Intellectual Property Law

Rhythm and memory in policy

By Susan Crawford

I just started reading Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez (hat tip:  Gordon Cook and his excellent listserv).  It’s  one of those magisterial treatments of a big subject - here, patterns of social and political transformations triggered by technological change.

Just as we read novels to see ourselves (or some secret aspect of ourselves) in the characters described, it’s worthwhile to try to figure out just where in Ms. Perez’s long sweeping waves of change we currently are swimming.  She says the cycle is made up of overlapping periods of transformation in different parts of society - and that institutional/political change happens with a different rhythm than technological change, which gives rise to (metaphorical) social earthquakes of various kinds.  Roughly, the idea is that a cluster of new dynamic technologies is developed, which generates explosive growth and structural change.  (Eg, the information/computer age begins with the manufacture of the first chip.)  This growth leads to great divides and bubbles of various kinds, and a paradigm shift in how institutions are structured to incorporate the new form of “common sense” that the technological change has engendered.  So - technologic change leading to organizational change.  This all takes a couple of decades, and she suggests that we’ve been through waves of this kind every half-century or so for a while.

A key point of Perez’s, I take it, is that there’s a period of mismatch between techno change and institutional change, and that it often takes a bubble-leading-to-recession phase to force the slower pace of institutional change forward.   Once things are better aligned, a “golden age”of prosperity is possible.

So I’m going to guess that we’re in the “recession” phase, a crisis phase, of the information age.  Even though there’s money sloshing around ($19 billion from VZ and AT&T to make sure they control newly-available spectrum!), we’re in a big downturn right now.

Perez suggests that recession may make old-industry giants willing to accept new rules - so, in the highspeed internet access market, the giants may become comfortable with the cushy margins involved in being a commodity provider, in a trade-off for an expanding user base.  And it’s pretty clear that the old organizational models aren’t working particularly well for ensuring that all Americans, not just these incumbents, share in the information age advances.  Because antitrust authorities will defer to the FCC, and the FCC will differ (generally) to these companies, no one is ensuring that information continues to flow freely.  What’s missing, using Perez’s terms now, is “a systematic articulation of a new regulatory framework and of the appropriate institutions that can steer and facilitate the new economy.”

We don’t have a wise Judge Greene, and we don’t have a competition case that can be put in front of him (at the moment), but we can start articulating.

Perez’s work is also helpful in its focus on patterns over time.  There have been a host of these tech changes, and she sees commonality in their overall social impact:  the industrial revolution, the age of steam and railways, the age of steel, electricity, and heavy engineering, the age of oil, the car, and mass production, and now our own age:  the age of information and telecommunications.  It’s important to remember where we’ve been over time; our age is arguably not unique.

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on March 26, 2008 (boomark / email).