Kaveh Waddell: In your research, you say that we’ve gone through an “information revolution,” and you develop a normative theory through which to understand our new information society. Why do we need this framework?

Alistair Duff: We are lacking a framework for attacking the problems of the 21st century. The Industrial Revolution created a lot of creative and systematic thinking about how society should be run. I think after the information revolution, we need to do exactly the same thing.

I think we need the big picture, not just individuals working on privacy, or intellectual property, or the distribution of scientific information, or this and that—you need to approach it in a holistic, integrated way. Not many people are doing that, and I’ve tried to make a start in my Normative Theory of the Information Society.

Waddell: How soon after the Industrial Revolution did philosophers start sitting down to try and come up with a normative theory of those societal shifts?

Duff: The term “industrial revolution” wasn’t coined until [Arnold] Toynbee, the historian, coined it, in 1886. That was after its heyday. But before the era was christened in that way, there had been a massive amount of creative responses to what I would call the normative crises of the Industrial Revolution.

That’s what the whole socialist movement was about: A way to humanize the factory system, tame industrialization, and make sure it was steered in the direction of human welfare.

Now, have we had anything like that in our own era? We haven’t. So there’s an open field.

Waddell: In exploring your theory, you went to Silicon Valley to see what the information revolution looks like there. Did you see anything while you were visiting that helped you understand the information society or where it came from?

Duff: I saw a lot that was good. I wouldn’t want to condemn Silicon Valley carte blanche: There’s a lot of innovation going on; there’s a lot of new jobs being created. There’s a lot of the good side of capitalism going on. It’s a very pleasant environment.

But I think there is a dark side there, so it did confirm some of my theorizing about the information age. There is massive inequality, which is unacceptable. Inequality should not be so great that it crystallizes into class distinctions—master-servant relations—and I think you have that in Silicon Valley, to some extent.

And I think there are issues over abuse of data. In fact, some of the information corporations that I interviewed admitted that. There are issues over intellectual property—profound concerns over some of Google’s innovations. I think they are playing fast and loose in the name of copyright, all in the name of progress.

We need gadflies who will ask searching questions and not just buy into Google’s narrative of progress, and those of other companies in the valley.