Q: Your book is about the future. Should we be fearful or optimistic?

A: Both. It's human nature to look for ways to improve the world around us, whether that's coming up with a better computer program or trying a new way to get your kid to eat his vegetables. Progress comes from trial and error, when we're free to try things and free to reject ideas that don't work. That makes me optimistic about the future. The problem comes when people either try to stamp out experimentation or try to cram one possibly hare-brained scheme down everyone's throat.

Q: Is your book about politics?

A: This isn't really a book about politics. It's about how we as a society learn. It looks at a wide range of examples, from Vidal Sassoon's hairstyling innovations to the connection between optical lens technology and the artistry of Citizen Kane. Newt Gingrich does put in an appearance, but mostly to praise beach volleyball. What's political about the book is that it says our biggest political divide today is over whether you allow trial-and-error learning to take place—whether you're comfortable with the open-ended, unknown future.

Q: To the extent that it is about politics, your book completely defies the conventional mindset of left vs. right. What's going on?

A: Our conventional left-right categories don't work on a lot of very hot ssues. They don't tell us why Pat Buchanan and Jeremy Rifkin can go on Crossfire and spend the whole show agreeing with each other that the future looks bleak and economic change is dangerous. They don't explain why "left-wing" environmentalists and "right-wing" nativists both oppose immigration. They don't tell us why people on both the left and the right are denouncing popular culture, Wal-Mart, international trade, and the Internet. And they don't explain why you also have a left-right convergence in the opposite direction: "conservatives" and "liberals" who support open markets, technological innovation, new media competition, or a simpler, less manipulative tax code. The old categories don't explain why both the left and the right seem to have cracked up. Something important is going on that conventional political and cultural analysts are missing.

Q: What does this new landscape look like?

A: On one side of the new political landscape you have what I call "stasists." They view the future as a dangerous abyss. To avoid the abyss, some stasists want a return to some imagined, more stable past. These stasists would include such people as Pat Buchanan and Jeremy Rifkin, or the anti-technology activist Kirkpatrick Sale, who goes around smashing computers to illustrate his speeches. Other stasists want to build a safe "bridge" to the future. They want to control the future. You get a lot of that among politicians. In either case, stasists first decide the one best future for everyone and then they work to impose it. On the other side of the new political landscape are what I call "dynamists." They see the future as an exciting process of experimentation and learning. That process has many different outcomes, for different people. There isn't "one best way." Dynamists celebrate such open-ended processes as scientific inquiry, market competition, artistic innovation, or technological invention. So they include people like Freeman Dyson, writing about science; or Tom Peters, looking at business innovation; or Stewart Brand, writing about How Buildings Learn; or the whole Wired crowd. Henry Petroski's book The Evolution of Useful Things has some great examples and ideas about the dynamics of invention. Dynamists tend to be less overtly political than stasists, because they aren't trying to grab government power to impose their ideas. But their vision—especially of the economy as a process—increasingly affects our politics.

Q: You write about the need for experimentation and feedback and trial and error. Why are these things so important?

A: Everything that works in our lives, from technology to manners to writing techniques, was refined over a long period of time. We don't know in advance how to do anything, and there's always room for improvement. Progress is an infinite series. Henry Petroski uses the phrase "form follows failure" to capture this idea. We find improvements by looking at what doesn't work, trying something we think will be better, and seeing whether in fact it is. Contact lenses took almost 100 years to get right—and they were a pretty crazy idea when they started out. And some things never work: flying cars, for instance, or Kleenex Avert Virucidal Tissues, which terrified customers with that deadly name. You don't want to stop the process of improvement, and you don't want to declare any idea a permanent winner.

Q: Your book is very critical of planning and centralized authority. Why is that?

A: I've got nothing against small-scale planning—we planned this interview. A certain amount of predictability is essential. My problem is with the assumption that somebody can take a God's eye view, know everything important, and work out grand plan for everyone. That's what stasists want to do, with their idea of the "one best way." There are two competing visions of knowledge. In the book, I talk about them as trees: Stasists see knowledge as a tall, spindly palm tree—one long trunk with a few fronds on top. Dynamists, by contrast, envision knowledge as a spreading elm tree—lots of dispersed knowledge, communicated through complex channels, often at a great distance. We benefit from things other people know that we don't. And a lot of knowledge is hidden.

In the early '80s, for instance, clothing companies got advice from high-powered consultants who told them that women were getting older and fatter and that they should therefore make clothes that weren't sexy or revealing but practical. That wasn't, however, what people wanted to buy. All those basics just stayed on the store shelves, while women bought miniskirted business suits and clingy slip dresses. The consultants missed the "X-factor." They had excellent demographic information, but they missed the hidden knowledge of what would inspire people to buy. A lot of public policy is based on that same idea—that someone can know everything important. San Francisco zoned new restaurants out of its neighborhoods. Its planners assumed they knew what people needed, and would need into the future—stores, not restaurants. So when Starbucks came into town, they couldn't open the sorts of neighborhood hangouts that have made them so popular. It was illegal for them to put in chairs. They had to get the law changed, to create a new category called "beverage houses." Of course, that only solves the problem until the next new idea comes around.

Q: Some people might view your hands-off approach to dealing with the future as reckless and insensitive to the needs of people who are being left behind by rapid change. How do you respond?

A: The first thing I'd say is that people who want to stop change, by giving some decision making body the power to choose a single future for everyone, are in fact making society more brittle. The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s was a direct result of static policy making—trying to dictate exactly what financial institutions should look like and then protect them from change or innovation. That static vision failed, and it cost billions of dollars to recover from. Stasists are being reckless, by taking away the ability to adapt. So, for instance, you find that the U.S. economy is much more resilient than Europe. Yes, people lose their jobs here, but that's rarely a permanent tragedy. New jobs are being created all the time, and companies are eager to find new workers. Whereas in Europe, it's simply assumed that nobody is going to take a chance on hiring young people—sky-high unemployment among young workers is a huge problem. Making young people economically irrelevant seems terribly insensitive to me.

Then you have the stasists who absolutely hate the idea of progress, who are determined to keep the world's peasants yoked behind their water buffalo for all eternity. That's profoundly inhumane. They dress it up in pretty prose, but what the stasist ideal of "stability" offers is poverty, disease, ignorance, and death.

So stasis is something we should fear. But I also have a positive message—that the dynamist vision is one that celebrates our greatest human capacities, above all the capacity to learn. The world is a turbulent place, with or without human efforts. Dynamism teaches us that we have to be adaptable, innovative, and alert. But that's what human beings were meant to be. That's what makes us special.