whether one is living off nature as a hunter/gatherer, planting food crops, domesticating animals for their milk and meat, or raising a family, we have to come to terms with the great laws of nature; we have to fit ourselves into the pace and tempo of nature’s own processes. We must learn to adapt, to live in harmony with our surroundings. It is in agricultural activities where we are the in best position to appreciate that we are part of nature, nurtured by it, and with an obligation to nurture it in turn. My wife comes from a farming family. Her first instinctive action, after eating a delicious fruit, is to save the seeds. My grandmother used to save everything she could, pieces of thread, pieces of paper, pieces of wood, pieces of metal. She knew they would be of use someday. She was expressing an ecological principle: in nature, nothing is wasted. In most rural communities, frugality remains a virtue—a lesson picked up from centuries of indigenous ecological learning. It is in the ecology sector where spirituality easily takes root, because there is so much in nature and life processes that proceed without human intervention and are beyond our means to control and even, perhaps, to understand. The industrial sector, on the other hand, expresses a world- view that reflects the central role of human labor power in transforming dead matter into a finished product. In nature, living things grow even without human intervention. But dead matter cannot transform itself into a finished product. Human labor power, frequently magnified by machines and technology, must be applied on the raw material, to mould and transform it into a product. We can see here the central role of power in material transformation. The history of technology might be seen as the development of various ways by which power can be brought to bear upon dead matter to transform it into a useful product. In our local language, to be compared to a nail means to move only after a shove. The shepherd and the crop grower, who have no choice but to bide their time and keep in step with nature’s own tempo, must appear slothful indeed to workers and industrialists who transform raw materials by their own labor or by the power of machines. I have referred earlier to the difference between material and non-material goods. Put five pieces of bread (of the non-miraculous variety) on the table and tell ten hungry men to get one piece each and one can expect keen competition for possesion of the pieces. They have a term for this in mathematics: zero-sum games. These are situations where the gain of one means somebody else’s loss. In order to win, you must defeat somebody else. A piece of bread in their hands means one less for me. So, I must fight for my piece. International trade is another example of a zero-sum game. For a country to attain a positive balance of trade, some of its partners must show a negative balance of trade, because by definition, the sum total of all exports and imports of all countries is zero. This is the case with material goods which are in scarcity, which is almost always the case because we can never have an infinite supply of material goods. Zero-sum games are, by nature, highly competitive games. The pitfall of many socialist economies was that they underestimated this aspect of competition for material goods, which emanates from the very nature of material goods. On the other hand, the acquisition of information is not a zero-sum game. If I put a diskette on the table and told everybody to make a copy for themselves, I will still have a copy afterwards. Your gain is not my loss. If everybody put their diskettes on the table for copying by others, we will all have gained in the process. This is what mathematicians call a positive-sum game. Positive-sum games are highly cooperative. If socialist advocates erred in thinking they could abolish competition for material goods, they stand on much more solid ground in advocating socialist principles for information. By their very nature, information goods are public goods and the urge to share is completely in harmony with the nature of information. However, work in the information sector can also develop a sense of omnipotence and absolute power that can distort the sense of the information creator. Those who have done some computer programming, or even played a simple video game, will know exactly what I mean. Because information is non-material and intangible, it does not need the kind of raw materials and energy supply that naturally puts a “limit to growth” on material goods production. The concept of the infinite (both in growth and in power) becomes a reality in the information sector. One can create something out of nothing, create virtual worlds where one can become a virtual god. One can wield limitless power and be in total control of “reality”. Because the information sector has only recently become a major sector, it is difficult to comprehend the implications of such illusions of absolute power and total control. These concepts of power and control emerged strongly in industrial economies, but they may reach their full expression in information economies. A very common problem with value-systems is the widespread misapplication of value-systems (or world-views) which might be appropriate for one sector of the economy but not for another sector. This has happened most often with the industrial sector’s value systems, and this may be called industrialism. Industrial thinking puts the power of human actions (amplified by machines) at the center of the universe. Nothing will get done if you don’t roll up your sleeves to do it. Put in more inputs and more power and you get more outputs. Put in more workers and money and you’ll get it done faster. This attitude becomes the dominant attitude not only in the production of material goods but also in social relations and in politics. Married with profit-motivated commodity production, this view has led to a concept of growth without limit, of production for the market, of market expansion. True, it has led to the availability of a vast variety of goods for popular convenience and comfort. But it has also led to the profligate use of raw materials and energy sources from nature. It has led to social monstrosities, both of the capitalist and the socialist kind, and to environmental disasters, some of which threaten the very existence of life on earth. It has led to the meaningless production of commodities whose main purpose is not to satisfy genuine human needs but to generate profits. It has led to the emergence of junk culture, whose main purpose is to generate for demand for commodities and raise profit levels which will in turn pay for the creation of more junk culture—a cancerous growth of decadence, commodity production and profit accumulation. The concept of private property, while it emerges naturally for the zero-sum nature of material goods acquisition, has expanded way beyond the range of dead matter and material goods. It has grown more absolute. A very monopolistic expression may be found in the concept of intellectual property rights, another misapplication of the private property concepts of industrialism. Under this concept, information may not only be privatized but also opened for monopoly claims of ownership. This concept was first innocuously applied to literary works and inventions, but has since expanded to cover a vast range of knowledge and information goods. Now it even includes genetic information and processes in microorganisms, plants, animals, and, yes, human beings. It is curious to note that the claimant to intellectual property rights thinks the same of information as a landlord thinks of land: once you successfully stake a claim of ownership over a piece of it, you can sit down and charge the rest of society rents for the use of your property. I would like to pause here and review very briefly—perhaps, simplistically—the three sectors and the different value-systems that emerge from them: 1. The ecology sector teaches us respect for life and the need for harmony with nature and its processes. On the other hand, it develops a somewhat passive attitude towards life and the environment. 2. The industrial sector teaches us the value of work and the capacity of people to transform their surroundings. On the other hand, this can result in overaggressiveness and excessive competition. 3. The information sector teaches us the value of cooperation and of sharing knowledge freely. On the other hand, because it gives a feeling of total control and absolute power by the intellectual creator, can lead to a very distorted sense of reality. Which value-system should we adopt? Should we, as the Philippines 2000 program intends to do, try to catch up with the rest of the NICs and make the industrial sector and its value-systems the dominant sector of our economy? Or should we follow the footsteps of the United States and go beyond the industrial stage? Should we, in fact, leapfrog industrializaton, transform our economy into an information economy, and adopt in full the concepts of intellectual property rights? Or should we remain a predominantly agricultural economy as we had been in the past, living in blissful harmony with nature? To me, the answer is, none of the above. Rather, it is to attain a balanced and harmonious development of the three sectors, all of which are important to us. We must also learn to be proficient in each of the value-systems that emerge from them, selecting what appears to be good and rejecting what appears to be bad. Is it possible to adopt three conflicting world-views? I would compare this to speaking three different languages. We must become fluent in speaking English, Tagalog, and Cebuano. Fluency comes from a mastery of each of the languages, and internalizing their structure, grammar, vocabulary, and idioms. To speak a mish-mash of English, Tagalog, and Cebuano words is not fluency in the three languages; it shows a lack of mastery in any of the three. We must be able to shift effortlessly from one language to another, depending on the situation, the location, and the people. Perhaps, by personal preference, or by accident of birth or family, we are more fluent in one than in another, but we must know enough to become accepted by native speakers of the three. The ideal person, and by extension, the ideal society, for me, is one that speaks these three languages fluently and knows when to use one language and value-system, and when to use the other. And this can happen on a wide-scale only if our economy itself reflected the balanced and harmonious development of the agriculture, industrial and information sectors. solaris--independant forum for IT & development issues un/sub info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "help" in the subject line or in the body of the message. URL: http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/solaris/ archive: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/solaris/
