Digital Dream
or
Digital Dystopia?By Douglas Bullis
The cheerily optimistic new world of Digitopia celebrates itself as a medium possessing a mix of skills and purpose that can reinvent the world around it. If it does, the result could be a humanity the world has never seen before.
Can it deliver?
In the mid-1400s a new information container called the book led to ideas such as capitalism, trial by peers, and liberal democracy. Indeed, so original was everything the book inspired that a brand-new word came into existence: nouvelles, French for "things that have not happened before." In English the word was translated as "news" and lost a lot in the translation. It came out "recent events worth recording."
Today's information container called the Net is already dropping a few hints of what it has in store for humanity. The new word it has coined to describe this is "virtuality". Like "nouvelles" the term is acquiring different dimensions as it percolates through different cultures.
Most people take the word to mean that electronically processed illusion will become so real there will be no need for reality any more. That may be true as far as entertainment goes, but virtuality is not a very strong structure on which to place the demands of civilization — things like economy, infrastructure, faith, power-balancing, and social stability.
Yet one encouraging quality of virtuality is that it tends to define the present almost entirely in terms of the future. This a reversal of the entire course of human progress up till now, in which the present has almost always been defined in terms of the past. Only with agonizing social costs has humanity crept forward, idea by idea.
Another positive shift derives from the fact that for many, the Internet is a medium nearly bereft of cynicism. Instead of information being seen as a tool to control or assert, it is seen as an ecology of dependencies that focus us on mutual advantage.
A third major shift is in human relationships, away from the assumptions about behaviour embodied inthe Samuel Huntington Hypothesis, in which cultures are thought to behave as political fault lines waiting to crack along the tectonics of religion, language, culture, and natural resources. The scales appear to be tipping toward Francis Fukuyama's notion that liberal-democratic capitalism has ended the need for prior history and we can now create a new history based on the principle that trust and mutual support build the stablest societies.
There are lesser but still pretty feathers on these first birds of spring. Rarely has a resonance between medium and message sprung into existence so quickly, creating its own mythology and ethos on the spot. Global person-to-person communication can now be achieved at an affordable price. The open-source movement abrogates the notion that mental property has to be profit property. The Napster/Gnutella concept of dis-centralized distribution, and Print-On-Demand are looming as the individual's survival mechanism in the face of corporate culture-shaping. Net-generated ideas are turning into ideals at unprecedented speed — indeed, almost at the same moment that they are invented. In contrast, religions took millennia to do this; and political ideas took centuries.
If the ideas flowing out of the Net indeed develop into a new kind of civilization, history will contemplate us in the same way we ponder what gave shape to the myths and institutions on which all our societies are founded today.
All these are templates that historians will redefine in many different ways over the next several hundred years. But the haste with which we idealize ourselves has profound implications. Idealization is the first step towards myth, and myth is the most rigidifying institution created by humankind. In our delight at reinventing history, are we unwittingly repeating history's worst errors?
The printed word did not achieve its goals easily. Social resistance to the kinds of change encouraged by the book gave the world some of its cruelest episodes — inquisitions, witch burnings, wars lasting decades, religions at each other's throats over which one could cast humanity into the worst hell. All these stemmed from a simple proposition: people prefer the past to the future, and will not give it up.
How are we Asians, in this new global realm of the phosphor and the pixel, going to deal with the reality that 95 percent of the Asian populace has never used a computer and 98 percent has never been on the Internet? A populace for whom 1) family and wealth, or class and caste, define almost all relationships; 2) magic and myths born in the fears of the Stone Age are the roots of almost all the laws; 3) legend, not fact, is the wellspring of the public imagination; and 4) the future is something most people go to an astrologer for.
What have we to offer to 2 billion people who can't read? How will we reconcile the Asia around us with the fact that we represent a medium that is an imported sociology founded on the assumption that efficient commerce is the pinnacle of human achievement? How do we propose to guide the abyssal undercurrent of Asian tradition into a media-shaped future without losing what to most people is a precious mythical identity? How will the underclasses of Asia respond to a medium that does not reinforce the courtyard culture of old Asia but appears all too ready to cast it aside for something defined almost entirely in terms of a marketplace culture? And how, with an unclear new identity facing them, can Asians avoid the two calamities that have historically gone into defining who they are: reactionary nostalgia and the bloodshed of change?
It is so easy, full of sail on the sea of URLs as we are, to overlook the empty isles and eddies of history as we progress toward our imagined huge harbor of the future. We are more hapless than we think.
I came face to face with the Net's shortcomings in India in May 1999 during the worst of the drought in Rajasthan and Gujarat. Its horrors were in large type and big pictures in the newspapers and slick weeklies. The photos were ghastly. Scarecrow people on lifeless landscapes were totally defenseless against realities as intangible as wrong weather predictions and mismanaged water storage. The middle- and upperbrow journals ran long, articulate, historically astute articles examining (and usually excoriating) the political figures and bureaucrats who exacerbated the crisis by failing to foresee it.
Meanwhile, on the Net of the portals and the chats, except for the capsule news blurbs on sites like rediff.com, you would have never known that a drought was underway. The digiterati in India, for all practical purposes, were digitibrahmins, and just as remote from all castes but their own.
About the same time, there was an article by Chitra Divakaruni in the U.S. magazine Atlantic Monthly that analysed the changing preferences of Indian parents seeking husbands for their daughters. She wrote in part: "Marriage is a serious and pragmatic commitment in the traditional Indian context, involving significant financial transactions and requiring the blessing of parents and grandparents. In a country that straddles the old and the new, where discos and arranged marriages flourish side by side, a good place to look might be the matrimonial columns of The Times of India." She gave an example in which ads in 1969 that tended to say things like "Kerala Vadama Srivatsa Brahmin boy desired. Horoscopes with 2 doshas [weak star positions] admissible" had by 1999 switched to "Only software professionals, doctors, or MBAs with six-figure salaries need apply."
At first reading, the only bridge across these three decades was that mothers-in-law are still picky. But looking a little deeper we see that all the information, worldliness, and wealth brought by the Net in India has not changed by one iota the tradition that parents, not couples, decide the marriages.
Are we Netizens living in a Palace of Versailles? We are a wealthy, elegant elite proud that our knowledge is far ahead of the world outside our walls. We are a tiny demographic in a huge and complex populace. We speak a jargony, precious language incomprehensible to the vast majority, and generate substantial amounts of personal wealth that do not find their way very far beyond our walls.
We must confront ourselves with a painful question: Are we making the Net a firewall between ourselves and the rest of the world? Have we given any thought to the environmental consequences of a significant body of the world's future leaders — us — learning most of what we know in a dark room in front of a screen that gives no reality to a tree, an animal, does not describe what ecology is, and ignores the disastrous ways humans alter nature's balances for the purpose of asserting an ego? Do we not wonder about the consequences of so many sites devoted to entrepreneurialism and so few devoted to conflict resolution? Isn't it a bit disconcerting that there is so little to be found in the online chat rooms and bulletin boards on subjects like survival mechanisms for those who live in semifunctional states like the India of the droughts and famines, when the print media run think pieces like this all the time?
For each of the glittering facets of our Net vision, there is a weakening flaw. One is that we ignore facts we don't want to know. For example, what are the consequences of economic power replacing political power as globalized identity replaces the borders of states?
Another flaw is that few of us have isolated the core competency we hope to change society with — namely information — and examined what historically has happened, not to the societies and cultures, but to the information itself. It's fascinating that the first book to describe how to preserve knowledge in the form of libraries was followed shortly by the last book to describe how to preserve it in memories. Information quickly lost its narrow rigidity and became manipulable. Whether cause or effect, this happened at the same time that Christian religions burgeoned explosively out of Catholicism and became the myriad array of Protestant sects, most of which are still with us.
What about the foresight flaw? Are we, like the Gujarati bureaucrats who failed to foresee an inevitable drought, failing to anticipate the consequences of digital decay — the loss of data from storage media quickly becoming obsolete, and that we personally forget important old data in the urge to assimilate the new? Are we creating cracks in our electronic vaults by trying to hold on to every scrap in the world's random drift of digital "information" debris?
Add to this the loss of institutional memory as the Net erases so many legacies of trusted linkages, and our looming lament in the future may well be, "Where, in what we know, do we find out what we know?"
After the invention of print the quantum level of information shifted sharply upward. One of the first developments was that old information held on to its value, but in a new way: the vellum manuscript went from being prized for its content to being prized for its beauty. Another development was the ease with which libelous, scurrilous, and seditious information penetrated into society and hastened the already dwindling respect for the control structures of the time, leading to the rise of the modern legal system. It's not hard to peruse the chat rooms of the Asian young and see that this is happening now.
If, as many believe, things are going wrong in the electronic interface between the West and Asia, what can we learn about this from history's mistakes?
Let's start with that pooja shrine of American hegemony, the Harvard Business Review. In the 13 issues from July 1999 to August 2000, the author list comprised 215 Anglo-American names, 20 Indian, three Chinese, and six South American or African. Most were associated with Western universities (including many from Harvard Business School itself). Only three articles appear to have been submitted from non-academic, non-establishment sources.
Nowhere to be found were vital homegrown ideas like Asian Islam's harmonization of the Qur'an with a globalizing economy via Islamic banking. Nowhere was there any recognition that the rest of the world is not culturally homogenous and can't be commoditized the way the West is.
Most Asians realize that the social value of economy is not merely that it feeds and houses, but is a support pillar in a courtyard community of cultural niches whose complex interactions require each to remain independent. In the Asian courtyard, the exchange of goods occupies but one corner. Behavioral expectations (most notably within families) occupy another, rites of daily duty still another. A system of art based on symbolic gesture and mask resides alongside the astrologers, herbalists, and feng shui masters. In the centre is an intense commitment to one's religiosity.
As a vehicle of exchange, the Asian courtyard society is closer to Napster and Gnutella than to the corporate franchise packagers of the West.
It is difficult for non-Asians to comprehend the power of the courtyard in the thinking and behavior of uncounted billions of Asians. The Harvard Business School is a culture so attuned to its own idea of civilization that this civilization is not merely all that it knows, it is all that it can know. Mention "Asian courtyard" to a Western MBA and he or she will think you're talking about an entrepreneurial opportunity involving architecture.
It is hard not to conclude that schools like HBS which train today's consultants are reenacting the same assumption that "superior institution equals superior culture" which gave us the Dutch East India Company in Indonesia and the British East India Company in the Subcontinent. Western cultural myopia is genuinely dangerous given the Asian tendency to think of "We" as "I" while most Westerners tend to think of "I" as "We". This is an invitation to steamroll which the market economy is only too happy to oblige.
An edifying example is Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor. The MSC wasn't conceived by Malaysians; it was suggested by McKinsey & Associates when the Malaysian government approached them for solutions to the problem of young Malays falling further and further behind in educational performance. Here a domestic social problem was transformed into a megaproject whose main beneficiaries were overseas businesses seeking cheap labour, and politically favoured Malaysian business concerns.
What can the digiterati of Asia can do to assert the region's integrity in the face of imported ideas, business models, and image management?
Many Asians realize that the principal defects of a market economy are 1) economy of scale and the principle that shareholders must be served first and foremost forces management to pander to the lowest common denominator, eroding higher senses of value; and 2) clever devices that substitute for thinking enable people to go on fooling themselves till disaster occurs. The thinking behind 128-bit video games is an example. How will fostering a tolerance — indeed, a hunger — for extremely violent hero-models impact an Asia whose social glue is calmness, consensus, and consideration?
Are there any signs that the global promises of the Net are being translated into local terms with local value?
One place to look is situations in which event is also symbol. This is a very common feature in the world of the arts. Take, for example, sites like artscommunity in Singapore. Anyone who has studied art history and who surfs across the Singaporean arts discussion groups comes away with the conclusion that creative young people there are in the self-defining stages of becoming to Asia what Paris once was to the West. Compared with Japan, the absence of tea-colored hair evidences the sense of personal place that Singaporean young people feel in their relations with the world, not just their peers. It is also clear from discussion groups that university-age Singaporeans worry about Asia being so accustomed to the anchorages of history it does not know how to set sail on the wind of change. Singapore is the least tradition-bound society in Asia, in part because it is surrounded by such obvious examples of tradition gone wrong, and in part because its leaders realize that to retain the worthwhile aspects of their own culture they have to come to terms with the global culture.
But why look at the arts as an EBSA (Edification By Surfing Around) pointer to Asia's future social identity?
Because to blend dream with dare and make it work is as often found in the world of the arts as in the world of entrepreneurial thinking. Business naturally sees its contribution to the human courtyard in terms of enterprise. The arts tend to embrace all of the others — the self-transcendence of religion, the compassion of mask, the integrity-building properties of the emotional bond, and the ayurvedic sense for the health of the of culture. One sees the most attention placed on those human attributes we truly need for survival in the Print-on-Demand zines, with their preoccupation with the literary. One finds the most attention given to escapism and narcissism in the space fantasies, dungeon battles, and porn sites of the Net.
Singapore is not alone. Artists in other locales exhibit an encouraging desire to merge the past and the future and call it the present. Hong Kong fashion designer Pacino Wan doesn't ape the boomy music and flashy lighting of Western shows, he recasts ancient legends as futuristic tales and dresses the characters in his clothes for today.* People like Wan and the young Singaporean performance groups are creating their own identity, not to erase the identities of their parents but to give meaning to the realities of now.
Information, for all its gleam in the eyes of business interests, has the much more responsible task of turning modern times into timeless times. If there's a lesson to be drawn from the history of life on earth, it is that the surest cause of species extinction isn't predation, but maladaptation. The biggest error we Netizens of Asia can make is to not beef up our social connectivity with our own inventions for social good. If we opt to be a house organ for the Palace of Versailles, we'll be the butt of a millennium's jokesters.
*It is a pity that more people don't realize that the Asian fashion show evolving among younger designers is not a forum for ego the way it is in the West, but a new performance medium creating what may well be a future art form. In contrast, a West a fashion show more resembles a circus.
Asia is the most interesting place in the world for someone interested in how young people will change their world. The region is a heady mix of a) personal inquiry prompted by the limitlessness of the Net; b) recognition that the rigid institutions designed for economic prosperity tend to stifle individual expression; c) personal self-exploration planting seeds in society's future; and d) receptivity to innovation than their parents because the Net has exposed them to a world in which few rigidities last long.
Douglas Bullis has lived in Asia since 1990, presently in India. He writes about business and economic affairs from the cultural point of view, and conversely, about contemporary arts from an economic point of view. His most recent book is Fashion Asia.