Position paper
London, 01 January 2004
Starting point of many of the researches Vision launched, is that we are currently witnessing a revolution. The revolutionary nature of the phase we are living in is the product of two different factors: the magnitude of the opportunities recent development in Information and Communication Technologies provide in terms of improvement of efficiency of the process though which publicly relevant goods get manufactured and delivered; the dimension of the organizational and institutional changes which are necessaty to make the potential impact of ICT to be realized.
But if the “revolution” has to happen and the progress (and risks) associated to it have to materialize, one very central question is: where can we find the political leadership which is necessary to drive the above oragnizational and istitutional changes and to overcome the huge resistance from incumbents that any revolution would encounter? Where is the class or the élité or organized interest group or political consituency which could spend its political or intellectual or economic weight for the very idea of making the Network Society to advance? And, in any case, what is leadership, how does it get restructured in a “digital age”, is there a new definition we should look for?
The hypothesis that this paper puts forward is that there is in fact a new class, probably most precisely a new élité which is growing as a “segment” of the civil society which may well take over power from present political leadership and assume the lead as far as realizing the changes Network Society need in order to “become real”. Such a group of people share precise enough common features as far as age (most of them are between 25 and 40), professional (most of them are knowledge workers being management consultants, investment bankers, journalists, researchers at major international universities, think tanks and NGOs, high flyers civil servants frequently working either in diplomacy or at any of the largest sipernational organizations like EU Commission or World Bank) and living background (most of them live in and move within the capital cities web made of the major american, european and asian urban hubs of culture and business – London, New York, Brussel, Tokyo, Paris, …).
Our hypothesis is that the professional success that these individuals normally experience is just as big as their political irrelevance. Their very being mobile do not make them to naturally belong to any of the geographical constituency parliamentary democarcy is normally based upon. The language they are normally used to, their very concept of “problem solving”, the value they attach to things like time and money make them a new breed of aliens as far as institutional, mainstream political landscape is concerned.
The last part of the story we want test is that eventually the contradiction between their individual lives coupled with the limitations which are imposed to their “social” sphere is becoming gradually larger and not sustainable any more and that growing frustration may make firstly young mobile people to realize that they are in fact a “class” and that accordingly they need to act as a group in the political arena, taking the responsibility of the leadership of a change that currently almost no policy maker seem to have fully understood.
This paper is about testing through converstaion and specific analysis the “story” we have just described: is a young and globalized class emerging? Does it have the motivation and the potential to propose itself as a leadership alternative to the ones we were used to in a pre information revolution era? Can we tell cases where such a “class” has already acted as such and which are the conditions for this shift in power to happen?
This project is, in fact, very crucial to Vision. The think tank itself is in fact an expression of such a “class”, the individuals who have promoted the concept, invented its organization model, the people who do produce its papers and work at its projecs (including this one), are indeed all young, mobile individuals living in different cities, working in internationally recognized universities, magazines, consulting firms, investment banks, supernational organizations, “swimming” in a “global village” which is in fact made of the sum (the web) of a number of (local ?) professional communities scattered all over Europe. Therefore such a project is about to say if Vision can be other than a think tank, an “independent” think tank, also a factory of politically relevant proposals. Being aware that “relevance” is together with “independence” one of the two terms between which any think tank must a strike an optimal balance in order to survive (and even qualify as a “tank of think”), one can easily see why this project is to Vision as vital as redrafting the organization manifesto or doing a market research to investigate its viability for the future.
The paper is articulated in:
The information revolution: myths and reality: the Vision point of view
A class in search of a conscience: common interests and diverging agendas of the “digital leaders”
What next? Clash and cooptation between old and new èlitès.
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The information revolution: myths and reality: the Vision point of view
Basic point of many of Vision researches is that the events we are witnessing represent the beginning of an economic and social revolution whose magnitude is comparable to the industrial revolution.
In fact, such a revolution is a very different one as opposed to all other revolutions history has experienced: it is again the nature and the scale of the technological progress, the destructive power of technologies enabled weapons, the vulnerability of a system which is interconnected by information technologies, that make not sustainable any more the violence, the discontinuity of the revolutions we have experienced in the past and of the wars which normally have accompanied those discontinuities.
The boldness and radicality of the changes that technology makes possible or necessary are faced by what appears a structural propensity of policy makers to conservatorism or at the best incremental and “at-the-margin” adjustments, huge opportunities in terms of quantum leaps in efficiency in the production and delivery of publicly relavant goods and services are constrained by the inertia of the incumbents, and, in more general terms, society and even more developed societies seem to be suspended between the desire of a new frontier and the need of protection against risks of a brave new world which is quickly unfolding.
In fact, the “revolution” will and actually is taking place: the diffusion of (technological) power (of receiving, elaborating, trasmitting informayion) is proceeding unstoppable. But parallell to it it is also growing the fear of the sustainability of the cost of departing form the legacy of a system which has grown up so complex that nobody seem to understand how does it really work.
A class in search of a conscience: common interests and diverging agendas of the “digital leaders”
What next? Clash and cooptation between old and new èlitès
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Vision is about to establish the study group which will be engaged with the “Generation X’s Revolution”: the intention is to verify – through a social analysis of different Countries - the hypothesis that a politically relevant class is being born. Such a “class” is defined by professional but most of all generational and cross-border mobility elements.