Rage Against the Political Machine

Not surprisingly, the Cyber-Libertarians lack a secure political home. The Libertarian Party is too marginal, the Democrats too fond of government. But even the Republicans are fundamentally flawed -- too slow to repeal government control over the economy, too quick to reach into personal life. The Cyber-Libertarian's social agenda might give Pat Robertson a coronary: they oppose banning abortion, mandating school prayer, or dismissing soldiers with HIV from the armed forces. Rodgers gets almost as worked up about the "Neanderthals" in the Republican Party as he does about the "Socialists" infecting the Democrats.

What captures the Cyber-Libertarian imagination is the conviction that the information revolution is tipping the political struggle in their direction. Just as big companies have been forced to flatten their hierarchies, the Cyber-Libertarians believe that Washington will inevitably cede power to local communities and individuals. More fundamentally, they believe that as commerce is increasingly conducted online, government will find it difficult to regulate, tax, or even measure economic activity.

Slim and silver-haired, Dan Lynch has spent more time than most thinking about the implications of the online economy. After selling his first company, an Internet consulting firm called Interop, he's invested in some 10 new startups, including UUNet Technologies Inc. and CyberCash, where he serves as chairman.

Based in Reston, Virginia, CyberCash is building a system for people to buy and sell products on the Internet without fear of credit-card fraud. Lynch projects that the Net will not only displace the mall as the principal meeting place of buyers and sellers, but will also become the transmission channel of an economy centered on information trading. With encryption technology, half the economy could be invisible to the eyes of the tax man in 20 years, he predicts. "The guys who are in power now don't understand this system, so there's a chance for new power centers to arise," he says. "The populace will be able to form its own interest groups and find new leaders."

To the Cyber-Libertarians, it's an article of faith that whenever government tries to second-guess or reverse the results of the market, it produces perverse results. What about tax incentives to discourage layoffs, as Labor Secretary Robert Reich has proposed? "It is our moral obligation to let people quit or be laid off by corporate losers so they can join corporate winners," Rodgers argues. Minimum wage laws? They destroy jobs and distort the market, Lynch says. Antitrust? A ruse to protect companies that have lost in the marketplace. "There is no such thing as a free-market monopoly," says Microsoft's Isenberg. "The only monopolies on the planet are those that have been enforced by government. Think of two guys in a garage kicking IBM's ass or two guys starting Microsoft and then becoming terrified of the other little guys in a garage who become Netscape. The market does not tolerate bullshit."

Techno-Communitarians

"The Information Age is inherently interdependent," asserts Morley Winograd, an AT&T director based in Monterey Park, California, and the coauthor of Taking Control, a new book on Information Age politics, which stands as a Techno-Communitarian manifesto. "That's the piece that the Libertarians miss. You're not going back to an autonomous, independent existence; you're going forward to an interdependent existence. The knowledge and skills required to be successful are so specialized that you can't accomplish a complex task without working with others. The interdependence comes from that environment; and that interdependence is where the libertarian impulse fails."

Techno-Communitarians part company with the Cyber-Libertarians over the central metaphor that will organize business and society in the next century. Rather than elevate the heroic individual, Techno-Communitarians celebrate the team. In an interdependent world, government is not an enemy to be overcome but a partner to be mobilized. "International competition is a team sport," says Perceptron's Carlson. "And whether you like it or not, government is part of your team."

Among Techno-Communitarians, Ralph Miller is the closest thing to a court philosopher. At 54, he looks the part with salt-and-pepper, scrub-brush hair and a professorial habit of winding his fingers when he talks, as though constructing a web. His office, in a low-slung building at the end of a gray industrial park in the Detroit suburb of Madison Heights, is oddly serene and faintly Eastern with a glass desk, muted green and redwood colors, and abstract art on the walls. Miller himself is a calming presence in beige linen pants and an open-necked Hawaiian shirt of yellow, blue, and black.