Technology, Democracy, Money

By Michael Kinsley

In the waning months of the 1980s, a Sovietologist named Francis Fukuyama published a provocative essay called "The End of History?" Fukuyama's thesis--that the collapse of the Soviet Union meant people would have nothing more to fight wars about--was soon disproved. The 1990s have not been short on history. The end of the cold war defrosted earlier rivalries that had been frozen for two generations, bringing bloody history back to places like Bosnia, where it had been in cold storage.

The 1990s, however, have indeed been a period when the great arguments about how society should be organized seemed settled. Democracy blossomed in South Africa and Russia; even Vietnam embraced capitalism. Nevertheless, life has not been boring. If the melodrama of history has been subdued, the melodrama of technology burns bright. We still live in interesting times.

Is it the blindered arrogance of the present to think of the 1990s as the decade of technology? Every decade in the 75 years since TIME was founded has seen everyday life transformed by invention. Is the Internet more life transforming than household electricity? Or air travel? Or television, frozen food and microwave ovens (to defrost the frozen food)?

Maybe technology isn't changing our lives faster than ever, but it certainly seems that way. Did Clarence Birdseye become the richest man in the world? Appear four times on TIME's cover? Did he become, as Bill Gates has, a cultural icon, right up there with the beautiful princess who died with her lover in a car crash in Paris?

Technology, democracy and capitalism, the themes of this decade, interreact. PCs may have been born in the '80s, but the productivity payoff came in the '90s. (It took 10 years to figure out how to use the damned things!) Thus technology added mightily to this decade's prosperity, which reinforced the prestige of capitalism. Capitalism, meanwhile, repaid the favor. A few years ago there was talk of the government's spending billions to build the "information superhighway." Then that highway sprang up overnight. Although the roots of the Internet are in the Defense Department, the Web's sudden arrival as a society-transforming force is largely the result of capitalism in almost textbook-pure form: not IBM or even Microsoft, but vast crowds of garage-shop inventors and hungry entrepreneurs.

Technology also promotes democracy--the exact opposite of what Orwell foresaw. The fax machine helped bring down communism, and the Net makes state control of information impossible. Even in free countries, citizens have new powers to communicate with and about their elected rulers. A.J. Liebling said that freedom of the press was guaranteed only to those who own one. Now almost anyone can.

This may give some people pause--and not just because of cybergossip Matt Drudge. When the U.S. Constitution was written, representative government was a necessity. Communication from a citizen to the capital could take weeks. Now government by instant referendum is technologically feasible, and government policy is increasingly based on the ebb and flow of public opinion.

History is not over; in fact, there's more of it than ever. It depends on written records, and the thrust of communications technology has been to make those records richer and more finely grained. The telephone, in that respect, was a step backward; it encouraged decision making without contemporaneous record. Now, between E-mail and camcorders, we may have more history than we know what to do with.