Last week we talked about the inherent weaknesses of Enlightenment 2.0 optimism. Malcom Gladwell makes this point in his review of Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price”. Gladwell was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” in 2005. Here’s a snippet of his response to Anderson’s leap from free distribution of information to total global Shalom.
This is the kind of error that technological utopians make. They assume that their particular scientific revolution will wipe away all traces of its predecessors—that if you change the fuel you change the whole system. Strauss went on to forecast “an age of peace,” jumping from atoms to human hearts. “As the world of chips and glass fibers and wireless waves goes, so goes the rest of the world,” Kevin Kelly, another Wired visionary, proclaimed at the start of his 1998 digital manifesto, “New Rules for the New Economy,” offering up the same non sequitur. And now comes Anderson. “The more products are made of ideas, rather than stuff, the faster they can get cheap,” he writes, and we know what’s coming next: “However, this is not limited to digital products.”
Full article here.
