The Balance of Commerce of Ideas (a fundamental article by Nikolos Negroponte on the digital economy for 1995, part 4)

An article that “started” the digital economy.


Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 .

Message: 22
Date: 4.1.95
From: <nicholas@media.mit.edu>
To: <lr@wired.com>
Topic: The Balance of Trade of Ideas
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On December 19, 1990, on the front page of the New York Times, an article appeared “The MIT Deal with Japan Triggers Fear of Competitors,” in which Media Lab was accused of selling to the Japanese. This news broke out in connection with a 1986 donation from a Japanese industrialist who, after five years, wanted to link his alma mater to the fundamentals of basic research in new media.

Believe me, you don’t want to be on the New York Times homepage ever. I did not understand how much the appearance on the front page becomes news in itself, as well as the soil for derivative stories. Newsday wrote an editorial based on this story in less than a week, called “Goodbye High Technology,” without checking for any details.

1990 was the peak of US scientific nationalism. American competitiveness collapsed, the deficit grew, and we were no longer number one in everything. Therefore, for the sake of all that is holy, Nicholas, I beg you, in the editorial articles do not tell the world how to make software, especially multimedia, something in which the United States became pioneers and dominated. It does not work this way, especially in an era when computing is no longer limited to large institutions and countries that can afford it. What really annoyed me was the idea that ideas should be viewed as car parts, without any understanding of where they came from or how they evolve.

Ironically, this particular case of seemingly unpatriotic behavior is associated with the field of consumer electronics, where the hardware has long been abandoned by the American industry. Zenith, one of the most talking critics of the time, does not produce televisions even in the United States, and Sony manufactures products in San Diego and Pittsburgh, which is sold both domestically and exported all over the world. Strange isn't it?

Damned if you do, damned if you do not

When I asked the question: “Isn't it better to create jobs (for example, Sony), than to own offshore factories (for example, Zenith)?” Some of my most distinguished colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology replied that ownership is power, and, in In the end, the Japanese will support all the “good” jobs in Japan and leave only jobs for unskilled workers in the US. I thought a lot about this logic. Shortly thereafter, the NEC corporation was criticized by the American press for setting up a fundamental research laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, where 100 people (95 percent of whom are US citizens) are engaged in basic science - “good” jobs.

But now this is also bad, maybe even worse, because Japan will run away with our creative abilities, having received both a goose and golden eggs (sitting on both chairs). This is stupid! New ideas come from differences. They come from different views and comparisons of various theories. Incrementalism is the worst enemy of innovation. New concepts and big steps forward, in a very real sense (literally), come from the suburbs, from a mixture of people, ideas, backgrounds, and cultures that usually do not mix. For this reason, the global landscape is the most fruitful ground for new ideas.

Global cottage research

In the recent past, in order to have the right to be called global, it was necessary to be big. This applies to countries, companies and, in a sense, people. Large countries cared for smaller countries, huge corporations were transnational corporations, and rich were international. Today, this paradigm is changing, and this change will have a huge impact on world trade in ideas. In the world of bits, you can be small and global at the same time. In the early days of computing, only a few institutions had tools for reflection, for example, linear accelerators. Many of the players were indebted to those who could afford the luxury of science. They took over the basic research provided by those who had the equipment for it.

Today, a $ 2000 MHz Pentium PC with a cost of $ 2000 has more power than a Massachusetts Institute of Technology central computer when I was a student. In addition, quite a lot of peripheral devices are produced at consumer prices; everyone can play in the multimedia arena and in a human-machine interaction system. This means that individuals or researchers from developing countries can now make a direct contribution to the pool of ideas of the world. Now your size does not matter. For these reasons, we must trade ideas more than ever before, and not prohibit them.

Reciprocity in the network

The network makes it impossible to implement scientific isolationism, even if governments want such a policy. We have no choice but to exercise free trade in ideas. I once became angry with people who said that American tax dollars spent on basic research should go to American companies, and I became angry when racism lifted its ugly head (it began to progress). It was normal to do business with RCA (100 percent owned by the French government), but it’s not normal to work with many Japanese companies that know much more about consumer electronics than we do.

Now I see the problem differently. The network has forced us to conduct such an open exchange, with or without government sanctions, and we bear the burden of responsibility for other governments, especially in developing countries, for changing their attitudes. For example, new industrialized countries can no longer pretend that they are too poor to reciprocate with fundamental, bold and new ideas.

Before the network existed, scientists shared their knowledge through scientific journals, which were often published within a year after they were submitted. Now that ideas are shared almost instantly online, it is even more important that third world countries are not debtors to ideas - they must contribute to the scientific pool of human knowledge. It is too easy to free yourself from the post of creditor of an idea, because you lack industrial development. I heard that many people outside the US tell me that they are too small, too young, or too poor to do “real” and long-term research.

Instead, as I was told, a developing nation can extract ideas from rich countries from the stock. Garbage. In the digital world there should be no debtor states.

To think that you have nothing to offer means to abandon the coming idea of ​​economics.

In the new balance of trading ideas, very small players can contribute very big ideas.

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