The rise of technology signals the fall of technocracy.
Running for re-election in 1996, Bill Clinton and Al Gore promised again and again to build a bridge to the 21st century. Their slogan cast them as the candidates of the future, youthful builders and doers, the sort of people with whom forward-looking voters would identify. It was a comfortable cliché, ideology-free.
Or was it?
A century ago, "bridge to the future" was not a bland cliché, but a potent political metaphor - a conceit representing an entire philosophy of governing. Building bridges is an engineering feat requiring big budgets and teams of experts, not to mention careful planning and blueprints. Once complete, the result is a quintessentially static structure, going from known point A to known point B, changeless and unmoving. Fall off - let alone jump - and you're doomed.
Like an earlier Clinton/Gore plan to overlay the Net with a centrally planned and federally funded information superhighway, their bridge to the future isn't as neutral as it appears. It carries important ideas: The future must be brought under control, managed, and planned - preferably by "experts." It cannot simply evolve. The future must be predictable and uniform: We will go from point A to point B with no deviations. A bridge to the future is not an empty cliché. It represents technocracy, the rule of experts.
And it is technocracy, not liberalism or conservatism, that has been the dominant ideology of US politics for most of this century. That's why the metaphor of the bridge has withered into a cliché. Our political discussions simply assume that every new development - cultural, technological, or economic - requires some sort of program to make it turn out "right." Harvard historian John M. Jordan calls it "the peculiar American paradox of kinetic change made stable." It is the ideology of the best way - the one best way.
Most political arguments still center on competing technocratic schemes: Should there be a mandatory family-viewing hour on TV, or a V-chip? Should the tax code favor families with children, or people attending college? Should a national health insurance program enroll everyone in managed care, or should we regulate HMOs? The fight isn't over whether the future should be molded to fit someone's ideal. It's simply over what that ideal should be.
In 1995, about a year into the Republican takeover of the US Congress, one Capitol Hill insider explained what had gone wrong with Newt Gingrich's "revolution." The problem, he said, was that most members of Congress - "revolutionary" Republicans included - couldn't imagine life without central, generally governmental, direction. "They're good conservatives, so they want to reduce government," he said. "But they think of that as getting as close to the abyss as possible without falling off." It's a bipartisan consensus that the future is too important to be left alone - that the marketplace can't evolve privacy standards, that Washington must protect kids from popular culture, that cloning must be banned.
Clinton's bridge to the future thus represents the same governing vision as the bridge to the past Bob Dole offered in his own acceptance speech. Below both lies the abyss.
The Cold War long obscured the technocratic entente in US politics, dividing the landscape right and left. If you worried about containing the Soviets, you were on the right. If you feared US militarism, you were on the left. People who didn't comfortably fit - who, say, liked entrepreneurship but were suspicious of the military, or who distrusted corporations but opposed godless communism - were pigeonholed anyway according to their Cold War views.
The 1990s changed all that. The Cold War evaporated, allowing new (and some very old) issues to come to the fore. Free markets are no longer simply what the communists don't have. They are powerful forces for social, cultural, and technological change, together shaping an unknown, and unknowable, future. Some people look at this and rejoice. Others recoil.
So, today's defining question is: What to do about the future? Do we search for stasis - a constrained, regulated, engineered future? Or embrace dynamism - the open-ended, evolving future? Do we demand rules to govern each new situation and keep things under control? Or do we limit rule making to broad and rarely changed principles, within which people can craft an unpredictable future? These two poles - stasis and dynamism - will increasingly define our political, intellectual, and cultural landscape.
The most powerful supporters of stasis are technocrats - people, often in position of power, who believe that the future can and should be engineered. Their central value is control, and they greet every new idea with "yes, but," followed by legislation, regulation, and litigation. People like Clinton, Gore, and Gingrich, are "for the future," but they expect someone to be in charge. They get nervous at suggestions that the future might develop spontaneously.
So it is that Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who defined technocracy as "the vital center," looks at today's technological dynamism and sees chaos. "The computer," he wrote in Foreign Affairslast fall, "turns the untrammeled market into a global juggernaut, crashing across frontiers, enfeebling national powers of taxation and regulation, undercutting national management of interest rates and exchange rates, widening disparities of wealth between and within nations, dragging down labor standards, degrading the environment, denying nations the shaping of their own economic destiny, creating a world economy without a world polity."
Schlesinger is not exactly a technophobe. But he is horrified by the thought of forces beyond the control of technocratic wise men. He wants someone in charge. And by blaming the impersonal computer, he carefully omits the decentralized, individual choices that actually create the out-of-control world he finds so frightening.
Nearly a century later, technocracy remains the default assumption of American politics: "Got a problem, get a program." But from urban renewal to the "wars" on poverty and drugs, technocracy has not delivered on its grand promises. Rather than a smooth-running engine, technocracy has produced a Rube Goldberg device that grinds gears, shoots sparks, and periodically breaks down entirely.
As government has grown and special interests have multiplied, bureaucracies that once functioned reasonably well have become decadent, rigid, and insulated: The United States Postal Service is both high-handed and frequently incompetent. NASA is sluggish. Public schools are dedicated to mediocrity, when they are not outright failures. Power corrupts, and monopoly power corrupts absolutely.
It is almost impossible to eliminate or significantly reform any technocratic program, so strong are the interest groups - "veto players," in political-science jargon - who nourish and protect it. Journalist Jonathan Rauch calls the problem "demosclerosis," noting in his book by that name: "No one starting anew today would think to subsidize peanut farmers, banish banks from the mutual-fund business, forbid the United Parcel Service to deliver letters, grant massive tax breaks for borrowing. Countless policies are on the books not because they make sense today, but merely because they cannot be gotten rid of." Technocracy not only hampers private experiments. Over time, it has lost its own ability to adapt.
The technocrats who today still dominate both major parties have considerable power and minimal intellectual oomph. But they also have tacit allies in a second static camp: reactionaries, who want explicitly to go back to a real or imagined past. Ranging from Pat Buchanan to the followers of such influential green theorists as Small Is Beautiful author E. F. Schumacher, reactionaries have plenty of vitality but minimal power. Their central value is not control, but stability. Their ideal world is one of peasant virtues - limited ambition and, hence, limited change.
United by a hostility to innovation, reactionaries create seemingly odd alliances. In January 1995 Pat Buchanan and environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin upset CNN's Crossfire by agreeing - ostensibly across the ideological table - that the future is bleak, economic restructuring is bad, technology is too disruptive. Buchanan was reduced to telling Rifkin, "You sound like a Pat Buchanan column," while Rifkin could only counter, "I find myself in a position of agreeing with Pat once again, which gives me alarm." Surprised they may have been, but nationalist conservatism and technophobic environmentalism are two sides of the same stasist coin. A similar left-right coalition is pushing drastic cuts in immigration; this spring Sierra Club members will vote on whether to join. And then there is technology itself: environmentalist author Kirkpatrick Sale defends the Unabomber and ends speeches by smashing computers, while the conservative Weekly Standard echoes him in a cover headline, "Smash the Internet."
The great strength of the static coalition is its numbers: plenty of people have some specific vision of society they'd like to impose. The problem is agreeing on what that vision is. Buchanan wants to restore the blue-collar world of industrial work, while Sale condemns industrialism. Rifkin calls for special taxes on computers and telecommunications; Buchanan is a cable-television host.
Stasists know they want the world to hold still. But they cannot agree on which particular order - which one static, finite society - should replace the open-ended future. Ultimately, they are undone by the totalitarian quality of their position: stasism cannot triumph unless everyone's future is the same.
The dynamic side of the new landscape is far less self-aware but increasingly influential. Dynamists have the opposite problem from stasists, and the opposite strength. Though fewer in number, dynamists permit many visions and accept competing dreams. To work together, they do not have to agree on what the future should look like. They seek "simple rules for a complex world," in University of Chicago legal scholar Richard Epstein's phrase, not complicated regulations aimed at making the world simple.
Dynamists typically are drawn toward organic metaphors, symbols of unpredictable growth and change. "I like building things," says Esther Dyson, discussing her work with entrepreneurs in postcommunist Europe. "But I'd rather be a gardener than in construction. I'd rather go out and water the plants, and clear the path for the sun to shine, and have them grow themselves." Dynamism is, in the words of its most important theorist, the late economist and social philosopher Friedrich Hayek, "the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution."
But dynamists so far are a party in name only. You can find them in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, but most will call themselves apolitical because they aren't interested in fighting over technocratic schemes. Cultural studies, an academic field associated with the left, harbors some dynamists. They even crop up in such technocratic citadels as the World Bank and the occasional urban-planning school (notably USC's).
Although most libertarians are dynamists, dynamism shouldn't be confused with simple libertarianism. And dynamists may disagree - about the extent and nature of public goods, the limits of paternalism, and the justice of redistribution. Like stasists, they are often drawn into positions that don't make left-right sense.
What dynamists do agree on is protecting processes rather than trying to engineer outcomes. Consider the quintessentially technocratic - and predictably "bipartisan" - Communications Decency Act. Instead of rushing to impose a single standard, Representatives Christopher Cox (R-California) and Ron Wyden (now a Democratic senator from Oregon) saw the issue of Internet standards as a question of helping parents enforce their own norms - an interest Internet service providers trying to attract families obviously share. So Cox and Wyden came up with language protecting ISPs from the relatively strict libel standards applied to edited publications - merely selling a "family friendly," filtered service wouldn't make a company responsible for monitoring everything it carried. Eventually subsumed into the larger bill, Cox and Wyden's provisions were upheld when the US Supreme Court struck down the rest of the CDA as unconstitutional. And today the Net still offers pornography - but people who don't want themselves or their children to see it have an easier time avoiding it.
Dynamists understand the limits of their own knowledge - and of everyone else's. They see markets not as conspiracies, but as discovery processes, coordinating dispersed knowledge. And they worry about the way technocrats blithely trample individual efforts and override local knowledge. Says Representative Rick White (R-Washington), a critic of attempts to regulate cyberspace: "When Congress focuses on an issue, Congress sees the big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big picture. They're the ultimate big-picture people. And they really don't understand the details."
Working without details - let alone intimate knowledge - is the technocrat's hallmark. "We have government by the clueless, over a place they've never been, using means they don't possess," says EFF cofounder John Perry Barlow. He's right, but the problem is hardly unique to the regulation of cyberspace. The creators of Post-it notes and plastics, TV shows and trucks, plus anyone who has ever hired an employee, built a building, or educated a child - all understand what it means to be governed by the clueless. Cyberspace is not the first dynamic culture that technocrats have tried to control; it is only the most recent.
Opposition to global trade, immigration, and new technologies has rallied stasist coalitions. Dynamists, on the other hand, barely know their "coalition" exists. They share beliefs in spontaneous order, in evolved solutions, in the limits of centralized knowledge, in the possibility of progress. They may see themselves as libertarian or progressive, liberal or conservative, playful postmodernists or hard-headed technologists. But they don't share an identity.
The Net is changing that. A symbol of dynamic, spontaneous evolution, it produces plenitude - anthropologist Grant McCracken's apt term for the way a dynamic society fills every available cultural and economic niche. You can find just about anything on the Net. And that drives stasists crazy.
Protecting cyberspace could become the catalyzing issue for a broader dynamist coalition, but only if the kind of people who read this magazine begin to see their situation as typical, rather than unique, part of a world of many evolving social and economic webs, their causes all bound up with others. Dynamists who bend metal, build houses, or distribute detergent will not rally to join cybersnobs who sneer at factories and think of themselves as the first people ever to turn ideas into wealth. If netizens become merely another interest group, they will miss a chance to fundamentally change American politics.
For technologists, especially, technocracy is an eternal temptation. When Al Gore's Silicon Valley fan club complained about lousy public schools, he flatteringly asked club members to come up with alternatives. Instead of focusing on incentives and feedback, they immediately started designing new technocratic gimmicks. The result was Dashboard, a push technology that sends information to parents. But if parents don't like what they see, they still have no recourse except to opt out entirely. The public schools' monopoly remains unchallenged.
Silicon Valley's infatuation with the vice president is itself peculiar. From computer encryption to rock lyrics to energy use to biotechnology, Gore has met dynamism and diversity with consistently technocratic, often reactionary rhetoric. His 1992 best-seller Earth in the Balance demands that we adopt a "central organizing principle for civilization," a one-best-way moral equivalent of war that subordinates all other goals. Few people in American politics so perfectly combine both sides of the static coin.
The fabled date 2000, long the symbol of the future, will soon be upon us - just another election year. But our politics will remain uneasy. As Cox notes, "there are these schisms in both the Democratic and Republican Parties," and they are not going away anytime soon. Technological change does not resolve political issues; it merely raises new ones.
To preserve the future as an ongoing process, dynamists will have to find each other - across party lines, academic disciplines, and professional affiliations. To do that, they need to drop misleading Cold War labels. And they have to find what they are for: not just the Internet, or free trade, or the "new economy," but a world of richness and variety where people are free to experiment and learn, to challenge themselves and each other, to cherish the wisdom of the past and create the wisdom of the future.
