Long live democracy!

The eminent MIT Economics Professor Michael Piore has an elegant description of the political history of mankind; according to him we start off in bands, progress to kingdoms and then end up in democracies. In other words power is first of all amassed by the state and then distributed again to the citizen, and this is all driven by technology, particularly communications technology.

He doesn’t suggest what comes after democracy, apathy maybe, but he does suggest that commerce may evolve along very similar lines. Commerce starts with guilds, groups of workers that band together to further business and protect their monopoly, then come “companies”, which in their most perfect manifestation can make and break national economies. Guilds are like bands, and companies are like kingdoms, but what, commercially, is like “democracy”?

I have two boys, twins, aged 13. One of their favourite games on X-Box Live is Call of Duty, a “first person” war game in which you are a member of a platoon fighting in the Second World War. Your comrades-in-arms could be boys from your class or 30 year old women from Hong Kong, it doesn’t matter. I hear the boys chattering away on their headphones, barking out orders, telling people to look out or get down. When they die, perhaps shot by the son of a Polish sheet metal worker or an Ecuadorian horse rancher, their on-screen avatar lies down for a beat and then jumps up and starts again.

Play is important, it helps to socialise children and it is demonstrably important to their cognitive development. Notoriously in Victorian England boy-children were taught by their games that dying for King and country was valorous and honourable. My boy-children are still playing war games, but what they are learning is that it’s possible to collaborate, in real time, with someone on the other side of the world as easily as your brother in the same room. Will they be as wedded to an office as I am, probably not?

Wireless beach-working has been a trope of IT advertising for a few years yet, but it’s not enough that technology makes things possible, the users of that technology have to want what’s possible and be comfortable with what’s possible. I suspect that true “democracy” will come to the agency world at least when people not only no longer have to gather together to do brain work, but don’t even see the point of doing so.