November, 1992
Shumpei Kumon
One cannot avoid the impression that world news has been dominated by unhappy events in recent times. The total population of the world has already reached 5.5 billion and is still growing by 2.5％ each year. In fact the growth rate is apparently accelerating. Even without acceleration, a population growth rate of 2.55％ per annum is a frightening statistic. If our population continues to grow at this rate, in 850 years, the human race will be heavier than the planet..1
Humanity is causing massive pollution of the Earth's environment through the waste products generated by industry and day-to-day living. Earth's greenery is being consumed and destroyed as feed for livestock, a source of fuel and other raw materials used in human activity. ...2
The socialist system, which was seen as a powerful tool for modernization and industrialization, has totally collapsed just 70 years after the Russian Revolution. However, the Western countries that emerged as victors from the Cold War are themselves displaying a variety of pathological symptoms, including economic stagnation and social disruption. The end of the Cold War was expected to bring total peace, yet ethnic conflicts have erupted in various parts of the world.
The world may be now "living on a lifeboat," as was predicted by a biologist, Garett Hardin. ...3
The countries of the South are attempting to deal with this harsh situation by despairing of their ability to attain the Modern Civilization and turning instead to fundamentalist movements based on the principles of earlier civilizations. There is a significant danger that the world of the late 20th century will be a world of endless confusion and conflict.
However, a totally different kind of social change is also occurring in today's world. In June I attended INET '92, the first international conference of the Internet Society, which was held in Kobe. Over 600 people from 70 countries participated in lively discussions about the exponential growth of computer networks and the social implications of this phenomenon. The number of the host computers in the Internet has been doubling each year since 1987, and I was told that this exceeded 700,000 for the first time early this year. ...4
Since then the rate of increase has accelerated even further, and we are now witnessing an explosive growth process. I believe that 1992 will go down in history as year one of the network era.
During his address to the Kobe conference, the President of the Internet Society, Vinton Cerf, predicted that the number of host computers connected to the Internet would be on the order of 100 million by the turn of the century, and that the number of users would be around the one billion level. He also predicted, in case the "ubiquitous computing" model prevails, that the number of hosts would eventually reach several billions. A recent survey of computer networking by the British Magazine, The Economist, concluded that "one day, the computers of the world will unite....5
This contrast between hopeless social stagnation and breathtaking social development merits close study. What meaning can we extract from this situation? In a speech to the World Economic Forum, which was held in Switzerland in February of this year, the then President of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, said that "[T]he end of the Communism ... has brought an end ... to the modern age as a whole." ...6
The Modern Civilization is based on the belief that we can attain a future of infinite progress and prosperity through the application of objective scientific knowledge in specialized fields. This value system is diametrically opposed to the fundamental tenets of the Classical Civilization, the predecessor of the Modern Civilization, which was based on the belief that the passage of time will lead only to the decline and fall of the glory of civilization that was built on the teachings of a great savior or principles described in holy writings from some golden age in the past. The communist system, which represented the perverse extreme of the Modern Civilization in this sense, collapsed not as a result of external military force, but because of rebellion by the people who lived within that system. Havel sees this as the end of the whole modern era. He maintains that we can no longer rely on the progress of science and technology to provide the answers to our problems. His speech continued as follows.
What is needed is something different, something larger. Man's attitude to the world must be radically changed. We have to abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions for use waiting to be discovered, a body of information to be fed into a computer in the hope that, sooner or later, it will spit out a universal solution. ... Things must once more be given a chance to present themselves as they are, to be perceived in their individuality. We must see the pluralism of the world, and not bind it by seeking common denominators or reducing everything to a single common equation. We must try harder to understand than to explain. The way forward is not in the mere construction of universal systemic solutions, to be applied to reality from the outside; it is also in seeking to get to the heart of reality through personal experience ....7
I must confess that I feel considerable sympathy for Mr. Havel's criticism of the Modern Civilization, particularly modern science and technology, as well as his call for change in the paradigms of human knowledge and life. However, I also feel considerable dissatisfaction. Above all, I want to ask if communism was really part of the Modern Civilization. I would rather argue that the communist systems adopted in the Soviet Union and China actually belong to the Classic Civilization. In my interpretation leaders of those countries merely sought to revive the authoritarian empires and ideologies of the Classic Civilization under the banner of "modernization" borrowed from the Modern Civilization. In that sense, I am convinced that their experiment was doomed to failure. As pointed out by Francis Fukuyama and others, to this extent the collapse of communism can perhaps be interpreted not as the end of the Modern Civilization, but rather as its triumph. ...8
This is not to say that the Modern Civilization is without problems. In fact it is clear that the Modern Civilization is already reaching the limit of its development, both in terms of the potential for global spread, and also in terms of our ability to achieve sustainable economic growth in the developed districts of the Modern Civilization. It is for this reason that I support Mr. Havel's criticism of the Modern Civilization. In the long run, our development-oriented civilization must inevitably give way to a different, sustainance-oriented civilization. At that time we may need to impose deliberate limits on the advancement of human knowledge, including science and technology. However, I also believe that this situation is still some distance in the future. As I stated earlier, we are riding on, or being carried along by, exponentially expanding waves of growth generated by the still-remaining development potential of the Modern Civilization. Thus I should like to offer the following hypothesis for your criticism. It consists of the following two basic propositions:
(1) We are moving from militarization/state-formation and industrialization/ enterprise-formation, into informatization/intelprise-formation, which represents the third and final phase of the development of the Modern Civilization. This third phase will be accompanied by a shift from the paradigms of an industrial society to the paradigms of an information society.
(2) The various new elements of the Modern Civilization -- knowledge, institutions and machinery -- that will be born during this third phase, will be integrated into and utilized as essential components of the post-modern civilization (the Wisdom Civilization) that succeeds the Modern Civilization. In short, I maintain that the modern era has not yet ended. I believe that in order to achieve a smooth and successful transition to post-modern civilization, we must work not only to understand and overcome the weak points of the Modern Civilization, but also to develop that civilization further. In particular, while we must recognize the problems that exist in the scientific and technological paradigms of the Modern Civilization, it also seems obvious that science and technology itself will remain as essential building blocks of post-modern civilization. My greatest source of dissatisfaction with Mr. Havel's speech was his failure to recognize this point. Since time is limited, I will limit the remainder of my discussion to the first of the above propositions. I will present my personal views regarding the nature of the third phase of the Modern Civilization, and about the shift in social paradigms that will occur during that phase. One of values that sustains the Modern Civilization is active instrumentalism. The individual actors who make up modern society use various means to influence the world in order to attain goals that they want to achieve. One of the most effective of these means is other actors. In other words, a secondary goal of each actor is the effective control of the acts and states of other actors in ways that contribute to the achievement of their own primary goals. Acts that are designed to control the acts and states of other actors are "political" acts in the broadest definition of the term. In this sense, political acts can be divided into two basic types. The first type, that is, negotiation, is based on indirect control, which consists of presenting requests regarding the acts and states of other actors, and negotiating toward compliance with those requests. The second type, that is, manipulation, involves the control of the acts and states of other actors by more direct means, without the presentation of requests
Negotiation can be further divided into three sub-types: ...9
(1) Threat: If you do not comply with my requests, I will attack you.
(2) Exchange: If you accept my requests, I will cooperate with you.
(3) Persuasion: It would be in your best interests to accept my requests. Manipulation can also be divided into three sub-types:
(1) Coercion: Forcing other actors to adopt the state that one desires, without ideration for their freedom of action.
(2) Exploitation: Taking advantage of gaps in the defenses of other actors, in order to achieve the state that one desires.
(3) Inducement: Creating environments in which others will be motivated spontaneously toward specific acts or states.
In either type, consideration for the independence of others is greater in the second and third sub-types than in the first. In modern society, there is a strong tendency to use threats in conjunction with coercion, exchange with exploitation, and persuasion with inducement. Historically, we have moved from the first phase of modernization, in which threats and coercion were widely used as socially legitimate acts, to the second phase of modernization, in which an increasing emphasis has been placed on exchange and exploitation. I predict that the advent of the third phase of modernization will be accompanied by a gradual increase in the use of persuasion and inducement.
During the first two phases of modernization, attempts were made to justify the legitimization of the prevailing forms of political acts by establishing concepts of rights and defining specific limits for those rights. The first two phases were also characterized by the development of competitive social games in which the objective was to acquire, accumulate and demonstrate the means of political acts. This was accompanied by the emergence of actors who became the main players in these games, and the formation of social systems that functioned as their arenas.
The first phase of modernization, which began around the 16th century, brought about the formation of modern sovereign states for which national sovereignty was a sacred concept. This resulted in the spread of the "prestige game," whereby states sought to enhance and express national prestige as the general and abstract means of threat and coercion. The prestige game was based on invasive wars and diplomacy in the arena of the "international society." International law was a system of rules governing the establishment, limitation and cession of the sovereign rights of states.
This was paralleled during the second phase of modernization, which began in the late 18th century, by the formation of modern industrial enterprises, for whom private property ownership was a sacred concept. The result was the spread of the "wealth game," in which enterprises used the "world marketplace" as the arena for a competitive game based on production and sales. Their goal was the accumulation and demonstration of wealth as the general and abstract means of exchange and exploitation. Commercial and civil law were developed as a framework to govern the establishment, limitation and transfer of the property rights of individual industrial enterprises.
While conflict and war have not been eliminated in the closing years of the 20th century, at least the international community has come to accept that wars of invasion are unjust wars. The implication of this is that the "prestige game" has decisively lost its social legitimacy. The competitive pursuit of profit in the "wealth game" has become the focus of criticism for various reasons, but we have not yet reached the point of totally denying the social legitimacy of this type of behavior. Although the nature of the wealth game may change, it is likely that it will continue to be played in the 2lst century. And even if we cease playing the "wealth game," the economic acts as such, namely production and distribution of goods and services, will not stop.
It seems to me that we are now about to enter the third phase of modernization, which will result in the formation of a new type of social entity, modern information intelprises, for which "information rights," rather than national sovereignty or private property rights, will be the sacred concept. We will see the spread of the "research and education game," that is the "wisdom game," in which these intelprises will compete in the "global intelplace" to acquire and demonstrate wisdom as the general and symbolic means of persuasion and inducement. In other words, we are on the brink of a change in our social paradigms for the second time in recent social history. Of course, we have not yet established a system of rules to govern the establishment, limitation and sharing of information rights by intelprises and other participants in the information society. However, I am sure that we will eventually start to form suitable systems.
In his Nobel Prize-winning novel, The Glass Bead Game, the great German writer Hermann Hesse described a kind of wisdom game that he referred to as the "bead game." Looking back from the Europe of the 24th century, Hesse uses his brilliant imagination to describe how the game originated in Europe in the second half of the 20th century and eventually spread throughout the entire world before slipping into decline. On my part I want to attempt to contrast the spread of the wisdom game with the growth of the wealth game in more abstract and theoretical terms.
Like other social games, however, the wisdom game must fulfill three preconditions before it can get established and start to spread in earnest. These three requirements are mental awakening, technological breakthroughs, and the establishment of a system of rules. Mental awakening will require recognition of ourselves not as "individuals" but as "contextuals" enveloped in various social contexts and relationships in which we are only relatively autonomous. This will replace the existing concept of the modern self as a self-sufficient and independent individual separate from other people, which is a prerequisite for the wealth game. Existence as a contextualist rather than as an individualist is equivalent to what Arthur Koestler referred to as self-awareness as a "holon." 9 In the words of George Lodge, it is "communitarianism." 10 It is also equivalent to recognition of oneself as a member of a network that consists of multiple relationships, or as a being that coexists with and is actually part of the environment. It also implies the awakening of wider forms of awareness, such as planetary consciousness or cosmic consciousness. In the United States this new type of consciousness is clearly present in the counter-culture movement and the networking movement, which have emerged since the mid 1960s.
Obviously, people who have achieved this awareness are extremely well qualified to become members of networks that function as social systems. They are also well qualified to become members of the intelprises that participate in wisdom games, or indeed to become intelprises in their own right. By "networks that function as a social system," I mean a social system that is formed primarily with a view to reciprocity in terms of the sharing of information and knowledge among members and the mutual granting of goods and services, and in which persuasion and inducement are the prevailing political acts. Persuasion is based on the sharing of information and knowledge, and inducement is based on the granting of goods and services. Networks that function as a social system can be categorized into "network organizations," which function as individual organizations, that is, complex actors, in their own right, and those that do not, which I refer to as "societal networks." In this context, intelprises can be regarded as network organizations that function as a social system.
The second prerequisite for the wisdom game is a technological breakthrough. By this I mean the development of computer-based information processing and communications technology and the use of that technology to create information infrastructure 11 in the form of the Internet, which is a network of computer networks for global information processing and communications.
The revolutionary progress of information technology (IT) 12 is generally regarded as the breakthrough that will lead to the informatization of industry and the industrialization of information, which will form the core of the third industrial revolution taking place since the mid 1970s. For example, there can be no doubt that the United States has adopted an industrial policy stance that is targeted toward the improvement of the international competitiveness of American industry through government-led efforts to develop information processing and communications technology in the United States. This is apparent from the passage late last year of the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 (102P, L. 194). Of course there is nothing wrong with this approach. However, I would also like to emphasize that the present technological breakthrough process is also significant as the technology breakthrough required for the wisdom game that will characterize the third phase of modernization. [Add some comments here on the 2lst century system and The Information Infrastructure and Technology act of 1992]
In fact, it is interesting to note in relation to my comments about the new American law that the National Research and Education Network (NREN) has been selected as the computer network that will form the core of the Internet from now on. There have been calls for private sector enterprises in the computer and telecommunications industry to participate in the formation of the NREN, and for membership in this network to be extended to include not only educational and research institutions, but also general private enterprises and individual citizens. Whatever the intentions of those who framed the law, an objective interpretation suggests that if the computer network is opened up in this way it has the potential to function as an intelplace, by which I mean the arena for the global wisdom game. The computer network can also function as a work space, or "office," for intelprises. In other words, the computer network will function as information infrastructure for intelplaces and offices for intelprises. Mitchell Kapor, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a private sector organization in the United States, has already suggested that the NREN should be structured as an international public network (IPN). He believes that the network should be open to small and medium-sized enterprises and individuals, and that its scope should be international rather than national. 13 The requirements for the wisdom game in terms of social systems are the establishment of information rights as the third major category of social rights in modern society, as well as the establishment of a global framework of laws and systems to provide partial limitation of those rights. As becomes apparent when we consider the wealth game, commerce and industry cannot grow freely until private property rights are established. However, the excessive insistence on those rights in absolute terms can actually hinder the development of commerce and industry. For example, if we decide that land bequeathed to us by our ancestors is too sacred to sell or even lease, it becomes in effect impossible to use that land for commercial purposes. On the contrary, when enterprises supply the goods and services that they produce to the market as commodities, they are showing their willingness to transfer their property rights to others at any time, albeit subject to certain conditions, such as payment. In the same way, intelprises are starting to supply the information and knowledge that they produce to the intelplace, which is a kind of network-based social system, as "sharables." They will probably show their willingness to transfer their information and knowledge to others at any time, subject to certain conditions, such as respect for their priorities.
Information rights differ from property rights in that they are based on the following three key components. The first component is the right of information-autonomy, which is the right of each actor to exercise autonomy over the processing of information. It also includes information-security right concerning such processing, namely, the right to prohibit other parties from invading or intervening in this process. The second component is the right of information-title, which I define as the right to claim title over new information and knowledge discovered or created through the information processing activities of individual actors. This also implies information-priority rights over information generated in this way, by which I mean the right to prohibit another person who has been allowed to share such information from sharing it with a third party without title-holder's permission.
The third component is the right of information-control, which is the right of actors to claim a basic right of supervision over information and knowledge that pertains to themselves. It also includes the information-privacy rights over the information concerning oneself or one's group. That is to say, I should have the right to prohibit others from processing information about me without my permission. Society is gradually forming systems to define rights and obligations relating to information. These efforts are currently focusing primarily on such concepts as privacy rights and the right to know. (Unfortunately Japan has lagged significantly behind in this area.)
There is also considerable pressure, particularly in the United States, for the incorporation of certain aspects of information rights, notably the concepts that I have referred to as information-title rights and information-priority rights, into the context of property rights, which fall within the scope of the wealth game, by treating them as "intellectual property rights."
However, it is grossly inappropriate to treat information-title and information-priority rights as another type of property rights. As many people have already pointed out, the transfer of information and knowledge to others does not necessarily result in the loss of that information and knowledge. There are certain types of information that could be lost in this way, such as material that is only recorded in document form and has not been totally memorized by anyone. However, the technological breakthroughs of the information revolution mean that it is now extremely easy to copy such information and supply copies to other people. Furthermore, since information does not need to take a specific physical form or occupy a particular space, we cannot readily check whether it has been moved or copied. Even if property rights are established over information, it is practically impossible to prevent infringements or ascertain whether infringements have occurred. An even more decisive problem is the fact that the economic value of information tends to depend on the range of actors who will share it. The price that I ask when I share information with you may differ according to whether or not we allow third parties to share that information. This means that if I sell information to you at a price determined on the understanding that we will not allow third parties to share it, the price of the information will change if you or I subsequently break this agreement. Once information has been sold as a commodity, however, it is practically impossible to revise its price once transaction takes place.
When these factors are taken into account, it is far more advantageous to share information and knowledge through the reciprocal relationships of networks than to distribute them through trading in the marketplace. In reciprocal relationships, the induction effect is determined by each partner's estimation of the extent to which they have given or received value. Unlike market transactions, no problems arise even if the giver and receiver place a different value on the information, or if the value fluctuates as the information changes over time. If after supplying information to you on the understanding that you would not share it with a third party I subsequently discover that you have broken that promise, all I need to do is to increase, in my mind, your debt to me from that point in time. Similarly, you too might feel psychological and social pressure to increase, in your mind, the extent of your obligation to me. The flexibility that results from the reciprocity of networks makes networks more suitable than markets as a social system for the distribution of information and knowledge.
Once these three prerequisites have been satisfied, the wisdom game will begin in earnest. The wisdom game will differ from the wealth game in a number of respects. In the wealth game, entrepreneurs produce individual and specific goods in factories and sell them as commodities. By selling their goods successfully, entrepreneurs demonstrate the social usefulness of their products and gain rewards in the form of wealth, thereby acquiring the symbolic and general power to trade. In this sense, the market is also an arena in which the social usefulness of entrepreneurs' activities is evaluated.
In contrast, the intelpreneurs who participate in the wisdom game produce individual and specific information in offices and seek to share it with others as sharables. By successfully sharing their information, they demonstrate the value of the individual information that they have supplied in terms of the social values of truth, goodness and beauty. Their reward is wisdom, which is the symbolic and general ability to persuade or exert intellectual influence. In other words, many people will be prepared to heed the words of an intelpreneur who has gained a social reputation as a person of wisdom.
In the case of the wealth game, if we disregard purchases by other entrepreneurs, the actors who buy commodities supplied by entrepreneurs through the market are "households." While entrepreneurs seek to accumulate wealth by selling "commodities," households seek to maximize utility by buying and consuming those commodities. I anticipate that the wisdom game will be based on the sharing of "sharables" supplied by intelpreneurs to network-type organizations, particularly network-type communities.
I would suggest the word "connectives" to describe these communities or virtual communities that are the counterpart of the household in the wisdom game. The goal of connectives and their members in acquiring information and knowledge through the intelplace would not be to expand their wisdom, and hence their intellectual influence, as is the case with intelpreneurs, but rather to use the information and knowledge to make their lives more meaningful. I am tempted to predict that in the third phase of modernization the connectives will replace the traditional community and family as the most basic social group.
It is important to recognize that, in the wisdom game, there is no need for the information and knowledge supplied in the intelplace for social evaluation to be treated as commodities that are subject to property rights, or even as the objects of reciprocal social exchange. Since it is desirable for sharables supplied in the intelplace to gain social value by being shared by as many people as possible, sharables should in principle be supplied at no cost or without charge, or even with some form of incentive attached. For this reason, it is totally inappropriate to think of the rules that govern the sharing of sharables as being similar to the rules that govern the sale of commodities.
In this sense, an excessive preoccupation with the concept of "intellectual property rights" is dangerous for two reasons. First, information and knowledge are basically unsuitable for distribution as commodities that can be treated as objects of property rights. Thus, even if our approach is based on the paradigm of the industrial society, we need to develop special mechanisms that differ from those used with other commodities. Second, intellectual property rights conflict with and contradict information rights in various ways. For this reason, the spread of the wisdom game will require efforts to establish and limit information rights systematically as something distinct from intellectual property rights and as a concept based on the paradigms of the information society.
The attitudes of those who regard the sharing of sharables as a means of wealth accumulation and who seek to accumulate intellectual property rights and sell them for the highest possible price are reminiscent of the philosophy of mercantilism, whereby the trading of commodities was seen as a means of enhancing national prestige and as something that should be under the control of the state. Perhaps philosophies and policies that place an unbalanced emphasis on intellectual property rights and balance of pecuniary payments can be described as "intellectual mercantilism."
The wisdom game's equivalent of the "world marketplace" of the wealth game will be the "global intelplace," which will function as an arena for the dissemination and evaluation of sharables as well as acquisition of intellectual influence, that is, wisdom. Obviously this global intelplace has yet to come into being as an established system, or even as a de facto structure. As I stated earlier, however, the Internet is already achieving explosive growth as the infrastructure for the global intelplace of the future. And history shows that social systems that could be described as "local intelplaces," which are equivalent to the "local marketplaces" of the wealth game, have existed for a very long time. One such example is the academic conference, where various schools of thought put forward theories for evaluation. The same is true of theaters, sports arenas, exhibition halls, newspapers and magazines.
These were all local inteplaces in which drama troupes, actors, sports teams, artists and artistic schools, writers and critics could present their performances and works for evaluation by the people. As the Internet's coverage expands and its circuits become capable of carrying large volumes of data at enormous speeds, people will begin to use it to supply advanced applications based on sophisticated technology, including multimedia, hypermedia and virtual reality. At this stage, the Internet will begin to take on the specific characteristics of a global intelplace. As a matter of fact, newsgroups on the USENET may very well be seen as a burgeoning form of such an intelplace.
Some critics may respond to this prediction by saying that before sharables are disseminated in the way that I have described, it is inevitable that they will first be traded as commodities. Of course, I do not oppose the commercialization of knowledge and information, and I am not saying that all sharables should be distributed without charge as "freeware." If the wealth game survives into the 2lst century, then the commercialization of information is inevitable to some extent. Intelpreneurs cannot live on air and must make a living by engaging in some form of economic activity. It is vital both to the spread of the wisdom game, and to the survival of its players, that participation in the game results in the fulfillment of economic necessity as a by-product. In fact, there will probably be enterprise-intelprise collaboration, at least during the initial stages of development of the wisdom game, and in this sense too the commercialization of information and knowledge is probably inevitable.
During the industrialization period, the nation states that participated in the prestige game enabled enterprises to devote themselves to the wealth game by providing various forms of support. In the same way, we can expect the enterprises that now participate in the wealth game to provide the economic support that will enable intelprises to devote themselves to the wisdom game during the informatization phase of the future. Naturally enterprises should be able to expect something in return from intelprises, just as the state has expected enterprises to pay for the provision of security through the payment of taxes and the reliable supply of large quantities of high-quality weapons. As part of this repayment, it is possible that intelprises will provide enterprises with information and knowledge that can be commercialized and sold either directly or indirectly. The growth of enterprise-intelprise collaboration should and probably will be accompanied by the gradual decline of the tendency to regard the state as the most obvious patron of scientific, artistic and sporting activities, and to expect it to operate, protect or subsidize such activities. The direction the Olympic game is heading today is, for better or worse, a typical example.
(Of course, this does not mean that there will be absolutely no role for the state, as an entity that is allowed to exercise threats and coercion, either in the preparation of an environment for the spread of wisdom game or in the provision of assistance to ensure a smooth transition to the wisdom game. The state or other supra-national centers of coercive power will be able to play active roles in the spread of the wisdom game in the same way as the state contributed for the spread and maintenance of the wealth game. In particular, the most important initial roles for organizations with the power to threaten and coerce will probably consist of the abolition or relaxation of outmoded regulations that hinder the spread of the wisdom game. Such power centers will promulgate and implement rules relating to the establishment and limitation of information rights and to the sharing and dissemination of information and knowledge. They will also make timely provision of accurate and useful information about those rules. Enterprises may be able to take over these roles from the state to a significant extent. However, I do not believe that there will be absolutely no role for authority mechanisms.)
Clearly it would be overly optimistic to assume that there will be no undesirable elements in the wisdom game and that participants will be able to establish an order simply by agreeing among themselves to ostracize or ridicule those who break the rules. Our past experience with computer networks shows that there are people who maliciously release viruses or deliberately try to spread unfounded criticism, insults or rumors. Sexual and other forms of harassment on the network are not uncommon, either. There is no justification for the assumption that the wisdom game can be played fairly and equitably without any rules or rule enforcement mechanism. Even if all participants in the game are virtuous, there is no guarantee that outsiders will not seek to disrupt the game or use it for their own purposes. In this sense, while the format of the rules may be based on mutual persuasion and agreement among participants, there will probably always be a need for an organization with coercive power that can take responsibility for the establishment of authoritative rules and for the maintenance of the order that evolves under those rules.
(However, it is unlikely that individual sovereign nation states will continue to function as the power centers that maintain the order of social games, including the wealth game and the wisdom game, in the third phase of modernization. Instead, an increasing portion of these roles will probably be taken over by a higher form of complex actors that transcend existing sovereign states. I am convinced that the wisdom game will be more global in nature than the wealth game. In this context, the major advanced nations will need to promote the formation of supra-national actors that can actively transcend the limitations of sovereign states and take over not only global security and environmental management, but also the establishment and implementation of rules for the new social game. )
Even if these prerequisites are fulfilled to some extent, we may find that the path to wide social acceptance is not an easy one for people with new attitudes, or for the new social games in which they are players. This was also the case during the early stages of the wealth game. The people who contributed to the technological breakthroughs of the industrial revolution and helped to establish the rules for the wealth game were described as "neither learned, nor ingenious, nor respectable," but as people whose hearts were "strangely warmed" who "set great movements in motion and change the whole temper of an age." ...14
These descriptions can also be applied to the early players of the wisdom game, including computer hackers, the leaders of new sciences, and the critics who develop and propose new social paradigms. People who are active on the leading edge of informatization may not always be treated properly under existing paradigms and social orders. However, I sincerely hope that their "strangely warmed" hearts will provide the trigger for a major movement that leads to a change in society's paradigms.
1 Based on the statement by Shigemi Kono, Director-General of the Institute of Population Problems, Ministry of Health and Welfare, at the GISPRI Symposium,1992: World-Wide Population Explosion and Japan.
2 Garett Hardin, "Living on a Lifeboat," Bioscience 24:10 (October 1974).
3 John S. Quarterman, "The Global Matrix of Minds," in Linda Harasim, ed., Globalizing Networks: Computers and International Communication, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, (forthcoming)
4 "SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: The Fruitful, tangled trees of knowledge," The Economist, June 20, 1992, pp. 91~94.
5 The New York Times Weekly Review, March 1 st, 1992.
6 ibid.
7 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: International Creative Management, 1992.
8 For similar classifications, see, Kenneth E. Boulding, Beyond Economics: Essays on Society, Religion, and Ethics, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1968, and John Kenneth Galbraith, The Anatomy of Power, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983.
9 Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine, London: Hutchinson, 1967.
10 George C. Lodge, The New American Ideology: How the Ideological Basis of Legitimate Authority in America Is Being Radically Transformed--the Profound Implications for Our Society in General and the Great Corporations in Particular, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.
11 Brian Kahin, ed., Building Information Infrastructure: Issues in the Development for the National Research and Education Network, McGraw-Hill, 1992.
12 Tom Forester, High-Tech Society, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
13 Mitchell D. Kapor and Daniel D. Weitzner, "Social and Industrial Policy for a Public Network: Lessons of INTERNET," in Linda Harasim, ed., Globalizing Networks: Computers and International Communication, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, (forthcoming).
14 Kenneth E. Boulding, op. cit. 15