The Digital Tokamak

By Zaid Hassan (August 2000)

It has long been recognised that the currency of the telecommunications revolution is intellectual property. As our economies and systems move towards this new currency, many minds are busily trying to work out how this new currency can be banked.

As long as currency was something tangible, like land or a bar of gold, the banking and manipulation of currency was fairly simple and well understood. For land you needed an army, for bars of gold you needed secure vaults and so on. With something intangible like ideas, all this changed; suddenly the handling and manipulation of currency was radically different, catching many people flat-footed.

Over the last few years we have seen many painful attempts to �bank� ideas, ranging from Amazon.com�s efforts to patent one-click shopping to the music industry�s expensive struggles with digital media (Napster, mini-disc, DAT). These are all examples of people and systems, geared towards banking bars of gold, grappling with the very nature of our new currency.

Today one of the most pressing issues facing the industry is the creation and evolution of systems (attitudes, laws, organisations and technologies) that will allow us to handle and protect knowledge efficiently. Nobody really knows what these new systems will look like but by looking further afield it is possible to draw out some design principles that could inform this work.

The Tokamak

In the 1960s a rather thorny problem was occupying the minds of many of the world�s leading physicists. Developments in nuclear physics since the war pointed to the possibility of harnessing nuclear fusion (which powers the sun) as an energy source, using purified water (deuterium) as a fuel, thereby giving us a potentially endless source of clean energy.

One of the main problems in accomplishing this was that of storage. Nuclear fusion takes place at rather extreme temperatures (40x106 Celsius) which meant that it was near impossible to find a container to hold the fuel (called plasma) at this temperature while extracting useful energy from it.

The ingenious solution to this problem was to create a magnetic �bottle�, a complex configuration of magnets that produced a doughnut (which is technically called a torus) shaped magnetic �bottle� with no physical walls that could contain the plasma. These magnetic bottles are known as tokamaks.

Our current attempts to bank ideas are reminiscent of pre-1960s physicists' attempts to contain plasma, and the nature of intellectual property is paralleled by the nature of plasma, volatile and so hot that it is difficult to conceive of a container capable of �holding� it.

If you go to Oxfordshire today you can visit JET, the Joint European Torus, which is an experimental nuclear fusion facility. Upon being shown the tokamak, one of the first things you will notice is that it is about six-stories high, surrounded by hardware and requiring armies of physicists, mathematicians and technicians to run.

You�ll quickly grasp that an undertaking of this magnitude requires massive amounts of technical expertise, financial muscle and political willpower. The amount of time, effort and sheer intellectual firepower it takes to build a tokamak means that countries such as Japan, the United States, the UK, France and Germany need to form consortiums because they are unable to do it alone.

Can we imagine similar time and effort going into building containment devices for intellectual property? We need to understand that the creation and evolution of systems that are capable of handling information is akin to building a tokamak, a truly leviathan exercise in all respects.

However the payoffs for building fusion tokamaks are huge, potentially unlimited, clean energy. What would the advantage be of building such a device for the knowledge economy? Would the effort be justified?

In the meantime, the use of a non-disclosure agreements and patent laws to �contain� ideas is a little bit like using a yoghurt carton in place of a tokamak. If we wish to �contain� this knowledge, we will need to be audacious enough, and perhaps insane enough, to build the digital tokamak.