From The Nation
Spin Cycle: On Tim Wu and Kevin Kelly
By Paul Duguid
According to Tim Wu, David Sarnoff, founder of NBC, liked to spin "vainglorious tales for reporters and historians," not unlike "the ancient Chinese emperors who rewrote history as soon as they came to power, to prove they had had Heaven's mandate all along." In The Master Switch, a history of "information empires," Wu is happy to pierce the vainglory of modern technological emperors like Sarnoff. In their place, however, he offers an almost heavenly account of what he sees as our true benefactor, the free market....
Kelly and Wu speak for a new technocracy, and their books epitomize its libertarianism and its frustration with the political system. Both seem at best hostile and at worst indifferent to politics. Wu sees government as inherently corrupt and best avoided, whereas Kelly treats it as irrelevant to the unfolding of his technium. Wu and Kelly claim that the smoothly self-regulating dynamics of markets and technological innovation can supersede the unmanageable modern state and its conflicting interest groups (upper and lower classes, labor and capital, left and right, public and private). But it's likely that such a scenario would lead not to a world without politics but rather to one dominated by market-servile technocrats insisting that in a technological society, they alone would make the best leaders. That note was struck by the presidential campaign of Ross Perot (founder of Electronic Data Systems) and was implicit in the recent electoral campaigns of Meg Whitman (former CEO of eBay) and Carly Fiorina (former CEO of Hewlett-Packard). If such technocrats ever succeed in gaining control of the state, I suspect that their policies would cater less to the wants of technology than to those of technocrats, especially the ones who have amassed large fortunes. What they want won't be what the rest of us want, or need.