Optipessimism for the 21st Century
Europe is, as we all know, quite old. The question is, if Europe feels old. Have we lost the capability to invent? Will the new technologies and particularly the technologies of the information society being rejected or are they going to be integrated into our culture?
To answer these questions one could have two attitudes. The optimistic and the pessimistic way. Very often journalists speak about the eurosceptics or the europtimists. I propose an optipessimism for the 21st century.
Why optipessimism? I am tired of the questions of journalists, when they are asking if I am an optimist or a pessimist. This logic of exclusion is obsolete and belongs to the old paradigm. What we need to build Europe and to integrate technologies in our culture is a new complementary logic, based on association. This is the logic of "and", not the logic of the exclusive "or". This is why I want to be an optimist and a pessimist for the new century. In fact, I would describe myself as a worried optimist and as a happy pessimist. This is not a dialectic trick, it is just to avoid the problem once for all.
Regarding the future we need to be three things: We have to be very well informed and we have the tools for it. We have to be responsible and should not always listen to everybody from journalists to politicians who tell us what we have to think. We have to be responsible for building our future. And we have to be constructive. After all I want to build a world for my children and for my grand-children and I do not want to say there is nothing to do. I am not an optimist or a pessimist, I want to be informed, responsible and constructive.
Characteristics of the Networked Society
Let me give you an example for this kind of new logic. I could have picked up many different trends in Europe. The model of America, which chooses employment, but poverty. The model of Europe, which has unemployment, but tries to share resources and to reduce the differences between people. But I will take the new information or networked society. Why is it so important for Europe to understand what information society means? Because the information society is not a new market, not just a new gadget based on the Internet, the PC or multimedia. It is a very, very deep trend, of which we are a part and which has gone from very long and which will accelerate.
We are living a very fundamental transition which will have a deep impact on the way we live, act and create. Matter, life and society have been following a path, that many scientists are studying now: the increase of complexity through information, through networks, through integration. If you look back five billions years to the origin of life, then you see, that it brought molecules into an environment, that we call the cell. With this the property of life emerged. Then, during the whole Darwinian evolution, the cells came together and organisms came into being with communication networks inside them. At the end emerges consciousness in human beings through the evolution of brain. Human beings came together with language, printing, networks and communication systems, and towns and societies emerged. Matter and energy were integrated on a higher level. This is all well known, but my question is: what are we building together?
Certainly cities are very complex organisations which do not work too well. We see nations, international organisations, commercial treaties like the GATT, flows of information and finance around the earth. This is building a new meta or super organism, a hybrid system made of living entities, that means human beings, of cities, communication networks, mechanical tools, computers and international organisations. We are building this without knowing what we are doing. We are building this through ideologies, commercial push, religious vision, but we are not building it on scientific and rational roots. Now we have the task to understand what we are doing. This is why I think that this transition to the information society is nothing less than the building of a nervous system for the super organism.
It is quite worrying to think that human beings might lose their individualities in something different than us. We know that we can lose in the cities our identity when violence come up. We know that we only can be numbers in the market. But what are we going to become as part, as cells or neurones of the superorganism hybrid system between biological beings, computer networks and mechanical tools ? This transition is even more critical than the transition from the agricultural to industrial systems, when machines had been invented and many people had moved from fields to cities. We are moving into a new space, which some people had called cyberspace. We are creating a different type of relationship between people, between organisations, between ourselves. This transition is a fundamental trend for human kind organising itself in more complex systems that we have called societies.
We enter a third revolution of access to information. The first one, the access to this universe of information, which came into existence when words have been frozen into writing, was called the book. And in the 15th century it was possible to access this universe of information by reading and writing. But if you want to be read by many people through the print medium your manuscript have to be accepted. Still now I need a publisher to be published. I have to go to the top of the pyramid to be distributed. The second one is access to an enormous universe of information through television. Television is a little box. You pay the fee to use it and you receive a huge amount of audio-visual information. But still if I want to be seen or listened to I have to go to the top of the pyramid. Some people in companies will decide if this what I am saying is good and to broadcast me or not. The third revolution is access through a personal multimedia communicator, which is called a computer linked, for the moment, to phone lines. With the networked computer the ocean of information is coming to you. You can be drown if you do not know how to swim in such an ocean. But instead of passive reading or receiving audio-visual information I can create. For the first time I really have access to this ocean of information because I can send information back. This is a major difference.
Another important phenomenon is the substitutive technology versus the integrative technology. Substitutive technologies replace each other linearly in time. Fax replaces telex, CD laser disks replaces vinyl disks. For us this is not a problem, because our way of linear thinking accepts very well causal change. One cause, one effect, one replaces the other. It adds up. This means substitute. It becomes much more complicated when we have integrated technologies like a personal multimedia computer hooked to a network. That integrates a computer, multimedia, a modem, a telephone network, servers, hosts, browsers, databases, search engines. This integrated system creates a new dimension. We have much more difficulties to understand them than how we can use these systems, because every older system is still there. It is like an onion. Let us take the core of the onion and let us call it speech, the logosphere. If we write something and send or publish it, it is the graphosphere. Then there is television, the mediasphere. Then comes the cybersphere, which surrounds the three others. The great difficulties we have with our linear sequential logic is to understand global change, not causal change. People continue to think in those terms, when they talk about the new technologies of communication. They still think the Internet is a technology, and even worse, they think it is a network. But the Internet is not a network, it is a protocol which allows computers of different brands to communicate together through telephone lines. It could use coaxial cable, satellites, fibre optics or whatever. It is a system of communication which is just the tip of an iceberg, and behind it is an enormously growing system which is called the interactive multimedia personal communication world-wide network.
Causal change looks at one technology and asks what effects this technology will have on the world. But the real question is: what is a social system which is using a communication system inside it, affected by small changes and amplified by other changes, which have an effect on the complete system itself? This is more like a wave which propagates through the whole system and bounces back. This is very different from the traditional view. The trend to the information society is now coming as an enormous wave on Europe. It started in the sixties and has opened now a little hole through which an enormous potential and impetus have gone. This system, the one we have now, is a challenge to the traditional structures of society and particularly in Europe, because the traditional structure is a vertical structure. It is like a pyramid with the power at the top and us at the bottom. The birth of the networked society is creating a very different relationship with power, because it creates a transversal network where, at the nodes, you could have people who gave the potential to be responsible and creative. This is why we see so much resistance against the information society in Europe and in many other countries, because it empowers people like us as nodes of the network and as the new neurones of the earth, which are connected to each other.
Five Reasons why Europe has Difficulties in Entering the 21. Century
There are five reasons why Europe has great difficulties in understanding and acting such an enormous change. Again I will take again the example of information society.
The first reason why such change is almost invisible is the structure of society, which is based on the long tradition, particularly in France, Italy or Spain, that the king has the power at the top. You can find this in large companies, in religious structures, in the family, in different groups and associations. The leader at the top is alone and the amplification machine works down through the hierarchy. This structure has created the top-down chain of command. This was and is adapted to a certain kind of amplification of power: through specialisation, taylorisation and centralisation. This is the key of the vertical structures in companies, schools and governments. We are so used to live in such structured that we almost cannot invent something else. The more at the top the more powerful and the less people. It is very lonely up there. It has created a way of management which functions through programming the tasks of people and controlling what they do, what they should do.
Complexity cannot be managed only through top-down organisation. It has to be managed through stirring. In a car or a plane you have all the commands in your hands. There is the dashboard which gives speed, altitude and other indications. In a modern company the stirring is done through this simple procedure. "As a manager I want you and your team to go in this direction. Here are the resources and I would say, stir the organisation at the goal. I don't care which road you want to go, but I want that you reach to the goal in time and with resources I gave you." This is a very different way of management. There is a third and fascinating way of managing through catalysis, which is to provide the structure for a reaction to happen quickly and which will not happen if the catalyst is not there. The whole business of managing complexity in society or in a company today is to catalyse the emergence of collective intelligence. When we come together in Europe as individuals we have to create this catalytic structure to have the intelligence to solve our problems instead of being told, being controlled or regulated. Our structure makes it very difficult to move from the top-down to the bottom-up.
The second reason is a wrong relationship with time. It is linear and sequential. Because Europe is an old country we are looking at history, economics and social sciences. We are looking at linear extrapolations from the past to the future. But now we have entered an accelerated evolution of a non-linear nature. The so called Darwinian evolution is well known. It took millions of years to invent many different species, because evolution has to test every invention in real time and in real nature. Then came a second type of evolution which works in centuries. Why is technological evolution going so fast? There is another world, the imaginary world, in the consciousness of human beings. Here one can invent a plane, a pencil, a locomotive, a telephone, write it down and is able to build it. The compression of time, the acceleration of time which we are witnessing, is like the Darwinian evolution - selection, mutation, market and amplification -, but in centuries rather than in millions of years. On top of it is a third one, called the digital evolution, which is based on even less material, because it is based on electrons and bits. And the third world which adds up to nature and the imaginary world is called the virtual world. It allows me not only to think about a machine but to build it virtually. You can visit a flat which has never existed. Again there is an enormous acceleration between the biological, the technological and the digital evolution. Is it going to slow down? No, forget it. It is a different relationship with time. Information and time are linked. As the information, as the network grows it becomes denser and denser. We are going to live with this density of space-time.
In my book Homo symbioticus I describe which kind of symbiosis could be developed with such organisms to empower us as human persons in our human life rather than to become a robot and to try to process information which is going too fast. I want to subcontract to this huge network which can process information faster than me, in order to live my human life. Acceleration is a fundamental process which will continue. The Internet for example is accelerating at a high speed. There are now 30 millions people on the Internet. Within three years they will be 400 millions. There are now 16 millions hosts in the net. In three years there will be probably 110 millions. There are now 150 millions webpages. In three years there will be one billion. It is an explosion.
And what about Europe? I am not speaking of the people under 35 or 30 years, but of politicians, heads of large companies, professors. It is not really a question of age, but of people of the old paradigm. What is the Europe of the old paradigm saying in front of such acceleration? It says, this is a hype, a fashion, it will go up and then it will go down. At the end of the seventies we saw the personal computer coming in with Apple. Some people said: "This is a fashion. Who needs a personal computer? We only need big mainframe computers." The next step has been the personal portable computer, the laptop. The same people said: "It is just for people who travel. This is only a tiny market. Forget it." Third step has been the multimedia portable computer in the eighties. The same people said: "Multimedia? What for? For colour? This is not serious. We need black and white. This is only for kids and games. A small market. Forget it." They hoped that this would be only a hype, because they had not started to get hooked to it. And then came recently the personal multimedia portable computer hooked to the Internet. Again they are saying, that this is a hype and will come down. This is a typical attitude of the old paradigm.
The third obstacle for Europe is the mode of thinking. I called it the causal, traditional, sequential, linear, Cartesian logic versus a systemic logic, which is taking in consideration the dynamic of change, the global change, the interdependence between different factors. All our schools and universities have trained us, and our politicians have been trained to understand complexity by bringing it down to simpler parts. In France we have two wonderful schools. One is called Polytechnique, the other L'Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA). This is the "crème de la crème", the top of the top of the top. Most of the politicians have been studying l'ENA. Most of the major managers come from Polytechnique. They have been trained to analyse things in terms of mathematics and analyse people in terms of law. But today mathematics and law are not sufficient to understand and act on complexity. You need another culture coming from system approach, from environmental research, from biology, from commerce. These are new trends to allow to understand complexity, but not only mathematics and law. This is the reason why I think that my country is ruled by the old paradigm and why there are difficulties to understand and act on complexity.
A fourth obstacle is the mode of action. Most of our politicians act on one cause to produce a measurable quantitative effect. But we all know, in cybernetics and system theory and particularly in biology, that if you put all your strength on one effect you immediatly create a cascade of other effects which can contradict the effect which we are trying to change. One change is immediately balanced by another change. Acting in a causal way is the totally wrong thing. Acting efficiently means acting in a combinatorial way. You have to combine your actions, wait some time to see the result of actions. It is a kind of acupuncture. You put a needle here and another here, wait and see the change and act on it. Politicians do not like to do this because they are elected for a short period of time; they need journalists to show that they have done something important. It is not a demonstration of power to say, for instance, that one takes a spoon of bran each morning and that this will avoid colon cancer. It is much more important to have a very big and expensive machine in hospital that treats only few patients for a very high price. This is very spectacular. But acting modestly at the nodes of the network to amplify change is no demonstration of power. So the mode of action in networked society is completely different to the mode of action of most politicians, based on history, sequential evaluation and linear thinking.
Finally one obstacle is our relationship with innovation which is strange. Certainly we are innovative, but we fear innovations because they change the worlds within which we live. We have a tendency to reject innovation and to be quite careful with it. In other countries, particularly in America and particularly in California, innovation is taken as a catalyst for change. Not everything there is nice and pink. I do not want to glorify California, but to adapt innovation to our culture in Europe. A good example is the relationship of a manager in Europe and a manager in the US versus telecommunication and computers. For us in Europe, computers and telecommunication are an expense. They cost money, so we have to reduce them, control them or reject them. In America and in other countries computers and telecommunication is taken as an investment, not as an expense. This is a very different way of looking at things. Innovation creates a turmoil and a change for a while, but if you can catalyse it and use it, it will change the society completely. Entrepreneurs who are the key to create new companies, new jobs and new activities don't have the same facilities in Europe than in the Silicon Valley or around Boston. The catalytic effect which exists in those areas, the relationship between venture capital, media, university professors, students, experiments and small labs, this critical mass of knowledge and intelligence is very difficult to bring together in Europe. When it comes up it has great success, but it is traditionally very difficult to set it up.
Diversity is one of the advantages of Europe
These are the five more pessimistic reasons why I think that Europe has difficulty to move into the new information society. What can we do? I am not pessimistic for this, because I am constantly in contact with young people where I work. We are continuously listening to the new generation. I feel that there is in Europe an enormous potential, an extraordinary diversity, which is in fact one of our major advantages. We have communities of culture in our diversity. We have common interests in Europe. We certainly have difficulties to communicate trough our different languages, different structures, different modes of operation, but the information society is keeping this variety and brings with it a potential of exchange which has never been as strong in the past centuries.
The Internet is not a machine to homogenise, it creates diversity. Many believe, since it comes from America and is mostly in English, that it is a big machine to crush Europe. But the Internet has the potential of diversification. In the past people had to be in their country with their culture and language. Now they have to learn English as the new Esperanto. But in the future we will have translation machines, which will learn from us and do a better job than now. I believe, diversity is one of the great advantages of Europe.