The Idea Revolution
August 23rd, 2004 by Breck YunitsThis is my first blog post ever, so if it sucks, don’t be surprised. Anyway, my concept of blogging is probably different than most. I only like to write if I have something to say. Until I start a daily blog(which will probably happen the day after never), expect longer, boring, blogs from this guy. Don’t expect news links, expect new opinions. The point of my first blog is simple: I don’t lose sleep over drops in CD or book or DVD sales. If there’s no business in it anymore, that’s too bad, but I’m sure there’s a good reason.
The Idea Revolution is here, and it is here to stay. This short post argues that the computer, the internet, in a word, digital has sparked a revolution that will be the single most impactful event in human history. I have three main points. First, technological change happens extremely fast; faster, indeed, than some of us would like to admit. Second, digital expressions are in fact superior to their non-digital counterparts. Third, this Idea Revolution will cause a paradigm shift because, for the first time, ideas will reach everybody and everybody will reach for ideas.
There is too much talk today about “Book sales”, “CD Sales”, “DVD Sales”, “Record stores”, etc. In 1870, when steel had just become producible, America produced a paltry 30,500 tons of it. Meanwhile, America produced mountains of plain iron: over 1,000,000 tons annually. But within twenty years things had changed dramatically. Steel production had skyrocketed to 1,900,000 tons and less iron accounted for less than 1% of metal produced. A similar rapid technological replacement occured more recently. In 1980, vinyl records were still the dominant form of distributing music. But by 1990, there were kids who couldn’t tell you what an LP was; who couldn’t be bothered anyway because they were busy listening to their compact discs and walkmans. By 2000, some kids had forgotten what a Record Store was. The point is this: it is not radical, on the contrary, it is very rational, to predict that few paper books, compact discs, DVD’s, etc., will be produced by 2010. Deal with it. It’s not scary or magic. All you have to keep in mind is that the pace of technological change is amazing because it is driven by human beings, who are amazing. Any intelligent person solves hundreds of problems everyday, some minor and personal, some significant and societal. When you have a connected planet with hundreds-of-millions of intelligent people, you are going to have rapid technological change.
While most people are still under the delusion that ideas in digital form are somehow less valuable than ideas expressed on paper, disc, or other mediums—the opposite, more rational, belief is beginning to gain ground.
Expressions of ideas digitally via the computer and Internet are, in fact, superior to the same copies of those ideas on other mediums. Because of the technological constraints of the past, creators of ideas had to keep not two, but three things in mind: meaning, style, and then technological form. In other words, creators always had to consider how the actual physical form of the book or record affected their work. Back before the Digital Revolution, I could still produce a wonderful music composition but for the work’s sake, I had better make
sure it was about 74 minutes long, no more, no less. The Digital(including the Internet)Revolution has largely removed such artificial restrictions on creators imposed by physical media constraints. Take blogs for instance. Before the Digital Revolution, was there any way for such a massive amount of creators to publish shorter works to such a broad audience? Wikipedia is another example. Before the Digital Revolution, the constraints of physical media imposed severe hurdles to maintaining a true “Encyclopedia”. But the Digital Revolution has not just removed obstacles, not just created more freedoms, it has not just benefited creators. Consumers—viewers, listeners, readers, learners—also benefit a lot more from expressions in digital form than ancient physical
copies. Take ebooks for instance. Some people, of course, still find reading books on screens inferior due to poor screen quality and other factors(On a sidenote, we’ll mention that hardware can reasonably be expected to soon not only replicate the experience of reading a paperback, but surpass it). Regardless, even if there still remains value in printing books on paper, the extra value of having the same books in Digital Form still exists. You cannot instantly search a paper book for a specific word or quote. You cannot point to a word in a paper book and have an explanation or reference magically appear. You cannot mark up the paper book without marking it up forever. You cannot make the paper book instantly appear again if you forget it at home or lose it on the train. But maybe more importantly, you cannot escape in reading, the same physical constraints of the technological form that the author dealt with in writing. No idea is found only in one book. Likewise, you can learn every single idea in one book without every even reading a single word in that book. Books are, on the whole, cohesive arguments. But nevertheless, it is no act of sacrilege, nor of foolishness, to ignore the cohesiveness of a book and violate the physical constraints that it was written with. Quotes, excerpts, specific chapters, can be now—thanks to the Digital Age—pulled out of their physical chains, and used by readers in ways
never before possible. You could, for instance, learn economics by reading chapters of Adam Smith alongside chapters of Keynes. Don’t get me wrong, old medias will still have a place—just as plain iron still has a place and vinyl still has a place—but the digital, networked media is where 99%+ of our ideas and expressions will exist and be used. And I’m not talking at all about concerts or speeches or plays; simply about the non-live expressions of ideas. The technology of the Digital Age, has freed the non-live ideas and their expressions from the chains of the technology of the past. And because of it, ideas and expressions in Digital form are more valuable.
Finally, the reason why this Idea Revolution will have much greater consequences than other “Revolutions” in human history is because of what this revolution is about. Think about some other revolutions. For example, consider the Agricultural and the Industrial Revolutions. Both can be described as the introduction of new technologies that dramatically altered society. Both were sparked by ideas. This revolution, the Idea Revolution, is a new technology that is leading to a dramatic acceleration of the dissemination and creation of the very thing that causes most significant revolutions and changes—ideas! Furthermore, ideas, it can be argued, are really all that separates man from beast; society from anarchy; the happy from the unhappy. Hence, not only will more significant changes be sparked by the increased abundance of ideas, and not only will society be much improved, but the Idea Revolution will be most remarkable because of this: for the first time in human history, the pursuit of the still unknown ideal of happiness will be available to all humans.
Again: (1) expect the Internet to almost completely replace books, CDs, DVDs, etc., in the distribution of expressions & their ideas by 2010; (2) get over–if you haven’t already–the belief that digital copies of expressions are inferior to their non-digital counterparts; (3) expect this “Idea Revolution” to have profound consequences. Of course, I’ve said nothing about the laws. How will Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks, affect this Idea Revolution? That is the question that’s not so simple.
Sources included Wikipedia and Ernest Mandel’s “Marxist Economic Theory/Volume II/ Translated by Brian Pearce/1968”.
