The Next Deal: The Future of Public Life in the Information Age, by Andrei Cherny. Basic Books, 268 pages, $24.00.
John Stuart Mill, in his essay on Coleridge, remarks that "a knowledge of thespeculative opinions of men between twenty and thirty years of age is the greatsource of political prophecy." If Mill is right, then one should pay particularattention when a young opinionator comes along with 25-year-old Andrei Cherny'scredentials--speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore and author of the 2000Democratic Party platform--claiming, explicitly and insistently, to speak for hisgeneration. As the Clinton administration wound down, Cherny enrolled in lawschool, though he keeps a hand in politics as a contributing editor for TheNew Democrat and senior policy adviser to the speaker of the California State Assembly. In a New York Times profile last summer, Cherny claimed to have set his sights on a career in criminal law. But it's hard to believe that TheNext Deal wasn't conceived as a bid for a top domestic policy post in the Gore White House. By the luck of the chad, however, we are reading here about a future that is not to be, at least not for another four years.
Perhaps it's just as well. Cherny's premise is that public life should bedrastically reshaped in response to what he calls the Choice Revolution: "thegrowing expectation among consumers that the world be customized to fit theirpreferences and the growing effort among businesses to meet this expectation." Wecurrently have an industrial-age government, he argues, for an information-agesociety. We go online to order everything from individually tailored blue jeansto individually tailored stock portfolios. We work online: In America today,Cherny notes, "a quarter of workers are wired workers (working with networkedcomputers in a flexible, team-oriented environment) and nearly a third are freeagents (working for themselves and from their homes)"--a new, knowledge-basedworkforce, "self-reliant and empowered to do their jobs as they think best." Wefind community online, in chat rooms and e-mail: communities "based on sharedinterests and not just shared geography." Yet we still "stand in endless lines topick up forms at the Department of Motor Vehicles." The new economy is a Pegasus:swift, flexible, responsive, efficient, and nonhierarchical. Government, bycontrast, is a dinosaur: "wasteful, corrupt, distant, and laden withbureaucracy."
Government must be reinvented before it can interest the "Choice Generation,"which has grown up with the Internet. This is a generation that "impatiently rapsits fingers on the table when it takes more than a few seconds to download a webpage from China, which expects packages sent from the other end of the continentto arrive by 10:00 a.m. the next morning, which finds it difficult to watch TVwithout a remote control in hand, which demands a piping hot pizza delivered totheir front door in half an hour." To an older critic, even a prematurely olderone like, say, Jedediah Purdy, these things might betoken a sadly limitedattention span and a hankering for instant gratification. But to Cherny, they arethe outward signs of empowerment.
The Choice Generation has an anthem, Cherny writes. Its verses are theadvertising slogans of dotcoms: "We're betting on ourselves" (Suretrade.com);"Bureaucracy Beware" (Homeloan.com); "Believe in yourself" (Ameritrade.com);"Power to the People" (DiscoverBrokerage.com). A young fogy like, say, ThomasFrank might take these phrases for mere marketing blather--the latest stage inthe phony conquest of cool. To Cherny they compose a "haiku of choice,individualism, and self-reliance."
We have struck camp, our young prophet tells us, and are on the open road:
The Choice Generation is clearly an evolving group--its valuesare continually reinforced as technology continues to provide more choices, morepersonalization, and more individualized power. The big three TV networks havebeen challenged in turn by cable, by more networks, by a thousand channels ofsatellite and digital cable programming. The movie theater competed first withthe VCR, which lets viewers control what they watch and when they watch from thecomfort of their couches. It has now to deal with DVDs that let viewers skip totheir favorite scenes and soundtracks. With increasing frequency, young peoplehave begun to eschew prepackaged music albums in favor of custom-created CDs madeup of the songs they choose. Pagers appeared and were followed by cellular phones. Personal computers transformed America and were followed by Palm Pilots. Young people traded in record players for personal Walkmans and then for even more control with Discmans. Everywhere one looks the technologies that shape the lives of the Choice Generation are constantly and consistently trending toward giving the individual more personal power. More than half of the nation's minors have a television and CD player in their bedroom. No one watches them over their shoulders; they have a previously unimagined amount of power to shape the environment they live in.
More fundamentally, the Internet has put them in control. They read whateverthey want to read, buy whatever they want to buy, download photos of the hotteststar of the moment. Moreover, they don't have to look at CNN's web page, they canlook at their MyCNN page, which shows them only the topics they are interestedin. They don't have to sift through the Web with the AltaVista search engine,they can search with MyAltaVista, which conforms itself to their "surfing"habits. At mybytes.com (with the slogan, "It's my web"), they can customize "myresearch tools," "my calendar," "my interests," "my life," and so on. Atmyway.com, where "you'll get all the information you need, the way you want it,"they are welcomed to "the Internet's distinct new personality. Yours." AtBarbie.com, they can design their own doll to fit the specifications they choose.At Nike.com, they can design their own sneakers and even have their own name puton the shoes. The notion of "one-size-fits-all" is ever more obsolete in a worldthey are increasingly customizing to fit themselves.
O brave new world, that has such choices in it!
How to bring government into the information age? The Next Deal is surprisingly short on program. You might think that a book that practically posits computer literacy as a prerequisite of effective citizenship would consider how to help the many people--even young people--who are not computer literate (or print literate, for that matter) to become so. Not a word. You might think that a book that celebrates interactivity would spend many pages detailing ways to bring every citizen adequate information about public issues--about, say, the fiscal impact of massively regressive tax cuts, or the environmental impact of hog farming and cattle raising, or the moral impact of unreformed campaign finance--and ways, in turn, to bring citizens' opinions to bear on officials between elections. A few pages, not many details. The Next Deal would doubtless have made Cherny's reputation if it had pointed out, before the media herd, that industrial-age electoral technology was a disaster waiting to happen, not to mention a clear indicator of the political class's contempt for the underclass. No such luck.
So what is the program? "As a general rule and whenever possible, government power and funds should go directly to citizens--and only rarely to institutions. Americans should have personal control over the money that government spends on their behalf, thereby putting decisions about the direction of government programs into their hands instead of those of bureaucrats." In particular: "Parents should decide which public school their children attend and have the funds follow the children to the schools that deserve them; unemployed workers should decide how to spend their job training benefits and choose the services they feel would be most beneficial to them; young people should decide where to invest a portion of their Social Security retirement funds and accept a greater share of both the risk and reward." Health insurance should be purchased individually rather than through one's employer, and "a system of tax credits and grants should be put in place to help those who cannot afford to purchase coverage."
To facilitate all this choice, Americans "will need access to even moreinformation. That means tests in schools that allow parents to compare students,teachers, and schools against national and international benchmarks. It meansrating health care plans, hospitals, and doctors. It means detailed, useful, anduseable information on the history and results rendered by every provider ofevery service that Americans will be able to choose from." There is already, ofcourse, plenty of information available to online retirement investors (though itwon't do them much good in case of a meltdown or even a long recession).
It's all rather sketchy, but there's something here. Why shouldn't government be more like e-business? If only Cherny hadn't skimped on programmatic detail while larding the book with potted history, irrelevant anecdote, and speechwriterly platitude. But I suppose his publisher wanted it in time for the inauguration.
At the end of The Next Deal comes a curious and heartening reversal. Cherny proposes a universal-national-service scheme--a one-year Citizen Corps for 18-year-olds. All those hip young consumers, he recognizes, need to shoulder a "New Responsibility" as a "necessary counterbalance to the individual autonomy of the Choice Revolution." Notwithstanding our (well, some people's) unprecedented prosperity, there's plenty of useful work begging to be done.
Millions of the old could stay out of nursing homes for years ifsomeone could come visit them once a day, making sure that they are all right andthat small household chores are performed. Millions of children need extrareading and math tutoring; thousands of homeless are looking for help in movingoff the streets and back into society; parents need, but often cannot afford,child care for their young children; after-school care is needed to keep olderkids off the streets, away from the television, and in a classroom; anoverburdened and expensive health care system needs an infusion of nurses' aides;the Peace Corps needs to expand its efforts in nations around the globe withoutreducing its quality; soil erosion needs to be battled; streams need to becleaned; classrooms need more teacher aides; and the police need help inorganizing neighborhoods against crime.
This is a splendid idea. It is also, as Cherny acknowledges, not a new idea.It is, come to think of it, a pretty old idea--pre-industrial-age, even. "Fromeach according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is only a recentrestatement of it. Turning this ancient idea into a smart, up-to-the-minuteinformation-age manifesto--now that would be a proper task for a talented and ambitious young wordsmith like Andrei Cherny.