SCN: All hail the new barbarism!

Mon Oct 2 18:28:12 PDT 2000

You may find this interesting!

-- Doug

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----- Original Message ----- 
From: <Cordell.Arthur at ic.gc.ca>
To: <futurework at scribe.uwaterloo.ca>
Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2000 8:11 AM
Subject: More Ian Angell

> Wired for Anarchy: London School of Economics professor Ian Angell
>  is a brilliant man with a dark and disturbing vision. And if he's right
>  about the future, you'd better learn to think like a "new barbarian."
>  Paul C. Judge
>    
>  10/01/2000 
>  Fast Company 
>  Fast Company, a Subsidiary of U.S. News & World
>  Report.
>  
>  If Ian Angell is right about the future of the new economy, most of the
> world
>  is screwed. From his vantage point as professor of information systems at
>  the prestigious London School of Economics ( LSE ), Angell, 53, spins a
>  scenario of the future in which the world's business and technical elite
> use
>  the Net to live wherever they want and to do whatever they please, without
>  government intrusion. Leveraging their wealth and their much-in-demand
>  professional skills, the chosen few ( who really aren't so few ) can live
> in
>  countries that will bid to have them as residents -- through offers of tax
>  relief and through promises of noninterference in their affairs.
> 
>  What will governments get in return? The unprecedented wealth-creating
>  power of this group of charmed individuals, whom Angell calls the "new
>  barbarians." And what will become of the billions of people who are left
>  behind? For some unfortunates, it will be a world of chaos, run by gangs of
>  thugs. Others will live under the "tyranny of democracies" -- societies
>  where people will have votes, but where the majority will be ruled by
>  racial, religious, and ethnic bigots.
> 
>  So much for teary-eyed talk about the "digital divide." Most of that
> earnest
>  but shopworn discussion focuses on the powerlessness of the have-nots. So
>  what about the haves? After all, they are the ones who will be in charge --
>  the agenda setters, the power brokers, and the virtual architects of the
> new
>  digital order. What will their world look like? Angell has thought a lot
>  about that question.
> 
>  His answer reflects an unabashedly somber vision, sort of like Free Agent
>  Nation on a global acid trip. Self-interest and security are the mantras of
>  Angell's new barbarians. Commerce and communities are disembodied,
>  existing for the most part on the Internet. Government's role is to shelter
> new
>  barbarians from the scourge of disease, to protect the food supply, and to
>  provide a clean, well-lighted place for data, the plasma of the new
>  economy.
> 
>  Who would want to live in such a world? Ian Angell, for one. His recent
>  book, The New Barbarian Manifesto: How to Survive the Information Age (
>  Kogan Page, 2000 ), conjures up a world that makes the brutal Darwinist
>  ecology of Blade Runner seem downright benign. But Angell isn't offering
>  remedies for rescuing society from such a fate. He believes that this dark
>  world can't come soon enough.
> 
>  "I'm an anarchic capitalist," says Angell. "I believe that business should
> be
>  running the world. Every major technological shift creates winners and
>  losers. Europe's a disaster because of a sentimental attachment to the
>  welfare state, which is just a vestige of the Industrial Age, when
> politicians
>  extracted taxes to buy votes."
> 
>  Needless to say, Angell revels in being an extremist. He has used his
>  position as a tenured faculty member at LSE to needle the British
>  government on issues ranging from privacy rights to its proposal to levy a
>  "bit tax" on information that passes through computer networks. When The
>  New Barbarian Manifesto was published earlier this year, it created a stir
>  among British intellectuals and led the Times of London to dub its author
>  "the Angell of Doom." He appears to be enjoying the attention, but Angell
> is
>  still a long way from being mainstream. "Whenever large numbers of people
>  start to agree with me, I think I'm wrong," he says.
> 
>  That's the attitude you might expect from a new barbarian. It also gives
>  Angell a certain currency as a maverick. Companies such as A.T. Kearney,
>  Cambridge Technology Partners Inc., USB Warburg, and Warner Lambert
>  Co. have invited him to speak at their corporate gatherings, hoping that
> he'll
>  shake things up with speeches about the changing nature of work, the end of
>  democracy, and, of course, winners and losers. "When the consultants want
>  to rattle their technologists, I get up and talk about how methods are
>  dangerous and statistics are worthless, because they make for tidy minds,"
>  he says.
> 
>  Angell's own intellectual journey has been anything but tidy. His
>  background and upbringing as a working-class intellectual would seem
>  more likely to have made him into a champion of the little guy. Angell is a
>  policeman's son who grew up in the coal-mining district in Wales. He
>  credits his mother, who "lived in a working-class town and was too clever
>  for her own good," with giving him an appreciation of anarchy and a
> distrust
>  of government.
> 
>  He started an academic career as a brilliant mathematician, but at the age
> of
>  30 he lost his faith in numbers and in their capacity to make sense of the
>  world. That's one reason he believes that "most of what they teach in
>  business schools is bunkum. Business is alchemy, anyway, not science."
>  Math kept him too isolated from flesh and blood, so he switched fields to
>  computer science. But Angell grew more and more disillusioned with
>  Britain's modern institutions -- particularly with the government and the
>  universities -- and he was nettled by the view that information technology
>  was merely a benign force that would liberate humans from monotonous
>  toil.
> 
>  Eventually, Angell says, he realized that businesspeople -- and
>  entrepreneurs in particular -- knew of better ways to exploit information
>  technology. The more time he spent as a speaker inside companies, the more
>  fascinated he became with those companies' potential to detach themselves
>  from their surroundings and to continue to flourish. And so, at the center
> of
>  the new-barbarian society is the virtual enterprise, the primary
> organization
>  in Angell's dystopia.
> 
>  "The information system is the firm; nothing else is permanent," argues
>  Angell. If the system gets cracked, either by criminals or by governments,
>  "the organization is finished." The threat of attack will be constant,
> Angell
>  believes, as disgruntled losers strike at the heart of the new-barbarian
>  society, and as computer hacking takes on all of the dimensions of class
>  warfare.
> 
>  A few years ago, Angell's special scorn for taxing authorities led him to
>  propose a banking system that was out of this world. Satellites acting as
>  depositories for digital cash would allow companies and individuals to
>  move money anywhere, using computers or even handheld devices linked to
>  satellite transceivers. With a secure system in place, commerce would
>  move beyond the reach of any government's ability to tax it. Tax payment
>  would then take the form of a negotiation between new barbarians and the
>  countries that are vying for their citizenship. How much would you pay for
>  security? For trees? For health care? "Companies and countries will be
>  scouring the globe, competing with each other to attract this top-quality
>  'people product,' dragging them off the planes if necessary," Angell
>  believes.
> 
>  Even without bank accounts in space, Angell says, new barbarians are
>  flexing their muscles in plenty of ways. He points to the U.S. government's
>  HI-B visa program for top-notch technologists from around the world as one
>  example. "The new rootlessness of economic mercenaries who are looking
>  out for welcoming institutions that are in tune with their own aspirations,
>  has the power to destabilize the wealth of any unsupportive community," he
>  argues.
> 
>  Bad science fiction? It would be, if there weren't a serious core to
> Angell's
>  arguments: Who can really argue with the proposition that elite knowledge
>  workers can dictate their demands to governments, as opposed to the other
>  way around? At the end of his book, Angell offers a few pointers on how to
>  become a new barbarian: Get an elitist education; keep your assets liquid,
>  and spread them around the globe; familiarize yourself with economic hot
>  spots that will be the most receptive to people like you. And finally, "Be
>  ready to flee at a moment's notice."
> 
>  Spoken like a new barbarian.
> 
>  Paul C. Judge ( pjudge at fastcompany.com ) is a Fast Company senior
>  editor. Contact Ian Angell by email ( i.angell at lse.ac.uk ).
> 
>  This article is available online at
>  http://www.fastcompany.com/online/39/ifaqs.html 
>  Contact: This article is available online at
>  http://www.fastcompany.com/online/39/ifaqs.html 
> 
>                               
> 
> 

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