How can the government best help propel us along the information superhighway?
In most of us, that question induces an instant MEGO (my eyes glaze over). I recall a moment in the Nixon White House when Diane Sawyer and I were earnestly briefing Ron Ziegler on an arcane point likely to generate questions after an economic speech; the press secretary absorbed all he could and finally said: "Stop. Any new fact you tell me now means I'll forget something else."In the same way, I am now convinced that if I figure out how to program my wireless telephone - on top of learning to force my computer to italicize at a keystroke - I will forget how to tickle my video recorder into snatching a movie scheduled for 4 a.m. on cable.
This surrender to saturation is not the charming helplessness of the determinedly old-fashioned; it is the revolt of the brain against the high life of the mind. The '90s Boggle becomes more frenetic in the clash of giant telecommunications corporations gorging one another, to compete with other mergers - of fiberoptic cable, dishy wireless and billionaire media "content providers."
Which technology, and which convergence, will offer the consumer the cheapest and easiest way to be constantly in touch with whatever happens anywhere? Wouldn't it be great if the government could choose the best system and then let the private companies compete?
No, it would not be great. Intrusion in the name of efficiency would be a disaster, and - at the end of the great day - inefficient and stultifying.
Something simple and significant underlies our decision about how to ride the communications revolution. Two political ideas are competing in the post-Cold War world. One stresses order; the other stresses freedom.
Take Singapore, where an American teenager was savagely beaten on a graffiti charge and an American professor was recently threatened with jail for criticizing the regime. In that plastic nation, order is all.
Because competition is a democratic value, it's good for local and national phone networks to invade one another's turf; it's good for cable companies to provide telephone service and the phonies to deliver pictures on their wires; it's good for wireless, satellite and broadcast networks to try to beat the phone companies' brains out.
In that way, consumers, not bureaucrats, will decide which systems suit us best. Risk-taking investors, not budgeteers, will channel money into the most efficient carriers.
This will result in a glorious mess. Asian Mussolinis will snicker at our sweet disorder as we lust after the way to deliver a pure signal along with a piping-hot pizza.
But there are advantages: innovation will be nourished, costs will be lowered and diversity will be celebrated. Geniuses and jerks will have their own channels and forums, while all the separate systems will have a way to unify us as a nation in a crisis.
Above all, the disorderly competition of "the American model" makes it much harder for some would-be ruler to control the people.