BuddeBlog

Introduction
I was recently privileged to follow a presentation by the award-winning Canadian essayist and novelist, John Ralston Saul. He was lecturing at the same conference at which I was speaking – the annual local government management conference (SOLGM) in Wellington New Zealand.

John has been hailed as one of the great thinkers of our time. He gave an awe-inspiring presentation, full of new ideas and philosophies about our society, culture, economic developments, the environment and aboriginal values.

He also had also something to say about technologies, but that was certainly not the focus of his presentation. I spoke directly after him and was so inspired by his views and ideas that I threw away my prepared address and followed up on his theme, linking it, of course, to my own topic, the broadbanding of local communities.

Economic models have changed but we haven’t caught up
John mentioned that our western societies still had not adjusted to the new economic order. Our modern economic society started somewhere around 1770 and was based on competition for limited resources, capital, labour and also the products we produced – food, clothing, luxury goods and so on were scarce. However since the 1960s the economic order has changed from one based on scarcity to one based on surplus.

But companies, countries and society in general are still operating as if the competition for scarce resources still exists. This is producing faulty economic and government policies and strategies, and these are damaging to the people, the society and the world we live in.

For example, new technologies should have created more free time, but we are actually working more hours and much harder. We are turning a lot of cultural and natural values into hard economic values and often forget to put a value on community, pleasure, enjoyment, freedom, lifestyle, etc. We should spend the extra time at our disposal on these not-for-profit, but very worthwhile investments.

The fallacy of Intellectual Property rights
As we have moved away from agricultural and manufacturing societies we have changed into a society that is based on ideas and information. It is therefore unforgivable that we are limiting the growth, and the flow, of ideas and information through Intellectual Property rules and regulations.

According to John, the inclusion of Intellectual Property into the WTO is severely hampering the flow of new ideas and information;  it is attempting to control the dissemination of ideas, thus making the spread and sharing of them increasingly difficult. This is damaging the new economy!

In the digital media industry we see this happening through Digital Management Rights (DMR). This is a totally unsustainable state of affairs and needs to be changed.

There must surely be better ways to protect Intellectual Property.

At the BuddeComm Digital Media Roundtable in August clear evidence was given that people are prepared to pay for Intellectual Property, but that it needs to be based on conditions that are acceptable to society as a whole, and not on power of the few who want to protect the scarcity economy.

See: Australia – Digital Media – Update Late 2007

People are changing, structures need to follow
At the same time many people are now prepared to speak out against the old world culture. The anti-globalisation protests are key developments in this respect. Despite the often violent nature of these protests it is important to recognise the underlying issues. These are clear warning signs of a society under stress.

A more peaceful, community-based form of protest (people power) is also beginning to make a significant impact on society.

The role of telecoms in all of this
I used this point about people power in my presentation, to argue for more input from local councils in setting the agenda for the broadbanding of their community. Telecoms is no longer a scarce resource either, but the establishment tries to maintain it as such, and this is contributing to the high stress levels mentioned above.

People understand the benefits of this infrastructure and want to be able to use it. From a community point of view the infrastructure is essential for e-health, tele-education, smart energy meters and so on. Why should it be in such short supply?

Australia is one of the few countries in the western world that – against the will of its people – fully privatised its national telecoms network, with disastrous results that are obvious to everybody. The incumbent is holding the country to ransom in relation to the future of its national telecoms infrastructure;  and it is suing the Minister in the process.

Also, the Australian Government is realising, belatedly, how important telecoms is to society and the economy – but at what cost? If only it had listened to the people in the first place we wouldn’t be paying the price now for the government’s lack of insight.

It is up to the people – for example, through local communities (councils) to take a leading role and set the social agenda for the broadbanding of local communities – to harness the needs of the community, map the infrastructure that is available and develop plans and strategies to get ubiquitous coverage of the infrastructure throughout the community.

Local councils are experts in local infrastructure and they need to take the lead here. It is not much different from other forms of infrastructure – water, gas, electricity, roads and sewerage – the same rules apply.

See: Global Broadbanding of local communities

Information Technology is somewhat Kafkaesque
John also made a few critical remarks about some of the new technology developments. IT has the tendency to limit face-to-face communications and could even alienate people. He also was critical of the way communication is used to ‘cover people’s backsides’ by copying everybody into emails and creating complex email/paper trails. He said that this particular IT practice created a Kafkaesque environment.

On the positive side, he said that technology had ‘millions of good effects’ and only a handful of bad ones.

The new city states
John also touched upon a range of other issues that are very close to my heart, especially when he started to talk about the medieval city states.

He said that more and more of our modern cities are starting to resemble the medieval city states, and he went back in history to describe the city states that developed in Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries.

I am currently writing a history (my hobby) of these developments in Flanders and Brabant, so John had my full attention on this topic!

He spoke of how these communities organised their own affairs by harnessing the people power within the towns. For instance, the Guilds, in addition to being trade organisations, were self-help groups for members and their families. They also built orphanages, schools and other public buildings.

The’contradas’ which are still alive and well in places such as Siena, had broad social and cultural functions.

Geographically subdividing neigbourhoods they forged a very strong community feeling, stimulating the community to take control over its own social affairs.  The custom operated as a social safety net for the community within the overall city structure.

As an example, when I was in Italy recently we saw the Palio di Siena, the annual horse race on the piazza in front of Siena’s town hall – broadcast live on national Italian TV. This is a clear demonstration that the age-old community structures are still relevant today.

As a start in moving towards the new social and economic order, John suggested we should send employees to do voluntary work, once a week for half a day. He said:  ‘imagine what that ‘investment’ would do to boost our community, cultural and environmental values’.

Good government and bad government
Of course, we now live in a completely different society, but many of the values in life that were seen as important by our Medieval forebears are considered just as important today.

With several hundred local government managers in attendance, John also mentioned the famous frescos in the town hall of Siena, painted between 1338-40, representing good government and bad government – this confronts the local leaders of Siena, forever reminding them of their responsibilities.

These paintings also made an impact on me when, a few years ago, we spent several hours wandering through the town hall of what is one of my favourite cities in the world.

Digital media – new tools for democracy
I strongly believe that telecommunications has a key role to play in all of this. The technology creates new community (tribal) structures and enables continued participation in existing networks (old school friends, distant family members, people who share interests and hobbies, communities, cities, etc).

The rationale of the previous economy (1770 – 1960) has undermined the democratic structures we have been developing since Athens in the 5th century BC. Interestingly, democracy started when the Greek economy was improving, but, rather than working more and harder, the Greeks used the benefits of the economic boom to ‘waste’ time on discussions, arguments and philosophy…..to develop democracy.

We have become complacent, lured into an artificial comfort zone, where problems are always somebody else’s responsibility.  We expect others to look after our own welfare and we tend to accept the decisions that are made ‘on our behalf’.

Citizens are now relegated to groups of representative ‘stakeholders’. They have to attend formal meetings, with set agendas and predictable outcomes. We are told that technocratic governments and corporations know what’s best for us. The reality, however, is that these processes are often driven by self interest by vested interests – a far cry from the agoras in Greece, where issues were widely discussed and hotly debated before decisions were made.

Of course, some people refuse to surrender their independence, but nowadays the tendency to relinquish control to the establishment is evident in all walks of life.

Telecoms structures are allowing us to reclaim the agora modus operandi. The Internet and related digital media are now making it possible to once more become involved in the debate.

In a separate report about the latest BuddeComm Roundtable on Digital Media I reported on the demand from the new digital media users. They want to be engaged, but they don’t want to be talked at. They are avoiding call centres and they dismiss commercial interference in their personal life (no advertisements on mobile).

At the same time they use telecoms via social networks, user-generated content and blogs to participate in quite different ways from those used in the old society, which was based on the so-called ‘scarcity’ models.

All of this is reminiscent of the 1960s, when we were all beginning to rebel against the old culture. That movement seemed to die out at that time, but email and the Internet has generated a renewal of the spirit of the 1960s.

Exploring aboriginal values
Another interesting point made by John was in relation to aboriginal values.

He said that, unlike the USA and Europe, Canada and New Zealand are privileged to contain a culture that is philosophically very different from western society. These aboriginal cultures (Inuit and Maori) are less ‘men’ centred and far more ‘nature’ centred and these societies as a whole place a much higher value on community, culture and nature.

He indicated that Canada and New Zealand were different from Australia.  This country also has a native culture along these lines, but, through treaties with their aboriginal population, Canada and New Zealand have a much better basis for interaction, and a mutual respect for each other. There are also much better structures in place in these two countries, which enable the people to look into, and learn from, philosophically different social value propositions.

With the economy changing from scarcity to surplus we should use this unique opportunity to tap into these old cultures, with a view to re-evaluating ourselves, our lives and our communities. A good starting point would be to study these cultures, to try and find some answers to the environmental changes that are currently having such a serious impact. As I write this, half of Greece is on fire – how many more warnings do we need before we start to make changes?

Change need not be detrimental to the economy. It can lead to new structures, new innovations and new wealth creation. What we make of it is up to us. However, we do need to invest in it. Look what happened when investments were made in a devastated Europe after WWII. An enormous amount of new wealth was created.

The same will happen when we start taking the environment seriously.

Paul Budde

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 3:18 pm and is filed under From Paul's Desk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.