My latest article at the Financial Times makes the case that, when it comes to technology policy in the “stimulus package,” fetishism and reification rule the day…
We are now in the middle of what looks to be a pretty bad depression
— so bad, that no one seems to find humour in the metaphor war du jour:
the fact that politicians now spend their time boasting about the size
of their own ”stimulus packages” and mocking those of their rivals. ”Is
President Obama’s package big enough?” we are asked. From his smile at
the G20 meeting, he apparently thinks so. Where’s Freud when we need
him?
Beneath the war of metaphors lies a troubling ignorance.
It turns out that we don’t know very much about what kind of stimulus
spending works. Of course you can put money into pockets, and thence
into cash registers, merely by having people dig holes and fill them in
again. But we’d like those holes to be useful, to generate their own
productive return to society. And nothing symbolizes this productive
form of stimulus in the public debate better than highway building.
Build improved roads, goes the argument, and you not only put workers
back to work, you make commerce simpler, easier, more efficient. You
encourage economic growth. A dollar spent on this kind of stimulus can
actually yield… well, the economists differ, but more than a dollar
of return. Of course, this only works if you need the roads. Japan’s
absurd public works program over the last 15 years made that very
clear. Bridges to nowhere were everywhere.
Because politicians like to seem modern, they try to update the metaphor. What about the
”information superhighways” we were promised in the 90’s? Could these
be the freeways of the information age, the autobahn’s of e-commerce?
That sounds promising…
We see the economic advantages of a network — the lowering of
barriers to entry, dramatic improvements in information flow, lower
transaction costs — and we associate those advantages with the thing along
which the network’s bits flow. But here’s the problem. The information
superhighways of the mind are not just wires. (Though we surely need
the wires.) The container is not the thing contained.
SNIP
…. We can
study the reasons for the absolutely stunning success of the internet,
and try extend that success, that model of network design, into places
that it currently doesn’t reach. Yet those ”places” are as likely to be
fields of thought as fields in West Virginia. …Some scholars have been arguing that
the architecture of the internet, its embrace of openness as a design
principle, might revolutionize science if we could apply the same
principles there — if we could break down the legal and technical
barriers that prevent the efficient networking of state funded research
and data. Imagine a scientific research process that worked as
efficiently as the web does for buying shoes…
More here
(apologies for the broken links earlier… The FT is a wonderful paper but its digital publishing efforts are about at the level of Gutenberg. To get an article published with the links intact, the right title and a stable URL permalink is a trifecta of vanishingly small possibility. On the other hand, they allow me to put my articles up under CC licenses — and that makes all the difference.)
