Bridge Over the Millennium

Excerpts from a presentation given at TechShow '97
Chicago, IL April 12, 1997

Samuel A. Guiberson

By my last count, this is not the year of the millennium. It’s is three years ‘til the millennium So, why choose this year to start talking about millennial change, and millennial transformation? And you know, this doesn’t happen a lot, but the last time it happened, the world seemed to have been evenly divided between those who believed the world was now going to end, and those who believed it was really just beginning. So, what's going to happen to us? What's going to happen to our country, what's going to happen to our planet, and of course, most importantly, what is going to happen to lawyers?

Now, let’s revisit the extraordinary event of the technological revolution. Unlike, perhaps, all but the smallest handful of human events in all of our known history, what a time to be alive. Those of you who aren’t old enough to remember when the first IBM PC came on the market, just trust us, we'll tell you about it. Begin by remembering what it was like, when you first were confronted with this remarkable tool, when someone you know got a computer. And, of course they weren’t what they are now, and they have never been pretty. They were even uglier then. And we stood before them in awe, trying to envision all the changes that this thing would wreak in our lives. And it was not because it was aesthetically attractive. It was because somehow this, the advent of this technology, fused with something in us, to give us a sense of inspiration. And it wasn’t anything about computing, and keyboards, and monitors, and programs, because I didn’t know anything about that. It was just the sense of potential that it presented to me, in my law practice and in my intellectual life

I was suddenly confronted with an instrumentality that could change the way I thought. I like to say that it wasn’t just another microwave oven that was going to cook the same old recipes more quickly; it was a new chemistry of thought. And anybody on the planet with a live mind had to be excited about what changes that would breed, personally and obviously, professionally and ultimately, culturally. We probably weren’t all that far along at that point. We were thinking about what kinds of work we could do, what kinds of art. Be it the art of the word, the art of the spreadsheet, the art of the image what kind of art this brush would allow us to paint.

Big change. Transformation technology, technology which creates a roll for itself that does not just change technology, but changes humankind. That happened in our lifetime. Now, we started to think of it as the growth of a human being, we started with the desktop computer, and we were challenged to find new ways to do work with that. Work that, by the nature of doing it personally, the microcomputer remember that? The microcomputer was called a microcomputer because the computer we could now buy, was not the size of a room. You didn’t have to have IBM's resources or a corporate financial structure to afford to do computing. This was a liberation!

Suddenly, every man and woman was empowered with the gift of control over information more massive, more complex, than they ever dreamed that they themselves could control and master. As I like to say, a new limb for the mind, as strong as our arms and legs, this gift changed our human potential, our capacity to use our minds But, it was all about me It was like childhood It was all about my changes, and my work, and what I could do now that I couldn’t do before, and what you over there on your computer could do that you could never do before. And, we would share that exaltation on how much more there was for each of us to do, but it was still my gift, and your gift. It was a solitary experience of personal change, and personal empowerment, and personal potential growth.

Well, then along came networking, and all the sudden another step. This is the adolescence of the computer revolution. We came to do things together, we had to change the way we did things together. We had already started to change the way we did things by ourselves. Now, we had to change the way we did things together. Organizations were affected. It was something that you took to the office, and it began to change the relationship between work and workers and—low and behold—it changed relationships between organizations, and it changed organizations themselves, just as it had begun to mutate the way people could conceptualize their work. Suddenly, offices weren’t top-down anymore. The network structure brought a leavening and evening of the resources of the office so that we weren’t stuck in rigid hierarchies that denied us the liberty of thought, and the freedom of expression, and true cooperation in the workplace. So, that was another step in the revolution And we were all very aware that a revolution was afoot.

Then, came the Internet. This is maturity. Because, for the first time it wasn’t me, me, me—the 80’s. It wasn’t working with the other, “our gang,” let's say, working with the people I know and work with, sharing and cooperating and building the power of intellect between a group of people that we knew, that were our friends, our co-workers. It was adulthood where we became, as a computing culture, responsible to the many. And for the first time, we weren't just being inspired by each other’s excitement about what potential was in these tools. And then along came the Internet and suddenly, we were gifted with the intellectual resources of strangers. It was no longer a part of fraternal relationships, buddies or office workers. Suddenly, we were commingled with an entire planet of participating donors for the commonwealth of global information resources. And that was a big step. But, it was as if it were the end of the frontier. And in the course of the individualization, and the socialization, and the globalization of computing technology, the dream of what was possible, became banal.

Let’s face it. You don’t see that many people in the wondrous state of awe that you used to see, when each new increment of technology is being introduced today. There is not that big "WOW" factor that was among us so few years ago. Now, are we getting jaded to it all? Are we just overwhelmed? Are our senses dulled? Or is the change rate so dramatic that we can’t absorb it, we can’t reflect on it and understand what we’re confronting, what we’re enjoying, what we are blessed with? I really don’t know what it is. But what it is, is a moment when we need to pause in this first maturity, this moment of maturity in the computer revolution, and think about where we’re going with it. It’s not so much what future in technology we’re looking at right now, it’s more important to think how we choose to look at the future of technology.

Well the word "renaissance" is in my title so I’ll start in on that. The Renaissance: a 200-or-so year period in Italian history when a cultural paradigm shifted. And the age of enlightenment and the modern world as we know it really began by combining a new sense of inspiration in the arts and sciences with the respect for the classical arts of the Greek period. What does that have to do with anything? It has to do with the fact that, that period, like our period, was a transitional stage, and, like any historical transitional stage, it can go bad real quick. Revolutions don’t always have happy endings, and it is not a forgone conclusion that the technology revolution will have a happy ending. It could go wrong, and it could go wrong in a heartbeat.

And the reason why we’re still at risk, I think, is because while we have been propelling ourselves along on the wave of technology, this sense of jubilation over the rate of change has now become constant. The only constant now in our professional and cultural lives, is constant change. And we’ve had to adopt ourselves, mature ourselves, in the notion that we are going to live the rest of our lives in a kind of social, technological, and intellectual tumult, and we’ve got to get used to it. We’ve got to get comfortable with it. We’ve got to accept it as the premise for our professional lives, form our professional strategies around the reality that nothing will ever be the same, and the only thing that will continue to be, is change.

So, the world has kind of broken out now, into not just the haves and have-nots, but the changed, and the changed-not. And everything in wealth, and intellect, and culture seems to be aligning itself along those societies and groups which are in the process of effectuating this change, and those that are not. So, in the future, there won’t be one future. There will be as many futures as there are different levels of technological integration, because, with each level of technological involvement and technological commitment, there exists a different culture. And we’re all here. We’re technologically savvy. We’re part of a culture. It’s not just "American Culture" now, it’s the global culture of technology, and those who are using it to press forward, to leverage their advancement—economic, intellectual. And this is truly profound change. I mean, I really lose track of it. I try to pay attention, and I lose track of it.

I mean, when we have children on the World Wide Web, who wake up, have their cornflakes, and web to the Louvre or, take time out to visit Nepalese web sites, this is not just a minor marginal change in the way children are educated; this is the evolution of our species! It’s like when reptiles learned to fly, the consciousness of that child, the world that child will live in twenty or thirty years from now, is as profoundly changed as that lizard was when he first grew wings. That’s how much difference there is in this society.

And we are kind of taking it in stride. You know, we don’t think a lot about how short a time ago it was that none of this was part of our lives. I mean, some of us in this room have cars that are older than e-mail. And yet, we think of it as an ubiquitous presence in our lives that is, you know, that seems to be, it’s like butter—it’s been with us as long as you can remember. These things have stepped into our lives and transformed our lives to an extent we hardly are able to acknowledge. Not because they are such small changes, but because they are such great changes. We have been anesthetized by the profound rate of change. And in that, there is euphoria, and it is a justifiable euphoria because these things truly allow us to advance our kind beyond our forefathers’ and foremothers’ grandest dreams for what we could accomplish.

Every revolution is born of a seed of idealism, a belief that human beings will be better if we can just win this revolution. And that’s true. We will be better if we win this revolution. But the problem remains that we don’t necessarily keep winning this revolution unless we practice eternal vigilance. The founding fathers understood very well that a revolution is not won once; it is won in every day one lives. And, what is missing from our revolution that puts it at risk, is the same thing that guided the Renaissance: a sense of return to certain classical values.

The computer revolution has lost a sense of ethical context. We have been so caught up in the technology that we have lost a sense of orientation as to the purposes to which it should, and should not, be put. And our best protection—really, the antibody of high idealism that can protect us from this, the retrenchment of the anti-libertarian forces in our society, that do feed on control, and upon structure, and upon the capitalization as a way of dictating economies and culture—is to plant and nurture that seed of idealism that brought us to this state of enthusiasm in the first place. And I tried to coin a term, and I decided it’s the "beta concept"—you know how we have beta releases. What is a beta release, but an effort to experiment and create a new product, a new application, a new form of invention, which leaps over into a better future invention? It recognizes that the creative process is always in transition, and that the beta concept is what guided us to have such energy around the technological innovations of our lifetime—the concept that the present is an experiment toward a better future.

And that’s what we lost somehow, as this technology became ubiquitous. We lost the sense that this technology has an ethical purpose; which is, ultimately, the liberation of humankind—from ignorance, from poverty and excessive labor, and oppression. That is what is present in this technology which is revolutionary, what separates it from a microwave oven, a whitewall tire, an electronic toothbrush, is that while we may not be aware of the ethical dimension—the idealism within the machine—it still knows that it is present to transform us. Not that we will simply change technologies—that was never the point of this. We have to rekindle a sense of where we wanted to take this transformation that is now in progress.

And so, like the body politic, I think those of us who have become committed to this technology as a way of life, as a way of working, as a way of seeing the future through the prism of this gift, we need to be part of a "beta politic." And as I see it, there are really four parts to the beta platform and the beta politic. And they sound very familiar and reminiscent of both the French and American Revolutions. . We have to now focus, not on the hardware and software side of the technological revolution, but on the humane, humanistic side of the technological revolution. . We have to think in terms of the establishment of digital liberty, digital equality, digital fraternity.

Digital liberty. That is, the translation of those constitutional liberties, those rights and freedoms we were afforded when computing and digital technology was not the media of all communication and economics in our country. A sense that all those rights which existed before technology need to be re-translated and preserved through that technology. Because I can tell you, as a criminal defense lawyer, that if we do not achieve the goal of digital liberty, we will have no liberty at all.

Digital equality. We now live in a world where a few people have eighteen million dollar jet planes, and a lot of other people run around the world naked with sticks, stabbing frogs. This division in our species is equally profound in terms of the level of technological sophistication that exists in our own society, much less the rest of the planet. If that persists, we will completely disenfranchise, disorient, and disconnect our society from within itself. We cannot abide such profound divisions between cultures of technology and of no technology, and survive. We’ve got to find a way to deal with that inequity, or be rendered apart, irrevocably.

And thirdly, Digital fraternity. We’ve got to protect the inroads that we have made in our society through this instrument of technology. All the sudden, the whole notion of how we use the Internet, is shifting back toward the broadcast-TV model, where capital-intensive industries push out signals to you, take over the bandwidth, tell you what you want to know, and then sell it to you. The trend in the commercialization of the computing culture is not a healthy one. The Internet cannot be reduced to a giant roadside stand. And it is at risk. It’s fragile, it’s an instrument of profound human transformation. But, if we allow it to be corporatized to an extent that it defeats the spirit of the thing as an intellectual resource, as the global library for all human experience, knowledge, and expression, and it gets turned into a “10,000 burgers sold” sign, I’m not sure that we haven’t lost the revolution.

I don’t think the sky is falling in, but I think it’s worth taking precaution, because the risk of backslide is very much with us. The world is full of forces that do not admire the enlightenment of humankind. The world is full of people who would just as soon turn technology to profit and oppression, as they would see it be a liberation and enrichment. The bridge over the millennium that I talked about in the title of my speech, isn’t really technology itself; because, technology has never been the solution. Technology has always been just an opportunity. And if we really had the ambition and the will to forge a better world through technology, if technology really is the profound agent of change that we have intuitively accepted it to be, then it’s time for us to start thinking about how we can insure that that technology changes us, and changes our time, for the good. Because if the only constant is now constant change, we have to insure that it is a change which brings more humanity to humankind, and not less.

It’s been a great run, this last twenty years, from the birth of the PC, to the evolution of the World Wide Web. It’s been a great childhood, it’s been a great adolescence, and it can be a great and gifted maturity, if we’re prepared to accept the responsibility for bringing, not the end of a revolution, but the beginning of the greatest human renaissance in our history. We are so close to the permanent uplifting of humankind through technology, that it would be unbearable, insufferable, and unexplainable to our children, if we fail.

Thank you.