Fukuyama: Let me speak about democracy and equality -- nice, small subjects.

The basic message is a kind of a "Yes, but" conclusion, which is to say, yes, in fact, I think we are on the cusp of a really major social revolution but, in a way, it may not unroll as smoothly or in as linear a fashion as we think.

It's one of the major cliche's of our present age to say that George Orwell was wrong. The telescreen that was supposed to be the instrument of centralized state control turned out to be just the opposite, and that the telescreen is basically the network personal computer and that, in fact, has empowered individuals and eliminated the control and bottleneck over information that authoritarian governments and other kinds of hierarchies held previously.

This is essentially technologies of freedom. But I think we have to be a little bit careful in the way that we think about this.

First of all, the types of technologies correspond to different elements of the process of democratic consolidation. Democracy exists, really, on a variety of different levels.

At the top level you have ideology, which is the basic sense of legitimacy that people have about their systems of government.

A layer below that are the institutions like constitutions and elections that people create in order to implement democratic principles.

Below that, you have a layer which is composed of civil society, which is all of the intermediate groups and associations that, as Toqueville indicated, are necessary to stay in a democracy.

And finally, at the bottom level, you have culture, which has to do with habits and morals of different peoples.

And every one of those four areas really has to democratize and develop before you can have a stable democracy, and each one is affected by a different type of technology. When we talk about technology having promoted the democratic revolution, it really is at the level of ideology and institutions, and we have to admit that is not the most recent technologies, but some pretty old-fashioned ones.

It's essentially radio and primarily broadcast TV that were essential in delegitimizing many governments in the former Soviet Union - the East Germans that could see the West German standards of living on West German television.

Other democratic advances have been spurred by the proliferation of certain simpler and older technologies like voice telephone and fax and AM radio.

In the future the real impact of things like network computers will not be on these upper level domains of ideology and institutions, but really in terms of civil society and culture.

E-mail and network computers are really great. They are very good for creating groups of people and allowing them to interact as groups. You can't do that with telephones, you can't really do that with broadcast media. You can do that with computers.

The interesting developments in the future will be the way that computer networks are used to create new forms of civil society, a lot of times, not nationally based, but transnational.

I guess I'm not terribly worried about the hegemony of English and of American culture.

If you look at the history of the printing press, you would see that this technology was actually the encouragement of national literatures in every European country, because previously culture had been the domain of people that spoke Latin. With the development of printing presses, you had the possibility for the development of local cultures, much more particularized kinds of cultures, because people within a society found the economic means to communicate.

I suspect that, whatever the hegemony of English and American culture and technology right now, that is simply not going to be the case for long.

Finally, the question of equality is a very troublesome one.

There's been a lot of talk about stagnant wages. One figure is that, for people with less than a high-school education, their real incomes have fallen by something like 20 percent over the last generation.

I really think that most labor economists would say that it is primarily due to the advance of technology and, essentially, when we talk about modern technology that means information technology. The impact of these technologies is very complicated. It destroys some jobs. It creates other new ones. It deskills some. It reskills others.

But the general impact is what has been called the intellectualization of skill -- the education requirements and the cognitive abilities of people to live in this new environment grow higher every year, and it leads to, among other things, low-skilled workers in the United States falling off the edge.

Rutkowski: The Internet's Worldwide Web is used in nearly every country of the world. The only (areas not hooked up) are some countries in Africa, and that's going to change soon, too, as the thresholds for getting access diminish. That's going to be a real revolutionary change this year.

Technology will soon be on the marketplace that for a couple hundred dollars, can use virtually any communications medium to browse the Web or to get e-mail. And that's going to change things further.

Duffey: Is the information revolution an international movement? Are young people worldwide becoming part of the Net?

Rutkowski: Around the world the young have been the early adopters of the Internet. They're also primarily the innovators.

It's forever amazing to me how you can go to Japan or Singapore or Eastern Europe and find the same kind of computer nerds. This technology is capable of being assimilated and adopted very quickly by young people around the world.

Duffey: Is this a culture of computer enthusiasts or are there other people also involved with computers?

Rutkowski: The Worldwide Web and an easy e-mail have changed that. Increasingly you have vast numbers of people that are professional people, that are creative people, that are business people, around the world using these technologies in clever and innovative ways, and that's going to be part of the changing paradigm.

At the same time, you're seeing older people, who have extra time on their hands using
the Net.

Duffey: How will the information revolution influence communities of people formed around common interests?

Fukuyama: One of the big changes that e-mail and the Web have created is the possibility for the rise of a much bigger non-governmental-organization (NGO) sector, which will be transnational.

Makers of foreign policy, in general, are going to face uncertain areas. They're going to face a world in which they're dealing not simply with state actors but with a lot of transnational actors and substate actors that in a way will make our lives much more difficult, because they're harder to influence and control.

As in previous communications revolutions, everybody is going to complain about how foreign policy is now out of control, but if you look at previous communications revolutions, the policy makers simply figure out how to adapt and they figure out how to use these organizations to their own benefit, because they can be used to mobilize support for positive policies as well as get in the way of executing others.

Question from the audience: A virtual world is a world without borders. What is the impact of this on nation-states?

Fukuyama: Let's take something simple - the protection of intellectual property rights. Last time I checked, there was absolutely no way to defend a fundamental right, like the right to property, without a state.

Similarly, in many ways, this information world creates a whole new range of international crimes that transcend national borders that are very difficult to solve, that again are very difficult to solve without the state mechanisms. It may require more international collaboration, but you still need state mechanisms.

This idea that we're all going to get homogenized into an internationalist culture -- the Internet or whatever -- is just a little silly, because people like to live in cultural and moral communities of various sorts, and the reason they like it is that it's different from those of other peoples, and it has all sorts of particularities.

One of the things you're seeing is a kind of backlash against the globalization that's brought about by the capitalist economy, that people want to hold onto their Scottish identity or their French language in Quebec.

I'm not too worried about the disappearance of the nation-state in the next couple
of generations.

Global Issues
USIA Electronic Journals, Vol. 1, No. 12, September 1996