Technology prepares to cross the finnish line

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Apr 1, 2001 | by words Pat Kane

It is known as the home of Nokia, one of the world's most lucrative telecoms companies. But Finland is not just a one-firm economy, as more of its population grasp the nettle and take the country deeper into the information revolution Jyri Engestrom is 23, shockingly blonde, American-accented, and the hippest young brand consultant in Helsinki. But when I ask him to define the Finnish attitude to new technology, the story he tells seems like something out of rural folklore.

"There's this British guy sitting at Helsinki Airport, talking in English in a very loud voice on his mobile phone, about how he's just screwed this Finnish company, completely ripped it off. 'These Finns just don't know how to do business' etc.

"So as I'm watching this, I see a man sitting behind him, who calmly takes out his cellphone and dials a number. This guy's local, employed by the company - and he's phoning straight through to the boss, telling him in Finnish to cancel the deal. Meanwhile, totally unaware, this Brit is carrying on, telling them to literally break out the champagne corks Now that's the Finnish attitude to new technology!"

There's much laughter around the table at Cafe Espresso, just off Vuorikatu, in Central Helsinki. It's the confident laughter of a group of smart, successful twenty-somethings, at home in their own country, but also willing to take on the world - and more than capable of doing so.

Around me is a conceptual artist (who's planning a virtual village), the head of a telecoms company (who's starting up a creative collective), and the irrepressibly funky Jyri. They call themselves "Aula" - which is either a new kind of urban living space, or a commercial consultancy, or an avant-garde charity - "or whatever we wanna make it" says Jyri. "Anything's possible here."

After five furious, head-spinning days in Helsinki, I wouldn't disagree with him. Unlike most visitors to Finland, I haven't come here to worship at the altar of Nokia. Just before I left, a senior UK executive at the company even suggested to me that I should "rub a little salt in our wounds we've perhaps had too good a press. Sniff around, get some other perspectives."

And indeed, there is an obvious alternative perspective to take on the Finnish miracle - one which puts the commercial power of Nokia (generating half the country's GDP, employing most of its graduates, and still the world leader in mobile handset production) in a much broader context.

For Finland is also famous for a tradition of new technology which simply bypasses the market, and sends its bounty out on to the networks, for the free usage of all. To understand the triumphs of Finnish dot.commerce, you also have to understand the profundity of its dot.communism.

The best known example of this is the Linux operating system. Its source code was invented by a 21-year-old Finnish student called Linus Torvalds (Finns have an almost utopian free education system, so there's plenty of time to play around with code). Torvalds published it freely on the web in 1996, inviting anyone to come along and participate in its development.

Improbably, Linux is now the supreme challenger to Microsoft's business operating systems throughout the world. IBM is just about to re-launch itself as a Linux brand, with the system's little penguin mascot dancing all over a multi-million pound software campaign.

Linux has been so successful because it is, to use the technical term, "open-source": the kernel of its program is made freely available to anyone who wants to tinker with it, or improve it. Unlike Microsoft, which keeps its under a tight proprietary lock and key.

Linux has been rendered by the new-economy press as the "triumph of the hackers" over money-grabbing corporations. Yet Torvalds was only paying respect to a long tradition of open-source software in Finland - including IRC (internet relay chat), anonymous remailing, and a host of other freely-given gifts to the infrastructure of the net.

Of course, the US also produces both software giants and subversive hackers - Napster being the most obvious recent example. Yet both sides are almost always at war, whether in the intellectual property courts, or even at the end of a police gun (remember hacker Kevin Mitnick's celebrated arrest a few years ago). A Microsoft head recently described the whole idea of the free software movement as "un-American", in the way it flaunts intellectual property rights.

In Finland, however, it seems that open-source radicals and corporate execs can happily co-exist. Is this the inevitable camaraderie among smart people in a small country? Helsinki itself, with its elegant thoroughfares and profusion of "third spaces", seems like a city where nobody could avoid meeting everyone after too long.

Or is there something deeper than that? Something which allows Finns to maintain a creative tension between the two great opposing forces of the new economy: information wants to be free - but information also needs to make money? Somewhere between Nokia and Linux, I thought I would find the truth about the Finnish miracle.