A letter arrived last week inviting me to a two-day conference called "The Information Revolution: Impact on the Foundations of National Power," to be held 24-25 September outside Chicago.
"On the threshold of the information age," reads the invitation from the Washington-based Center for Strategic & International Studies, "many of the traditional measures of national power appear under challenge."
This stood out immediately from the stack of junk mail piling up on my kitchen table.
The CSIS is a powerhouse military/national-security think tank whose board members are listed on its imposing letterhead and include Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Sam Nunn, James R. Schlesinger, Brent Scowcroft, Harold Brown, Carla A. Hills, and R. James Woolsey.
For those unfamiliar with these names, they include former national-security advisors, secretaries of state, secretaries of defense, US senators, and other cabinet secretaries.
The ambitious focus of this conference, said the invitation, "will be to examine the impact of the information revolution on economic, knowledge-oriented, social, and cultural foundations of national power."
It seemed the foundation was offering to fly me and 45 others to Chicago, and to provide hotel accommodations, meals, and transportation to the foundation's private conference center.
Anyone who doubts that the digital age is sending shock waves through the most powerful elements in American business, politics, and journalism ought to read the panel topics, along with the guest list.
That I am on the list of "invitees" is both a shock and a mortification.
The overall context for the conference, the invitation explains, is the way the information revolution is putting stress on the fundamentals of national power. There's some "context," too, about the nature of social revolutions - the eventual winners and losers.
For all our cyber-chatting, it's a shock to see these Great Whites preparing to convene to talk so nakedly about national political power and the digital culture, and even more of a shock to realize that many of our ravings - about how rattled the power structure is by the liberation of so much information - are actually truer than we even knew.
This group will have five panels:
First, there's "Economic Might as an Element of National Power," to explore how the task of generating robust economic resources for the citizenry and government are being challenged by the forces of globalization and internationalization. "How," asks the letter, "does the information revolution affect a nation-state's ability to marshal and control its economic resources in support of its leaders' and peoples' objectives?" And "What are the working and theoretical models that promise the most success in adjusting national economic power to the realities of the information revolution?"
And you thought you were just downloading cool software or browsing neat new sites.
The second panel topic, "Knowledge Acquisition as an Element of National Power," addresses what "is the most effective mechanism for addressing the task of strengthening national power through the cumulative acquisition of knowledge by a nation-state's citizens and institutions?"
Panel three is "Civic Dynamics as an Element of National Power."
The description for this panel says the information revolution "has been forecast to usher in a new age of mankind, fundamentally changing civic structures and roles by impacting the nature of work, the bonding of groups and individuals, and the role of the citizen."
The description adds: "The societal transition resulting from the industrial revolution was accompanied by a transition to a set of nation-state mechanisms for domestic and international relations. Can we expect another tectonic shift in civic structure and national mechanisms as a result of the information revolution?"
Panel four addresses the subject of "Cultural Identity as an Element of National Power."
Culture has served to bind people across generations, says the brochure, but the "information revolution delivers culture to any people at any place. What is the future role of culture as a cohesive binding force between peoples who are located and/or share a common interest? Can ethnocentric culturalization withstand the homogenizing battering ram of the information revolution? How do a people balance the enriching and eroding effects of the information revolution on their own unique culture?"
The last panel is entitled "Rethinking National Power in an Information-rich World."
The information revolution, says the CSIS, "appears, in at least some cases, to have fundamentally altered the state's conception of, and ability to exercise, national power. The rise of new, nonsovereign authorities and global forces suggest that the traditional equation of national power will continue to change; others, however, insist that classical conceptions of power will remain valid, the information revolution causing only marginal changes."
Each panel, says the invitation, will be accompanied by an academic paper to help "focus" discussion.
Wow, I thought, while reading over the topics.
These people are disturbingly smart, if clunky panel-topic writers. They've fully grasped what hasn't yet occurred to William Bennett or The New York Times or Bill Clinton or Al Gore - that the rise of the digital age has little to do with pornography, stolen term papers, or email-addicted students. It has to do with raw power - who gets, defines, and controls it, and for what purpose.
The CSIS board cares much about this.
Its members comprise a blue-ribbon list of what used to be called the military-industrial complex. That it would convene all these interested parties, fly them to Chicago from all over the country and world, and stuff them with canapés (and entertainment and museum tours) at great expense is a striking affirmation of how seriously the Net and the Web are being taken in the real corridors of power.
This letter read not so much like an invitation to talk about the Net but an X-Files script mailed to the wrong address. I expect Cigarette Man will be sitting in the rear of the conference center, leering, puffing away, and smiling wryly at the attendee's naive notions of how power really works.
I won't be there, though. In my next column, I'll explain why and share the list of other "invitees."
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
