Technology & Leadership
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Participant
All of these recent comments pertain to the direction this conference is taking--all about participative democracy. Harlan's comments surely, as well as the back and forth about who should be voting.

On the latter, Ray, you may think me a bit far out, but I think everyone should be encouraged to vote, not just permitted. One of the fears is that people will ignore the larger good and vote in their own self interest. Curiously, it's very difficult to get people to vote in their own self interest. For most of the time that they have been enfranchised, women have voted with the men in their lives, and blacks have voted with southern whites. It is only recently that they have begun to vote as blocs (as they become better informed).

Participant
I do not fear people voting in what they perceive as their best interest. I fear their voting, without thinking about it, in what is really someone else's best interest.

As soon as they care enough to WANT to vote, I'm willing to assume that they will, at the same time, care enough to think about HOW they should vote.

Participant
I'm astonished that, in the multilogue about whether "we the people" should mean everybody, or the best and brightest, or those who are paying attention, no one has yet quoted Thomas Jefferson. Even after trying for eight years (1801-09) to be the people's servant-leader, and after another decade to think about it, Jefferson still wrote this to a friend in 1820: "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion." When he wrote that, he had already helped invent what became the University of Virginia--which has since helped inform the discretion of two centuries of Americans. (One of them was my father.)

Participant
My way of looking at a conversation like this is to look at where the frame gets extended. For example

--Cleveland’s opening sanctioning serious thought

--Farson’s friendliness

--Craven’s dense thinking allowing us to be Shakespearian.

Each of these, and many more in this good conversation, sanctions a larger conversation, with more resonance.

My own view is to look at the larger historical picture (which is always a reframeable frame).

Given that, here are my thoughts.

The tendency in this conversation is to focus on

1. the participatory nature and potential of the technology

2. the tendency towards control in its application..

I believe these are related and create the tension we feel: the tech is not finding its natural audience and use; open management and cross boundary learning in and among organizations. Why?

The tech has the tendency to support group collaboration, because each person in the system, through email, seeing the organization’s website, or conference capability like this one we are in now, has more to talk about with co-workers,

But the tech also gives a certain transparency to the system and allows management to cut costs, unload coasts onto clients, and think of how to use artificial intelligence to replace paid work. In classical economics it’s an axiom that when information is shared, there is no profit, because some group at the margin will always compete. Information drives out costs, and makes profit only attainable

1. in monopoly or quasi monopoly positions, or

2. for a short while until competition either buys you out or competes.

The result is that leaders are in a conflict between

1. profit, and

2. participation

And want to get rid of the very people they would like to have be more participative.

This is all occurring in the context of (late) empire with its tendency to always have elites that pull more and more resources to themselves.

But, globalization, the current phase in empire logic, is self-limiting. Because it tends, despite nation state attempts to limit the process, to level out standard of living and labor/management costs. In fact middle level managers are approaching parity around the world. The result is that for each industry there comes a point when manufacturing at a distance is more costly than local/regional production. At that point logic favors local economic activity.

At that point, I believe, the promise of this tech as participatory will be stronger than its tendency to eliminate profits and personnel. Local education, jobs, ownership, press, and politics (and environmental responsibility) cohere at the local level. The giants don’t go away but provide a commons of stability within which local economies can have their hegemony.

I think this helps explain the paradox we feel, the disappointments we experience, and supports the hope we covet.

Long winded. I promise to be shorter.

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