|
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
 |
Study Materials | |
English 197: American Literature and Business
Culture
Professor Christopher Newfield
T Th 2:00-3:15, SH 2617
Introduction: Creativity in the New Economy
Clip: Once And Again,
air date 11/28/00
Technology focus: precision reading
What Is the New Economy?
The advent of the new economy was first
noticed as far back as 1969, when Peter Drucker perceived the arrival
of knowledge workers. The new economy is often referred to as the Information
Economy, because of information's superior role (rather than material
resources or capital) in creating wealth.
I prefer the term Network Economy, because information isn't
enough to explain the discontinuities we see. We have been awash in
a steadily increasing tide of information for the past century.
Many successful knowledge businesses have been built on information
capital, but only recently has a total reconfiguration of information
itself shifted the whole economy.
The grand irony of our times is that the era of computers is
over. All the major consequences of stand-alone computers
have already taken place. Computers have speeded up our lives a bit,
and that's it.
And fiddle we do. The technology we first invented to crunch
spreadsheets has been hijacked to connect our isolated selves instead.
Information's critical rearrangement is the widespread, relentless act
of connecting everything to everything else.
. . .
The new rules governing this global restructuring revolve around
several axes. First, wealth in this new regime flows directly from innovation,
not optimization; that is, wealth is not gained by perfecting the known,
but by imperfectly seizing the unknown. |Second, the ideal environment
for cultivating the unknown is to nurture
the supreme agility and nimbleness of networks. Third, the domestication
of the unknown inevitably means abandoning the highly successful known
- undoing the perfected. And last, in the thickening web of the Network
Economy, the cycle of "find, nurture, destroy" happens faster
and more intensely than ever before.
-- Kevin Kelly, “New Rules for the
New Economy, Wired (1997).
Across the advanced capitalist economies,
. . . two quite distinct types of labor-management systems reflect sharply
contrasting approaches to managing production workers and encouraging
productive job performance. One
approach features relatively cooperative labor-management relations,
including a fair degree of employment security, positive wage incentives,
often with substantial employee involvement and also often with strong
unions. The other builds upon much more conflictual
labor-management relations, including relatively little employment security,
reliance on the threat of job dismissal as a goad to workers, minimal
wage incentives, sometimes weak unions.
The former system relies on the carrot, the latter on the stick. . . .
In contrast to the postwar boom, when healthy corporate profits
and rapid productivity growth helped make rising real wages possible,
the onset of the wage squeeze [in the 1970s] eliminated that luxury. Corporations were faced with clear alternatives: Either they could
revamp their managerial structures entirely, abandoning the structure
of top-down control established after World War II, in order to forge
the kind of cooperation and gain- and pain-sharing that might have smoothed
the transition to an era of lower and falling profits; or they could
deepen their reliance on top-down control and make up for the loss of
worker incentives that falling wages imposed with an intensification
of supervisory control. They chose the Big Stick.
-- David M. Gordon, Fat
and Mean
I. DESIRE AND IDENTITY IN LATE CAPITALISM
January
11
Hip Capitalism
Question: does capitalism absorb most
or all creativity for its own ends?
In contrast to the postwar boom, when
healthy corporate profits and rapid productivity growth helped make
rising real wages possible, the onset of the wage squeeze eliminated
that luxury. Corporations were faced with clear alternatives:
Either they could revamp their managerial structures entirely, abandoning
the structure of top-down control established after World War II, in
order to forge the kind of cooperation and gain- and pain-sharing that
might have smoothed the transition to an era of lower and falling profits;
or they could deepen their reliance on top-down control and make up
for the loss of worker incentives that falling wages imposed with an
intensification of supervisory control.
They chose the Big Stick.
-- David M. Gordon
“Three types [of consciousness] predominate
in America today. One was formed
in the nineteenth century, the second in the first half of this century,
the third is just emerging. Consciousness
I is the traditional outlook of the American farmer, small businessman,
and worker who is trying to get ahead. Consciousness II represents the values of an organizational society.
Consciousness III is the new generation. . . . Consciousness
III postulates the absolute worth of every human being -- every self.
Consciousness III does not believe in the antagonistic or competitive
doctrine of life.”
-- Charles Reich, The
Greening of America.
“A curious consensus [has emerged]:
business and hip are irreconcilable |enemies, the two antithetical poles
of American mass culture. Whether
it is the crude rendering of Jerry Rubin and Charles Reich or the complex
analysis of later academics, the historical meaning of hip seems to
be fixed: it is a set of liberating practices fundamentally at odds
with the dominant impulses of postwar American society. . . . Despite
the homogeneity, repression, and conformity critique favored by so many
avatars of cultural studies, historians like Warren Susman, William
Leach, and Jackson Lears have pointed out that the prosperity of a consumer
society depends not on a rigid control of people’s leisure-time behavior,
but exactly its opposite: unrestraint in spending, the willingness to
enjoy formerly forbidden pleasures, an abandonment of the values of
thrift and the suspicion of leisure that characterized an earlier variety
of capitalism. . . . [For Leach], consumer capitalism [has taught] a
‘concept of humanity’ according to which ‘what is most “human” about
people is their quest after the new, their willingness to violate boundaries,
their hatred of the old and the habitual.’”
-- Tom Frank, The
Conquest of Cool.
From Civil Rights to Cultural Diversity
Question: do large organizations value
individuality and identity?
Culture, as Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines it, is “The integrated
pattern of human behavior that includes thought, speech, action, and
artifacts and depends on man’s capacity for learning and transmitting
knowledge to succeeding generations. . . . The informal cultural elements
of a business [are] “the way we do things around here.” Every business
. . . has a culture. . . . Whether
weak or strong, culture has a powerful influence throughout an organization;
it affects practically everything -- from who gets promoted and what
decisions are made, to how employees dress and what sports they play.
. . . We hope to instill in our readers a new law of business life:
In Culture There is Strength.
-- Terrance E. Deal and Allen A. Kennedy
“Right from the start,” said [a former
CEO of Procter & Gamble], “William Procter and James Gamble realized
that the interests of the organization and its employees were inseparable. That has never been forgotten.” Poorer-performing
companies often have strong cultures, too, but dysfunctional ones.
They are usually focused on internal politics rather than on
the customer, or they focus on “the numbers” rather than on the product
and the people who make and sell it. The top companies, on the other hand, always
seem to recognize what the companies that set only financial targets
don’t know or don’t deem important.
The excellent companies seem to understand that every
man seeks meaning (not just the top fifty who are “in the bonus pool)”.
-- Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
The people who make up the population
of the organization . . . are
different from one another. They
are also similar in some respects, and there are no doubt many lessons
to be learned from their experiences, but it is their differences with
which we are . . . concerned.
Some of the differences are easy to identify, for they are visible
right on the surface: individuals are male or female, young or old,
white or minority. Other differences are not so easy to see: education level, lifestyle, goals and ambitions,
sexual orientation, personal values and belief systems involving loyalty
to authority, commitment to the organization's vision, ways of thinking,
and respect (or fear) for new ideas.
Within any one organization, you might find representatives of
several of these groups: some
who are inclined to push against authority, some who are very cautious
with change, some with an entrepreneurial, 'loner' style, some who flourish
in a team setting. And you would probably see women and men of
several different races and ethnic groups: white, black, Asian, Hispanic,
native American. This mix is
termed “diversity.”
-- R. Roosevelt Thomas, Beyond
Race and Gender
January
18
Diversity and Efficiency
Questions: Are diversity and efficiency
in conflict? How are they negotiated?
I was tired of living in an apartment,
cutting my own hair, wearing the same turquoise ultrasuede dress.
I was sick of committing class suicide in the name of righteousness.
I finally took to heart the words of evangelist Reverend Ike:
“The only thing I have to say about poor people is don’t be one of them.”
I go to work at the Postnot simply for the money, but for
the power. Even though it is
the mid-Eighties and I might be ten years too late, I am finally going
to try to “change the system from within.”
-- Jill Nelson
Surrounded by the advisers he recruited
from Wall Street investment banks, Clinton essentially adopted a financial-market
strategy for governing, hoping that deficit reduction would reassure
investors and that they would reward the economy with lower interest
rates. His budgets did make
significant progress on reducing the federal deficit, but he got no
credit from the rich folks or Republicans.
They hate him because he raised income taxes on the top brackets.
-- William Greider
Jill NELSON, Volunteer Slavery:, pp. 102-end.
II. THE MAGIC OF THE SYSTEM
Engineering Culture
Question: To what extent can innovation
be traced to systems of disciplined training?
The human element of labor is a challenge
to the engineer. He has applied
the laws of physics to produce efficient machines. . . . He must now
step in -- not as a welfare worker, not as a sociologist, but as an
engineer -- to help labor find its place in the production scheme. Cannot scientific analysis resolve the causes
of maladjustment which threaten the life of our institutions? Cannot the engineering mind reorganize the
human elements of production as it has already done with the mechanical
and material elements to secure efficiency?
-- Engineering News-Record
(1918).
Stabilization of material forces is
not sufficient; human relations must be stabilized; stabilization of
production is not sufficient; merchandising must be stabilized. Stabilization of production and merchandising is not sufficient;
general administration must be stabilized.
Stabilization of an individual enterprise is not sufficient;
all enterprises in the industry must be stabilized. Stabilization of one industry is not sufficient; all industries
must be stabilized. . . . Stabilization of national industry alone is
not sufficient; international economics must be stabilized. Achievement of any of these ends is a step
toward a more balanced and harmonious industrial and social life; each
end is but a means to another greater end.
-- Harlow Person, former director of the Taylor Society, 1931
If science was to be effectively controlled,
scientists had to be effectively controlled; the means to such control
was the fostering of a spirit of cooperation among researchers second
only to a spirit of loyalty to the corporation. . . . The content of
the education had to provide the training necessary for technical work,
especially for the early years of employment; it had to instill in the
student a sense of corporate responsibility, teamwork, service, and
loyalty.
-- David Noble, America By Design
January
25
The Centrality of the Human Factor
Questions: What role do psychological
factors like interest and enjoyment play in innovation? What is the role of competition?
“All that’s happened is that you’ve
walked to the edge of the great mosaic of human knowledge. Up until now, you’ve been living in a world
full of ideas and concepts that other people have set out for you. Now it’s your turn. You get to design a piece of the mosaic and
glue it down. It just has to
fit with what else is there. And
if you do a good job shaping your tile, it will be easier for the next
person to fit his around yours.”
“You’re saying that I’ve been looking for an answer when really
I should be making one up?”
“Don’t believe the bull about science being only an objective
search for truth. It’s not.
Being a scientist also requires the skills of a politician. It’s a struggle to define the terms, to guide
the debate, and persuade others to see things your way. If you’re the first one there . . . You get
to say what it is that others will see.”
-- Jerry Kaplan, Start-Up, talking to his dissertation director.
4. January
30
The Group Solves the Problem
Question: How could technological innovation
come from group “chemistry”?
Essentially, Schumpeter believed that
an increase in knowledge, plus the profit motive, will induce an entrepreneur
to undertake something new and unfamiliar, usually borrowing money to
build his innovative product. When
the products of entrepreneurs are commercialized and sold in the marketplace,
the total output and wealth of the economy are increased by far more
than the old products or capital that were replaced or destroyed. What’s more, Schumpeter not only believed that
bursts of technological innovation are the single most important forces
that create and drive a dynamic growth economy, he also asserted that
technological innovation leads to more
output, with better quality, at lower prices. According to the US Labor Department, personal computer prices have
fallen nearly 100% since the early 1980s.
High-tech capital equipment prices are dropping about 30% a year
. . .”
-- Lawrence Kudlow, American Abundance
The Xanadu ideal
is to model and enact exactly a new world that users would want and
need if they realized it was possible.
The most general statement of the Xanadu paradigm is this: the
purpose of computers is tracking connections.
A new computer world must be created built around explicit connection. Great efforts must be made toward this end.
The present computer world is built on crude traditional models:
hierarchy (believed by some to be synonymous with "structure");
paper analogies, machine analogies, spatial analogies; a crude model
of time and backtracking. Older
computer methods have great unseen drawbacks, pushing huge problems
out into users' laps.
Users' needs are ill-addressed by the paradigm of hierarchical
files and their inability to deal with non-overlap.
The objectives are: the escape from paper, finding the best ways
to support human thought and creativity-- building on a sophisticated
knowledge of complex documents, not building up from the simplest implementation
of the simplest documents. The
search is for an orderly, fast-evolving, fast-accumulating universe
of electronic documents, not modelled to paper, and showing detailed
relations among
- Ted Nelson, The Xanadu Project
Tim BERNERS-LEE, Weaving the
Web: The Original Design and
Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, pp 1-122
February
1
New Human Relations Theory
Question: What role does “individualism”
play in innovation?
People with a high level of personal
mastery share several basic characteristics.
They have a special sense of purpose that lies behind their visions
and goals. For such a person, a vision is a calling rather than simply a good idea. They see ‘current reality’ as an ally, not
an enemy. They have learned
how to perceive and work with forces of change rather than resist these
forces. They are deeply inquisitive, committed to continually
seeing reality more and more accurately. They feel connected to others and to life itself. Yet they sacrifice none of their uniqueness.
They feel as if they are part of a larger creative process, which
they can influence but cannot unilaterally control. . . .
Helplessness,
the belief that we cannot influence the circumstances under which we
live, undermines the incentive to learn, as does the belief that someone
somewhere else dictates our actions. . . . This is why learning organizations
will, increasingly, be ‘localized’ organizations, extending the maximum
degree of authority and power as far from the ‘top’ or corporate center
as possible. Localness means moving decisions down the organizational
hierarchy; designing business units where, to the greatest degree possible,
local decision makers confront the full range of issues and dilemmas
intrinsic in growing and sustaining any business enterprise. Localness means unleashing people’s commitment
by giving them the freedom to act, to try out their own ideas and be
responsible for producing results
-- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline
Mental toughness is humility, simplicity,
Spartanism. And one other, love.
I don’t necessarily have to like my associates, but as a person
I must love them. Love is loyalty. Love is
teamwork. Love respects the
dignity of the individual. Heartpower
is the strength of your corporation.
-- Vince Lombardi
III. THE NEW INDIVIDUALISM
5. February
6
The Heroic Entrepreneur
Question: what role do “new economy”
thinkers assign to individual “entrepreneurs” (in contrast to groups,
teams, whole professions, governments and nations?
The capitalist was reinterpreted as
a heroic life-force, a bringer of growth, innovation and riches to others
as well as himself, associated with giving and generosity rather than
meanness and avarice. As Gilder
explained: “Capitalism transforms the gift impulse into a disciplined
process of creative investment based on a continuing analysis of the
needs of others.”
-- Anthony Sampson
Seed investing requires a special kind
of hunger. [Steve] Jurvetson's
parents were immigrants from Estonia, and he was reared in Dallas by
the creed that what he was to make of his life was entirely up to him;
there were no entitlements. In an undergraduate psychology class, he answered a series of Enneagram questions meant
to divine his character type. He so fit the description of a Type 3,
the Performer (as in star performer), that he was
asked back in following semesters to lecture about the traits
of Type 3's: tremendous need for achievement, with an inner drive to
do something beyond the ordinary.
That drive is why he belongs dead center in the creation zone
of the new economy: where there's constantly a new goal to keep him
from getting bored, and where he has all of Silicon Valley as an audience
to perform for. He seems very similar in character to the
headstrong young entrepreneurs he deals with, and perhaps that is partly
why they mind-meld with him so well.
-- Po Bronson, The Nudist on the Late Shift
February
8
Distortions of Monopoly
Questions: Does the new economy have
a bias toward size and concentration?
If so, how does size and concentration interact with innovation?
Its Windows operating system claims
some 86% of [the PC] software market, and its Office suite of productivity
programs, including a spreadsheet and word processor, has an 87% lock. . . . Microsoft is expected to reel in more
than $4 billion in profits this fiscal year, which ends in June, on
$14 billion in revenues, up 23% over a year ago.
. . . . In calendar year 1996, its $8.7 billion in revenues accounted
for 10% of all sales for the 613 publicly traded software and information-services
companies . . . More significantly, its $3.1 billion in operating profits
was a remarkable 30% of all such profits.
With the company’s pockets lined with riches from Windows and
related software, it can spend a staggering $2.5 billion a year on new-product
development -- more than the annual profits of the next 10 largest software
companies combined. And what
it can’t develop fast enough, the company can buy,
-- Business Week 19 Jan 1998.
Wealth is never created by income.
It's created by capital gains. If
you can't let your profits run untaxed, you lose a huge compounding
advantage. As a broker or a doctor or a lawyer, you're
essentially paid by the hour. If you stop going to the office,
you stop making money. The only way to wealth is to be an entrepreneur.
How many people do you know who
are worth tens of millions of dollars and have worked for a living all
their life? On the other hand, most entrepreneurs’ resumes won't get
them hired as CEO of a $10 billion company. You have to go
build it yourself.
-- Dick Heckmann, founder and CEO of US Filters, Success magazine (1997)
Truly original thinkers tend not to be entrepreneurs who've spent
10 years at Cisco and can be trusted to know what they're doing. They tend to be 26 years old and highflying.
They often have a very childlike mind, with some naivete. We're impressed
by people who don't know what can't be done.
-- Steve Jurvetson, venture capitalist firm Draper Fisher
The nation’s largest Internet company
has ordered an Aurora [Colorado] woman to stop selling and promoting
her book You’ve Got Male because
of the similarity to the America Online phrase ‘You’ve got mail.’” First
time author Madelene Sabol says, “I’ve spent the past three-and-a-half
years doing research and writing the book and invested at least $10,000
in it . . . My attorney told me, ‘You may as well change the name of
the book because you can’t fight a big company like that.
But why is a big company coming after a little girl like me.’”
-- Denver Rocky Mountain News 20 Aug 2000
6. February
13
Creativity and Natural Selection
Question: what is the impact of biology-based
understandings of change and evolution on our understanding of human
creativity?
[Later nineteenth century thinkers
used Darwinism] to buttress the conservative outlook in two ways. The most popular catchwords of Darwinism, “struggle
for existence” and ‘survival of the fittest,” when applied to the life
of man in society, suggested that nature would provide that the best
competitors in a competitive situation would win, and that this process
would lead to continuing improvement.
In itself this was not a new idea, as economists could have pointed
out, but it did give the force of a natural law to the idea of a competitive
struggle. Secondly, the idea of development over aeons
brought new force to another familiar idea in conservative political
theory, the conception that all sound development must be slow and unhurried.
-- Richard Hofstadter, Social
Darwinism in American Thought
February
15
Big Government, the Innovator’s Friend
Questions: does innovation depend on
government orchestration as well as private investment? Does government-sponsored research seem more
or less innovative than individual or corporate research?
Before World War II, technical innovations
on which economic expansion depended were the product of individual
entrepreneurs working at a low technological level. . . . Beginning with World War II, however, innovation became increasingly
dependent on a very high level of scientific and technological expertise,
and on a corresponding investment in an extremely expensive capital
plant to carry out research and development so that only very large
enterprises could undertake such programs.
The problem for innovation then was to produce a large body of
scientifically trained experts with an orientation toward research as
a career, and to provide those research workers with libraries, laboratories,
technical assistants, equipment, expendable supplies, and channels for
communication of preliminary results.
Although the aggregate resources in the hands of corporations
are more than sufficient, those resources cannot be mobilized by the
usual anarchic and competitive mechanisms of capitalism. . . .
Some method must be found to pool the individually limited resources
of private producers while resolving the contradiction between the individual
competitive demands for immediate profit and market advantage on the
one hand, and the long-term cooperative nature of research on the other.
That is, both the cost and
the conduct of research and technological education must be socialized.
. . . It is obvious that only the state can be the instrument of that
socialization.
-- R.C. Lewontin, “The Cold War and the Transformation of the Academy”
IV. REIMAGINING LABOR
7. February
20
The Persistence of Craft Labor
Question: does innovation depend on
some version of “free labor,” and if so, why?
I happened to walk into a basement
workshop in the physics building at Cornell University. There I saw two students, dressed in the customary
style, with bare feet and long unkempt hair. They were working with intense concentration,
building a cryostat, a superrefrigerator for low-temperature experiments
using liquid helium. This was not an ordinary helium cryostat that would
take you down to one degree above absolute zero.
This was a new type of cryostat, working with the rare isotope
of helium, that would take you down to a few millidegrees above absolute
zero. The students were exploring
a new world and a new technology. . . . Their brains and hands were
stretched to the limit. . . . At the time when I saw them as students
putting the apparatus together, they were not dreaming of Nobel prizes. They were driven by the sam passion that drove my grandfather [the
boilermaker], the joy of a skilled craftsman in a job well done. Science gave them their chance to build things
that opened new horizons, just as their ancestors built ships to explore
new continent. They had found
a creative middle way, between the hierarchical world of big business
and the utopian dreams of student rebellion.
-- Freeman Dyson, The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet
February
22
The Sources of Revolution
Question: what are the personal or
“human” qualities that sustain creativity and innovation?
People surmount tragedy when they use
themselves up fully, when they use what they have and what they are,
whatever they are and wherever they find themselves, even if this requires
them to ignore cultural prescription or to behave in innovating ways
undefined by their roles. The
tragic sense does not derive from feeling that people must always be
less than history and culture demand; it derives, rather, from the sense
that they have been less than they could have been, that they have needlessly
betrayed themselves, needlessly forgone fulfillments that would have
injured no one. The scientific enterprise, like others, becomes edged with a tragic
sense when scientists suspect that they have wasted their lives. In confining work to the requirements of a
demanding and unfulfillable paradigm, scientists are not using themselves
up in their work and are, indeed, sacrificing, leaving unexpressed,
certain parts of themselves -- their playful impulses, their unverified
hunches, their speculative imagination.
When scientists commit themselves compulsively to a life-wasting
high science model, they are making a metaphysical wager.
They are wagering that the sacrifice is ‘best for science.’ Whether
this is really so, they cannot confirm; but they often need no further
confirmation than the pain this self-confinement inflicts upon them.
-- Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis in Sociology
8. February
27
Innovation and Emancipation
Questions: Is the new economy accompanied
by a new corporation? How are
things for the “cubicle dwellers”?
It is in this relaxed way that the
new workday begins. A day filled
with rancid coffee, angry clients, drawn-out staff meetings, grouchy
supervisors, incompetent coworkers, lecherous bosses, unreliable equipment,
relentless faxes, incessant voice mail and enough “Dear Colleague” memos
to move the acid production in the stomach into high gear.
If it seems we are working harder and longer for less, that’s
because we are. The economic data paint a grim statistical
portrait of what lies behind the amorphous mix of grief and anxiety
that has caused many of us to develop sudden cravings for Hamburger
helper. For more than twenty years there has been a
steady slide in real wages . . . And a recent blip upward has done little
to reverse the trend. In fact,
about the only economic indicators that are setting records these days
are corporate profits and executive compensation.
These increases are not being driven by faster growth of productivity,
but instead came about from a squeeze on wages in the 1990s . . .
-- David S. Levine, Disgruntled:
The Darker Side of the World of Work (1998).
Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin, Net Slaves: True Tales of Working the Web,
pp. 3-161.
March 1
Defensive Individualism
Question: What is the relationship
between self-defense and creativity? Does corporate management require
self-defense at the expense of creativity?
Like any successful cult, sacrifice
and penance and the idea that the deity is perfect and his priests are
better than you works at Microsoft.
Each level, from Gates on down, screams at the next, goading
and humiliating them. And while
you can work any eighty hours per week that you want, dress any way
that you like, you can’t talk back in a meeting when your boss says
you are shit in front of all your co-workers.
It just isn’t done. When Bill Gates says that he could do in a
weekend what you’ve failed to do in a week or a month, he’s lying, but
you don’t know better and just go back to try harder.
This all works to the advantage of Gates, who gets away with
murder until the kids eventually realize that this is not the way the
rest of the world works. But by then it is three or four years later,
they’ve made their contributions to Microsoft, and are ready to be replaced
by another group of kids straight out of school.
-- Robert X. Cringeley, Accidental Empires
Corey Thomas, senior at Vanderbilt
was told he was being self-centered in his job hunt. “But the way I see it is that while I want a company that’s good
for me, I truly believe that if I don’t perform they’ll get rid of me
in a heartbeat. My dad worked
for Sears for 19 years as a security guard, and then he was laid off. I have to position myself so I can constantly
watch out for myself. I have
to be self-serving.”
-- “The New Organization Man,” Fortune (March 1998).
Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin, Net Slaves: True Tales of Working the Web,
pp. 165-246
Free Agent Nation
Questions: What are the possibilities
for independent or self-managed work? What difference would it make if we really were “free agents”?
Free agents quickly realized that in
the traditional world, they were silently accepting an architecture
of work customs and social mores that should have crumbled long ago
under the weight of its own absurdity. From infighting and office politics
to bosses pitting employees against one another to colleagues who don't
pull their weight, most workplaces are a study in dysfunction. Most
people do want to work; they don't want to put up with brain-dead distractions.
Much of what happens inside companies turns out to be about . . . nothing.
The American workplace has become a coast-to-coast "Seinfeld"
episode. It's about nothing.
-- Daniel Pink
Collectively, the employees own the
means of production. Individually,
few of them are wealthy. . . . Collectively, however, whether through
their pension funds, through mutual funds, through their retirement
accounts, and so on, they own the means of production. . . . These pension
fund managers are the only true ‘capitalists’ in the United States.
The “capitalists” have thus themselves become employees in the post-capitalist
knowledge society. They are paid as employees; they think as employees;
they see themselves as employees. But
they act as capitalists. One
implication is that capital now serves the employee, where under Capitalism
the employee served capital.
-- Peter Drucker, The Post-Capitalist
Society
March 8
The Hacker Paradigm
Questions: What are the advantages
of disorganization?
As late as the third quarter of the
nineteenth century, the natural sciences did not constitute the single-minded
pursuit of the ultimate truths of nature that we imagine it to be today. That pursuit was still very much in the hands
of the theologians who presided over the universities. Rather, the sciences were a source of helpful
hints for improving inventions and controlling limited parts of the
environment. The mathematical
elegance of Newton’s account of the physical universe played well in
Sunday sermons as evidence of God’s design, but it was rather uncharacteristic
of the piecemeal grubbiness of most actual science. . . .
-- Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn:
A Philosophical History for Our Times (2000).
10. Dead Week
March 13 March 15:
Democracy as Creativity
The function of the Negro college,
then, is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education,
it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help
in the solution of problems of race contact and cooperation.
And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men. Above our modern socialism, and out of the
worship of the mass, must persist and evolve that higher individualism
which the centres of culture protect; there must come a loftier respect
for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself and the world
about it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and self-development; that
will love and hate and labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old
and new. Such souls aforetime have inspired and guided
worlds, and if we be not wholly bewitched by our Rhinegold, they shall
again. Herein the longing of
black men must have respect: the rich and bitter depth of their experience,
the unknown treasures of their inner life, the strange rendings of nature
they have seen, may give the world new points of view and make their
loving, living, and doing precious to all human hearts.
And to themselves in these the days that try their souls, the
chance to soar in the dim blue air above the smoke is to their finer
spirits boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth by being black.
-- W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
For the first time, [real network]
cooperation is plausible. Decision
making in future years will be increasingly decentralized, as computer
links lead to networks of aligned, self-determining teams, acting to
mutual purpose within a larger corporate structure.
. . . If the industrial infrastructure does not move to such
an approach, it cannot sustain itself.
But imagine what it would take to move there -- in human terms.
Executives would have to think about goals that do not immediately
accrue profits to shareholders. Companies
would have to become leaders: presenting a picture of life in the next
millennium to citizens who have no reason to trust corporations but
who have been waiting for someone to credibly present that picture. Companies would also have to be open and responsive
enough, internally and externally, to live up to the trust that consumers
then place in them. Gradually,
companies would give up their previous source of security: the control
they had over production.
-- Art Kleiner, The Age of Heretics (1996)
Infinite Creation
The discoveries of recent decades in
particle physics have led us to place great emphasis on the concept
of broken symmetry. The development
of the universe from its earliest beginnings is regarded as a succession
of symmetry-breakings. As it
emerges from the moment of creation in the Big Bang, the universe is
completely symmetrical and featureless.
As it cools to lower and lower temperatures, it breaks one symmetry
after another, allowing more and more diversity of structure to come
into existence. The phenomenon of life also fits naturally into this picture.
Life too is symmetry-breaking.
. . . Every time a symmetry is broken, new levels of diversity
and creativity become possible. It
may be that the nature of our universe and the nature of life are such
that this process of diversification will have no end.
-- Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions (1988).
Review, Rewind, Looking Ahead
REQUIRED TEXTS: