DEFENDING THE FUTURE

Virginia Postrel, author of “The Future and Its Enemies,” defines dynamism as “not just change but evolution through variation, feedback and adaptation.” We talked with her about dynamism and communications innovation.

On the economy: “The economic realities of business are part of the feedback. It's not just innovation for innovation's sake — it's innovation for the sake of improvement. Lots of ideas sound good in theory, but there's always the question of what people really want.”

On regulation: “In telecom you're trying to untangle legacies of old regulations that had specific models in mind. In the untangling, of course, you get into all kinds of politics where people are trying to get it untangled to the advantage of their model. It's very hard to have innovation and learning within that framework. But it's impressive how much innovation there is in telecom given all the political constraints.”

On competition: “You need a system where the status quo can be challenged. How you deal with that in a network industry is not easy. There are questions about the best ways to keep things open to competition without, in that pursuit, entrenching in some other kind of model.”

On the Internet: “The underlying rules of the Internet were set up without dictating that the technology would be used in a particular way. The people writing the protocols left the rules open-ended so that others could write applications on top, and you got this tremendous flourishing of different uses.”

On the struggle of start-ups: “One of the reasons we have such a successful system is that you have these periods where people just try stuff. There's capital available, and people try all kinds of things and most of those things don't work. The beauty of the system is that people get to try those things and that it does get sorted out. You're having to discover genuinely new things — not just new technologies but questions about what people want.”

On what's next: “Periods of tremendous creativity are always followed up by some sort of sorting period. We'll see another period where there is investment in new ideas and new companies. But it won't be as much of a get-rich-quick frenzy, and it will take four or five years to build a company before some kind of liquidity event as opposed to trying to do it in a year and a half, which is unrealistic.”