COVER -> MEMOIRS OF THE INFORMATION AGE
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On its face this statement could be written off as the usual bravado of the young --- particularly the young denied access to an established system. But as this new century dawns, This Writer believes, we do ourselves a disservice if we only look on the face of developing trends.
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It was trendy among politicians here in the United States and abroad less than five years ago to refer to this as the emergence of a Third Wave economy. But I would suggest to you that they did not grasp the revolution inherent in the concept, how it would shake their supporting models to their foundations, or how it held the potential to disrupt capital markets, central banks and national governments.
I do believe they've taken a few wake-up calls since the phrase was coined and abused.
| The bodies are lying everywhere these days. Either that or lots of dot.com people are pitching their experience in the cyberverse to other companies looking for hungry talent. What I find saddest is that the Lowest Common Denominators are surviving the shake-out ---- for the time being anyway --- and pretending that they LIKE being known as the scumbags of the new environment.
But if you look at market valuations around the planet, it's becoming obvious that too many losers are still standing. So let's look at what the new "Next Phase" of the Information Economy will be about. |
The Internet Times ran an overview of an intriguing article from The Guardian this week looking forward to a time after Alan Greenspan and Central Banks when enterprises produce their own currency. That's right, a form of legal tender not tied to governments (a relatively new financial phenomenon, historically) but to international businesses. For example, Microsoft or American Express might produce their own electronic "money" which their vendors and suppliers could choose to honor. Think about the implications of this type of fiscal development for taxation as we know it.I recently sent friends of mine in California and Connecticut gifts of Flooz, an electronic currency honored by e-merchants like Godiva Chocolates and Tower Records. In exchange for setting up my first account with Flooz.com, I received $10 (USD) in Flooz myself which I could use for a future purchase. As the Internet Times piece suggests, this is only the first type of experiment with electronic currency, more far-reaching ones are certain to follow and change the fiscal landscape as we know it today.
One example: "... But when companies can settle their bills with each other electronically, without needing to use the banking system, then central banks no longer control the levers of the economy. Digital payments systems will allow companies to instantly transfer wealth, without the risk of default. Once there is no need to use the conventional banking system, there is no need to use national currencies either..."
"... For the libertarian right, private money is a long-held dream which the internet may finally provide the technology to fulfill. 'Money does not have to be created legal tender by governments. Like law, language and morals, it can emerge spontaneously. Such private money has often been preferred to government money, but government has usually soon suppressed it," wrote Frederich Hayek, 50 years ago."
The long-term implications are clear: No central banks, no means for national governments to efficiently monitor taxation. I believe that world governments, weakened as they have been by corporate power, know enough today to see what a potential threat this remains.
Now let's leap further into the becoming that Third Wave economics presents to the people of the world. Let's talk about workers actually having the opportunity to form communities which own both the means of production and distribution. Marx is doing pinwheels in his grave over this one!
Think about the quote from Kir again.
What Kir advocates is that if the Old Arrangement can't accomodate his need and aspirations he NOW FIRMLY BELIEVES THAT NEW ARRANGEMENTS ARE POSSIBLE AND VIABLE TO MEET HIS NEEDS... and aspirations. These new arrangements are a direct consequence of how Information Technology has made national borders more porous than ever before.
The magazine you are reading now is based on the fait accompli of international communications. There is no "headquarters." Rather there is a model of colleagial effort, all coordinated by a single person in a single apartment.
Just this week the notion of "virtual" companies was presented to me by friends active in the Green Party here in the United States. The model presented was of an organization of equally empowered workers --- where the stock-option (Confederate money) paradigm was expanded to include equal ownership among all players --- all of whom worked from "cottage industry" type units. A company made entirely of telecommuters.
AND THE BEAUTY OF THIS MODEL was that --- unlike the most recent dot.com scenario where CEOs created shake-and-bake companies fueled by venture capital and walked away with millions while the workers who actually produced the product got shafted and "riffed" --- all participants shared in success or failure equally.
| The existing crop of corporate managers --- even among the booming dot-coms --- are not equipped to comprehend the real prospects of a "new" economy because they are too wedded to the old. It's like asking a person who thought of an automobile as a "horseless carriage" to imagine a hovercraft! Just won't happen.
The first people who will see all the "windows of opportunity" for the Internet economy are between 5 and 20 years old today. |
Notions like this --- what some would call "hippie" notions --- are a direct threat to the top-down philosophy supported by the Old Arrangement. It accepts that the experts of the Third Wave are the children for whom the Third Wave environment has been the only reality.
Why do you think Baby-Boomer, mainframe-vision models have so often proven vulnerable to hacks by kids in countries that have less than 10% Internet access?
But don't think that I'm naive enough to believe this becoming Third Wave is now more than becoming. It is not yet. Part of what it will take is the maturation of the Internet Generation --- people for whom this global environment is what they grew up with.
Sometimes, This Writer believes, you cannot fully embrace a medium or a model --- AND SEE ALL OF ITS INHERENT POSSIBILITIES --- unless it's a medium or model in which you are like a fish to water. I don't see Third Wave actualization coming from a Baby Boomer. Gen-X missed it. I'm hopeful for Gen-Y.
Thus, I envision a world exhibiting a new tribalism. Much like the clans that are so much a part of the gaming community, many of us on the Internet are dividing into new tribes already.
And within these new clans is the idea of leaving the Old Arrangement behind.
It does not support the diversity of languages, races, and non-American vision in the new cyberverse. It sometimes, in fact, militates against what the Third Wave is becoming.
- We don't want top-down management schemes which only enrich bean-counters and people with "connections" to the Old Arrangement.
- We don't want a white-on-white (paranoid) model.
- And we certainly don't want Amero-centric outlooks. We don't believe that the whole world should look like homogenized, franchised mall culture!
We want a revolution NOW.
But, again, as a long observer of society and culture, I don't expect the change, the becoming, to happen with my chronological peers. They are looking toward their retirements and too wedded to the Old Arrangement to see possibilities any longer.
I am sanguine in knowing that the past remains prologue.
And that the future is happening even as we "speak."