-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Gurstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: futurework <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: Caspar Davis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: November 26, 1998 5:12 PM
Subject: Re: More Angell Dust
>
>Ian Angell is for real. He is a Professor of Computer Science at the LSE
>in the UK and is making something of a career out of making remarks such
>as those I forwarded.
>
>My sense is that he took Ms. Thatcher rather too much to heart...
>
>M
>
>On Thu, 26 Nov 1998, Caspar Davis wrote:
>
>> Is this for real? Who is this guy? I plead ignorance, but I need to
>> know if this is straight or satire. And if straight, who he is and what
>> his sphere of influence.
>>
>> Caspar Davis
>
>
This answered the question I was about to ask, namely, is this Angell guy
British? As soon as I read it, it sounded to me like a nutty (and obnoxious)
Brit I heard interviewed on CBC quite some time ago. It must have been four
years ago when we were building our new horse barn as I was on my way to
rent a hammer drill and never did hear the end of the interview.
Novelist John Barth wrote, "There is many a cowpat on the road to heaven." I
foresee many on the road of Angell's disciples to their IT heaven.
(1) Their electronic citadel will never be as impregnable as he likes to
think. It will always be subject to attacks from various sources: juvenile
hackers who simply want to piss on the IT altar as a teenage rite de
passage; rogue crackers who will continue to demand, "your money or your
database''; and (if they ever establish anything like the dominance they
want) electronic saboteurs--note, he is talking about turning programmers
into techno-peasants.
(2) I doubt that IT will afford the opportunities that these self-appointed
alphas think it will. Some people in the field feel that it will be totally
automated in 20 years. Thus the smartass alphas will be downsized unless
they happen to have inherited a few hundred million.
(3) Maybe I'm a bit thick, but I believe an IT economy can only exist by
piggybacking on the conventional economy which deals in tangible goods and
services. As I see it, all digital expertise is applied to only two areas,
either entertainment products which are purchased by people out of their
discretionary income, or applications which are ultimately (even at several
removes) about the physical world, controlling a manufacturing process,
shipping products, raising capital to build a factory, acquiring data to do
something in the real world. If I am right about this and Angell is wrong,
then he is operating under the same delusion as companies like Nike that
relocate manufacturing to low-wage economies, the delusion that they can
have a few $0.30 an hour workers and a lot of $50 an hour consumers
purchasing their products. It can work for a few, but as soon as a
significant number jump in, it becomes a pyramid scheme and collapses.
Victor Milne
FIGHT THE BASTARDS! An anti-neoconservative website
at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/pat-vic/
LONESOME ACRES RIDING STABLE
at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/
