This administration plans to take over the network that our lives depend on. They say, “Sure, we’ll let private enterprise build it. But in exchange for our generously granting construction permits, we want to control it.” It’s called Industrial Policy, and it doesn’t work. This policy is going to be shoved down our throats – unless we stop it. That’s right, we’re the ones who have to stop it.
Predictor: Stahlman, Mark
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Mark Stahlman, president of the New York-based research and financial services firm New Media Associates, writes: ”Hothouse cybersalons are busy incubating Information Age Manifestos, Magna Cartas, and Ultimatums. Congress is being congratulated for mandating sweeping FCC regulations in areas they don’t understand – like multimedia networks. And a traveling band of bureaucrats is holding town meetings to drum up support for the War on Info-Poverty and to collect ideas on how to soak us all to pay for desperately needed Info-Stamps. It is as Terence McKenna said: ‘The 1990s are just like the 1960s – only turned upside down.’ Now the hippies are the fat cats with fat bank accounts and even fatter appetites for talk-show fame. Just as flower-child Hillary wants to ‘fix’ health care by running it from the basement of the White House, the Teflon Vice President, Al Gore, along with his Deadhead staff, wants to install his digital command center in the attic. Wait until he gets every school kid to join his Save-the-Environment-Youth-Corps and sends them out to take water samples to post on the Internet. (And you thought D.A.R.E. was frightening. ) The Merry Pranksters go to Washington, indeed … Replacing Big Steel with Big Silicon doesn’t change anything – it’s still the same political system … In our zeal to make our technologies and our digital culture mainstream, we’ve fallen into a trap – a very old trap. We’ve become co-opted. We’ve forgotten why we mistrusted government in the first place. We’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that we’ve won and that the “good guys” are fondling the levers of power now. We’ve become cyberdupes. This administration plans to take over the network that our lives depend on. They say, ‘Sure, we’ll let private enterprise build it. But in exchange for our generously granting construction permits, we want to control it.’ It’s called Industrial Policy, and it doesn’t work. This policy is going to be shoved down our throats – unless we stop it. That’s right, we’re the ones who have to stop it.”
Biography:Mark Stahlman was the president of the New York-based research and financial services firm New Media Associates in the 1990s. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Role of Govt./Industry
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Just Say No – To Cybercrats and Digital Control Freaks
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/stahlman.if_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney