2004 Information Society Report to the Parliament of Finland

 In 2004, Dr Pekka Himanen, a doctor who specialized in philosophy and computer science, released a report on the challenges, that global information society In 2004, Dr Pekka Himanen, a doctor who specialized in philosophy and computer science, released a report on the challenges, that global information society presents. Himanen focuses on five core issues, that would arrive in the future. 

Himanen provides us with three models, that could help us better our society.

 

1. Silicon valley model, The Silicon Valley model refers to the neoliberalist scenario of “leaving the weak behind”. Although this scenario is technologically and economically dynamic, it comes with a high social price. For example, the Silicon Valley area itself produced 60 millionaires a day at the end of the 1990s, but they had to move to fenced residential areas, because a society that leaves some of its citizens in the margin is a society of fear, while a lot of people live in poverty. with this model, everyone has a chance to succeed and everyone has a chance to fail at any moment.

 

2. The Singapore model is based on tax competition, i.e. “a race to the bottom”. This has also been a dynamic model, although the limitations and problems of competition have recently become evident. As other countries can always reduce their tax rates more in order to attract multinational companies, production keeps moving to cheaper and cheaper countries. In the case of Singapore, companies have moved, for example, to China and India. This model implements companies, that move to places where demand is big and the market is profitable, the model encourages adaptation and resistance.

 

3. The third scenario, i.e. the current European combination of the information society and the welfare state has the danger of “the dead hand of passivity”. According to this scenario, people keep protecting all the industrial era structures of the welfare state, but they do not recognise that the future of the welfare state is only possible if the welfare state is reformed with the same kind of innovativeness that the information economy has gone through. In practice, passivity leads to a situation where welfare needs to be cut back more and more and the dynamics of the economy fades. People protect their own vested interests and envy other people for the benefits that they get. This can also be called the society of envy, where the strong survive and others fail.

 

4. Fortunately, there is a fourth scenario. It is possible to combine the welfare state and the information society also in the future if only we have the courage to revise this model appropriately. Therefore, under the current circumstances, the welfare state is best defended by those who speak for its reform through innovation. The fall of the welfare state can be prevented by moving from a reactive to a pr active policy: we should no longer focus on reacting to something that has already happened; instead, we should act beforehand and boldly lead the way.

 

Many things have happened since 2004 and all we can say we live in a more and more capitalist world, ruined by corruption and fear. Things need to change and they might just never do. I was hoping that corona will bring change and it did, just in a backwards way. We as people deserve better.

reference (https://web.archive.org/web/20170221105053/https://www.eduskunta.fi/FI/tietoaeduskunnasta/julkaisut/Documents/tuvje_1+2004.pdf)

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