Free Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin Barber Page A

President (shipping), which derives two thirds of its income from foreign port sailings. 14
    Twenty or more years ago, many of the American companies now deriving majority revenue abroad were almost exclusively focused on the domestic market. A “French” company like Michelin (tires), with 20 percent of world tire sales, earns only 19 percent of its revenues in France, while Sony earns less than a quarter of its nearly $30 billion in annual income from Japan, deriving over half from the United States and Europe (28 percent of its total sales in each). Smaller countries have also lost even nominal sovereignty over their businesses. Sweden’s cheap furniture retail giant IKEA sells better than four-fifths of its products ($3.2 billion in sales in 1992) beyond Swedish frontiers and founder Anders Moberg (like Wal-Mart’s Sam Walton, a billionaire) recently transferred total ownership of IKEA to a foundation he established in Amsterdam, while company headquarters went to Denmark (Moberg himself moved to Switzerland). 15 With a style called “Danish modern,” how Swedish can IKEA really be?
    As manufacturing is internationalized, and traditional industrial powers cede dominion to new markets with cheaper labor, the industrial sector is itself being transformed. The internationalization of companies is only one part of this change; for the goods companies make—the very idea of what a consumer good is—are evolving. From hard to soft goods, from soft goods to services, which are themselves becoming goods. We turn now to that part of the story.

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From Soft Goods to Service
    T HE WALKMAN IS a perfect exemplar of the impact of new hard technologies on choice and liberty, appearing to expand each, yet in truth contracting both. By one measure the Walkman is not new at all: it is just the latest version of a very old modern technology: the phonograph. But the Walkman’s portability, its suitability to solitary listening, and its supermobility make it a ten-ounce fifth column for McWorld that insinuates lifestyle preferences directly into the inner ear while modifying traditional behaviors in socially significant ways. The Walkman technology transforms listening from a social into a solitary occupation; it takes a foreground end-in-itself activity and turns it into background for other consumer-society-desirable behaviors like jogging (Walkmans sell athletic shoes and athletic shoes sell Walkmans!); and it permits a sometime music listening activity to become an all-the-time habit that demands the production and sale of ever more music software.
    Computer technology has equally momentous (equally invisible) social entailments. A computer not only conveys information to users but draws them into new forms of interaction that more or less leavetheir bodies behind, abandoned in front of screens that are the entry to new and peculiar kinds of virtual community that (unlike, say, books) reconstructs their bodies as cyberspace members and thus suggests some kind of virtual politics. Just what kind of politics remains altogether problematic—albeit we can be sure there
will
be a politics of one kind or another. Even the form that information takes—video-textual, digital, programmed, time-shifted, technology-dependent—will inevitably impact culture and politics and the attitudes that constitute them. It has been speculated that video-game players acquire hand-eye skills critical to certain professions—fighter pilots, for example, or laboratory technicians handling dangerous materials by remote control; it has also been speculated that players may develop diminished capacities in other domains such as imagination or human sympathy. There have been no decisive empirical studies of such linkages, but it certainly seems likely that linkages exist and will have important political implications. Those interested in democracy, culture, and civic life cannot afford to leave the discovery of their character to chance.
    With these