Political organizations require thousands of hours of volunteer time. Envelopes have to be stuffed for direct-mail appeals, and volunteers must go out and contact people by whatever means possible. Only a few issues, the environment being one, are potent enough to overcome the difficulties involved in recruiting enough volunteers to operate an effective political organization.
The information highway makes all communication easier. Bulletin boards and other on-line forums allow people to be in touch one-to-one, or one-to-many, or many-to-many, in very efficient ways. People of similar interests are able to meet on-line and organize without any physical overhead. It will become so easy to organize a political movement that no cause will be too small or scattered. I expect the Internet will be a significant focus for all the candidates and political-action groups for the first time during the 1996 U.S. national elections. Eventually, the highway will become a primary conduit of political discourse.
Direct voting is already used in the United States for specific issues at the state level. For logistical reasons these ballot propositions can occur only when a major election is already taking place. The information highway would allow such votes to be scheduled far more frequently, because they would cost very little.
Someone will doubtless propose total “direct democracy,” having all issues put to a vote. Personally, I don’t think direct voting would be a good way to run a government. There is a place in governance for representatives—middlemen—to add value. They are the ones whose job it is to take the time to understand all the nuances of complicated issues. Politics involves compromise, which is nearly impossible without a relatively small number of representatives making decisions on behalf of the people who elected them. The art of management—whether of a society or a company—revolves around making informed choices about the allocation of resources. It’s the job of a full-time policymaker to develop expertise. This enables the best of them to come up with and embrace nonobvious solutions direct democracy might not allow, because voters might not understand the trade-offs necessary for long-term success.
Like all middlemen in the new electronic world, political representatives will have to justify themselves. The information highway will put the spotlight on them as never before. Instead of being given photos and sound bites, voters will be able to get a much more direct sense of what their representatives are doing and how they’re voting. The day a senator receives a million pieces of e-mail on a topic or is able to have his beeper announce the results of a real-time opinion poll from his constituents is not far away.
Despite the problems posed by the information highway, my enthusiasm for it remains boundless. Information technology is already touching lives deeply, as evidenced by a piece of electronic mail a reader of my newspaper column sent me in June of 1995. “Mr. Gates, I am a poet who has Dyslexia, which basically means I can not spell worth a damn, and I would never have any hope of getting my poetry or my novels published if not for this computer Spellcheck. I may fail as a writer, but thanks to you I will succeed or fail because of my talent, or a lack of talent, and not because of my disability”
We are watching something historic happen, and it will affect the world seismically, rocking us the same way the discovery of the scientific method, the invention of printing, and the arrival of the Industrial Age did. If the information highway is able to increase the understanding citizens of one country have about their neighboring countries, and thereby reduce international tensions, that, in and of itself, could be sufficient to justify the cost of implementation. If it was used only by scientists, permitting them to collaborate more effectively to find cures for the still-incurable diseases, that alone would be invaluable. If the system was only for kids, so that they could pursue their interests in and out of the classroom, that by itself would transform the human condition. The information highway won’t solve every problem, but it will be a positive force in many areas.
It won’t roll out before us according to a preordained plan. There will be setbacks and unanticipated glitches. Some people will seize upon the setbacks to proclaim that the highway never really was more than hype. But on the highway, the early failures will just be learning experiences. The highway is going to happen.
Big changes used to take generations or centuries. This one won’t happen overnight, but it will move much faster. The first manifestations of the information highway will be apparent in the United States by the millennium. Within a decade there will be widespread effects. If I had to guess which applications of the network will be embraced quickly and which will take a long time, I’d certainly get some of them wrong. Within twenty years virtually everything I’ve talked about in this book will be broadly available in developed countries and in businesses and schools in developing countries. The hardware will be installed. Then it will just be a matter of what people do with it—which is to say, what software applications they use.
You’ll know the information highway has become part of your life when you begin to resent it if information is not available via the network. One day you’ll be hunting for the repair manual for your bicycle and you’ll be annoyed that the manual is a paper document that you could misplace. You’ll wish it were an interactive electronic document, with animated illustrations and a video tutorial, always available on the network.
The network will draw us together, if that’s what we choose, or let us scatter ourselves into a million mediated communities. Above all, and in countless new ways, the information highway will give us choices that can put us in touch with entertainment, information, and each other.
I think Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote so eloquently about how people came to think of railroad locomotives and other forms of technology as friendly, would applaud the information highway and dismiss as backward-looking those who resist it. Fifty years ago he wrote: “Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures—in this century as in others our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together. Do our dreamers hold that the invention of writing, of printing, of the sailing ship, degraded the human spirit?”
The information highway will lead to many destinations. I’ve enjoyed speculating about some of these. Doubtless I’ve made some foolish predictions, but I hope not too many. In any case, I’m excited to be on the journey.
AFTERWORD
The information highway will have a significant effect on all of our lives in the years to come. As I suggested in chapter 9, the greatest benefits will come from the application of technology to education—formal and informal. To help facilitate this in a small way, my portion of the proceeds from this book will go to support teachers who are incorporating computers into their classrooms. Through the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education in the United States and comparable organizations throughout the world, the funds will help teachers create opportunities for students—just as the Mothers’ Club at Lakeside made my first exploration of computers possible.
I’ve worked long hours on this book. I work hard because I love my work. It’s not an addiction, and I like doing a lot of other things, but I find my work very exciting. My focus is to keep Microsoft in the forefront through constant renewal. It’s a little scary that as computer technology has moved ahead there’s never been a leader from one era who was also a leader in the next. Microsoft has been a leader in the PC era. So from a historical perspective, I guess Microsoft is disqualified from leading in the highway era of the Information Age. But I want to defy historical tradition. Somewhere ahead is the threshold dividing the PC era from the highway era. I want to be among the first to cross over when the moment comes. I think the tendency for successful companies to fail to innovate is just that: a tendency. If you’re too focused on your current business, it’s hard to change and concentrate on innovating.