The Wind of Change

Perestroika all around

Twenty years ago today, the Berlin wall finally fell, thus uniting two Germanies which, in my childhood I had been taught were East Germany and West Germany - an aberration of dividing a country of same people into two distinct countries finally vanishing.

Perhaps of the many stories out there on the Internet, of events leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall, is one of Wolfgang Kleinwächter, who was one of the people in St. Nicolaï Church in Leipzig, a location widely believed to be the origin of the protests that re-shaped politics in Europe.

His article can be found on: http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/31/31019/1.html

and if you don't read German, a Google English translation into is found here.

Of course, this change was not possible without the help of visionaries like Mikhaïl Gorbachev who had recognised and decided to follow the policies of "Perestroïka- Перестройка" and "Glasnost - Гласность", meaning "restructuring" and "transparency", as defined a few years earlier by intellectuals like Alexander Yakovlev.
But change was seen my many as being a scary thing - because it announced a period of unrest and an uncertain future. Indeed, history showed us that such fears were warranted in the short term, but in the longer term, we can venture to say that the end of the iron curtain was better for everyone.

Of course, an iron curtain is still present in many countries around the world. A week ago I made a point to use the last day of my trip to Seoul, to visit the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between South and North Korea.

The North is still under the control of one of the most oppressive communist regimes - very much like the kind of regime that was in place in East Germany. Seeing the DMZ with its rows of barbed wires and an estimated 1 million land mines in the no-mans-land separating the two sides, I could not help but feel sorry for those people only two kilometers ahead of us who had never been allowed out of their country and were definitely living in another age. Change, it seemed was still far, far away.
In the hope that another 9 November 1989 happens soon, South Korea has already built a huge infrastructure at Dorasan, just across the border, ready to receive thousands of commuters, but for the time being, the place looks like a ghost town. I felt really humbled to be able to walk the earth of one of the potentially most technically advanced countries in the world (ICANN Seoul with native IPv6!), and being within eyesight of a country stuck in 1953, one which proudly displays its big accomplishment of "The tallest flagpole in the world" in Kijong-dong, and which I saw in the distance with my very own eyes, towering at 160m.

The air in the DMZ stood still, but how much did I wish for a "Wind of Change"?

It is precisely a Wind of Change which is currently blowing over the rest of the world, and the Internet is right in the middle of it.

Three strikes and you're out

Take illegal downloading of multimedia content, for example. The blame is put on Internet downloading when downloading is only a small part of the puzzle, a significant part of pirated music and movies being transfered from person to person on USB keys. The young generations are quite blatant about that.
As I have mentioned publicly at EURODIG, Copyright died the day we moved from analogue to digital. Analogue reproduction introduced a natural boundary thanks to loss of quality at every generation of copy. Digital made it all eternally and recursively duplicable. Radically new business models are required, and if it means less profit and overall, music producers and artists will earn less money, then so be it. The industry is changing and "Major" music and film production may have gone through its golden years. (Graphic source: RIAA)
Note that "alternative business models" are proposed as well. The trouble is that any downloading of music will pinpoint the "bad" music which was traditionally mingled with the "good" music. i.e. an album containing 9 tracks had 4 good tracks and 5 tracks which weren't really good (they were pretty awful actually). So now that you can mix and match yourself, you download the good tracks and leave the bad ones, which adds-up to less profit for the record company. Independent music labels can now cover the whole globe, and Web sites like MySpace have also taken a huge chunk of business from Major music companies. Today's youth enjoys downloading music from unknown artists - not only the big promotion stuff. All of these factors erode the profit for the Majors. They value-add has decreased dramatically in the music business ecosystem. That's what I call a Wind of Change.

Prior to the internal combustion engine, an industry of horses, blacksmiths, horse-drawn carriages and roadside inns and barns existed. It was perhaps one of the most significant industries pre-dating the industrial revolution. It disappeared within 30 years of the first self-propelled vehicle roaming the roads.

To see which jobs have disappeared over time, I suggest a look at:
http://flare.prefuse.org/apps/job_voyager

The Internet Catalyst

At ICANN Seoul, a group of us "old-timers" from all backgrounds, scientists, civil society activists, social researchers, lawyers, engineers and government people went out to have a beer or two together and started asking ourselves: if the Internet was and still is a catalyst for change, have we created a monster? Yes, the Internet has destroyed some jobs by overturning some industries, but it has also created different types of jobs, and yes it has sped business up and the Internet tidal wave is likely to change every aspect of our society yet even further.

We might just be witnessing the beginning of this change. One technical aspect is the introduction of IPv6, which will make every electrical and electronic device a directly addressable device. What changes are we likely to see thanks to this new barrier being torn down? What new challenges are we likely to face? What opportunities for new activity will arise out of this technical revolution? Will the Internet of things increase the rate at which the world is changing?

Since change is something which most of us humans inherently dislike, perhaps is there a limit to the rate of change that we can accept or adapt to. Is there a physiological limit to change, one where a human mind can just about make sense of things, before qualifying change as complete chaos?

The current worldwide recession has affected countries around the world to different extents. The speed at which the world went into recession startled many people, starting with bankers caught off guard by a very abrupt financial crisis. Of course, the finance world had been sped up thanks to the "Big Bang" of 1986, when trading went on-line. The spread of the Internet has sped things up even more. News travel faster than ever before thanks to social networks. Markets change and technology evolves so quickly that it is often obsolete by the time it comes in production. So my question is, how much faster can the world go? And could part of the current paradigm shift, the recession and unemployment being only but a symptom, be in fact a cranking up in gear to reach the next "level" in the rate of change?

Let me say this again: the Internet is a catalyst for change, and the rate of change is increasing. Perhaps the biggest problem facing the music industry, and other industries as a whole is that the current rate of change has increased beyond the maximum rate of change that the industry can reach. This results in a condition by which a corporation rapidly becomes obsolete.

Something economists should ponder about quickly.

Adapt like a Starfish

In the book that he co-wrote with Ori Brafman, Rod Beckström describes the ability of "Starfish" to adapt to change a lot faster than "Spiders". Starfish are likened to distributed bottom-up processes with no centralized power, whilst the Spider architecture is a conventional top-down hierarchy. Do Spiders need to convert to Starfish to survive, how much time is required for Spiders to convert to Starfish, and will they succeed in time?

Last but not least, we are seeing a new type of Governance arise through consensus. Currently used only in Internet circles, this "experiment" is proving itself to be quite robust and sustainable, and to embrace change rather well. It is a Starfish.

If industries are having trouble keeping up with the rate of change, is there any possibility that at some point, governments will have difficulty keeping up as well? In this case, what can government do to be ready and embrace our changing world in the smoothest of ways when it will be time to do so?

Many challenges lie ahead of us, but together as a multi-stakeholder society, we have more than an ample capacity in collective wisdom and brainpower and skills to succeed in gearing up to the next level of change and to rise up to success.