The Road Ahead

(5 of 8)
SHIRKY: We're seeing lots of places where value is being created outside of institutional frameworks, in ways that institutions can't touch. When you look at the way Linux has developed, it's not a model that can be emulated by any organization that wants to pay programmers because if someone has one good idea, it will be added to Linux. You would never hire an employee who only has one good idea. That would be a bad hire.

THE MYTH OF PROGRESS?

GLADWELL: I'd like to make a distinction between change and progress. A lot of what we've been talking about falls in the category of change, not progress. To use a prosaic example, technology related to golf has improved and will continue to improve dramatically. Golf clubs are way better today than they were 10 years ago, and will be way better 10 years from now. Golf scores, however, have remained absolutely stable. This is an important distinction because historically when we talked about the future, we always talked about the possibilities for progress. Today when we talk about the future, we talk about the possibilities for change, which says that either we have deliberately lowered expectations or we're playing a game where we're pretending what we're talking about is progress when all we're doing is talking about change.

DYSON: The fundamental change is that most individuals have more choice. They also have more responsibility: if they don't like the way things are, they can't complain as much--at least not with moral justification. And not everybody likes that. It can be comfortable just to follow orders. But if you consider that most people have a better chance of getting what they want because they have more choices, then by and large, there's progress. People have more choice: they have more power "to," even though they don't have more power "over."

GLADWELL: But most of this falls into the category of giving me more of things that I don't need. The explosion of choices on the Internet--the fact that I can get 100,000 songs on iTunes as opposed to 1,000 songs--is that progress?

DYSON: No. But if I have a choice about whether or not I go to college or where I'm going to work or what job I have, that's a valuable choice.

DERY: Maybe I'm channeling my inner Marxist here--which I'm sure will give David a fit of vapors ...

BROOKS: You'd be surprised.

DERY: ... but I feel that in discussions like this, there's a phenomenon where technopundits wear Global Business Network blinkers. The democratization of available avenues of possibility is always phrased in market-friendly terms. It's about purchasing power--the cornucopia of options available to those who can stuff their shopping carts and proceed to checkout. How many options were available to those who were marooned in New Orleans? The ragtag who are rotting in what used to be quaintly called the real world, somewhere off-line, are left behind.

SHIRKY: That may be true. But the "cloud dwellers" now are far and away the majority of the country. It's not some privileged élite who have access to things like JetBlue flights and the Internet. It's the bulk of America.

CULTURE CLASH

IN MOVIES, MUSIC, I'M SURPRISED PEOPLE HAVEN'T BEEN MORE EFFECTIVE CIRCUMVENTING THE STUDIOS TO GET THINGS MADE.

1. McCain's Prickly TIME Interview
2. Why McCain Picked Palin
3. McCain's Surprise Pick: Sarah Palin
4. The Palin Pick: Bold or Disastrous?
5. Klein: Obama's Speech 'Very Tough'
6. Obama's Risky Stadium Gig
7. Exclusive Poll: Obama's Swing Leads
8. Is McCain Overplaying the POW Card?
9. What Bush Taught McCain
10. Clinton Builds a Bridge to Obama