Giving Power to the People
In his day job, Glenn Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee. The 45-year-old has also tried his hand at beer brewing, recording music, penning novels, launching instapundit.com--a popular interactive website for libertarian and conservative political commentary--and most recently authoring An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths. Reynolds spoke to U.S. News about how our modern slingshots--blogs, cellphones, 24-7 connectedness--are shifting the balance of power to the little guy. Excerpts:
Is this the golden age for the individual?
Yes. It's at least a golden age for the individual. People are freer to use their potential than they've ever been, though perhaps not as free as they'll be in the future. There's a wonderful point from Arthur C. Clarke. Twenty thousand years ago, there were people running around the planet who had all the ability to be a symphony conductor or an airline pilot. But their talent was wasted. Now it's changed. More and more, you're able to find a niche. It's worker control of the means of production without all that tiresome communism stuff. All kinds of power that used to be available only to large organizations is now available to individuals.
Just how influential are bloggers?
People oversell the power of blogs and alternative media. They don't yet have a lot of power, but they do have a fair amount of influence. They have the ability to get things into the national conversation that would otherwise be left out. That's a big change from just a little while ago, when a small set of gatekeepers controlled it all.
You write enthusiastically about an outing to a Build-a-Bear store with your 10-year-old daughter, where you had an epiphany about the possibilities of do-it-yourself activity. Will our work lives be mostly do-it-yourself in a generation?
I think for a lot of us, they will. At least it will be very different. Up until the late 18th century, almost everything was done by a small group of individuals. The advent of the steam engine and the modern corporation really erased that model. A steel mill was really more efficient. Now the technology is coming around the other way. Tailors were sort of replaced by these textile factories. Now there are customized factories; call it personal manufacturing. An awful lot of things are going to be done on the individual scale.
You're not a fan of big corporations, arguing that they have outlived their usefulness. Are they of any value in the 21st century?
Oh, sure. I wasn't saying that big was necessarily bad. But I do think that the kind of bigness that's going to work is a different kind of bigness. That's why I contrast Wal-Mart with eBay. Wal-Mart is a very traditional, top-down organization. It's very good at what it does. But eBay is something you wouldn't have seen before the 21st century. It is big; there's not much difference in the number of people who make their living with either company. The difference is that eBay [unlike Wal-Mart] doesn't get there by telling [employees] what to do.
In addition to the behemoth companies, you hammer big media and big government as out of sync, given the emergence of nimble technology. What about big education? Will there be a shift in power in formal schooling, or will longtime institutions adapt to the pressure of all the "Davids"?
Yes, there will be a change. I have that chapter on video games and computer games. I think those will play an increasingly important educational role. I don't think just commercial entertainment games but also stuff that's custom made for it. In fact, the [U.S.] Army is ahead of the curve on this. So when it comes to teaching skills, I think they're terrific. When it comes to teaching other stuff, I don't know. Yet traditional teachers like myself are not necessarily that efficient at teaching. Things like the University of Phoenix [which teaches through distance learning] don't really fit into my Army of Davids, but they might have an effect.
Toward the end of your book, you talk about privately funded space exploration. When will we inhabit Mars?
Not soon enough, probably. You know, the funny thing about privately funded space stuff is that if you read science fiction before 1960, they all assume that's the way we're going to get there, like aviation in the '20s. The [government-funded] Apollo program sort of jump-started it.
You generally come down on the side of the optimists in looking at new technology. What are the drawbacks?
The obvious drawback is that when you empower individuals, you empower the good ones and the bad ones. And of course, terrorism is different today. Back in the days when you had to swing a sword to kill someone, one person couldn't do that much damage. Now, one person can. We will have to worry more about that in the future. There's a blindness in thinking that good things can be done only by bigger organizations. There's a kind of blindness that dangers only come from big organizations. I don't think that's true either.
This story appears in the April 10, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.