Reflections Knowledge: economy or community?

At the end of World War II, Western civilisation put engineers on a pedestal after seeing how well the US military could manage matériel and logistics. This led to a stockpile of consumer goods. Marketers became the heroes as they created mass-consumer markets. Following the mastery of distribution, promotion and sales, accountants came to prominence. They estimated costs and counted the profits, until money itself became a commodity passing the dominance to the financial managers. The information age emerged as all these fields demanded better computing. Perhaps it should have been called the IT-industry age. After all, hardware and software may have generated far more profits than the savings supposed to flow from managing information. Today, information has been ‘value-added’ to enfold a more fashionable package called knowledge. It wraps up information and application know-how from various fields, and is more than what is usually found on the Internet. A notable context, today, in which knowledge is fast attracting capital moves us far beyond matériel towards the essence of life itself. In fact we see in biotechnology how knowledge is being turned into capital—knowledge capital. As capital, knowledge is now being accumulated and tightly controlled rather than widely shared. We have a knowledge economy rather than a knowledge community. Is knowledge economy yet another neoliberal utopia? Corporate interests already well endowed with power and money are amassing knowledge capital at the verge of the human spirit. The emerging biotech industry, driven by a new science, deals in the engineering of living organisms, including human tissue. By invading this sacred space, and taking upon itself the mantle of universal creator, knowledge capital has found yet another commodity to sell to the highest bidder in the so-called global free market. Futures 37 (2005) 881–887 www.elsevier.com/locate/futures