Fight for your right to web standards!
To receive this article in Deutsch, Francaise, Italiano, Portuguese, Francaise, cut and paste the complete URL("http://www.g21.net/do51.htm"), then click here.
As I have spent the last few years embracing the "Information Age," being an evangelist for the Internet, and the trend toward globalization, much of what I have to say in this essay will come as a shock to some people who know me. Those who have read my writing here and elsewhere may consider this extended reflection a contradiction. But also, most people familiar with my work know that I base my conclusions on the experience of my own eyes/life, the visceral. For them, this exercise will make absolute and consistent sense.
Bear with me as I make my case.
As regular readers of this magazine know, I have converted myself into a "virtual" enterprise. My existence and livelihood no longer depend on what I (sometimes) have referred to as "meat space."
Rather, my survival depends entirely on producing information/content here on the Internet. I can accomplish this from anywhere which has the appropriate technological infrastructure (phone lines, ISDN, T1, a desktop computer, the appropriate software.)
I do not report to a geographical office. I work from "home." (Meaning, wherever I am at the time that has an Internet connection.) Over the past six months, I have produced the work I need to earn a living from California, Maryland, Connecticut and New York, respectively, without interruption. As the joke goes, I could work from the Gobi Desert if phone lines were available.My conclusion: I am beginning to believe that the global society portends the death of democracy.
What this means is that I have no social, political, or economic connection to the communities in which I reside and work.
Which, further, means that I have scant interest in their educational status, how they treat their people, or what their economic situation is. I am not one of the stakeholders in any community, per se. It has NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on my ability to gain my livelihood and thus my continued prosperity or lack thereof.
I am a disconnected "Brain Lord" as Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron's treatise of a few years back would have it, without the need of the larger society around me --- as long as there is a technological infrastructure. (As a Black man, this puts me in august company. Unless you consider my debts.)
Stay with me on this.
Ramp this argument up from the personal to the political, and the global.
Consider the situation if we are not just looking at Rod, the citizen, but at Coca Cola or General Motors or Nike, the corporate citizens.
In case you did not know this, corporations have the same rights as individual citizens, per the U.S. Supreme Court.
So if you are a multinational or trans-national corporation like those I have listed above, you have much the same situation as I described in Life of Rod.
All you need is the infrastructure. The social, political and economic well-being of individual countries or communities has NO IMPACT on your well-being. Your corporation is not a stakeholder in any community, anywhere.
Whether a country is a democracy or a dictatorship is not a Talking Point.
As long as there is stability --- meaning the infrastructure exists to support your livelihood consistently -- why should you care about life on the street?
Are you starting to get my drift?
It is not because I don't understand the corporate mentality that the G21 is so consistently anti-corporate, but because I do.
If anything, and my resume here bears this out, I was educated, trained, worked and thrived in the belly of this Beast. My writing elsewhere bears this out.
I know of what I speak.
The salient question is: What can be done about this form of malignant, treadmill immorality?
