-Caveat Lector- Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.smh.com.au/news/0011/11/spectrum/spectrum2.html">The geek shall inherit the earth - s…</A> ---- - SPECTRUM The geek shall inherit the earth Today's nerd or slacker has a mysterious way of turning into tomorrow's Bill Gates ensconsed in a $100 million house on Puget Sound. Guy Rundle envisions the new technocracy. Going on the fairly dependable rule that next year we will be reading what California read last year, the volume that all aspiring avatars of the new economy should get their hands on is, of course, Thorstein Veblen's The Engineers and the Price System. Don't be surprised if you can't find it aside from a small "sociological classics" reissue in the '80s, it has been out of print since the first decades of the 20th century, and is now circulating as cybersamizdat scanned-in copy zapped from one hand-held computer to another as an e-book. Which is sort of appropriate, given that the principal thesis of the work is that power in society will inevitably and totally flow to those who make the things on which it runs. That the work is archaic, simplistic, plain wrong and graced with more than a hint of totalitarianism has been no barrier to the epidemic spread of its key meme that engineers, software or otherwise, shall inherit the earth. No wonder dot-com CEOs are lapping it up with the enthusiasm of Jesus Christ reading a biography of John the Baptist. Until this unlikely revival of such an archaic tome the title alone is redolent of the concerns of the pre-World War I era, with its unstinting belief in the onward march of progress towards rationality Veblen's reputation rested almost entirely on his 1899 classic The Theory of the Leisure Class and its introduction of the concept of "conspicuous consumption" to thinking about contemporary life. Veblen was one of the first people to take the methods of anthropology that had been developed to study traditional societies and turn them on everyday life and values in contemporary society, and his assessment of the world of his time is scathing in the now-traditional manner. The success of the labour movement in raising wages and the falling costs of mass-produced consumption goods throughout the latter half of the 19th century made it possible for a significant number of people to spend money on non-necessary items for the first time in history. Knick-knacks, gewgaws, deluxe goods, doodads prosperity brought with it the creation of entire industries devoted to the manufacture of what we now call kitsch. It also promoted an equally vigorous cultural industry devoted to the denunciation of such, with artists, craftworkers, radicals and conservatives weighing in with assaults on the decadent, overloaded, sentimentalist nature of the furnishings, art and fashion. William Morris was so horrified by the dripping rococo and gilt excess of the products on display at London's 1851 Great Exhibition that he went off and founded the arts and crafts movement, and Ruskin, Pugin and countless others joined the fray on his side. By the 1880s it was taken as read that an artist of any calibre would be on the side of the angels promoting plain design and the virtues of craft and disdain for the products of industrial civilisation. It was Veblen's stroke of genius to recognise that the much-despised mass consumption was not conducted for the pleasure of the objects themselves, but purely to maintain status with other people who were consuming them. That is not to say that consumer objects had no content. The archetypal plaster ducks flying up the wall are a visual pun about perspective, but they are also about domesticity, reassuring people that they are indoors. Others have specific cultural roots the Cadillac could come only from America, the Tamagotchi from Japan. But as these objects accumulate, they lose their particular meaning, and people become caught in a cycle of consumption that occurs only because everyone else is consuming, with a consequent rise in dissatisfaction, until the latter emotion becomes dominant. Advertisers must then resort to ever more powerful illusion to encourage people to believe that the one product the palliative for one's jaded enthusiasms is just around the corner. Our world of Nike and Prozac is one that Veblen would have recognised immediately. Getting off the merry-go-round, Veblen believed, would require a return to the values of what he called "workmanship" a reorientation to the values of production and activity rather than consumption. That's where the engineers come in. As the world became steadily more reliant on machines, Veblen believed that the makers of such would eventually come to a sort of class consciousness about the social power they held. The big capitalists would eventually have no choice but to turn over control of the world to them because they would be the only ones who knew how it worked. The advent of such a technocracy would then usher in a revolution in values, and the curse of luxury anathema to Veblen's Norwegian soul would be swept away. As we now know, planned society didn't quite go according to plan which is probably a good thing. Veblen's vision was more humane than that of other planners such as H.G. Wells, but its vision of rational technocracy fed as much into the society built by Mussolini as it did into the stream of cultural criticism, from Orwell to McLuhan, that followed it. The engineers of the new economy clearly think they have a better chance of making a go of it than did their civil and mechanical predecessors, and they may not be too short of the mark. The machine-makers never really managed to break free of financial capital because the costs of progressing from backyard tinkering to full-scale manufacture were so enormous that the inventors themselves were forced to make partnerships with the banks to get under way a rule that extended up to the development of the personal computer in the 1970s and '80s. Behind Thomas Edison and his ilk stood J.P. Morgan, the top-hatted moneybags of the Monopoly board. Behind the nerds who made the Macintosh stood a bunch of California venture capitalists in cheap suits. But as the focus moves over into software, the relationships start to change. A 19-year-old can create a program like Napster and with the flick of a "send" button throw the entire edifice of copyright law and intellectual property into a turmoil of unenforceability. An operating system enthusiast with a modicum of public spirit Linux developer Linus Torveld can create an "open source" (ie, free) system with the potential to supplant Windows within a matter of years. Even more conventional entrepreneurs such as Amazon's Jeff Bezos share some of the funky "slacker" style that is the descendant of the "workmanship" aesthetic that Veblen and others promulgated no suits, no big houses, no ceremony. Many continue to live the way they did when the money hit that of the perpetual Seattle student, of coffee houses and worn trainers. Gradually that culture is spreading to the more traditional sectors of the economy firms such as Arthur Andersen have now extended the "dress-down Friday" rule to cover the entire summer. A small shift, but revolution is in the details, and the end of the compulsory suit is a symptom of a more momentous change running beneath. Or so the e-ntrepreneurs would have us believe. Whether it will pan out that way remains to be seen. Conspicuous consumption has a way of flooding back into the system at ever higher levels. The really weird thing about the culture of the new economy is the way it manages to carve new commodities out of thin air quite literally in the case of the "oxygen" bars that have sprung up across the world. Here, for the price of a reiki massage and a low-fat frappaccino, you can don a mask and take in purified oxygen which, according to the experts, will have almost no tangible health effect at all. Life coaches, adventure holidays and bottled water the genius of the new economy is to create anticonsumption consumption, where the more intangible the element you're actually being sold, the higher the price. Older forms of consumption are left high and dry as the price varies upwards in direct proportion to the austerity of the product. It's the same principle that has made Van Gogh the artist most prized by financially successful people and Alan Bond: the more artistically pure and removed from the circuit of exchange the artwork is, the more desperate is the desire to draw it back in by paying ludicrous prices for it. It's an attempt to acquire deep and untransformable meaning the sort that you can't get in the money economy by buying it, and the phenomenon covers everything from the sudden "discovery" of Aboriginal art, to the popularity of Shaker furniture, the New Age and culture contact tours. As high-priced austerity kicks in, styles that were hitherto mainstream come to be seen as overexpressive self-parody. Photos of interiors from the '60s, '70s and even the '80s come to appear like those taken of the New Guinea cargo cults, gathering the sacred refrigerators and Bakelite wirelesses in preparation for the second coming of the Duke of Edinburgh, whom they believed to be the messiah. The literalness of filament lamps and burnt-orange breakfast nooks that was invisible to the era of their creation comes to the surface, and laminex tables become a hot-ticket item. What is then being sought for purchase is not even meaning, but other people's old meanings. The price system that makes a Web site a collection of 1s and 0s suddenly worth billions is the same one that doubles the value of a lava lamp, or a sketch on a napkin signed "Picasso". Any relation to a system of value is purely coincidental and today's slacker/nerd/engineer has a way of turning into tomorrow's Bill Gates, ensconced in his $US100 million house on Puget Sound a smart St Simeon, whose microchip sensors know what songs its owner likes and plays them each time he enters a room. Trying to persuade the nerds that this is a less than fulfilling vision of the best that humans can be is a reminder of what a world ruled by them may be like one accurately captured by Veblen in his pessimistic observation that professions are inevitably "a conspiracy against the laity". [go to top] In this section One jump ahead The geek shall inherit the earth Between the lines Gluttons for punishment ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Site Guide | Archive | Feedback | Privacy Policy Copyright © 2000. The Sydney Morning Herald All rights reserved. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. 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