[Nettime-bold] Fw: <nettime> Closing the information technology gap

[Michael Gurstein <mgurst@techbc.ca>]

The document below is very revealing in the context of our "dotforce"
discussions.

For those on the US side of the Atlantic, a fairly close reading will give some
idea of the quite different mindset which the Europeans (the Eurocrats at least)
bring to issues of IT/ICT... Implicit in the document is the sense of a need to
"catch up", of the capacity of Governments to intervene in technology and
technology deployment issues, the notion of "top down" direction to these
developments and the notion that technology (as with other) rights/opportunities
are something which are "granted" rather than available to be taken/used at
will.

The term "dirigiste" springs to mind which of course, is everything which the
folks in Americaland resist/despise/reject as being precisely the difference
between their culture/economy/polity and its success and everyone else's
culture. And of course, this is the culture etc. out of which the technology
bounty has arisen.  Much of the rest of the world including large numbers of
business folk in Europe as elsewhere are now much intrigued with this---what
Barbrook et al have called the "California Ideology".

The technology has now grown up a bit (and gotten very very rich), and now the
"adults" (I love that term, which is being used in the context of the US
election to refer to the good grey folks in the background who really make the
decisions and set the limits on the playpens in which the mere candidates are
allowed to play) are starting to take an interest.  So now the clash of world
views as between Eurocrats and California Cowboys (CCs), between oil folks who
like stable markets and stable economies and techie folks who couldn't care
less, between Foreign Ministers and Chefs de Cabinet and their younger confreres
jumping up and down about WAP and Napster and Linux will begin to emerge.
Anyone watching what is happening at the moment between the "Big Board" i.e. the
NYSE and the Tech Exchange i.e. the NSDAQ...

And one of the places where all of this is going to be played out is in venues
like "G8-DotForce Initiative" where the old economy/polity meets the new at a
level where the old economy is very very comfortable and the New Economy quite
frankly doesn't have a clue.