Keith: > How could any economy be one thing, especially the digital economy? Fine question!
Because technology defines the *environment* in which we live -- so regardless of what "we" bring to the situation, the *ground* of our experience is the SAME! ECONOMY means (etymologically) "how we manage our household" and whether its Pretoria or Mumbai or Jakarta or Berlin, in crucial respects we have all been living in the "same" house for quite awhile now. This of course is the theme of GLOBALIZATION -- which was already in place in the 1950s, pre-saged with the Arthur C. Clarke's initial article on geo-stationary satellites intended to "beam" the same television shows to everyone on earth. That is, of course, exactly what happened. Furthermore, following WW II, one group of elites "managed" the world economy -- since they were the "winners." They set up the UN, the IMF/World Back, the CIA and directly ran the "re-invention" of the German and Japanese economies. They defined the Cold War down to the level of "hiring" virtually every intellectual and social scientist, as well as the basis of "engagement" on both "sides." While there had been many EMPIRES before this, finally it had become one Big Blue Marble -- as symbolized by the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog (and the subsequent practices of its expansion into the Global Business Network and its spinoff WIRED magazine -- which, btw, under the name "Californian Ideology" was a key basis for the formation of nettime!) Your question also reflects the enormous difficulties social science has had dealing with the effects of new technologies -- particularly in economics but also in anthropology and sociology. Economics has become largely a field of "modeling," in which the requirement for "quantification" has forced the abstraction away from real humans, also reflected in the "micro" demands of CIA-funded "area studies" in which the BIG PICTURE has been largely sacrificed as the people in these fields became the "specialists" who never put together an overview. I work with the people in the area of "evolutionary economics." Never heard of it? Well, that's because it is decidedly NOT mainstream for the reason that it a) doesn't produce models and b) deals with technology -- which most economists consider an "externality" (even though there is general consensus that technology is the primary source of economic growth and change) and c) tries to understand how the MACRO features of the economy *evolve* under the impact of changing technology. In particular, Carlota Perez is on my company's advisory board and her 2002 Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (which continues the work of her recently deceased husband Chris Freeman and the group at SPRU) is where we all need to *start* in this MACRO economic analysis. _http://www.amazon.com/Technological-Revolutions-Financial-Capital-Dynamics/ dp/1843763311/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337258077&sr=1-1_ (http://www.amazon.com/Technological-Revolutions-Financial-Capital-Dynamics/dp/184376331 1/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337258077&sr=1-1) _http://www.carlotaperez.org/_ (http://www.carlotaperez.org/) In addition, I work with the tools supplied by Marshall McLuhan -- who as perhaps the most important "renaissance(S)" scholar of the 20th century, dealt with the social and psychological effects of new technologies from a deeply researched understanding of Western history, as reflected early in his 1943 PhD thesis The Classical Trivium. _http://www.amazon.com/Classical-Trivium-Place-Thomas-Learning/dp/1584232358 /ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337259099&sr=1-1_ (http://www.amazon.com/Classical-Trivium-Place-Thomas-Learning/dp/1584232358/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UT F8&qid=1337259099&sr=1-1) As one nettime stalwart "shyly" put it to me in a private email yesterday, "Nice one! I disagree with your McLuhanist reasoning but agree with your conclusions..." If you don't approach these problems from the standpoint of how TECHNOLOGY changes *us* by CAUSING changes in our behaviors and attitudes (since it is the "medium" in which we live, like yeast in a vat <g>) -- which, in turn, *drives* the changes in our economies and societies -- then it seems to me that you will have few CLUES about what is going on. Here, McLuhan's (posthumous) 1988 The Laws of Media: The New Science is a *foundational* text for understanding our present situation(s). _http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Media-Science-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/0802077153/ref =sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337259136&sr=1-1_ (http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Media-Science-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/0802077153/ref=sr_1_ 1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337259136&sr=1-1) The FUTURE has already arrived and we all live in it. Understanding the *present* is always a very difficult task. Many opinions are expressed on this list but rarely do they seem to take the opportunity to step back and provide a broad enough historic context. Let's all see if we can "up" our game, okay? If anyone reading this message knows of others who have successfully elaborated a body-of-work that provides significant insights into the *historical* interaction of new technologies and society over time -- where McLuhan's work traces back to the origin of the alphabet and Perez's to the first Industrial Revolution -- please tell us about them! What we need is some BIG HISTORY here (and not the Big-Bang-to-Global-Warming type <g>.) Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
