As it's a long holiday weekend here in the UK, I relaxed with a terrific mystery set in Victorian London, featuring Joseph Bazalgette, Charles Darwin, Charles Babbage, Florence Nightingale and above all the great Isambard Kingdom Brunel (just pipped at the post by Winston Churchill in a 2002 BBC vote for the Greatest Britons). The book is Tony Pollard's The Minutes of the Lazarus Club. The hero is a surgeon, and the book has all the naturalism about dissections and body parts one might expect from an author who runs the University of Glasgow's Centre for Battlefield Archaeology. It's a page turner too and ideal for others who, like me, have a passion for the technological surge of the Victorian era, the difference engines, steam engines, railways and not forgetting the first London sewerage system.
It set me pondering about the way the Victorians achieved a combination of private gain and public achievement in a manner which was chaotic and disruptive at the time but, from our perspective, appears incredibly robust. The past quarter century has profoundly failed to bring about a happy union between private and public domains, and it strikes me as an urgent and serious challenge now. How should we organize our societies for the greatest mutual benefit? We can't even create a robust sense of public domain in the online world, never mind the material. Yet you only have to look at a superb Victorian building like Manchester's Town Hall, as I did on Monday, to realize that when private and public interests can be aligned, anything is possible.
But isn't the internet a pretty robust integration of public and private interests? Sure, there's a lot of rubbish in the virtual world, but that's ok so long as the good stuff can thrive there as well. So long as censorship and profiteering doesn't sink it, and so long as issues of privacy can be sorted out, it seems to be as splendid a structure (in all its chaos and mess) as Manchester's Town Hall.
It certainly contains both but I think your conditions are pretty far from being met, and there also needs to be a clearer and more balanced outcome in terms of intellectual property, and some difficult issues to resolve about what's free and what's not!
This review makes The Industrial Revolutionaries by Gavin Weightman sound an engrossing account of Victorian technology.
“It set me pondering about the way the Victorians achieved a combination of private gain and public achievement ”
They didn't let the lower orders into the franchise. We need to restore the property-owning qualification immediately, or substitute some other qualification. See http://blog.dgwbirch.com/?p=176
But what would achieve your aim? A minimum income (rather than property) qualification? An annual citizenship test? Voluntary activity? A threshold IQ level? Or all of the above?