From: doug@uuisis.isis.org (Doug Thompson)
Subject: Re: Suppressing innovations (was Mander and Television)
Organization: International Shared Information Service (Ottawa)
Date: Thu, 09 Apr 92 18:48:58 GMT

shomer@Cadence.COM (Steve Homer) writes:

> In article <1992Mar31.061917.10381@norton.com> brian@norton.com (Brian Yoder)
> >In comp.society.futures article <1992Mar27.205254.14755@Cadence.COM> [Steve 
> >> Historically, technological 
> >> change has always been guided by government intervention. States encourage
> >> some innovations and suppress others. Our government is no different; 
> >> it spends billions on research and targets that money according to 
> >> political priorities. 

While states often try to influence the development of technology, I
think there is reason to suppose that technology is more powerful than
states. When the printing press first came out many states attempted to
ban its use. There was limited success for a time, but eventually the
printers all moved to countries with more liberal laws and smuggled
books.

In South Africa television was banned until relatively recently. There
was a fear that access to English, Dutch and American programming would
bring about a reduction in support for Apartheid. Seems the fear was
justified!

When Germany sought to build an A-bomb during the war, Britain and the
USA had 'no choice' but to build one of their own (or try to) first.
What any one state - however large and powerful - can do by way of
regulating anything is confined by what other states do.

While the goverments of the major western powers did build enormous
nuclear and conventional military forces in the last 40 years, it wasn't
really because very many people in any of those countries thought this
was a splendid thing to do. Those governments built those historically
unprecedented military machines because of what *OTHER* countries were
doing, talking about doing, or threatening to do. It was done *in
reaction to* foreign (outside) events and forces.

There are few stronger examples of the inability and incapacity of the
nation state to be effectively self-regulated in a world containing
other states and coalitions of states with comparable power and
influence.

The idea here is that it really didn't matter whether Americans, for
instance, wanted or didn't want a huge military. What mattered was
political and military facts external to the US. It was those that
created the case for the huge military spending, not any internal desire
to build bombs for domestic consumption.

Commercial regulation within any nation-state is likewise strongly
influenced by the regulations of neighbouring countries and trading
partners and competitors.

There are numerous other examples. 

The problem here is that state influence of technology is mostly
confined within the borders of that state and its empire. Beyond those
borders technology may take different directions under different laws.

This places pragmatic limits on the extent to which any state can
actually make a lasting impact on technological development unless ALL
states adopt similar policies.

The classic argument against controls on polluting technologies, for
example, is that which says "we'll just move our plant to some country
without such restrictions". Likewise minimum wage laws which try to
protect the poorest and weakest workers run into the same dilemma. If
the regulations are more advantageous to business in another country,
the business has an incentive to move there.

This is one of the many factors leading to the 'obsolescence of the
state'. States just aren't big enough anymore. The world's largest
states, China, USA and recently USSR are perhaps less obsolete in that
they each speak with very loud voices, but in a world of two hundred-odd
states, no one is big enough to really regulate anything and few are big
enough to even try. "Outside influences" will undermine any one state's
efforts to march to a different drummer.

The fashion these days seems to be to eliminate the 'outside' with UN or
other international arrangments that show some aspects of 'world
government' thinking.

As world economics have seen the rise of the supra-national corporation
in the past century, the idea of the supra-national government has
advanced from the weak Leauge of Nations (1919) to the rather potent
"coalition" of nations which recently made that rather splashy attempt
to bomb Iraq into the stone-age for violations of International Law.

Large-scale international cooperation is still very difficult to
achieve, and the UN institutions available to achieve it are very weak,
but there does seem to be a tendency in that direction, especially when
it comes to things like pollution and other matters which are of
trans-national concern.

The largest single weakness in any argument made to any state government
to control this or that is the argument that 'it won't do much good' if
this or that is controlled only in this state, and besides, it will
chase business and jobs away to places that don't have such regulation.

Whatever the desirability of any regulation from any point of view, no
regulation makes a lot of sense if it's effect is to drive business to
other countries, and if no one else in the world abides by that
regulation. 

I strongly suspect that supra-national institutions will grow in
importance and authority in coming decades. My concern is that agencies
such as the UN are *not* democratic. There is no authority based on
represetnation by population. Thus it is possible (likely?) that
interests other than the perceived self-interest of the majority will
come to create internationally enforcable regulations from which there
is no escape at all - even if a majority of the world's people oppose
such measures.

It is one thing for one country to do something stupid - at least the
rest of the world can effectively oppose it. But if a 'world government'
dictates something and there is no opposition option, and no country
where it cannot be enforced, then we have an historically unique kind of
absolute political power.

The current UN dealings with Iraq are a relevant example. The world
community is forcing one member state to do quite a number of things its
government does not want to do. This is facilitated by the fact of this
country having a non-democratic and rather vile government which has
demonstrated that it is quite willing to do the same right back, if only
it could - but that misses the point. The point is that the government
of any nation state is not powerful enough to regulate anything very
effectively if the rest of the world is in substantial disagreement.

If you think technology needs to be regulated, then the upshot of this
is to think about world federalism. If you think nothing should be
regulated ever - then world federalism is a very scary concept. At least
in the present day there are places you can go where almost any
regulation you can think of isn't enforced. That includes places where
the general social censure of murder and robbery does not extend to
effective sanctions against those who want to murder and rob.

Because of the increasing internationalization of most trade and
commerce pursuant to improvements in transportation and communications,
the ability of nation-states to regulate anything in a way that achieves
the goals of the regulators is declining. As it does, political pressure
for supra-national regulatory agencies increases. Along the way we shall
likely see a decline in regulations of all kinds leading to a growing
pressure on nations to support trans-national regulatory efforts.
Nothing else will work and most people will agree that some things need
regulating . . .

I think the argument as to whether regulation is good or evil is
somewhat wasteful of mental effort. Some things need regulating, like
pirates, murderers, and Saddam Husseins. The real question facing the
coming century is that of how to establish 'appropriate' regulations -
or even determine what 'appropriate' consists of.

As always it will be a question of 'appropriate for whom', and what is
good for 1st World industrial peoples may not be so good for 3rd World
peasant peoples, and vice versa.

What is good for the boss and what is good for the worker may not always
appear to be the same thing.

And this, it is said by some, is the basis of philosophy, politics,
government and war. Just what do we do when we don't agree? 

I'll end this with the observation that without computer communication,
and large scale computer power, administration on trans-national scales
is extremely difficult and enormously expensive. Computers, however,
play a major role in reducing the relative imporance of geographic
discontinuities and advancing the reality of the 'global village'.

Some nervousness about who's going to become the 'village chieftain' of
the 'global village' is quite warrented, in my view.

=Doug

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