Better is the poor that walketh in his integrity, than he that is perverse in his lips, and is a fool. Proverbs 19:1.
Better that we accept the reality that America’s economic problems are beyond fixing. We must face it; a hard row to hoe lies ahead. With integrity, though, we will overcome in short order that which America’s weaknesses and false promises have wrought on us.
In Wired magazine, September 1997, Kevin Kelly wrote what our future would be. It can start in America, China, India, or in any other nation. Kelly predicts “a social shift that reorders our lives more than mere hardware or software ever can. It has its own distinct opportunities and its own new rules. Those who play by the new rules will prosper; those who ignore them will not.”
“Many successful knowledge businesses have been built on information capital, but only recently has a total reconfiguration of information itself shifted the whole economy. . .All the most promising technologies making their debut now are chiefly due to communication between computers. The technology we first invented to crunch spreadsheets has been hijacked to connect our isolated selves instead.” Hello! Just what I’ve been telling you!
“The new rules governing this global restructuring revolve around several axes. First, wealth in this new regime flows directly from innovation, not optimization; that is, wealth is not gained by perfecting the known.” Exactly! What has led us to a point of no return, financially, is thinking anyone is too big to fail.
“The Network Economy is fed by the deep resonance of two stellar bangs: the collapsing microcosm of chips and the exploding telecosm of connections,” the very thing that is worrying the establishment to no end. “When linked by the telecosm to a neural network, these dumb PC nodes created that fabulous intelligence called the World Wide Web. It works in other domains: dumb parts, property connected, yield smart results. . .A planet of hyperlinked chips emits a ceaseless flow of small messages, cascading into the most nimble waves of sensibility.”
What do we know about free enterprise in the twenty-first century? Value comes from scarcity, right? Wrong! When things are made plentiful, they become devalued. “In a Network Economy, value is derived from plentitude, just as a fax machine’s value increases in ubiquity. Power comes from abundance”—individual not central. “In the Network Economy, scarcity is overwhelmed by shrinking marginal costs. . .The archetypical illustration of a success explosion in a Network Economy is the Internet itself.” So what does the establishment want? It wants control of the Internet.
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