by W. van Dieren (Speech at the Doors of Perception 3 Conference)

Table of Contents:
Summary
Introduction
Fairy Tales
Heaven and Hell
Growth
The Rebound
Informia

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Summary
Wouter van Dieren is a member of the Club of Rome and one of the authors of its recent report Faktor Vier (Factor Four). He is critical of information technology and our expectations of it in the near future, based on his previous experience in television and as an analyst of global economic and environmental trends. Van Dieren points to a paradoxical and destructive aspect of the global economy: its performance is measured largely in terms of economic growth; throughput of material is a central indicator. Design innovations and dematerialisation may improve humanity's wealth and welfare, and go a long way towards avoiding the rapidly approaching eco-crash, but they will not necessarily be registered as positive by the world's economic measurement systems. In fact, they will probably be registered as negative. Van Dieren is sceptical of those who believe that information technology -- or any technology, no matter how greatly improved -- is a guarantee of better things to come, or that sheer availability of information and better design alone can help us avoid the coming eco-catastrophe and add to our store of knowledge. Without, in his words, research, analysis and strict limitation of possibilities, progress will not be made.

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Introduction
It is a sunny day outside, but we are forced to close the curtains and sit in the dark, following an oddly prevalent custom of conferences these days. And this church -- this is a former church -- used to be used without microphones and illuminated by daylight. This is a hall of fame. When in the late fifties and the early sixties churches were losing their constituencies very rapidly, this church very soon became a place where the revolutions of the sixties were conceptualised. I was a student in those days. This was where the authorities were told that they were no longer in charge. That was here, and now it is a beautiful place in decay, old and used for a next phase of imagination.

My institute is nearby and might be worth visiting to find out something about what information was like in the past. It is Amsterdam's first theatre, the Vondel Theatre, built in 1637. For the last four hundred years or so, it has been used for meetings, without microphones or artificial lights. So is it really this we need, all the lights, stages and computers? Are they adding something to information? Are they adding insight? Or is it an affair of toys? I am afraid that it is. I will try to tell you something about my beliefs and experiences.

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Fairy Tales
I think it is very important that the world of design take this subject of de-materialisation seriously. Our most recent Club of Rome report is about this, among other things, and it contains examples that support development. But I think a lot of fairy tales are going around and in order to tell you about them, I need some stories from the original Limits to Growth (published 25 years ago by the Club of Rome). It told us a very simple story, namely, that the main variables of the global system consist of material flows, the main ones being population, resources, industrial production, pollution and food. Resources are scarce and being wasted and the environmental functions keep disappearing, while they function as sinks and must be renewable. What should we conclude from all this?

Resources and environmental sinks are the principal production factors for food and industrial production. Industrial production and food are the principle variables for a population to feed itself. Their interaction is now is of such a nature that the earth's systems will soon stop functioning (there are various different drafts and scenarios of this). Beyond the Limit tells us that 25 years after we did the first analysis, nothing really has changed. Whatever variable we now take, things are even worse. This in spite of the enormous amount of criticism around the globe, especially from economists, who cannot stand it that others bother about their profession, which I do not consider a profession but politics in disguise. They could not stand it and they have attacked it fiercely for many years, but the conclusions have remained unchallenged.

And ever since, we are invited around the world to repeat the story. It is not the marginal part of the world doing the inviting, either. Strangely enough, it is the establishment who open their doors without perceptions -- honestly, without a concept of what the future is like. They open their doors and we talk and they say: This is serious, we know things are going wrong. And then the doors open again for the public at large and they tell a different story.

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Heaven and Hell
Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, written in 1954, was about a personal experiment with a native Indian drug: peyote, better know as mescaline. It was long before LSD, hashish, and what have you appeared on our world stages of imagination. Huxley wrote an astounding essay about the worlds beyond the reality of today. It is astounding because it is so modern. And I am afraid that people in the computer world now believe that they will experience a peyote dream if they pass the doors of perception. That they really believe that beyond the doors of the computer screen, beyond that perception, is a new, sustainable world full of hope. I am afraid that this is just as much a myth as the other technology myth that we have witnessed during the last hundred years.

How much is technology actually going to dematerialise life? Technology has been a subject of imagination and hope as long as we know it. If you think of the creation of the seagoing vessel, the sailing vessel, a few thousand years ago; the invention of gunpowder; the technological revolutions of the steam engine, electricity, the car, the train, aviation, mass communication, modern medicine, it has always been a recurring focal point of global change and hope. People thank God that the new technology exists, because they hope that it will create a paradise.

Europe, (at least continental, northern Europe) was a Germanic-oriented culture before WW II. At the universities, we wrote our dissertations in German. That was the language of science. After the war, the American dream was exported to Europe. And I mean exported, by means of information technology and mass media like Life Magazine. These cars and refrigerators and the consumer society in general did not exist before that. The Europeans' reaction was: `My goodness, the Americans, they really have a grasp on the creation of heaven on earth, so let's imitate that, let's do that here in Europe! We stupid Europeans, fighting wars for so many centuries. Now we have a fantastic combination of consumerism and technology that will open the door to heaven instead of hell.'

The term used to systematise the American dream was economic growth. You will be hearing almost every day that economic growth is necessary and that we cannot live without it. 90% of the audience here believes it, without realising that economic growth is a magical term with very little scientific basis. In this book (Faktor Vier) we say: if economic growth is the answer, then what was the question?

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Growth
The question was: how to create wealth and welfare? How can wealth and welfare be created if the depletion of resources is considered economic growth? Is there economic growth in divorce, crime and pollution? Divorce is fantastic for economic growth, because it sells one house and it buys two. And lawyers and so on -- excellent! And a massive car crash is excellent for economic growth. The Japanese earthquake, according to the Wall Street Journal, was excellent for economic growth. Why is the economy up and why is America down? The Atlantic monthly recently wrote. Why do we have 25 million unemployed in Europe? We must have economic growth. We must have new technologies. And here is the newest new technology: information. And that will do the next trick. It will help to boost the economy. In Faktor Vier, we also tell you that it won't. If you de-materialise the economy, which is excellent to save the planet, then the economic parameters of this world will register that accomplishment as negative, because there is less throughput of material. And the throughput of material is what counts, statistically. If it is replaced by information or replaced by a de-materialised world, then it will be registered as an economic crisis. The world will be in better shape and more wealth and welfare will be created, but the stock exchanges will be in pain. That is what this book is about.

The funny thing is that responsible people seek escape and relief and seem to find it in information technology. Faktor Vier contains numerous examples of a de-materialised world, but if we add in this factor four to our existing scenarios for the future, something very strange happens. The peak of industrial production will indeed peak higher in about 2020-2030, but the collapse will be even worse. And the reason is very simple: the signals of scarcity are being delayed and we need them in order to be informed on how to change course. The maximum you can achieve in terms of de-materialisation with the help of information technology is about 10 to 12 per cent of the current material throughput in the world. Is that a half-full glass or a half-empty glass? Some people say it's fantastic. But I am inclined to say the opposite.

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The Rebound
In this regard, let us examine one important phenomenon known as the `rebound effect'. As a consultant, I have witnessed big companies adopting information technology during recent years; this effect is very typical. It works like this. E-mail reduces the material used in the posted letter by a factor of thousand -- a fantastic improvement! But the rebound effect is ten thousand new e-mails or letters which would never have been written while paper and the posted letter were the only means available. Similarly, the energy-saving lamp is a fantastic achievement. And the rebound effect is that Philips is now selling more of them than ever before, because people have started lighting their gardens, as well as their houses. I am afraid that this rebound effect is a very serious thing, indeed. We have the hyper-car, a fantastic thing that rides a hundred miles on two or three litres of fuel, but every family will buy four.

It is not true that technologies of the past have done what they were supposed to be doing, which is to create relief and progress. I know this sounds odd, but let me illustrate my point.

The machine surely has replaced hard labour; the machine surely has helped to abandon slavery and the car is surely faster than the coach, but today's car, in crowded areas like the Netherlands or Bangkok or Tokyo, has an average speed of about twelve miles an hour, whereas the same car 20 or 40 years ago had an average speed of twenty-four miles an hour. The down sides of cars and machines are like the brooms and buckets of the sorcerer's apprentice, in my view. I don't think we master our technologies. The question is: why the next technology wave will do what the others did not accomplish?

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Informia
The question is: will that other World of Information, this new Informia, that we expect to find beyond the doors of perception be like heaven? Why should it be? Because we always have believed in heavens. The Japanese word horaisan is the name of a magic island that looks like paradise (it is the source of the word horizon in our language). In the Ramayana you find many kinds of paradise. Why will there be a new Jerusalem, why will there be suddenly a land full of peace, wisdom and happiness in Informia? Will we really find ways and means to guide the millions on the electronic highway of Informia into the proper channels? Why is information technology so important if the information itself is of no importance? Why was Limits of Growth -- a fantastic message -- spread all over the world in millions of copies and not believed? Will abuse be abandoned in Informia? Will the Mafia be blocked from the highway? Is it indeed true that for the first time in history, we will have a technology that will not be used by crime and criminals? Will there be one universal language of message and meaning in Informia? And is cyberspace the next horaisan or the garden of Eden or the Celtic island of Avalon? Will it be, in the words of the Ramayana, a land watered by lakes, with golden lotuses and rivers by thousands, full of leaves with the colour of sapphire and lapis lazuli, where trees bear flowers and food and perpetually give forth a sweet fragrance and abound with birds?

I think not. If indeed the borders of Informia open up and the other world of cyberintelligence appears, then a final issue must be raised: the other worlds that Aldous Huxley explores beyond the doors of perception are inhabited, not by the many, but by the happy few. It takes a lifetime of hermeneutic behaviour, indulgence and prayer to be allowed entry into the other world and if virtual reality is the new cyberspatial paradise where Microsoft replaces mescaline, then by definition, this paradise cannot be given away to the masses, even though the masses will have an Internet and computer. By definition, the information level then achieved will be a mass information level, beyond which a new elite emerges, a next horizon, as it were, beyond which a new tower of new elites will be built. Knowledge has never been and can never be mass culture.

This is true in spite of all of our efforts - I have been a television man for many years, I have done whatever you can imagine in the field of the media, and my biggest disappointment was that I realised one day that all my dreams about this new world could not be true, because mass information is by definition information on pulp and horror and not the information of wisdom and resurrection which we all hoped for. Knowledge is not universal; knowledge as such does not exist. Even so-called hard facts do not exist -- you have a hard time proving that they are hard. Knowledge is only made meaningful by adding interpretations and selection; knowledge of the good can never be separated from evil. The electronic highway can be jammed with facts, data and stories, but the vast majority of it will be experienced as inaccessible and meaningless. People cannot observe data neutrally. They can only learn in terms of context and culture. Consequently, I believe that the electronic highway is the next technological accident. It is one of meagre proportions. Does that mean that it is a meaningless tool in de-materialisation of the world? As I told you earlier, it can be meaningful, but only if we move beyond the doors of perception into the doors of research, analysis and very strict limitations of the possibilities.