Years ago, when I worked for a company whose name need not be mentioned, we had a visit from a man with a thick accent. He would be returning to his country shortly, he said, and wished us to sell him a certain item of computer equipment to take back with him. There were some legal problems, yes, involved in taking such equipment from our country to his, but he told us not to worry about that. And the less we said about the transaction, he let us understand, the better it would be for all concerned. I believe he paid in cash.
Yes, I'm confessing to taking part in a smuggling operation, but before you turn me in, let me plead the extenuating circumstances. The computer was an Exidy Sorcerer, the country to which the computer was going was Brazil, the law being violated was Brazil's, and the smuggler only wanted to use the computer for bookkeeping in his small business.
Brazil's protectionism laws, intended to stimulate the growth of an indigenous computer industry, have rather held up the computerization of the Brazilian economy, according to Louis Rossetto in his non-editorial in the April Language Technology. Smuggling and the black market are becoming necessary evils in the face of $2,000 Rio de Janeiro street prices for XT clones. Rossetto cites evidence that the protectionism is crumbling, including Brazil's decision to consider an Olivetti subsidiary "national." The damage it has done, of course, won't go away quickly.
But Brazil's travail doesn't amount to a hill of coffee beans in the crazy world of Pacific rim economics as described by James Fallows in the May Atlantic.
Fallow describes a condition, one of whose syndromes is protectionism and one symptom is the 47th Street Photo paradox: if 47th Street Photo in Manhattan could export to Japan the Japanese-made goods it sells to New Yorkers, it could make a fortune. Charges of protectionism fly in both directions, usually couched in the polite terms that characterize U.S.-Japan relations. But the facts are pretty one-sided. "How protectionistic can a country with a $10-billion monthly trade deficit really be?" Fallows asks. Japan, on the other hand, is keeping its people relatively poor to compete economically in the world market. Fallows says that Japan's policies are ultimately ruinous for everyone, including Japan, but sees little evidence that Japan will change its ways soon.
As I was writing this column, I heard on National Public Radio of the suicide of one Japanese bureaucrat involved in the corruption that is bringing down the government. It's dramatic news, but even the fall of the government is not expected to affect Japan's economic policy. Another story I heard on NPR while writing this column concerned the possibility of the Supreme Court's reconsidering Roe vs. Wade, the decision that legalized abortion. Whatever your feelings about the legality of abortion, you should consider the implications of a side issue that is also being brought before the Court, an issue that touches on the relationship between information and power. The issue is whether or not restrictions should be placed on access to abortion information.
Everyone reading this magazine is intimately involved in a technological revolution, one of the most radical effects of which will be a redistribution of access to information of all sorts, combined with an increased dependence on information in society. The fact that purchasing power now rests on the ability to provide an acceptable credit card number and expiration date is just one example of the "informatizing" of society. Those of us who are in the vanguard of the revolution should be especially sensitive to attempts to redefine access to information. If knowledge is power, then access to information is enfranchisement.
If the Supreme Court should decide to overturn Roe vs. Wade the decision may be made out of strong moral convictions regarding abortion. But it is also true that the most effective way to stifle dissent is to keep the dissenters ignorant. If access to information is enfranchisement, then restriction of access to information is tyranny.
On the lighter side of tyranny, in the May Lotus magazine, Lindsy van Gelder examines groupware, a software category some detractors have labelled fascist. "Groupware," she quotes Institute for the Future fellow Paul Saffo as saying, is software that "can be used effectively only by two or more people." Is it a real opportunity for developers or just a buzzword? Van Gelder paints an unpromising picture of an ill-researched concept ill suited to the way people work today -- but that picture would also have fit the personal computer a decade ago. One working model of groupware is the CASE model, without which some large software projects would never get done.
Shopping for exotic fauna for my garden of typos, I recently unearthed "terrabyte WORMs" in a computer magazine editorial. It should be "terrabite worms," of course, an allusion to the appetites of annelids.
Copyright © 1989, Dr. Dobb's Journal