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Owning the Future : Staking Claims on the Knowledge Frontier

Name: Owning the Future : Staking Claims on the Knowledge Frontier
Author: Seth Shulman
ISBN: 9780395841754

by Seth Shulman

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Overview

Knowledge is the key variable of the new global economy. But in the rush to stake claims in the knowledge economy, players are losing sight of impending threats to innovation, limitations on choice, and the fostering of monopolies that will inflate the costs of goods and services we take for granted. If this continues, Shulman warns, we will lose the public education and public access that are the bedrock of a democratic society. As knowledge becomes a valuable commodity, people will hoard it, fight over it, and seek to control it like never before. Owning the Future chronicles the battles for control over the intangible new assets--genes, software, databases, and technological information--that make up the lifeblood of the new economy. These battles will affect our jobs, our schools, and the information we read, influencing the price and availability of products and even fostering international conflict.

About the Author, Seth Shulman

Seth Shulman is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Threat at Home: Confronting the Toxic Legacy of the U.S. Military. He is a former Knight Science Fellow at MIT, and his writing has appeared in many publications, including The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Nature, Parade, The Progressive, and Technology Review.

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Editorials

Seattle Times

Impeccably documented...Eminently readable and entirely unacademic, Owning the Future sounds a clarion call, one that is particularly pertinent in the present climate of merger-mania and antitrust scrutiny.

Philadelphia City Paper

The range and variety of outrages Shulman catalogs are reminiscent of those that sparked the Revolutionary War...Owning the Future excels at sounding the alarm. If we don't heed it, the future we lose will be our own.

Village Voice

Shulman's book is entertaining, and a selective reader could easily skim for the pure thrill of outrage, skipping from one mind-boggling case of info-profiteering to another. But Shulman himself is careful never to stray too far from the larger and subtler social consequences.

From The Critics

When Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine in 1954, journalist Edward R. Murrow asked him: "Who will control the new pharmaceutical?" As award-winning science writer Seth Shulman recounts in Owning the Future, Salk reportedly replied, "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"

Oh, how times have changed. Today, scientists at biomedical companies are racing to map the human genome, and corporate lawyers are right behind them. Of the portion of our DNA that has been mapped, roughly a third is privately owned, Shulman reports.

Turf wars are raging in biomed, software, agribusiness in every field of today's economy in which information is the currency. The book devotes a chapter to such software battles as the attempt by Compton's New Media to patent "multimedia" and E-data's pending claim on the invention of electronic commerce, as well as Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft over control of Java.

Whether it's software or the human genome, the end result, predicts the author, will be a stifling of innovation and the further consolidation of wealth in the coffers of a few multinational corporations.

Like any good reporter, Shulman has followed the money trail, and it leads straight to those who not only own products, but who purport to own ideas themselves.

 Maria De La O

Kirkus Reviews

An effective polemic against those seeking any monopoly on knowledge in the information age. The free flow of know-how is for Shulman (The Threat at Home: Confronting the Toxic Society of the US Military, 1992) a necessary prerequisite both for the survival of the democratic polis and for our continued economic progress. Today, however, he argues, such a free exchange is threatened by an emerging pattern of claims of private ownership of knowledge. Whereas in the past, patents were granted only for the practical application of theories and ideas, today it is these very ideas and theories-"actionable knowledge," which is only potentially useful-that are increasingly privately owned. For instance, programmers "own" basic knowledge of software codes; doctors "own" innovative medical procedures; and drug-companies "own" wild plants and insects (and exercise exclusive control over the medicines produced from these). Even our genetic makeup is being sold, as researchers lay claim to genes they discover or decode within the human genome. Freely shared knowledge, concludes Shulman, is thus an endangered species. This is tragic and dangerous, he judges, in both social and political terms. Knowledge thrives and expands as it is shared and propagated. To divide basic ideas up into what Shulman terms "fiefdoms of knowledge assets" is to threaten the very expansion of knowledge itself. Further, democracy demands a well-informed public; all must be able to draw on a spring of accessible knowledge. Economically, too, we may be harmed as society grows divided between "a wealthy cadre of technological titleholders" and a struggling, less entitled majority. Moreover, such polarization may occur on aworldwide scale as the West comes to "own" and control knowledge desperately needed by the developing world. While alarmist and prone to overblown hyperbole (e.g., he warns that we are entering a new "Dark Age"), Shulman points to real dangers as knowledge seems, more and more ominously, to equal power. .