tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80782602024-03-23T11:14:28.764-07:00Metaphorical WebWhere the map meets the territory.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.comBlogger73125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-74911324466089908482014-03-01T14:20:00.001-08:002014-03-01T14:20:08.761-08:00Meta-trends and Mind Palaces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNGNKmSa8Rp7FVy_0Vg3LKxS_J_y5zzsa2HFEF69ZXK9v5RhbovDHJD7ydbuivO5bIAOgf3mtEOcnHA-1I-kGTAsMy8ta9R4DuX94pAnosD0n7BGTQHz-jOE8tJ9yy36K0aVjzUA/s1600/thumb.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNGNKmSa8Rp7FVy_0Vg3LKxS_J_y5zzsa2HFEF69ZXK9v5RhbovDHJD7ydbuivO5bIAOgf3mtEOcnHA-1I-kGTAsMy8ta9R4DuX94pAnosD0n7BGTQHz-jOE8tJ9yy36K0aVjzUA/s1600/thumb.gif" /></a></div>
Society has become future oriented. Half a century ago, the future was something that belonged primarily to the domain of a handful of technically oriented writers and thinkers - Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Philip K. Dick - and a staple of world fairs, but while there have always been people who have cast the net wide to see what would happen a decade from now, a lifetime from now, a millennium from now, the future generally both seemed incredibly fantastic and, curiously enough, a lot like the present, except with air cars.<br />
<br />
The 1970s and 80s saw the rise of the profession of analysts and futurists - professional prognosticators who advised business, government, the military, investors and researchers. Like most professionals, the fields started as more of an art than a science, and generally involved lots of research, figuring out patterns and trends, trying to figure out whether such trends were simply transients or had staying power, then using them to get a better feel for which way we were going.<br />
<br />
By the 1990s, we were living the future. The Internet was new and bright and shiny, and suddenly whole industries were being transformed (for better or worse) by this vast wave of interconnectivity and information sharing. This is a pattern that is still playing out, rapidly moving us to a web of things where everything, from phones to cars to glasses to toasters, possesses rudimentary intelligence and in some cases even rudimentary awareness. This massive trend (one of Toffler's megatrends) is in turn fueling similar transformations in energy and transfportation infrastructures, health care and bio science, materials engineering, finance, education and the like.<br />
<br />
Yet it's important to understand that change itself is transient. In the wake of such change there is quite frequently a period of consolidation, the recession on the back end of the boom as each disrupted system seeks a new equilibrium. Sectors that had seemed to be brimming with innovation become moribund and entrenched. Social values become more reactionary and conservative, and in many cases become radicalized. This doesn't last - in the wake of one of the most profound megatrends (the unholy admixture of high tech and high finance) in the last eighty years, much of the "advanced world" shifted deeply conservative, but there are signs that this period is ending, from the ongoing series of social revolutions that are taking place along the Fertile Crescent to the current struggle for control of the Republican Party in the US. This isn't necessarily a shift in predilection for the moderate status quo parties, but instead may be an indication that there are new political philosophies emerging that are more reflective of the changes in reality, and that these are indeed proving attractive again.<br />
<br />
I bring this up to make a distinction. A megatrend can be thought of as a tsunami - it's typically enabled by the earthquakes of technology, and is often tied to one or two domains of innovation. The pattern and characteristics, the drivers of that wave's amplitude and velocity, the chaotic aftermath and rebalancing of the the society wracked by this megatrend ... these are all meta-trends, characteristics of trends that define their nature and, to a great extent, also determine their impact.<br />
<br />
I work as an ontologist. This word is not familiar to most people, and indeed, if you asked on the street about what an ontologist does, you'd probably be told that they are doctors who specialize in diseases of the naughty bits. There is, unfortunately, more truth there than I'm comfortable with, if I was completely candid.<br />
<br />
An ontologist is someone who builds models. These models generally don't come in kits nor require the use of special adhesives that make you lightheaded with overuse, however. Instead, the models that an ontologist builds are conceptual - what types of things exist within a particular problem domain, and how these things relate to other types of things within that domain.<br />
<br />
Perhaps a good example of what an ontology is can be taken from the BBC television show Sherlock. Benedict Cumberbatch's titular character has the obligatory Sherlock scan, seemingly able to look at a strand of hair, a bit of dirt, and a smudge of grease, then from these deduce that a man is a military doctor previously deployed in Afghanistan and a crack sharpshooter. This of course is pure Conan Doyle. Where the current version differs is that Doyle saw these as being deductions - if A then B, if B then C, whereas Cumberbatch's Sherlock instead employs something rather different. He creates in his mind a model, a set of scenarios or conjectures, each of which in turn builds upon a foundation called a Mind Palace. The Mind Palace is the collection of known information and the relationships that exist between them, and the scenarios are then assertions made against this Mind Palace to test these.<br />
<br />
In other words, Sherlock is an analyst working with a Mind Palace (an ontology) and conjectures (hypothetical assertions or models) in order to see if the latter are consistent with the former. Such analysis is never perfect, because no model can perfectly capture all the information about a particular thing, and a good analyst generally understands that you cannot completely eliminate a candidate scenario from discussion (there's a very deep link between ontologies and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that makes me believe that a mathematical formalism for ontological analysis probably looks a great deal like quantum theory), but what it can do is make it possible to rank scenarios according to potential likelihoods.<br />
<br />
It's worth noting even in legal theory, that you can never absolutely determine whether someone performed a critical act. At best, you can get a confession and multiple eye witnesses, but nether of these are fool proof: the person confessing may in fact be protecting someone else, be deluded or even confessing to one crime in order to avoid being convicted for another, and eyewitness almost invariably color their memory with their own belief systems, with their desires to help or hinder, and can even create what didn't happen. Instead, the human element exists primarily to establish a social judgment of the validity of a given model or scenario, and usually to also determine the degree to which, if , a positive conviction is achieved, the perpetrator of that action shall be punished. <br />
<br />
I think these same kinds of formalisms can be applied to future analysis. Analysis is not a magical bill - it will not tell the future. What it will do is provide a set of scenarios that explore potential futures, and with this establish an estimate of the likelihood that such a scenario might occur, as well as using these building blocks to step out this process (if this scenario is seen as true, then what scenarios follow from this). The ontology - the Mind Palace - for this then consists of the models that that contain those concepts that are most relevant, along with their respective relationships. These, then, are the meta-trends of Predictive Analytics.<br />
<br />
I've created a new group on Linked In called <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Future-Proof-7468838?trk=my_groups-b-grp-v" target="_blank">Future Proof</a> to explore meta-trends and the ontology of predictive analytics, though will also continue discussing this and related ideas here on <a href="http://metaphoricalweb.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Metaphorical Web</a>.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-91750990773069734002013-01-21T00:48:00.001-08:002013-01-21T00:48:12.042-08:00On Generations and GeneralitiesIn the comment stream from recent posts, I've had a couple of people take me to task for making sweeping generalities, and for trying to create broad brush generations that act to unify peoples actions. I'd like to focus on both of these topics here.<br />
<br />
In statistics, you have three core concepts that together describe what I'd call the "middle values". One of these is the average - you take a number of samples from a set to determine a given property sum, then you divide it by the number of samples. Averages can actually determine the behavior of a population reasonably well when that population is large enough - relative small outliers tend to get smoothed out. However, for smaller populations (under 800 or so people, it turns out) significant outliers can skew the data significantly. This is why in general why talking about the average (or mean) value, you usually want to give two values - the mean μ and the standard deviation σ. For Gaussian distribution curves, this is a pretty good measure of how widely dispersed the data is around that mean value, and hence the likelihood that the mean provides a representative value for the property being measured.<br />
<br />
The median value indicates the value that, for a population is such that there as many (give or take one) values above that median as there are below it. The value of the median is that it provides a measure of whether the data set is skewed in one or another direction, and hence is not symmetrical. The closer the median is to the mean, the more likely that the distribution is bell shaped, whereas the farther it is, the greater the likelihood that the distribution either has several significant outliers or that there may in fact be more than one distribution peak involved (which in turn usually indicates that the variables involved are in fact hiding two or more distinct properties that each factor into a standard gaussian around different means).<br />
<br />
With this elementary bit of statistics aside, I want to focus on two other terms - generalities and stereotypes. A generality is an assumption that for any given property or characteristic, by knowing the value(s) of a subset of a group one can generalize this up to the group as a whole. Most surveys that are done utilize this principle, and so long as you have a Gaussian distribution (not necessarily a given) and a sufficiently large sample (800+ or so), you can ascertain the degree of confidence in making such generalities.<br />
<br />
Stereotypes, on the other hand, involve going from applying generalizations to individuals within a given sample. Having determined a generalization, as you then apply it to smaller and smaller groups, you also have to take into account that the probability that a given person within that sample has a given characteristic drops according to a clearly defined relationships with the standard deviation. The lower the standard deviation, the higher the chance an individual in that group has that property, the higher the standard deviation, the lower that chance.<br />
<br />
When talking of generations, what you are in fact usually describing is a cohort that has a number of mutually common characteristics above the mean expected value for all individuals. These characteristics usually come about because of shared common experiences, and are usually consequently driven by demographics. As an example of this, consider the US space program and its effects on pedagogy. In 1958, Sputnik was launched. The US space program really started in about 1961, but from the standpoint of public awareness, John Glenn's historical flight in the Mercury program in 1962 was in many respects the start. From 1962 to 1974, then, the space program became a seminal part of public education, with the high point being the landing on the Moon in 1969. By 1974, the impact of the moon missions had dropped as other factors, including the outcry over the Vietnam War and the scandals of Watergate, as well as just general fatigue, made the moon missions less and less effective from about 1971 onward.<br />
<br />
From the standpoint of grade school and high school kids, this had a huge impact, probably more than it did for any other group, in great part because the school curricula was built around those programs. This group (for people born from about 1955 to 1972 or so) had a higher proportion per capita of engineers, scientists and researchers graduate from college than at any time before or since. By 1977, when the youngest of this group was entering into grade school, this big STEM push was fading, in part because a conservative agenda was reasserting itself in the school system and there were fewer "gee-whiz" engineering innovations happening to drive the push.<br /><br />Significantly, 1962 marked another significant point. The number of babies born had risen steadily from about 1943 onward as economic conditions improved and soldiers returned from World War II with significant disposable income saved up. This peaked in 1955, and then started to drop as the war generation reached forty and menopause began to set in. It also dropped more precipitously because of the advent of the first birth control pill in 1960, to the extent that by 1973 there were only 75% as many childrern born as at the peak.<br />
<br />
Most demographers tend to measure populations from the zero-point between a peak or trough (or when the population Gaussian reaches a certain number of standard deviations from the peak.) However, sociologically, a better measure of a population cohort may be that population at either a peak or a trough + five years. In general, those born before a peak will have more of societies resources available to them - attention, money, policy, etc. - while those after the peak will see those aspects diminish. The five years has to do with the fact that until Kindergarten, the impact of the larger world on a child is fairly minimal - babies and toddlers will behave the same regardless of when they are born and the way that we treat them will tend to be the same as well. <br /><br />However, by age five, the children are entering into universal education, which means that for the next ten to sixteen years, there is a homogenization effect - all kids will tend to experience the same culture present at any given time, and will correspondingly be shaped by that culture. They will watch the same shows, hear the same issues being discussed (albeit from potentially different viewpoints) at the dinner table, will wear roughly the same fashions and will be affected by the same educational indoctrination). This has a huge impact upon future development of people, because during their formative years they have a common cultural reservoir from which to draw.<br />
<br />
Now, obviously, no one is going to grow up to be a clone of everyone else. Gender, regional differences, growing up in urban vs. rural vs. suburban households, ethnicity, family history and personal temperament will all play a significant role as well. However, if you take the population as an aggregate at any point in time and look at the population of a given age at that time, generational deviance from the norm for specific characteristics will be well above the long term aggregate for that age, and those deviations are more pronounced for distinct cohorts of ages.<br />
<br />
Births per capita troughed in 1973, and peaked in 1990, but bucked the pattern of previous generations by troughing in 2002 at very nearly the peak value and then rising again until 2008, at which point the birth population began to drop precipitously through to this year. This indicates that birth rates are not purely cyclical, but are affected by societal changes (long term declines in earning power meant ered) were marrying later, and consequently having both fewer kids and skewing the curves from previous generations) and by economic ones (the birth rate was trending upward in 2007 then dropped sharply by 2008 as the global economy sputtered). With the advent of oral contraceptives fifty years ago, the ability of women to choose when they get pregnant is significantly enhanced, and this no doubt will continue to alter what had been fairly distinct generational patterns before (BPC was nowhere near as sensitive to economic conditions before the Pill).<br />
<br />
My goal with these essays is not to create stereotypes, but rather, from a sea of data, whether there are consistent patterns that emerge about the evolution of society. I see the Millennials - those born between 1980 and 2000 as in general being very connected and artistically inclined, because this was the first cohort to have digitalized media and the tools to use them from the time they were in kindergarten. This will make them very different from those born prior to 1980, who largely wrote the tools. However, this does not mean that a person picked at random from this group will be permanently connected to their iPads and music players - only that statistically it is more likely that they will. In effect, this is an attempt to identify and model the various cohorts, in order to better understand how society will change as they enter different phases of their life as a group.<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-4275061649684953682013-01-07T12:43:00.000-08:002013-01-07T15:39:56.997-08:00Semantic Modeling and Related TopicsA short post - when I'm not throwing firebombs at big social institutions, I do a lot of work in data modeling, XML and semantics. If you have come to metaphoricalweb.blogspot.com looking for more technically oriented content, please check out my new site at <a href="http://semanticmodeling.blogspot.com/">Semantic Modeling</a>.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-46749266080430562782013-01-06T11:44:00.000-08:002013-01-06T11:44:43.130-08:00The Mercantilist and the Engineer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3yDyPgonalSljC0ud0B6ogttqOgBvN_VDqZP5cM3SHV8cE4cFtOe-EM90-gXc3eLoex_-yIk8ZaPpvWK0Zp6_lcXtsuNLlFNzhh9vScuYAOrjWwsWuvOf9VBl4EcPIwoDKDaERQ/s1600/civil-Engineer.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3yDyPgonalSljC0ud0B6ogttqOgBvN_VDqZP5cM3SHV8cE4cFtOe-EM90-gXc3eLoex_-yIk8ZaPpvWK0Zp6_lcXtsuNLlFNzhh9vScuYAOrjWwsWuvOf9VBl4EcPIwoDKDaERQ/s320/civil-Engineer.gif" width="313" /></a></div>
In 1959, author and journalist Vance Packard wrote about the class structures inherent in the US in <i>The Status Seekers</i>. While his work appears fairly dated today, his basic premise, that America has always been a stratified society with distinct "classes" even as it espoused egalitarianism. I first encountered his work in high school in the mid-1970s, but even then, while I thought there was a great deal interesting in the work, I also thought he missed something critical. After thirty five years, I have a pretty good idea what it was.<br />
<br />
<br />
Packard broke down society into nine classes in a pyramid, ranging from lower lower class (the destitute) to upper upper class (the ultra-wealthy). In his time the upper lower case consisted of the trades or blue collar workers, with the lower middle class being the lowest level of managers, and small independent service oriented business owners, the middle middle class being the layer of middle management that was all pervasive in the years after World War II, and the upper middle class being the professionals - lawyers, doctors, accountants and so forth. the lower upper class in turn consisted of the nouveau rich, while the middle upper class was the old money rich, and the upper upper class were in effect the thin strata of ultra-wealthy cloud-dwellers who dominated the world's financial system.<br />
<br />
So far, so good, though the description of new wealth vs. old wealth I think hid a deeper truth. Moreover, Packard brushed over a few anomalous classes - the military (which has always had a two tiered class structure independent of the rest of American culture), the academic (which had a similarly distinct system of students, non-tenured professors, tenured professors and department heads and deans), and one final group that he really had trouble with - techno-nerds, which even then didn't seem to fit into the broader picture.<br />
<br />
The reason that this last group didn't fit neatly into the equation was that the techno-nerds of the time were simply a manifestation of the engineering class, which has never fit neatly into the hierarchy. Most are well educated, but not academics, often having an ambivalent social standing somewhere between the middle managers and the professionals, but in general not belonging to either. In many respects, this has always been true. The engineering class has, over the years, bounced around. In wartime, it's not at all uncommon to find it residing with the military, which taps it's expertise, even though most engineers find war mystifying ... they see too much potential in human beings to necessarily feel that taking someone else's life is justified simply because they are not us, and in many cases, those engineers were as likely as not corresponding with their counterparts on the other side up until the day that hostilities were declared (and often even beyond that).<br />
<br />
In peacetime (and despite waging two global wars until recently, most of the United States is still on a peacetime footing) they tend to get tapped by the upper middle class (which I think is actually part and parcel of the lower upper class) in order to gain ascendancy into the upper middle class, while knocking those in the UMC down a rung or two into the LUC). In effect what you have at play is a perennial struggle between the emergent upper class - the New Mercantilists, vs. the existing upper class - the Old Mercantilists.<br />
<br />
In today's terms, mercantilists are investors, financiers, senior (non-technical) managers, account executives, marketing and advertising professionals and others involved in the buying, marketing and selling of goods and services. Engineers, on the other hand, are technical designers and implementers - programmers, architects (both structural and software), scientific researchers, mathematicians, information managers and librarians, industrial and product engineers, as well as most domain analysts.<br />
<br />
It's worth noting that this process is recursive. The Old Mercantilists were a previous generation's New Mercantilists who took advantage of the technology (and the technologists) of their time to knock over the then masters of the universe. However, in the process, the old mercantilists also tied themselves to a particular technology, and so long as that technology was not made obsolete, they generally continued to build up their power base. Eventually, perhaps over generations or even dynasties, the balance of power shifted as the innovations of the technologists permeated through society and rendered the technological basis of the old guard obsolete.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span id=".reactRoot[975].[1][2][1]{comment467965873251134_5040110}.0.[1].0.[1].0.[0].[0][2].0.[0]" style="line-height: 14px;">E</span></span></span>ngineers and mercantilists have long had an uneasy relationship. In general, most mercantilists of one era are the beneficiaries of the achievements of engineers of the previous era. Engineers are problem solvers, and given the opportunity to attempt to find the best solution they all too frequently do not take the time to distance themselves from the projects and understand its full business ramifications until some mercantilist, who seldom has the engineer's focus, realizes that it will in fact meet a need he has for making more money. <br /><br />Having done so, the mercantilist all too often realizes that should the engineer go elsewhere, so too does that exclusivity of knowledge, and so the mercantilist will generally do everything in his power to make sure the engineer stays under his control. In the past, this included killing the engineer if necessary.<br /><br />Needless to say, engineers have become a little distrustful of mercantilists as a consequence.<br />
<br />
It should be noted that politicians and senior managers generally arise from the middle upper class preferentially (as do the most influential military officers and (non-scientific) academics, even today), which usually tends to strongly color their views about social and financial morality. It's noteworthy that the current Congress is still dominated by millionaires, partially because politics is an expensive occupation, but partially because the background of those who run for Congress heavily slants towards those who are second and third generation wealthy; relatively few people who have made their wealth in the most recent technological revolution are now involved in policy setting, simply because the ones who made the wealth generally are too old while their children are not old enough to play in that arena. There are exceptions, such as Maria Cantwell of Washington State, but I suspect that we're really only going to see the scions of the New Wealthy get into politics in any numbers in the next thirty years or so as the GenXers move into the policy arena.<br />
<br />
One problem that the engineer faces is that most mercantilists, young or old, are afraid of the engineer. Engineers are problem solvers. Mercantilists are opportunists - they seek problems to exploit, in order to make a profit. So long as the problem exists, they profit by mitigating the effects of it, but if the problem was solved, they would have no market. As such, there is often a tension when mercantilists work with engineers, because the engineer's natural impulse is to solve a problem in as thorough a manner as possible, and the idea of deliberately leaving a problem open (or even deliberately creating them, as mercantilists have been known to do) runs counter to the engineering mindset.<br />
<br />
Moreover, engineers tend to be egalitarian, particularly with other engineers. The open source movement is a prime example of an engineering solution, and even now, mercantilists are struggling with how to keep it under control and not ruining their business models. The transparency in government movement is an engineering solution to solving corruption in government, but politicians prefer opacity because politics is generally about doing a favor for someone in exchange for a favor for you at a crucial time, and transparency radically undermines that. It also makes it far more difficult for people to follow the long, time-honored tradition of going from politics to corporate advocacy to academia back to politics.<br />
<br />
Not surprisingly, this often means that engineers and mercantilists speak different languages, because many of their operating assumptions are very different. Engineers are noted for the precision of their language - terms have very clear meanings, and when a term is ambiguous the natural tendency of an engineer is to formally specify a definition to disambiguate it. This precision of language is important, because it enables high throughput communication. It also has the side effect that engineers dislike lying and deliberate vagueness, because it stands in the way of communication.What's more, an engineer is more likely than others to check up on assumptions received from others when he or she is uncertain about its source or veracity, and deliberate falsehood will usually reduce the authority or weight of information from that source.<br />
<br />
Engineering communication also involves both a bandwidth check and dominance check. When an experienced engineer communicates with someone else, he is likely to start out with probing questions to determine the level of competence of the other person and then will adjust up or down as appropriate. Competence is a big part of the engineer's stock in trade, so the authority of another person goes down in his mind when the engineer has to throttle his conceptual flow, while if in communication it's revealed that the person being addressed has a higher degree of competence, then that person's authority rises accordingly. Thus, when a new engineer is brought into a group of engineers, one of the first thing that happens is a dominance game occurs, where the new engineer attempts to establish his or her place in the social hierarchy via his competency. This often has only slight correlation with social standing in a corporate hierarchy, for instance - the most competent engineer becomes the guru, and is accorded both the highest degree of respect and to a certain extent the ability to veto a course of action, even if he is not in a position to do so socially.<br />
<br />
Mercantilists, on the other hand, use corporate social standing (typically tied to wealth or influence) in order to both establish dominance and to communicate. Language is typically vague and multilayered. A mercantilist is constantly playing poker - attempting either to convince others to buy what they are selling against obvious resistance to do so or attempting to buy what others are selling for the least amount of outlay. This means that in terms of communication, the mercantilist seeks to be deliberately vague, in order to provide the least amount of information to either their transactional partner or potential competitors for the same resources. This extends beyond simple monetary transactions to personal transactions - information, like everything else, can be traded for gain or loss. The mercantilist is precise only in contracts, and then only to insure that there is nothing within a transaction that can leave them obligated beyond very set terms. Theirs is the language of persuasion, and their metric of success is the degree to which their persuasion has enriched them.<br />
<br />
Given these differences, it's perhaps not surprising that there is as much animosity as exists between the two groups. When an engineer is asked to estimate the time it takes to do a task, he or she will treat it as a problem to be solved, and will usually be able to tell you fairly accurately a range of time that such a project will take, given uncertainties for certain tasks. A mercantilist, on the other hand, will hear a time and implicitly assume that it is a commitment, and will usually attempt to minimize that time as much as possible because they are paying by the hour. A mercantilist, on the other hand, will go out of his way to never be put into a position where he is responsible for a given time commitment. Engineers are inclined to share information, because it increases their overall authority. Mercantilists are inclined to hoard information because it decreases their vulnerability and protects their advantages in the marketplace.<br />
<br />
Even their social structures are different. Mercantilists gravitate towards hierarchies, because their social position is predicated upon their measurable influence, which can typically be seen by the number of people who work "under" them. In essence, their authority derives from the number of people who report to them, coupled with their success as sales people (either directly as field sales agents or indirectly through the number and effectiveness of the field agents that report to them). Engineers, on the other hand, gravitate towards distributed nodal networks, where you have small clusters or nodes of engineers that work with one another within the context of a larger sea of communication. In this context, an engineer's social standing is based upon their authority - the people they have studied under, the number of works they have authored, the number of papers they have presented, the number of patents they have submitted.<br />
<br />
Put another way, for the mercantilist, authority derives from social position, while for the engineer, social position derives from authority. In many respects, this is one reason why engineers and creatives usually find common cause. A creative, whether an author, an actor, an artist, a musician or an athlete, is known primarily for his or her works. It is the strength of their works that establishes their reputation. They can become quite wealthy on the basis of that work, of course, but it is not in general their wealth that determines their social position. Indeed, like engineers, few creatives are ever really welcome in even Nouveau riche circles, and the ones that are in general are there because they have parlayed their wealth into investments and corporate control (and even then they are suspect).<br />
<br />
On a final note - the twentieth century has been defined either by the military (which is a strong command and control society that is very hierarchical) or the mercantilist (which is a hierarchical society that tends to venerate those most successful at persuasion and making money). There are indications that the twenty first century will see the twilight of the mercantilist and the rise of the engineer (a move towards decentralized networks and authority as a measure of social status) followed by the rise of a creative class (the Millennials) where authority derives from reputation. This argues that Packard's basic premise was flawed. It may be more appropriate to think of society cycling through different structures with power and influence waxing and waning across each sector over time. <br />
<br />
My thanks to Hugh Chatfield for the inspiration for this one. Please see his post on Emily Carr, CNN, Carl Sagan and Bucky Fuller <a href="http://hugh-chatfield.com/Blog/Entries/2010/10/31_Emily_Carr%2C_Carl_Sagan%2C_Bucky_and_CNNs_Restoring_the_American_Dream.html">here</a>.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-77818248206755405182013-01-02T21:54:00.002-08:002013-01-02T22:13:24.247-08:00The Paradox of the Wage Slave<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.collisiondetection.net/images/zombie_attack.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://www.collisiondetection.net/images/zombie_attack.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Once upon a time, there was no such thing as the hourly wage. If you were an independent farmer, you'd sell your grains, cows, pigs and vegetables at the market, and in general would try to stagger these so that you could have money coming in most times of the year. If you were a tenant farmer, when the land lord sold the goods you produced, you'd get a percentage of the sales based upon the amount of land you farmed. A smith would negotiate by the piece or the lot, and usually took a down-payment to cover the costs of the materials. Farmhands and soldiers would be paid a set amount each week, usually at the end of the week after the work in question was done, but might also get a certain proportion of their wages from a share of the harvest or a chance at the spoils. Sailors would get a share of the shipping proceeds (or plunder if the ship in question was a pirate or privateer vessel), plus a stipend for completed voyages and occasionally a small signing bonus.<br />
<br />
In general, the per week payments were intended to keep the laborer involved until the final payout - in effect the laborer was part of the venture and would share in the rewards, or was paid per piece with just enough to cover the artisan's or tradesman's costs and basic sustenance paid in advance.<br />
<br />
Industrialization changed that, along with the arrival of the mechanical clock. People have always had the ability to tell approximate time via candles or hour glasses, but because such resources were both expensive and required maintenance (and were at best very approximate) most timekeeping was managed by church bells sounding the times of worship. With the advent of the clock, however, it became possible to measure tasks more precisely, and as a consequence to break up time into discrete units during the day.<br />
<br />
The machine paradigm also broke the normal agricultural rhythms of working at dawn, getting a big breakfast, working until the sun reached it's peak, taking a short siesta, then working until near dark. Instead, you worked to the clock. In the factory paradigm, it made less sense to pay the workers an small initial payment then pay them a share of the proceeds after the project was done, because there was never a "done" point - the machines ran twelve hours a day, every day. Because industrialization was going on in tandem with the break up of the feudal tenant farm system, there were a lot of laborers available for factory jobs, and consequently, factory owners could limit the laborers to hourly stipends without any hope of final renumeration. This was also the stage where factory labor diverged from trade or artisanal labor, although the former also depressed wages for the latter.<br />
<br />
In the 1940s in both the US and England, most able bodied young men went to war, where they learned regimentation, and where both officer and enlisted class became intimately familiar with command and control structures. The military had standardized on hourly wages, but also had standardized on the concept of a standard work week for those not in theater in order to simplify wage accounting. In practice, that meant that you got paid for 48 hours of work a week, period. Senior grades had a higher pay structure per hour, and officers made more than enlisted for the same number of hours of service.<br />
<br />
When the war ended, the officers went into the newly booming corporations as managers as they switched over from war time to peacetime production of goods, while the enlisted went into the factories as foremen and line managers. The terms "white" and "blue" collar jobs reflected this - naval daily officer uniforms were white cotton, while the ratings and seamen wore blue chamoise-cloth shirts.<br />
<br />
Wages began going up both because of increased demand for skilled workers and because the management class was also getting wages - they were still hirelings of the rentier or investor class, but because they were doing management type activities they typically had far more involvement in the longer term success or failure of the company. Moreover, much of that management was involved with sales, which in addition to wages, paid a commission on sales made that boosted the income of the management class significantly in the years after World War II.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, unions, which had struggled during the Depression and World War II, exploded in popularity in the 1950 and 60s, in part because there was a massive demand for people in the building trades - skilled carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and so forth who had until then perforce taken temporary jobs on an as available basis, and in part in manufacturing, where again high employment demand had meant that a system that both guaranteed competence and provided an environment for younger union members to gain experience made them attractive. As many of the companies involved were comparatively weak, the management of these companies were unable to stop this phenomenon, as they needed people too much not to concede to labor demands.<br />
<br />
By the 1970s, labor unions had become very pervasive, and arguably had become too powerful, at least from the perspective of corporations that were now facing increasingly severe headwinds. In the 1950s, the United States was effectively rebuilding both Europe and Asia. By the 1970s, however, these economies had recovered, and were increasingly competing against the United States in critical areas. Additionally, the Breton Woods agreement in 1944 that had established a global reserve currency (the US dollar) and pegged that dollar to gold was seen more and more as a burden by the US, since it meant that US banks were very limited in the amount of money that they could loan out. When French President Charles de Gaulle demanded that the US make payments to France in gold, not dollars (as the French were concerned about the Americans' depreciation of their currency during the 1960s), President Richard Nixon severed the tie between gold and the dollar. This had the immediate effect of causing the oil producing states of the Middle East to band together in order to raise prices in response, which in turn began an inflationary spiral that didn't really end until Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker raising interest rates to nose bleed levels,<br />
<br />
The massive spike in inflation caused demand for American produced goods to fall dramatically, exacerbating problems that the unions faced. With reduced demand, corporations were able to close plants with impunity. People paid into unions because they had been successful in raising wages and work standards (including reducing total work time to 40 hours per week), but as manufacturing jobs disappeared, so too did the clout of the unions, because there were far more people competing for jobs than there were jobs available. This has always been the Achilles heel of the union movement. Ironically, those places where unions have remained strongest are also those where educational requirements and continued training have also been the most stringent - teachers, nurses, engineers, fire and police professionals,<br />
<br />
It's also worth noting the distinctions in types of inflation. Talking about a broad "inflation" rate is misleading, because in general, inflation is the rise of labor or resources relative to the nominal price of other resources. wage inflation occurred in the 1950s and early 60s relative to commodities, energy and finished goods because labor was comparatively scarce for many jobs. Wages largely stagnated since about 1971, but there was massive inflation in managerial salaries and dividends. Energy has inflated relative to wages since '71, while commodities inflated during the period from 1998-2008, and real estate inflated dramatically from about 2000 until the market collapsed in 2008. <br />
<br />
Most corporate managers and rentier class investors prefer it when labor costs fall while finished goods inflate (which increases their profit), but fear when labor costs rise and raw material goods inflate (which can often squeeze margins at a time when the economy is tight). Not surprisingly, when the main stream media discusses the desire of the Federal Reserve to increase inflation, what they are usually referring to is the inflation of finished goods (from cars and houses to computers, packaged foods and so forth) rather than wage inflation, even though in this case wage inflation is precisely what needs to happen, relative to other asset classes).<br />
<br />
In the late 1970s, a new class of business consultants such as Peter Drucker began making the argument that the primary purpose of a corporation was not to create goods and services but to maximize shareholder value. This credo was part of a shift in thinking pushed largely by the Chicago School of Economics and the monetarists, led by Milton Friedman. Along with this came the belief that the senior management of a corporation, such as the CEO or CFO, should be incentivized to increase stock value (which was widely seen as a good proxy for "shareholder value") by giving them options to purchase stocks at a greatly reduced price. <br />
<br />
With skin in the game, these senior managers would then have more reason to keep stock prices up. In point of fact, all that this did was to transfer a significant amount of wealth from the employees (who were not similarly compensated) and the investors to the managerial class. Ironically, this has served in the long term to significantly reduce shareholder value, while at the same time making such manageables largely unaccountable as they ended up stocking boards of directors with their cronies. Weighed down with expensive senior management contracts many companies ended up reducing long term wages on employees that weren't critical to success to compensate - additionally, because stock price became the only real proxy for a corporation's value, corporate raiders emerged who would push the stock value of a company down through market manipulation, buy it out, reward the senior managers and fire the labor force, often gorging on pension funds and patents in the process.<br />
<br />
The rise of unemployment that resulted was partially masked by the rise of the IT sector. The information technologies revolution started in the 1970s with big iron systems that began to reduce accounting staffs, but it really was only the marriage of the personal computer in the 1980s with networking technology that things began to change dramatically. One of the first things to happen was that as software reached a critical threshold in the mid 1980s, it began to erode the last real bastion of wage employment - the non-managerial white (and pink) collar jobs that had been indispensible to the command and control corporate structure.<br />
<br />
The creation of presentations provides an interesting illustration of the impact this had. Until the mid-1980s, many corporations had graphic design departments. If a manager needed to make a presentation, he would need to work with a designer to design the slides, who would then work with a typesetter, a graphic illustrator and photographer to create the slides, a copy-writer, and possibly a printer, and would often take a month of lead time. With the introduction of presentation software such as Harvard Graphics and later Powerpoint, the manager could do all of these jobs himself, eliminating these positions and drastically reducing the time to do this work. Adaptable artists and designers did eventually go to work for themselves to provide such services, but for every person that became successful in this milleau, three or four did not, and in the process it caused a shift away from the monolithic culture into more of a freelance and studio arrangement.<br />
<br />
Ironically, such a process served to hinder the women's movement for at least a few decades. Falling real wages coincided with a rise of women's empowerment to bring a whole generation of women into the corporate workforce as secretaries, which often provided a stepping stone into mid-level management (typically office management or administration). The introduction of personal computers into the corporate workforce actually initially proved beneficial to secretaries, because they were often the first to get access to these typewriter-like devices and consequently ended up getting a leg up on their male managerial counterparts. However, as more people began using PCs in the work environment, it also radically thinned the number of secretaries required in an organization (although in a fitting twist of irony it also had the same effect on mid-level managers a few years later). This is part of the reason that there's something of a gap between older and younger women in most organizations, especially as IT itself became increasingly seen as a specialized domain for nerdy young men.<br />
<br />
For manufacturing, however, the IT revolution was devastating for workers. Once you networked computers, it became possible to distribute your workforce, and from there it was a short step to moving work outside the US in particular to countries with low labor costs, low taxes and lax regulatory regimes. Standardization of shipping containers made shipping raw goods to these external factories for processing and sending the finished goods back easier, and new telecommunication systems meant that it was easier to coordinate production eight to ten hours ahead or behind you globally. This served to inject huge amounts of money into the Asian economies, which had the unintended effect of raising the wage levels of Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Korean workers dramatically. This outsourcing drained manufacturing from the US, leaving much of the Midwest and MidAtlantic as derelict ghost towns.<br />
<br />
This also had the effect of reducing the overall import costs of foreign goods, which companies such as Walmart took strong advantage of. The outsourcing on manufacturing not only eliminated manufacturing jobs, but also had an adverse on the many service jobs that supported these manufacturing jobs, driving down wages in these areas and giving rise to the McJob - part time, no benefits, paying minimum wage, offering little opportunity for advancement and making an insufficient amount of money to catch up on with steadily rising food and housing prices. Automation generally affected services economies less directly - services almost by definition require either human intervention or human knowledge - but it did mean that mid-level management jobs (which typically provided a career path for people in these sectors) disappeared, leaving fewer ways for a person to break out of the "wage-slave" trap.<br />
<br />
Dramatic rises in energy and commodities due both to scarcity and a growing realization on the part of countries that they were being pillaged by Western corporations caused the machine to falter even more. As the opportunities for the giant petrochemical companies to get access to foreign oil at highly profitable rates disappeared, cries for energy independence began to arise in the US. Energy independence in this context should be read, however, not as an increase in the use alternative energy sources (which currently receive a very small subsidy by the US compared to the oil companies) but as increased drilling for shale oil, offshore oil and natural gas deposits via rock fracturing (aka fracking). These deposits were considered less economical (in part because of the remediation and political costs) than foreign oil and natural gas, but at this stage there are considerably fewer alternatives left to the oil companies (in 1960, oil companies owned roughly 85% of all oil deposits globally, in 2010, that number is closer to 10%, as most of these has been nationalized by their respective governments).<br />
<br />
This has led to an increase in the number of hydrocarbon engineering and maintenance jobs in the US, but this is a labor market that runs hot and cold. The jobs will be around until the fields play out, then will be gone - this will likely happen within the next decade.<br />
<br />
We are now in what has been described as a bubble economy - government stimulus is frequently needed to create a temporary market, but these markets, unregulated, quickly grow to a point where they are oversupplying the available demand, attracting parasitic speculators that then cause the system to collapse, causing inflation in that sector followed by rapid deflation and despoiled ecospaces. This happened in IT in 2000, in housing in 2008, and in education and energy production likely in the next couple of years. The housing collapse in particular is still playing out, primarily in Europe, though it has left a legal tangle of housing ownership that will take decades to untangle, if ever (I expect that ultimately much of this will end up being written off as uncollectable).<br />
<br />
It is against this backdrop that it becomes possible to understand what will happen to jobs over the next couple of decades. There are two additional factors that play into the picture as well. The first is demographic. People born in 1943, which I consider the start of the Baby Boom, turn seventy this year. In the depths of the recession that started in 2008, when this group reached 65, many of them went back to work - and for a while it was not at all uncommon to see a lot of low wage jobs being held by people in their seventh decade. However, even given advancements in geriontology, the ability of people to work into their seventies deterioriates dramatically. The Boomer generation peaked around 1953. If you assume that only a comparatively small fraction of those age 70 or above are still in the workforce, this means that this gray workforce will fade fairly quickly from the overall workforce just in the next five years. This will have the effect of clearing out a large proportion of upper-level management as well, which has been heavily dominated by Boomers just given the sheer number of them.<br />
<br />
GenXers are a trough generation - as a group there is perhaps 65% as many of them as there are Boomers. These people are now entering into policy making positions in both government and business, but because of numbers, the Boomer peak for leaving the workforce hits at approximately the bottom of the GenXer trough for entering into senior management and senior professional positions. This actually translates into a relative scarcity of executive and professorial level talent by 2020, now only seven years distant. GenXers, for the most part, are engineers. Many of them, in their 20s through 40s, were responsible for the low level implementation of the web in the 1990s and the 2000s. A large number were contractors, people who generally benefited far less overall monetarily from the emergence of the computing revolution and the web, and as such they see far less benefit in large scale corporate structures.<br />
<br />
Indeed, the GenXer view of a company is increasingly becoming the norm. It's typically small - under 150 people, in many cases under twenty people. It's distributed and virtual, with the idea of an "office" as often as not being a periodically rented room in a Starbucks, and with people working on it from literally across the world. Participants are often shareholders without necessarily being employees. Their physical facilities are on the cloud, and staffs are usually two or three people devoted to administration while the rest are "creatives" - engineers, developers, artists, videographers, writers and subject matter experts. The products involved are often either virtual or custom as well, and usually tend to have a comparatively small life cycle - often less than six months. This could be anything from software to customized cars to media productions to baked goods.<br />
<br />
In effect these microcompanies are production pods. They may be part of a larger company, but they are typically autonomous even then. They can be seen as "production houses" or similar entities, and they may often perform specialized services for a larger entity - a digital effects house for a movie, a research group for a pharmaceutical company, a local food provider, specialized news journalists. When they do have physical production facilities, those facilities may be shared with other microcompanies (the facilities themselves are essentially another company).<br />
<br />
One of the longer term impacts of ObamaCare is that it also becomes possible for such pods to enter into group arrangements with health insurers, and makes it easier for people to participate in such insurance systems without necessarily being tied to a 40-hour paycheck. Health insurance was once one of the big perks of the more monolithic companies, but until comparatively recently changing companies typically involved changing insurance companies as well, a process that could become onerous and leave people with gaps in insurance that could be devastating if a worker or her child was injured. As command and control companies end up putting more of the costs of insurance on the employee, the benefit to staying with that employer diminishes.<br />
<br />
The same thing applies to pension plans - it has become increasingly common for companies to let go of employees that are close to cashing out their pensions for retirement, often leaving them with little to nothing to show for years of saving. The younger generations are increasingly skeptical of large companies to manage their retirement, usually with good reason, especially since the average 40 year old today may have ten or more companies under their belt since they started work, and can expect to work for at least that many more before they reach "retirement age". This means that GenXers and younger (especially younger) are choosing to manage their own retirement funds when possible, independent of their employer.<br />
<br />
Once those two "benefits" are taken out of the equation, the only real incentives that companies can offer are ownership stakes and salaries. As mentioned earlier, salaries are attractive primarily because of their regularity - you have a guarantee that you will receive X amount of money on this particular date, which becomes critical for the credit/debit system we currently inhabit. Ownership stakes are riskier, but they constitute a long term royalty, which can be important because it becomes itself a long term semi-reliable revenue stream. If you receive royalties from three or four different companies, this can go a long way to not having to be employed continuously.<br />
<br />
The GenXers will consequently be transformers, pragmatists who are more interested in solving problems than dealing with morality, overshadowed by a media that is still primarily fixated on the Boomers, quietly cleaning up the messes, establishing standards, and promoting interconnectivity and transparency. Many of them now are involved in the technical engineering involved in alternative energy and green initiatives, next generation cars, trucks and trains, aerospace technologies, programming, bioengineering, information management and design, and so forth. While they are familiar with corporate culture, they find the political jockeying and socializing of the previous generation tedious, and though they are competent enough managers, GenXers generally tend to be more introverted and less entrepreneurial. Overall, as they get older, GenXers are also far more likely to go solo - consulting or freelancing. They may end up setting up consulting groups in order to take advantage of the benefits of same, but there is usually comparatively little interaction between consultants - they are more likely to be onsite with a client troubleshooting.<br />
<br />
From a political strategist standpoint, one of the great mysteries of the modern era has been the disappearance of the unions. Beyond the strong automation factors discussed earlier as well as a politically hostile climate to unions, one factor has always been generational. GenXers are probably the most disposed personality-wise to being union members, but because unions generally gained a blue collar reputation, many GenXers (who in general see themselves more as engineers and researchers) have tended to see unions as being outside their socioeconomic class. Moreover, the consultant or freelancer mentality is often at odds with the "strength in numbers" philosophy of most unions.<br />
<br />
I expect this generation to also end up much more in academia, especially on the technical and scientific side, or to migrate towards research, especially by 2020 or so as they finally reach a point where passing their knowledge on to the next generation outweighs any gains to be made by consulting. As is typical, the relatively inward looking GenXers will lay the groundwork for the very extroverted generation following after them - the Millennials.<br />
<br />
Millennials were born after 1982, with the peak occurring in 1990, and are the children of the latter wave part of the Boomers (many of whom started families comparatively late - in their very late 20s, and had children until their late 40s). However, there's also an overlap with the children of the GenXers that creates a double crested population hump, with the trough in 1997 and then growth until 2007 (which actually exceeded the number of births per year of the Baby Boomers). After that, however there's been a sharp drop off to the extent that in 2012 the number of births is expected to approach the trough levels of 1971. For all that, the Virtuals (those born after 2000) will likely be a fairly small generation, given the drop off (most likely due to the economy's collapse).<br />
<br />
The oldest Millennials are now thirty years old. Displaced by the gray workforce and facing the hardships in the economy by 2007, many started work four or five years later than in previous generations, had more difficulty finding work, and were often forced when they could find work to take MacJobs. They are distrustful of corporations, and are in general far more bound to their "tribes" -- connected over the Internet via mobile phones and computers -- than they are to work. Their forte is media - writing, art, film production, music, entertainment programming, social media, all of which lends itself well to the production house model, and which will likely mean that as this generation matures, it will end up producing the first great artists of the 21st century.<br />
<br />
What it won't do is make them good workers in the corporate world, or in traditional blue collar positions. Overall, math and science scores for high school plummeted for the Millennials during the 1990s and 2000s, and enrollment in STEM programs in college declined dramatically after 2000 (when the Millennials started into college). Most Millennials are very good at communicating within their generation - this is the most "connected" generation ever - but overall tend not to communicate well with authority figures outside that demographic. (I've discussed this in previous essays.)<br />
<br />
While I've seen some commentators who are critical of the Millennials because they see them as spoiled and entitled, instead, I'd argue that these characteristics are actually more typical of a generation that overall is just not heavily motivated by financial factors. Most have learned frugality after years of having minimal jobs. They will likely marry later and have fewer children than any generation before them, and their social relationships may actually prove stronger than their marital ones. On the other hand, they will also likely focus more strongly on their craft because of these factors, which means that as they age, they will prosper because of their innate skills and talents.<br />
<br />
Temperamentally, the Millennials will tend to act in concert to a far greater extent than the generations before them. They will not join unions, but they will end up creating constructs very much like them. Moreover, they will be inclined to follow authority, but only if that authority is roughly in their generation. Consensus politics will be very important to them, and this will be the first generation that really employs a reputation economy as currency.<br />
<br />
Given all this, it is very likely that the nine-to-five, five day a week job is going the way of the dodo. It won't disappear completely for quite some time, but the concept of a salaried employee will become increasingly irrelevant as the production house model obviates the command and control structure corporation. If you're still learning, you would get paid at a fixed rate plus time, but once you reach a point where you add significant value to a project, you would get points in the project towards a return royalty. Service jobs, similarly, will likely revert to a work for hire basis, coupled with some profit sharing. Manufacturing is shifting to a combination of insourcing with pod companies and artisanal production. Legal and accounting services, where they haven't already shifted to web-based delivery, are pretty much already done on a work for hire basis, with partners getting profit-shares.<br />
<br />
The biggest changes that are taking place are in the sales sector. The rise of eRetailing is beginning to hit brick and mortar businesses hard. Christmas hiring at physical retail stores has been dropping consistently in the last five years, even as the economy itself has begun to recover. This is primarily because more and more retail is shifting online, to the extent that it accounts for nearly half of all retail activity in the United States during the last three months of the year. Mobile continues driving that as well, as it becomes far easier to "impulse buy" when your computing platform is constantly by your side.<br />
<br />
The only real exception to this trend is in groceries and restaurants, though even there online purchases are accounting for a larger percentage of sales than a few years ago. Many grocery chains now offer online ordering and delivery services for nominal fees, up from only a couple specialized services a few years ago. Supermarket shopping is perhaps more ingrained in people than other retail shopping, so it is likely that this trend will take longer to play out there, but it is happening, especially in cities where grocery shopping is more complicated than it is in the suburbs.<br />
<br />
Ambiance stores and restaurants are perhaps the only ones truly bucking the trend, and this has to do with the fact that most restaurants ultimately are as much about entertainment as they are about food. It's why there's been a slow death of the fast food industry, but places such as Starbucks do quite well. They are the modern day equivalent of pubs.<br />
<br />
Note that I do not believe that such service jobs will go away completely, but they will diminish, and at some point it is often more profitable for a common to only be virtual and not maintain the costs of storefronts. No storefronts means fewer stores in malls, and already many malls are closing or being converted to other purpose buildings, while there are very few new mall or strip mall projects starting. Similarly, the number of "big box" stores has been declining as well. On any given day, go into an Office Depot or Best Buy, and what's most remarkable is how little traffic there generally is. Yet people are buying from their online sites, and the stores stay open increasingly to keep the brand alive in people's minds. At some point I expect these expensive "advertisements" to finally close down or turn into general distribution points, with only token merchandise on the floor.<br />
<br />
This brings up the final paradox of the wage slave. The number of jobs being created is smaller than the number of jobs that are going away by a considerable degree, even in a "healthy" economy. These jobs are not being outsourced, they are being eliminated due to automation. The jobs that are being created in general require specialized skills, skills which used to be acquired via "on the job training", but increasingly these low and mid-tier jobs that provided such training are the easiest to automate, and hence are going away as well.<br />
<br />
It is possible to train people some of these skills in the classroom, but the 10,000 hour rule of mastery generally applies - in order to understand a particular topic or acquire a given skill, it usually takes 10,000 hours worth of study, experimentation and practice to truly acquire competency in that area. In practice, this usually correlates to about ten years of fairly rigorous working with the topic. This means that while education is a part of the solution, the time required to impart that education can often make these skills obsolete.<br />
<br />
The upshot of this is pretty simple - eventually, you end up with a large and growing percentage of the population that simply become unemployable. They are not lazy - most of them had positions until comparatively recently, but those positions are now gone. Meanwhile, profits that are made from the automation do not go to the people who lost the jobs, but the people who purchased the automation, and from there to the people who commissioned the creation of that automation in the first place. Put another way, productivity gains over the last fifty years were privatized, while the corresponding unemployment was dumped on the public domain. That unemployment in turn created emotional and financial hardship, foreclosures, a rise in crime and in the end a drop in the overall amount of money in circulation.<br />
<br />
This last point is worth discussing, because it lies at the crux of the problem. In a capitalistic society, the velocity of money is ultimately more important than the volume of money in circulation. When money moves quickly through the system, more transactions take place, and in general more value is created in that economy. When money ceases moving, no one buys or sells, no investment takes place, no jobs are created (though many may be lost), and money becomes dearer, because you have a fixed amount - you can't count on additional moneys coming in, you can't get loans, even the simplest economic activity stops. This was close to what happened in 2009. As automation replaces work, billions of man hours of work payments disappear - money that would have gone to labor instead goes to the investors, who generally contribute a far smaller acceleration to the global economy than middle and working class individuals do in the aggregate. The wage-hour ceases being an effective mechanism for transferring wealth in society.<br />
<br />
Eventually, a tiny proportion of the population ends up with most of the money in that society, and there is no way for the rest of the population to get access to that money to get the goods they need. We're not quite there yet, but the imbalance is already sizable and only getting worse.<br />
<br />
One solution to this problem is to tax wealth that's not in use. This transfers money from wealthy individuals to the government, but given that government has become increasingly captured by those same individuals, the result of those taxes end up as corporate kickbacks to the same rentier class in terms of subsidies. Taxes can be reduced on low income individuals, but for the most part, low income individuals generally pay little in the way of payroll taxes, though they do pay in hidden taxes and fees arising from having to buy the smallest units of finished goods and services, which is generally the most expensive per item cost. Money can be distributed to everyone to spend, but the benefits of such stimulus usually tend to be short-lived, because the amounts are too small to make an appreciable difference in the same extractive mechanisms still exist in society.<br />
<br />
Government mandated minimum wage floors can be set, but while this will help some, it is precisely these jobs that are most heavily impacted by automation. Moreover, the same corporate capture of the government provides a chokehold on the ability to impose such requirements on corporations. In effect the oligarchical control of the government continues to pursue policies that locally increase their profits, but at the systemic cost of destroying the consumer base upon which those profits depend. It is, in many respects, yet another example of the tragedy of the commons.<br />
<br />
In many respects this is what the end state of a capitalistic society looks like - stalemate. Fewer and fewer jobs exist. Money becomes concentrated not in the hands of those who have jobs, but in the hands of investors, yet investment money is seldom sufficient to create a market, only to bring a product or service to that market. Wages become two tiered - bare subsistence level or below, and lavish for those with specialized skills, but only at the cost of continuous learning and training, and the concommittant loss of expertise as skilled workers choose not to share their skills at the risk of losing their marketability.<br />
<br />
Because needs are not being met in the formal market, an informal or gray market emerges that is outside of the control of both the government and the corporatocracy, one with lax quality controls and legal redress in the case of fraudulent transactions, and consequently one where organized crime can play a much larger role. While this may seem like a Libertarian wet dream, the reality of such markets is typically like Russian markets in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet empire, in which crime lords created monopoly markets where basic goods were only available for high prices or coercive acts, and where legislators and activists who tried to bring such crime lords under control were regularly assassinated.<br />
<br />
So how does a society get out of this trap? My own belief is that in the end, it decentralizes. Power production shifts from long pipelines of petroleum based fuels to locally generated power sources - solar, wind, geothermal, hydrothermal, small nuclear (such as small thorium reactors), some local oil and natural gas production, intended primarily to achieve power sufficiency for a region with enough to handle shortfalls elsewhere in a power network. This provides jobs - both constructing such systems and maintaining them - and insures that energy profits remain within the region. <br />
<br />
Establish a minimal working wage but also provide mechanisms for employees to become participants through profit-sharing and royalties, rather than options and dividends. <br />
<br />
Make healthcare and retirement saving affordable and universal, rather than as a profit center for insurance companies and pharmaceuticals. <br />
<br />
Tax financial transactions in exchanges, and use this to provide a minimal payment to individuals as a way of redistributing the costs of automation (and financial malfeasance) on employment. <br />
<br />
Eliminate the distinction between salaried and hourly workers in the tax code, which has created an artificial two tiered system designed primarily to make it possible for unscrupulous employers to have a person work up to 39 hours a week and still not qualify for benefits. <br />
<br />
Eliminate the 40 hour workweek - it's an anachronism. Instead, establish a government base payment that provides a floor for subsistence living for everyone, coupled with wage payments from jobs to fill in towards a production royalty payoff that provides wealth for people willing to put in expertise and effort.<br />
<br />
Eliminate the income tax, and replace it with a value-added tax. The Federal income tax has in general been a disaster, increasing class warfare, often being used punitively by various administrations to favor one or another group, is extraordinarily complex, requires too much effort to maintain records for independent workers and small businesses, and usually being easily subvertible by the very wealthy, putting the bulk of the burden on the middle class. A value-added tax, while somewhat regressive, is generally easier to administrate, does not require that employees maintain detailed records, can be automated easily, and can in general be fined tune to encourage or discourage consumption of certain things within the economy.<br />
<br />
Tax employers for educational support. Too many corporations want their workers to have specialized knowledge or skills, but in general do not want to pay for the training. Some of that tax can be in kind knowledge transfer from people that do have those skills in those corporations , at which point the corporation pays for that employer/contributor to teach.<br />
<br />
Similarly, tax employers for infrastructure support that directly or indirectly benefits them. Much of the last half century has seen the maxim of privatizing profits and socializing costs become almost holy writ, but this has generally resulted in ghettos and gated communities that benefit a few at the expense of millions.<br />
<br />
Encourage telecommuting and virtual companies, while taxing those corporations that require large numbers of employees onsite at all times. If telecommunication tools were good enough to outsource to China, they are good enough to provide telecommuting. This generally has multiple benefits - less need for infrastructure, far fewer carbon emissions, less energy consumption, less time wasted in traffic, fewer monster skyscrapers serving as corporate shrines.<br />
<br />
These changes (and others like them) are feasible, but in general will only work if they are attempted locally - at the state or even city level. These are transformative changes - as different regions attempt these, facets that work and don't will emerge, and local variations will no doubt come about based upon cultural temperament, but overall success will beget success. Demographic changes, as discussed in this essay, will accelerate this process - those regions that are already investing in twenty-first century technologies are already doing a number of these things, and are seeing benefits, but those that are heavily petroeconomically bound will resist them. The irony here is that this means that in these latter areas, the wage slave paradox will only get worse, and the economy more dysfunctional over time.<br />
<br />
It is likely that thirty years from now the economy of the United States will look very different - mass customization through additive printing techniques, millions of virtual pod corporations that number in the dozens of people only distributed all around the country (and probably the world), cities that will be in a state of controlled disintegration, powered locally and with much more local autonomy, with the rise of a strong creative class supported by an elderly engineering class and a youthful research cadre. None of this will happen overnight, nor will it happen uniformly, but I feel it will happen.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-17437127223406132312012-12-21T16:18:00.003-08:002012-12-21T16:18:53.880-08:00The End of the World Didn't Happen Today<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1Iw4rm7GrWSAcEo651ltqW3445BkdzQs16fYX57EzmMAddiaDeR58A34u3RSjcZKH2YkUabWBVqlNSGutvcyLjYuDC0CzbrWIjqrICP8PIUhkEDJDwHvZrU5izLjkdwALR10wug/s1600/44089.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1Iw4rm7GrWSAcEo651ltqW3445BkdzQs16fYX57EzmMAddiaDeR58A34u3RSjcZKH2YkUabWBVqlNSGutvcyLjYuDC0CzbrWIjqrICP8PIUhkEDJDwHvZrU5izLjkdwALR10wug/s320/44089.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Just one of many ways to bring it all to an end.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
On this day, according to the Mayan Calendar and the hordes of New Age experts who make their living looking for such portents, the world will have ended. Again.<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
We <i>like</i> the end of the world. Hundreds of millions of dollars a year go into exploring various and sundry ways the world will end - in TV shows, movies, video games, novels, even serious conferences. Asteroid strikes, tsunamis, earthquakes, black holes, rogue planets, expanding suns, supernovae, killer biohazards, the plague, nuclear war, zombie infestations, rogue weather, Chthulu-esque demi-gods, vampires vs. werewolves, strangelets, divine retribution, global flooding, alien invasions, Nemesis, Aphosis, false vacuum phase shifts, brane collisions, it's rather remarkable just how many ways there are to turn out the lights, once and for all.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There's something eminently satisfying about going out with a bang, like the dinosaurs did when an asteroid slammed into the Gulf of Mexico 65 millions years ago. Except they didn't, really. Oh, no doubt there were quite a few dinosaurs for which that fateful collision truly was the end of their world. However, the day after the asteroid, there were still quite a few T-Rexes wandering around - a bit dazed and confused perhaps, but they still managed to successfully take down a stegosaurus or three for breakfast. They were there a week later, and a month ... indeed, by all indications they were still going two or three million years after Game Over.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
What ultimately did the dinosaurs in was bad weather. In India the collision of a breakaway piece of Antarctica and the Asian subcontinent had caused the crust to become particular thin over a hot spot region deep within the Earth's core, and it opened up a whole series of volcanoes, initially cooling the atmosphere with all of the sulfur being released, but ultimately warming it again as nickel, normally held deeply within the core of the Earth, made its way in great concentrations to the surface. As it cooled, the nickel provided a critical substrate necessary for the flourishing of a form of methanogen, a methane consuming microbe that generated copious amounts of carbon dioxide. In the end, the planet became too hot for the plants which fed the huge appetites of the stegosaurs which in turn fed the t-rexes, and the giant dinosaurs that needed vast amounts of food to support themselves ultimately ended up starving (or more likely dehydrating) to death. Meanwhile, the much smaller mammals and tiny dinosaurs that could get by on a miniscule fraction of the food survived, the mammals by burrowing and hibernating, the dinosaurs by taking to the air. This happened over the course of two to to three million years, still relatively fast by evolutionary standards, but far from the "death raining from the sky" eye-blink that makes for such good cinematic fodder.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
We like "game over" endings. A good ending makes for a satisfying read, and a poor one, one where too few threads get tied up, makes us feel dissatisfied with the work. You want the villain to be dead at the end - want so that he can't get back up and menace the heroes one more time. You want the prince and princess to get married to resolve that awful teenage-angsty hormone-driven sexual tension, so they can go on happily with the rest of their lives. You want the war to be over. A good story builds tension, and at the end of the narrative that tension needs to be released and resolved. Life as orgasm. Even when the ending is horrific, one where everyone dies a particularly grisly death, the desire for closure is stronger.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Ironically, a part of this has to do with the implicit assumption on the part of the reader that, by hearing the narrative, they will in the end be a survivor. They will be alive to tell the tale, not rotting in an anonymous grave somewhere. The fact is that, every day, it is the end of the world for somebody, but in all but one case, those somebodies are not you.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
However, great closures are also critical for societies overall. The US Empire is in decline. It has been for several years. Historians, who are masters of the narrative, are already looking for the smoking gun, the one event that definitively says that the Third Age is over (to borrow from the recent Tolkienesque interest) and the Fourth Age is begun. They're looking for the day that Gollum bit off Frodo's ring to recover his Precious before tumbling, fatally, to his doom in Mt. Doom. (For a man who invented two complete languages, Tolkien was remarkably inept at naming mountains). </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
On this day, the bad guys are vanquished, and the good guys can start building something new again. Yet today it's hard to tell what that "something new" is - or rather, it's easy to tell, but hard to chose from the plethora of something new's that are currently in vogue. For the Libertarian, that something new is a society where the intrepid hero defeats the evil government to become a master of his own fortunes. For the Liberal, that "new" is a world where oil is no longer pumped from the earth, where we live in harmony under a benign government of the people, at one with nature in our tree-enshrouded sanctuaries, away from the gun-toting yokels and religious nuts. For the Fundamentalist, the "new" is a world where a benign god looks once more upon His people, bringing them peace and prosperity while the evil unbelievers burn forever in the pits of Hell, in the ultimate of punishments.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Curiously enough, the villains in one person's narrative are the heroes in another. This again brings up the problems of narrative tension. An arbitrary apocalypse in the vast narrative always favors the listener's own tribe in the same way that it favors themselves. Your tribe will remain, if scattered and sorely beleaguered, while the evil tribes will get theirs. Those few that remain will see the wisdom in banding with your tribe and your way of thinking, at least in the main.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
However, life is seldom that neat, and endings, when they do come, are seldom swift and absolute. Instead, the visible signs of a transition, a change from one social regime to another, are usually symptomatic of broader but generally less immediately tangible changes. We're hitting resource peaks in the first half of the twenty first century that will have major ramifications for the next three or four hundred years. Climate change will cause various regions to lose or gain economic and hence political power. Our economic system is in flux right now because the foundations of those economies are shifting, both due to the aforementioned resource peaks and to the innovations that we have unleashed in the last century. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
We have an unprecedented degree of understanding both about we do and what we don't know about the universe, and the transition from physical discovery to materials engineering to commercialization is occurring in a breathtakingly short amount of time. Our ability to innovate with our economic systems is also unprecedented, and this in turn means that we can make economic experiments (meaning mistakes - offshoring, anyone) and recover from them within a surprisingly short interval.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Yet the need for narrative is still there, and that is perhaps the challenge of political, social and economic innovators moving forward. For too long the narrative has been that the story is coming to a close, that the survivors will be ones with the greatest amount of money, land socked away up in the mountains, arsenals of heavy machine guns waiting for the coming zombie hordes. What's so disturbing about this particular narrative is that the zombies in question are thinly disguised latte-sipping urban liberals, drinks in one hand full of rotting milk and coffee; the fear being that the world really is coming to an end, the cities with all of these people with their big government regulations and reprehensibly open social policies (women's rights! gay marriage! unions!!!) are going to overwhelm the god-fearing farmers and ranchers of the Real America.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Ironically it is a narrative that's also promulgated by the suburban financiers and senior managers - the ones that may work in downtown New York but have a home in the Hamptons, or that control their empires from Dallas but are driven in by chauffeur from the Park Cities or Lakewood. They too fear the zombies, but in this case the zombies are the undesirables that will drive down home prices, will cause cracks in the illusion of absolute mastery that they maintain around themselves. These are the people most invested in the status quo, the ones that see the visions of sustainability and lower economic inequity as a direct threat against their own wealth and station. They are concerned about the New Money, because New Money often comes from undermining the paradigm that helped establish the Old Money in the first place (which was itself once New Money), and today that New Money is increasingly coming from the young, technically competent engineers, scientists, creatives and advocates who recognize the dangers and limitations of the status quo. At one time, this force was helping to prop up the Old Money, but as times and technologies change, the gulf between these two forces widen.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In a way, the younger generation is shaping its own narrative, one that's increasingly at odds with the status quo. They see the future and are worried by it, which means they are adapting far more quickly to it. A winnowing process is going on, one in which the most salient technologies are enhanced, while the less salient are diminished. Biotechnologies, information science, nano-engineering and alternate energy development are all critical. As a generation they have less use for corporate religion or giant conglomerates - they view businesses simply as vehicles to apply capital to solving problems, and view religion as being increasingly private and self-directed. They drive less, and are far more comfortable working and playing with people that may be thousands of miles away than their predecessors. Their mantra increasingly is that too much power in the hands of anyone - government or business - is bad, and are becoming increasingly proficient with the ability to make decisions collectively with astonishing speed. These people do not respect existing institutions, but instead see them as being relics of another age that are no longer germane to them.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
For these people, the end of the world is nowhere in sight, other than as an excuse to throw a good party and an opportunity to remake the world according to their own narrative. To them, this is exhilarating, to others, this is terrifying. In the end, though, they will be the ones writing the next chapters. For now, it is perhaps best to know that this grand story is ... to be continued ... </div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-62914847682769891782012-12-12T10:54:00.001-08:002012-12-12T10:54:39.629-08:00Decentralizing Society<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB1D-QSX6K0qFuUM495-esbNEFbRmsk_V4gQ1iqHhLXIDJgul_oloIz-vjeoRhI6o7bnKqmv-PPJeHAHlENgZbBKhnLpwTTHEHg5BQIl0tjGAQN_zeD6CUUHeHaG7Y11ADlv3Uiw/s1600/18iceland.xlarge1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB1D-QSX6K0qFuUM495-esbNEFbRmsk_V4gQ1iqHhLXIDJgul_oloIz-vjeoRhI6o7bnKqmv-PPJeHAHlENgZbBKhnLpwTTHEHg5BQIl0tjGAQN_zeD6CUUHeHaG7Y11ADlv3Uiw/s640/18iceland.xlarge1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
Scotland, Germany, Iceland, Denmark, Finland - one by one a very subtle shift is happening in the world, something that I think will become a much bigger factor in the decades ahead. Each of these countries is attempting to achieve energy independence by moving as much of their energy production as possible into renewable power sources. In the examples cited above, the reason for such migration is as much geopolitical as it is concern for the environment - these countries (I'll get to Scotland in a second) are in a situation where they do not have many of their own carbon energy resources, and consequently, are especially dependent upon other countries, ones that historically they have had occasionally disastrous relationships with in the past.<br />
<br />
Iceland's an interesting example in several different ways. During the collapse of 2008-2010, Iceland did something unprecedented. Saddled with supposedly safe debt that "exploded" on them, they rejected austerity, arrested and prosecuted the bankers, nationalized the banks, and repudiated their foreign debt as being unpayable. In doing so, they were forced into a situation where they could no longer get letters of credit for huge oil purchases, so they began a crash course in becoming internally sustainable. One of the first things that they did was to re-evaluate their internal energy profiles and recognized that they had a wealth of energy from geothermal and hydroelectric sources - the energy inherent in hot springs, geysers and melts from glaciers. Taking advantage of this, Iceland's renewable energy resources make up 81% of the total energy production from the island country, with the balance coming from North Sea oil.<br />
<br />
The economic news and the energy news are not unrelated. The petro-industrial complex is intimately tied into the financial services sector globally, and indeed, many of the aspects of globalization, from outsourcing of jobs to 5,000 mile salads to the explosion of the 0.1% globally in terms of overall wealth owned, are intimately tied to the retrieval, transportation, distribution and consumption of petroleum products. Iceland chose to drop out of that web for a bit, and in the process are beginning to worry financiers in New York, London, Berlin and elsewhere.<br />
<br />
Scotland's driver is a growing desire to separate themselves from the political control of London. They have similarly made 100% energy independence a major part of this process, because by no longer being dependent upon the North Sea oil well (which is showing signs of playing out), they end up with much greater autonomy in other matters.<br />
<br />
Germany, ironically, is a financial powerhouse, but much of that is built primarily upon engineering services and manufacturing of precision goods. Their overriding concern is maintaining independence from Russia and its oil and natural gas production, and to achieve this they are betting heavily upon solar and hydrothermal technologies.<br />
<br />
Moreover, they are treating such energy production in a paradigm shattering way. Their goal is not to replicate oil production, but to look at their infrastructure a piece at a time and figure out how to make each piece effectively fuel itself. Projects there include using genetically modified algaes that not only are especially good at filtering waste water, but that generate energy as a by-product of doing this. The energy produced isn't huge, but it is sufficient to generate the power to run the plant and push some back into the grid.<br />
<br />
Similarly, solar panels are becoming so much a part of the German landscape that in many towns there are few roofs that don't have them - and this in a country that has a disproportionately high number of cloudy days. The irony is that Germany is now producing so much power that other countries that are Germany's power grids are becoming overwhelmed because Germany is producing more power than it can use and is dumping that energy downmarket on unprepared grids and bringing these down.<br />
<br />
The thing that these countries share is that they are relatively compact, are already affluent, and have strong external (typically security) reasons for achieving such independence. For the US overall, this is generally not the case, and this is frequently an argument given on the part of the petroleum industry and their supporters about why alternative power is such a pie in the sky dream in the US. However, these arguments (when not trying to argue that global warming is only an illusion) usually assume that complete conversion of petroleum to technology X is infeasible because petroleum is far more effective and the infrastructure to upgrade the entire country would be absurdly expensive to replace.<br />
<br />
In practice, however, this is where the paradigm of self-supporting infrastructure makes so much sense, and why, in many ways this conversion is already taking place. Forget about total conversion, finding a one-size-fits-all magic bullet (seriously mixed metaphors there) that will replace the petroleum economy overnight is simply not going to happen in the US. What can happen, however, is the notion of making infrastructure self-supporting.<br />
<br />
Much of that technology already exists today. You can get an intelligent security monitoring plus power management system for your house for $50/month from cable companies that will let you control the outlets, air system and appliances in your house from an Android or iOS app located anywhere. Throw in the next generation LCD lighting systems, add in a solar collector for your roof, and your house becomes a net neutral environment. Put all the street lights on local solar cells, start tapping into geothermal as well as hydropower, solar PV and wind-powered systems for municipal structures such as government buildings and schools, and these too start disappearing from the grid. Malls, which have traditionally been huge energy sinks, are either being shut down or taking advantage of large expanses of parking spaces to erect solar panels to become self-supporting. Trains, especially light rail and subway, can take advantage of flywheels located in the stations themselves to extract power via induction to slow the trains down, then can then give the same trains an induction based boost to get out of the station, reducing it's overall energy footprint by 60-70%.<br />
<br />
The same principle applies increasingly to work. One intriguing trend is the re-tollification of paid-for highways. Municipalities are assessing tools on previously free roads, which is having the unexpected side effect of encouraging telecommuting as employers are forced to question whether having employees do hour-long commutes in order to be in the same office is worth the wage increases that will be needed to cover these commute costs (in effect, most commuting to and from work as well as parking costs have been pushed onto the employees, when this is in fact a requirement imposed by the employers, and employees are pushing back on this).<br />
<br />
Similarly, the very technologies that allowed outsourcing - including cloud computing and applications as service - are also increasingly making insourcing more attractive as the pendulum swings in the other direction, because such insourcing is still distributed, but over a more manageable geographic region. Monitoring and troubleshooting as often as not now occurs on distributed systems on the cloud, so having a lot of engineers located in the IT "server" room is now "so 90s" - the room is no longer there, the network admins all have their iPhones and iPads configured to notify them the moment an error condition gets fired, and most of those apps are increasingly running on Amazon or Google or other cloud providers. Managers work from home, marketing people produce ad copy and visuals by collaboration, and most meetings are now down through GoToMeeting or something equivalent.<br />
<br />
Why does this matter? Every virtual meeting is five to ten less trips downtown, or perhaps five to ten airline tickets. This puts fewer cars on the road, which decreases the energy footprint. Automated toll systems can also be tied in to financial banking networks and hence audited, making it possible to determine who pays for driving. Insourcing also reduces the number of cargo ships on the seas, each burning hundreds of gallons of oil an hour, and reduces the amount of air traffic.<br />
<br />
Yet the argument would be made at this point by those invested in the status quo that fewer shipping or aircraft trips represents that many fewer jobs - fewer airline workers, fewer stevedores, fewer truckers. They're right, of course, it does. And here is where things go all political. Ultimately, something has to give. The future has arrived - all of those labor saving devices, all of those robots, all of the efficiency generating software and infrastructure ultimately implies that the number of hours of meaningful work is in permanent decline. There will be occasional spikes and probably a floor at some point, primarily in the services sector, but even with jobs moving back home you need 1 person for what required 100 a century ago in the manufacturing sector, and increasingly even the financial sector is beginning to look anemic as trading algorithms replace the Masters of the Universe, just as large scale search databases have significantly dented the legal and medical professions.<br />
<br />
Ultimately then, the question is how you resolve this fundamental contradiction - providing a means for the distribution of value in a capitalist society to the largest percentage of people when the most traditional mechanism - wage labor - no longer provides that capability. I'll address this issue next week.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-45123580677538202062012-12-03T11:44:00.004-08:002012-12-03T11:44:49.349-08:00Moving to CascadiaIt's been a busy couple of months for me, and as happens, this has left me with relatively little time to write (though perhaps too much time surfing Facebook). The election is past, my side won (yay, me?) and as also happens, the national mood has shifted once again to the mundane. Journalists, I suspect, don't like incumbents winning - they do what they did before they had to go out and stump to save their seat, and as such there is no "news". Over the years, I've come to realize that the news industry, were it personified, would be a somewhat vacuous blonde babe with a severe case of ADD "Oh, shiny!" - when there is no news, she gets bored and pouts, just to get something into print or fill airwaves or Internet electrons, or whatever the metaphor du jour is for the media, and she has the attention span of a four year old after eating a dozen pixie sticks.<br />
<br />
All that aside, I am writing this from a Starbucks in Issaquah, Washington, under cloudy skies, watching the ravens and seagulls squabble over the various leavings. After two and a half years of Maryland, I am once again back home, where we raised my eldest daughter when she was a toddler and I was a young, wet behind the ears programmer who wrote educational game software. Hey, it was all the rage back then, even though I could replicate everything I did back then in Macromedia Director in most browsers nowadays. It was a racket then, I really don't think much has really changed, save that nowadays we spell educational game software as A-P-P-S. and they're delivered on a tablet with about 100,000 times as much processing power as I had available back then.<br />
<br />
So why the move back from Maryland, where there was, arguably, more work for my skills? The laundry list is pretty long, but includes family health issues, the fact that my eldest daughter was going to school here, and a new contract that's at least partly based on the West Coast with a large media company that does a great number of animated movies about princesses. However, there are other reasons, less rational perhaps but arguably of a bigger draw. I grew up as an Air Force brat, and have lived in just about every environment imaginable - the mountainous region of Germany, Alabama's sweltering farmlands, perched aside a mountain in Hawaii, the river bluffs and flat farmland of north-central Illinois, a couple stints in the Appalachians from West Virginia, through Eastern Tennessee and all the way down to Georgia and Florida.<br />
<br />
Yet even before I moved there, the Pacific Northwest has already exerted a pull on me, and when I arrived there in 1990, I immediately felt like I was home. I suspect it was because of those early formative years when I was in Germany, where the weather was overcast in the winter, firs and spruce dominated the landscape, and mountains were tall, majestic things that crowned the sky, not just higher hills than average. I've never felt as grounded as I did when I was in the Northwest, almost as if I could feel the solidity of the land around me in my heart. In Maryland I felt curiously adrift, as if there was nothing for my soul to wrap itself around. For someone as rational as I sometimes can be, this may sound perhaps an unusually romantic notion (in the 19th century sense) but I think it's a very real thing.<br /><br />
Yet there are other differences that took me a while to appreciate. Northwesterners are, by and large, quiet, contemplative, introverted, and most especially polite people. Marylanders were friendly, but there is also a tendency there for people in the beltway especially to take on the airs of self-importance and self-promotion that is pretty much a requirement for operating in a highly politically charged environment. Appearances mattered more than skill or talent, conforming to the two flavors of ideology (or the very careful kabuki "neutrality" that was an ideology all of its own). It would have bee all too easy to get sucked into that weird limbo, taking job after job there, but I'm not sure I would have liked what I was becoming.<br />
<br />
It's funny. I'm not a religious person, but increasingly I see myself as being a spiritual one. This has nothing to do with the concept of an afterlife. Whether the "spirit" or "soul" survives after death has never been a big concern to me - the "me" will die with my body regardless. Yet what is becoming more pertinent to me is the bigger picture of my role with relationship to the rest of the universe. We do not exist in a self-contained unit - human beings are intrinsically psychically messy, spilling outward from their physical shell with an extended web of relationships, obligations, and temporalities, something that has become only more apparent within the context of social webs and the Internet. There I felt stifled, limited, constrained by expectations and requirements on me that reduced my role to the relevant cog in the machine. It was not the path I wanted to walk, and perhaps it is simply the ticking of that ultimate clock that made me realize that in the end it served only to fulfill some contractor's requirements on a checklist for me to be there, not whether what I was doing was really making any difference (in most cases it was not).<br />
<br />
Okay, that's it - no big sweeping surveys of humanity's futures this time around. I'll be posting more regularly (and consistently) from here on out, now that we're no longer in moving limbo. Sometimes it is necessary to concentrate on the local, what's in front of us, and now is that time for me. I'm home.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-66722904238014763732012-10-15T18:40:00.005-07:002012-10-15T18:58:00.186-07:00My Inner Neanderthal<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEira20MiHKS8KWLggsN9tPIKwBnRl_EfxedwYdIkxOivY8MU164NoyVi_Q8aNUqgSTOVJIbbbMiscYKoTB4otZcqqqUgXkamQAq2kt2UgoEibjx0Xs9PpCsz96hE8Mp8qJYM3tdpg/s1600/neanderthal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEira20MiHKS8KWLggsN9tPIKwBnRl_EfxedwYdIkxOivY8MU164NoyVi_Q8aNUqgSTOVJIbbbMiscYKoTB4otZcqqqUgXkamQAq2kt2UgoEibjx0Xs9PpCsz96hE8Mp8qJYM3tdpg/s320/neanderthal.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
I am an introvert, possibly an extreme one. While not necessarily a hermit, I don't generally tend to function well in the world of corporate cubicles or even offices, find it difficult to navigate the vagaries of office politics, and don't tend to define myself in terms of my title or position in the hierarchy. I an a pretty good consultant, perhaps because I'm good at coming into an organization from the outside and seeing the strengths and weaknesses of that organization, but whenever I find myself either willfully or inadvertantly pulled into the maelstrom, there is a primal part of me that screams to get out of there as fast as possible.<br />
<br />
The last decade has seen a radical change in the way that we have come to understand the evolution of the human race, largely as a result of our ability to sequence the human genome and see how we have evolved over time by determining when a particularly gene or allelle first appeared. <br />
<br />
So, what does this have to do with office politics? It turns out that a curious incident occurred in the human genetic structure about 35,000 years ago - we interbred with aliens. Half a million years before, there was the first great migration of humans out of Africa, probably during a global warming period - food became scarce in East Africa, and some (but not all) of the early hominids stayed put. <br />
<br />
Our record of their travels is limited, because the older the fossil record becomes, the more likely that human bones and remains would get destroyed by flooding, burial, wildfires and so forth. This process occurred a number of different times, and each time it would strand a portion of humanity in a different environment - coastlines along the Indian Ocean, on lands such as the British Isles that was only periodically connected to the rest of Europe and so forth.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCx1ShvqWMfYa_g71hTCva7RDmGQIb5mis5dekEp4uWACK9c43HA-KRFso0tg1BINSDg_9OMQcw_riYy-5Mn8j4vGiwWx9f32tEifO0_x0tt0w0MCbpTYI6X5rCvWN5a38ICCDkg/s1600/110815_r21179_p465.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="305" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCx1ShvqWMfYa_g71hTCva7RDmGQIb5mis5dekEp4uWACK9c43HA-KRFso0tg1BINSDg_9OMQcw_riYy-5Mn8j4vGiwWx9f32tEifO0_x0tt0w0MCbpTYI6X5rCvWN5a38ICCDkg/s320/110815_r21179_p465.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
One of these stranded groups had gone north and west, forming a cultural group that extended from the area around Hungary, along the Volga north to Scandinavia and the Danube east to France and, across a land bridge that formed, to Prydhain, which would in time become the British Isles. When the glaciers came, many of these people died, but the ones that survived adapted, becoming shorter, brawnier of chest, their hair, going from brown-black to red, or to pale white in the Scandinavian regions. They became used to living in snall familial groups, and the survival skills they developed shifted from tribal hunting of large game animals to individual trapping of smaller animals - which meant that the skills that were emphasized tended to stress pre-planning, the development of more sophisticated traps, and long periods in relative isolation. Neanderthal women generally had to be more self sufficient, and both men and women were strong enough to handle many of the more physical activities that such a life demanded.<br />
<br />
Over time, isolation started the process of speciation. These early humans adapted to their environment. During cold times, they would hibernate - their heart rate would drop dramatically, they would start metabolizing fat and they would sleep deeply for days on end. Their diet was high in protein (which could be converted to fat) though they did also eat nuts, grains and cold adapted fruits, which changed their dentition. They started communicating tonally - Neanderthal speech was probably more like song, whereas Cro-magnon speech was generally atonal and more consonant driven. They developed tonal musical instruments - nose flutes, for instance, early on as well (and possibly had other tonal instruments that have not survived). <br />
<br />
They lived longer - a neanderthal could potentially live to be 140 years old, primarily based upon their hibernation. They could be brilliant improvisationalists, but tended to have poor cultural transmission (probably because the population was never very large). They also likely loved to fight, not out of hatred, but just simply because it was fun. They also partially domesticated animals early on - wolves in particular may have been domesticated first by Neanderthals. They periodically surfaced into conscious awareness, but for the most part probably lived in a timeless world of the subconscious - what people would refer to as a fugue state today.<br />
<br />
Around 35,000 years ago, the ice retreated, and the CroMagnons that had been living in Northern Africa, the Middle East and Southern Europe followed. They met the Neanderthals, who had been apart long enough to be very nearly a separate species at that point, and the Neanderthals retreated to increasingly inhospitable areas - the Transcauscasus mountains in Hungary, Wales and the Highlands of Scotland, Finnland, <a href="http://www.aoi.com.au/bcw/neanderbasque.htm">the Basque region of Spain</a>. They may have fought, but they also mated. It may have been that only Neanderthal men mating with Cro-magnon women were fertile while the other combination was not, or it may just be a sampling issue, but few people seem to carry Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA, although as much as six percent of the Neanderthal chromosome may have been infused in Cro-Magnon DNA.<br />
<br />
A similar phenomenon happened (albeit farther back) in the Far East with Homo Denisovan. It's possible that the Denisovans and the Neanderthal were related, but also just as likely that Denisovans were just similarly cold adapted early hominids that ended up influencing the Melanesians and Australian aboriginals, to the extent that every so often a Melanesian is born with blonde hair, just as speciation had begun with East Asians developing epithelial folds as an adaptation to countering snow covered vistas.<br />
<br />
The Neanderthals themselves were effectively absorbed by the Cro-Magnon, but their hybrid children gained both good and bad from both species. These hybrids likely tended to be intelligent, innovative, but not necessarily disciplined, were perhaps more pugnacious and less respectful of authority, preferred clan structures rather than disciplined hierarchies, as often as not had red hair, were argumentative and always loved a good fight, and were unusually gifted as singers. They were also more introverted, moody, and generally more restless around people, often seemed to be "fey-touched", were more easily depressed, and were more heavily influenced by seasonal change. If this sounds a lot like the Scots (and the Irish) this is perhaps not surprising. It is very likely that the Neanderthal population was high here 20,000 to 30,000 years before (and potentially that Neanderthals may actually have survived into more contemporary times, perhaps even 10,000 years before.<br />
<br />
Red hair, in this case, may be the key. Red hair is rare in humanity - only 2%-3% of people globally have red hair, and even in Europe, that percentage is only about 6%. The places which have the highest concentration of red hair? Scotland, Ireland, the Basque region of Spain and Northeast Italy. While there's a tendency to think of the Norse as having red hair, this was generally true only after the Norse had begun raiding the West coast of Scotland (and intermarrying with the fiery red-heads there). Significantly, these are not far from areas where remains of Neanderthals were found. Red hair is due to the TRPM1 gene, which tends to occur frequently with the DRD4 7R gene. Most people in the world have DRD4 4R instead, but 7R shows up in Neanderthal DNA.<br />
<br />
What make several of these areas intriguing is that the linguistic patterns of languages in this region predate the Indo-European waves coming from the Russian Steppes. While little remains of Pictish except for a few place names, those place names are distinctly unusual and don't follow the ancient Prydhain (very early Brythonic or Britannic) forms. While it's pure supposition (I would love to see genetic evidence here), it is possible that the neolithic Picts intermixed with the very early Celtic immigrants, and that these same Picts had Neanderthal ancestors (it's unlikely they were Neanderthals themselves, but there is evidence that this area had been inhabited from well before the last ice ages). Recently, a submerged land bridge has also come to light in the region to the north of the Hebrides that would have stretched, either directly or as a series of islands, all the way to Denmark during both the Ice Ages 12,000 and 14,000 years ago as well as the more intriguing ice age 32,000 years ago (England was also connected directly to the continent at those time), so it is possible in either of those scenarios for Neanderthal hybrids to make their way north, and then from there to travel along the Danube and other rivers directly to the Mediterranean. (The Norse followed the same route 1500-2500 years ago, and it seems to have been a natural trade route through Europe)<br />
<br />
There are a few very ancient cultures in Europe that have puzzled historians and ethnographers for years. Three of the more intriguing including the Etruscans, the Scythians, and the Minoans. The Etruscans occupied an empire (Etruria) that at one time spanned from Latium, the future home of Rome, through much of Northern Italy and into parts of Greece and Switzerland. Their language bears some resemblance to the Minoans, and no resemblance to the Indo-European languages that originated in the Indus Valley. Intriguingly, red hair was fairly common among the Etruscans, and that trait manifested itself most famously in the red-haired Julius Caesar, an anomaly in the mostly dark-haired Romans. This hints that Neanderthals-Cro-Magnon hybrids may have settle Etruria from the north before the wave after wave of Mongol-derived inhabitants flooded the region.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.aoi.com.au/bcw/Neanderthal-women.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.aoi.com.au/bcw/Neanderthal-women.jpg" width="230" /></a></div>
Like the Etruscans, the Scythians are also shrouded in some mystery. Their name derives from the use of the Scythe as both a harvest tool and a weapon. It's likely that Scythia was a melting pot - a successive wave of proto-Persians streamed into the region from the south, meeting and intermarrying with the northern hybrids, creating a number of competing "countries" in the region. Among these were the Sarmatians, who lived on the Eastern border of Scythia. The Sarmatians were a semi-nomadic culture, but were unusual in that Sarmatian women were allowed to become warriors (something very rare in the Indo-european cultures), and these women may have ended up becoming the historical basis for the Amazons. Recent unearthed Ukranian burial grounds has proven unequivocably that Sarmatian women were honored as warriors.<br />
<br />
Again, the record of the mythical Amazons (and some evidence of the historical Sarmatians) indicated that blonde hair was the norm in this culture, and that both men and women were large of frame and stature and heavily bearded. While no direct evidence for red hair exists here, the physical appearance and beardedness (Mongol beards tend to be slow growing and black) is suggestive. Moreover, some aspects of Sarmatian decoration are similar to those found both in Etruria and the Minoan culture, and again contrary to the pattern of the Indo-European invaders. Even more intriguing is the fact that Neanderthal remains have been found in caves in Croatia (within the same general area as Sarmatia) dating to 32,000 years ago, and Neanderthal suggestive fire sites have been found to 24,000 years ago.<br />
<br />
Going on a very speculative limb here, it's possible that there was an arc of Neanderthal "settlements" that stretched up the Danube from the Middle East to Brittany, across the landbridge that crossed the English Channel, and that extended as far west as Ireland. The repeated ice ages and thaws forced the Neanderthals to alternately expand outward or become isolated at various times. As the diapora begun from East Africa up through the Middle East to the Indus Valley, the Neanderthal intermarried in the highlands (where their cold tolerance gave them a distinct advantage) but were defeated in the lowlands. Neanderthal hybrids would have the best of both worlds, physical strength and the deep thought processes that came from the semi-conscious Neanderthals (in the sense that they had comparatively little time sense), and ended up forming pockets in Sarmatia, Etruria, Northern Israel, possibly Mycenae in Greece, Spanish Basque, Brittany and Prydhain.<br />
<br />
However, as the Earth warmed (due in part to increasing agricultural outgassing and slash and burn farming), even these descendants of the Neanderthals faced increased pressures. There's some evidence that both the TRPM1 and DRD4 7R genes are declining in the population overall, and may in fact become extinct within the next 200-300 years. On the other hand, the rise of "Silicon" outposts may be reversing this trend somewhat. The rise in Aspergers and high functioning autism (which may in fact be a manifestation of Neanderthal like mental characteristics) in areas like San Francisco, Seattle and Boston coincide handily with the growth in "Geek" populations there - software developers, engineers, artists and so forth. It would be worth doing a genetic study to compare the prevalence of DRD4 7R in those populations as compared to elsewhere in the US.<br />
<br />
So, it may very well be that my dislike of offices stems from my Neanderthal heritage. Or it may not, but it's an interesting line of speculation nonetheless.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-44350424057773812022012-10-08T08:44:00.001-07:002012-10-08T09:11:01.584-07:00Notes from my Phone #1<div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.gizbot.com/files/2012/10/ipad-education.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://www.gizbot.com/files/2012/10/ipad-education.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Student in India using iPad at school.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
After that last megapost, I decided to do a much shorter one on my phone, primarily to test out the Blogger mobile interface. Overall, it seems to work, using an external portable bluetooth keyboard to enter in content.<br />
<br />
Today is the start of my post ACA career. I left on a high note, I believe, and am putting the final touches on a business process engine in MarkLogic that should both make things a lot easier for the application developers and make it possible to build workflow management pipelines without too much effort. This works by recognizing that a great deal of "enterprise bus processing" can be expressed as a series of transformations and validations on a given internal document as it moves from one state to the next. <br />
ESBs work on the principle of moving documents around, but I'm coming to realize that by looking at "resources" (internal, abstract documents) as being in a workflow state as part of a workflow graph, you generally don't need to move the document around at all. <br />
<br />
I'm still pulling the pieces together, but if I work it right, I could end up replacing a lot of Java code, Of course, that may not necessarily set well with the people WRITING that Java code,<br />
Interesting piece in the Washington Post this morning, talking of things technical. It seems that kids under the age of ten don't know what a mouse is. Schools have been scrapping large, bulky desktops for pads with specialized "desktops" for a few years now - not only are they cheaper, but they are usually easy to locate, provide a more intuitive interface, and can go home with students in order to facilitate homework.<br />
<br />
Discussions at Norwescon and on online educational forums seem to support this - we're in the midst of a computing revolution in the schools, Haven't investigated this area much yet, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a tablet equivalent of Hypercard waiting in the wings, if not already deployed, More on this soon.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-8244759839679657202012-10-07T21:15:00.002-07:002012-10-07T21:15:10.627-07:00So What Comes After the American Dream?
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.creativeuncut.com/gallery-04/art/ac-blacksmith.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.creativeuncut.com/gallery-04/art/ac-blacksmith.jpg" width="204" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A blacksmith, from the <br />Assassin's Creed video game..</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">The American Dream
is a remarkably powerful piece of mythology. Stated simple, it is the
belief that "If you work hard, if you play by the rules, you
will succeed in America." It is so embedded in our national
psyche that few in this country, until recently, have questioned it,
despite the fact that it actually runs counter to history not only
here but abroad as well.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">"Work hard
and work within the system, and you will be rewarded for your
efforts" also sounds like the foundation of modern Capitalism,
but again, it is a truism that gets remarkably slippery once you
actually try to apply it to the real world. We live in a country
where the differences in pay between the wealthiest and the poorest -
or even the wealthiest and most of the inhabitants of the country, is
astronomical - quite literally. The median income in the United
States is about $50,000 for a person with a bachelor's degree. The
total wealth of that same person in terms of house, vehicle,
investments, etc. as well as income is roughly double that, or
$100,000.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">The upper echelons
of the uber-wealthy start at about the $1 billion dollar mark. To put
that into perspective, that's $1,000,000,000 or five orders of
magnitude higher. That means that, before taxes, an individual would
have to work 100,000 years to get to the same level of income. Given
that this is roughly how long as it has taken for human beings to go
from living in caves and fighting off saber tooth lions to today, the
idea that one can in fact get to be a billionaire by working hard is
actually pretty laughable.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">You pay taxes. You
buy food that continues to rise in price, to the extent that cereal
manufactures are faced with the very real problem of being able to
get bulkier cereals into their boxes because they have been shaped
too thin in order to hide how little you're actually getting. You
have to pay for gas that seems to be permanently ensconced around $4
a gallon. You put your kids through school, and then the racket
called "higher education". By the end of the year, if
you're lucky, you've socked away maybe a few thousand dollars in your
savings account, which gets negative real interest (you pay to save).</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">So, once you do
the math and look at how long it will take to save up that first
billion, you're now in the 100 million year category. The dinosaurs
were still around at that point, and would be for another 40 million
years or so, and the continents were still reeling from just having
split apart a few billion years before. Now, chances are pretty good
that you will drop dead from overwork long before you even get to
that first $100K in the bank that's "discretionary savings"
- what used to be called wealth.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">So, suppose that
you don't have those wealthy parents, you have to win at the "lottery
economy". What's that? The lottery economy is actually pretty
close to the economy we have today. In the simplest example, you buy
a ticket and defying all odds, you win the lottery. However, a more
subtle form of this is in the entertainment world. You get blessed
with a handsome face and hot body (or a pretty face and attractive
curves), and then put some work into making those attributes pay off.
Or you have a good singing voice, or you play ball very well, or you
have a strong sense for acting, or you otherwise have physical
attributes and natural talents that can, with a lot of work and
effort, get you considered for the big time.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Yet that "big
time" is still a lottery. For every supermodel there are 10,000
young women who are as beautiful but didn't have the right qualities
for a particular ad campaign or casting call. For every scientific
discovery, there are thousands of scientists who struggled with the
same problem but didn't have the right samples. For every Michael
Jordan, there are thousands of young men who for one reason or
another never quite hit the big break.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Now, that doesn't
mean that hard work is not important here - it absolutely is. You are
trying to prove yourself better than millions of other people, and to
do that you have to work hard. Yet ultimately, there is almost
invariably a lucky break involved that catapults you out of the
unwashed ranks into the ranks of superstardom (and almost always to
the very lowest levels even there).</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">This holds as true
in business as it does elsewhere, perhaps more so. If Bill Gates had
started Microsoft in 1990, Microsoft would likely be nowhere as
successful as it eventually became. Google survived by changing the
paradigm of search on the web. Apple did not build the first personal
computer, only the first such computer that was designed as a
consumer product. In order for these companies to have done as well
as they did (how's that Facebook stock doing for ya?) they had to
fill a niche that existed for a very tiny window of time, then had to
be ruthless in keeping others from that niche long enough to survive.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">A secretary
working for Microsoft in 1980 would be a millionaire today if she'd
been granted stock options (as most were at that time). Did she
materially make a difference in the future of the company? Probably
to the extent that any secretary would have. That secretary probably
was less important in the scheme of things than a systems programmer
twenty years later, but by that time, Microsoft's stocks had
plateau'd. The opportunity had passed.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">This is especially
true for investors, which is the ultimate lottery. How many times
have you heard "If I had only bought Apple or Starbucks or
Microsoft at the beginning, I'd be rich right now!"? Yet, the
reality is that most people have comparatively little discretionary
income. A few people get rich by lucking out - picking the right
stock at the right time. In most cases, though, the very wealthy get
even richer by hiring people to invest in a lot of stocks that might
in fact take off, then selling off those that fail early. To do that,
you need money to be able to absorb losses while waiting for the hits
to happen. You can still lose everything, but because you have the
luxury of diversifying your portfolio, in general losses in one area
are typically offset by significant gains in another - and if you can
then right off those losses as tax write-offs, you're actually not
losing all that much money.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">There's a certain
threshold that separates the wealthy from everyone else. The exact
value varies, but currently it's around $10 million dollars. Below
$10 million dollars, the drag on wealth from various factor in the
economy makes it harder to accumulate wealth. Above $10 million
dollars, wealth becomes self-perpetuating - so long as your wealth is
reasonably well managed, it will grow with very little risk to the
wealthy, because debt works in the person's favor.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">In that respect,
it's worth thinking about the lottery economy as being a rocket, and
that threshold is escape velocity. Any rocket that goes up will
ultimately come down, though it may be in a high enough orbit that it
will take a while to escape the gravitational well of the earth.
However, once it hits escape velocity, the force of gravity acting on
it is not enough to pull it into a parabolic orbit, so it is able to
go to the moon or be shot out into the solar system.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">In some cases,
this can be a multistage effort - even if one generation doesn't
quite hit that threshold, a success (against less gravity) for the
next generation may very well do it. Thus, to become wealthy takes a
lot of work and a lot of luck, but to stay wealthy requires simply
not doing stupid things, once you're above that magical threshold.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Not doing
something stupid unfortunately usually involves not doing something
criminal, and that's where things get problematic. Wealth can be used
to buy power. That's not a new thought - the wealthy were buying
governorships in Rome and were probably buying Ziggurat Rulerships in
Mesopotamia. It's usually not hard to find some poor, hard working
civil servant that could use a little extra to buy that nice house in
the country, and with enough money, you can buy votes or even better
vote counts (usually by "helping" your favorite candidate
into the office of his choice, at which point he becomes YOUR
congressman or member of parliament).</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Yet there's also
been a fairly long time understanding in the fact that businessmen in
general make for poor civic leaders, for the simple reason that being
a civic leader means insuring the welfare of the people over who you
govern, while being a businessman involves eliciting the maximum
amount of profit from an investment. These usually are antithetical
goals, because maximizing profits typically requires that you are
exploiting all of the available resources within a region as quickly
as possible, without necessarily worrying about long term viability,
while governing a region is essentially attempting to make it
sustainable over the long term, even at the potential cost of short
term profits.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Civic institutions
and financial institutions move with different frequencies, and have
throughout history. Throughout much of the Middle Ages, the church
generally played the role of the banker, attempting to gain political
power large through control of monetary policy, and political leaders
tended to move closer to or farther from the church based largely
upon the state's need for money - to pay for troops, supplies,
equipment, horses, and weaponry. Both Germany and England broke from
the Catholic church in great part because the rise of mercantile
trade significantly enriched these country's coffers, and as such
they were able to reduce the degree to which papal "strings"
could override local autonomy. </span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">However, one
consequence of that was that the mercantilists themselves found
themselves in the position the church had occupied - providing money
to the state for investment in exploration and colonization in return
for increasing political power. In England, a cash hungry monarchy
made it possible to buy and sell lordships, and many a minor lord,
left with the upkeep of the moldering family mansion and increasingly
losing the rents due from tenants on those lands as mobility picked
up, were perfectly happy to sell their inherited titles to the
highest bidder. Similarly many extinct lineages were bought up
(usually with some folderol about service to the crown) by wealthy
mercantilists who then used the political power to further their own
business agendas.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Civic
administrators generally are not interested in empires. They've
developed a working equilibrium with the people under their care, and
they know the cash inputs and outputs in their domain. Empires are
for mercantilists who are seeking to exploit cheap materials and
potentially cheap labor in order to maximize profits, and in some
cases to build captive markets. When mercantilist pressures are
strong (when the merchant class has largely taken control of the
political class) you end up with periods of exploration, wars,
exploitation and schism.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">The problem with
the "American Dream", is that it is dependent upon a highly
mercantile state where its client states standards of living are
farthest apart. As those client states dry up (or become more
autonomous), the empire weakens. Resources that had essentially been
subsidized due to the high differential between extraction costs and
standards of living of the client vs. imperial states begin to become
more expensive as the resources get used up and the standards of
living equalize, and this in turn manifests as a diminishing standard
of living in the host. </span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">One way of
thinking about this is to consider that a business started in 1950,
if it manages to survive to 1980, would likely have generated huge
dividends over its lifespan. The same business, however, started in
1980, would generate far smaller dividends, accounting for inflation.
Most business started in 2010 will likely generate comparatively
little in the way of earnings over its lifetime, likely enough to pay
for the wages of its employees and materials, but with razor thin
profits. This is primarily due to the fact that for most people,
discretionary income has diminished as the influence of empire has
dropped.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">The mercantile
class is not immune to this - indeed, they are directly impacted by
this. In times past, this typically ends up in an attempt to more
directly control the political class in order to continue to steer
government policy their way. However, while when standards of living
are generally high and the labor class participates in the benefits
of the wealth pump that is part and parcel of empire, when standards
of living drop for the labor class, resistance builds up to the
inequal distribution that tensions rise. In this case, the mercantile
class overreaches and attempts to take control of the state directly.
This is happening today in Greece, Italy, Spain and elsewhere in
Europe, and was one of the big drivers of the Jasmine Spring in 2012
as well as the Occupy movements in the US and elsewhere.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">At this stage, the
American Dream is dead. There are an insufficient number of "niches"
or opportunities for a startup company to grow, and this in turn
means that ascending into the lower realms of the wealthy occurs only
by "lottery", with that lottery happening less and less
often. The wealthy in turn, realizing that their wealth is in danger,
start moving it (and themselves) out of the country, away from the
political class, in a move very reminiscent of the church during the
Reformation. The political class, which derives it's power either
directly or indirectly from the people, begins to turn what had been
previously "legal" activities (legal in the sense that the
financial class had managed to get protections enshrined in law) into
"illegal" ones, in order to prevent abuses happening in the
future.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Like most systems,
empires do not die all at once. There is usually an overshoot period,
where the resource pump is beginning to dry up - in the US this
happened around 1971, when the US was no longer able to rely upon its
internal energy and resource stores and so begin importing oil, as
well as implicitly pulling out of the Bretton Woods agreements of the
mid 1940s. American oil companies had already managed to control many
of the major oil producing countries of the world, but one by one
these countries have been nationalizing their oil production.
Standards of living for the labor and professional classes peaked and
began to decline even as the standard of living for the rentier or
mercantile classes continued to rise all starting around the same
period.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Global oil
production peaked in 2005, and has been sitting on a plateau ever
since. New oil discoveries are still being made, but the quality of
those discoveries is declining, and the cost of exploiting them is
rising to a point where there is an insufficient profit motive to be
gained. What's more is that at a certain price point, oil becomes too
expensive in a deflationary environment for certain levels of
economic activity to occur, and so the economy shifts to a lower
economic state. Currently economic activity is roughly on par to
where it was in 1992, despite a significantly higher population, and
there are indications that unless the economy is radically realigned,
it will enter back into recession.<br /><br />The mercantile class is not
uniform. At any given time, there is usually an established "old
money" class and an emergent "new money" class. The
old money was once new money - years or generations ago, the people
in this class took advantage of an emerging niche in order to
catapult themselves up from the labor class. In this case, that
original class emerged in the 1930s, 40s and 50s in the petroleum,
chemical processing, munitions, aviation, transportation, real estate
and insurance finance industries, all areas that had ties either to
supporting the troops during World War II or enabling the buildup of
the suburban landscape as the troops were coming home. This was also
the period of biggest buildup for the Christian evangelical movement,
which can be thought of as Big Religion. These are all empire
building industries.<br /><br />The new money of the mercantile class
consists primarily of those industries that are related to
information technology and dealing with the consequences of the old
money industry - information technology, mobile communication,
alternative energy, non-petroleum oriented transportation, biomedical
research, nano-materials engineering, as well as alternative
publishing and the Internet. These rely upon the complexity of the
previous industries, but increasingly are trying to break those
dependencies, and this delinking will only increase over time (the
primary dependency increasingly is upon rare earths, which may be a
critical weakness of these techs).</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">What
differentiates the two is that each ultimately has to do with how the
economy is structured. Much of the economy of today is still built
around the command and control structures that emulated the military
structures that soldiers returning from war were most familiar with,
an economy in which labor was at the bottom under a pyramid of
increasingly well paid supervisors, managers, vice presidents and
CEOs. The person at the top was the equivalent of a four star
general. The new money economy, however, is far more distributed,
with fewer layers of managers, increasingly with creatives
(designers, engineers, artists, writers, programmers, etc.)
interacting as separate contracting entities, and consequently far
smaller. A lot of management is mediated electronically, and wealth
usually tends to be distributed as shares in ventures.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">This model
requires fewer people - not just slightly fewer, but significantly
fewer, and those fewer people generally need to be more competent in
their areas of specialty. This doesn't just hold true in software
companies - new era automotive production requires far fewer shop
workers and smaller facilities, new era energy companies are focused
on localized energy production solutions, new era biomedical firms
typically have a very small footprint. 3D printers will turn
manufacturing into a just in time process, creating only those items
that are needed at a given time, which means that the huge wastage
that is typical of the old era manufacturing and production ceases to
be a problem.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Unfortunately,
while this is good in terms of its impact on the planet, it's impact
upon the rest of society is not so beneficial, at least in the short
term. The new model takes far less capital investment, which means
that the velocity of money is slower. There are fewer entry points
for unskilled and semi-skilled labor – in the 1960s, it was not
uncommon for a career at a big corporation to start in the mailroom.
Today, there's no mailroom. Because of the lower capital investment
requirements and instantaneous communication capabilities, it is also
increasingly common for countries that never made the large
"industrial" stage investments to leapfrog countries that
did by adopting new technology and building up competence with an
Internet connection and mobile computers.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">For those within
the new model economy, those who succeed are those who stay competent
in edge technologies – the expertise you acquired from previous
jobs is useful to help establish context, but if you're not
constantly learning, you're road kill. However, for many in the old
model economy, this is antithetical to the way they learned you
learned to do business. A significant portion of the old model
economy is based upon management, which becomes increasingly obsolete
(you need a thin layer of management, but not the layers upon layers
that characterize most Fortune 500 companies). Creatives occupy a
fairly minor part of the whole process, and are usually at a low
mid-tier of the corporate pyramid, while manufacturing workers are at
the bottom. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">In
a new model economy, manufacturing workers often overlap with
creatives, and management exists primarily to manage financing,
rather than managing production. Increasingly that funding is crowd
sourced, especially for entertainment, software, and other soft
products. As 3D printers and similar tech comes into play, however,
that may very well change ("Seeking investors to put together
line of specialized computerware vests, seeking total investment of
$40,000, return at 7%"). Once the initial investment is made
(designing the requisite software) then total costs come down to
materials costs and shipping. You would probably see a few big
"custom manufacturies" that would specialize in economy of
scale work with various software driven models, but overall most
manufacturing would be component integrators (a model that's already
used for computer and mobile device development).</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Again,
however, one of the big issues that arises here is that such custom
manufacturies will not employ a lot of people, and the people they do
employ will not be "laborers" in the sense used in the
twentieth century, but rather "artisans" – creatives and
designers for the most part, or technical maintenance service people
intended to keep the manufacturies themselves running. <br /><br />This
is a huge disconnect right now, because many of the people that are
currently out of work were people that were in the FIRE sector –
finance, insurance and real estate in the 2000s. </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><i>These
jobs are not coming back for years, if not decades</i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">.
Management jobs are going away (and have gone away), and the ones
that remain will pay less and be far less powerful. Sales jobs are
also going away (though marketing will remain, ironically).
Accounting jobs have been disappearing for years, as these functions
have moved from pushing paper around to moving electronic documents
through electronic systems in the "cloud". </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I see other areas where jobs are disappearing not because they are no longer necessary, but because they are moving outside of contemporary established boundaries. One of the most obvious is teachers. Teachers are critical in an information oriented society, yet if you pick up any newspaper (or more likely read news on the Internet) there seems to be a cultural war on teachers. Part of our society feels that teachers should only be teaching the basics - readin', writin' and 'rithmatic, and that they should not be teaching anything controversial (history, most forms of science, computers are suspect, etc. - in short, anything that questions the validity of the bible, the manifest destiny narrative of American history, or even critical reasoning). Another part believes that the prevailing narrative is racist and sexist, that too much emphasis is placed on the "basics" and that grading and being critical of students will only stunt the development of their self-esteem. Neither wants to pay for it.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
For the most part teachers themselves face rigid curricula, low salaries, limited or non-existent expectation of tenure, high student-teacher ratios, critical parents, expensive certifications, and long days on their feet. Given the crap that they endure, it is perhaps not surprising that many burn out quickly, leaving only either the most idealistic or the least competent over time. </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
It's my expectation that education is on the cusp of both a collapse and a revolution. More school districts are shifting to a magnet school approach where different schools are set up with a focus on different areas or disciplines. One school may focus on mathematics and science, another on art, a third on ecological studies, others on literary careers. At the same time, high schools and even middle schools are being structured more like community colleges, relaxing to a certain extent the requirements that a person must have a Master's degree to teach (though they may be supervised by another who does) and treating teaching less as a formal career and more as a chance for people with experience to teach others about that experience. Put another way - I think the career of "teacher" itself is going away, perhaps in favor of a concept that the Japanese seem to have understood a while ago: Sensei.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A sensei (which translates as both "master" and "teacher") is someone who has achieved a high degree of experience and is now passing that experience along to their pupils. The sensei has more control than a teacher does - they can set their own curricula and can determine success and failure criteria, and can determine when a student succeeds or fails at that criteria. Personally it would make sense for the sensei to also determine when a pupil moves to the next level, and possibly may work with a group of students over the course of the student's tenure at the school.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This will likely occur in the most progressive school districts first, and may become a facet of private instruction as well. I'm not a fan of private schools in general, but I will readily acknowledge that they can act as laboratories for testing such theories of education (magnet schools are another). Similarly, the increasingly confirmed realization that there are in fact several learning styles and that different students respond more or less effectively to each style in consistent ways is pointing towards schooling based less on topic and more on approach - visual and aural learners may best go a more traditional route, tactile and kinetic learners may be more oriented towards a hands on or physical approach, while autodydactic learners may actually set their own curriculum and goals in conjunction with a sensei who acts more as a guide in that respect.<br /><br />This could end up absorbing a lot of people who have been otherwise displaced job-wise, especially those later in their careers, and also provides a means for transmission of skills, values, and standards that currently doesn't exist. It may also go a long way towards providing a certain degree of fulfillment for the sensei - in creating "professional teachers" our society has robbed itself of the opportunity for people to pass on the knowledge they've learned, something that I think is an invaluable part of the cycle of life. But it does require that we seriously re-evaluate our current command and control educational system and recognize that it is not meeting the needs of anyone.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Another area where I think we'll see a revival is in the "trades", less from the standpoint of construction and more from the standpoint of maintenance and increasingly "deconstruction". The housing collapse caused a temporary glut of tradesmen on the market, but one consequence of the increasingly iliquid economy is that people are generally not moving around as much, staying in their houses longer, and consequently needing more support for plumbing, electrical work and housing extensions. In at least informal surveys I've conducted, most tradespeople have more than enough work now, and there's increasingly shortages of skilled tradespeople in some areas (Mike Rowe, of Discovery Channels' Dirty Jobs, has found this as well, to the extent that he's begun promoting the warning that we have too few people entering into the "dirty jobs" to replace those that are now retiring). Similarly, the "deconstruction" or salvage business is increasingly booming as houses and commercial real estate is being decommissioned and "unbuilt".<br /><br />Similarly, I think that you're beginning to see the revival of many apparently extinct professions - from iron smithing to dressmaking (cosplay) to customized cooking and baking. These are boutique professions right now targeting a niche market that is too small, too quirky or too esoteric for large companies, but nonetheless has a demand. The irony is that while these items may be priced higher than mass produced goods, as global resource demands put pressures on extended supply chains, such artisan products may actually end up becoming more affordable than less customized ones. </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />So, to wrap up a long essay, what does come after the American Dream? Perhaps something more sane. The dream of growth has ended. Already businesses are restructuring away from the massive military juggernaut corporations to far more ephemeral virtual companies, the <span class="t_nihongo_kanji" lang="ja" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;" xml:lang="ja">サラリーマン or </span>Sarariman (the Japanese transliteration of "salaryman") has gone from being the norm to being a quaint reminder of another time, and many of the jobs that were dependent upon economic growth and empire wealth pumps are going away.<br /><br />In a way, I'm not really shedding many tears for those jobs - they were high stress, dehumanizing, politically poisonous and ultimately harmful. The new economy model jobs are not in general as lucrative for a few, but may ultimately provide a far more livable wage for many. They will force a change in the way that we account for the total lifecycle cost of a manufactured good or service, will likely reduce the amount of waste we are producing in order to "mass-produce", and overall will be more geared towards sustaining the economy rather than growing it. As with any large scale societal changes it will take time, and there will be a lot of resistance from the existing stakeholders. However, resource limitations, demographics, and the general vectors of the global economy ultimately are all aligned against the status quo remaining such.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Perhaps the new dream should be this: "I lived my life content, improved the lives of others, taught what I knew, and leave the world in better shape than I found it." I can live with that. </div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-60420444621819903202012-10-06T11:38:00.003-07:002012-10-06T11:38:47.836-07:00Time and Introversion<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAA7EMv1OuKTBV8pMuxuW-GMbjjYylPAsylbSOYjGrNX3JyHI8GFg7iaMpXzorUp31JbwPYHK04IRwhgHyfaM4vVh5f2NUyeXIh3kA5FjxVU0golsWDogp3KKJLcB9bH5mXwv1qA/s1600/490a05a29bfe4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAA7EMv1OuKTBV8pMuxuW-GMbjjYylPAsylbSOYjGrNX3JyHI8GFg7iaMpXzorUp31JbwPYHK04IRwhgHyfaM4vVh5f2NUyeXIh3kA5FjxVU0golsWDogp3KKJLcB9bH5mXwv1qA/s400/490a05a29bfe4.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">Today's my decompression day. I have learned, over the years, how to be "on" - how to interact with people, get things done, appear (hopefully) professional and competent and even navigate political minefields, but I can't do it for extended periods of time without needing to periodically decompress or else I go into stress overload.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">Decompression is a quiet day, possibly at a coffeeshop, focusing on writing or drawing or just catching up on the news. It's not a vacation - there's little travel involved (if I can possibly help it), I'm not going off to a museum or a movie or some event, because in general in all of those I have to deal with people, have to work to someone else's agenda, and always have to be conscious of budget and time, neither of which I have in abundance.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">Perhaps that's what lies at the heart of introversion. The extrovert is VERY conscious, if by conscious you mean aware of the passing of time. Most extroverts that I know have their lives scheduled to an extreme, they get bored easily, and overall they are impatient - they can hear the ticking of the clock and hate "wasting time" or waiting. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">The introvert on the other hand is disconnected from time. She (just to keep pronouns clear) focuses on the task at hand, the book being read (or written), the creation of the drawing on the page, the encoded sky castle in her mind. Time ... jumps ... 8:15 ... 10:45 ... 3:15 already? </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">The extrovert wants to know exactly how long a task will take, down to the minute if possible. The introvert will tell him that it will take as long as it takes, not a moment less. To the introvert, this is a reasonable statement ... to the extrovert it is an affront, because he cannot conceive that someone would not know going in exactly how long something will take to do, and therefore the introvert is being impudent.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">We live in an extroverted world, with the corporation perhaps the ultimate extroverted edifice. In a corporation, the primary task is coordination - most meetings exist not to design but to review, to communicate to managers the information necessary to make a decision. In a dysfunctional corporation (which seems to be the norm) the process of actual design and creation are largely peripheral, and increasingly are done by external entities - freelancers, contractors, consultants - those that can disengage from the endless rounds of meetings and political posturing to actually get something done. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">Since the overwhelming bulk of creatives are introverts, this means that over time introverts get pushed farther and farther from the center of power and decision making. Yet the impact of this is that introverts get excluded from the ranks of power, or if they manage to push themselves into the fray, are most often overwhelmed (and consequently excluded) by their louder, more impulsive, more extroverted colleagues. This is probably why so many corporations seem to be so shallow - there are few deep thinkers there, few people actually taking the long perspective and working towards insuring that what is created will survive beyond the next quarter.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">Over time, I think this may spell the ruin of corporate capitalism. Already, the introverts are withdrawing, finding their own kind, in many cases preparing for this event. Trying to find a culture that is more timeless, less fixated upon the clock and more upon the task at hand, one attuned to the natural rhythms of the world, not the vibrations of cesium atoms by a ruby laser. Trying, perhaps, to become human again.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-3657891117911639372012-09-01T18:41:00.002-07:002012-09-02T14:48:09.903-07:00We Buried Grandmother Treewalker Today<br />
<div style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 2.5em;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFW7oTzXkE51aCwrOSnN2sJ19PxOTwJNICkqwUnvA9tPUSReZ7fUhiHwS-c3RfbjrGuD-bJGIXoGM1RB-kV7nEajdIXTxlrmtdauHN6pNrV1r7NwEgrhvwE7jvQdAfXI9ZGUaxNQ/s1600/3414178960_1f9952cca3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFW7oTzXkE51aCwrOSnN2sJ19PxOTwJNICkqwUnvA9tPUSReZ7fUhiHwS-c3RfbjrGuD-bJGIXoGM1RB-kV7nEajdIXTxlrmtdauHN6pNrV1r7NwEgrhvwE7jvQdAfXI9ZGUaxNQ/s320/3414178960_1f9952cca3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
We buried Grandmother Treewalker near the roots of the Arcology, an area that's become known as the Faerie Mound because it resembles the burial mounds of the early British peoples. Her grave plaque is made not of stone but of wood, a Celtic pentacle carved into the wood itself that in time will grow out again. As I wandered along the roots, I saw other such memorials - Christian crosses, Pagan pentacles, Stars of David, the Taoist Wheel and Crescent Moon and Stars, some like my grandmother's light tan wood marker where the wood had most recently been cut, others old enough that the tree had shaped the symbols into a new layer of bark. More than a few of the newer markers had a stylized iterated fractal tree as their symbol of choice - the People of the Trees. That described us of the Arc very well.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 2.5em;">
Grandmother Treewalker had been born a century before, more or less. and though she had been failing for some time, she would still talk in her thin, cracking voice about the world when she was a child to me and Ilise, the two youngest of her great grand-daughters. It was a strange world, one filled with great wonders and even greater horrors, and for all that some of it sounded like magick we were all of us taught from when we were in diapers that magick comes at a great price, and the more powerful the magick, the more awful that price. Slipping past Grandmother's fresh grave, I followed the wood and earthen wall widdershins upward in a spiral, the great tree of the mound having been shaped by countless hands so that the roots of the ancient Douglas Fir formed a natural staircase following a spiral to the top, clutching the bottled ink made from squid ink and carbon black, my crow quill pen and penknife, and the first Journal that is mine and mine alone, as Grandma Treewalker bade me.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 2.5em;">
My name is Alanna Selkirk Treewalker, and I am the Chronicler of the Seatlc Arc of the People of the Trees, as was my Grandmother, Kirstin Atlee Treewalker, before me. There is, within the Arc, a library with her books and those of her predecessor, as well as histories, chronicles, and scientific works that could be salvaged, but she, like I, preferred to actually write out here in the open, overlooking the Pujiet Sond. At the top of the mound, a branch of the great tree had been cozened into becoming a table for her to write on, and many hours did I sit there once she became too old and blind to write and transcribe her words, or later, when she would sit mute, would capture those memories or impressions that I had in her journals. Today, I would start to write my own chapter.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 2.5em;">
Once, my grandmother said, Seatlc was not an island as it is today, but rather was an isthmus that trapped a lake, with only single channel between the lake and the Sond. Three million people lived in this area, a number I can scarce credit - there are four hundred of us in the Seatlc Arc, another three hundred in the Tekoma Arc, a little more than two hundred in the RedMound Arc. The moot we had when I was twelve (and my twin sister was first pledged to the son of the Healer of the Tekoma Arc) brought eleven hundred people together, and it seemed frightening to see so many gathered in one place and time. Grandmother believed that there were less than one million people in the world today, though she could no longer be sure. There were eight thousand million when she was born, though surely this was an exaggeration.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 2.5em;">
But I wander. Once there was a great peoples called the Merkantl in a land that stretched so far that one could walk for weeks from our shores before getting to the other side. They built great cities, like the city that would eventually become the ruins of Seatlc that I could see even here from the mound - a few of its buildings rusted towers of iron emerging from the Sond itself to the West. The people that built this empire were proud and arrogant and wealthy, their power coming from digging out an oil from the earth that caused their carts to run without horses, allowed them to fly vast metal birds through the sky, and made it possible for them to carry foods from the other side of the world on boats far larger than the Arc. Yet the more they used that earth oil, the hotter the air itself became, and the more poisoned the land, and even as they used it they never questioned that perhaps, one day, the magic oil would run out.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 2.5em;">
As a child, grandmother Treewalker witnessed the sundering of the Merkantl into many smaller nations - the Fedrated Republics of Markantl, Applesha, the Merkan Union, Tekasis, many others, as well as the nation of Cascadia, of which Seatlc and Fratsisko were a part. And even then they warred upon themselves, even as the ships stopped traveling for fear of being sunk, even as the metal birds were grounded for lack of fuel, even as people abandoned their magical carts for lighter ones that horses could pull. The sky was filled with dirigibles and balloons that took less far less fuel and were easier to make, yet even then the wars went on, and every year the glaciers melted away and the seas rose. At first they built retaining walls and pumps, but when my grandmother was a young mother herself, the weight of the new water and the warming seas caused gasses into the sea to start bubbling, and one day, a part of the contintental shelf off the aushengtn coast gave way, and created a wave more than 200 feet high. The wave scoured away Vancufr to the North, bounced, and rolled into the Puigit Sond, submerging much of Seattl, forming a channel that cut Seattle off from the mainland, and destroying much of Limpia and Tekoma the south.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 2.5em;">
Yet still the Earth was not done with my forebears, for the earthquake that caused the wave was enough to awaken Mother Rani, the volcano to the south. It exploded, sending hot rock, mud and lava North and East, destroying what was left of Tekoma and the cities between them and what would become the Red Mound peoples. Had this happened earlier, when the magic still existed, grandmother believed that the cities could have rebuilt, but the world was fallen on hard times, and there was little help. Many succumbed to illness as the magic medicines that had kept diseases at bay ran out, and as those who could secure more chose instead to use them as a source of power over others. Soon people were starving as the crops parched year after year and the boats and carts stopped coming, and many more died. Others left - going south and east and north, and in time most were never heard from again. This had been made worse by the genetically modified crops that "expired" without producing viable seeds and polluting the seed stocks, or that produced poisonous crops that produced gorgeous grains, fruits and vegetables that were lethal when consumed over months. </div>
<div style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 2.5em;">
Yet for all this devastation our corner of the world was spared much of the worst of what happened elsewhere - as civilization collapsed, those who had benefited most from it had for a while managed to keep an island of technology around them, but in the end when the infrastructure collapsed far enough that maintaining this island became impossible, they were in many ways the least prepared for what would happen next. For a while, society went through a succession of "strongmen" - warlords, often from the guards of these wealthy men and women who turned on their employers and killed the burgeoning aristocracy to become the next logical successors. Without a responsibility to society, these strongmen abandoned the nuclear power plants that had been sitting idle for lack of radioactive fuel, letting the hundreds of thousands of rods of waste rods go unattended until eventually their pools evaporated, their cladding were eaten away, and they became nuclear waste zones that poisoned the land for millions of square miles.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 2.5em;">
People tried to adapt, but change was happening faster than even humans could adapt to. Grandmother said that for a while things had begun looking up - society had actually fallen faster than the available energy, and there was something of a rebound, one built upon the remnants of the original technology and culture - but this was a temporary reprieve because the atmosphere was still getting hotter, though at a slower rate than before. Populations were pushed north, ecosystems began collapsing in earnest as heat and storms began to take their toll, and the rise of the oceans, almost imperceptible in the twentieth century, was now well on its way to levels rising at a dozen feet a year. The toxic mix of submerging cities hit fragile oceanic fish stocks, and for a while, significant portions of the ocean could support little more than jellyfish and algae. In time, most ships still plying the oceans were built of wood, because the deep draft tankers and container shifts could no longer find ports, and the global economy collapsed as the highways of the sea went empty. Seatlc had been a major port city, but after the devastation of Mother Rani and the flood, rebuilding the ports was no longer important (though we would eventually rebuild the ports for our own purposes).</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 2.5em;">
Ironically, this may have saved the few who remained here. Resource wars - especially wars for untainted water - raged across much of the world. Rising sea levels contaminated freshwater stocks everywhere, while sufficiently high aquifers that had been drained decades before did not have enough time to refill, and the technology for desalting water disappeared along with all too much else. The heat and overfarming, in turn, caused the collapse of the Merkantl Midwest as well as places like the Ukirane in Russkva. While this was a problem in the Puijit Sond as well, it had always had a different ecology than much of the rest of the world, and was primarily hit by a barrage of heavy rains for years on end coming off Nippon. Yet for all that, life had become hard, and the population collapsed.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 2.5em;">
In time, the weather finally changed, reaching a tipping point where there was no longer enough of a stimulus coming from human activity to force heat into the atmosphere. Storms had been building close to the end of that period, until eventually much of the Northern Hemisphere was under a continuous, long lived storm. For months upon months it rained and the winds howled sometimes in excess of two hundred miles an hour, as energy that had been building up high in the atmosphere began to reground itself. Cities that had survived the ravages of excess heat, rising sea levels, salinated water and neglect collapsed in these near permanent hurricanes, and in many places the people who survived did so only by burrowing down in the lea sides of mountains, or by adapting to the environment. </div>
<div style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 2.5em;">
In Seatlc, the response to the storms was the construction of the first arcology. Because most of the Pujuit Sond sat between two mountain ranges, the storms were considerably tempered. The earliest of the arcologists built a living city from trees shaped by the last magic of the jentists, ones that were wide-based with deep roots and able to be shaped into dwellings that could absorb the worst of the winds, and that, still living, were able to withstand the ravages of fresh and salt-water. These were built into the hills of the island that had once been an isthmus, and extended down to far enough underground to use the island as a natural filtration system. Around it other trees built up around the arcology, keeping it hidden, with the burial mind anchoring it on the south end. For a while, the Arcology was able to support a few thousand people, and similar arcologies were built into the earthen banks near the remnants of Red Mound, within the hardened mud and lava of the now quiescent Mother Rani, and along the foothills of the Limpic mountains, usually in the intervals between the major blows of the Great Storm.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 2.5em;">
When the Great Storm finally ended, little of the old world remained. People survived elsewhere - periodically we get small ships that by luck, hard work or miracle made it through the storm mostly intact, but the message the sea peoples bring is always the same - pockets of humanity has survived, but little of its civilization. I was born during the Great Storm, the world that my Grandmother spoke of is wondrous strange and terrible, but to me it is just a story. Still, even that story is not yet at an end - those from the North are reporting that it has begun to snow again in places that haven't seen snow in a century, snowing heavily, and the world is far cooler today than it was before the Great Storm. Grandmother told me that she thinks that the Great Storm was the correcting factor for not just a few hundred years of industrial development but more than twelve thousand years of human habitation keeping the world moving away from the sun actually undergoing a long term cooling trend, and that the response to that will be a new ice age. This is a problem that my great grandchildren will face - already, we can see the glaciers forming in the far distance, and the mountains remain snow-covered even in summer, and every year winter has lasted long than the year before it.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 2.5em;">
Yet today it is pleasantly warm, and there is a gentle breeze coming from the south. From the Mound of the Dead beneath the Spirit Tree of the Arcology, I can see the fisherfolk gathering fish and shellfish, men and women alike wearing loincloths and little else, mothers with young babies suckling even as they gather the day's catch. Farther up island are the fields for growing berries, potatoes and wild rice, strains recovered from research seed banks and organic farms that had escaped the worst of the death seeds. We glean most of this by hand with simple tools that would have not been out of place 3,000 years before, and we are all to conscious of how fragile the world still is. The world goes on and we survive, chastened and more humble. </div>
<div style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; text-indent: 2.5em;">
I dip my pen into the dark brown ink, touch it to the hand-made rag paper, and begin to write.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-58733050863134610382012-09-01T16:03:00.002-07:002012-09-01T16:11:52.810-07:00Suffrage, Gender Politics and Millennial Women<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.firstladies.org/images-exhibit/Brochure_img_0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.firstladies.org/images-exhibit/Brochure_img_0.jpg" width="229" /></a></div>
This particular essay came from a question posed by a friend of mine, Amber Gray-Fenner, in a Facebook post:<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">Thought Experiment: If the "single issue" facing voters in November's Presidential Election was women's suffrage, where do you think your preferred candidate would stand? Women---we've had the vote for less than 100 years. Think before you use yours.</span><br />
<br />
This got me to thinking a lot about women and generational politics. This is, admittedly, always a land mine for a male writer - while I can look at the historical record for patterns, the world view that women and men have are, at a biological level, fairly different, because physically our brains have evolved over many hundreds of millennia to facilitate very distinct biological functions. Thus, I'm having to mentally "think like a woman", and as my wife is quick to remind me, that's not always an exercise I do well.<br />
<br />
In response to Amber's comment, however, I started thinking about the context during which most of the world moved towards women's suffrage. It's significant that while the issue of a woman's right to vote had been percolating under the surface during much of the 19th century, the catalyst for woman's suffrage came after World War I. If you go by Strauss and Howe's generational designation, you had four generational groupings active at that time - the Progressive Generation (1843-1859) ,the Missionary Generation (1860-1882), the Lost Generation (1883-1900) and the G.I. Generation (1901-1924).<br />
<br />
<i>For what it's worth, I don't completely agree with S&H about the generational names or dates, but usually differ only by a year or two on the latter - I think that while in the main they are correct about characteristics, the naming is too tied to a specific event. However, since these are already fairly well established, I'll refer to these groups as the Progressives (differing from 21st century progressivism), the Missionaries, the Lost and the GIs respectively, noting that these are previously given generational titles.</i><br />
<br />
There is a profound distinction between pre and post World War I cultures. Suffrage battles had percolated in the background in the decades after the Civil War - with the 14th through 16th amendments, slaves had not only gained emancipation, but a profound change had happened in American culture with the enfranchisement of those former slaves ... especially since not that many decades before one of the most hotly debated issues was whether non-land-owners had the right to vote. The representational form of government that we have today has its history not in the impracticalities of direct voting (though that played a factor), but rather in the belief that there needed to be a buffer layer between the enfranchised (who might be rabble) and the actual elective process. When slaves gained the right to vote, it had as an immediate effect a major shift in political power (though black representatives were few and fare between on the ground until the twentieth century).<br />
<br />
However, it also still meant that roughly fifty percent of the US population couldn't vote - women. The sentiment behind this was that "lacking education and the capacity for advanced thought" women were incapable of making important decisions about the direction of state. Yet since this was exactly the same argument used about the former slave population, it became ever more difficult for that legal pretense to continue. (The same argument was occurring in England). This continued through the latter Victorian period and into the Edwardian with Victoria's death in 1901. Victoria herself was famously against woman's suffrage, which makes sense given that she was born in 1819, a time during which women's roles were extremely circumscribed in England especially, and in many respects before the Industrial Revolution which had the effect of seeing women enter into the clothing mills and other early factories that fed England's imperial rise. With her death and that of King Edward VII in 1910 (Edward was also largely pre-industrial, having been born in 1841), much of the institutional pressure in England against suffrage has slipped away, and by 1918, women aged 30 and over were allowed both to vote and run for Parliament, with the vote extended to those 21 and over in 1928.<br />
<br />
In the US, those (especially the women) born after the Civil War - the Missionary Generation - were also increasingly questioning why it was that women were still not enfranchised. One of the key figures in the woman's suffrage movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had been an ardent abolitionist prior to the war, and had shifted her energy to the woman's suffrage movement afterwards. However, both she and Susan B. Anthony had also been very vocal about her opposition to the 14th and 15th amendments, arguing that the amendments should only have been passed if they also enfranchised a woman's right (white or black) to white. (Here is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Cady_Stanton#Ideological_divergence_with_abolitionists_and_the_women.27s_rights_movement">good summary of this period</a>), and her positions on the liberalization of divorce laws, property ownership and other issues was a big part of the schism between the two suffrage movements, one more progressive, the other more conservative and Christian oriented).<br />
<br />
The two did eventually merge in 1890 as the National American Women's Suffrage Association, with Stanton as president. However, the schism was sufficient to take much of the momentum out of the movement, and when Stanton died in 1902, suffrage was still two decades out. Similar debates had been taking place elsewhere in the world, driven in their respective cultures by the fact that industrialization frequently had the effect of putting women into a position where they were able to accumulate wages, but that such wages effectively were the property of their husbands. Because industrial work forces also generally needed to be somewhat better educated, this also had the effect of increasing the literacy levels of women throughout much of the industrializing world.<br />
<br />
By the end of World War I, women effectively became the work force while American and British men were fighting in the trenches. Ironically, one of their biggest opponents (and later Allies) at the time was a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. In his first term, Wilson was fairly adamantly opposed to the suffrage movement (a position that may have been due to his wife Edith Wilson's own ambivalence towards the movement ... her origin in Georgia (and her family's extensive contributions to the Confederacy during the war) made her very resistant to the idea of woman's suffrage)). Woodrow Wilson's position was made increasingly untenable, however, when he announced that the newly entered World War I was a war for the protection of Democracy - this so enraged the suffrage movement that it organized a major protest in front of the White House, organized by National Woman's Party president Alice Paul. Arrested and sentenced to seven months in prison, she began a hunger strike that eventually forced Wilson to relent, and by 1917 he had shifted to being for women receiving the vote. That women were heavily involved in the war effort by then was no small amount of the calculus as well (something that should be understood in the current political light). In 1920, after several votes opposed largely by the more conservative southern members of his own party) Wilson signed the 19th Amendment granting Women the right to vote.<br />
<br />
Given this history, it's worth looking a the question in light of the two existing contenders for President - current President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. Again, a bit of a diversion into the more recent past is instructive.<br />
<br />
In the 1970s, one of the most amazing political transformations in recent history occurred - the Democratic Party became the Republican Party. A succession of maps from 1952 to 2000 illustrates this:<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglkv4oixscy35aF0vkIPhynrU6NIGNL2e-SZIt-3MN-8p8kHTIiEiwQ-AV5EtFw44NPDpBGnY5Bo1RBAdlRo-h7HNdoD0iDhSnH8K8vwOvwPcJpr4cVXG4O0hUJj6fp20dQL_8dw/s1600/350px-ElectoralCollege1952.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglkv4oixscy35aF0vkIPhynrU6NIGNL2e-SZIt-3MN-8p8kHTIiEiwQ-AV5EtFw44NPDpBGnY5Bo1RBAdlRo-h7HNdoD0iDhSnH8K8vwOvwPcJpr4cVXG4O0hUJj6fp20dQL_8dw/s320/350px-ElectoralCollege1952.svg.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk6WiDgDMTq-77lNqKSFXdP19Mtb23oEGb-8vAuHJY_CgRVLeWqO5m0IYzs5mmm9uHRHiNL6N-FWFitChGPOGsNcDGO8vYssLZNFxvuTNtCjfQJfymbXScL8-cV7fLXRLGEAegxA/s1600/350px-ElectoralCollege1956.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk6WiDgDMTq-77lNqKSFXdP19Mtb23oEGb-8vAuHJY_CgRVLeWqO5m0IYzs5mmm9uHRHiNL6N-FWFitChGPOGsNcDGO8vYssLZNFxvuTNtCjfQJfymbXScL8-cV7fLXRLGEAegxA/s320/350px-ElectoralCollege1956.svg.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6MMC0pEUuoXhvXaSSNy3aIyel1J6O9gG9ZseJpXoC3RF1Xy0kEkrChho67vncFDMWlK5RWP1QgSGqQSUuzGhAy900F7sO480DSP_N-Z0Ek26h6zCZWLLQ-Zt0GddBNCZdbbwxhA/s1600/350px-ElectoralCollege1960.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6MMC0pEUuoXhvXaSSNy3aIyel1J6O9gG9ZseJpXoC3RF1Xy0kEkrChho67vncFDMWlK5RWP1QgSGqQSUuzGhAy900F7sO480DSP_N-Z0Ek26h6zCZWLLQ-Zt0GddBNCZdbbwxhA/s320/350px-ElectoralCollege1960.svg.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU9X8CeX5r2jtlbFqYzBO97xFmDIFPyvSiAXQ_AQ7Sp2Mh4LsBtKBjjH94r-vV1sk0lZv5D1P4wquSrneFjnAtdIBlIYKuJ_N2x67m6wk8s4czuZf_P0V1Zeke-5vqtkNacTy17Q/s1600/350px-ElectoralCollege1964.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU9X8CeX5r2jtlbFqYzBO97xFmDIFPyvSiAXQ_AQ7Sp2Mh4LsBtKBjjH94r-vV1sk0lZv5D1P4wquSrneFjnAtdIBlIYKuJ_N2x67m6wk8s4czuZf_P0V1Zeke-5vqtkNacTy17Q/s320/350px-ElectoralCollege1964.svg.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR5ynOS5dEwHh-fShRQLXKfK6r440mg82wGT0xTYeQG5E8vIW-m4lFTTDotb6oOXIPM7ty-Ilm9jD1V4hOroAz-TZVB0BzCUGCYQsals3WJd2MV3dJGZQPE7RsXc32kUXV1q8O5A/s1600/350px-ElectoralCollege1968.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR5ynOS5dEwHh-fShRQLXKfK6r440mg82wGT0xTYeQG5E8vIW-m4lFTTDotb6oOXIPM7ty-Ilm9jD1V4hOroAz-TZVB0BzCUGCYQsals3WJd2MV3dJGZQPE7RsXc32kUXV1q8O5A/s320/350px-ElectoralCollege1968.svg.png" width="320" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv7qy2pVP_xkCmHMR9wPPqAqr72E2U-OKMeSiHvO75zPIUPNw8nHc-ylVawoXfWxIMPEQGlVy06JY8LNS4U91YZcN5bH_kJRw_QgnwZRHKxHYo0HGb4W4duPlGXJq_bfg3h4STHg/s1600/340px-ElectoralCollege1972.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv7qy2pVP_xkCmHMR9wPPqAqr72E2U-OKMeSiHvO75zPIUPNw8nHc-ylVawoXfWxIMPEQGlVy06JY8LNS4U91YZcN5bH_kJRw_QgnwZRHKxHYo0HGb4W4duPlGXJq_bfg3h4STHg/s320/340px-ElectoralCollege1972.svg.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZQJ9xbQ6daR4B_TkG2UjYusdW2nl_waTRx7ISYUjsMq8sj9SAPqM6V9QDJpMzTNvbn1JIbhiu0q601OdBK120kj-uVhxHrXxROyxv-B0gQfAVYnmY_jeU3yqa9mbrxX-vRd3Aog/s1600/350px-ElectoralCollege1976.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZQJ9xbQ6daR4B_TkG2UjYusdW2nl_waTRx7ISYUjsMq8sj9SAPqM6V9QDJpMzTNvbn1JIbhiu0q601OdBK120kj-uVhxHrXxROyxv-B0gQfAVYnmY_jeU3yqa9mbrxX-vRd3Aog/s320/350px-ElectoralCollege1976.svg.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTNcd6CWFCgCKm_6iOuR5xnlPzeUgBlazTRmfXgkTfLcCh1guKnlwNIcD3-t3RNGERo3D1F3LZM5xtK786j1hR5AIr2WvnIS50gbXV2Cdbfuz89U1wMF99V90z090loCPo_ZtoYw/s1600/350px-ElectoralCollege1980.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTNcd6CWFCgCKm_6iOuR5xnlPzeUgBlazTRmfXgkTfLcCh1guKnlwNIcD3-t3RNGERo3D1F3LZM5xtK786j1hR5AIr2WvnIS50gbXV2Cdbfuz89U1wMF99V90z090loCPo_ZtoYw/s320/350px-ElectoralCollege1980.svg.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_L5EGgTb5ZA0SnvYIwzNE9KTUbYHIXxm-h0z8nmjhb2T6KU-EhD6cnSder3G2X1EbjhJrhSJkPQTT_zukYj0PvTyk-gpJ4nPEZwWDiPMuVzUl4-V9IH3J40XKrNJH7AXLgiv4kw/s1600/350px-ElectoralCollege1984.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_L5EGgTb5ZA0SnvYIwzNE9KTUbYHIXxm-h0z8nmjhb2T6KU-EhD6cnSder3G2X1EbjhJrhSJkPQTT_zukYj0PvTyk-gpJ4nPEZwWDiPMuVzUl4-V9IH3J40XKrNJH7AXLgiv4kw/s320/350px-ElectoralCollege1984.svg.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji4yjdI09GLR3N06ivYMRHtPyaIhmwZNw4OUw_fee5h644HfRbfNglSHbpjPwSMAdCzEopihKOXpfdGAyGUzmQkhxxoGcbiPp2mtt2q6KDyMZyrQIpD0A7X6u1pfhTI3Xup9bkrw/s1600/350px-ElectoralCollege1988.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji4yjdI09GLR3N06ivYMRHtPyaIhmwZNw4OUw_fee5h644HfRbfNglSHbpjPwSMAdCzEopihKOXpfdGAyGUzmQkhxxoGcbiPp2mtt2q6KDyMZyrQIpD0A7X6u1pfhTI3Xup9bkrw/s320/350px-ElectoralCollege1988.svg.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivxYw_vnWRqHqA_uoct9nRAjKe8HVjQbdxKUiAZAc42jcWOyxgsibX1rQP8hGoeuDvfEtUQBm4Zi1A6KX8JsyJAPXGdr5-GJHEftxULpHxp8YxI-XQCFYvGAwo4OCD6cJGwCF3Sw/s1600/350px-ElectoralCollege1992.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivxYw_vnWRqHqA_uoct9nRAjKe8HVjQbdxKUiAZAc42jcWOyxgsibX1rQP8hGoeuDvfEtUQBm4Zi1A6KX8JsyJAPXGdr5-GJHEftxULpHxp8YxI-XQCFYvGAwo4OCD6cJGwCF3Sw/s320/350px-ElectoralCollege1992.svg.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
In the 1950s, the Democratic Party was concentrated in the South, while the Republicans tended to be the party of the West Coast and the Northeast. In the 1960s, however, the Democrat John F. Kennedy, from an affluent Boston family, gave limited, lukewarm support to the Civil Rights movement taking place in Alabama. After his assassination in 1963, Lyndon Johnson further supported this expansion, but in so doing, the core southern states of the Democratic Party effectively balked.<br />
<br />
During the 1950s as well, Eisenhower came out in favor of an amendment to the Constitution first proposed in 1923 by Alice Paul. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) effectively would have guaranteed equal protection under the law for men and women. Ironically, it was labor unions, the mainstay of the Democratic Party at the time, that were most in opposition, because they feared in general that as proposed the ERA amendment would undermine government protection of women in labor unions - a stance that Eleanor Roosevelt also took (primarily for the same reasons that Elizabeth Stanton opposed the 14th and 15th amendments, fearing that if these were locked in they would override other policies that currently provided protection. Thus, it was largely middle class Republican women in the 1950s and early 1960s that were among the biggest backers of the ERA. Additional many unions in the South were concerned that the ERA would weaken the influence of the largely male dominated unions.<br />
<br />
The 1964 election was nearly unanimous in favor of Johnson, largely because the death of the popular Kennedy was still vibrant in people's minds, but significantly, the only holdouts in that election were the southern Democrats, who were becoming concerned that Johnson was pressing too heavily with civil rights, and who were becoming increasingly attracted to the conservative politics (of the time) of Barry Goldwater. Additionally women in the conservative south were increasingly concerned about the feminist movement and its growing divergence from "traditional" views of women (this was also the period during which religious fundamentalism was becoming more pronounced in the South). When Nixon resigned and Ford became president, the ERA was increasingly in trouble in southern states, and eventually it would run into trouble in those states that are increasingly seen as Republican territory.<br />
<br />
In effect, between 1960 and 1980, the Republican party captured the southern stronghold of the Democrats, but alienated most of the Northeast Republican base, and women, originally drawn to the Democratic party through the effects of Kennedy and Johnson, abandoned the Republican party wholesale after Nixon, as did African Americans. Many "Dixiecrats" (who had supported Alabama Governor Wallace in 1972) become the most ardently conservative Republicans, and after 1980 the political center of the US Government shifted considerably to the right.<br />
<br />
Given all that, I finally get around to Amber's original question. Barack Obama was born in 1961, which puts him on the cusp of being a GenXer. Politically, he is very close to being an Eisenhower Republican, which ironically puts him marginally to the right of Richard Nixon. However, he came of age AFTER the great political dance of 1968, making him today slightly more progressive than southerner Bill Clinton. It can be argued however that he is also probably the most feminist friendly President since Richard Nixon. Obama also tends to manifest much of the policy as engineering approach that I suspect is a defining characteristic of the GenXers, and it means that his approach to governing tends to be systemic, which typically manifests itself in attempting to find that point in the system that has the largest impact and applying pressure there, even if it doesn't seem obvious that this is a huge priority.<br />
<br />
Mitt Romney was born in 1947, which puts him in the leading vanguard of the Boomer generation. Romney's formative years were in the early 1960s, and in many respects his policies as Massachusetts governor were also along the same mold as Eisenhower. However, what he has to contend with is a Republican party that is really the Southern Dixiecrat party. This party has become increasingly reactionary as wealthy southern military/petroleum industry began to spend larger and larger amounts of money in the region, making the descendants of the 1930s labor union workers comparatively wealthy while at the same time catalyzing the growth of a Calvinistic Fundamentalist movement that really started to gain a foothold in the mid-1960s and expanded dramatically with the rise of the Religious Right during the Reagan campaign.<br />
<br />
As the region grew, it attracted large numbers of people willing to deal with the hot, damp summers as well as a number of Silent Generation who found the area a good place to prosper. This generation overall were the ones that fought in World War II as young soldiers, were more than likely of agrarian origin, and who generally were the most religious. The leading edge of that generation is now in their late eighties. They were the union workers and office workers in the 1950s, were hitting their point of highest affluence in the 1970 and 80s, and for the most part are now funding the various conservative movements today.<br />
<br />
There seems to be a pattern in human behavior that one's political views late in life tend to be a reflection of an idealization of that person's childhood. The childhood of the Silent Generation was that of the Depression - bleak, mostly agrarian, where women had very traditional roles, partially because the bad economy significantly reduced opportunities for women (and men for that matter), because clothing was expensive and "fripperies" were to be discouraged, and because in agrarian 1930s America, women worked the kitchens all day, keeping the house presentable and making sure the kids were engaged doing something useful while the menfolk were out in the fields toiling. The men, for their part, tended to see "their women" as part of the furniture - the person who cooked your meals and washed your clothes and bore your kids, and neither men or women (especially those in the rural areas) understood the real power that would come with the right of women to vote, because these changes would really only manifest themselves with their children and grandchildren.<br />
<br />
Moreover, these changes really did happen more slowly in the agrarian areas, and even today, much of the South and West is still largely agrarian. The Republican (aka neoDixecrat) Party of today manifest that with increasingly reactionary policies that are very much at odds with where the rest of the country is today. The Tea Party is indicative of this - it is largely agrarian in origin, arises primarily among southern Boomers and Silent Generation people, and combines a mix of self-sufficiency mythologizing that hearkens back to that earlier age (when you had to be self-sufficient) with a strong religious upbringing where the Scopes trial had the right finding (teacher John Scopes was found guilty) but then was miscarried due to a technicality, along with a string suspicion of the government and taxes (these were the people who felt that Roosevelt had betrayed their country by becoming a "socialist").<br />
<br />
This hearkens back to a second question that Amber asked me, about why Republican women would so obviously vote against their own self interest - even to the extent of voting to repeal the vote:<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: #edeff4; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"> </span><span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text" style="background-color: #edeff4; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">I was hoping for some decent commentary, which yours is. I tend to agree with your assessment. A delicate calculus indeed. There's just a lot to think about. I mean, what does it mean to be a "Republican Woman"?</span><br />
<br />
While my first response would be to say "Stupid" that's both unfair and inaccurate. I think there's actually two factors that come into play there. The first is a kind of mental blindness that happens when women say that they think women shouldn't vote, that they would naturally be exempted from that - what they're actually saying is that "unless you are part of the elect, you will not get a vote in the system, especially if you are a women."<br />
<br />
I have no doubt this likely would happen - the goal here is to get the other party out of power in order to have a stable oligarchy where the wealthy are the only ones who have a voice in the government, and as women tend to dominate Democratic politics at the local and regional level (for reasons described above), by turning conservative Democratic men against women, it splits the party.<br />
<br />
However, I think the above commentary should also be factored in. For the Silent Generation, this was how they were brought up, and it is hard to change that internal programming when you get old. It's a lot like like traumatic stress disorder - when the economy has collapsed around you and you're not even sure where your next meal is going to come from when you're a child, you learn frugality, a dependence upon the power of faith and a suspicion of anyone or anything that may make life even harder ... even if you are now a multi-billionaire.<br />
<br />
There's a certain magical thinking among this group that "if only we return to the old values the world will be better". That's the essence of conservatism in a nutshell. The traditional values in question are almost inevitably those that they had as children or young adults. For the Boomers, this is the "Happy Days" world of the mid 1950s and early 1960s, when their lives were secure, they didn't have to start making their own life choices, and there were clearly defined gender roles. It's why the Republican convention really does look like it's the re-enactment of a particularly affluent 1950s high school.<br />
<br />
Romney is now facing that - he grew up as a privileged kid in an affluent suburb, but his party is now dominated by people who grew up in the Depression and are increasingly reverting to that era. In attempting to track to the right (all politicians do that during a primary, because they have to secure their base), he ended up getting sucked up in a political whirlpool that was so strong as to keep him from tracking left towards his more natural moderate Republicanism. This fringe is dominated by deep pocketed people whose PTSD evolved into a strong business sense and whose politics were shaped by a world of Social Darwinism where survival came down to never letting yourself be on the losing side of a deal, no matter how reprehensible, but in addition to them there are their children or grandchildren who are instructed that this is the way the world is, even if it isn't anymore, and they in turn then call out to others like them.<br />
<br />
It's worth noting that this is why I am certain that the GOP as it currently exists is on its way out. The religious conservative base, for the most part, is ancient, and those ranks aren't replenishing themselves. They are dying off. As a movement, it is also based primarily in the agrarian south, and the urban south is both becoming more prominent, more liberal, and younger.<br />
<br />
That's why this move towards trying to use gender politics will prove so disastrous for the GOP. It worked in the 1970s when the party had used it successfully to mobilize social conservatives on abortion after Roe vs. Wade, but that was also forty years ago. Yet it doesn't even remotely correspond to the world as it exists today for most people under the age of fifty.<br />
<br />
My generation, the GenXers came into its own during the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Gender roles were being called into question, the economy was uncertain and money was tight, the stentorian tones of Walter Cronkite were being increasingly replaced by journalism that challenged the status quo. Girls during this era grew up in the heady days when the cultural icons were people like Gloria Steinem and George Carlin, and as such you'll find that there's a sharp-drop off in the number of Republican women in our generation ... and that the ones that are there in general are products of very conservative subcultures such as the Deep South and Texas.<br />
<br />
Our generation is now entering into the dominant power position in the cycle. If you put the start of the GenXers at about 1962, this means that the leading edge of that generation turns 50 this year. This means that the values that you and I acquired when we were 12-15 are increasingly going to manifest as public policy. Obama's a GenXer, albeit at the very leading edge, and having grown up in a primarily urban setting has meant that his philosophies are probably pretty close to the norm for that generation. His policies wrt women are clearly informed by that ethic (and the fact that he was raised by a fairly progressive mother alone I think contributed to the fact that he is more sensitive to "women's issues" even than many of this generation).<br />
<br />
However, to get back to the original question - the women of our generation are less bound by the "supermom" ethic, and for the most part are also much more likely to continue questioning gender roles. The downside is that these women generally married later, had familien theren theres later, had smaller families, and typically were not as well educated in critical "life skills" as cooking, folding laundry, and even child rearing, partially because the novelty of dual income households which effectively doubled family incomes for the previous generation has now morphed into the necessity of dual income households as the much broader arc of oil depletion sends reverberations through society.<br />
<br />
I have two girls - one Millennial (Kate) born in 1993, about 60% through the arc of that generation, and one Virtual (Jennifer) born in 2000, or just at the cusp of her generation. From what I've seen of Kate's generation of young women, they are highly social within their own peer groups (and in near 24/7 communication with them) but shy and awkward around older generations. Politically they are very much conformists, but that conformity is generational and even stratified by age groups within that generation. GenXers are engineers and accountants, Millennials for the most part are creatives and integrators. (The mashup is very much a Milliennial construct). Gender roles are fluid, and tend to be worn and shed with the ease of changing a cosplay. From what I can tell, Millennial women will likely end up marrying late if at all (the institution of marriage is seen as increasingly irrelevant by this generation) and despite the size of the cohort (it's about the same size as the Baby Boom generation, but that's primarily because it's an interference bump where both Boomers and GenXers later child bearing periods caused an overlap) I think they will actually have considerably fewer children than the preceding generations, as it is also a generation where making social interactions has a higher precedence than making romantic commitments, and such children limit mobility.<br />
<br />
As to the Virtuals (2000-2018? or so), the oldest is now in Junior High, so any guess I make is speculation. Having said that, they will not be baby Millennials. The Millennials are overwhelming extroverts (like the Boomers), the Virtuals will be introverts (like the GenXers). They are growing up in hard times, and anxiety is a constant in their lives. It means they will be seeking structure, and will tend to be more institutional than the Millennials.<br />
<br />
Overall, they are more systemic thinkers, having grown up with systemic tools, but the novelty of constant communication has worn off for them - it's what their bigger sisters did. The Millennials are making their own traditions, but see them as being transients. The Virtuals will encode those transients into a new social order. The Ms tend to operate in group think, and as a generation tend to be somewhat shallow - they're the "ooh, shiny!" generation. The Vs will resent this, and will be exasperated by it, and since the Ms are in the process of essentially resetting most of what had come before, the role of the Vs will be to try to classify and order and make sense of that world. The virtuals are the scientists and teachers and librarians. The Millennials will be the nomad generation, Virtuals will be homebodies.<br />
<br />
Not sure how this plays out in terms of gender roles, but demographics gives a hint here. Removing net immigration effects, The leading edge of the Boomers turns 70 in a year and a half (assuming 1944 as a baseline). I think there is a good probability (25-30%) that Ms and Vs will be the first generations since Vietnam to have a significant presence of that generation at War (2020-2035). Millennial women will probably start asserting their model of women's roles in that period (the best analogy there would be to look at Millennial women as being the "flappers" of the 21st century - daring, iconoclastic, androgenous, testing societal boundaries- while Virtuals will be far more traditional in their roles out of necessity - clothing is expensive, women need to be more supportive and protect their children during times of war and hardship, social continuity is more important than innovation, etc.<br />
<br />
(This latter part is very speculative, mind you, but it feels right to me. Perhaps the iconic image of the young Virtual woman in 2030 would be that of the French Partisan, though even that doesn't quite capture it.)<br />
<br />
A final note here - I think we're hitting the zenith of the technology revolution now - it'll play out for perhaps another decade or so but I'm not sure it's locally sustainable. There are problems with supply chain disruptions, economic collapse, accessibility of energy and rare earths, a whole spectrum of problems that are knitting together to cap that experiment for a while - possibly for centuries, certainly for the next few decades. Gender roles tend to oscillate around certain norms, so while I think that in some respects our descendants will on the whole be more egalitarian, there will be cycles where those roles freeze and thaw.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-68464523265685683132012-08-19T17:47:00.001-07:002012-08-19T17:47:06.011-07:00Back on BloggerOver the last few months, I've spent a fair amount of time working writing on Tumblr rather than on the Metaphorical Web Blogspot. Why? It was a somewhat easier interface to work with, and I had found it worked reasonably well for a number of projects. However, I've also noticed that it's difficult to see if there's any traffic on the site, and I've noticed that overall Tumblr is gaining a reputation as being rather sleazy in terms of the type of content that gets posted. <div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Consequently, I've transferred a number of posts back over to the Metaphorical Web site, and expect to continue here moving forward. I'm also planning on writing at least one new blog post a week every Sunday, to post Monday morning. Because I want to keep topics somewhat separated, I'll actually have two this time around - this and the one to follow shortly afterwards.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Metaphorical Web has, regardless of the hosting site, been a playground for my non-technical ideas - thoughts on politics, the economy, major issues that the world faces - resource constraints, climate change, political extremism, economic collapse, generally light-hearted topics like that. Most of my technical talks will continue on <a href="http://xmltoday.org/">XMLToday.org</a>, so if you're looking for those here, you may want to check out that site instead.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-36617777872377589532012-08-19T17:10:00.001-07:002012-08-19T17:10:23.873-07:00Kurzweil Cities and Kunstlervilles, Revisited<br />
<div class="post_title" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 22px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.3; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
<i>Pessimistic Optimism in the Near Term Future</i></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
The future is a fascinating place, yet lately it seems like we’ve reached a rather disturbing fork in the road. On one side is the techno-fetishist fantasies of Ray Kurzweil, computer pioneer and auteur of the Singularity concept, in which by 2040, the world will reach a point where everything goes hyperbolic and the distinction between humans and machines gets lost forever. The utopian world that he inhabits is one in which the compound interest derived from Moore’s Law reaches a stage where technology is all pervasive, where we are all completely interconnected, and we hit an event horizon beyond which are febrile flesh and blood brains of today seem incapable of imaging or envisioning. We ARE the network.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
Take the other road, however, and the world begins to get disturbingly scary in a different way. In this future we’ve hit the peak resource wall - oil is declining everywhere, the society that’s so utterly dependent upon that oil collapses into a either anarchy or post-modern pioneer society, where being a blacksmith is a good profession, we’re hitching those carbon composite cars to the horses to get anywhere, and the technological boom will fade away as power distribution systems disintegrate. It’s not a bad life, if you like living like the Amish.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
In an earlier article (one sadly no longer on the web) I called these two destinations Kurzweil Cities and Kunstlervilles. They seem to represent the two extremes of our love/hate relationship with the technological society, the one transcendent but based upon some fairly absurd assumptions, the other bleak and dark, the expulsion from the rather dubious garden of the petroleum driven Eden. Curiously there are in many ways more people who seem to long for the seeming dystopia of the Kunstlervilles, the neo-Ludites who spend their evenings stocking away supplies awaiting the fall of civilization while blogging this fact to their technologically connected friends and cohorts.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
Yet for all of that I cannot help but wonder if perhaps the fork in the road is itself largely an illusion. My gut feel - my intuition, it you will - is that societies are remarkably more resilient than we assume, even if characteristics of those societies change dramatically over time. Personally, I believe that the current cultural edifice of wealthy robber barons (read - the Financial, Military, Petroleum based superindustry and their chief investors) will collapse within the next decade.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
Why? Because overall they are all too reliant not only upon hydrocarbons but even a certain grade of those hydrocarbons, namely those in and around the higher end of the “-ane” group - high octane groups. Electricity generation can be accomplished readily with other means, but the conversion of the American fleet of cars, trucks and aircraft can’t be - and the disruption this is already bringing is forcing major societal changes.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
Automobile ownership of those between the age of 16-35 is the lowest it’s ever been, and the number of people in this age group who do not even own a driver’s license as a percentage of population is the highest ever. Some of that is due to the explosion in mobile devices - in addition to reducing the need to “get together” to interact, such devices also make it far easier to share cars and to coordinate schedules with other transit options. Some of it is due to the fact that this group has fewer job opportunities, but when those opportunities do arise, many of them can be done without the need to spend an hour on the road for eight hours of time wasting meetings and another hour on the way back home.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
But there’s another reason as well. These kids aren’t stupid, and they aren’t as vested into the system of lies and self-deceptions that their Boomer managers and grandparents are. It makes sense to them to keep their expenses low, and a car is a major expense. Put another way, a car has gone from being a luxury, to being a necessity, to increasingly being a luxury again, and one with less and less desirability … especially if you opt out of the corporate model of life.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
The same thing applies to the financial system, and with it the military. The US Military has many missions, and it is unfair to categorize all of them as negative. However, a great deal of military policy is ultimately geared towards the protection of oil supply chains globally. The financial sector has gained the primacy it has largely because militaries are expensive - the budget for the Dept. of Defense dwarfs every other department in the Federal Government. Much of this budget has been suborned by military contractors such as Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and others for advanced weapon systems that are, for the most part, designed for “conventional” warfare, only faster, with more muscle, and a greater “boom” factor. </div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
However, the writing is on the wall even there. President Obama has “ended” the US military involvement in Irag, though there are still tens of thousands of contractors, and while it is a slower, and more complicated process, will, if he serves through November 2012, likely see military troops come home from Afghanistan by the summer of 2014. A trillion dollars worth of cuts loom in 2013, and the military will take the brunt of that (and likely much of that brunt will be born by the contractors whose programs get cut). Romney is self-destructing - I put the chance that a new nominee will emerge from the GOP convention as approaching 50% at this point (with about ten weeks to “sell” that nominee to the public), so the reality is that with neither the billions spent on such systems nor the billions in fees generated by servicing the loans for this, neither the military nor financial sectors will survive without radically diminishing their influence.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
One of the central tenants of the post-abundance movement is that we’ll go through a radical crash as the systems seize up, and that crash could end civilization as we know it. Yes, of course. But what about civilization as we don’t know it.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
Here’s a question to ask yourself: Today, if you had to give up your car or your access to the Internet, which would you choose?</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
I suspect that most people born before 1960 would answer that they would far rather keep their cars. Those born after most assuredly would answer that they would far rather give up their car. The Internet means communication, accessibility, entertainment. Today, with the Internet, I can order food (from restaurants or grocery stores), furnishings and equipment delivered, can find and do work, can order finished products or raw goods, can stay informed, can promote what I do, can communicate with friends, family and customers, can education myself and my children, can engage in politics and even societal functions.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
The car, on the other hand, is primarily a means for getting you to work, for meetings or for transporting goods. It serves a secondary purpose, that of a status symbol, though again that status symbol comes at no small expense (which is, I suppose, part of the rationale for it being a status symbol). In most cases, it is inextricably tied to the type of society that is car-bound - malls, fast food restaurants, millions of miles of highways, centralized offices, gas stations, supermarkets, big box stores, and so forth. What this means in practice is that this generation begins to gain affluence, all of these businesses that have built their business model on the car will also effectively collapse. Less travel, less need for having fast food restaurants at every highway intersection and in every shopping complex, stagnation and eventually decline of their parent companies. And if you believe the future is bright for such companies, take a look at their sales figures in the last five years.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
Yet the infrastructure won’t completely collapse. Delivery becomes a bigger concern. Snow Crash’s Neil Stephenson clearly understood that - home delivery clearly becomes an integral part of the business model. Here, ironically, the second major disruptive aspect of the mobile web revolution takes place. Colby Cosh of McLean Magazine wrote what should be a must-read for anyone looking for what the future will bring: <a href="http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/06/11/artisan-chocolate-and-social-revolution/" style="color: #444444; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;" target="_blank">Artisan Chocolate and Social Revolution</a>. In it he highlights a phenomenon that has been given names like the neoVictorian Aesthetic and the Second Arts and Crafts Era. The notion is that mass production will not suddenly cease - it is actually a remarkably efficient use of energy to create necessary goods and services, even though if carried through to its logical conclusion it also tends to eliminate almost everyone in the workforce.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
What Cosh argues is that this is giving rise not just to “mass customization” but rather “artisanal” products. Artisanal products and services are those that are customized to a specific audience or customer base. His argument is that the chocolates that the team in question make likely end up using the same base products as large manufacturers, but that because they can hand-create their chocolates to individual needs - a party or celebration, a gift, specialized items for artisanal restaurants - it is in fact this customization that provides the added value.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
Another good example, one that I love, is the Steampunk laptop. Steampunk of course, epitomizes the neoVictorian sensibilities of William Morris, but the fascinating thing is that most of these laptops were originally created as works of art, but they proved to be so popular that the artist ended up going full time into creating such specialized laptops. Internally, the laptop is similar to countless others, but it is the customization, and the time and talent involved in doing so, that makes this aspect so popular.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
The Kickstart project is yet another example of this phenomenon. Kickstart makes it possible to raise small private capital from small investors in order to get a book, magazine, or production funded. The investors may share in some of the profits or receive product in compensation, but the key point here is that the investors in question aren’t billion dollar funds looking to get a high yield return on their money (indeed, these kind of opportunities are drying up), but are instead investments made to see small, manageable products and services be created that don’t have a high enough profit margin to be attractive to the moneyed interests but that nonetheless fulfill a need or want. Significantly, this is actually one of the most benign forms of capitalism out there, because it serves to create a community of interest.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
On the services side, you’re beginning to see the emergence of itinerant service professionals - people who will come to your house to cut your hair, give you a manicure, instruct your children (or yourself), and so forth. Why? Both because service people bill by the customer, in general, and the customers are drying up. Transportation costs shifts to the provider rather than the customer - I think that’s going to increasingly be the rule moving forward as the Millennials age. You may in fact see the rise of doctors doing housecalls, a practice that became unfeasible primarily because of the distances involved in the suburban era. </div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
And in many respects, that brings me back full circle to the question of which road will be taken. Artisanal customizations is dependent upon mass production to get started, but over time, I think it will increasingly dominate as the underlying forces that currently favor mass-production will fail one by one. Long term I think that the strength of regional economies in the US and Canada will ultimately outweigh the national economy. Artisanal development is an interim step there, and one that may very well be required in order to push aside the rubric of a hundred years of mega-corporate oligarchical controls over everything from employment to zoning to the intrinsic shape of cities.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
In time, as supply chains begin to collapse, the scope of the artisans’ efforts will increase even as their effective reach diminishes (because of transportation costs and subsequent reduction of raw materials). Cities become more concentrated and more autonomous even as their suburban neighborhoods begin to crumble, leaving an annulus that will ultimately revert back to wilderness with towns emerging towards the periphery where distances to the city become unfeasibly far but where the town has a reason for being (a port, a crossroads, an agricultural center, etc.). The artisans may at that end up becoming the new mercantilists, but it will take a while for that cycle to repeat to the extent that it has become today (largely dependent upon energy profiles).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
The Internet will be a part of this - people will fight for their ability to stay connected even as the automobile era ends. Most than likely, what you’ll end up seeing is the rise of regional internet authorities in the same way that you have regional power authorities, beholden to their customer base directly but regulated by the regional governments. The regional authorities would keep the primary lines connected as much as possible, even though I suspect that at least at some time during the next several decades, the bandwidth available over the systems will decline overall for a number of years before turning around. </div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: -5px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
The Kunstlervillagers are right in thinking that society will become very unstable for a while. Where I break from them is the idea that we’re heading back to a wild-west type society as it was 150 years ago. I think that ours society will be different, not so much regressed as reforged, and that for a few generations yet, these unborn children will challenge us by going in directions that may seem completely foreign to us, but that will work for them. The only real unanswered question is whether they will look upon out time as a golden age or as an object lesson?</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-57310376324928003982012-08-19T17:08:00.004-07:002012-08-19T17:08:58.409-07:00Artists vs. Engineers: Millennials (and Virtuals) in the Workforce<br />
<div class="post_title" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 22px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.3; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
<em style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">Further thoughts on the coming generations.</em></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
A recent post about <a href="http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Expert-Voices/Millennials-at-Work-Not-My-Generation-836016/?kc=CIOMINUTE05022012STR1TOC" style="color: #444444; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;" target="_blank">Millennials in the workforce</a> was as notable for what it didn’t say about that generation (from the perspective of a Boomer) as for what it did. Indeed, to me it highlighted the fact that the Boomers really, really do not understand the Millennials, just as they didn’t understand the GenXers after them. This is perhaps not surprising - the Internet and the resulting explosive connectivity changed the very language of business, and to a great degree that difference can be summed up in the aphorism “If the Boomers are the ME generation, the Millennials are the US generation.”</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
First, the motivations that drive Millennials are VERY different from the ones that drove Boomers, and in a number of ways are different from thoset that drive GenXers. First and foremost, there’s a lot of pent-up anger out there in the Millennial generation towards corporations in general. When the Boomers came of age, most corporations consciously or unconsciously emulated the command and control structures of the military, because the young men that fathered those boomers had come right out of World War II, and had brought back with them not only GI Plan schooling but a very clear idea about how large organizations should be structured, which served well as the United States became the primary supplier of goods to the world in the aftermath of the destruction of WWII. The Boomers entered universities that had a similar command and control structure, and while there may have been protests and the like, once Boomers entered into the corporate world they took to it like a duck to water. <br style="margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;" /><br style="outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;" />For the GI generation, the idea of being employed for life at the same corporation you started with in the mail room to the time you finally retired was pretty much a given. For the Boomer generation, ascent was in 8-10 year arcs with different corporations, each arc providing you with counter experiences to your previous job, until ultimately you ended up as senior management with the job you finally retired from. For GenXers, you were more likely to be a freelancer or consultant, in between speculative startups. Job segments were shorter and riskier, you could make a lot of money, but job security was always an iffy thing, and not surprisingly, ours is much more of an engineering generation than the Boomers ever were. As we enter into the end game of our own careers, we’re looking at uncertain futures (retirement? huh?) and typically are ending up as senior academics, heads of consultancies, researchers, senior engineers and systems architects. <br style="outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;" /><br style="outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;" />The Millennials grew up with the Internet, and are easily the most connected generation ever. Their notion of corporations are informed by Google and Facebook, not General Electric - relatively small and autonomous working groups under a larger umbrella group, team oriented but with small, spatially-disparate teammates that communicate largely via electronic means, as often as not outside cubicle walls. They have a far greater job mobility, and the distinction between employment and unemployment are far fuzzier. The corporation that they work for is less important than the team they work, and the distinction between employee and contractor - so significant to the power games of the Boomers - is pretty much meaningless to the Millennials. Money is a motivation - especially in these times - but for the most part it’s not at the top of list of motivations, but simply a reflection of the fact that to stay connected they need to have the tools to do so, and need to have a place to sleep at night. Ironically, one benefit that this generation has is that they are likely to be great savers, because not only do they have the object lesson of the Greater Recession, but beyond improving their communication gear they really do not have a big need for materialistic possessions per se. <br style="outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;" /><br style="outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;" />To Millennials, the Boomers are hopelessly materialistic, not because of any reflection of their moral failings (indeed, Millennials consider most Boomers to be sanctimonious) but because materialism does not translate well to mobility. Sales of mobile homes are actually increasing among this generation, even with the high cost of gasoline, because a lot of Millennials are accustomed to going to where the work is (or at least where a steady internet connection can be found) and see physical homes as liabilities. Millennials are also getting married much later in life, are having kids much later, and are having fewer of them (if they decide to have any at all). Marriage itself is increasingly seen as optional, and both of these have a huge impact upon business, as it means again that one of the biggest factors that tend to stabilize a person’s career is the presence of a family. <br style="outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;" /><br style="margin-bottom: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;" />This means that Millennials view employers as clients to be serviced rather than overarching structures that provide long term meaningful careers. They are loyal to a fault, but they are loyal to their circle, not to any large institution. They distrust marketing and corporate spin, find the political games and infighting in large organizations, and yet are more inclined to act by creating temporary alliances between different groups to provide a united front to meet a crisis than they are by trying to subsume those same groups.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
This is one of the reasons why the dominant innovation of the Millennials thus far is the Flash attack, in which action tends to percolate quietly in the background, often well below the current mainstream, then suddenly overwhelm the media with a seemingly large and monolithic front. Boomers are used to campaigns, much like military planners preparing for the next battle. Millennials are more like guerrilla fighters - snipers coming out of nowhere then disappearing into the background. This agility is both a strength and a weakness - it can get things done very quickly, but sustained action becomes problematic, and this tends to manifest in business focus as well. Millennials are the ADHD generation - they tend to be easily distracted from long term goals by immediate needs or crises, and consequently can get bored when projects extend beyond a certain window.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
Of course, the flip-side to that is that Millennials also tend to be very innovative, especially with regard to social innovation. They are reinventing “media”, moving it far outside the box that their parents envisioned, seeing news, entertainment and education as all effectively just part of a single broad digital experience. The iconic image of the world for Boomers was the Mercator project map of the world, for GenXers is “The Big Blue Marble” and for Millennials is Google Earth. Carrying this point further, Google Earth is the world as entertainment - it is fundamentally interactive, is contributed to by a large community providing different layers of information, is generally not formally curated, combines temporality, geophysical location, images, media files and hyperlinks, and more importantly turns everything we know about geography “applications” on its ear. Millennials are not working out of the box, they are creating their own tessaracts and throwing the idea of box out altogether.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
Most Millennials are also remarkably optimistic about the future. Unlike the GenXers, who for the most part have had to deal with the disintegrating remnants of the concept of “job” that came from the Boomers, Millennials are redefining the very concept, and are doing so in ways that are increasingly moving away from the institutional view. A job is something that you do for a couple of months to perhaps a couple of years, wrap it up and move on to the next job (or perhaps jobs). More and more of that work is virtual - Boomers generally have shied away from telecommuting, as their focus has always been the office. GenXers began to embrace it, but the generation itself tends to be more introverted than their (highly) extroverted parents so working in a solitary fashion with the occasional interactions with work was more natural to them. Millennials are like their grandparents - highly extroverted and social as a rule - but overall so tuned into the connectivity of the web that their socialization (both personal and business) tends to take place on that medium in preference even to physical interaction. Ironically, this means that commercial real estate is going to stay depressed for a long time, even as “business” picks up, because as the Millennials increasingly become the dominant workers, the need for dedicated business spaces for people will diminish dramatically.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
And what of the generation after, the Virtuals? They will likely share some of the characteristics of Millennials (certainly the connectivity aspect), but will also tend towards introversion (this cycling of extroversion and introversion seems to be a generational characteristic), and all that implies. At the moment, the leading edge of the Virtuals is 12-13 years of age, so it is difficult to generalize, but there are several intriguing signs. Test scores for Virtuals in mathematics and science have been going up in comparison to those of Millennials (which went down in those areas when measure at the same age), and interest in those fields is rising.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
The Virtuals generally have a higher number of Aspergers and high functioning Autism than the Millennials did per capita, which usually manifests as social retardation but higher focus or intensity in specific areas. They are not as media driven, and ironically they are more inclined to play strategic games and build applications than communicate with their peers over computer or smart tablet environments. They are more avid readers, however, and tend more towards non-fiction or speculative fiction than their Millennial brethren did. If SMS and social media were the iconic symbols of the Millennials, for the Virtuals it’s tablets, and likely virtual glasses as they start rolling out towards the end of 2012 and into 2013. Their world will be immersive - the web will simply be an overlay on everyday life, and everything in that world will have information and context. “Traditional” academia will also be crumbling pretty dramatically by this point, and it is likely that the Virtuals will far more likely be self-educated and auto-didactically skilled - education will be unable to keep up with the disruptive changes and challenge to its authority that the coming era of Big Data augers, and while Virtuals will be considerably more knowledgeable (and potentially skilled) in specific areas than any previous generation, they will largely be building the edifices which would nominally be educating them. </div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
As a generation, they will be entering the workforce at a time when there will be massive upheavals in the corporate and political world as Millennials become the prime shapers of social policy and direction. Indeed in many respects they will be the primary agents by which these radical reforms are actually implemented (just as GenXers built the web that was largely envisioned by Boomers). The office of the future (circa 2030) will be notable primarily for being non-existent. Businesses will still exist, but retail will be a far reduced shadow of itself (and malls will likely end up being repurposed as work hotels where spaces get rented out as needed, if they don’t get torn down outright). Big box stores will become fulfillment centers for online retailers from grocers to clothiers to automobiles. Work will be done by ad hoc groups working distributed, with perhaps half of those working from home. Manufacturing will shift to mass cottage industries (pay very close attention to 3d printers), and zoning will have to take into account the rise of new residential/light industry sectors.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
Note that I suspect this will be the case perhaps even more if we are in a diminishing resource environment. Short of a complete catabolic societal collapse, which is possible but unlikely, what will more far more likely happen is that society will adapt to a mode where driving an hour each way to work every day will become prohibitive, where work will likely be either immediately local or will be far enough away that travel on a regular basis to it is not feasible (it’s also worth noting that the Millennials are the first generation since the 1930s in which driving does not play a prominent role, and this will carry through in their approach towards work … if they have to drive any significant distance to get to it, they won’t be interested in taking the job).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
On the other hand, this is also a generation where marriage occurs late and child rearing occurs later if at all, and this means that the Millennials will be far more likely to hop - migrating from one city to another to take on a job for a certain period of time, then moving to the next city. Ironically, this mode doesn’t necessarily involve a car - the Millennials will tend to travel very light (a tablet, a couple of changes of clothes and toiletries), will travel by train or bus, and will rent a car as needed rather than own one outright. They are also growing up distrusting big business and big government simultaneously, and this means that they will tend to be very conservative both in their spending and saving.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
Finally, Millennials are already defined by the cohesiveness of their extended networks as compared to older generations. This is a generation of specialty convention goers, and many of their closest relationships will be shaped by common interest rather than by geography. From an outsider’s perspective they may appear somewhat childish, but these conventions serve much the same purpose as bars did to an older generation - a place to meet others and establish new relationships (romantic and otherwise). This generation is also less likely to do hard drugs or become alcoholic than previous generations did (as demographic trends seem to be proving out).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
The combination of living light (which places a far lower demand on finances than maintaining a house, car, furnishings, and so forth) and demand for mobility means that work will tend towards transient relationships as well - it simply will not play as big a role in the lives of Millennials compared with their social life. (They also will tend to stay “in the nest” far longer than preceding generations.) That doesn’t mean that they will be beggars - that same mobility will translate into a penchant for saving rather than spending, and when they do finally “settle down” towards the end of their 30s, they will likely be far better off than the preceding GenXers at that age. </div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: -5px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
It’s hard to say what the longer term characteristics of the Virtuals will be - the oldest is now twelve, but there are a few indications. Expect Virtuals to be home-bodies - they will establish nests, workshops, and other bases of operation fairly early, will likely not be anywhere near as transient as Millennials, and may be somewhat more materialistically inclined. They will see Millennials as flighty and somewhat inconsequential, too hung up on media and rather spoiled. As children, they will have grown up during fairly harsh times, and as such Virtuals will likely also be thrifty, but in different ways than the Millennials - they will be inclined towards saving as a defense against potential downtimes vs. saving as a consequence of a light living style. The Millennials will envision the social foundation for the century, the Virtuals will be ones to lay down the infrastructure to support that - the artists vs. the engineers.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-43463551383332801422012-08-19T17:06:00.004-07:002012-08-19T17:07:33.270-07:00Technology and Generations<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m19562J4Sc1qh50d1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="image" border="0" class="toggle_inline_image inline_image" src="http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m19562J4Sc1qh50d1.jpg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgb(187, 187, 187) 0px 1px 4px; box-shadow: rgb(187, 187, 187) 0px 1px 4px; height: auto !important; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 125px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" /></a></div>
<div class="post_title" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 22px; line-height: 1.3; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">A couple of days ago I came across a story talking about how </span><a href="http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2011/nov/HQ_11-388_Education_Collaborations.html" style="color: #444444; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;" target="_blank">NASA was interested in helping to interest the next generation of students in science and technology careers</a><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;"> (the so-called STEM, or </span><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">S</span><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">cience, </span><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">T</span><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">echnology, </span><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">E</span><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">ngineering and </span><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">M</span><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">athematics fields). It’s been one of the greater mysteries in technical circles about what caused such a massive fall-off in the number of people pursuing technical degrees in the early 2000s as compared to the 1990s, and most of the obvious explanations (the tech recession in 2000 for instance) have always seemed rather facile to me. I actually think the reason is deeper, and if I’m right then this may in fact be the perfect time for policy makers to be investing in STEM related educational programs.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
Recently, I had a chance to thoroughly read the classic work The Fourth Turning, by Strauss and Howe. For those not familiar with their theories, the core idea is that there is a societal cycle called a saeculum (from which we derive words like secular) that roughly spans 80-90 years. Each saeculum consists of four generations, each of which tend to have similar values, motivations and philosophies, and each of which interact with the other generations in a clear and distinct pattern. As each generation moves through the various stages of life (youth, adulthood, middle age, senescance) each of which tend to be 18-20 years of length as well, they also tend to have very different concerns, expectations and desires. As prior and succeeding generations are also moving along those same stages but offset, this means that there are distinct configurations that describe the psycho-social characteristics of these generations. </div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
I believe that the current drought in STEM interest (except in certain very specific areas) may actually be generationally driven, and both points to the likely characteristics of the incoming generations and gives a road map that educators and policy makers should pay attention to closely.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
A good reference point to show this is to look closely at the Baby Boomers and how they ended up shaping both business and society. The Boomer generation (born from 1943 to 1961, using what I think is a realistic ethical rather than demograph division), for the most part, were not engineers or scientists, though there were several notable engineers and scientists in that generation. It was the GI generation that built the space program, created the first computers, built much of the highway and electrical infrastructure of the country. The Boomers were marketers, managers and salesmen. They were the corporate warriors, and as they moved into the workforce, the engineering ethos of the previous generation was replaced with the marketing ethos of this one.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
The GenXers (born from 1962 to 1981), on the other hand, were engineers of sorts, but their playground was not space, but computer technology and biotech. They did the bulk of the programming, designing, engineering and analysis work of the Internet and of the Biotech revolution. What’s interesting is that as the Boomers retire and the GenXers begin to replace them on the other side of the generational gap, the focus of management, of education, and of policy is going to shift increasingly towards problem solving - not “How do we make the most money doing this?” but “How do we solve the problems we’re facing in the most efficient and elegant manner we can?”</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
I’d argue that this represents a radical shift in thinking in society. It’s hard for a 60 year old C-level manager who’s uppermost thought during the day is “How can we improve the share price of our company?” to understand the motivations of a 42 year old senior engineer who’s looking at finding the optimal solution to building a software system. More significantly, when that 42 year old becomes the 60 year old CEO of the company nearly two decades later, her motivation is not enhancing share price, but building the software products that meet the greatest needs of their customers, with shareholder value far lower on the priority chain. The company structures will be different, the valuation systems will be different, EVERYTHING will be different. They will be focused on SOLVING PROBLEMS.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
The Millennials (1982 to 2000), on the other hand, are media people. They grew up in the silver age of Social Media. The Internet had reached a point of complexity that it could start supporting a number of different kinds of media, and the communication aspects of the Internet are far more important to them than the technical aspects. For many of them, there was never a time where the Internet didn’t exist. The oldest of the Millennials are now out of college, they are intensely anti-marketing (this is the generation under which media deconstruction hit its high point) and they are highly genre savvy. This is the generation that will a hundred years from now be seen as the artistic giants of the twenty first century.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
However, it is the next generation, what I call the Virtuals (born 2000-2018) that will be the bringers of the next wave of technical innovation (outside the media space). This is a generation that will have high capacity gene sequencers, big data cloud infrastructures and semantically aware computer systems, mobile sensor networks, near-earth commercial space travel, LEDs and memsistors and high voltage solar “fabric” and all the things that are emerging largely from the work of the GenXers (who are now going into research rather than management) before most of them are out of high school.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
The oldest Virtual at this point, is twelve years old and is in sixth grade. The youngest will not be born for another six years. The Virtuals are not like the Millennials. I have two children - one born in 1993, the other born in 2000. The elder of the two is a classical Millennial - she’s into cosplay, animation, computer graphics and computer games, and social media. She’s entering college in media arts, and I fully anticipate that she’ll find herself very much caught up in a world where creatives are very much in demand and where the rules of society are rewritten daily. She’s a social deconstructionist.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
My youngest was born in 2000, and she is what I believe many Virtuals will be like. She’s more literal than her sister, was programming game levels by the time she was seven (and taught herself how to read off the Internet), and is rather scarily good at finding the information that she needs to educate herself. She’s a technical synthesist. She has trouble with school though, because school doesn’t work the way she thinks - she can find information, but she’s having trouble learning strategies for synthesizing that information. Of course, the schools themselves haven’t really caught up with this fact - they’re just starting to come to grips with the fact that the Millennials exist in a world that is global, is more engrossing than school, and is mediated by networks - and many of those Millennials have already graduated.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
As not so much of a diversion here, I think education is a critical part of any society, but I rather despair at the educational system in the US. The content of it is designed by values-conscious Boomers determined to put a stamp of morality and jingoistic patriotism (while minimizing the importance of science in many parts of the country), implemented by technical GenXers who chafe under this system and despairing about the Millennials who all seem like ADHD candidates permanently wired to their smart phones and who for the most part are more interested in video games and cosplay than in IMPORTANT THINGS (even as they themselves wonder whether what they’re teaching is worth anything). And of course, STEM (science, technical, engineering and mathematics) courses of study have seen a massive drop in participation. We’re becoming a nation of gamers and idiots.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
Except I’m not so sure that’s really the case. The Millennials are the counter-stroke generation to the Boomers - interested in art and literature, philosophy and media, architecture and music. They are communicators first and foremost, but they really have in the aggregate comparatively little interest in the technical except as it relates to these areas.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
The Virtuals, on the other hand, will be technical synthesists. The GenXers have built the scaffolding and infrastructure that the Millennials use for communication and social bonding, but they have also built the scaffolding and very early infrastructure for the Virtuals to build on in combining bio-engineering with information management, for building and designing specialized energy aggregators and generators, and for integrating all of these together into a cohesive technical superstructure of applications (one that reengineers the human body all the way up to the height of the human noosphere). They will in fact be the ones that rebuild the technical underpinnings of society, quite possibly as the world that the Boomers built finally collapses under its own weight.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
The GenXers started entering into college (the start of adulthood) in 1982 and its noteworthy that the number of students graduating in STEM technologies started picking up dramatically by 1986. It hit its peak in 1995, four years after the GenXer population peaked (and four years after they entered college). By 1999, even though the tech field was still hot, STEM graduates were declining again. Where were the (now) Millennials going? New media, gaming, communications, web design, graphics, as well as a noticeable pick up in theatre arts, writing, photographer and similar fields. Certainly the technologies were now coming online to make this field attractive, but its worth noting that the place they weren’t going into - not just STEM (except for technology related to the communications revolution) or medicine but also law, finance, business or even the more humdrum aspects of marketing and sales, in places where, ironically, the tools and technologies were just as well developed.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
The Millennials are now coming out of college - they hit their peak in 2009 and there’s some evidence to indicate that the number of graduates in the media arts arena is leveling off, consistent with a graduation peak of about 2013. It’s also worth noting that most generations have somewhat different characteristics pre- and post- peaks. Pre-peak generations have shadows of the previous generation that colors their attitudes and beliefs. Post-peak get “premonitions” of the next generation, sharing more and more of their values. At the cusp points between generations, you often end up with people who are generalists, not necessarily strong in any one generation but often being renaissance characters that don’t easily fit into any generation.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
If, as I suspect, the Virtuals end up being technological synthesists (as opposed to the GenXer’s role as technological analysts), then 2013 will also mark the trough of STEM graduates, and the trend should turn around. However, their focus is going to shift - alt-energy vs. geologist engineers and chemists, distributed AI construction (possibly with robots and telepresence) vs. business applications, life-form engineers vs. geneticists and oncologists. As a generation they will be very utilitarian and focused compared to the previous generation (whom they will consider as being rather frivolous and perhaps overly indulged). The mid-point in the trend will occur around 2022 with the generation peaking in 2031 in terms of STEM graduates.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
Of course, this also brings up an interesting conundrum. The Millennials are for the most part community oriented, though that community is defined virtually rather than physically. This means that their optimal learning style (all other things being equal) is one where learning takes place via interactions with their peers, and social awareness is considered of greater value than technical competence. There, the principle role of the teacher is very much that of the mediator and director, shaping the conversations towards the completion of communal projects. </div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
Virtuals, on the other hand, are already showing that they respond best to autodydactic approaches to learning, where they learn by doing, research what they need when they need it, and generally find traditional teaching methodologies to be confusing at best and counterproductive at worst. As it turns out, this is in fact the best way to learn science, where the role of the teacher is primarily that of advisor rather than authority. The students also tend to gravitate to an apprenticeship model, where you have a master with a limited number of apprentices and sojourners (the pairing of a GenXer with one or more Virtual is a particularly effective combination), especially as the GenXers will be entering Senescence at this stage in their own lives, when their principle role is to be teachers and advisors rather than decision makers.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
There’s been a pendulum swing towards anti-intellectualism that seems to be reaching its peak in the US, but we may in fact be near the end of the pendulum swing. The Boomers entered into the period of senescence starting around 2000 (these things tend to be fuzzy +/-3 three years), and the Boomers have generally been the generation of the salesman. In conjunction with senescence this has meant that the Boomers have been focused on physical and financial security, mortality, maximization of financial assets. They also have tended to push conformance to the status quo, which, given the demographic size of the group, has generally meant THEIR status quo, and in old age this has tended to result in dogmatic uniformity, ideological rigidity and a move towards centralization.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
By 2009, the peak of the Boomer generation entered senescence (and out of a decision making capacity). By 2018, the Boomers will be completely within senescence, with the GenXers fully invested in the decision-making “Middle Aged” bracket. Since societal direction tends to be determined largely by this bracket, this again hints at society beginning to shift towards more pragmatism, more focus on problem solving rather than profit maximization, and more of a need for (and respect of) scientists and technicians. Just as with the rise of STEM graduates, society itself is beginning to move back towards a mode where the problem solvers, rather than the empire builders, are coming to the fore. Personally, it couldn’t happen soon enough.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
<em style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">One final note. The one area where I break with Strauss and Howe is in their designations of saecular titles. In the fourth turning (the one we’re in now, extending from 2000-2018 +/- a few years) the Millennials are “Heroes” while the virtuals are Artists. I believe that a perhaps more accurate way of thinking is to see Millennials in this phase as Social Deconstructionists (with the Boomers being Social Constructionists, promoting the status quo and GenXers being Technical Constructionists, building technical infrastructure). This means that Virtuals would be Technical Deconstructionists - they will be the mix and match generation, crossing technical disciplines, questioning the technical status quo.</em></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
<em style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">Deconstructionism in literary terms is the process of identifying literary tropes (cultural assumptions), and deconstructing them in an attempt to understand how they work, why they work and how they can then be reconstructed to more closely model the world. Technical construction effectively builds on existing infrastructure to create new works, while technical deconstruction is the process of re-examining those core assumptions, discipline boundaries and underlying physical constraints and create whole new directions with them. The OWS movement is fueled largely by early cycle Millennials (just as the Tea Party is primarily made up of early cycle Boomers). GenXers largely were tool builders, Virtuals will be tool users.</em></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: -5px; margin-top: 10px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">
<em style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: 0px;">Okay, THIS is the final note and a pet peeve. GenXers have generally gotten a bad rap compared to the Boomers - introverted to the Boomers extroversion, indifferent to material success compared to the Boomers’ avid capitalistic streak, perceptive and slow to make judgements or decisions compared to the Boomer’s decisive leadership and charisma, pragmatists to the Boomers’ idealism. Yet it was the GenXers who were mostly responsible for the creation of the web, probably the single most important invention of the last century. The Internet was initially a construct of the GI generation, while the web was conceived by a late cycle boomer (Tim Berners Lee, born in that incredible technical banner year of 1955, the same year that both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born), and implemented for the most part by GenXers (Marc Andreesen, Linus Torvalds, Dan Connolly, Roy Fielding, many others). </em></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-25187138422259086212011-05-22T10:52:00.000-07:002011-05-22T12:37:09.465-07:00Shared Spaces<div>This is the world of Jayne Lucier:</div><div><br />
</div><div>Jayne is currently working towards a PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington. She's single, fit, twenty two years old, with short brown hair worn spiky, brilliant green eyes behind a pair of barely there glasses, a penchant for plaid skirts and vests, grandmother boots and backpacks over purses. With a little exaggeration, she could pass for a Miyazaki anime character, though there are hints of the more mature woman in her smile and posture.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Jayne lives in a shared space with three other girls - Tanya, Candice and Mykie - in which each has a separate room but they share a communal kitchen and den along with two shared bathrooms. The rent isn't cheap, even with the four of them sharing it, but in this day and age that's hardly unusual. The walls in the common rooms have artwork screens placed at convenient locations, with the rule being that while anyone can set any or all art at any time, they can't be something that would send the parental units screaming in anger or fear. A couple of other larger screens are for more traditional uses - gaming, news, the latest shows - and they're on a first come, first serve basis, though if a roommate doesn't reclaim it every hour it's up for grabs.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Every girl has a smart phone and a pad, which the shared space uses to determine who is where at any given point. The phone's usually considered a better bet - pads, while important, usually tend to end up in backpacks. Jayne's room also has a full screen on her desk, along with a wireless keyboard that she can use in lieu of her device's still cumbersome onscreen keyboard. Besides, with the keyboard it gives her more real estate to write on.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The morning ritual is usually pretty much the same - up at 7am when Jayne's pad communicates with the audio in the room, playing everything from Gustave Holst to Emilie Autumn from her playlist at random, into the bathroom to take a shower while the pad on the medicine cabinet reads out comments from the students' she's doing Teaching Assistant for, as well as any messages that came during the night. She can also bring up the house status, both from the sensors on the internal systems - <i>#toilet 1 has a leak and needs to be repaired, report sent to building maintenance</i> - and from the external ones: <b style="font-style: italic;">Candice->Mykie: </b><i>The SalonCare Shampoo is MINE. You take it, you DIE!!!!</i><b style="font-style: italic;"> . </b>Yeah, Candice has issues.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The medicine capinet, cupboards, fridge and linen closet all have RFID scanners, as does her closet, though that one she could disable if she wants. She can see at a moment's glance what she has, where it is, how long it's been in there, what's likely close to needing to be replaced. The medicine cabinet informs her that she still needs to take four more doses of the Amoxycillin, which was prescribed to her after a fall cold turned into bronchitis, and grimacing, she pours out the foul smelling liquid into a small cup, drinks it, makes another face, and puts the lid back on, the top's click sending a signal via a simple active RFID transmitter in the bottle to decrement the count. </div><div><br />
</div><div>The shared apartment has its own online presence - all of the ones in the building do. It includes a message queue (which she moderates - as the oldest and farthest along in her studies, there was no question that she would) between each of them, a shared chat thread (which is usually pretty quiet, but sometimes can see a lot of activity, especially when Tanya brought Jack home a few weeks ago which immediately set of a bidding war. Jack never knew how close he came to having Mykie hijack him, but she settled for a pair of Avril tickets. It also contained their respective calendars, showing who had what duties when, who was out of the house, who needed a few moments of privacy with a significant other. It didn't always work, but there was enough incentive there to keep it up to date that the girls participated.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Jayne dressed, frowning at the long list of clothes that were currently marked as dirty. She'd need to do laundry tonight, or she'd be down to one particularly inappropriate pair of rave pants and a peekaboo mesh blouse for teaching in - probably not something that Dr. Hannaford would be particularly pleased to see her in - though no doubt a few of her more erstwhile students might.</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Reminder - laundry tonight," she said to the air, and the air dutifully recorded her reluctantly claimed penance. Somehow they never got around to automating laundry.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Dressed in a white blouse, forest green vest and green plaid skirt and knee-hi's, her hair up in a bun, she knew the image she projected, but frankly didn't care. It was her teaching image, and the one time she'd shown up in jeans and t-shirt (because she <i>had</i> forgotten to do laundry) everyone from her professor to half her students to her friends in Vladivostok and Stockholm had written notes of worry and concern. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Closing the door (it automatically locked when her phone left the room unless she voice-overrode it) Jayne wandered down the hallway, looking at the latest artwork choices of her roomies - Kandisky (Tanya), a DNAngels anime drawing (Mykie), Hot Firefighter for October (Candice - that one bordered a little too close to the edge of the parental unit rule) and Waterhouse's Lady of the Lake (hers). Candice splayed out on the couch, texting furiously with her ... girlfriend, Jayne remembered, the gender and identity tended to change weekly - while Mykie came out of her room with her oversized pad in her backpack and the zombie-look of Starbucks withdrawal plastered on her face. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Mykie was their resident artist, and the pad she carried was her canvas and palette as well. She'd taken one look at Jayne when she'd let the empty room (Kirsten had graduated the previous semester) and immediately pulled out her electronic pad, slapped a sheet of paper on it, and started drawing. The schoolgirl that had emerged from Mykie's pen had ended up both on her wall and on her "school wall", one if physical media, the other in virtual, and Mykie had been delighted to let Jayne use that as her "logo". </div><div><br />
</div><div>Tanya emerged from the refrigerator, a bowl of cereal and nearly empty jug of milk in hand. </div><div><br />
</div><div>"We're almost out of milk," she said around the cereal already in her mouth.</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Already on the delivery queue," Jayne replied, "and it's your turn to meet and greet the delivery man."</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Oh, da- ... sorry, I forgot. I've got another appointment."</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Did you calendar it?"</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Um, er ... no ..."</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Fine, then you either work it out with the delivery guy or you get to pick up the tab for all the groceries this week, 'cause I'm not going to have the milk spoiling and soggy ice cream because someone forgot."</div><div><br />
</div><div>"I ... okay. I'll see if I can reschedule."</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Good. 'Nuff said."</div><div><br />
</div><div>Jayne despaired at Tanya - she was a good kid, but she tended to have her head in the clouds, and they weren't electronic ones. She grabbed a sweet roll from the pantry, threw another one Mykie's way that was caught deftly as the artist headed out the door, and waved an unreturned bye to her remaining roomies. </div><div><br />
</div><div>As she walked out the door, the local shared space handed her off to the outside world (her choice, she usually wanted to maintain context awareness). She could still bring up the apartment's shared space if she needed to, but the phone typically latched onto whatever context (usually spatial, but occasionally temporal) was most appropriate for configuring the apps available to her. Jayne liked called her phone her context machine.</div><div><br />
</div><div>She grabbed the phone from her vest (she liked the vests because they included an outside pocket ideal for phones and inside one ideal for pads) and pressed the UW bus app, which picked up her location automatically and passed it to a central dispatch which in turn aggregated the calls and arranged for a least time path between pickup points. The app returned a modal notification: "Green Bus in 10 minutes". She'd bought a year pass, but if she hadn't, the app would have simply debited the fare from her account. The university had taken their time getting the system in place, but this had proved one of their biggest successes. It pushed ridership up dramatically while insuring that they didn't have buses driving empty when they didn't have to. There were still a few traditional loops, but they were being phased out as the number of non-online students dropped precipitously.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Jayne shared an office with Doug Stillwell, a PhD student in Computational Linguistics, though truth be told they could have just about hotelled the grad student offices, which were, for the most part, little more than closets. They'd already started doing that in other buildings, and she suspected that Informational Systems was probably next. When she needed to face-to-face with a student, Jayne usually preferred to meet them in the mini-cafeterias in the basement. The professors were still very jealous of their own offices, and could not understand why the younger generation seemed to be so blasé about giving up theirs. Of course, Jayne thought, the whole university institution was undergoing so many changes that it was likely not to exist in a remotely recognizable form ten years later - the Post-University Deconstructionist Movement, as the more philosophical members of the school called it.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The bus dropped her off at Mary Gates Hall, and she ambled to her classroom. She'd spent the evening grading papers online (for her XML class) then laughed quietly as she realized that there'd never been a paper anything - she'd read through each q&a pair as they came up on her screen, marked up wrong answers both inline and in a separate comments block and invited additional comments and clarification, gave each answer a rating, then summed up the rating for a grade. In a few places, she'd annotated with links to their textbooks at the appropriate paragraph or external links to the web, and in a few others she'd added video commentary directly, though she preferred not to do that - more than once, she'd found her face staring back at her on Youtube under the heading "Hot for Teacher", usually with a contemporary rock song playing in between her pauses. Never give students ammunition they can use against you.</div><div><br />
</div><div>She entered her classroom with ten minutes to spare, and stood in the doorway as Doug (soon, Dr. Doug, as she liked to tease him) finished up his own lecture on semantics. Doug was ... cute - puppy dog nerd cute, but was finally growing into his 6' 7" in frame. He'd never be a face person, but he was passionate about his research, was damned good with the electric mandolin, and not only could he get a computer to sit up and beg, but he looked good in a Steampunk outfit, as he'd shown when he arrived at the office after a weekend at a con. They'd already been out on a couple of dates, but neither were in any hurry.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The classroom itself was tiny, no surprise there, but what was surprising was that it was intended for a class of up to 300 students, even though there were only sixteen seats in the room itself. A teacher in this day and age was expected to be a television performer; the video setup in the backroom was mostly automated, though there was usually a kid - Steven or Kaitlin for her own classes - who sat and monitored all the classrooms just in case from a central station. The school, like most universities, had realized that students could record lectures and leave, and that seats in butts was becoming an increasingly anachronistic concept. Some students still showed up for class, but for the most part classes were taught remotely, and questions were handled asynchronously and offline. </div><div><br />
</div><div>As a consequence, her classroom was tiny, but her blackboard was infinite. The classroom's shared space had picked up her pad the moment she walked in the door, but wouldn't relinquish control until after Doug chose to, which he did with a flourish ...</div><div><br />
</div><div>"... and up next, the sexiest Computational Linguistics teacher on the UW campus, the ever lovely and charming Jayne Lucier."</div><div><br />
</div><div>"I'll get you for this," she mouthed at him as he walked past her, and he winked in reply.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Still a little flushed, she headed to the front of the room, her pad activating the university presentation app, automatically slaving the monitors to its controls. She rather liked the presentation that she'd come up with last night - her presentation skills weren't quite at the level of Mykie's, who could do absolutely incredible game quality work, but like most people her age she'd cut her teeth editing digital video and presentations - it didn't hurt that she had also paid Mykie a reasonable sum of money to help her put together clips for her talks.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The students filed in - she was female, she was pretty, and she liked interacting with live students, so she had a pretty full room - but she also noted that her class was currently being audited by 1,052 people worldwide, though she set a maximum of forty participating students just to keep ahead of the homework. The auditors could take the tests and would eventually see the answer keys so they could self correct, but they didn't get credit. Still, they could (and did, vigorously) participate in the chatter stream, and often times would provide help or assistance even as she was giving her talk (there were a couple of professors at MIT who interacted with her show regularly, as well as several engineers at Google, Microsoft and Intel, and she doubted she'd have much trouble landing a job or a post-graduate position once she was done with her own PhD).</div><div><br />
</div><div>The teleprompter monitor just outside of the camera's vision, which showed her with the composite background from her pad as compared to the green-screen behind her, flashed the ten second signal ... five, four, three, two, one ..</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Welcome to XQuery 102, Week Fourteen, class 25. I'm Jayne Lucier, your instructor. Last week, we examined the use of faceted search methods in order to ..."</div><hr /><i>This particular sketch - not quite a story, more a bit of exploratory narrative - originally came to me in a dream . It highlights both what could be in the very near term future and where we are not quite yet at. There are a few key highlights that should be food for thought:</i><br />
<div><i><br />
</i></div><div><i>Smart phones in particular truly are context machines - at any given point, they know who you are (assuming you are the owner of the phone), know where you are, and know when you are. This is a powerful combination. With these three pieces of information, shared spaces become possible. A shared space is place that can take advantage of that context to make facets of itself available. The applications that you need at home (whether shared or not) are different from those that you need at work or on the road. </i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div><div><i>Shared context can be combined with membership to identify groupings of services, and to provide appropriate levels of access for those services. Jayne and her roommates could purchase specific food for themselves as well as food used in common with that handled by automatic debiting, could have the food ordered in the background, could have it delivered at a time and space most appropriate for everyone (though someone still has to put it away :-). Shared spaces allow the access to display devices (the various public screens in the apartment), services (online delivery of movie content) and responsibilities (who gets to take out the trash or wash the dishes this week).</i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div><div><i>Such a shared space is a web presence (Facebook for places, if you will), and it's about more than just people - the toilet announcing that it has a leak, giving a telematic warning to the building's superintendent, or the shared space of an individual, the clothes in her closet and the medicines in her medicine chest. It's also a space that knows it's own physical boundaries - Jayne walking out the front door hands her off from the apartment's shared space to other broader shared spaces. She can still log into the more focused ones, of course, but ultimately it is the ability to move from one appropriate context to the next that makes remote devices so compelling.</i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div><div><i>Shared spaces also open up some interesting issues; monetary transactions become largely background issues. We're getting close to that now, but for the moment, such transactions are still largely at the institutional layer (and the need to wander around with dozens of cards). Things like QRCodes and Near Field Communication (NFC) should speed that along - the ability to go from visual to device to web is powerful, as is the ability to use the device as a physical replacement for credit cards, vendor cards, metro bus cards, membership cards and so forth. Of course, security becomes a much bigger concern as well - loss of a phone could be inconveniencing, theft of one could be financially (and reputationally) damaging, but I frankly do not believe that this factor alone will be sufficient to deter these technologies from moving forward.</i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div><div><i>Indeed, one area that I think QRCodes in particular could help is that it provides a powerful way to change your shared space. Go into a store and scan it's QRCodes, and all of the apps that are available for that store become visible, from deals to chat rooms to means of optimizing payment. Go to a convention and can it's QCode, and you then have the whole shared context for the convention's activities, feeds, maps, and presentations. Scan a course's QRCodes, and you have apps that provide links to syllabi, bios, resources, feeds.</i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div><div><i>In this respect a shared space is a portal, but its a portal of both links and applications, and what's more its a portable that knows you and can provide you services based upon access levels and need. Because it knows time, it can look at your calendar, it can update lists of things that need to get done, and it can even make inferences once enough history is gleaned.</i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div><div><i>One additional aspect of this is that we're moving to a world where physical proximity is no longer necessary in order to interact with the world, because we can replace this with information about context. Mass transit systems -- especially buses -- are comparatively inefficient - they still require that you move to an access point in the system in order to get on it or get off it, and that access point may be very inconvenient from where you need to go or be picked up from (this is especially true in suburban neighborhoods). On the other hand, by aggregating requests and using that to determine the optimal routes moves you to a door-to-door service while at the same time providing for the most efficient distribution of stops. While some communities have a similar system today that's phone based, for the most part these are limited to people with disabilities, and as such have a comparatively small participation rate. </i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div><div><i>Similarly, teaching, training, sales conferences, and the like have been moving to a distributed model for some time, though the public educational system is perhaps slower there. In many respects one of the central problems with distance teaching is the belief that it is necessary to build elaborate software presentations on top of content. That's certainly possible, and I think as we move forward the ability to present effectively online will need to become a much bigger skill-set for teachers at all levels, but at the same time, the rise of collaboration tools means that it becomes increasingly possible to use proven pedagogical principles in order to teach - even Q&A type essays can be handled in this manner, and over the web (and especially over mobile) this may in fact be the most effective means </i>to<i> teach complex content.</i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div><div><i>Additionally, there's a need to recognize that mobile devices (pads in particular) will become the de facto mechanisms for both giving and receiving instruction moving forward - and that these will be used asynchronously. We don't think with our butts. We think with our heads </i>focused<i> upon a particular instructor or information provider, and the reason that the lecture is still a fundamental tool in the teaching lexicon is that such a lecture is a means to achieve that focus. </i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div><div><i>Yet attending a lecture when awake, when distracted either mentally or physically (school chairs, anyone?), or when attempting to digest a </i>previous<i> lecture on a different topic, is usually counterproductive. By separating the presentation from the perception, it makes it possible for the student to determine the time when he or she </i>is<i> focused. It also makes it possible for the crowd sourcing phenomenon to extend beyond the immediate moment, giving it time for people to ask questions or make points, and for informational gestation to occur.</i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div><div><i>The idea behind putting this scenario out is to help understand where the technology is (and more importantly where it isn't and could be) and to envision given that what improvements in technology (or even what technologies themselves) are needed to achieve that technology. I hope to do this again in different contexts.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
First published at <i><a href="http://blogs.avalonconsult.com/blog/e-learning/shared-spaces/">http://blogs.avalonconsult.com/blog/e-learning/shared-spaces/</a></i></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-33318812218339728662011-05-10T10:52:00.000-07:002011-05-10T11:40:39.410-07:00Bad Call? Microsoft buys SkypeSoftware titan Microsoft just purchased Skype, whose voip-based services have made it one of the largest players in the web telecommunications space. The deal, for $8.5 billion in cash, provides a major benefit to Microsoft, which has struggled to remain competitive with their Live Meeting offerings and significantly expands their consumer base, but also indirectly provides benefits to Facebook, a Microsoft investee - by marrying Skype capabilities with Facebook's core systems, Facebook can get a significant leg up on phone connectivity between its members significantly expanding its standing as a social communications medium.<br />
<div><br />
</div><div>For Skype, the acquisition by Microsoft also places the company into a position where they can expand their offerings into the enterprise space that Microsoft has a major presence in, a market that Skype had difficulty penetrating before. This in turn provides a direct challenge both to Google, which has been trying to expand its Google Voice offerings to do the same (in conjunction with Google Docs and their email services), as well as Cisco's enterprise VOIP and virtual meeting software and hardware.</div><div><br />
</div><div>What I find intriguing about this particular buyout is that Skype will in effect become a separate division of Microsoft, one reporting directly to Steve Ballmer. Not only does this put one of their divisions almost completely in Silicon Valley, where Microsoft has had but a token presence until now, but it also emphasizes the underlying realization by the company that VOIP has become a major pillar and diffentiator for the largest software concerns, and needs to be treated as more than a minor offshot to their office strategy.</div><div><br />
</div><div>This last year has also seen an increasing validation of a strategy to try to keep companies intact with only a secondary ancillary branding as a Microsoft entity. This can be seen in Facebook, which bears little outward mark of being a Microsoft invested company, and ironically, if (and it's a big if) Microsoft can get Facebook and Skype to play well together, there may be some advantages to be had.</div><div><br />
</div><div>At the same time, the acquisition of Skype may also be a case of Ballmer chasing after brand and market share rather than technology, an approach which has burned him more than once. VOIP is reasonably well understood at this stage, and Skype's been sold once before because it couldn't make the revenue match predictions (it was losing money in its PC to PC communications, which of course was its prime attraction). Admittedly, it was still outcompeting Live Meeting, but there's a major question about whether the effort to integrate Skype into the Microsoft line-up (and the costs attendant with any such reorganization) may ultimately make this a losing proposition. If Microsoft reduces its service offerings there, it also reduces the appeal of the Skype service, and given the fairly mature state of the VOIP market, the primary paying customers may very well end up sticking with their dedicated providers.</div><div><br />
</div><div>In the end, I suspect that this will be modestly successful, but not a major game changer. The buyout helps Microsoft recover lost market share in a critical market if the integration remains minimal, but if Ballmer tries to bring Skype too much into the Microsoft fold he risks both customer and employee defections. Moreover, while voip should be a major part of a company strategy for a company the size of Microsoft, it may also prove a distraction to those areas where it needs to be far more focused, such as the related mobile market space, and even with a fair amount of cash still in the books, the cost of acquisition and integration is going to eat up a not insignificant part of that at a time when other markets are likely to be more profitable long term.<br />
<br />
Moreover, there's the question of whether this deal was motivated more by the need for Ballmer to show himself as being aggressive in the marketplace than it was for the stockholders. Ballmer has been far less aggressive in the market space than Gates was, and has often been swayed more by the desire to get the hottest properties rather than the ones that made the most competitive sense for the company. Skype was an old maid - it had been sitting out in the marketplace for a while, represents older technologies, and really was most valuable for its installed customer base - most of which were looking to pay as little as possible to use its services. This doesn't really bode well for Ballmer moving forward - indeed, it may prove to be the final misstep in a series of questionable buyouts and investments. </div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-44355341629506662272011-04-16T12:10:00.000-07:002011-04-16T14:06:42.360-07:00A New Job and New Ramblings, or Information Architecture 101<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Hi! Chances are if you came from links for the <a href="http://www.marklogic.com/">MarkLogic</a> site, you're probably looking for <a href="http://xmltoday.org/">XMLToday.org</a> (I run both) but if you're just here to see some rambling thoughts about information architecture from a graybeard, then no doubt you are in fact in the right place.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">About the new job - about a year ago, I came out to Annapolis, Maryland in order to work as a contract data architect for Lockheed on the US National Archives ERA project. NARA was fun to work with. Lockheed, not so much. In January, in a cost cutting move, several consultants were let go. The usual scramble for work began, aided for once with a fairly healthy bank balance and being in a place where there is a hunger for XML architects. Eight weeks later, after a number of interesting encounters, I landed at <a href="http://avalonconsult.com/">Avalon Consulting</a>. They had what I was looking for in a job - challenging work, decent pay, sane ideas about remote working and a lot of very bright people that liked to do good things in the information space. That it gave me a chance to work with MarkLogic again was a big plus, as I've rather become addicted to the platform.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
I even have a nice shiny new title - Information Architect. I seem to be making a career out of taking jobs with titles that didn't even exist five years ago, which is why I've always found it amusing when interviewers ask me what I want to do five years from now. I think next time I'm in that position, I'm going to tell the interviewer that I hope to be a Paradigm Architect. What does a paradigm architect do? I have no frickin clue, but it definitely sounds cool.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">So what about that Information Architect role? I have a theory about this. Humans have this obsession with building. Anthropologists seem to miss the point about humans being tool users - plenty of animals use tools, but only humans use those tools for the purpose of constructing buildings ... you don't see beavers out there with trawls spreading mortar on their dams, you don't see birds construct suspended baskets and scaffolding in order to build their nests. What's more, in every single animal except humans, the building of nests is something that seems to be specific to one overriding objective - to insure that the female and her young are protected while gestating and nursing.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Walk along the Mall in Washington DC or Fifth Avenue in New York and ask yourself whether in fact the role of all of those huge imposing edifices is to insure that someone's female and her young are protected. Uh huh. You answer likely was the same as mine. We build because we can, because it makes a statement about the builder, because it serves to house complex entities - governments, businesses, universities, marketplaces and so forth. It is our attempt to impose upon the natural world a sense of constraint, orderliness and predictability, in great part because our sense of reality is predicated upon the fact that, when reality is orderly, it means you can concentrate upon other things, but when reality is disordered, all of your attention is perforce placed just upon threat analysis.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The idea that information can be similarly ordered is hardly a new one. Large scale relational databases are a testament to such a philosophy - there are known schemas and relationships that exist within any given domain, and one can consequently order those schemas and relationships, describe them precisely down to data type and exceptions. The problem with this is similar to the problem that I see at the Madison Building of the Library of Congress, where I've been doing some consulting. The outside is a massive marble monument, a testament to the power of the written word and the making of informed decisions, and this is carried into the main atrium. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Yet beyond the <i>power foyer</i>, much of the building is occupied with dense arrays of small cubicles, and people who aren't essential to the day-to-day activities of the library are actually encouraged to work from home because it frees up space. The architecture of the building effectively limits the flexibility of the activities, because when the building was conceived, it's evolution was never really taken into account (this is a common problem with office space in DC in general; many of the buildings were created at a time when government was roughly a fifth the size it is today).</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Many years ago, I wrote an essay entitled The Architect and the Gardner, and while my perspective has (hopefully) grown since then, I find that my belief in the validity of the underlying thesis really hasn't. Organizations evolve over time, but they build their information systems as if the organization is always static. The reality that they see is a snapshot of a changing culture, but just like the buildings which seem massive on the outside but are in fact cramped and limited in space on the inside, the information structures that they create also tend to reflect the business reality of the time, with no thought to the evolution of that business.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">My own belief is that in many respects the information systems for an organization are a vital, living part of that organization. They follow cycles of creation, maturation, senescence and destruction. They evolve - both in terms of the nature of the data that passes through them and in terms of the ambient technological framework which dictates new content. Additionally, just as an organization has different types of culture depending upon where it is in its own cycle, so too do the information needs of that organization change based upon factors as diverse as current economic climate, stability and size of the company, regulatory regimes and so forth.<br />
<br />
Taken in that context, the idea of "building" such an information system begins to look suspect. Rather, a good information designer should think more like a landscape architect than a building architect. From the outset there should be a recognition that information systems have a definite life cycle - growing seasons, if you will - and that a rich ecosystem will have everything from long term data systems that are much like the trees in a garden and that serve as the archival backbone of an organization, to intermediate systems that support working data management and act as perennials, to localized data systems that are brought up on an application basis then brought down when that application is no longer needed.<br />
<br />
Yet even beyond that are transients - data that streams through the organization, that arrives from and goes to external services. Until comparatively recently these were seen as being more in the domain of the network manager, but while the network manager is concerned with throughput and access, the information architect is more focused on the content of those data streams, and insuring that the organization doesn't build dependencies upon those streams that are more than transient in nature themselves.<br />
<br />
Like a gardner, the information manager has to spend a great deal of time not only planning but pruning - insuring that legacy data systems are either migrated into archives or brought down gracefully, such that interdependencies can be reduced, and providing growth avenues for data flows when they become a larger part of an organization's operational information.<br />
<br />
One additional responsibility that an information architect has comes in helping to shape the shape or type of that data. An IA isn't a data modeler or ontologist (though he or she may wear that hat as well), but typically the architect will be called upon to set the ground rules upon which the ontologists build, as well as to determine which standards will be followed when working with content.<br />
<br />
A big reason for that is that information systems, like gardens, generally will evolve on their own, but not necessarily in a way to help facilitate the useful or relevant information flow for the organization. Again, in the garden analogy - if you have good soil, sunlight and rain, you can get anything to grow in a garden, but it's more than likely that what will take root are weeds - information that takes up space in your physical systems but provides little benefit, and reduces the availability of resources for that information that is important. Ontologies run rampant can make accessing information difficult, ad-hoc or poorly designed schemas (or no schemas at all) can make interoperability difficult, too high a degree of coupling can cause siloization and make the sharing of physical resource problematic and so forth.<br />
<br />
In many respects an information architect performs for the information in an organization the same role that a systems architect performs for the physical hardware and a software architect performs for processing systems. The three are complementary roles, and are still largely technical in nature, and in general they represent the technical systems designers for an organization. In particularly large information-centric businesses information architects may manage data designers, ontologists and search engineers, something I suspect will increasingly be the norm for organizations as they shift from process development to information management.<br />
<br />
Granted, a lot of these are just my own observations. Roles emerge because there is a niche that needs to be filled in an organization, and given the increasingly dominant role that information organization and management (information gardening?) has in business today, it only stands to reason that the role of information architect is likely to be a critical one moving forward.<br />
<br />
Now, about that paradigm architect position ...<br />
<br />
<i>Kurt Cagle is an Information Architect specializing in XML data systems, and works as a consultant for Avalon Consulting. He can be reached at caglek@avalonconsult.com</i></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-13361238293024586902010-02-16T00:50:00.000-08:002010-02-16T00:50:26.168-08:00So What's the Problem?Recently, I stumbled across an interesting article on the <a href="http://news.discovery.com/tech/visualizing-the-electric-car-2015.html#post-a-comment">X Prize for zero-emissions automobiles</a>. While I think the article had some merit (I especially liked the concept of using the skin of an automobile to store and release energy), the associated commentary actually got me to thinking about a bigger problems: how do you get from the world as it exists today to one where we have far smaller dependency upon oil, are able to significantly curb carbon emissions and still have a society that is able to grow in terms of its intellectual innovations even as it meets the demands placed upon it by its population?<br />
<br />
There are of course several camps of thinking here. The first is the BAU - business as usual - camp, which basically says that we can continue doing what we do today and expect some miracle solution to save us. In this scenario, each problem that emerges is essentially isolated and unrelated to any other, resources are limitless because there will always be some magical piece of technology that will keep us empowered and keep our environment clean and productive, and that you can create economies based upon the movement of electrons representing financial tokens. I refer to this world view as Kurzweil City, named after famed futurist Ray Kurzweil and his belief in the power of technology.<br />
<br />
The second camp is the apocalypse view - world oil production is falling even while the population is rising, the environmental systems are under extreme stress and will soon result in massive climate change, and we've passed the event horizon. In this view, the end of civilization as we know it is nigh, and we will be in for a painful, long term depression that will ultimately end up with us huddled in our unheated houses, guns at hand, waiting for the morning as the ravening mobs strip the landscape like locusts under cover of night. The resulting Kunstlervilles, named for writer James Howard Kunstler, ultimately resemble nothing more than 18th century frontier towns set against a backdrop of rusting automobiles and decaying suburbs.<br />
<br />
While my own views tend to be more Kunstler than Kurzweil, I think that both are missing the point. Humans adapt. It's what we've done successfully for more than three million years, and there's absolutely nothing to indicate that, as a species we've lost this ability to adapt. At the same time, we usually adapt best in times of maximum adversity ... we're not terribly good at anticipating the need for change, but once change has happened, we are actually quite good at seeing what the landscape looks like and changing our behavior accordingly. What that implies is that both Kunstler and Kurzweil are correct, but the scale on which they are correct are different.<br />
<br />
Consider, for instance, the twin problems of climate change and peak oil, both of which I think are in play. It's quite probable that the global climate is in fact heating, but there are three questions that, in my mind, are still very much unanswered:<br />
<br />
1) Have we accounted for all externalities? That is to say, can we see with any conclusive proof that there are factors that aren't anthropogenic that are causing the changes in the environment?<br />
<br />
2) Are the models that we're creating sufficiently powerful to create an accurate (rather than politicized) view of the behavior of weather? and<br />
<br />
3) Are we certain that non-linearities in the model won't ultimately end up inducing a negative feedback look that will dampen factors? I'm thinking most specifically of the North Atlantic Gyre here, and the potential for causing localized cooling effects that could ultimately dampen out the heating effects, though there are other feedback loops in the system that I don't think we've fully taken into account.<br />
<br />
Climate change is very important to us right now because our civilization is remarkably sensitive to weather based disruptions, from hurricanes to the massive snow-storm that blanked the eastern US this year, while leaving the Olympics snow-free in Vancouver, but we need to understand that there is a distinction between such climate vulnerability and specific trends. Indeed, the most rational course of action is to develop plans for considering many potential futures, then to fine tune them as any given scenario comes to pass.<br />
<br />
Peak Oil is another such issue, and likely a far more immediate one. Again, however, the problems that are associated with Peak Oil tend to be problems that have occurred because we've built an oil based economy, and that economy is becoming increasingly tenuous. I have concentrated on the historical aspects of Peak Oil in other posts as well potential effects down the road, but here I want to look at the question of how do we deal with scenarios where oil supplies become unreliable.<br />
<br />
The BAU scenario is becoming evidently increasingly unsustainable long term, but the interesting thing is that slowly and far from uniformly, things are changing. One of the most obvious consequences of the oil-based economy is that it has shaped our cities. Most European and Asian cities were formed before the power resources inherent in oil were available, and as such tend to reflect a pedestrian model.<br />
<br />
In North and South America, on the other hand, most of the population growth has taken place in the last one hundred years, and as such has fitted very closely to the rise (and to a certain degree fall) of oil as the primary motive and heat source. Small, largely isolated communities were connected first by rail, then by road, growing larger until they eventually overlapped other communities. Political autonomy in this communities was lost as the benefits of centralized authority took hold.<br />
<br />
More importantly, work centers shifted out of these small towns to urban centers, in part because of economies of scale, in part because of the strong need for managers to have their primary operations personnel - financial systems, research and development, production and so forth - as close to the management structure as possible in order to minimize communication and resource management problems.<br />
<br />
A certain amount of ego was involved as well - you aren't truly successful as a business unless you have a tall, new tower to dominate the landscape, a symbol (fraught with obvious symbolism) of the overarching control you have compared to everyone else. Because power was centralized, this meant that such psychological issues could readily be rationalized as business ones. Similarly, workers in this system were important only for their skills, and as such required constant babysitting and/or bullying lest they revert to the lying, cheating scum that management knew them to be.<br />
<br />
This meant that the work was at an increasing distance from the homes. Here's where I break with Kunstler - I don't believe that the suburbs were created due to poor urban planning, but rather occurred because urban planning can at best only nudge the development of a city by zoning - and fails to take into account the fact that in many cases agglomerated townships had their own views of zoning and planning that were consistent at the time but failed to factor in being swallowed by larger entities.<br />
<br />
People moved to the suburbs because of three factors:<br />
1) Cheap oil made living at a distance still more affordable than living closer nearer to the urban center, and provided the opportunity to own nicer property at lower prices,<br />
2) Once a family is established in a house, they will live there for a while, and will only move when economic benefits outweigh the benefits of maintaining residence. This meant that expanding populations will end living farther and farther away because there are simply not enough niches closer in, and this factor usually meant smaller communities getting absorbed into larger ones.<br />
3) Cheap oil and the fact that that the US in particular was a net oil exporter meant that there was significant money for the development of large scale interstate projects and traffic artery construction.<br />
<br />
This means that the underlying structure of most cities came about at a time when energy was cheap and money was plentiful, and are increasingly at odds with an era where energy is expensive and money is scarce. It is this mismatch, as much as any, that is causing so many problems in our society.<br />
<br />
Yet it is worth appreciating the fact that most of this change has occurred within the last fifty years. While, for a certain generation, this may seem like the bulk of their lives, social memory usually doesn't get baked into stone until after a couple of centuries. In many places, such as here in Victoria, the pre-oil era didn't really end until comparatively recently, and there are many still alive who remember a time when the oil economy wasn't so heavy an influence. This means that for many people (especially the younger ones), the oil economy is itself a relatively transient event, which is what offers up some hope.<br />
<br />
The year 2007 is notable for the fact that for the first time, Christmas sales online exceeded Christmas sales in the brick and mortar world. More books are now sold online than are sold offline, and an increasing number of those are eBooks. From the Internet today, you can provide your measurements to any number of vendors and get a full wardrobe sent to you within a few days, a wardrobe that likely is closer in style and fit than anything you could find in stores. Malls, once the center of retail activity, are increasingly becoming ghost towns, and in some places are being razed and left to go fallow again. Meanwhile online retail presences are growing, even in one of the harshest recessions in living memory.<br />
<br />
Once critical business support centers - accounts receivable and payable, research and development, marketing, sales and even management - are increasingly becoming distributed, and in more and more cases are becoming virtualized altogether. The office towers, constructed in part because of the need to consolidate business functions, and in part as somewhat phallic representations of power and dominance, are emptying out, not just because businesses are folding but because businesses increasingly have no need for them - they're white elephants from a different era.<br />
<br />
Intellectual services - legal services, medical advice, accounting, design, marketing, etc. - have been migrating to a virtualized state for the last couple of decades, as professionals in these fields chase the money to where the market is ... in this case online. Traditional publishing is in freefall because of this, but after a couple of decades of transition, online publishing is beginning to distinguish itself as a profit center, adjusted to the environment of the web.<br />
<br />
Physical services - from hair care to acute medical care to restaurantiers and pubs - make up the bulk of the suburban businesses, but it's easy to underestimate their significance. These are services that effectively can't be virtualized (you can't get a haircut online), but can be distributed. What's more, these businesses are shifting away from the major corporate chains, which are facing increasing challenges because their primary benefit - an ability to distribute large amounts of food inexpensively through the use of uniform packaging, marketing and purchasing economies of scale - are now being challenged by the mix of higher oil prices and stricter environmental regulations.<br />
<br />
Indeed, this last point needs to be reiterated. Many business analysts made the mistake of assuming that the primary reason that companies such as McDonalds proved so popular was because of their effective uniformity of marketing. I don't think that was actually the case, or at least all that major a part of it. The real benefit was logistical - by taking advantage of economies of scale due to inexpensive energy and oil availability, such companies could reduce the overall cost of a meal to well below what the local market could provide, forcing many of those companies out of business, except at the boutique end.<br />
<br />
However, once that factor fades - once the real costs of shipping those Big Macs and Fries enter into the equation and the cost of mass producing the raw inputs for those meals rise, the local stores (with much shorter supply lines and generally fresher and healthier product) are more effectively able to compete. This is why the next decade will see a dramatic rise in the number of independently owned restaurants compared to the chains.<br />
<br />
The same is true of the big box stores, save that their demise will likely come due to the Internet rather than competitive local stores. However, what's interesting here is that the goods being sold will be more locally produced, likely through networks of vendors working either independently or in conjunction with mediating merchants online.<br />
<br />
Again, distribution and shipping costs play a big part here, and these will force a relocalization of both raw materials and finished goods. While the middleman may not be completely cut out of the equation, the chances are good that the middleman is likely not going to be spending large amounts of money on mall outlets when they can spend the money online to minimize distribution costs. <br />
<br />
This raises questions about the viability of the Walmart model moving forward. Walmart is fundamentally dependent upon the oil economy model. It's goods are generally produced in low labor cost and low materials cost regimes, then distributed in bulk on oil-intensive transport tankers. They have been competitive because of their ability to undercut local producers. As that competitive edge disappears (and local vendors begin to become cost competitive again), expect the big box stores to be closed.<br />
<br />
Manufacturing has similar patterns. Manufacturing overall tends to be local, and because of the potential environmental issues, manufacturing in general has been more distributed than other businesses. Because outsourcing of manufacturing is becoming increasingly expensive, local manufacturers should end up being far more competitive than they have been, and will better be able to supply localized economies.<br />
<br />
What this means is that urban use patterns are now shifting - intellectual work no longer needs to be tied to an urban center (because these services are being done over the web), which strengthens local suburban communities. Manufacturing and physical services similarly are becoming more localized and shifting away from either urban centers or outsourced vendors. This will tend to strengthen suburban centers as the needs for such services rise, though such centers will likely become more municipal than commercial.<br />
<br />
The final factor in all of this is energy production. As you shift towards more localized and distributed forms of energy production (and alt-energy forms), this tends to provide additional revenues that accrue at the local level. Large scale energy production - coal, oil, nuclear, etc. - on the other hand, favor transnational corporate control of energy resources, as does the oil distribution network (especially when the country is a net importer of oil). This money in turn usually cycles itself back into the local economy, where it can be used to continue upgrading existing infrastructure, setting up a virtuous cycle again.<br />
<br />
This process won't happen evenly, and it definitely won't happen without some (perhaps a lot) of pain. It will give more power to specific regions, and metropolitan areas within regions, at the expense of the larger nation-state (the US, Canada and Mexico especially) and rural areas (which currently tend to have a disproportionate amount of influence in the US especially given their greater weight in the Senate).<br />
<br />
It will also favor those regions that have the best mix of urban and rural distribution, available water supplies, ports and the like, while coming down especially hard on those regions that are missing key pieces of this mix (for instance, Scottsdale, AZ has few water resources and little in the way of arable farmland, even though they have the potential for solar energy, while areas like Seattle or San Francisco are reasonably well endowed with all of these).<br />
<br />
However the speed at which this occurs will depend largely upon the effectiveness of the existing economic power structure in obstructing the changes. That it will occur is a given - these are very hard and fast megatrends at work here - but such an economic transition favors very different players, and the oil economy players have the advantage of incumbency at this stage.<br />
<br />
I'm coming to believe that political considerations - the structure of power sharing within a society - are increasingly driven by economic considerations rather than vice versa, though politics generally dictates the degree to which economic costs are externalized to the society at large.<br />
<br />
Many economies globally are now going through a period of economic decline as positions favoring the oil economy are being unwound, mostly due to the realization that the underlying assumptions of effectively limitless energy resources, which lays at the foundation of our current credit-based economy, are no longer valid. These assumptions were facile on the surface, but were vital for the oil economy to get access to the necessary funds that would finance the continued development of political structures and labile populations friendly to this economic viewpoint.<br />
<br />
The very likely second leg of deflation, now beginning to unfold in Europe as the Maastricht treaty disintegrates though likely to come back round to North America as American and Canadian investments in Europe are hit by the largest margin calls in history, are only continuing the unwinding of these assumptions, further weakening the oil economy and likely causing the political unrest necessary to affect meaningful political change, even if such change ends up redrawing political boundaries to more accurately reflect economic rather than historical realities. <br />
<br />
To that end, I'm increasingly of the opinion that while you will see political volatility and a great deal of economic instability over the course of the next fifteen to twenty years, these changes are the necessary precursors to the transition to a new economy and new political reality. It will force us to rethink a great number of assumptions, from the nature of work and the mechanisms of valuation to how we build our cities (and countries) moving forward. It will look superficially more agrarian, but will hide a sophisticated technological underpinning.<br />
<br />
It will offer fewer opportunities for "getting rich", but potentially a healthier, more satisfying standard of living for a larger percentage of the population. It will not be uniform - by the end of the twenty first century it is very likely that there will be regions that are technologically and socially far more advanced while other regions may almost be feudal in nature, based largely upon choices made in the next decade.<br />
<br />
This should be an interesting time.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-24028498973246115572010-02-13T02:47:00.000-08:002010-02-13T02:52:31.300-08:00Economic Hurricane SeasonThis is my first blog on this platform in a while, though I will likely be writing more from here moving forward. My life seems to have moved into one of those strange interstitial periods where, despite the best of intentions, little seems to be happening. Over the years I've noticed that these are often gestational times, when the batteries are recharging and projects that had been sidelined or abandoned are re-examined and revitalized.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
There are projects - I've actually been writing out chapters to a novel, though I'm nowhere near solid enough at this stage to even seek a publisher, assuming I don't just go the route that I think many others are now following of going directly to print (and eBook format) without the intervention of a formal publisher, at least to start.<br />
<br />
While I won't go into details here, many of the ideas of the novel come about from my thoughts about where we're going, both technologically and societal, thoughts that I've expressed here and elsewhere in a more speculative mode. For those whom I've discussed this with before, this is essentially Open, Mark II, just cast into the mode of fiction rather than speculative analysis. <br />
<br />
Regarding the "where are we going" part, what happens over the next couple of years is going to have major ramifications for the next thirty or more, probably more so than at any time since perhaps the early 1970s. The sovereign economic crisis in Greece will likely get resolved by some deft paper movement, likely at least officially out of the IMF, which in practice means that the US and Germany are effectively loaning Greece the money to try to get out of their hole.<br />
<br />
Of course, this loan will only be effective if Greece is capable of reducing its current debt (on and off book) from 800% of GDP (yes, you read that right) to something closer to 75%. This means that all governmental expenditures stop - no health care, no unemployment insurance, no government subsidies, no education, no spending on infrastructure, and that taxes rise to 75% or more on all citizens.<br />
<br />
Put another way, in order for any financial assistance to be even remotely useful in restoring the financial health of Greece, it will require cuts so draconian that people will be in the streets with torches and machine guns. It won't happen. This week has seen the application of a band-aid on a cancer patient.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/madoff/Insolvent.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/madoff/Insolvent.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Greece isn't alone in this. Portugal, Ireland and Spain are in only slightly less dire straights, and the political will to save Greece will likely mean that one or more of these other countries will almost certainly be left hat in hand at the curbside. And lest those in the US feel smug about their own situation, consider that both US and UK debt at this point has on and off-book debt obligations well in excess of 500% of GDP, and several subcountries within the US (California, New York, Georgia, etc.) are looking at remarkably similar debt ratios.<br />
<br />
We're facing an ebb-tide right now. There's an interesting phenomenon that anyone who's stood in the water of a beach with sizable waves can attest to. If you stand out far enough in the water, you'll notice an interesting shear force that occurs as a wave crashes and advances along the beach. Even as it is advancing, there's a back flow that is occurring, moving away from the beach, near your feet.<br />
<br />
In the US the backflow started about 1972, which was, not coincidentally also the time when oil imports exceeded oil exports in the US for the first time. The momentum of the breaking water caused the waves to continue to advance for some time, but people already noticed that it was becoming harder to feed a family of four, that despite increasing wages, the money didn't seem to go as far, and the trips to far off places that were part and parcel of the 60s and early 70s became increasingly expensive over time.<br />
<br />
By the mid-1980s, women were coming into the workforce less because of feminism and more because the family increasingly needed that second income to continue the lifestyle that they had, and even then the lifestyle seemed to recede. The job guaranteed for life became two jobs, then four, then eight, and has now reached a point where employment itself is becoming a dicey proposition.<br />
<br />
Populations are becoming older globally, though most especially in the so called first-world countries. People who retire pull money out of the system rather than contributing money into it, or at least would have if a couple of back-to-back recessions didn't proceed to pull out most of that money for them. And yes, financial managers are as aware of the demographics as anyone, and increasingly the questions need to be raised about exactly where all that invested capital ultimately ended up.<br />
<br />
We're in full ebb-tide now - beyond the demographics, the realities of Peak Oil (which by many accounts the peak of which occurred between three and five years ago) indicate that we're in for a time of oil price rises and crashes globally, meaning that there's now a very real brake acting on the economy anytime it begins to show signs of health. In that kind of environment, especially with credit still effectively frozen, development of both oil exploration and extraction rigs and development of alternative energy forms slow to a crawl because the risk premium is too high. Government investments here will help some, but those investments will take a while to show any significant returns, and as such are vulnerable to political pressures.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://dshort.com/charts/mortgage-resets.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="288" src="http://dshort.com/charts/mortgage-resets.gif" width="320" /></a></div>And for those looking for a bottom to the housing market, consider that we've been in what amounts to the eye of a hurricane since March 2009. Subprime mortgage papers hit reset points from 2007 to 2009 as teaser rates jumped 100-300% once the grace period ended. These have largely reset (resulting in about 7% of all mortgages now either 90+ days in arrears or in foreclosure, up from 0.3% in 2004). However, most alt-prime mortgages are resetting between now and early-2012, as are a number of ARMs, along with a lot of commercial real estate that is increasingly being abandoned by tenants going out of business.<br />
<br />
This second wave of the hurricane will hit an already badly weakened economy in the US and UK (and is a big part of the reason that it's already taking out the weaker economies along the Mediterranean). This is why, despite valiant efforts to keep the DOW propped above 10K, the inertia has shifted away from an explosively growing market to one that is a black swan away from a major nose dive. While it is <i>just</i> possible that we'll hit the best case scenario of the economy staying relatively stagnant for the next couple of years, most people already feel instinctively like we're already entering phase two of the first twenty-first century depression.<br />
<br />
Yet, as odd as it may sound, the net effect of all this may ultimately end up proving to be positive. There have been two forms of globalization that have been taking place. The first has been the consolidation of financial power as the end game that started around the end of World War II. This gave the movers of money unprecedented control, and ended up with obscene fiscal imbalances between richest and poorest, both within countries and globally. This particular storm is destroying that power base, is eliminating the bonds of economic liberalization that overall have benefited the wealthy at the expense of the weak.<br />
<br />
It's forcing us to rethink the notion of export oriented growth economies. At some times, growth economies are good - when a population on average is young, significant industrialization is needed to support the needs of those entering into the work force, is needed for educating the children and taking care of health and providing better infrastructure for transportation and resource distribution. When populations are old the societies contract; you need fewer goods and smaller houses, more medical services but less educational services. The economy should contract as well to reflect this. In the fullness of time this will change again, but those changes occur on the scale of decades, not years. <br />
<br />
The second change has been globalization of communication. This is a trend I expect to continue, and it's also having far reaching effects, especially among the young. This is helping to deconstruct the command and control economy in place since the early 1950s, and replacing it with transient global webs of entrepreneurship and innovation. It will likely end up destroying education as we know it, education built largely upon the need to learn facts rather than analysis, but will replace it with something both richer and stranger than we can possibly anticipate.<br />
<br />
It's also about to replace sovereign reserve notes with myriad local currencies, each jockeying for position on a second by second basis, their strengths and weaknesses mirroring localized economies and their ability to trade - and the soundness of their economic policies.<br />
<br />
Phase transitions can be harrowing, sweeping away ideas that worked until they didn't that have become embedded into society, but they are also times of opportunity as new economic niches open up ... a lot like hurricanes, when you think about it.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-1970556961777443532009-05-07T10:08:00.001-07:002009-05-07T10:08:49.154-07:00Future Proof: Kurzweil Cities and KunstlervillesAccording to a number of serious and well-intentioned articles written in the last century (not to mention the Jetsons), by 2010 we were all supposed to live in giant cities with mile-high sky-scrapers, flying cars, pneumatic tube transit, and robot servants. Admittedly, this view gave way to a somewhat more dystopian version around 1980 or so - think <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJrOVLEUBgw">Blade Runner</a>, for instance - in which overpopulation, over-urbanization and technology gone wild created a dark and threatening world.<br /><br />Perhaps one of the biggest exponent of the power of technology to change the world for the better is <a href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html">Ray Kurzweil</a>. Inventor, author, visionary, Kurzweil's central thesis has been that as Moore's law continues in its seemingly unrelenting progression, humanity and the machine will become ever more indistinguishable, and that ultimately there will be no problem that can't be solved with the suitable application of intellect.<br /><br />At the other end of the spectrum for Kurzweil is <a href="http://www.kunstler.com/">James Howard Kunstler</a>. Kunstler has been writing about the relentless spread of urbanization and the problems that will occur as systemic shocks - peak oil, peak water, climate change, aging populations and so forth - cause profound changes to the way that we build our cities, ultimately resulting in the destruction of the suburbs and the end of technological society as we know it. His vision of late 21st century life looks a lot more like the mid-19th century, and it is, curiously, surprisingly appealing even in its starkness.<br /><br />I've dubbed these scenarios Kurzweil Cities and Kunstlervilles - views of optimism and pessimism that, when looked at through somewhat different lenses, could just as readily be interchangeable in terms of their values as utopias vs. dystopias.<br /><br />As many people have noted, cities are organic over a large enough period of time. They exhibit emergent behaviors that seem eerily similar to the way that lower order life-forms act. They grow in response to available energy sources, expanding outward as energy enters the system, contracting back in on itself as energy leaves. Highways and streets are the arteries, carrying car and truck corpuscles from one part of the city to another. The nerves are the power and information conduits within the city. When cities collide, they either form systemic cells or absorb one another, the older former towns slowly losing their distinct identity over time.<br /><br />This metaphor, or abstraction, is an important thing to keep in mind when looking at the future of cities. Cities grow in response to increases in population. This may seem obvious, but I'd contend that its actually a very subtle point - the larger the population, the more likely that the necessary number of interactions can take place to push the city to a new level of abstraction, while at the same time the greater the drain on the energy resources available to that city. In a city where the energy drain is higher than the energy sources (where energy can be physical energy such as electricity or the abstraction of energy in the form of money) the quality of life in the city drops - there are fewer job opportunities, the standard of living goes down, the government becomes more authoritarian, the ability to support urban services decline.<br /><br />Technology cannot create new energy - it can only make it possible to use existing energy more efficiently, and always at the cost of powering the technology itself. This has always been the fundamental flaw of Kurzweil's vision - Moore's law does not come for free. Every generational doubling in processing power occurs because more energy goes into the technologies to make it happen. Costs for fabrication plants for creating new microprocessors increase geometrically as well - the cost to create a typical fab is now well into the billion dollars category.<br /><br />The problem that's led to the current crisis is that the energy costs here are borrowed. Intel or AMD generally doesn't have anywhere near the amount of cash on hand to build new fabs. Instead, it borrows the money against future earnings - it is in essence borrowing energy that hasn't been created yet.<br /><br />This future borrowing has been endemic in US culture for a long time. Cities (and larger geopolitical structures) generate their revenues in one of a few ways - they either take possession of a power or resource source and sell from that, they receive revenues from the state (which simply pushes the problem up a level of abstraction), they place a tax on the current revenues of its citizenry and associated companies, or they create bonds to borrow from the future earnings that the project in question will produce, adding in a premium in order to compensate the bond holders for the potential risk of the bond defaulting.<br /><br />When the weight of such credit exceeds the potential of the system (as it exists) to pay back those loans, the system collapses. That's what is happening now. The system is becoming less energetic, and as such, the ability of the system to support its abstractions is diminishing. The US government is working diligently to prop up the system, but it's constrained by the same problems - any money that it creates is a promissory note on new energy production, despite the fact that energy production in the US has been declining since the early 1970s. It may be able to sustain the status quo for a while longer - but the next crash will likely be harder.<br /><br />So is Kunstler in our future then? Not necessarily. Kunstler's central thesis is that an oil-dependent economy will eventually lead to collapse as the supply of oil continues to diminish relative to demand. Oil <b>is</b> important, both as a fuel source and as a resource for production of goods, but its important to differentiate these two use cases. The principle use of oil today is for transportation, moving things from point A to point B. If you can switch cars over to electric or electric-hybrid use this will significantly reduce demand on oil - perhaps even to the point where US production can easily accommodate all other uses of oil. Flywheel systems, and shock kinetics also add potential power, especially for larger vehicles that have more intrinsic momentum).<br /><br />To do so, however, other changes become important. Electricity production needs to become more distributed. Efficiencies in solar power production are raising the possibility that cities can actually become net power producers - both with regional power "farms" and solar enabled houses and businesses. Beamed power - in which solar power collectors in space are used to create coherent microwave beams that can provide power to collectors even in cloudy areas, could dramatically increase capabilities. Geothermal taps, wind power, wave power and more efficient super capacitors make energy production in coastal areas more feasible. More efficient monitoring and routing of power (smart grid) can also insure that energy is made available to those places that have the largest demand, rather than getting wasted.<br /><br />There are even places for such technologies as nuclear fission plants, which, despite the publicity of both Four Mile Island and Chernobyl, are generally much safer today. The principle problem here comes in taking care of the high upfront costs and the still troublesome waste disposal issues.<br /><br />What this implies however is that the future will likely be neither Kurzweil cities nor Kunstlervilles. Instead, for a while it will be a mix of both - cities that can most effectively harness net energy production will thrive and grow, and the standard of living there will improve. Cities that can't will sink into slums and abandoned neighborhoods, crime will rise and people who can afford to leave will for those places that offer better standards of living. The dominant cities of the twenty-first century will be the ones that make the transition first, and it is likely that these cities will also end up creating stronger regional trading blocs that circumvent political boundaries (a case in point would be the Vancouver/Seattle/Portland corridor, which has the potential to become a cohesive political entity as energy and resource systems merge, despite crossing both state and national boundaries).<br /><br />Indeed, this last point is worth reiterating - political boundaries may be conservative, but they also eventually snap in the face of energy flow structures. Regional trade and energy blocs are comparatively new abstractions, eddies along the older nationalistic boundaries. They will gain in cohesiveness over time, eventually overshadowing older nationalistic boundaries altogether. This means that, again taking the case of "Cascadia", while inhabitants of Portland, Seattle and Vancouver will continue being citizens of their respective states, provinces and countries, they will increasingly think of themselves as being Cascadians as trade and energy alliances build.<br /><br />Ultimately, the cities of 2020 or even 2050 will likely end up being not that different from today, at least on the surface, though individually they may look quite different. Some places, like Detroit, may not even exist - it was conveniently placed in the 1920s through the 1960s to bring together the raw materials, energy sources (from Pennsylvania oil) and cheap labor to mass produce cars, as well as conveniently placed to distribute them. None of these factors are in play anymore, so the city is dying.<br /><br />On the other hand, when a city enters into this mode, it is also, ironically, at its most fluid - investment terms are favorable, it's easier to raze dead neighborhoods, townships that are tethered to the city are able to break free and make more effective decisions at lower levels of abstraction, Detroit in 2050 may very well be a network of independent towns, each powering their own subgrids, each producing its own own products and services. Education and the arts may may very well be growth industries by that point, with energy production subsidizing the initial costs, and this is perhaps the real lesson to be gained from Kurzweil and Kunstler both - by moving off the oil grid, by moving away from a caustic and self-defeating consumerist culture, it may be possible that both scenarios come true; the future is a region full of universities towns and centers of learning and the arts - urban enough to bring together the necessary confluence of people but rural enough to sustain the agriculture basis of the region. I could live with that.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078260.post-62626600329355938222009-05-07T10:07:00.000-07:002009-05-07T10:08:06.199-07:00Future Proof: FreelancerI have been a freelancer for most of my working career. The specific jobs vary, of course - I've been a freelance writer, a freelance journalist, a freelance programmer, a freelance information architect, a freelance trainer, a freelance teacher - the list goes on and on. While there is a standing joke that freelance is another word for unemployed, I'd definitely have to disagree there ... I have had years where I've cleared six figures as a freelancer, though there have also been a few years where I've made just barely above the poverty line.<br /><br />There are certain professions that lend themselves well to freelancing, most of them in the information sphere. Programming is a natural - projects have a beginning, a middle and an end. After the project is done, you may or may not need the skill-sets of the person involved. Ergo, freelancing. Writing is another intellectual pursuit that has a definite terminus. You teach classes for a quarter or two, but unless you're tenured there's no real advantage to keeping a teacher when all you're looking for is someone to impart this particular wisdom at this time.<br /><br />There are similarly professions that don't lend themselves well to freelancing, though they are becoming rarer. Indeed, as I'm writing this, I'm scratching my head about what professions can't be done in freelance mode. And that, in a nutshell, may be the problem.<br /><br />Full time work makes a great deal of sense in an industrial society - the need for producing X number of widgets per hour every day means that you need to have labor there every hour of that day, you need managers for that labor, then need managers for the managers. The cost of disruption in that labor is high - if someone quits then you have to get someone else trained up in that new role, and you have holes moving through the organization until you can find someone from the outside. This translates into significantly reduced productivity.<br /><br />Most of the "benefits" provided by business have their origins in this mindset as well - health care originally made sense by having an onsite doctor or working closely with a nearby hospital, in great part because it made sense financially to insure that workers had as few disruptions due to illness or injury as possible. Pensions (and later investment vehicles) similarly emerged as a way of keeping employees long term - people were far less likely to quit for a competitor (and take potentially valuable information with them) if the company held on to their retirement savings. In general, retention was the rule.<br /><br />However, today, this process is going in reverse. Businesses are disaggregating. Conglomerates are selling off or IPO-ing divisions because the costs involved in a large labor force are increasingly outweighing the benefits. Health care costs are skyrocketing as the workforce grows older, as the multiple layers of "managed care" extract ever larger portions of the pie, and as fewer doctors and nurses enter the field. Pensions had long been something of a running joke - a borrowable pool of funds for the company that was often used to invest in fairly risky investments, and as those investments failed to play out, companies are now faced with new retirees asking for their pension funds just as those funds have been wiped out by malinvestment and mismanagement.<br /><br />What makes this worse is that the technologies are increasingly in place such that people no longer need to be in one place to work, and that if a person does in fact leave they seldom have the same negative impact on productivity (in the short term) that they once did - even if that person is a stellar performer. Longer term, of course, losing those start performers can be the death knell for a company, but the difference is that the impact is seldom felt for a while.<br /><br />Thus, for many companies, the ongoing recession is a chance to reduce their existing obligations - purge their full-time ranks and then, as people become more desperate, rehire them on a contingency, freelance or part time basis. From an accounting standpoint, this is the best of all possible worlds - you don't need to pay for ever-increasing health care, don't need to make contributions into a pension plan that you know will never actually be fully capitalized, don't have to dilute existing stock, can hire more people when demand rises and can then lay them off when demand falls, either on a project basis or over the course of a general economy's rise and fall.<br /><br />However, from the labor standpoint, this is also the worst of all possible worlds. As a freelancer, you are essentially running your own business, but almost invariably without the level business support that corporations routinely have. You become responsible for your own health care, for doing your own taxes (and usually get taxed at a fairly high premium for being "self-employed"), for your own retirement. Work becomes episodic and sporadic - you either are searching for new work or you are facing a glut that you can't fill, but you don't dare outsource it because you need the money to tide you over in the lean times.<br /><br />Most independent freelancers compensate for the sporadic nature of the work by charging a premium for services - a contractor should, in theory, cost a company more than a full time employee short-term because the freelancer is paying for his or her overhead that would otherwise be paid for by the company. However, in practice, unless you are highly specialized, you are competing with a (currently growing) pool of similar contractors which mean that companies can effectively bid on competing contracts to keep these wages low.<br /><br />This practice is exacerbated by agencies, which usually end up acting as a buffer between the freelance labor force and companies. Most of them may offer very short term benefits for the duration of the contract - minimal health care policies, for instance, that the employee usually has to purchase - but usually nothing beyond that. In exchange for that, they absorb that 20-30% pad that freelancers would otherwise save up for down-time, meaning that from the hiring company's standpoint, the labor is still expensive, but can be let go at a moment's notice without significant contractual problems - and because the agency itself can cap the wages, the wages are still less than they would be for an independent contractor.<br /><br />Currently 29% of the workforce in the United States is contingency contract, up from 24% in 2005. That includes both part time workers (those that are deliberately held below the minimal 35 hour line that costitutes full employment) and freelances who may work 40 hours or more a week but are hired on a temporary basis. It's likely, as companies continue to shed jobs that this will grow to between 33 and 37% by 2015, meaning one in three people will be working outside of the established "safety net" of full or salaried employment, including a rising percentage of professionals - management executives, medical practitioners, financial services professionals, lawyers, engineers, marketing and communication specialists, designers, system architects and software developers, along with the whole plethora of "creatives" - artists, writers, musicians and so forth.<br /><br />Of those, roughly 70% are female, which reflects less upon a bias against women (though that's there too) and more on the fact that women have entered the workforce more recently than men, are more likely to be in information-centric careers and are thus perhaps more indicative of future trends than men are. It's worthwhile noting that the percentage of contingency workers under the age of 40 is also much higher than it is for those older than forty, though how much of this is due to structural changes in the workforce vs. the fact that younger workers are more likely to have fewer commitments that make contingency work more attractive is hard to tell, save that the under-forty contingency percentage has been creeping up steadily for decades.<br /><br />The question for policy-makers is what to do about it. First, its worthwhile to note that there is a world of difference between a freelance lawyer or programmer who has specialized knowledge and can usually afford to handle insurance, taxes and retirement savings and the part time Walmart worker who likely can't - and for clarification, I'll refer to the first as freelance workers and the second as contingency workers.<br /><br />The freelancer in general should bite the bullet and incorporate as a small business, and press for better legislation to provide more legal rights to these microcorporations. I see this ultimately happening, especially as the number of web businesses rise - businesses that have significant "virtual" presence, but that may represent a group of one or a handful of active partners. Overall the IRS has taken a dim view of such small organizations, but they represent the bulk of all new incorporations, and as the force multipliers of technology have increased the ability of such small companies to have an oversized presence, it's likely that most of these businesses will stay small, people wise.<br /><br />Unfortunately, contingency workers may not be as well positioned. In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt worked with the Federal Reserve to create a plan to put Americans to work long term - an decision was made to allow for a certain amount of inflation in the monetary base in exchange for full employment. In essence, every year the monetary base was allowed to grow by between 2% and 3%, which devalued the dollar by a corresponding amount. Prices rose, and with them real wages dropped, but as more people were entering into the system at that point than leaving it, it meant that people entering the system were actually making marginally less that, in the aggregate, freed up a lot of capital, which in turn was used for starting new projects and hiring more people while keeping people happy that their wages (at least on paper) were stable or growing slightly.<br /><br />This worked for a while because it was a Ponzi scheme - so long as the work population itself was growing, such a model was sustainable. However, in the last eighty years, the demographic pyramid has inverted, and there are now more people near the end of their career than there are starting out. Add into this the effects of technology in making work more efficient, and you get the rather ugly situation that we're in now - a situation where you have more people who are staying in the workforce at the higher wages that their skills and experience should support (and who are desperate now to refill their coffers after the last couple of years) and fewer people at lower wages that support the Ponzi scheme.<br /><br />What this means is simple - many of the jobs that are being shed now by business are not coming back. Middle management has been hemorrhaging for the last two decades because the value provided by these managers is no longer as critical. Retail sales jobs are disappearing at a rapid rate as retail centers collapse in the face of low demand and Internet distribution. Manufacturing looks to be in its death throes in the US (if the bankruptcy of Chrysler and GM are any indication), and it is likely that moving forward the jobs being replaced will not be at the upper end but at the lower with new designers and engineers who are more familiar with cutting edge tools, fabrication methods, and technologies. Construction will likely be at an ebb for the next decade. There are more marketing people out there than there are markets, and again as new jobs do arise, they will be in areas where you have the young and savvy rather than the experienced.<br /><br />What makes this worse is that even in those areas where growth may occur - health care, energy production, high speed rail, education and the like - you are generally going to be talking about specialist jobs requiring long term training - and an education/training system that is still bound up in a large corporate model. What's more, even if the education did exist, the absorption rate for these professions is comparatively small - you need more doctors, for instance, but if even one half of one percent of the unemployed work force were to go back and get medical degrees, it would easily swamp the field.<br /><br />This will set in place the great forces of the next decade. Each recession is likely to result in higher unemployment than the previous one, while each recovery will see a smaller percentage re-employed. Against this will, paradoxically, be the growth of spot shortages in the labor markets in specialized areas - those that are capable of going freelance and are successful at it will end up creating loci of specialized job growth, but the growth will remain limited.<br /><br />This is always a dangerous mix for political stability. Shadow economies usually emerge once you get a certain level of unemployment - people still have an imperative to survive, and will do so any way they can. Drug trafficking typically rises during recessions, even as prices for those drugs fall, because drug dealing provides not only income but organizational structure (albeit very dangerous organizations). Prostitution rises as well for much the same reason. Both left wing and right wing paramilitary organizations usually tend to do quite well during these periods, providing both places to live and organizations to be a part of, and such organizations, while possibly carrying out political agendas, usually provide "security" services to that same underground economy. The Internet in this case will likely only hasten this process; it is very easy to set up online communities and exchanges that can't be easily regulated, taxed or even monitored. As people become more desperate, expect that barter and trafficking on these sites will increase dramatically.<br /><br />On the other hand, its also likely that a virtual side of the shadow economy will show up in online games and other environments. Already, there are people that are making a living either producing goods and services in games like World of Warcraft or Second Life, are playing automated gambling sites, or are fully engaged in eBay or other online markets. The irony here is that while this market is likely growing dramatically, its metrics are so different from those of the "real" world that it's hard to tell how many people who are technically unemployed are actually making a living there.<br /><br />Note that these are also freelancers, though they don't show up in official measures as such - and there's a lesson to be learned from this. Over the next decade you're going to see a generation grow up on the Internet, learn to make a living there, and develop an entirely new conceptualization of business there. They're growing up in a grey area that's neither "corporate" nor governmental, becoming very entrepreneurial while at the same time working outside of the bounds of contemporary business.<br /><br />Many (and certainly the best and brightest) of these younger men and women are going to grow up with nothing but disdain for the modern corporation. The more that they establish themselves on the Internet, the less likely that they are going to put up with office politics, small cubicles, long commutes, and the increasing uncertainty of job stability in an organization that could cut 10,000 jobs in one fell swoop. The talented ones will be on the cutting edge, creating new virtual company after virtual company, each staffed with perhaps a couple dozen people tops that communicate with one another from remote locations, each company with a killer product or idea that will chip away at market share of conglomerates piece by piece.<br /><br />When the economy does improve, this generation will not come to work for the old corporations. The smart companies will change in response. Most won't. Many of these companies will sink into irrelevancy, no longer able to tap into a mindset that is radically different from anything that the senior managers can even begin to imagine. These people will have become used to starting with next to nothing and being exceptionally frugal - they will be anti-consumerist, highly innovative, and with very little use for traditional social structures.<br /><br />Hiring managers, beware. The freelancer is about to take over your business.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11746604103523406806noreply@blogger.com0