Info vs power

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

==============================

Gaining Freedom by Modem

by Robert Wright


(NY Times)---At the end of the 20th century, American foreign policy 
acquired a new premise: history is on the side of freedom as never 
before. The basic idea is that economic and political liberty -- which 
always had a fairly close relationship -- are now, suddenly, joined at 
the hip. What joined them is information technology. As President 
Clinton said in 1998, justifying his policy of economic engagement 
with China: "In this global information age, when economic success 
is built on ideas, personal freedom is essential to the greatness of 
any modern nation."  

Or, to put the argument in less gauzy terms: These days, for 
markets to work well, microcomputers and modems must cover the 
economic landscape. As a side effect, state control of information is 
eroded and citizens are empowered. So governments that want 
prosperity must sooner or later tolerate political freedom.  

In assessing this argument, it helps to realize that the 20th century 
wasn't the first time a new information technology tightened the link 
between political and economic freedom. Much the same thing 
happened five centuries ago, after Johannes Gutenberg introduced 
the movable-type printing press to Europe.  

A look at that revolution, while broadly justifying Mr. Clinton's faith 
in the liberating potential of technology, also suggests that breaking 
out the champagne would be premature. This week's announcement 
by the Chinese government that it would tighten Internet censorship 
may foreshadow a series of such efforts that, however futile in the 
end, could in the meantime prove quite consequential.  

That the printing press could decentralize power became apparent 
early on to the Church, whose authority had been hard to question 
when the cutting-edge publishing technology was monasteries full of 
scribbling monks.  

The threat to the Church wasn't just the one stressed in history 
textbooks -- that the Gutenberg Bible let lay people become lay 
theologians, hence more open to radical interpretations of scripture, 
like Martin Luther's. More vital to the Reformation was plain old 
pamphleteering. Luther posted his famous critique of orthodoxy on 
Oct. 31, 1517, and within a month reprints were rolling off the 
presses in three German cities. Before long secular authorities 
shared the pope's discomfort. In 1524, German peasants used the 
press to air complaints about feudalism. More and more, printing 
would be a weapon of the downtrodden in Europe.  

Ruling classes naturally tried to rein in a technology that could so 
sharply redistribute power. In the late 16th century, Britain's Star 
Chamber restricted printing to head off the "great enormities and 
abuses" caused by "contentious and disorderly persons professing 
the art or mystery of printing or selling of books."  

But rulers faced the stubborn fact that today confronts authoritarian 
regimes: as new information technologies spread, the cost of stifling 
them is high. After all, technical advance depends on the free flow of 
ideas. So, to shut down printing presses is to slow the rate of 
invention. In addition, free presses would increasingly smooth the 
day-to-day workings of capitalism. In the 18th century, newspapers 
became, as one scholar has put it, "appendages of the market" -- 
read for their commodity prices, their shipping schedules and 
miscellaneous business news.  

All of this helps explain why Britain, which by the end of the 17th 
century led Europe in liberty -- and which had a daily newspaper 70 
years before France did -- is where the industrial revolution reached 
critical mass. It also helps explain why the Netherlands, which 
rivaled England in its aversion to despotism and in the vibrancy of 
its press, had paved the way for industrialization during its Golden 
Age in the 16th and early 17th centuries.  

This is the good news: when an information revolution lowers the 
cost of processing data, thus expanding the frontiers of technical 
progress and economic efficiency, political liberalization indeed 
seems to be the price for long-run prosperity.  

The bad news is that, even as some rulers harness this dynamic by 
permitting freedom, others sink into denial. They think they can be 
autocratic yet stay at the forefront of affluence. In fact, in many ways 
European government grew more absolutist in the centuries after 
Gutenberg's invention.  

To be sure, this resistance was futile. The economists J. Bradford 
De Long and Andrei Shleifer have shown that, in general, the more 
absolutist the governments during this period, the less prosperous 
their polities. Still, it took awhile for the logic of liberty to play itself 
out. Even as late as 1848, Europe's ruling classes managed to 
largely frustrate a continent-wide, print-lubricated revolt of the 
middle and lower classes, who sought political rights and/or 
national self-determination.  

This doesn't mean that the Internet's implications will take another 
several centuries to bear full fruit. Things are moving much faster 
now. In all probability, resistance to the Internet's political logic will 
be plainly futile within a decade or two. That's one reason 
engagement with China is the most reliable path to political 
pluralism and human rights.  

But both boosters and detractors of the engagement policy have 
acted as if it were supposed to work on a much shorter time scale. 
Mr. Clinton has sometimes spoken so bombastically as to suggest 
immediate results. So it is only fair play when opponents of 
engagement cite year-to-year downturns in Chinese freedom as if 
they refuted the policy's underlying logic.  

What's more, Mr. Clinton has soft-pedaled the turbulence that an 
information technology's centrifugal tendencies can bring. A century 
ago, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy refused to acknowledge that 
the spread of printing and of literacy, by empowering nationalists, 
had long since rendered the empire's Balkan holdings more trouble 
than they were worth. This self-delusion triggered World War I. Do 
we have a plan for encouraging Beijing to more gracefully accept the 
empowerment of Islamic separatists in western China, an almost 
certain consequence of the continued spread of microelectronic 
technology?  

he age of Gutenberg may not have been the first time that an 
information revolution decentralized power. In ancient Mesopotamia, 
when literacy spread beyond an elite group of scribes employed by 
the ruling class, greater economic and political pluralism seems to 
have followed. Cuneiform contracts from around 2000 B.C. reflect 
thriving private-sector commerce, a departure from earlier, more 
statist economies. And, at the same time, tablets show community 
assemblies, previously confined to judicial functions, deliberating 
on public policy.  

Maybe, then, today's freedom is the natural fruit of an evolution 
stretching back to the earliest communication technologies. 
Certainly that's a cheering thought.  

Still, if history shows that new information technology is a good bet 
for expanding liberty, it also shows that, after placing your bet, you 
should settle in for a long ride and fasten your seat belt.  

Robert Wright is the author of "The Moral Animal'' and, most 
recently, "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny."

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company





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