Enemies Of The Future

Kent Newsome is waiting for an answer to a recent question:

[from Attention Convention]

I tend to favor Stowe’s argument [where I call a detractor “an enemy of the future”], but there is a little hole in it we need to plug. Stowe says to Dave “I agree with you about trolls. There are people out there who are the enemies of the future (as Virginia Postrel styled it in her book of the same name), and they need to be outed whenever possible.” I haven’t read that book, but my question to Stowe, and others, is this: what defines an “enemy of the future?” Stated another way, how do we distinguish a troll from someone who merely disagrees. A troll from a skeptic? And who gets to decide where those lines are drawn? Debate and competition are key forces in innovation and efficiency. I agree that there are those whose goal is not to debate and compete, but to condemn and destroy. But I think there is potential danger in how we tell them apart.

I lift a definition from Virginia Postrel’s website, Dynamist.com:

In The Future and its Enemies, Virginia Postrel explodes this myth, embarking on a bold exploration of how progress really occurs. In areas of endeavor ranging from fashion to fisheries, from movies to medicine, from contact lenses to computers, she shows how and why unplanned, open-ended trial and error - not conformity to one central vision - is the key to human betterment. Thus, the true enemies of humanity’s future are those who insist on prescribing outcomes in advance, circumventing the process of competition and experiment in favor of their own preconceptions and prejudices. [emphasis mine.]

Postrel argues that these conflicting views of progress, rather than the traditional left and right, increasingly define our political and cultural debate. On one side, she identifies a collection of strange bedfellows: Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader standing shoulder to shoulder against international trade; “right-wing” nativists and “left-wing” environmentalists opposing immigration; traditionalists and technocrats denouncing Wal-Mart, biotechnology, the Internet, and suburban “sprawl.” Some prefer a pre-industrial past, while others envision a bureaucratically engineered future, but all share a devotion to what she calls “stasis,” a controlled, uniform society that changes only with permission from some central authority.

On the other side is an emerging coalition in support of what Postrel calls “dynamism”: an open-ended society where creativity and enterprise, operating under predictable rules, generate progress in unpredictable ways. Dynamists are united not by a single political agenda but by an appreciation for such complex evolutionary processes as scientific inquiry, market competition, artistic development, and technological invention. Entrepreneurs and artists, scientists and legal theorists, cultural analysts and computer programmers, dynamists are, says Postrel, “the party of life.”

I maintain that the answer is that those that prescribe the future rather than letting it run. In this particular case, we need to see where this pesky web 2.0 stuff is going to lead us.

(Oh, by the way, Dave Rogers is still basting in the bile since I wrote Dave Rogers: A Bitter, Bitter Man and suggested he was an enemy of the future. And not because he called me a blowhard, but because of the line of rhetoric he was pursuing: “None of this VRM or Web 2.0 bullshit is important. It’s all crap.” I still disagree, and I believe that those advancing these arguments have to be countered.)