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The Digital Declaration of Independence
Bill Hill
Digital technology is remaking our world. Five hundred years from now, historians will look back at the things all of us who read MSDN® Magazine are doing today, and I believe they'll call our time The Digital Renaissance.
All of the science, technology, medicine, and economic prosperity we enjoy today—and the political shape of the planet—can be traced back to the printing technology developed by Johannes Gutenberg. It's hard to imagine how any of those developments could have happened without the widespread adult literacy and ability to record and share knowledge, which his technology enabled. The Bible that Gutenberg produced in 1455 wasn't the first book ever printed. But it was the first ever printed using movable metal type in a mechanized system. This innovation was like an undersea earthquake. Not even noticeable at first, it became a tidal wave that changed the world forever; its ripples are still being felt after more than half a millennium.
The ability to easily store and share information broke the stranglehold of church and state. It enabled widespread adult literacy and it led to the explosion of thought we call the Renaissance. It also led to the new political and economic thinking historians call the Age of Enlightenment. People knew their world was changing. Thomas Paine, one of the thinkers behind the American Revolution, captured it best. On St. Valentine's Day, 1776, he said, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand."
Once it was clear the shape of the future was up for grabs, the group of like-minded thinkers to which Paine belonged began to ask: "What kind of world do we want to build?" Their thinking led to the Declaration of Independence, which defined a set of human rights toward which we still strive today. We haven't yet achieved all of the lofty ideals it contains. But it has been like a beacon on a high hill, against which we can check our progress.
An even greater change is happening now. A new undersea quake occurred about 40 years ago, when the first crude "personal computer" appeared. It's taken since then to build the huge tidal wave that is once again sweeping across the planet. My son, who is 17, takes it for granted that he can carry his entire gigantic music collection with him wherever he goes. He can have online friends in Massachusetts or Mongolia. He can produce his own music, video, or film. He can get news from anywhere in the world, buy airline tickets or any other kinds of goods online, and so on and on.
Those of us who create the digital technology to make possible these things—and things we haven't yet thought of—have it in our power to "begin the world over again," as Paine said. So: what kind of world do we want to create? There are huge issues and questions that need to be addressed.
Microsoft, with more than a billion users, has hit many of them first. There's never been a company whose products had the potential to change the lives of billions of people across the globe. And there's no playbook to follow. So we'll stumble sometimes, but we'll continue to grow if we get more things right than wrong. Are our first billion customers the "early adopters," who paid a premium price to be in the first wave? What about the next billion?
A couple of these big questions led Microsoft to create the Unlimited Potential program. This program, aimed at the five billion people living in underserved communities worldwide, attempts to assist those individuals and communities in achieving their dreams by supplying current and affordable technologies.
I don't know even a fraction of the questions we'll all have to ask—far less the answers. There's no detailed map of this journey. But we do need another beacon to give us a direction. I couldn't find a better one than the Declaration of Independence, updated for the Digital Age. So here's my Digital Declaration of Independence:
We hold this truth to be self-evident, that every human has an equal and unalienable right to the means to create, distribute, and consume information to realize his potential for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—regardless of the country he lives in, his gender, beliefs, racial origin, language, or any impairments he may have.
It's not about forcing democracy on the whole world. And it's not about trying to change everything at once. Remember, it took more than 200 years from the first Declaration to bring about equal rights just in the United States, even though slavery had been abolished for more than 100 years—and are we there even yet?
The Digital Declaration is not a map; it's a compass bearing. Join me on the journey?
Bill Hill joined Microsoft in 1995 because he believed the company would lead the transition from reading on paper to reading on the screen. He is one of the inventors of the ClearType technology, which dramatically improved the screen readability of text.