essential social services such as housing, education and health care. As it turned out, the trickle of imported consumer items eventually turned into a flood; coupled with falling oil export revenues, this exacerbated the Soviet Union’s financial shortfalls.
Since the talent to design fashionable, attractive clothing was certainly always present, this was strictly a failure — one of many — on the part of the Soviet leadership. What they entirely missed was the ability of consumer goods, especially clothing, to undermine morale by allowing privileged young people to differentiate themselves in appearance from the rest of the population, and to do so in a way that quietly made a mockery of the official ideology, without any sign of overt dissent. It is well known that putting on a uniform has a profound effect on a person’s behavior. Attire that is branded with an ideologically charged symbol actually influences one’s ideology, because putting it on implies making a statement, and because people tend to agree with themselves, standing by the statements they make. Consequently, putting on attire that is branded with an ideologically hollow symbol, such as a designer logo, is a way of shrugging off ideology altogether and of denying the power of ideologically charged symbols. It gave young people a painless way to opt out of looking and feeling Soviet.
Today, the United States is being flooded with imported consumer goods, just as the Soviet Union was during the stagnation period of the ’80s, and with similar impact on the country’s trade deficits, but here these branded products are too common to serve as a social differentiator. To the contrary, with the exception of sports brands, it is the cheap clothing that is most often emblazoned with a corporate brand, not the high-priced articles. The few consumer articles that are still manufactured in the United States more often than not have a strangely old-fashioned, stolid, institutional look, reminiscent of Soviet production, and maintain their tentative foothold within the domestic market by appealing to the US consumer’s sense of patriotism. When the exporting countries finally decide to stop selling their products on credit, and their container ships stop visiting America’s ports, perhaps the institutional look will become fashionable. Then again, the homemade look may win out, or the threadbare look, or the clothing-optional look; the future of fashion is hard to predict. The worst possible outcome is that everyone will don uniforms, fashioning themselves into identical, mass-produced, ideologically lobotomized servants of the fully privatized, corporate-run state.
Information Technology
One area of superpower competition in which the United States declared early victory, and in which it is now handily defeating itself, is the area of information technology. The Soviet Union failed to keep up for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most important one was the insistence that the whole endeavor be shrouded in secrecy, for security reasons, due to the Soviet government’s deep mistrust of its own people. Their failure to keep up was especially striking in view of the fact that they had some of the best talent. During the late ’70s, many of the pioneering American computer companies were staffed by specialists who had recently emigrated from Russia.
Also, the explosive development of computer technology has generally proceeded through oversight and random, accidental successes, rather than through successful central planning. The US funded the development of Internet routing protocols hoping to create a network that would be resilient in the face of nuclear attack. Luckily, this ability was never to be tested, but the factors that made it resilient also made it anarchic, and this eventually gave us worms and viruses, botnets, peer-to-peer networks and spam. IBM released their PC architecture into the wild, thinking it worthless, and others took the basic blueprint and made a multitude of cheap clones of it. A few tinkerers in a garage came up with the first generation of Apple’s machines. A few other tinkerers at Bell Labs used their copious spare time to write the Unix operating system, more or less as a joke, and it eventually took over most of the bigger machines. It later morphed into Linux, which is now gradually taking over many of the smaller ones. Microsoft blundered across a good thing when IBM mistakenly failed to provide a viable operating system for the PC, and no amount of subsequent blundering has been able to erase this initial advantage. The Soviets, with their secretiveness and tight central control, simply could not match this level of amateurism, haphazard innovation and random improvisation.
It took a while, but the United States eventually found ways to approximate the Soviet failure in this area, and is presently hard at work looking for creative ways to kill the goose that lays golden eggs — by developing some secretiveness and tight central control of its own. The US is executing a three-pronged attack on the goose: through enforcing intellectual property laws, through criminalizing work in the area of computer security and through perpetuating a fraud called enterprise software, which has become something of a poster child for national dysfunction.
It is in the nature of all information to want to spread freely, and networked computers make it ridiculously easy for it to do so. This is really just a minor effect, because information found ways to be shared before the advent of computers and it will go on being shared after the lights go out for good and the disk drives stop spinning. But as computers started to displace newspapers, stereos, television sets and library books, corporate interests decided to start charging rent on the use of information, as opposed to charging for products or services, and they pushed through laws to make that possible. These laws are hard to enforce and the information they are intended to hold for ransom is easy to liberate, with some unintended consequences. It is now possible to buy a DVD of an American film — or any other — in Beijing or Moscow before it even premieres in the United States. It also means that a Chinese or a Russian can generally use any commercial software free of charge, whereas an American has to either pay for it or be threatened with prosecution. The officials in these countries actually like intellectual property laws, because they give them arbitrary authority to prosecute anyone they happen to dislike, but, based on their record of enforcing these laws, they seem to like most people. Finally, let us consider the fact that American corporate equity, with intellectual property included, is being bought up by foreign interests, which are no longer happy accepting US Treasury paper. What this means, in the end, is that Americans will be reduced to paying foreigners for the privilege of using their own creations, while everyone else enjoys them free of charge.
Add to this the dubious American innovation of extending patent law to cover software. Software is basically speech — an expression of the programmer’s thoughts in mathematical or logical constructs — and software patents are limits on such speech, restricting what sorts of things a programmer is allowed to write. According to the very highly respected computer scientist Donald Knuth, the computer revolution of the 1980s would probably never have happened had software patents existed then. The existence of software patents means that any software project may run afoul of some number of patents, which are expressed in vague and tortured legalese, making it legally unsafe to sell software in the United States without entering into various corporate alliances and cross-licensing agreements. The only viable strategy with regard to software patents is to fashion yourself into a sufficiently large nuisance by having plenty of patents of your own and by threatening litigation against anyone who infringes on them, so that anyone thinking of litigating against you would opt to negotiate a cross-licensing arrangement instead. This strategy is only open to large and well-connected software companies, because all the smaller ones would be automatically bankrupted by the exorbitant costs of litigation. Historically, these large companies are also the ones that are the least likely to do innovative work.
This is not to imply that software patents are beneficial even for the software giants. For them, the software patent system is like a large wrecking ball swinging about the software industry, toppling this or that part of it. A recent example is the pending lawsuit filed by Oracle Corporation against Google, based on patents Oracle came to own as a result of acquiring Sun Microsystems. The irony of the situation is that many of the patents in question are essentially nuisance patents, filed by Sun’s engineers as a defensive measure after they had lost a patent infringement lawsuit filed by IBM. Sun lost, essentially, because it didn’t hold enough patents at the time. One of the key patents held by IBM and infringed upon by Sun — the so-called “RISC patent” — basically said, once you strip away all of the ridiculous legalese, that if you make a microprocessor simpler, it will run faster. One of the patents Sun filed in response (by none other than James Gosling, the father of the Java programming language) basically describes a software