WHEN AN UPSETTING CHANGE ENCROACHES, LET IT BE, LET IT BE

By Bruce Ramsey
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER, December 23, 1998

In "Pleasantville," a fantasy now playing at cinemas, two teenagers are sucked into a TV show from the 1950s where everything is black and white, mom always cooks meatloaf and nothing ever changes.

It's not a description of the real 1950s so much as a certain mind-set. The two '90s kids explode that mind-set by introducing change. At the end of the movie, the couple who reminded us of Ward and June Cleaver are sitting on a bench. One asks the other, "What'll happen next?" The other says, "I don't know." The picture ends - and life begins.

The future we don't know is the issue explored in Virginia Postrel's book, "The Future and Its Enemies" (Free Press, $25). It attempts to plant the subversive idea among Internet entrepreneurs, biotechnologists, architects, builders, video artists and other agents of social change that they have a common claim to elbowroom.

This is a political book. Postrel, a columnist for Forbes magazine, argues that an increasing number of public issues revolve around how to deal with new ways of doing things. Whether it's a fight over trade, genetic patents, breast implants, mobile phones, bovine growth hormone, video games, high-definition TV, Wal-Mart, encryption or human cloning, the issue is: What do we do about this?

One group says: Stop it. These, says Postrel, are the reactionaries, who want to preserve the past.

Another group says: Control it. These are the technocrats, the believers in the One Best Way.

Both groups, Postrel says, envision a static, engineered future. Her argument is for the people who create a dynamic, uncertain future. It's not always clear how their projects will work out, but that's OK. Let them experiment.

Their projects should always be open to criticism. That's part of the scientific method. Some projects cannot be tolerated at all, but leave lots of room for ones that can. Don't insist that each experimenter promise in advance that nothing will change. You can't live in Pleasantville.

It's not enough that interference is democratic. Referring everything to a public meeting, she says, is merely to give "self-appointed activists the power to veto other people's experiments."

When the car was invented, should our ancestors have decided its fate in a public meeting? How about TV? The birth control pill? (They did try to control the Pill. TV, too.)

A dynamic society, Postrel argues, should set the limits of experimentation with "broadly applicable and rarely changed principles" of common law rather than detailed rules.

Philip Howard's "The Death of Common Sense" was a brilliant assault on detailed rules. But he argued that the answer was to give discretionary power to public officials. Postrel argues that the power belongs to citizens. In her view, the best order is spontaneous. The future arrives like coffee bars, home schooling or mother-in-law apartments - unplanned.

In the mid-20th century, people envisioned an engineered, obedient future - something like Isaac Asimov's "Foundation." Everything would be one great machine, and it would all work. Instead, we got the personal computer and the Internet. In their current form, these are largely the product of unplanned private experiments - sometimes people pursuing money, and sometimes people horsing around.

As much as possible, Postrel argues, such people should be left alone. As John Perry Barlow said in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: "You do not know us, nor do you know our world." If a problem arises, like kids' access to pornography, let the people dealing with the problem directly tackle it first.

Don't give politicians and policy wonks control over new things, because they don't know.

Readers will be loading up with objections. "Yes, but, what about this?" What if people could buy drugs for uses unapproved by the Food and Drug Administration? (They can now. It's is only "off-label" drugs and the Internet that make the FDA tolerable.) What would happen without zoning? (Neighborhoods like Seattle's Capitol Hill and Queen Anne Hill happened without zoning.)

What about human cloning? Our society has absorbed heart transplants, sex-change operations and surrogate motherhood.

Writes Postrel: "We draw even the most extraordinary technologies into a broader cultural context that is far more resilient than reactionary wise men like to think."

The message of this book is not that you never have to pass a law. But stand back for a while. There may be a One Best Way, but you won't find it by by taking a public vote. Innovation comes from individuals. Let them try things. See what works.

Bruce Ramsey's column appears Wednesdays. His e-mail address is bruceramsey@seattle-pi.com

Reprinted by permission of the author.