Q&A WITH MANUEL CASTELLS Q. It's Tuesday the 20th of May, 1997. I'm talking to Professor Manuel Castells, and my name is Cliff Barney. So, that being said, can we first talk about what is the network society, what do you mean when you talk about the rise of a network society? A. Well, I would say that very simply for me what the network society is, is first the kind of society we already live in, it's not a future social structure. The social structure of the information age, which is connected by the fact that everything that is important, meaning it generates power, money or information, happens through change of flows in networks. Q. Change of flows we've already -- A. Flows of information. Q. Flows of information. Okay. A. Flows of information, because even when money is exchanged, it's information money. So this is new. Not that, as you know, not that network are new, but the complexity of the network structure now can be operated by new, powerful technologies, that make possible to live in extraordinary complexity of exchanges between everywhere and everywhere and everything can be in the network, and it still can be handled. So networks now have the possibility of being inclusive of everything, the technological possibility. The example, the most obvious example is the global economy is not the world economy. The world economy, as economic historians have shown, has existed in the western hemisphere at least since the Sixteenth Century, and when Spain sent ships to Lima once a year everything depended on that ship in Lima, and Spain depended on the gold coming from Lima, and the same thing with the Dutch companies in Southeast Asia and so on. So the -- and capital accumulation was proceeding at a global, at the world (inaudible), where international exchange, it was very important. So -- but that's not a global economy. Global economy is the one that can operate as a unit, as a working unit in real time. Capital now is truly global. Your pension funds, my pension funds are flying somewhere and changing where they go every hour, or every second. And this has been managed, so savings from all over the world are being invested all over the world constantly. Q. You talk about that in the conclusion to The Network Society, and what you're essentially saying is that everything that's surplus, all surplus capital goes into the network economy -- A. Goes into the network of financial flows. Q. It doesn't get stuck in the vault somewhere. A. No. No. But it never did, to some extent, in capitalizing. However, had to be in relatively stable stocks, because the process of trading had to respect some rules and institutions. Now once your money goes into the financial market is operated globally, and you don't even know what's happened, no one knows. Q. You say previously it had to respect some kind of institution? What do you mean? A. Well, for instance, it was highly regulated. Highly regulated. There were strong regulations that could not be bypassed easily. That's why you always have the guy with the briefcase and full of money tearing around. Smuggling had to happen. Now, we also have huge amounts of smuggling, but this smuggling also goes to the networks. Q. Right. Did you see the story yesterday about the Clinton Administration wants to reduce the value of an [ureported] international transfer of money. Now if it's under ten thousand you don't have to report it. They want to bring that down to seven hundred and fifty dollars. A. Well, you know what that means, that simply they need more people to do the job! Q. Okay, so now, money goes into the global network. A. No, capital is truly global. Capital now is truly global. It was not global before. It was, was regulated within national constituencies, and in order to be transferred and exchanged, it could not be systematically invested, and to invest it constantly, in a constant whirlwind of global networks, which now is the case. So capital is truly global, I mean, the most spectacular example (inaudible) now Singapore has a very advanced communication system. People have the possibility from their ATMs to invest in the stock markets around the world. So, you know, you're going to an ATM market -- ATM in Singapore and you invest in the Buenos Aires stock market. Q. And the money goes in your account. A. Exactly. And the money's managed between Singapore and New York. So in that sense, that's what I mean, that all these networks have absorbed, because of technological capacity, almost a monopoly of everything that is important. And no one controls the networks. No one controls the networks. That's the physical thing. Capitalism still rules, I mean, we live more than ever in a capitalist economy, but you see, there's no capitalist that controls the networks, and the networks are not the market, you know? We always talk about the market as the invisible hand, but the market has its logic. These kind of networks have no logic. There is nothing -- the economic logic is second to what I call the turbulences in the networks, for instance, Greenspan has a family problem in the morning, he says something in an oblique way, and the dollar goes down, and the whole thing changes -- but it's rectified the following day in the opposite direction. You see? These are turbulences. This is not market. Q. But you say somewhere in here that the people who are at the switches have the power. A. Yeah. That's -- because one thing is to first describe -- describe, not, you know, the system, how it works with these turbulences, these networks, et cetera. Then, at the second level this has to be an analytical effort to find where there's still power. Still power. And I -- and I find it at two fundamental levels, in one the switches, as you say very well, which is people who set up, for instance, the connection between global media and global financial capital, who invests capital into the media, who controls this. And how the media report about companies. There is a switch. Q. Upside is a switch. A. Maybe. Maybe, I mean I don't know. But -- Q. Well, they report about companies. A. Yeah, well, in that sense it's a switch, if they have the power to say what they want. Q. Right. Oh, they do. A. In other words, in order to be in the position to switch, without consequences, you need a great deal of autonomy. That usually is linked to a great deal of wealth. Murdoch is a switch. Or, people who are at the crossroads between fund-raising and politics. Or people who translate technological innovations into money-making machines. We have all the stories about the wonderful innovators in Silicon Valley, I said, Well, but innovations happen every day, and some of them go bust, and some of them are really developed. Who are the switches there? I mean, historically for instance, remember in the ancient histories (inaudible) twenty years ago. Regis McKenna was a critical switcher between Apple [and thefinancial community]. A. You see, this -- these junctures. But you have to be at the juncture, and you have at the same time to have the autonomy of initiative. [If] you don't have the autonomy of initiative -- that's why I don't know if at Upside's that's the case. You have the autonomy of initiative if you don't care about the audience or you don't care about who's going to finance you the next year or so. Then you can do it. And the other power sites and battles is the production of cultural codes. That's the critical thing. The categories through which we think. In in the Information Age the way we think determines the way we produce and also the way we live. Q. What's a cultural code? A. For instance, if we -- if we think that we are universal citizens with no identity other than being citizens, that's a code. And then if I say, but -- I'm a citizen, but I'm Catalan. Okay? Then you're defining yourself in a way that creates some autonomy vis-à-vis this abstract universality of everybody's the same. Or if I say, Well, I am a human being, but as a human being, I am part of an ecosystem which is planetary, and I have some solidarity with this little animal that is around there, well, you define -- you think yourself as part of the global ecosystem. You are creating a cultural code, which has all kind of other consequences. Q. But everybody's then a creator of cultural code. A. Well, but who gives the cultural codes? Most of the creation of the cultural codes is highly controlled. The individual, the consumer, the role as a husband or a mother or a daughter, the categories under which we live can be produced in a way that we don't really fit into what is our [project of life], and historically social change has always happened when people redefine the categories of what they are. Example: When workers instead of being exploited, dirty people who have to work to live become the proletariat, I am the proletariat, it changes a lot. It creates many troubles for many people, but at the same time it's a transformation. You win your autonomy. When women say, "I am a woman" before "I am a wife." Q. But once again, any woman can say that. A. Sure. They can. Q. Therefore -- A. They can, but -- but, but it has taken a long time in history for women to be able to say that. Q. I get the sense though that, that when you talk about producers of cultural codes having power that maybe some people have more -- produce more codes than others or some people are defining general codes or -- A. Well, my point is that most people consume codes. Most people are in this -- as you know, we are in an information overflow, there's all kind of information, images and ideas that float around. So in fact most people consume what is sent as cultural products. And these cultural products are being produced by money-making machines, and power-making machines, in which ultimately -- there are a few things like come from tradition, like, "be a good worker," "be a good family person," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but since this does not correspond anymore to what this site is -- in fact we consume all kind of codes that keep ourselves, keep us in the same submissive condition of just repeating what is expected from us, and feeling miserable individually. Q. Okay. But that discussion started when we were talking about -- A. Power. Q. -- power flowing through the network, and I asked you to talk a little bit about flows, but, okay -- this is the real change that we see in a network society, that power flows through the network. A. Yes. Q. And you say somewhere that it's uncontrollable, it can only be adapted to -- A. And for instance, what does it mean that it's uncontrolled, these days? If a business cannot operate in a given locality, it can decentralize, relocate, automate, offshore, subcontract, outsource, there are all kind of possibilities, which make it very difficult to control. Now, on the one hand I would say that these -- these flexibilities are wonderful, it's a wonderful quality for the production system. The problem that a society that is only oriented toward the production system ultimately destroys itself, because if business is highly productive, but by doing so, it moves constantly from one locality to another, and leaves behind burned land on the locality, then ultimately the social cost -- and finally the economic cost in terms of burned-out people, burned-out capital, burned-out societies, will [affect] ultimately, the business productivity as well. So on the one hand the idea of flexibility is not a bad idea, it's what is happening, but we say -- a colleague of mine, we have proposed a term of sustainable flexibility, that is, flexibility that at the same time is embedded into a system of social control of a different kind, which is not the unions, which is not the traditional political parties. That has to be reinvented. And I would say that through the network and through the Net, new mechanisms of control may appear. Q. As a part of the network society? A. Yeah, I don't think that the network society is by definition a society that will create, by definition, inequality, will exploit people, et cetera. What I see emerging is that the network logic and the network society at this point is fully developed in everything that is technology, business information, but not in culture, not in social control, not in politics, not in the element that makes a society a society and not just a market. Q. Well, you were talking mostly about the global economy, and -- A. It's the most obvious example of the network society, But the network enterprise also is important. Q. Okay. Let's talk about the network enterprise. A. Because the network enterprise is the organizational tool to do business and work in the network society. Now, this -- in fact I simply am trying to theorize what is already the practice in the business world, in which firms are legal entities and they are financial entities, but in fact the operational terms always takes place in corporations, between firms, and not just small incorporating with large, but large corporations have a strategic alliance among themselves; they work together, one particular project with one product line in one market one year, and not the following year, or not in another area of the world at the same time. So they're both cooperating and competing. Same thing, small business form networks to incorporate on some projects, and then they dissolve and then they go into something else, the small with large, and then within the -- a given network of firms incorporating they're also contract individuals. They hire you for this, they hire you for that, you are writing an article for Upside, another article for another journal, so it's -- to some extent it's like the actual operating unit is always a network of different people and firms, and organizations that come together for a project, and then form something else. Q. I think people have noticed that. It's different in the information business. People really notice that. A. This is also how Hong Kong Garment works, and how Northern Italy Machine Tools work, this is the Benneton type of organization, this is what really has taken over the business world, this network capacity, which is not a network of firms. Q. It's a network. A. The network enterprise is not a network of enterprises. The unit is the network, and different pieces of different firms, or people, contribute to this network, and this network forms for one product, dissolves and forms for another project. Q. You mentioned somewhere that what determines the success of the network enterprise is how well its elements communicate, and also how well -- A. Compatible they are -- Q. --how much the goals of any individual firm are consistent with the goals of the network. A. Exactly. Because if you don't communicate well, then it's extremely difficult to operate together, and -- but it's not just a matter of being able to communicate. Are you really trying to do the same thing? I mean, if a firm is trying, for instance, to create a chip that will enhance computer power for individuals, and decentralize information, and another firm on the contrary is trying to revive the mainframe hierarchy, well, it's not going to work, even if they are both technologically interested. So there has to be compatibility between the goals and communication between the means. Q. Presumably they get together and agree on that beforehand. Or -- A. Well, unless they don't know that they, they are not compatible, or they have some different (inaudible) strategy, but the main thing [is that] they may not know that they are compatible. I don't know for instance if IBM is still compatible with Apple type of company. I don't know. Q. IBM is the one who is breaking, decentralized now. A. Exactly. Exactly. That's my point. IBM, in order to be able to connect to the network society has to transform itself into a network, to then be compatible, because the whole mentality and the whole corporate culture of IBM was not compatible with what was emerging, but once they realized they transformed themselves, and what we call IBM today is not the IBM of twenty years ago. Q. So what does an individual firm in one of these enterprises, how do they -- what are their principles of operation, how do they best -- A. Well, that's really the key issue. There are two things, productivity and competitiveness, these are the two main characteristics of the economy, both of the global economy and of an individual firm. You have to be productive and you have to be competitive. Productivity is units of output per unit of input; competitive, you have to win market share. Now, competitiveness depends on flexibility, on being able to adapt and to reinvent yourself, so that's the network. So you -- it's like an amoeba. You reinvent yourself for everything. [If] you are the same firm to do whatever you do, wherever and whenever, you are dead in this economy. So it is the constant reinvention of the firm. That's flexibility, that's networking. However, if you only do this, there is a problem. It's -- in everything you do well there's a learning curve, as you know. So this learning curve needs some cumulative process of knowledge over time, starting with workers. Workers have some training, have some skills, but they learn through the process. Part of the learning is general to technology and to business, but part is specific to a particular firm, so -- and Japanese firms have been geniuses at this particular skill, by generating cumulative knowledge in their workers, in their employees, by being there all the time and committing themselves to the firm. Then the problem is that you are extremely flexible and extremely adaptive, but you don't care on anything but the instant. You're purely ephemeral. There is no accumulation of this knowledge and no learning curve. So ultimately you lose productivity. So what the older firms really are struggling with these days is how to create a kind of firm that at the same time is a network but is a network that reinvents itself with the same materials, reassembles the materials of the network. And that's -- that's critical, and that's where information technology helps a lot, because through information technology you can constantly update the information that remains in the system. Q. Well, it's information technology that makes it possible now. A. Both networking and accumulation of knowledge and experience in the firm. Q. That's really what's new in the operation of the economy, the fact that you have instant communications, and you can do these things. A. Absolutely. Q. You're saying that this is not only a new form of business, though, that -- but that it has now become pervasive in the whole society. It is now a network society. And yet from your descriptions, the network society isn't planetary, a lot of people are left out of it. Where does it -- what's its locus then? A. Exactly, because -- that's a very good point you made, because the thing is, technology does not develop in a vacuum. It develops in a society that is submitted to a process of power and inequality and -- and discrimination, et cetera. So it's not the technology that produces inequality, but it's so powerful that it amplifies the effects of inequality. Business, powerful universities, politicians, bureaucracies, criminals, have an instrument as powerful as information-based networks, in which you can have the privilege of linking up everything that is valuable, and not paying attention to everything that is worthless. And that's the instrument, it's wonderful. I mean, we always had rich and poor, it was very different to really put them apart. You could segregate them, [you had] Apartheid et cetera, et cetera. But ultimately, you had to live with the block in which some people would be better than others, even much better than others. But you did not have the possibility of linking what is valuable from Tokyo to Singapore to Buenos Aires to Madrid, to Silicon Valley, and then forgetting about everything that doesn't work. And you develop the economy by deepening the productivity of the good people that you have. And since these people at the same time are the ones who are highly rewarded, well, you deepen the market there, and you don't care about the rest. That is what has happened in Africa, and why Africa, six hundred people, have evaporated. Q. But there's always been -- Africa has always been poor. A. No. No, Africa in the 1960s were doing much better than today. Uh, Volume Three has all the data! [Laughing]. African states have cooperated very much into this, so it's not simply the logic of networking, but what the logical networking makes possible is to switch off everything that is too cumbersome, too -- too complicated to deal with, and this is an increasingly cumulative phenomenon. Even until now in terms of countries, we still had the cold war, so therefore the superpowers were playing strategic games -- no more need of this. Now we have a universal capitalism that's going to be there. The Soviet threat is vanquished, so now it's a different kind of geopolitical threat, which is terrorism, et cetera, it's a different matter, so neither for economic or political reasons, do we have to take care of the undeserving poor. We are in [pure] Victorian England in this sense. We have the network society, that is, with an extraordinary technological capacity, to implement the dream of living only with your kind. Q. Well, part of the game then becomes getting a seat at the table, in the network society. Is that -- A. Who? Q. Well, for anybody. Anybody that's not in it. A. Absolutely. Well, there are two possibilities. You see, one is that people trying to use the information and the network and communication networks to make their claims and to say, We are here, and in fact I am very hopeful that [many social movements] and many progressive (inaudible) in the world are doing that. For instance, you know, in one case, International Global Communications, San Francisco is doing a wonderful work in linking up environmental groups around the world. So people trying to do good things together can also group together. But on the other hand, large segments of the population, who simply feel left out, and don't have much chance to even put a finger into -- the gap is so wide already, I mean, the whole of Africa has less telephones -- not computers -- telephones than Manhattan. So when you have such a huge gap, then the temptation's a different one, saying, Well, you're excluded. Me, I exclude you. I change the system, I change the values. And that's religious fundamentalism and that's the cults and all kind of reactions of -- not necessarily from the poor people, sometimes there are people who feel excluded culturally, who feel empty by this endless race to, to something better, something faster, something richer, that in fact they don't find the meaning there. So, when the system is so powerful, trying to fight within a system in which they feel so weak and powerless, ultimately, [leads to] complete rejection. My whole book that's about this is about the Net and the self [Vol 2 of TheInformtion Age trilogy: The Power of Identity]. On the one hand a net formed by networks of power information, and on the other hand people stating their irreducible identities saying, I don't care, that you have power. I am myself. I am -- I have God with me. I have my identity with me, I exclude you. You're a disbeliever and you are excommunicated from my community. And in between society disappears, because of course society has always been the combination of some identity and some instrumentality. On the one hand we do business with the power, and on the other hand we live, we love, we fight. There are two things where -- the culture, let's say, and the instrument, were in nonaccommodating relationship, but there were both sides there. What's happening now is that you have the world of network without any specific identity, global, cosmopolitan, et cetera, and then people who are absolutely rooted in their identity, and cannot move from there and therefore cannot even communicate, and if you cannot communicate, the other becomes an alien, and you shoot it. Q. Is Africa big enough to have its own local continental economy outside the global economy? A. Oh yes, it could, but the problem is that -- there are two problems there. One is at first -- the same logic. Once you start with this logical exclusion, it, it destroys itself, because there's always someone even more fundamentally (inaudible), and -- and the big commune becomes a smaller and a smaller communes, and they weaken the commune system, more radical affirmation of principle, fundamentally, for instance, and the other thing is that it's exclusive but not [completely] exclusive. It's not like Africa is entirely excluded. Every [node] that is valuable in Africa is included. So it's both inclusion and exclusion. . .But the ten percent of the population that is included in Africa is very included, and has all interests at even keeping their own people in a way that then they can bargain something, the political economy of begging. You need a lot of poor people to then go and get paid and get a television program and get a vote in the United Nations. If you don't have children dying, then you -- you have nothing, so children die and becomes a commodity, it's the political economy of begging. So it's inclusion and exclusion. Q. And you're saying that this is an irreversible process that's happening. A. Well, this is a -- Q. The network society -- A. This is irreversible because it already has happened. . .Now, what is not irreversible is all the effects about the lack of social and political control, et cetera. The reason for that is simply as every changing history you have first a transformation of the structure always around the dominant values, and the dominant interests. They are always the one that first transform. And then -- and then people start to react and find -- and find ways to establish a control, but control not in the bad sense of the word of a smashing the dynamics of the networks, but control in terms of introducing in the networks elements that are not just business, technology and power, but, culture, individual dreams, social equality, other elements, which exist in the Net as we all know, in terms of the chat groups and in terms of the sites, but exist as a relevant culture, I mean, we are talking about the Net. It's not simply the Internet. Q. No, I understand. A. When I'm talking about the Net it's really the network of interest that shipped capital and information technology throughout the globe. Is not much that is happening in terms of actual communication of people, culture and alternative interest. It's not much for the moment. Q. And that's essentially what you're trying to stimulate. A. No. Frankly speaking, I would like this to happen, but I wrote this book in a very detached way, not because I am indifferent, but because I really don't have answers. And not only that, you will see in the general conclusion, I am militant about intellectuals not providing the answers, because I come from a generation that invented the answers before framing the questions. And then the whole idea of the dogmatic lefts, for instance, was, well, you have to justify this, this, this, and then in order to therefore if you want really to avoid all this trouble I can tell you what to do. So I'm being militantly silent. Q. Militantly silent? A. Not that I don't care, but I want my work to be used as a tool, and not as a prescription. I'm trying to analyze, really. Q. You make that clear in the beginning when you talk about the place of theory and -- A. And I make that even explicit in the conclusion when I said -- last time that an intellectual tried to implement an answer to all these questions, anytime that an intellectual tries to -- catastrophe ensues, particularly with a certain Ulianov in 1902. Lenin. I'm very critical of what was in fact the dogmatic approach of leftist intellectuals, including myself. I'm not excluding myself at all. . .I think that those from Europe who came from the socialist tradition, et cetera, I was always -- I was associated at the age of sixteen. And (inaudible) we were too political, and so we had so many things to fight against. We didn't question enough the categories under which social change was being claimed and was being proposed, so -- and I have seen so many catastrophes provoked by intellectuals doing bad work, simply for the reasons of political expediency, that I am very adamant about keeping extraordinary distance between analytical work and political uses. I'm not saying that intellectuals and myself shouldn't be political. No. I can be very political myself. But my theory should not be, because -- it is very political, but should not develop into a formula for social action, political action. Q. But -- okay, at the same time, you do have feelings about it. A. Oh, strong feelings. Strong feelings. Well, I think we're in big trouble in that sense. I think we have an extraordinary gap between our technology overdevelopment, and our social underdevelopment, I mean, the gap is dramatic. Q. See it every day. A. We have extraordinary productive capacities, technology is doing extraordinary things, I mean, mind-boggling things, as we know, and then what we do with this, at best is limited and boring. Q. You can't say it's limited and boring if it's totally transformed the way companies do business. A. Well, that's true. But when you finish your business day, what happens then? I think there are extraordinary things happening in the business world and the technology world, in the research world, in the university, et cetera, et cetera. But in terms of what all this means for us as individuals and for society as a collective, we are not using not even one percent of the potential that is there. I mean, in fact social inequalities [are being] aggravated. Social conditions of large segments of the corporation are being aggravated, and I fear that the most extraordinary evolution, which is biological evolution, it's going to be misused too. Q. Is this partly because of the weakening of the power of the state, that the state is no longer able to function the way it was because it's not in control of its own policy anymore? A. That's correct. That's correct. But, but the reason for why the state cannot exercise power is, one is technological, but the other is that nobody trusts the state anymore. I mean, it's totally delegitimized. Everybody universally thinks, I mean, all the data are there, thinks about politicians as crooks, that they are simply trying to make images to get into power, once in power they need the money, in order to continue in power, so therefore they sell out, and the whole thing is political marketing, so on the one hand the ideal of a state-regulating society et cetera is a wonderful idea in a democratic society, but people are totally against regulation these days because they don't trust their government, universally. We are in a situation of extreme individualism, so unless we reconstruct civil society from the networks, and with the networks, I don't think that the controls are going to come from the state. Q. Well, you seem to be saying that the states have lost their power anyway, or have lost a lot of their power. A. A lot of their power. That's why I say on the one hand they don't have much capacity to regulate, and second, people don't want them to regulate anyway. Yes, they have loss of their power because most of the flows of power of technology, information, capital, bypassed the states, including, by the way, the criminal networks, which is something that everybody knows, but nobody brings into the analysis. Q. You've got a figure of seven hundred and fifty billion dollars. A. That's a United Nations figure. Q. That's a UN figure that goes into the criminal economy -- A. Yeah. Q. -- that's laundered into -- A. That's laundered. Q. How big a hunk is that of the total -- A. Well, this is about fifty percent more than total trade in oil. It's about seventy percent of total electronic production in the world. Q. And it's -- it's simply in the system, circulating, throwing its weight around, so to speak? A. It's in the financial markets. I mean, one of the main sources of accumulation -- as soon as everything is made, that's precisely the capital that is [immediately recycled]. So the seven hundred and fifty billion figure which, well, is not a solid figure, right? it's -- but that is the United Nations conference in 1994 bringing together all the counters in the world to make some estimate of all of this. Well, even that's what is longer, and, but you probably have to multiply by three in terms of the actual cash, because you know, you lose a lot of money by laundering. Actually it's only one third that ends up being laundered, because you have to pay a lot of commissions for the money to be laundered. I mean, countries, main countries -- Russia, these days, is -- you cannot explain Russia without explaining the penetration, the absolute penetration of the Russian economy by criminal networks. According to the Russian government, last report, eighty percent of Russian businesses pay protection money to the criminal network. Mexico. We're not talking about small places. Mexico, you know is totally controlled at this point, the PRI is totally gotten by the criminal networks, and that's what -- that's the crisis of Mexico. And that's the ones -- the ones who killed Colosio, the ones who organized the whole thing, the ones who killed Massieu, the ones that finance Raul Salinas -- Mexico has come totally under the control of [the Mafia] -- more than Columbia at this point. The Caribbean is entirely controlled. The Yakuza in Japan is a decisive force, that appoints prime ministers; there's a book published about Japan that shows the historic connection between Tanaka who is the towering figure of Japanese politics and the Yakuza. In Italy, Andriotti, the father of the Christian Democracy, was on the payroll of the Mafia for forty years. And so on and so on. This is not new in the sense again that all these organizations existed; what is new is they have connected. They're all now globalized and in networks. And with extraordinary capacities. Q. They've connected in the sense that their money is in the global network. They have strategic alliances. There are all kinds of documents on all this. Did you see this story about the Russian submarine? Did you see that? Q. No. A. Oh, the DEA, two months ago, announced that they had arrested in Miami a Russian Mafioso who owns a club there, who had already sold Russian helicopters to the Columbian cartels, and now they were doing something much better. He was selling a Russian submarine, including a former admiral and the whole crew, to transport coke throughout the ports of the West Coast of the United States. That's genius! A Russian submarine complete with the crew. Q. With the crew! [Laughing] Well -- A. No, it's serious business. One of the things that I am very very strong in terms of the analysis is that nobody takes seriously the threat of the global criminal economy, and the global criminal economy now is an extraordinary financial power, extraordinary political power, and politics in many countries cannot be explained any longer without reference to the penetration of this -- Q. Well, you say that the high tech industry's intimately connected with the financial community, right? I mean, it goes both ways. The financial community needs them for the technology, who needs the financial community so they can spend the money to innovate making a product, so are we saying that -- is there a link here between the criminal economy and -- A. Well, not direct. Not direct. Not direct, but the criminal market has certainly penetrated. First they have penetrated in terms of the capital, and second, there are first indications, last year, in Wall Street, first indications of Mafia groups moving into brokerage. Q. Now, even beyond that you're saying that the structure of the network society inherently makes governments weaker than they were. A. Yes. Q. Because they simply don't have control over their currencies and they don't have control over what their companies do. A. Absolutely. If you don't have control over the currency you cannot have an economic policy, and they don't have control over the currency. That's really a fact. You can develop it a little bit here and there, but the financial markets decide the (inaudible). Q. All you could do is adapt to it. A. To adapt, to go with the market. Q. Right. Right. A. And adjust. So you don't have control over the currency, you -- Q. Don't you think people can take steps that have an impact, I mean, (inaudible) as a government is, there are things you can do with the money, with the capital you do control that are going to affect the way the network behaves. A. You can play -- you can play in the network. You can be one of the players, but you don't have sovereignty. You have a strategy, but you don't have sovereignty. And that's a different matter. Economically. But also in information terms. Frankly, I have to say I'm [probably] libertarian, and it's a joy to see that the states cannot control information, because over history the monopoly of power was based on the monopoly of information. This is finished. They cannot control the Net. There's all kinds of technological discussions of this, but -- and I'm not competent to say entirely, but everybody that I know and that knows somebody about it say, No. In fact, the architecture of the Internet is such that you can -- the only way you can control is to disconnect. Q. Mm-hmm. A. But if you live in an open network, and you want to benefit from all the exchange of information, you can sanction afterwards, you can go and kill the guy! But you cannot stop the flow of information. Q. Well, maybe that's a good place to talk -- to start talking about Hong Kong. That's what people fear is going to happen when control goes over to the Chinese. they think the Chinese will try to exercise control of information in Hong Kong the way they do in Beijing, and that that will either strangle Hong Kong or result in subversion of China. You also mention that Hong Kong is already deeply involved with investment in businesses in China. You have a figure of twenty thousand factories or something like that? A. More than that. They have six million workers in the [Pearl] River Delta working for Hong Kong, six million workers. Q. And that's where you say the next big megacity is going to arise. A. Mm-hmm. It is -- it is arising. Q. It is arising. What happens when -- and you say also that it'll be -- you say somewhere that when Hong Kong is incorporated into China, that process will accelerate if anything. A. Mm-hmm. Q. So are you saying that you don't think the Chinese can control the information flow in and out of Hong Kong? A. Well, that's -- that's an interesting point, so let's see one second Hong Kong and then the information, because they are really two -- two problems, linked, but not the same. That's a very good point. I know quite well Hong Kong. I was a visiting professor there twice and have written a book on Hong Kong, so I know the place quite well. The -- first of all, I don't think that there's going to be too much of a problem in political terms, unlike what people think. Business in Hong Kong doesn't care about democracy. They never did, and they are very glad that -- not to have too much democracy. Unions in Hong Kong exist and are relatively strong, and they are already, and they were already dominated by Chinese Communists. That was the main influence in the trade union in Hong Kong, and there were -- one element of stability and social peace in Hong Kong was precisely the Communists not wanting to make trouble in Hong Kong because that was their business school, that was the capitalism school for China to learn about how to operate under capitalism. The mass of workers in Hong Kong are not political at all. They are enjoying the standards of living, they need jobs, they want work and they want the standard of living. The middle class of Hong Kong is the one that wants political democracy, that's -- but this middle class has the possibility to leave Hong Kong, they are all -- many of them have already their green cards, or their passports [in several] countries, and many of them even have their families away, and what they are doing is that they are making so much money, so much money and being so much [invested] in Hong Kong that they are going to exhaust the possibility. I don't think that China is going to be stupid and destroy any of the social fabric of Hong Kong, except the things that will be direct political attacks. But if there's no direct attack to challenge the Chinese authority, and only a minority of people will do so, I don't think China is going to interfere too much into the actual workings of Hong Kong. What they have done, in fact, is transferred the power to the business elite of Hong Kong. And to make Hong Kong to continue, as a big money-making machine, now working entirely for China. China was already one of the major investors in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong is totally tied into the [Guandong Province], the surrounding province, as I told you, six million people working. They had their maquiladora program, in fact. Q. Like in Mexico? A. The maquiladora of Hong Kong are in [Guandong Province] in the rural areas, not in Canton, small towns, where six million industrial workers, manufacturing workers working for Hong Kong manufacturers who then export. Q. Uh-huh. It's exactly the same as Mexico. A. Exactly the same as themaquiladoras, exactly. But the largest program in the world. Maquiladoras at this point employs about half a million Mexican workers; Guandong, six million, at least. Some people say ten, but I would say conservatively six. Now, information. Which -- here is going to be the challenge. Can a society develop exactly as China is doing, and not to be open in terms of information. The Soviet experience shows you cannot. My analysis of the Soviet Union is exactly on that, the information society in Russia was incompatible with the central economy and Soviet economies. China thinks they learned the lesson and they can manage, and they can be high-tech, but not information-open. Problem with this is that information, as you know, is synergistic. You don't let information circulate, information doesn't develop into a creative process. If people are closed out from the world, in terms of what they receive from news and from culture, et cetera, they also will be closed out from the world in terms of technology information, of business, of business skills, et cetera. Q. Well, the Russians weren't for a long time, they had a -- they developed their own technology, they seemed to do quite well in some areas. A. Well. That's a very interesting story. I can give you a little book on this. And that I know quite well because I did research exactly on that, on that issue. Deviating then from Hong Kong. The Russians were doing quite well until 1960, and then in 1960 when the information technology revolution started to accelerate in the United States, that was a different matter. And then, the KGB organized the technological [revolution] of RussiA. How? They went to see their scientists and researchers, and they say, Well, look what the Americans are doing. Can you do as well? Certainly. No problem, but we come from a different angle. They were developing a different kind of computers, but very effective. But it was a different line. And the KGB said, no way. Too risky. Because if you missed it, we are finished. So we are not going to work like this. We are going to be as good or as bad as the Americans. So, what they did is to smuggle computers, IBM mainly computers, and [Fujitsu] computers into Russia, do reverse engineering, and produce the same computers as American. However, they forgot the acceleration and the speed of the technology transformation. So from the moment the computer was really operational in America to the moment that it would be operational in Russia was first three years, then five, then ten, now they are twenty years behind. It's an extraordinary story, in terms of the KBG deciding to play safe and to have the same kind of technology. Q. But who was that? Was that Andropov then or -- who was -- A. This decision was made in the late 1970s, so yes, it was Andropov. Was Andropov. Q. Big mistake. A. It was a historic mistake in that sense. But the other thing was also the inability of the Soviet Union to organize the [next age] of information, with the world, for themselves. For instance, in the Academy of Sciences, to make a photocopy, a photocopy, you needed three signatures of political commissioners, for one photocopy. Actually two for a Russian text and three for a foreign text. Okay? A telex, not even personal computer, who was -- imagine, a telex was in a special room controlled by the KGB. A typewriter could only be used on work with some purpose, could not be a private thing, and people who had typewriters at home were in danger. Had to be declared as a printing machine. So it's -- Q. Right. It is a printing machine. } A. It is a printing machine. So the thing about China now is that they think they can, they can get away with it, and their model is Singapore. Their model is explicitly, they call it the Singapore model. Q. Singapore is repressive. A. Very very repressive, very repressive, then you do it -- you incubate society through consumption, through indoctrination, et cetera, and at the same time you simply control the information and -- well, but that's a little island, and can one point two billion people do the same thing? I did in 1987 a study on technology policy for the Chinese Government in China and they had a very primitive vision of what technology -- they thought technology were machines. Say, we have great scientists. So the only thing -- we need machines. So we just license or buy machines. No, but listen, technology is brains. Okay, we have good brains. No, but technology is brains who learn how to operate the machines and change the machines, and the machines change, and that interaction, that learning process. And for the brain to expand they need to reopen. You cannot be extremely intelligent in relationship to one machine, but not to create any problem and not do anything else about the world. Okay? It goes together. You open minds, you open minds. So in fact they liked the report very much, and they did change some of the technology policy in that regard, for instance, my recommendation was import high-tech companies into China, rather than machines from high-tech companies, because it's by working with high-tech companies in China that you will learn what is a technology. Overall, I -- Q. Did they do that? A. That's what they are trying to do, at this point. Overall. About Hong Kong then. Hong Kong is not a high-tech place. Hong Kong is a business place. Hong Kong was never a leading place in electronics. Was never a leading place in any kind of innovation, and in fact, Hong Kong, interestingly enough, Hong Kong now, right now, in these last months, the Governor of Hong Kong has designed a science and technology park to establish Hong Kong into the information age, because they know that if they only have the old manufacturing lines, plus financial and business services, they may lose out to the technological transformation of their competitors in Singapore and Taiwan, et cetera. So therefore I don't think that Hong Kong is going to have any problem in China because they were not an information technology place and they were not linked to innovation. They are a business center and a traditional manufacturing center using advanced machinery. But using microelectronics but not producing microelectronics. (BREAK) Q. There are two areas that I want to discuss that are kind of theoretical areas. One is the idea of real virtuality. In the information society they talk about virtual reality. You explain in the book that all reality is in a sense virtual because it's mediated by symbols and signs. But in the case of the network society, the media is so pervasive, electronic media is so pervasive that it kind of -- it lends its own reality to the transmission of information. What's the implication of that? Like, so what? A. Well, we live in this world of symbol communication through electronic media, first, so that that is our reality. So that's why I call it real virtuality because it is our reality, I mean, what we watch on television, what we interact in the Net, what we receive in a constant flow of images and so on, this is our reality. It's not something imaginary that happens out of us and then comes to us. No, it is our reality. I'm not saying it's the only reality, but it's our reality, and it's a very powerful layer of our reality, starting with politics. People receive eighty percent of the political information through television. So fundamentally our reality in symbolic terms is being organized in a system of interactive, intercommunicative electronic text. So what is new in this sense is two things, one is the comprehensiveness of this electronic text. Everything that counts is there. Everything is in television, everything is in the Net, everything is in the radio, and every -- and therefore the entire realm of our interests, values, dreams, everything, is captured into this space of electronic text. Second, everything communicates with everything, meaning television, Internet, radio, even newspapers by inference, all these forms, same text. So this constant interaction between different sources of information and communication. And in the future even more because it's potentially interactive. There's technology going interactive already, but it is still not fully developed interactive. Means that most of our communication is captured into this, into this special (inaudible). [Nielsen] of course (inaudible) saying something like "interpersonal communication on the average in America is something like eighteen minutes per person per day, at home," okay? Eighteen minutes. And on average television is open seven and a half hours. It doesn't mean that we watch television seven and a half hours. Q. In the background. A. It's in the background. So what I am saying is that we're not in the world of television. We're in a much more sophisticated world, much more complex world in which other electronic media come in and diversify the possibilities of interaction through electronic communication and because they diversify they become even more [present]. Q. Well, you gave an example in The Network Society of the interaction between Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown. A. That's an example, yeah. Q. But it occurred to me that it wasn't really between Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown, there were actually people there who were creating Murphy Brown, right? Who were -- somebody made the decision. A. I mean, Murphy Brown is even more real than -- Q. Somebody made a decision that it would be -- it would be a saleable product to have an unmarried mother on TV, just as, what, last week, Ellen coming out as gay, right? A. Absolutely. Q. And we have all these stories about [Ellen Degeneris], how she really is gay. As though that mattered, as far as the TV show were concerned. A. Yeah, but the reality is the TV show. It's not what happens behind, because what happened behind is not communicated. Q. No. Not per se. Well, it -- A. So for you and me the reality of the people who are in the TV, I mean, we don't know really Candace Bergen. Q. No. A. We know Murphy Brown. Q. Right. A. So that's our reality. Murphy Brown. Not Candace Bergen. Q. And we -- A. I wish to -- Q. -- even less do we know the people who wrote the script, or the producers. A. Absolutely. Therefore, the only thing we know is the final product that -- Q. But we know that there are those people. A. Yeah. Q. We know that they're there. A. Yeah. Q. What I'm trying to get at is, do you think that this -- this real virtuality in some way gets in the way of interpersonal communication or is -- A. It frames personal -- it frames communication, because yes, you are right, people create personas. However, they create, like a marketing technique. So information act they are also extracting from us our dreams, projections, ideas, et cetera, et cetera, so they only create Murphy Brown because we like Murphy Brown. Q. Right. Right. A. If not it will be killed in a matter of seconds. Q. Right! A. So it's ourselves. Q. Uh-huh. That's what they say. A. It's our selves, to a large extent. Q. We give them what they want. A. To a large extent. It's not necessary that exactly what we want is what we get, but it -- if we really don't want, we don't get it. So we have a level of resistance. But for instance I remember a wonderful article, an old one, from Umberto Eco. It's -- the title says everything. "Is Television Being Perverted by the Audience?" Q. You mention that in here. Right. A. It's a wonderful article, because really -- listen. People are not that stupid; we are not stupid. We are people, by the way. So if we receive a message and we don't like it, it goes away. So okay, maybe some intellectuals in their moments of being real intellectuals don't like this or that, but overall, the market is the market, and the cultural market and the communication, so it's not true that -- and by the way, people are reacting to this on network television. They are going away from network television, once they have alternatives. Network television has declined from ninety percent of the audience in the 1970s to sixty percent of the audience now, and is going down. Ninety to sixty is a big difference. All right? So my basic point is that this real virtuality is the set of messages that are tried on us and to which we [oppose] the least resistance or to which we adhere, this can be said in two different ways, but whatever is finally transmitted, and even more if it is interactive, anywhere we live, our communication by and large is enclosed in the space of electronic communication, not in the space of the media. That's my point. The Internet is very important there because it's something else, it's not only the traditional media. We have a hypertext which is electronically connected. The Internet is becoming increasingly important there. Q. Well, I can see, in a way what you're saying is that the medium does become the message in that all messages have the same frame, they all come at you in the same way. A. No. They are all in this electronic space, but precisely there's not the same message, because it's extremely diversified, and at the same time it is not unidirectional. It's very diversified, very segmented, different audiences get different messages, young people or housewives, okay, they have different -- it's a very segmented audience. We have a global system, and Murdoch transmits Hindi operas in Hindi in India, Chinese for the Chinese audience in Hong Kong and soap operas in Latin America, and every culture gets its due. So that's exactly my point. My point is against the idea of the mass media, we are not in a world of mass media. We are in a world of segmented media that are much more inclusive, much more flexible, and because of that, we are really taken into it. Because everything goes. Anything you want, or I want, we can find it in this world of -- of communication. Therefore it's our reality. Now, what it means that our reality has an electronic medium? Well, it really means that the capacity to code, to encrypt these images and these sounds is a fundamental capacity to do anything in society. If you are not in this space of electronic communication, you don't exist, in our society. And the most clear example is politics, and it is not a minor example. Or in business, if you don't advertise you don't exist. Or for an intellectual, if you want to communicate outside academia, if you are not in the media space, your ideas don't exist. Q. That's always been true. That's always been true. A Well, frankly, it was not always true in politics. Q. That's true. A. It was not always true in politics and in business it depended. There's still industry that didn't need to advertise. When everything -- when defense was so important, they didn't need to advertise. Q. That's true. A. So not really, and I -- in that sense we have become an absolute market, and a market completely taken into this -- into this real virtuality, and this is absolutely critical, that we live in a world of images and sounds, and the way we refer to each other, the dominant patterns and for most people and for the young people for instance, is through these images and sounds. Literary culture in that sense is [finished]. Q. Oh -- you think so? A. I think so. Q. Just -- go down to Cody's. You see all -- I mean, I'm astounded, there's more fiction being written now -- and good fiction -- than there has for twenty, thirty years. It's extraordinary, the number of books that are out there, and pretty good ones too. A. And I hope so, but -- but at the same time, it's -- it's really for a minority. Q. It's small. A. Of people who entrench ourselves as the cultural elite, but we'll only survive if the books go on the Net. Q. I don't know. A. The Net is the last hope of the literary culture, and I think it's a great hope. Q. I'm not so sure, having been doing it for awhile, but, I mean, I don't think you'd want to read very much on the Net. You have to print it out. I have an idea that there's going to be some kind of hybrid distribution system, and that's great, because you can put it up there, and it's there. Anybody anywhere in the world can get at it, if they have the right tools. But most people don't have the right tools, and won't have the right tools for a long while, therefore, why not print out a given node and distribute it, you could do that cheaply. A. Well, I can tell you that this university in ten years plans to have no more books, except for a few of them, more of the books will be on line, no more access to the books. Which I hate. Q. A friend of mine just paid four hundred dollars for a book published by Cristo, you know, about his Sonoma running fence. Were you here when they did that? Cristo is a conceptual artist. He's the guy who wrapped the Reichstag. He also constructed a fence across Sonoma County, sometime in the seventies. In order to do it he had to get all these permits and he had to get a great number of people together and so forth. I mean, it was a big operation; his whole conception was to do that and that was part of the work of art. The fence was extraordinary, I saw it, I mean -- A. I saw one television program of it. Q. Well, the book is out, you can get it now in Cody's in the rare booksection, it's got swatches of the fence in it, it's got copies of every legal paper, it's a beautifully bound book, and it costs four hundred dollars. A. That's what I mean. Books are a luxury item. Q. Okay. Let's talk a little about the people who read Upside, the technology elite, the people who really are in tune with the Network Society, they work in it every day, they love it. It makes their life very rewarding, they're really in a period of extraordinary growth. Do you get any sense that they understand what they're doing, that you have this contact with them? Do you think they have any particular, they have any special role to play socially or do play any special role whether they want to or not? A. Well, first of all I do think that they could -- they could play an extraordinary role, of being the bridge between the new system of production and innovation and the new civilization that we are creating. They are really the critical bridge. Second, I know -- I wouldn't say very well, but I know quite well, we have this Berkeley round table on the international economy, [BRIE] it's usually considered to be the think tank of many Silicon Valley companies, and we know them quite well, in fact, I am on the board of this institute. In Europe I was very close to the European Electronics Association and the Spanish Electronics Association as one of their advisors. Hewlett Packard has published my interviews and my writings, so I am relatively close to the [tgechology sector]. I'm not close at all to what I would call the traditional corporate world, for instance, big banks, not at all. The reason I am close to the high tech business world is because I think the element of cultural innovation that exists there makes them much more prone to ideas that go beyond what technology is. They understand that new business comes from ideas, and ideas have something to do with culture, and culture has something to do with society. So there is a connection there, which I think is absolutely critical. Now, my problem with people in the -- what I call the innovation business is usually their extreme individualism, which to some extent is explicable, because I feel the same as a researcher in the university setting. You know, you are with your ideas -- your innovations, you're driving to something, like an artist at the same time, and for some people it's pure technology, others it's business. So it looks like it's your creation. Well, but it's only to some extent your creation. One day comes when you can be in big trouble, when your company's bought, when your innovation is not taken, when you're forty years old and you're burned out, and then you're burned out after working, you know, fifteen hours a day doing something wonderful, and then you're forty, you still have life to go on, and you don't know anything about life. Because you have to spend your life doing this, and then suddenly one day it stops. Either you're fired or your technology is not considered to be the good one, or you're simply destroyed psychologically. We know there is tremendous stress [on] people. . .So starting from the individualism, the idea of extreme individualism is that nothing is going to happen to you. It's purely naive. Everything is going to happen to everybody. And therefore if the only thing you have in life is this drive for innovation and business and money-making, you are doomed to have a devastating midlife crisis. That's one thing. Second thing is that even in the best of the worlds, we cannot ignore society. And precisely because in this culture people are very innovative, very rich, very intellectual and rich, and very educated. They [have] yet to live in a society in which they have to really change themselves. In Palo Alto, in Los Altos Hills. And not to pay attention to the rest of the world, except to the VIP rooms in the airports and so on and so on. It's a very depressing idea. In fact, these are people full -- I know many of them -- full of ideas, of curiosity, of culture, so they have to live in a protected world, not caring about the crumbling of the ruins of the Roman Empire about them. Q. I think the Roman Empire is crumbling. A. It's -- I think it's crumbling, but -- the new empire is appearing, but only for a global elite. So -- and there's no technological or economic reason for this to happen. It's only the shortsightedness of the way most businesses are conducted today. So if instead of having a purely individualistic world and a short-term profit-maximizing, we open a debate that society is more than markets, a very simple thing, and that culture is more than technology. These two things. Markets plus society, technology plus culture, and they have to interact. And let's forget about the state, because the state in our society is either powerless or corrupt, and nobody (inaudible) the state, and I think we are all right. But this idea that society itself can reconstruct forms of coexistence, expand culture, this has to start -- cannot start from the state anymore, cannot start from the political system, it can't. It cannot start from -- start from the oppressed, deprived people, because they are too busy trying to survive. Has to start from people who are cultivated enough, intelligent enough, which is the technology elite, and that have the technological medium to organize. And the technology medium is the Net. The same way that the labor movement a hundred years ago was organized by whom? Remember? By the printers. The printing artisans were the ones who organized the -- all over, democratic socialists. Q. And now they've gone. A. Intellectuals organized the Communists. The democratic socialists were organized by the printers, who were the workers who were really workers, but were kind of educated, who were able to relate the culture to the masses. So the technical elite, in my opinion, until now, has only -- Q. You're talking about the working people in the technical [sector]. A. I'm talking about the innovators, the designers of chips, the designers of software, the artists of the multimedia gulch in San Francisco. The people who create computer graphics. These people, which by the way, they're organizing a computer graphics guild, interestingly enough, like the printers, these people on the one hand, they have the culture and the innovation and then on the other hand could, just could have the sensitivity to have ideas about how to reconstruct society and not to make a pure system of networks. I don't know, that's -- that's -- [pause]. That's why the technical elite is really central. Q. A lot of them are really fascinated by the process of the technology. A. That -- right. Q. You see that in Wired Magazine. A. You're right. Q. The Net is all -- the Net has no edge, the Net, you know -- A. It's true that the Net has no edge, but you have an edge. Q. You have an edge. Right. A. I mean, and the edge comes on you very quickly, very quickly. You know, you know, the -- the fifty-fifty rule in the Valley, in Silicon Valley. You are over fifty, and you make more than fifty thousand dollars, you're out. Q. Okay. A. The fifty-fifty rule. And you are lucky if you get fifty. Now they -- what everybody thinks, Okay, by the time I am forty, I had made so much money, that I don't care. That's what everybody thinks, but first it is not that frequent, is not fifty percent of the people. And second, well, and how you reach fifty, I mean, in order to make so much money when you are forty or fifty, you -- but I would say forty is more important, because it's really the breaking point. In fact, you have impoverished yourself of everything else, which is not the one-dimensional technological [drive]. And my point is not only is sad for society and for you, personally, but is sad for the technology itself. Because much of the innovation comes from creative ideas, about the association of different things, about culture, about music, I mean, Steve Wozniak was at the same time a great fan of music and then -- and (inaudible), and put a lot of money in this, a lot of money, but he didn't care, so I think the serendipity of this cultural -- culture-technology connection is a critical aspect. So I understand why people work fifteen hours a day on the technology, I do it on my own technology. However, I think that the -- the idea that this technical elite is socially illiterate, or intellectually beyond the technology first is not true, and -- but second, if they don't express these ideas of cultural and social innovation, then ultimately they will be burned out as a group, and as individuals. So I have great hopes for this group, but only because -- Q. Acting as a technical elite? or -- A. Acting as a cultural elite. Q. Cultural elite. Because you mention in Volume 2 there are areas of what you call communal groups that can take political action, environmental people (inaudible), people operating on levels that are not local, but they are -- they're kind of issue-oriented. A. Well, environmentalists in that sense are the new international. Environmentalists are (inaudible) local on the one hand, because they defend the specific issues at the local level, but connected throughout the world. Connected throughout the world. I mean, and they really use technology, both to define the issues on which they have to fight, and to communicate these issues and to build [assistance]. Greenpeace is an international movement and it's increasingly organized from the Net. So I do think that there is some hope for this. Now, then there's another matter, which is a different one, which is how new social movements [try] to resist the exploitation or the oppression, et cetera, are becoming culturally literate -- technically literate, and starting to use the Net, from the American militia to the Zapatistas, to all kind of movements that are now in the Net. So the Net is not going to be an uncontested space. It's going to be used by all kind of people, all kind of group. But that's a different matter. The main matter I was trying to make, the technical elite has the cultural potential to not only produce technology but to produce culture, and this is absolutely essential if we don't want to live in a society that is [disintegrated] and individual. Q. A lot of the culture that they're producing is kind of adolescent stuff, you know, they're -- A. I agree with you. Q. -- you know, games, juvenile games and -- A. I agree with you. Q. They haven't really gotten into it yet -- there has been material that's quite sophisticated, but it doesn't sell. A. I absolutely agree with you. Q. But beyond actually creating multimedia that people would buy, you're talking about being social activists in their own communities. A. Well, but not only that, I'm, I'm -- acting on real issues of society, I mean, stopping political corruption, for instance, so diffusing information in the Net. Or organizing solidarity campaigns on the specific issues that are important, issue-oriented, [the actions]. Well, for instance, interestingly enough, when the economic interests of the industry were at the stake, the American electronic companies have been decisive in making a more humane and more intelligent immigration laws in America. We thought -- we thought that xenophobia -- without electronic business companies, xenophobia would have been much more important in America. It's still substantial, but it would have been even worse without what the electronic companies were doing on behalf of foreign workers, because they know the importance of minds and international minds. So I think you -- we are both right. You are right, in terms of what is the current situation, which is the naivete and low cultural level of people who otherwise are technological innovators, very educated, very intelligent, and potentially generators of culture, and they don't. They don't. One of my guesses is that they don't because they are burnt out when they finish their work. So my hope is that enough intelligence is developed within this group to start balancing life a little bit more, and not only for themselves but for society, and that the relationship between technological change, cultural change and social change is more balanced. Otherwise again, if we have tremendously-powerful technological tools, in the hands of not very intelligent society, and not very culturally developed society, we're going to make very bad things with these tools. And making money, yes, but once you've made money, you have to spend it, all right? And it's only, you know, some, a limit to how many women or men you can have, how many banquets you can eat every day, how many hours of flight to visit every possible country in the world you can do, I mean, traditional consumption is meaningless. Spiritual consumption is the new frontier, and spiritualism requires an opening of the mind. And you cannot open the mind if you are only technologically working in the same program every day. So that's -- that balance is what I'm calling for. [Second batch of tapes, Tape 1, Side A] Q. Interestingly enough, the other night, and the night after we talked, I was in San Francisco, I went to a meeting of an industry group, and they had a panel on what -- "The Next Twenty Years," it was called. And one of the people there Mike Dertouzos, who is head of the MIT computer science lab. He had this interesting idea as to what you could see in the next twenty years. He said, there's a problem with medical care in the United States. He said, you could have a kiosk in Market Street [in San Francisco], and there could be a doctor in Sri Lanka, let's say, and the doctor in Sri Lanka makes twenty dollars a day. It would be economically advantageous to have him consult with you, you'd have to have a nurse here or something, but they could consult with this homeless person who couldn't get medical care in the United States on the Net. So I talked to him afterward, and I asked him if I could -- you know, if he would entertain some questions on this whole idea, and he said he would, so I sent him an e-mail and I asked him, you know, it sounds to me like the same issue we have about the global economy, that Sri Lanka probably doesn't have enough doctors. The United States has too many doctors. The issue is not can you treat this guy on Market Street, the issue is the distribution of medical care in the United States! A. That's the bottom line. Q. So why, you know -- A. That's why I -- I usually don't like futurologists, because they are always trying to find the technical fix to things that are much more complicated than -- much more simple and much more complicated to solve then technology. Q. Yeah. It just sounded to me like such a wacky idea, in a way, and yet, he said, Well, you know, you could do it. A. It's not going to work for obvious social and political reasons. That's why futurologists keep all the time saying these things. You can do this technologically. So what? Society doesn't work technologically. Technology is used and reused and adapted by society. Q. You make that point in the book. I thought, Well, what would it take to put that kiosk on Market Street, even assuming that, you know, forget whether it's worth doing or not. What -- A. Well, first of all, before any other political or social debate, the American Medical Association would sue for unfair competition. Q. Yeah, exactly. A. That's it! Q. Interestingly enough, though, he also came up with an idea very similar to one that you have in Volume II about work centers. He thought that would be a good idea, because he was concerned about access, and -- A. Oh, this is happening, that -- it's not my idea, it's just -- I observe that it's happening. Q. Where? A. It's in -- in Southern California. There are -- Q. Really? A. I cited (inaudible). Yeah. Yeah. There are (inaudible) going on. And in the reference I gave -- I took it from there. I'm very very serious about not proposing anything that I have not documented that is happening somewhere. And it's not my proposal. I'm saying, It looks like it's going this way, not -- not -- BREAK Q. You write in English. A. Before I used to write in French. Q. I wondered about that. English is what, your third language? A. No, I would say at this point it's my second, and professionally speaking, it's ninety percent of what I -- Q. It's ninety percent of what you do, but as far as your personal history. A. My personal history, it's a third language. Q. Uh-huh. Because your English is really good. I don't mean, I don't mean just it's competent, I mean I like the way that you write. A. I made a special effort to do this, because I didn't use to do that, you know? I was so interested with ideas that -- you read my other books, and -- Q. I got The Informational Society. A. The Informational Society is all right, but it's not the same literary quality. Q. I know. This is very powerful. That's what first grabbed me about this book, that you were really making solid --| A. And it's not really edited. It's edited for copy-editing, but it's not that I hire an editor to revise the book. Beause I want to keep my personal style. Q. Well, let's start with what I mentioned to you in that e-mail. You know, I went back to the the epigraph to Volume I. You have a thread here that links all the rest. When did you see that you had a thread that links all the rest? When did that occur to you? A. Yeah, in biographical terms, I think what was very important is the -- my change from Paris to Berkeley, really, was very important. Because I arrived in Berkeley in 1979 full of French theoretical ideas about social change, society, political economy, I had been working on economic crisis in America, I had just published a book on America in English, The Economic Crisis in American Society. I had finished this book that was published in 1980. So I had all these ideas from a European perspective about political economies, society, social reform, ideology, politics, and suddenly the impact of moving to California in the late 1970s, I discovered the technology -- the information technology revolution by myself, not in everyday life, but I went to Silicon Valley, I talked to people there, I started to do some research, in fact, some of my students did the first research on Silicon Valley. So Silicon Valley in that sense propelled my interest. Q. Silicon Valley was already well along by then, but that's -- right. So you could see it. A. Yes. But let's say that -- we knew in Europe of course about Silicon Valley and about electronics and all these matters, but I could not sense it. I'm a sociologist, which means that I have to feel things to really start thinking more theoretical, analytical, so anyway, it is the combination of my interests on political economy and social change that came from my career previously, with the observation of the blossoming of the information technology revolution that was in the mid-seventies. Q. The PCs were just beginning to happen. A. Exactly. Exactly. Seventy-nine was when you really could see the PC revolution started, when you could start perceiving what would become the Internet later on. Q. EIES was there, Arpanet was there. A. And it was starting and all the -- I mean, of course the microelectronics revolution had already happened, but the diffusion of the power of information technology into all kind of applications into people, et cetera, was exploding at that point. So that -- that intuition of how important this technology change was really took me. But on the other hand I reacted very strongly against all kind of prophets of technology that -- like [Toeffler], who know nothing about society and economy and et cetera, et cetera, and who proposed what is going to be on the basis of some very primitive extrapolation of technological uses. So I tried to say at the same time two things. Against most people in the social sciences, I was trying to say technology's extremely important. This technological change is dividing human history, as the prophets of technology were saying. But on the other hand, I was saying, Well, but, which are the consequences of this technology. Change is open to all kinds of interactions, and depends on all kinds of economic, political and cultural conditions, and it will be different in different cultures and in different societies. And frankly, very stubbornly out of this I designed in my mind a research project that would be global, and would analyze this transformation in the entire growth, looking from the United States, from Western Europe, from Latin America that I knew very well, from Russia, and from the Asian Pacific that I didn't know at all. And I decided I will know it, and then I started a system series of studies on (inaudible) -- Q. You started to go there. A. -- and the Asian Pacific for the next ten years. That was to write the book. Q. Uh-huh. That's what you meant when you said you started thinking about this book in '83. A. Uh-huh. I mean, the book is started in my mind, was there in 1984. Q. So by that time you had already been -- you had already taught in Latin America and Mexico -- A. Oh, yes. All over the place. Many times in Chile, several times in Mexico, in Brazil, in Venezuela, and I had traveled all over the Latin American places. Q. And then you also went to Asia a lot, though, didn't you, to -- A. Yes, but starting then, 1983, I -- the point is that I -- I already then, and now, I receive invitations all the time. But I only take -- some people take the invitation for tourist purposes. I only take invitations in relationship to the work I was doing, so until then I had been concentrating on Western Europe, Latin America, and saying no to the Asian Pacific. Starting in 1983, I started to systematically accept the invitations to Asia Pacific, so I was visiting professor in Hong Kong in '93, and '97, I was a visiting professor in Singapore in '87 and '89, and in Taiwan in '89, and in Japan I was several times and a long time in 1995, so. I build up and -- Q. Do you have any Asian languages? A. No. That's really too much. I speak -- I speak six languages including Catalan -- Q. Uh-huh. Do you speak Russian? A. No. Russian, well, Russian, my wife is Russian. Q. Right. I know. A. And therefore I've always had a privileged intermediary. Now I'm learning Russian. I didn't have the time while writing this book to learn a new language. But what I always did in China and Japan and Korea, et cetera, is I always had very good colleagues, and in fact good conditions in the sense that they -- some institutions always hire excellent research assistants from the country who were speaking English and Japanese, and some Chinese, to work with me. So all my work always was together with a team of people who would feed me information, who would be my bridges with this society, including, including reading huge amounts of material, books, et cetera, in Chinese or Japanese, that then we would -- Q. And reporting on it for you? A. -- and reporting -- and me discussing and taking notes. So their assistant would read the book -- and I would ask questions, and we would discuss about the book for two or three days, so it was like [reading] the book. But of course, it involves a huge amount of work, but I had the impression that I know at least some of the (inaudible). Q. It really comes through, I mean, that's -- that's one of the impressive things about the book is that every place I go I see all this local research, it's, I mean, that's -- A. And I have been there. Q. Yeah. A. You see, in China, for instance, in 1987, I was several months with doing -- with a research grant in relationship with the Chinese Government, designing -- doing a study on the technological organization of China, and the problems and the obstacles, and I interviewed international companies there, and Chinese officials all over the place, so I -- and then other visits, but this, for instance, was a big moment in which I understood a lot about China. Q. I want to get into some more of your personal life and how you came to do the book, and so can we like go back a little? You -- you grew up in Barcelona, you said that you came to Paris as a refugee? A. Yeah. When I was twenty years old. Yeah, what happened, you should remember at that point and between 1939 and 1975 was the dictatorship of Franco in Spain. Q. I remember. A. So I grew up, I was born in '42, so I grew up after the Civil War, and I -- and when I went into university, I was much more interested in literary matters, I was doing theater and writing, et cetera, had several theater prizes. It was impossible. We always ended up in prison, as soon as you would have a theater play that was somewhat critical of something, but even classic theater, or something perverse like I remember we ended up in prison because I was -- I was the director of the university theater and we played Caligula of Albert Camus, and because the main persona was a gay person, Caligula was a gay emperor, we ended up for -- for defense and for apology of homosexuality, so we got in prison. So at one point it became impossible. So then with other students we became very active in organizing the anti-fascist student movement, at the moment when there was practically no opposition in Spain, it was 1960, when I was eighteen years old. So by 1962 I was president of the Student Association of Barcelona, the University of Barcelona, and then at one point the dictatorship decided to eliminate the entire student association and they arrested many people and then I have to escape to France to avoid torture and jail, so I was a political refugee at the age of twenty. And then I pursued my studies in France, I finished law, economics, and a doctor of sociology, and then I was appointed Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris at the age of 24, I was actually the youngest professor. Q. That's where you met Alain Tourraine, and -- A. Alain Tourraine was my director, the director of my Ph.D. dissertation, at the University of Paris, and he in fact was my intellectual father, my main direct intellectual influence is from Alain Tourraine, who is considered the best French sociologist and one of the two or three main theoretical sociologists in the world today. He's seventy-two years old now. Q. What's he doing? A. He's retired, but he's still writing one book every year and traveling around the world and receiving doctorates (inaudible) from here and there (inaudible) writing in the French newspapers almost every day and he's -- he's really extremely extremely intelligent and active and important in the world, and is one of the -- I would say two or three -- two or three leading social scientists in the world, with [inaudible] in Germany and Giddens in England. Q. So you were then in Paris in '68. A. Exactly. I was appointed Assistant Professor of the University of Paris at the age of twenty-four, as I told, in '66, and I was appointed at the first -- the new campus of the University of Paris that was created in Nanterre. So I was Assistant Professor in the sociology department there, and I would say that I saw the '68 movement starting because not only -- it started in my campus, in my department, and literally in my classroom! Because my -- one of my students was Daniel Cohn-Bendit who was a leader of the rebellion, and literally the movement started from my classroom, not incited by me. But the students in my classroom took the chairs and the tables of the -- and threw it through the window on the police that was entering the campus, and that's how the movement started. So I saw it start very much. The '68 movement was a great moment, great moment in my life and I think great moment in the life of the world really. I would say it was a little bit like Berkeley, in 1964. It had a different connotation in Europe because it was immediately linked to workers' strikes and general strikes and political left, and with socialists and communists, but the movement in itself was a libertarian movement. Q. You mentioned that. A. It was absolutely a libertarian movement, on defense of sexual freedom, on defense of free expression in the university, free political expression. In fact Cohn-Bendit, who was the leader, was an anarchist, was a member of a group of anarchists. So then the left-wing parties and the unions tried to use the explosion that the movement had created for other political purposes. But the movement in fact never never merged with the traditional left. And I remember when the students in [Nanterre were after a day of demonstrations and clashing with the police were returning to the university in the evening. The university was occupied by the students with red flags all over, but red flags had nothing to do with communism. Communist students were there, at the door of the university, giving their leaflets saying, You are adventurist provocateurs. So one day students, tired of battling the police the whole day and then coming back home, that is, to the university campus and being admonished as provocateurs by the communist students, they beat them up. They decided that that's enough. So there was in fact a very strong anticommunist movement at the same time. So that's the one thing that people don't realize, that although the left, to cover, was -- in fact, the Communist left was never never close to the '68 movement, then the ideas of the '68 movement spread all over the world, very very quickly. And in a very different form they became key ideas that later on had been accepted, and in fact in France the Socialist Party was repealed on the basis of these ideas, Socialist Party had practically disappeared. It was completely (inaudible). Q. On the basis of what idea? A. On the ideas of freedom, personal expression, experimentation, women's equality, human rights, all kind of new ideas that -- environmentalism, grass-roots democracy, participation, citizen participation, these ideas were much more important than the traditional left ideas that were not challenged, like, you know, wages, jobs, equality. It's not that no one was challenging all that, but it was adding a totally new layer, which is much closer to the California movement. Q. But they apparently weren't able to incorporate that successfully, then, the Socialists. A. Well, not entirely, certainly not. Certainly not. But the ideology of the Socialist Party in France completely changed, and became a mixture of traditional welfare state workers rights ideas, with new ideas about the role of women, the role of ecology, the role of municipal government, citizen participation, et cetera, this -- this merger is what allowed finally the Socialists to conquer power in France in 1981, then after that they became completely corrupt. That's another problem. Q. Interesting results of the election. A. Well, but at the same time it's -- they are in fact it's a negative reaction against globalization. Q. Well, you know, that's -- it is skipping ahead a little bit. That's what it seems to be, right? A. Absolutely. Q. Can you -- since we're talking about France, can you talk a little bit about that in terms of what you've written here. You know, it does seem to be a -- A. Absolutely. Q. -- rejection of a -- because the idea of the globalist was, Well, we've got to cut back on the welfare state. A. Absolutely. Q. In order to compete in the global market, right? A. Well, you see, the whole process of European unification is being presented in France, in Germany, and in Spain, everywhere, as, well, in order to be competitive in the global economy we have to sacrifice and we have to reduce budget deficit, to reduce inflation, to establish microeconomic parameters that would be equivalent to those in the United States or in Japan, and equivalent to those that the International Monetary Fund tries to impose all over the world. The entire world has to be by the criteria of the International Monetary Fund. And people frankly don't understand why it should be so, why they have to die for inflation, to control inflation, I mean, to control -- to go from three percent, from four or five percent to two percent inflation, why? I mean, what is this dramatic -- they had been living with three to five percent inflation for thirty years and enjoying the highest standards of living in the world. Now, what's happening is, therefore, is that European governments and European business is imposing a one-sided process of European unification, in which sacrifices have to be imposed on behalf of competitiveness, but abstract competitiveness, which does not translate in improvement of living condition for most people. Q. They're trying to control the currency; isn't that what that's -- A. No. They're trying to unify the currency, but to unify the currency they have to convert all the criteria of all the countries in terms of these basic microeconomic parameters. But, more than that, they are trying to make these microeconomic parameters compatible with the world microeconomic parameters, and particularly with the United States. Well, what is impossible is at the same time to have the same economic conditions in the United States but not the same flexibility in jobs, not the same constraint on wages, not the same inequality, not the same social tensions linked to the lack of health and public education in the United States. You cannot have both ways, you see? And that's what's happening in Europe. Business and governments want to be as competitive as the United States, as Japan, as the Asian countries, et cetera. And people say, Well, we want to be competitive, but, keeping our welfare state, keeping our wages, keeping our social equality, keeping the total protection of jobs, and both things are incompatible. Q. Are they? A. Absolutely, I mean, we think the current economy, we think the current economic, you cannot work in a unified economy in which -- in which you have to compete with other companies in the global market, and then have much higher social cost, job security, no job flexibility, much higher wages, subsidized health and public education of good quality for everybody, I mean, unless Americans are absolutely stupid, and Europeans are geniuses, that -- by working a little bit they can have all this and yet compete, you are creating conditions from competitiveness on the production side, that are equal to everybody. You cannot have a total difference in flexibility of labor, social protection and social cost on the other hand. It doesn't add up, you see? Q. Yes, I do, but are you saying then that that these countermeasures are like doomed, they can't succeed because the economy is going to be the way it is, the welfare state will have to go away, despite -- A. It is going away. It is going away. Q. It is going away. A. It is going away, and the only thing that Europe could do something different, and I think is going to happen, is that not to integrate into the global economy, not to integrate in (inaudible). Q. How do they do that? I mean -- A. That's exactly the difficulty. But you see, that's exactly what the debate is going on in Europe, business and government at this point in Europe are saying, We must integrate into the global economy, first integrate Europe so that we'll have a stronger basis, but at the same time Europe has to be globally integrated, and following the same criteria. And people are saying, No. I want globalization, but, without changing all the good conditions of living we have been enjoying for the last twenty-five, thirty years, I don't want to sacrifice this. And if I have to sacrifice, explain why I have to go into the global economy. So, and see, these are democratic countries. You are going to see more and more tremendous reaction -- tremendous reaction against economic unification and against globalization. My point is unless there is a global movement that changes the conditions everywhere, you cannot have the kind of labor market flexibility and strong social welfare state that you have in the United States or in East Asian countries, and, and at the same time being integrated in the same condition as the European economy. Because what's happening in Europe, concretely speaking, is that companies under the current conditions of labor legislation and welfare state in the European economy, they simply invest in the Asia or in the United States. And there's massive unemployment in Europe. Q. That's true, but then -- but they do have their little social net. A. They have -- which creates even a higher problem. Q. Right. There's twenty-five percent unemployment in some of the places in Europe, right? A. In Spain. In Spain. Q. I was just in East Germany. They had a terrible -- A. In East Germany it's [fifty percent], yeah. Q. Yeah. A. But overall in the European Union it's almost thirteen percent. Q. Thirteen percent. Uh-huh. A. And it's, it's going up, and it's concentrated among the youth, you see, among the youth is thirty percent. So that's -- that's the problem. The process of globalization creates conditions of interdependence that makes very difficult for any country or even a continent to play by different rules. That's the fundamental European dilemma. So you are going to see more and more reactions from European public opinion, voting against the governments who propose globalization regardless of the political orientation of the government, and I'm not sure at all that the process of unification is not going to be delayed. It is a serious possibility that the process will be delayed. Q. You show a lot of doubt about that and you indicate that there's some kind of networking state that's forming with regional organizations connecting to one another and to have just as much influence as state governments connecting to one another and -- A. Yes, well -- Q. -- and that that is kind of an ad hoc, but not a real political union. It's not a political union, right? It's a network structure. A. Well, no, but that's a different point. What I was referring now is the reaction of the public opinion and the voters against the process of unification that implies to accept the conditions of the global economy and therefore the dismantlement of the welfare state, labor flexibility, et cetera. A different matter is a concept of the network state, which is a new kind of state that is emerging in Europe, in which political decisions are shared by European institutions, national governments independently, national governments together, regional governments and local governments, and everybody negotiating with everybody, and what I am proposing that maybe this is the kind of political institution that corresponds to the network society and the global economy. Q. That's -- i was wondering if you had that in mind when you were writing in Volume Two that the increase in power of local governments was an important trend that you were seeing. A. Absolutely. Q. And that's the reason, because they can act now in these global networks in the same way that -- A. Absolutely. But I don't use it -- the term power. (Inaudible) influence. Q. Influence. A. Because my point is precisely that the local governments have not much power but neither national governments do, and both are influential, and both are negotiating with each other, with economic forces, with international institutions, and it's these network decision-making agents that is really the operating political unit. Q. Now you said a few minutes ago that because these countries are democracies, they're going to be able to fight against this process of globalization. Other places in the world, not necessarily democracies, not able to fight so well, right? I mean, you talk about Mexico as being totally corrupt and not responsive to people. Same thing in the Soviet Union or -- pardon me -- Russia. A. Absolutely, but, you see, I do think that people all over the world are opposing globalization. I mean, that's one thing that clearly belies this thesis about the end of history, and the end of ideologies, et cetera, et cetera. Globalization per se is not a bad phenomenon, I mean, the idea that we can communicate with everybody, that we can sell and buy, from everywhere, that we can all be together, that's a wonderful ideal, you see, in fact, it's a humanistic, universal ideal. However, what globalization means for a large proportion of the human kind is that they are being disenfranchised politically, impoverished economically, they have no control over investment, they -- they don't have the proper skills, they are bypassed by global flows of capital, and they can never negotiate with their employees, because their employees keep shifting places as much as they want, or outsourcing, or bringing workers or -- or supplies from anywhere else, so. And people are reacting. They are reacting in Mexico. Q. Guerrero, they had an armed clash. A. Well, the Zapatistas. Q. Yeah. The Zapatistas too. A. The Zapatistas is a movement explicitly against globalization. Then there's another guerrilla movement in Mexico, which is much less clear who they are, and frankly I don't know at this time. Q. Have you had any direct contact with Zapatistas? A. Not with themselves directly, but with many people who know them very well, including their solidarity committees, and in fact one of my best friends in Mexico is the woman who was the government representative in the negotiations with the Zapatistas, but she was so understanding of some of the things that the Zapatistas were saying that she was dismissed. And it was the deputy of Camacho. So the Zapatistas in Mexico are fighting effectively against globalization, and proposing a control (inaudible). There's also fights against globalization in democracies, like in the United States. I certainly don't share their views, but what the American Militia and the so-called Patriots Movement in the United States are doing and there are about five million people that are more or less related in very loose form to this movement, and they are opposing, explicitly, the disenfranchisement of America by global flows, by the United Nations, by global corporate capitalism. They're fighting globalization, and even the campaign of another person that I am not in great sympathy for him, Pat Buchanan. Pat Buchanan was -- and his campaign was quite successful until the Republican establishment made a deal with the Christian Coalition, to stop Pat Buchanan --was explicitly almost word by word the same kind of thing that the French extreme right has been saying in the elections, and even some of the -- part of the French, or, or German or Spanish left are saying vis a vis globalization. So there's tremendous backlash, and the process of globalization is going to trigger not only social inequality, but is (inaudible) social struggles at a heightened level of conflict. Q. That raises a point that I wanted to talk about. Could we separate these movements, these militias from other social movements that are somewhat broader-based that you call projects, such as environmentalism and feminism, you don't see them on the same level as responses. Or do you? Because in the conclusion to Volume 3, you talk about information technology, the new global economy and the social movements as being mutually -- being independent. I thought I picked up in earlier volumes, that you felt that the social movements arose as reactions to what had happened to the first -- as reactions to the global economy and the new -- A. That's a very good point. Let me then try to clarify a little bit. You're putting everything in a political matter. There could be some inconsistency there. One thing is what I call the genesis of the network society and of the new world we are living in. Another is, one, it has been constituted how it works and which reactions are triggered by this new kind of society we are in. So in the process of formation, and how it was formed, how this network society was formed, what I argue is there were three independent processes that came together in the last twenty years, and that started to interact with each other: the information technology revolution, the reorganization of capitalism and statism, both, except that the [statists] collapsed, it couldn't master its reorganization. And the emergence of the cultural-social movement, by cultural meaning social movements that are trying to change the values of society rather than to seize power or propose their economic interest, movements focused on values and on cultural transformation. These three trends in my opinion, together through their interaction, but separate in their existence and their origin, were the ones that came together into the constitution, into the formation of the network society. Now. Once the network society was fully formed, let's say to simplify things, in the early 1990s, very recently, when it was really constituted, when capital became truly global, when information technology exploded, the Internet is starting to diffuse massively, et cetera, et cetera, then this new social and economic form is triggering reactions. Q. Okay. A. And these reactions are reactions both against globalization and against some of the social movements that emerge from the 1970s, particularly the feminist movement. So these reactions are, some of them, is what we talk about movements, explicitly against globalization, but there are some more fundamental, more important reactions, which are religious fundamentalism, nationalism, racism, but religious fundamentalism, nationalism, I would say are the two most important reactions [on] the world, and these are both against globalization and against the -- what I call the crisis of patriarchialism, the idea that the patriarchial family has been called into question. Therefore, if today, after saying all this we look at which are the powerful social movements in the world, we see two kinds of social movements, one that I call reactive and one that I call the proactive. And the reactive movements are the movements rejecting this new society, but usually on the basis of reconstructing some lost ideal, some primitive state, which probably never existed, but people entrench themselves in their communities, in their natures, in their values and in their religion, and say, I don't want any of this. I believe in God, I believe in my family, I believe in my community, I'm going to fight it all. And in a less extreme form is what the European unions are doing; I want my welfare state, don't talk to me about globalization. I don't want more immigrant workers. I want my salary, my privileges, my Europe -- in fact, my France. If you can do it with Europe without bothering me, that's all right. So these are reactive movements of different kinds, and then the proactive movements, which are of several kinds, but fundamental ones, are feminism and environmentalism, which come directly from the 1960s, late 1960s movements, and had been reinforced. Q. I guess I'd say when feminism really got its modern kick, right? A. Yeah, I mean, I -- feminist ideas had been around for a long time, but feminists as a mass movement, as a movement in which many women, even those who don't call themselves feminists, recognize the idea that women are equal to men, et cetera, et cetera. This is from the last twenty, twenty-five years, on a massive scale. Q. I know, my mother couldn't stand it! A. In fact, you and I are part of the transition generation, the generation that went through the transformation of our life by the movement. And as you can see in the data I show on the American family, it's -- the traditional patriarchial family is a tiny minority, I mean, at this point only about twenty-three percent of American households correspond to the traditional image of a married couple with children, and (inaudible), a married couple in first marriage with their biological children becomes insignificant. It's about ten percent. BREAK Q. Let's talk a little bit about your experiences in Russia. When did you start going there? A. '84. Q. Eighty -- ah. Okay. So that was Breshnev still in power? A. In '84 it was Chernenko. Andropov had already died, and Gorbachev had lost the first battle of succession, and Chernenko was kind of being put by the apparatchiks of the party to stop the reform that Andropov had started and Gorbachev wanted to continue. Q. And how did you happen to go there? What was -- A. Well, I was invited there by the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, and I was invited to Siberia, because the -- Khrushchev created in the fifties in the virgin lands a first-class science town, called Academgorodok, which was and is a first-class scientific research center, mainly on nuclear physics and computers and everything, but in all kind of thinking. And there was an institute of economics that included sociology as well, very good, led by Begin who became later on the leading economist advising Gorbachev on perestroika; and the sociology department was led by Tatiana Sovslavskaya, who was Gorbachev's advisor also for the perestroika In fact, this institute created the economic and sociological ideas of perestroika. So this institute invited me before Gorbachev, in 1984, when they were already working with Gorbachev, and the person who organized that meeting was and is a fantastic woman with whom I fell in love completely, and is today my wife. So we met there, in Siberia, and -- but of course to finally have our life together we --it was a long and complicated process. We had to destroy the Soviet Union first! Otherwise, she could never get out over there. No, she was a very loyal Russian and -- Q. Is she a sociologist as well? A. She -- no, in fact, she's a linguist, but she was the person responsible for the international relations of the Academy of Sciences. She was the director of international relations of the academy. So that's -- that's how -- and then after -- after that I kept going to Russia. Q. How long was it before you got married? A. Well, she could only come finally to this country in 1993. Q. Oh. A. So, so it's only 1993 we could get married. Q. And you now have a daughter, is that -- A. No, she has a daughter and I have a daughter but from previous marriages in both cases. My daughter lives in Italy, is married and lives in Italy, and her daughter lives still in Siberia. Q. You were previously married? A. I was previously married, yeah. My first wife was Spanish. But we divorced very early. It wasn't a nice relationship, but you see, we married when I was twenty and she was eighteen, and we had a baby at the age of, me, twenty-one. Q. When you were in Paris. A. In Paris, in exile. So -- the marriage lasted about five years and then we separated on very nice, friendly terms. My daughter was in between us, and -- I have a wonderful relationship with my daughter. She's an environmental economist. She's a researcher in the European Union Research Center in Italy. Anyway, about Russia, then I kept going there, and doing work and I obtained some research funds to do some analysis of technological change in Russia, I -- in fact the first research on Russian -- on the Russian Silicon Valley. I did it in 1990 and 1992, on the microelectronic and telecommunication companies of Russia, and then also another research on the process of political transition in Russia. And through my work there, I knew a number of people who were involved in the democratic movement, at the moment when Gorbachev was trying to do his perestroika, but still trying to keep control as Communist Party, and he was really convinced that he could make the Communist Party into a party that would control the process, open up a little bit. Q. What the Chinese are trying to do now, huh? A. Yeah. But, well, I -- in -- Q. But different -- I understand, different. A. I would say that Gorbachev would open more than the Chinese are trying to do. But the fundamental idea that the Communist Party should be the leader of the reform process, and keep control of the situation, and the fundamental idea that technology and economics should be reformed, first of all. That was Gorbachev's idea, but then he could not. He had to open up politically, which he didn't want originally, and then when he opened up he lost control. During this process, I was there, let's say during the period 1990-1993, which was the most intense period of my research in Russia, I was there at least every two months, and sometimes for one month, sometimes for a week, and not only in Moscow, in Moscow, Leningrad, and in Siberia. Q. All the time, in the context of your plan, right? A. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So during this period I met with Gennadi Burbulis. Burbulis was the right arm of Yeltsin, and the period when Yeltsin had become a leader in the Parliament, in the Russian Parliament, already expelled from the Communist Party, and trying to mount a democratic opposition to Gorbachev. Ganady Burbulis was an intellectual, was a professor of philosophy, was really his right arm, and his political strategist. He was the Machiavelli of Russian democratic politics. He cooked up everything and I would say he probably was the man who thought and planned the destruction of the Soviet Union. Q. Really. A. Yeah. He thought that was the only way to get rid of the Communist state, was to [blot] the Communist state at the top, that was the Soviet state, while keeping the states in the republics that were much more penetrated by the democratic movement. So Burbulis in April '91 asked me to organize a research committee, sorry, not a research committee, an advisory committee, because they were thinking already at one point they would seize power in Russia. They didn't think they could control power in the Soviet Union. But they were trying to think about transforming from the Russia Federation Government, transform in Russia, transform the conditions. So he said, Well, we want to organize an economic committee of advisors that ultimately was led by Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard University, and became very famous, but in parallel we want to organize a committee of leading social scientists that would advise us on the social and political problems of the transition. And they asked me if I wanted to do it and I said, Yes, I would do it, I was interested, on the condition of not being paid and -- Q. Really. I was just going to ask you that. What did they pay you for that? A. Of not being paid. That's one of my basic conditions for any government, any advisory role, because I want to be absolutely independent, and I don't see how you can be independent while being on the payroll. So I had advised several governments, et cetera, never being paid, never once cent. Q. Is that right? A. I can do some consulting for international organizations, and sometimes I did for some business firms for a specific purpose, but anything that is a major political problem, for a government or technology policy for a government is always, always on the basis of my independence. Q. Fantastic. A. And in particular in this case was critical, because then with this legitimacy I can go to people who respect me at a very high level. So I organized a committee that was formed, a small committee. Q. Right. Steven Cohen was on that -- A. Was formed -- well, first of all, by Fernando Cardozo. Q. Cardozo was on it. A. At that time he was senator, but was (inaudible) political scientist, and was not -- today is president of Brazil, but at that point he was not [in with] the government, otherwise he could not have accepted. [Alain Tourraine], as I told you, (inaudible), [Martin Conroy], the dean of the Education School at Stanford, because they wanted someone in education. And then originally I asked to my old colleague, Laura Tyson. Q. Laura Tyson. A. And she accepted, but then at the last, very last minute she became very involved, as we know now, in the Clinton campaign, et cetera, so she couldn't do it, and then the Director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the National Economy, [Steve Cohen], who was colleague with her, came instead, so these five people committed, (inaudible) high calibre, I was the chair of the committee. Then in the middle of all this -- Q. What year are we now? A. '91. Q. '91. Okay. A. In the middle of all this the coup, August '91 arrives, then -- then the scenes with the White House in Moscow, surrounded by the troops and Yeltsin seizes power, and then -- well, I thought, well, with all this, Burbulis certainly has forgotten the whole idea, but no no. As soon as they were in power I again [reached them] through my contacts in Moscow, they said, Well, now we are really -- we now really need this committee. So, starting in January, I contacted all of my friends on this committee, they decided that we could work, and starting in January we worked on some advisory goal with -- I went to Moscow myself every two months. I met first in January, in early January '92, in the prime minister's office. It was Yeltsin and then [Yegor] Gaidar, and Burbulis on the same level. Burbulis for political affairs, Gaidar for economic affairs. So I met with Gaidar in January '92, in his office in Moscow, and we decided to go ahead with the committee. We did a lot of work, and in March, end of March '92, we had a full meeting of the five members of the committee in Moscow, with the two prime ministers, Gaidar and Burbulis, and all the leading people in the Yeltsin administration, not with Yeltsin, though, but with everybody else, for two full days, closed door meeting, we can -- after which the Russians themselves called a press conference to present our committee and our first recommendations, which we did, and it was published. Q. And that's when you said you told that they needed the institutions for a global economy in place? A. Exactly. Well, not really. For -- for -- for capitalism. Q. For capitalism. Right. A. Our point -- our point was very strongly made that you could not have a transition to a market economy without political institutions and legal institutions that support this market economy, that capitalism is not pure markets, it's a connection between society and markets and institutions. And this is the most elementary statement one could think. And all this was published, but then we also had several more confidential reports, and in the reports we called explicitly for the dissolution of the Parliament, the Parliament was inherited from the Soviet period and they were in fact blocking the reforms and taking advantage of everything for themselves; dissolving the Parliament peacefully, calling for a constitutional assembly that would approve a new constitution and discussing the constitution; and then proposing a constitution with also proposed that given Yeltsin's prestige, he lead a presidential party that would be the engine of the reform, uniting all the democrats together, and then going through this institutional process and including the institutional process the startings of a new civil code and new set of commercial rules, the entire set of institutions. So the constitution for political purposes, an entire transformation of the legal institutions, including the administration of these legal systems, before they would go full speed into market reforms. They could start doing some things in the market, but not transforming everything in terms of the economic, if they did not have the institutions to control this opening of the market reforms. Q. Can you say what specific kind -- name one -- A. Like banking laws. Q. Banking laws. Okay. A. Like banking laws, like the -- the very clear code of foreign investment that would give warranty to foreign investors. Like the stabilization of the ruble, but the stabilization of the ruble on the basis of a well-determined policy by the central bank of Russia, that was completely arbitrary at that point, so in other words, the concept was to go step by step, side by side, the economic reforms, and the institutional reforms, and what we said explicitly is that if clear rules of the game would not be established, but market would dominate immediately, then the criminal economy would take over, because the only ones ready to move would be those who were taking advantage of the privatization process with few rules, and creating the kind of mafia capitalism that we have been seeing in Russia. So ultimately the committee stopped working when the entire government was dismissed by the Parliament in the end of December, and during this process -- and there were several interviews with me in Izvestia, in which I repeated the same thing, during this process what happened apparently is that -- what Burbulis basically told me is that Yeltsin thought that he didn't need all this institutional complication and that he could maneuver the whole strategy by himself without needing to create (inaudible). The two resources that we actually foresaw, one, they did dissolve the Parliament, wrote a new constitution and created a new party, and did this one and a half years later. They had to use the tanks to do it, they rush the writing of the Constitution, and they in fact rushed the creation of the party that became a ragtag party from all kind of people. So they could never unify the democrats really, because -- Q. And the criminal element did get -- A. And that's one -- on the political side. And on the economic side, a market, and a privatization process with no clear rules, no clear controls, and lack of institutions, generated a mafia capitalism. So unfortunately, and I really think unfortunately, our analysis was correct, and the devastating consequences of not following our early recommendations in the spring of '92, when they had all the power, when everybody was completely disorganized, with mafia capitalism, which is still at the beginning, then they could have done all these kind of reforms, acting quickly and decisively. They didn't do it by a combination of [too -- excessive] self-assurance that they could handle everything, certainly in the case of Yeltsin, and at the same time, ideology of market relationships thinking that markets by themselves will solve the problems, and markets can deal with the economy, but not with society. Since then I continue to work in Russia, I go there every year, and -- but the sad story, and in fact it's one of my saddest stories in life, which I was so close to the key people who were really making the decisions in Russia, at the critical moment, and I had -- not myself, the group I had assembled had real knowledge about historical -- about political experience (inaudible). And we -- we could say the right things to the right people at the right moment and it didn't matter. Q. And it still didn't matter. Right. There's an issue that you raised in the very first volume when you say that you do think it's worthwhile to construct a social theory, to build these models, because they are useful in making sense of what's going on, but in this case -- A. This clearly didn't work. Q. Didn't work. A. Didn't work. Which means that you -- yes. If you don't have the material, that is, social theory, the model, the analysis, the knowledge, then you are blind. But in addition to not being blind, you -- you need to act on it. Q. You need to act. A. And certainly -- but what is also clear is that the same people who do the theories are the worst possible people to act on it, so that's why the role of advisors is a very important role, and it requires a channel of communication which people are -- have the knowledge and are able to talk to people with capacity of deciding, and people who are decision-makers have to be literate enough, informed enough and courageous enough to risk on advice that -- even if it's not necessarily what their gut feeling tells them. Because their gut feeling told them, No, we can do it. And the result is what happened. Q. You talk -- there's a whole chapter about the criminal economy, the global criminal economy. Can you talk about that as a manifestation of the network society? A. That's one thing, is that, you see, and -- all the series of phenomena to analyze, on the one hand is practically everything important that's happened in the world, but I think we can trace back each one of these major phenomena, including the global criminal economy, to the technological, economic, social transformation that is presented under the form of the network society. Why? Well, because crime has always existed, it's the oldest activity of humankind, or at least the second-oldest activity of humankind. Organized crime also has a long history in our society, all the mafias as we know have histories even -- several centuries of history, and many of them, like in Italy or in the Chinese [triads] originate in political resistance against the invaders. But, what is new is the formation of a global criminal economy. That is a system of joint ventures and cooperation between all these organized crime networks around the world, and the formation of huge amounts of capital, labor, goods and services that originate in these criminal networks and diffuse throughout the entire global economy. This in addition includes the penetration by these criminal networks of states and institutions and administrations at the highest level, in many many many countries. In some countries at the highest level even, like in Mexico, let's say, or in Italy, or in Japan. But, well, many other countries are also penetrated in many ways, which we know much less. And that until one day we start knowing things in such and such a country. So what is new is that the technology has enabled all these criminal networks to ship people, merchandise, everything from everywhere to everywhere, has enabled to launder money by the billions of dollars, seven hundred and fifty billion dollars per year, which is fifty percent more than the total trade of oil in the world. This is data of the United Nations. So the technology has enabled these networks to work. Q. But these aren't -- you don't think that these are networks of consciously plotting global criminals, do you? Or you merely mean by the fact that criminals can now launder money into the global capitalist system that they play a -- that they have an influence, but not necessarily -- A. No. Okay. Q. I mean, do you see global activity going on, purposeful, purposive global activity the same way that Nike makes shoes in Southeast Asia? A. Absolutely. There are all kind of agreements, for instance, who gets the market of cocaine in Europe versus who gets the market of heroin in the United States, they have meetings, they have board meetings, they -- they have joint ventures in smuggling -- Q. How do you know this? A. There's lots of evidence in the press, in the newspaper reports. Q. Okay. A. And -- Q. You rely on a couple of books, excellent -- A. I rely on the United Nations Conference that United Nations gathered in 1994, in Naples, very properly. Andthey have a whole unit in the United Nations called the Crime and Justice Prevention Unit, with headquarter in Vienna, that gathers documents on these matters, and I relied on a number of task reports, and then two powerful books that summarize a lot of evidence. But then on national books in different countries. I relied on the whole literature on the Columbian drug cartels, on the Italian mafia, on the Chinese triads, on the Japanese Yakuza on the Russian mafia, so each body of literature concerning one particular national organization in fact refers to the connection. Q. To the others. A. And to the networks. So there is a system and a source of interactions, and all kind of illicit trades are related, drugs with arm sales, with human organs traffic, with massive prostitution throughout the world, the sale of children and women, and ultimately all this with money laundering, which without money laundering would be none of these, right? So this is new. This is new. And the power of these networks, at the highest level of government, this is new. And the impact of these billions of dollars into the global financial markets, this is new. This is one of the most important sources of turbulence in the global financial market, because by definition capital that has been laundered has to move, all the time, has to be changing from one stock to another, to -- Q. Once you get it into land or some place, isn't it okay, I mean, can't it sit there for awhile? A. Depends where the land is, and when. In Russia, in Moscow at this point, yes. But it used to be, for instance, the Japanese Yakuza bought Pebble Beach. They had to get out of that deal, because it it became known, et cetera, so. It depends. But the one -- the one thing that is not, that cannot be tracked, or very difficult to track, is financial flows, financial investment. You buy currency, you buy stocks, you change, you move from one country to another, and constantly, and after a number of changes, it's practically impossible. Q. You can't find it. Right. A. And then you invest. Then you invest in real estate, et cetera. BREAK Q. Let's talk about, a little more about this business of the flow of money then. This is one of the areas that [Giddens] criticized you a little bit about, he says -- A. Okay, he's right. He's right. Q. He says you don't -- A. I don't talk -- Q. You don't discuss money markets and global money flows beyond -- | A. In detail. Yeah. Q. For certain levels you don't get into that, but -- A. Absolutely. Because it's a very technical matter. Q. You do -- but you do say -- at one point you mention something that happened in Europe, in October of '92, in one week a trillion dollars. A. Yeah, and I was very close at that point to the Office of the Prime Minister of Spain and I knew exactly what was happening. Q. What was happening? A. Well, what was happening was that the European Union governments and central banks, trying to stop the speculation on global financial markets, but speculation not from one group who decided to speculate. Again it -- anonymous turbulence. Q. Arbitrages... Something like that. A. Turbulence that appear in the market and then some people invest in one way, trying to, to bet on the devaluation of the pound, of the liter, of the peseta, and of the [escudo]. And they -- if that devaluation would occur, then an entire policy of unifying the European currency would be challenged, and in fact, could be at least delayed and made -- and even jeopardized entirely. So the -- although the Bundesbank was very happy about the devaluation, but it was order -- well, cannot be ordered, because it's independent, but the German government expressed a strong interest that they should cooperate with the devaluation, so in fact the British pound, the British Bank tried to stop the speculation, used about twenty percent of its reserve in hard currency in one week. Italy spent the entire reserves of foreign currency in one week. Spain about forty percent ,which was a huge amount because Spain had very high reserves, and France and Germany also injected substantial amounts, nobody really knows how much, but, probably in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars, at least two or three hundred billions of dollars at least. It didn't change at all, because that particular week in terms of the -- was the moment when it was realized that, that in one week almost one trillion, almost one trillion dollars changed currency, so the market just -- Q. Just absorbed it. A. -- absorbed everything, and since then the movement has accelerated, because now the current data, I mean, the data a year ago which haven't changed too much, and every day, one point two trillion, every day, changes currency, in the financial markets. And this is not -- Q. Just in the currency market, just in -- A. In the currency market. Q. Swapping pounds for francs? A. Exactly. And has nothing to do with payments within the national payments. Q. Just buying money. A. Because international payments can be either in dollars or in the -- or in the -- in any hard currency, and in fact, as I told you, transactions of goods and services, vis a vis financial transactions in the world, is only three percent of the total value of the transactions. It's pure financial transaction. Q. That's a key point then, right. A. So, and if you look at the -- at the charts that I have in my book, they show that while financial transactions over GDP of countries in the early 1980s were about ten percent of the GDP, in all major countries, including the United States, they're way above a hundred percent by the 1990s. Q. Uh-huh. A. Means what? That the financial world has taken an independent logic on its own, and that it -- you make money or lose money in the global casino, quite regardless of what happens in the production world, not only production of manufacturing; services, anything. I'm not saying that that's not the real economy, because in fact the only real thing in our capitalist economy is money. But what I'm saying is that the logic of transaction, financial transaction in all kind, is a much more important source of making money. . . . Now, in terms of what economics would tell you is, well, but in fact it's not so dangerous because in fact at the end of the day losers equalize winners. So it's no, no crash, I mean, because yes, there is speculation, there is financial transaction when some people lose, some people win -- and ultimately the market goes back to equilibrium, there's some crisis sometimes, but the market readjusts. However, the problem is that this financial, global financial markets are related through financing and investment into the real economy. And every movement of destruction of one segment of this financial capital translates into closing a company, laying people off, and starting somewhere else, and burning the land of actual jobs, actual office work, actual factories, actual fields, that make the machine work and relate to people's life. So while in economic terms losses equilibrate wins, in real-life terms, every loss burns something, and it starts it over again somewhere else. So what is economic equilibrium is not social or territorial or personal equilibrium. Q. Is it similar to what happened in the Mexican economy whe the peso fell? A. -- The Mexican economic crisis of 1994 has been called the first 21st Century economic crisis. Why so? Because what happened is that the Mexican economy was receiving a huge amount of foreign investment, the highest in the world at that point. Now it's China. At that point it was Mexico. Now they were banking on the expansion of NAFTA, the ability of Mexico to penetrate the U.S. market, et cetera et cetera. The Mexican peso was in fact undervalued, it was overvalued in relationship to the -- and was being devalued by the actual movement in the economy, but Salinas decided to artificially sustain the peso, as an indication that Mexico had reached stability of currency and finally the peso could be like a hard currency. He used this huge research from foreign capital investment to constantly sustain the peso. It gave the movement of the economy that were betting on its evaluation. All right? Therefore the peso became floating artificially on the basis of the constant flow of capital investment. Any problem with this flow of capital investment would make the peso collapse, and what happened, the Zapatistas attack. Q. Ahh, uh-huh. A. And then -- you know the Zapatista (inaudible) anything, but the idea that Mexico now as a quiet country, under control, globalization is operating is operating, you see how things are linked. Q. Yeah. A. So social movements against globalization -- in fact they stopped globalization, at least create (inaudible) for globalization. And then -- then flow of capital stopped, then Mexican peso collapsed, then the United States intervened to sustain the peso with the biggest bailout in the history of Mexico and of the United States, and in fact, because, look how things go, because the United States intervened there were fears in the financial market that the dollar would be drawn down with the peso in terms of the exchange rate. Then the German mark and the yen skyrocketed as reserve money, and the explosion of the German mark created tremendous tensions in the European currency, the other countries had to revalue their currency also, and in order to revalue they had to -- they needed tighter budgetary policies, that stopped government spending, that increased unemployment. You see, the Zapatistas attack, and [leave] more unemployment in Europe. Q. Right. And somebody out in Paris loses a job. A. That's globalization. Q. Right. That's globalization. And -- A. And that's why people have rightly seen the idea that they have lost control over their lives. It's not that they had much control, but at least they knew where the controls were. Q. And this is -- this is -- to pull back a little where you say this is -- this is one reaction to -- this is where you talk about the polarity between the network and the self, where people have lost control over it, therefore they look elsewhere for identity. A. They look -- exactly -- upon themselves. They, they look -- they look at themselves, they say, Well, I don't know where is this network, I don't know what I can do in the network, so I -- I'm going [win] myself, I'm not going to disintegrate. So I am my self, that is my god, my, my family, my fatherland, my territory, and I shoot you! Q. Now there are a lot of folks -- there are a lot of folks, particularly among the people who'll read this article, who think, Great. This is the network, this is where -- I will surf it, you know, I -- A. It is true! Q. This is what I've been looking for. Now I can operate globally. A. It is true. As long as you are not switched off from the network. Q. As long as I'm not switched -- as I'm not switched off, right. Therefore I have to keep my job or I have to keep -- I have to keep a say, right? Many people like to play it independently. A. Yeah. Q. Many people, they become little companies of their own. They play market economics with themselves. That's how they do it. A. Well, and in fact it's working, and we are seeing a revival of individual entrepreneurism, which is very positive, frankly. I like more, you know, there's more entrepreneurs inventing and dealing, et cetera, than lots of anonymous corporations that had become too bureaucratized. So in that sense they have some wonderful feeling of freedom about the networks and about the networking logic. The problem is when we reduce societies and institutions to networks, because at the end of the day we still need the home, we still need some institutional support for basic things like good public education, good public health, good culture that is not directly commercialized, a number of things which I would call a reconstructed welfare state of the network society. And that's what most people are against, not against the freedom of the networks, and not about the -- against the flexibility, but against the lack of control over their lives. So you need the network and you need something else, and this something else has been dissolved, because the networks are so dynamic, that whoever is in the network, and by the time they are in the network they eat up the rest. Q. Well, I experience it myself. Since I left the magazines, I have to struggle to stay connected, it's true; and if I'm not connected, I'm out of it. A. Absolutely. You have to be all the time in your flight, constantly, constantly, constantly. Well, but this translates into all kind of other thing, you see, because it -- on the one hand we know that Silicon Valley's a fascinating place to produce and innovate, et cetera, but we also know all the stress life of Silicon Valley. We know it's one of the highest rates of divorce in the country, highest rate of suicide, highest rate of alcoholism and drugs among the middle class. Q. Right. A. A very high proportion of single living, and then this idea that life becomes very intense and very wonderful between the age of twenty and forty, and after forty, you're in big trouble. And you're expendable very quickly. Very quickly. People render themselves obsolete very quickly. So this drive toward innovation, which is a wonderful process in terms of creativity and in terms of fulfillment of life, has to be at the same time supported by community, by institutions in society, by planning an individual in -- not only individual, but in social terms, about what's going to happen later, institutions of solidarity. My friend Martin Conroy at Stanford University is publishing a book on these new working patterns called sustainable flexibility, which is how to recreate social protection and institutional protection to these networks so that people when they work, they can work like this but with the idea that later on, later on they will be able to -- if one day they lose their job or one day they need a year to recycle themselves to go back to the university, or if there's an illness of the family, if you want to take a few months out and work half-time to do something else, or painting, or whatever, you can do it. Otherwise it's an endless race. Q. The other part of life in Silicon Valley or life in the network society is the culture that you talk about of real virtuality of the media, of the media providing the real data of experience so that the culture wars, the battles of society that are being fought are culture wars now, being fought out in the media. You make a good point somewhere that it isn't really a mass culture, but -- A. Segmented culture. I think most of the media vie to sell and to have influence, those two things, which ultimately connect also, but they're two different mechanisms. To do so they do marketing. They try to satisfy a particular segment of the demand. So they look for this market and they reflect more or less what they think at least that people want. Sometimes by the way I think that some media have a very simplistic vision of what people want. For instance, there were experiments the last two years in the United States showing that for the new cable stations and the new interactive media (inaudible) when they -- they clearly think what people want is entertainment, massive entertainment, and I -- and one of the reasons interactivity is really not developing in the United States is because it's not true. People like entertainment, but it's not the only thing they like, and they think they have enough Because when you can choose between five hundred different porno movies or five hundred different western movies, it doesn't add much from being able to choose between ten. Q. Well, you know, you give the of the communication between Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown; what I'm thinking of is there's something kind of cartoonish about that kind of communication. If Dan Quayle talks to Murphy Brown, the level of discourse is going to be pretty simple, and in that respect the culture doesn't have any richness. A. Well, but you see, what I was trying to say through this example, is how real the media are. That in fact, an actual interface between a persona in the television of the series and the vice-president of the United States could really happen, and have political consequences. Q. I think you're saying that it makes the vice-president look just as fictional as -- A. Except that you don't know who is more fictional there, but both have concrete consequences. Q. But it came out, you know, later on there was a big article in the Atlantic, saying that Dan Quayle is right. A. Sure. And it triggered debate. So there are actual consequences of an interface between a character in a television series and the expression of the country. But that was an example, certainly not a demonstration of anything. It's an example to try to communicate what I'm trying to say, which is this new culture is characterized by two things. It is a culture of the ephemeral. Everything appears and disappears in one instant. Everything is a special effect. Everything. You don't retain almost anything. A Bogart would be unthinkable in this culture. And I'm not saying it's good or bad, but you don't -- you don't relate -- you don't identify to any particular character that goes on in -- everything is ephemeral. Everything exists one second and disappears. That's why I use the example, the idea of a persona that you -- under very different characters and playing very different people, you will identify some kind of this sweet toughness of the forgotten hero. This kind of elementsdon't have a place in a culture which is a culture of the video clip, of the ephemeral. That's one thing, the [ephemeriality] of the culture. The second is the interactivity, but not interactivity between people and the culture, because still we have very little interactive, real interactive communication. But between all kinds of cultural expression, meaning, all kinds of television, all kind of video, radio, newspapers, Internet communication, they refer to each other. They forward to each other. Everything, every message is forwarded to something, it's a reference to something else. So it's an endless game of mirrors. You see an endless game of mirrors in which everything refers to something else which (inaudible) refers to something else which is a deviated expression, so ultimately you never know where you are, but by the time you are tired of watching, of watching these different mirrors, that's it. You have enough. Q. That's what you say when -- in your general conclusion to Volume One that -- when you say the network society represents a qualitative change in human experience, that's what you're talking about there, right? A. Yeah. Absolutely. The idea that in order to resist to this constant flow of images that are sent to each other, you need such an extraordinarily solid individuality. Q. Uh-huh. A. That otherwise you are taken by the flow. Q. Uh-huh. Well, a lot of people just turn it off or they don't care or they -- it seems to me that people say, Well, I don't understand. A. But they turn off the television, but they switch on the computer. Q. And they also -- sometime I think people don't give the media credit for the power that they really have, and they think -- oh, I understand, it's all a game. I'll play the game. A. The media have extraordinary power, but not in the sense that they have the power by themselves, it's that all power games go through the mediA. They frame the power. So it's much more important than to have a power strategy. Any power has to go through the media. Q. Has to go through the media. Well, in the conclusion to the work, one of the things you say if the media can transmit the message instead of becoming the message -- A. You know, well, that's -- my ten lines of wishes are wishes. That the media become the messengers rather than the message. Q. Rather than the message. A. Because today the media is the message. Not the message is the medium, but the media. Q. The media is the message. A. Anything you want to say has to be said within the format of the media, in politics, in culture -- Q. And you have to -- and you have to accept the media's codes and the media's structure. A. Absolutely. Q. In order to get in there. A. Absolutely. So the setting of the messages, is fundamentally done by the media. Like, for instance, one concrete example. In political soundbites, in television, in the last twenty years on average, political -- in political interviews, not advertising, but political interviews, the average soundbite has gone from thirty seconds to eight second. Q. I know. A. So you have to give your idea of the new politics that you're propose in eight seconds. Or you are out! Q. Right! But living in the Bay Area, -- or living in Berkeley in particular, this is an extraordinary place. A. It is. Q. We have the Mime Troupe, and we have a pretty vibrant local culture around here. A. It is. Q. Even the local musicians, you can go to little musical clubs all over the place. A. Absolutely. Q. I'm not much of a world traveler, I don't know how typical we are, but -- A. Well, I think it's very typical of many places in that sense. Yes. Yes. In Europe many many places have a very strong local culture. That's why I'm saying, because not everything that -- it's not that a network society is everything. I'm saying this is the dominant structure in our society. This is where power is, where money is, where culture is, where politics is, what shape society is organized in now. Return to  Network Society page