from Brad Cox:

We're a brand new hyper-interdisciplinary department that arose out of a
number of converging interests. One is the feeling of GMU's adminstration,
shared at least in part by its faculty, that academia had better carve out
a new relationship with society than sitting in ivory towers writing boring
papers, or society will invent another solution responsive to its needs.
There's a lot of academic bashing going on right now and at least part of
it, IMHO, is justified. This feeling became focused in the feeling that
becoming more interdisciplinary would address what ails universities, and
this department was one of the outcomes.

Another is the conviction of this department's founders (Don Lavoie and
Jack High) that the principles of Austrian Economics and libertarianism are
relevant to far more than just economics. A particular emphasis of Austrian
Economics is in seeing markets as distributed decision-making machines, and
in viewing knowledge (instead of labor, capital, and rent as in classical
economics) as a major determinant of value.

Yet another is Lavoie's work in analyzing the flaws of centrally planned
European economies. He sees parallels between the way Russia organized its
manufacturing age economy with the way modern offices organize for the
information age. The idea in a nutshell is "Now that the results of central
planning are known with respect to Eastern European manufacturing age
economies, what should economists do next?" Refocusing from manufacturing
age goods to information age goods seems seems like a plausible answer.  We
hope to explore free market approaches such as superdistribution as an
alternative to working for big brother for a salary.

This line of thinking led them to found the Agorics project several years
ago as an offshoot of the Center for the Study of Market Processes. This
project has been pursuing software as an atypically well-encapsulated
example of information age goods (more well-defined, for example, than
other information age commodities, such as the products of decision-makers
such as managers). This project has been working closely with Amix and
Xanadu for some time (Mark Miller is on their board of directors, and has
co-authored an article with Drexler in their journal). 

Another straw in the wind is books like Peters' "Thriving in Chaos", which
projects a future in which central planning will collapse under its own
weight. The business gurus coined the term "Organizational Learning" to
indicate the rapid responsiveness needed to thrive in a world of fast
change, niche markets, and quality-obsessed consumers. This resonated well
with Austrian Economics notions of the role of markets as distributed
intelligent super-organisms; a kind of "thinking machine".

I became involved when Agorics called me for advice on how to fund a major
study of software reuse. This study was recently completed and will be
released to non-sponsors in January, initially via Patricia Seybold. 

The resonance with my own interests grew out of a paradox that has
concerned me for years. I've been pushing the idea of Software-ICs for a
very long time; applying specialization of labor to software development so
that we assemble pre-fab components acquired from a market instead of
continually fabricating software from first principles. So when they asked
me to join their department, it seemed quite natural to oblige. 

Reusable software components have been technically feasible since the very
first days of computing, and are even more so now that OO programming
languages came on the scene. Yet this potential has never become actual. In
fact, the trend in OO circles has been gravitating back to fabrication from
scratch (Ada, C++, etc). Large repositories of prefabricated components
just don't make it off the ground. Why? The answer, I'm convinced, is not
poor technology, but poor economics. We don't know how to incentivize
people to build easily-copied information age goods that can be copied in
nanoseconds and transported at the speed of light around the globe.

So the environment I now find myself brings this software craftsman (I
cannot bear to dignify my medieval pre-scientific field with words like
computer _science_ or software _engineering_) into daily face to face
contact with economists, historians, sociologists, policy theorists,
geographers, and a host of other humanitarian types to try to understand
why society in general, and organizations in particular, have such
difficulty in adjusting to the increasingly rapid pace of change, largely
driven by global telecommunications and computing infrastructures.

In case this (hastily written) reply is too garbled to understand, I've
enclosed a course syllabus that states my interests in this subject more
coherently. 

PSOL 5XX        Taming the Electronic Frontier  Spring 1993
        Draft Course Syllabus   Sun, Oct 25, 1992
Instructor:     Brad Cox, Ph.D. bradcox@sitevax.gmu.edu

How can individuals and organizations adapt to a increasingly chaotic, ever
shrinking, faster changing world? How will we make money as the economy
shifts from the tangible goods of the manufacturing age to the intangible
goods of the information age? What does it mean to 'buy' or 'sell'
intangible electronic or intellectual property? What does it mean to 'own'
goods that can be replicated in nanoseconds and transported at literally
the speed of light? Does it make sense to own something that can't be
counted, or seen, or tasted, or weighed, and that can be replicated and
transported so readily? If not, how else might we incentivize people to
supply information age goods that are timely and relevant to our needs? How
can organizations learn to respond effectively to the accelerating pace of
change in an increasingly global, knowledge-intensive economy?

Beneath each of these questions loom challenges even larger than in the
major intellectual revolutions of history. Electronic goods raise
fundamental questions with respect to concepts at the heart of any
cooperative/competitive activity. Such basic concepts as property rights,
rights that could be taken for granted for the hard-to-copy tangible goods
of the industrial revolution, must be specifically invented, considered,
debated, adopted, deployed and enforced for the intangible goods of the
electronic frontier. What does it mean to 'own' software, indeed?

This course examines the history of major revolutions of the past from the
viewpoint of Austrian economics to extrapolate beyond the established
paradigms telecommunications, computer science, and software engineering to
how the information revolution may unfold in the future.

Audience

This broadly interdisciplinary course aims to establish, a productive
dialog between producers and consumers of information age goods.

Technical specialists, such as students entering the computer science,
software engineering, or telecommunications professions, will find the
breadth of this course valuable for guarding against the criticism that
technologists care more about technology than customers and for
anticipating fundamental changes in the way information age workers earn
their pay.

Students with non-technical interests will find the course a way of
developing sufficient telecomputing skills for understanding the growing
impact of telecomputing on the modern office. Both will learn techniques
for acting as effective change agents for organizational learning as
offices struggle to enter the information age.

Prerequisites

Students should have (or be able to acquire with assistance) basic
familiarity with personal computing sufficient to use a terminal emulator
to access a Unix account that will be provided for each student. The
account will allow students to communicate with the course instructor,
other students, and people outside the university. Class assignments will
involve extensive use of email, netnews and other internet facilities, as
well as advanced groupware systems as they become available during the
course.

Sessions 1 & 2: Where do we stand today?

The first third of this course brings the class to a basic level of
competence with the established tools, methods, and paradigms of today's
telecommunications, computer science and software engineering culture.
Subsequent classwork will use telecomputing infrastructures extensively,
particularly internet, to provide first-hand acquaintance with the
electronic frontier and the bewildering phenomena that are occuring there
today.

Sessions 2 & 3: How did we get here?

The second third examines the history of other major revolutions to see how
similar frontiers were conquered in the past. By studying the major
paradigm shifts of the past, we'll search for insight into how the
electronic frontier might develop in the future.

When interchangeable parts were introduced to manufacturing, the belief
systems and vested interests of the cottage industry gunsmith establishment
came into direct conflict with their customers' desire for easily
repairable weapons. This part of the industrial revolution provides
particularly rich examples of the dynamics of organizational learning.

The computer software industry has been on the threshold of a similar
revolution ever since the term, 'software crisis, was coined a
quaarter-century ago. Software producers defend present practices by
proclaiming "There's no Silver Bullet" in the face of their consumers
demand for radical improvement. By denying this hope, could the software
establishment be defending its privileged role in society at the expense of
our customers' demand for change?

The dominant paradigm for reasoning about electronic data and especially
computer software, constitutes the central belief-systems of computer
science and software engineering. The computer establishment's present
emphasis on logic and mathematics is like that of the Ptolemaic astronomers
and the alchemists of medieval days. Following Plato, they believed that
logic and mathematics were primary means for arriving at essential truths
without the deception that could arise through experimental observation of
nature.

The Copernican shift to a nature-centered paradigm based on experimental
observation is only beginning to arrive on the electronic frontier. But
what might it mean 'observe' software as Copernicus observed the planets or
Lavoisier observed the behavior of oxygen? What corresponds to 'nature' in
an electronic frontier where everything is routinely fabricated from first
principles instead of being assembled from pre-existing components?

Sessions 5 & 6: Where are we heading?

The telecomputing industry evolved in a uniquely puzzling manner. We've
deployed a remarkably robust infrastructure capable of moving goods around
the globe at literally the speed of light. But we have never created a
robust market mechanism to encourage the production of goods for the
infrastructure to carry.

Users are beginning to ask fundamental questions indeed: "Why should I buy
a computer? I want to buy water, but you're selling plumbing. Why should I
invest in telecom infrastructure when there are no goods for the
infrastructure to carry?" Executives are asking "Why is my organization's
thirst for timely, relevant information not abated now that my company has
invested so heavily in information age plumbing?" There are even reports
that computers may reduce white-collar productivity by providing noise at
the expense of relevant signal.

Possible answers to these questions may already exist within other domains
of human experience. For example, the music industry found itself in a
similar predicament a century ago as they came to terms with radio and TV
broadcasting. An extension of the pay-per-use system that they ultimately
adopted might allow software to be distributed for free in return for
usage-based revenue collection.

An industry-wide consortium of Japanese computer manufacturers is already
exploring exactly such a solution under the direction of a now-retired
director of MITI. He calls the approach superdistribution by analogy with
superconductivity, because it allows information to flow freely, without
resistance from copy protection and piracy.

Finally we will consider the controversial implications if this approach
were applied, not just for software, but as an incentive mechanism for
organizational learning within the far broader context of white-collar
productivity in general.

==
Copyright 1992 by Brad Cox. Electronic distribution is freely granted so
long as this notice is enclosed. Contact bradcox@sitevax.gmu.edu for
permission to distribute via other means.

          Brad Cox; 703 993 1142 secretary 703 968 8229 evenings 
     George Mason Univ; Program on Social and Organizational Learning