All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
OAKLAND, California -- He's better known for his political, environmental, and spiritual perspectives, but Jerry Brown has always kept a keen, if skeptical, eye on technology.
As governor of California in the 1970s, Brown had some audacious plans for science and technology, including a Golden State space program that never took off. For his efforts, he was dubbed Governor Moonbeam by Mike Royko, Chicago's late columnist and curmudgeon. The name stuck for years.
Elected mayor of Oakland last fall, Brown has some down-to-earth, real-time plans for revitalizing a city surrounded by the booming high-tech centers of Berkeley, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.
Already, Oakland has more than 2,000 high-tech companies and an established business incubator for communications-technology startups. Underneath Brown's office, and throughout downtown Oakland, is an extensive fiber-optic telecommunications network laid by Pacific Bell in the 1980s. Brown hopes those subterranean lines will lure more high-tech business to the area and reverse the economic troubles that have plagued Oakland for decades.
Before Brown answered questions, he explored Wired News' Web site for several minutes, reading the headlines aloud and typing his name in the search box.
Wired News: When you look around at all the cell phones, pagers, Palm Pilots, and other gadgets that have worked their way into people's pockets and lives, what kind of impact do you think it's having on the way we communicate?
Jerry Brown: It breaks down the boundaries. It truly destroys place and substantive space. So, no matter where you are, you're at the office. If you're at the beach with your girlfriend, you're still at the office.... Before, you walked across the threshold and you were in the privacy of your home, your hearth. Well, that idea has definitely been marginalized.
WN: Would you like to see more investment in any specific technological or scientific areas?
JB: What I would like is for technology to strengthen the neighborhoods and deal with some of the important issues, like making the neighborhoods safer. We have 57 neighborhood crime-prevention councils, which actually meet in 57 different areas of Oakland, a place 54 square miles in size. I would like to see the Internet used as a communication channel for those groups to share information....
Secondly, I'd like to see the Internet used as an educational tool to support home school, [as well as to] support more decentralized and diversified learning webs or environments....
A person I like is Seymour Papert, the author of Mindstorms. He is a real visionary of the role of the computer as a tool of the student and for the child, not as a lockstep mechanism of standardized learning but rather as an extension and embodiment of the child's mind. So I'd like to explore that possibility.
That's not something seen in the age of standardized tests, where they want everyone in the United States to take the same test on the same day in the same kind of place. That's a very tightly configured arrangement.
At the current level of computing power, kids should be able to use computers for a lot of different things -- for mathematical concepts, for projecting ideas in a more concrete way. All sorts of things can be done. But they have to be driven more by the creative imagination than by committees that are essentially bureaucratic and mediocre in their expectations.
Oakland in the Age of Electronic Commerce
WN: You have the opportunity here to set an economic course for a major American city. What ideas do you have for bringing high-tech and developing businesses to Oakland?
JB: Basically, like the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, we're market driven. We're not looking to hand out some kind of additional money. The market is the best guide for where to go. And we feel on just pure market terms, Oakland is very attractive. We have a strong mayoral form of government. It's very streamlined and we're very responsive to businesses. A streamlined government and market conditions, plus the fiber optics, are the assets.
We want strong business that wants to take advantage of the location -- which is 12 minutes from downtown San Francisco, and 12 minutes from Berkeley, and not all that far from Silicon Valley.... We don't believe in this industrial policy where the city says, "We like certain kinds of computer businesses but not other types." No, we like businesses that have a good return on investment.
WN: Oakland has already invested in attracting high-tech businesses, and you have plans to do more. But as these businesses begin to threaten existing, traditional businesses, how do you balance that investment?
JB: That's what business people have to balance. What does your government do? We make the streets safe, make the schools good, and make sure the streetlights go on and off. In terms of whether to build a big box or a small box, or [whether they] are electronically wired, that's up to investors who want to risk their own capital. That's beyond the competence of government.
WN: What's your view of e-commerce?
JB: I think it's good. Well, it's not good or a bad, it is. It is in the way that the world moves on. We used to have a lot of department stores in San Francisco that don't exist anymore like the Emporium, White House, and City of Paris. So times change.... It's something that Schumpeter described as the "creative destruction of capitalism." It doesn't stop. You have to be nimble, ready to move.
WN: You don't think the government should try to regulate the process?
JB: Well, you need to make sure that kids are trained, make sure there isn't racial discrimination, make sure that chemicals let loose in the air are hopefully stopped. And keep pushing the technology to make sure of the highest quality of life. Do you know any governments sitting around picking between electronic commerce and big department stores?
WN: As Net-based businesses start to take away traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, such as Auto Row or the bookstores, what do you do?
JB: That's the exact time not to help the brick-and-mortar businesses, if they're losing.... Capitalism is about the strong, not the weak. What we're looking for is people to live here. So our strategy in Oakland fits in perfectly with electronic commerce because people can live here and not have to cross the bridge in the morning, they don't have to commute down to [the Valley]. They can live in the city, which has not yet reached its prime.
The value of housing will not go away, and the view to San Francisco will not go away. So whether electronic business takes over the automobile business or whatever business, this can still be a place for craft, for housing, for artistic and cultural expression. I see Oakland as a dynamic, diversified, urban place where many ideas and many forces mix in the confluence of change.
WN: What other plans do you have for Oakland?
JB: I'd like to get the city's TV station to link to our Web page and get the citizens participating and create a real two-way communication between the government and the citizens.
We also want to get Internet crime statistics. Our GIS [Geographic Information Systems] system very soon will [provide] the ability for anyone in Oakland to put in their address or any other address and get a crime within 300 feet or 1,000 feet of that area -- from the day before, the week before, the month before, and the year before so they can identify trends and do something about it.
And then also we want to open up learning. [Marshall] McLuhan talked about learning without walls 20 years ago. Learning is not within walls, it's within the mind. So, with tech we should be able to give people more opportunities to discover what they want, refine their skills.
Technology: Political and Cultural Impact
WN: There has been a lot of stratification in the US over the last 20 years. Are computers exacerbating this process, and if so, what are the cultural ramifications?
JB: More division, more discontent. Less security. That's happened, that's the name of the game. Everyone is in competition with everyone else.... Right now, the thesis is that the market knows best with very few exceptions. Until that breaks down, the current trajectory will continue. That's not to say it will lead to a benign outcome. Far from it.
I think what I can do in Oakland is bring leadership that will make the schools better and encourage charter schools that are sites of innovation, creativity and choice. To encourage people to live in downtown Oakland, build the infrastructure of conviviality so that people who are creative and enterprising will live here and they will invent the countermeasures to untrammeled market hegemony.
Individuals will come up with ideas and governments can make rules based on pressures and the activism of individuals, who will see opportunities for ameliorating this growing disparity. It is a fact that between 1960 and 1990 the gap between the rich and the poor grew significantly, [both] globally and nationally, as well as the pace of technological innovation, almost along parallel paths.
WN: There were reports during the Clinton trial that email and other feedback from Net sources weren't being taken as seriously as more traditional sources -- phone calls and letters, for instance. When do you think the Net will become a more viable, influential medium for political action?
JB: It's a medium for people to share ideas. It certainly gets [issues] from third-world countries around the world. And the Mudge report, or what's his name, "Sludge"?
WN: Drudge.
JB: Drudge, yeah. So he got a lot of stuff out. But a lot of people still like paper. I heard Mr. Microsoft Gates say that for anything longer than three pages, he prefers written text. So if he says so....
WN: What do you think the prevailing attitude in Washington is about the Net?
JB: Email doesn't have much weight in the polls. I think the Net will allow for movements to grow very quickly, so it will increase the volatility in politics. But it's not going to usher in a revolution. It's an important channel to mobilize a constituency. So it would allow an independent candidacy, or some issues movement to develop very quickly and spread. It would have to go from the Internet to the television, because TV still determines a lot of the collective thinking.
The Net, In Closing
WN: How much do you use the Net and for what purpose?
JB: About 45 minutes a day, on the Net and email. Mostly it's research. I used the word "gradualism" in my inauguration speech and I knew I heard it from Martin Luther King. So I found the exact phrase in the "I Have a Dream" speech. It was "the [tranquilizing] drug of gradualism." So it's research -- I look for things. I needed to talk to the head of the NFL on Super Bowl possibilities, and I didn't have his phone number. I went to NFL.com, got his phone number and called him. So I use it for real mundane kinds of uses.
WN: You've had a fascination with science and technology for some time. When you look ahead, say 10 years, how do you think it's going to be different in the ways that we use it and how it appears in our daily lives?
JB: Or how it uses us. I think we are going to shape ourselves to fit our technology. So that's all. Whatever will facilitate technology growth is what human beings will force themselves into. Unless one is a Luddite or a resister. [Brown pauses and grins.] Then you will engage in a rearguard action against the juggernaut.
