Untitled - socium.ge

The hacker ethic 429The meaning of this for the general economy is that the value of a company’sor an individual’s work becomes more and more based not on the value of thatwork (measured in itself) but on the movements of money made out of moneyin the financial markets. To be sure, pay and profits definitely remain fundamentalmeasures for workers and companies, but market value and marketvalue-related rewards (stocks, options) are acquiring a new significance thatfurther shifts the balance between work and money toward money as theweightier value. In addition, individuals are increasingly moving their moneyfrom traditional savings in the bank to investments in the financial markets.The informational economy is permeated with the idea of betting on the movementsof money – while the very idea of betting was abhorred by theProtestant ethic. The informational economy is far removed from the asceticismof the Protestant ethic. In its more moderate form, this means a culturewhere people want to enjoy their money; in its extreme form, it is a consumerculture where people expect immediate self-gratification.This is the answer – for better or worse – of the informational economy tothe old tension in the Protestant ethic between work and money as supremevalues. However, a new, unsolved tension has been created by combiningmoney as the highest value with increasingly tight intellectual property laws.There is now a tension between the current extremely money-oriented informationalcapitalism and the basic tendency of the culture of innovation.Money-centeredness leads to the closing off of information. Innovation liveson the open flow of information. If information is owned too tightly, the globalinnovation process suffers. This has both an economic and an ethical dimension:it keeps a large part of the world’s population structurally outside theinformational economy, thus limiting both the markets and the sources ofinnovation, as well as exacting a great human price through exclusion.It also limits the culture of innovation within the informational economy.Tight intellectual property laws make it very hard for new innovators to enterthe market. Money-centeredness also blinds us from seeing how there mightbe room to develop a stronger culture of innovation or the hacker ethic outsidethe private sector. In fact, it stops us from seeing that, in the information age,the sustainability of the public sector will also depend on the release of a workculture of innovation based on networked creative passion and a more flexiblerelationship to time – something that is possible only through a consciouschange in the culture of public management. It is only through such an innovation-basedimprovement in productivity that the public sector will be able tocontinue to provide a sustainable basis for the global information age, and notbe eliminated as outdated. (This can be called the idea of the “e-welfare state”or “the welfare state in the information age” or “the creative welfare state,” the“e” referring not to the Internet but to the informational structure and cultureas described above.)