On the Frontier

From the Wild East of Russian capitalism to the evolving forms of cyberspace, Esther Dyson likes the promise of unsettled territory--and the challenge of civilizing it.

Virginia Postrel from the October 1996 issue

(Page 4 of 5)

Reason: The Net will also make possible very small charges.

Dyson: Now that's the most interesting question. A lot of people say that maybe you can't charge $2.00 a page, but could you charge five cents a page? You probably could, but you're going to be competing with pages for zero. And so some intellectual property will be charged for and some won't. But the overall price levels are clearly down. Reason: You had an interesting statement about reengineering: "Reengineering is supposed to be about continual change and not a one-time shift to something else permanent." I've used similar language to discuss conflicting philosophies of government--open-ended futures versus the technocratic attitude that says, "We like change, but our change is we're going to switch to this and keep it that way." A lot of people are profoundly uncomfortable with--continual change.

Reason: Then that translates into politics, and you get Pat Buchanan.

Dyson: This is something that you see most intensely in Russia. There was this woman who was interviewed on CNN, I think it was after the second coup, and she was asked if she was optimistic. She was not an old lady, she was not a specimen, she was supposed to be the voice of the future. She said, "Yes, I'm fairly optimistic now. Now maybe we'll get what we were promised." And that was scary.

To go back to your question about change--the emblem of the tragedy is the 50-year-old man who has been as honest as the system allowed him to be, who tried to care about the work he was doing. Now all these people are saying, "Your life was a lie. Communism is corrupt. Everything that you worked so hard to achieve is a sham, but you're too old to be part of the future." To be 50 and say your life is a waste is the worst sort of tragedy, because it's too late to fix it, you've lost the 50 years, you're not dead yet, and you have to go on living with this knowledge.

Change means that what was before wasn't perfect. People want things to be better. They certainly complain all the time about their problems, but at the same time [it's hard] to be told that the rules by which they lived, the assumptions on which they based their lives, that these things were wrong--and that's what change implicitly means. When you get a haircut and people say,

"Gee, you look really great," you always wonder, "What did I look like before?" Reason: What you describe happening to the 50-year-old Russian is an order of magnitude or two greater than what is happening here, but it's really the same thing that's happening to people at AT&T.

Dyson: Exactly.

Reason: Their work was a lie at some level--there were thousands of people who were not really adding value and whose jobs had come out of sheltered monopoly status--and yet they worked hard and played by the rules.

Dyson: They believed in what they were doing.

Reason: Change needs to occur and ought to occur, and it ultimately is better psychologically for us as a society. But in the individual case, it can be really terrible.

Dyson:It can destroy people. And so could living the lie destroy people. This is the thing: Life is not perfect. Again, Russia makes all these points so much more clearly. The transition to a more fair system is very unfair. You talk about corruption, and again, take this 50-year-old. He's a factory manager. The system was you would manage the factory and you got a very small salary, but you got a nice house and you also had control of assets. You didn't own anything, but you could put your brother-in-law in charge of the factory cafeteria. It was understood. Just like a company car in the U.S., or more so in Europe.

Now somebody comes along and says, "We're going to get this new fair society and we're going to privatize your factory, and I'm sorry but you don't own anything. You're not going to get a share in this factory because that's not fair. Just because you worked here for 40 years." Is that fair? Had the rules been the same from the beginning, he would by now have a very nice house that he owned. He would have a pension. He would be doing very well as this factory manager. The transition to a fair system cuts him off with nothing. A lot of those people will say, "Well, I deserve this. When the factory goes private, I'm going to sell a chunk to my brother-in-law before it goes private, and then he'll take care of me." And then somebody comes along and says, "That's incredibly corrupt." And it is. But it's just not as simple as it looks.

Reason: Given the fear of change, what do you do?

Dyson: First of all, you have stories and legends and role models. The role model is a person who goes through changes, makes mistakes, tries again. The company goes bankrupt but the workers go and get new jobs at other companies.

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