For use: Wednesday, July 4, 2001

 Future Shoes    
"Go Fourth"

by Michael Finley
(c) 2001 by Michael Finley

It's already 4 PM July 3, pretty late to start a Fourth of July column. But since the Fourth is my birthday, and therefore not subject to the usual rules, I will proceed.

The most relevant item in the news is Slobedan Milosevic entering no plea at The Hague Tribunal yesterday. It was typical Milosevic -- defiant and dismissive, playing not to the world opinion but to the only opinion that matters to him, that of his fellow Serbs.

When Milosevic arrived on the scene in 1987 he was something new in Yugoslavian politics, something like a Chicago politician, clever at appealing to the interests and passions of different groups, and build a winning coalition. These skills were not necessary under Communist rule. It is important to remember that the genocidal wars against Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo were conducted with the consent of Serbian voters.

He was something new then, and he is something new and very rare now: a dictator who controlled the media of his country, and yet was overthrown because people found out about him anyway. How did they find out? Through all the media Milosevic was unable to control -- the testimony of outsiders, the flow of information into and out of Yugoslavia, broadcast and print media that flew below Milosevic's radar, and most importantly, the Internet.

In Transcompetition, Harvey Robbins and I argued that information age was revolutionizing the way people learn about the world around them. First, it decentralized the information base, sidestepping broadcast centers that can be easily controlled. Second, by being interactive it invited feedback and corroboration. An instance of injustice in a pre-Internet world has a terrible burden of proof before it can be believed. In an Internet-driven world, information arrives from a thousand angles at once. Hoaxes and cover-ups can be perpetrated, but it is an uphill proposition requiring tremendous discipline.

When Chinese students took to the streets in 1989, information flowed past censors primarily by fax machine. It was a striking instance of technology empowering citizen action. That Chinese authorities crushed the uprising with tanks may say more about the feebleness of fax technology than about their power.

With Milosevic in jail and facing certain conviction for war crimes, the light is truly shining on China. The world's largest nation is a prison in theory, but a very porous one. When citizens summon the courage to take to the streets again, it won’t be armed with a papier-mache Statue of Liberty and a battery of fax machines. It will be in a world of wireless communications in which the whole world will truly be watching.

Us looking on, and voicing what we see, and not shutting up until action is taken, may not seem like much against tanks and artillery shells, and it carries no guarantee of success. But it remains revolutionary, and it is a revolution we can all take part in.

And the granddaddy of it all is our Fourth of July.

  Copyright (c) 2001 by Michael Finley

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