This piece was originally written in 1995 for the UK edition of Wired as an indignant response to a gung-ho techno-libertarian op-ed piece in their first issue’s ‘Idees Forts’ section. The article in question insisted that the true meaning of the then-new digital culture was that “we are all hunter-gatherers now”, and that government should “get the hell out of our way” as we surged ever onwards to a brightly entrepreneurial digital-Darwinist non-dependent future. I suggested to Wired’s executive editor that this was an essentially American notion which simply wouldn’t play in Europe, and that, furthermore, the vast historical, social and cultural differences between European and American cultures meant that ideas were a lot harder to move between continents than packets of data.
He commissioned this piece; I wrote it; he didn’t print it; and then UK Wired bombed out, which — as far as I’m concerned — demonstrates that my diagnosis was correct even if the piece was what a designer friend of mine refers to as ‘wubbish’.
For your amusement, here it is – just as it was in 1995.
Information may — as a contemporary truism puts it — want to be free, but ideas want to travel. What’s more, they generally also want to acquire some real estate when they arrive at their destinations. Cultures are the soil in which ideas either thrive and spread; or else fall on stony ground, fail to take root and, effectively, die. An idea can travel anywhere and everywhere in the amount of time it takes to upload, fax or broadcast it, but a culture needs human carriers if it is to extend its sphere of influence beyond its home turf. Without such carriers, cultures stay where they are, but not necessarily as they are: changing and mutating as they either adapt to the ideas they choose to nurture, or starve out the local ideas they choose to destroy.
New ideas can change the cultures in which they arrive, but so equally can cultures modify such ideas to suit their own particular needs and priorities. The remorselessly accelerating pace of technological change has spray-seeded a variety of cultural terrains, both fertile and infertile, with a staggering variety of tools and toys, memes and models, notions and nonsenses. What they all have in common is none of them will remain quite the way they were when they arrived. And if they are not appropriate or in some way applicable to the existing situations in which they find themselves, they will fail to take permanent root.
Let us take, as an example, the humble baseball cap. In the USA, virtually everyone finds some occasion to wear them: young and old, rich and poor, black and white, rural and urban, male and female. This is not surprising, since Americans actually play baseball and take a serious interest in it. In Europe, virtually no-one plays baseball, but the caps are frequently seen, mostly on those of an age to enjoy rap and rock, and the bats — as opposed to the indigenous cricket bat — are only used in Britain during the commission of violent crimes. The European cap-wearer declares his or her nominal allegiance without even knowing whether, say, the L.A. Raiders or the Chicago Bears play baseball or American football.
Most people in Europe happily consume a substantial quantity of American stuff, from Nirvana to Schwarzennegger; from Fender Stratocasters and Apple Macintoshes to Roseanne and Star Trek. Some people are even drinking Budweiser, for Chrissakes, and I don’t mean the good stuff from the Czech Republic, either. America leads the world in things, and the popular cash vote, all over the world, is for American things. American ideas are a very different matter, though, and the notion that those can be universally exported as successfully as consumer products and communication tools have been is likely to prove more than somewhat problematical.
A few examples: most Europeans, even those who abhor smoking and smokers, consider the ownership and use of powerful handguns to be rather more dangerous than cigarette-smoking. Most Europeans, even those who support the reintroduction of the death penalty, would find the idea of celebrating executions to be utterly repulsive. And, most crucially, most Europeans may indeed be exasperated with their governments and highly resentful either of the tenor of said governments’ policies or of their inability to carry them out efficiently, but they would regard the notion of getting rid of governments entirely to be no more than infantile utopian prattle.
Page 1 Page 2
