- Reynolds, Glenn.
An Army of Davids.
Nashville: Nelson Current, 2006.
ISBN 1-59555-054-2.
-
In this book, law professor and über
blogger (InstaPundit.com)
Glenn Reynolds explores how present and near-future technology
is empowering individuals at the comparative expense of
large organisations in fields as diverse as retailing, music
and motion picture production, national security, news
gathering, opinion journalism, and, looking further out,
nanotechnology and desktop manufacturing, human longevity
and augmentation, and space exploration and development
(including Project Orion
[pp. 228–233]—now there's a
garage start-up I'd love to work on!). Individual empowerment
is, like the technology which creates it, morally
neutral: good people can do more good, and bad people can
wreak more havoc. Reynolds is relentlessly optimistic, and
I believe justifiably so; good people outnumber bad people
by a large majority, and in a society which encourages them
to be “a pack, not a herd” (the title of chapter
5), they will have the means in their hands to act as a
societal immune system against hyper-empowered malefactors
far more effective than heavy-handed top-down repression
and fear-motivated technological relinquishment.
Anybody who's seeking “the next big thing” couldn't
find a better place to start than this book. Chapters 2, 3 and
7, taken together, provide a roadmap for the devolution of
work from downtown office towers to individual entrepreneurs
working at home and in whatever environments attract them,
and the emergence of “horizontal knowledge”,
supplanting the top-down one-to-many model of the legacy
media. There are probably a dozen ideas for start-ups with
the potential of eBay and Amazon lurking in these chapters
if you read them with the right kind of eyes. If the business
and social model of the twenty-first century indeed comes
to resemble that of the eighteenth, all of those self-reliant
independent people are going to need lots of products and
services they will find indispensable just as soon as somebody
manages to think of them. Discovering and meeting these needs
will pay well.
The “every person an entrepreneur” world sketched
here raises the same concerns I expressed in regard to
David Bolchover's
The
Living Dead (January 2006): this will be a wonderful
world, indeed, for the intelligent and self-motivated people
who will prosper once liberated from corporate cubicle indenture.
But not everybody is like that: in particular, those
people tend to be found on the right side of the bell curve,
and for every one on the right, there's one equally far to the
left. We have already made entire categories of employment
for individuals with average or below-average intelligence
redundant. In the eighteenth century, there were many ways
in which such people could lead productive and fulfilling lives; what
will they do in the twenty-first? Further, ever since
Bismarck, government schools have been manufacturing worker-bees
with little initiative, and essentially no concept of personal
autonomy. As I write this, the élite of French
youth is rioting over a proposal to remove what amounts
to a guarantee of lifetime employment in a first
job. How will people so thoroughly indoctrinated in
collectivism fare in an individualist renaissance? As a
law professor, the author spends much of his professional life
in the company of high-intelligence, strongly-motivated
students, many of whom contemplate an entrepreneurial
career and in any case expect to be judged on their merits
in a fiercely competitive environment. One wonders if his
optimism might be tempered were he to spend comparable time
with denizens of, say, the school of education. But the
fact that there will be problems in the future shouldn't
make us fear it—heaven knows there are problems enough
in the present, and the last century was kind of a colossal
monument to disaster and tragedy; whatever the future holds,
the prescription of more freedom, more information, greater
wealth and health, and less coercion presented here is certain
to make it a better place to live.
The individualist future envisioned here has much in common with that
foreseen in the 1970s by Timothy Leary, who coined the acronym
“SMIILE” for “Space Migration, Intelligence
Increase, Life Extension”. The “II” is alluded to
in chapter 12 as part of the merging of human and machine intelligence
in the singularity, but mightn't it make sense, as Leary advocated, to
supplement longevity research with investigation of the nature of
human intelligence and near-term means to increase it? Realising the
promise and avoiding the risks of the demanding technologies of the
future are going to require both intelligence and wisdom; shifting the
entire bell curve to the right, combined with the wisdom of longer
lives may be key in achieving the much to be desired future foreseen
here.
InstaPundit visitors will be familiar with the writing style, which
consists of relatively brief discussion of a multitude of topics, each
with one or more references for those who wish to “read the
whole thing” in more depth. One drawback of the print medium is
that although many of these citations are Web pages, to get there you
have to type in lengthy URLs for each one. An on-line edition of the
end notes with all the on-line references as clickable links would be
a great service to readers.
March 2006 