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"THE FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES: THE GROWING CONFLICT OVER CREATIVITY, ENTERPRISE AND PROGRESS" |
BY VIRGINIA POSTREL |
FREE PRESS, 265 PAGES BY ETELKA LEHOCZKY | Find politics pointless? That's only natural. With a Rabelaisian burlesque spellbinding Washington's two political parties and nonplusing the rest of the nation, the time is ripe for someone to reframe the basic issues. And so along comes "The Future and Its Enemies," a clarion call for radical political and economic change. Well, radical in theory, anyway. Author Virginia Postrel's book is both a siren's song and an inspirational text, and in the style of such things she generally refrains from messy specifics. That's fine, really, because her target audience -- the brilliant, rebellious innovators of the tech industries -- is by and large perfectly satisfied to keep its head firmly in the clouds. Postrel's got the ideal message for them: that innovation would be spurred, naysayers foiled and progress hastened if we could just convince the fuddy-duddies to get out of the way. She calls this philosophy "dynamism," and she invests it with boundless possibilities. It's no surprise that Postrel should stress the transformative power of a few good ideas. As the editor of Reason, a libertarian magazine, she's accountable to a group that nurtures deep suspicion for any political action more coercive than a nice, rousing speech or, at the very outside, a majority vote. Of course, it's this penchant for angry but ultimately fruitless fulmination that has kept libertarians on the fringes of political discourse in America, influencing but never really determining the direction of public policy. Postrel aims to change all that by attracting some vital new blood to the cause. With "The Future and Its Enemies," she reaches out to a natural, but as yet rather hands-off, libertarian constituency: high-tech pioneers. Her lures are manifold. They include breathless paeans to any and all innovation, the requisite fond words for the miracle of the Internet and a light, pithy writing style that zooms past thorny contradictions to deliver quick, comfortable conclusions. But such gimmicks are by no means the whole story. Unlike many similar screeds, Postrel's is vibrant with genuinely remarkable new ideas. Her central thesis is solidly common-sensical. To replace the old liberals-vs.-conservatives dichotomy, she proposes a division between "dynamists" and "stasists." Dynamists, she explains, are those who embrace change. They fearlessly endure and even cherish uncertainty, adjusting to unexpected circumstances with speed and panache. Venture capitalists, biotechnologists, the execs at Starbucks and beach volleyball enthusiasts all fit into this category. Stasists, on the other hand, quail at the very notion of anything new. They try to organize developments into preexisting structures and keep them there -- even if it impedes progress and kills innovation. Would-be regulators of the Internet, opponents of genetic engineering and Hillary Rodham Clinton are all stasists. They're the titular enemies of the future. N E X T_ P A G E .|. Postrel's assiduous courtship of the geek set |
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Virginia Postrel's "dynamism" manifesto reaches out to geeks.