9.   March 6
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”?

Quotes for Class Seventeen

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

Assignments:
Randy Komisar, The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur , pp 1-93.

March 8
The Hacker Paradigm

Questions: What are the advantages of disorganization?

Quotes for Class Eighteen

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. . . .
                The casualness with which science was pursued up to this point cannot be overstated.  It continues to bedevil historians interested in tracing the flow of information during that original watershed of “R and D” called the Industrial Revolution.  We can get some perspective on this matter by comparing the social character of science two hundred years ago to what we find nowadays in the emerging personal computer culture.  Here we see a torrent of activity, but very little of it passing through the gatekeeping mechanisms of academia.  To put it bluntly, the most interesting developments in computer culture are happening outside the computer science departments.  . . . The trial-and-error, decentralized, hands-on nature of personal computing hardly serves to deter hackers; on the contrary, it is an inspiration for newcomers to branch off into their own sectors of cyberspace for possible fun or profit.  Yet it would be seriously misleading to say that these devotees of computer culture are collectively engaged in a disciplined quest to solve the fundamental problems of virtual reality.
-- Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (2000).

Assignments:
Randy Komisar, The Monk and the Riddle, pp. 94-177