I’ve begun noticing more and more how people anthropomorphize (to ascribe a human form or attributes to) the afterlife. Ask someone their vision of what the afterlife will hold in store and they will express some fantasy scenario or ownership of some fantasy object. Virgins and Lamborghini’s are often mentioned (used to be just the guy’s view). If you ask the question whether or not that means the person will experience the joy of ownership or orgasmic delights they usually say no, I want the thing itself. Although they don’t say it I expect they also mean the car will run on the ultimate autobahn, with convenient rest stops and a bottomless gas tank. As far as the virgins go (the unisex view), the expectation must be that after hitting number 72, number one won’t complain that it took too long to get back to her (or him), question whether they look like they got fat while you were away, and the clincher, like number 41 better than them. Heaven hath no nags!
Of course with few (sic) returnees from the afterlife, we’re not really sure if there are actually enough Lambos or virgins up there (it’s still up right?) for that matter. This uncertainty has caused many a warlord (or insert the name of your favorite pharaoh here) to be buried in their Cadillacs with their own cadre of virgins. So what are skeptics left with? We obviously can’t join in on the slow, grinding, lottery game that is life, waiting for the big payoff at the end. I guess the good news is that this faith and these dreams do keep the rabble quiet most of time and provide the non-rabble with a way to quantify creating their heaven on earth.
Parentheses abuse score: 8.5 out of 10 (lower is better)
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I can’t imagine the hubris of Romney and Gingrich expecting us to believe that we do not understand what they are attempting to sell us. Predatory capitalism, influence peddling, self-serving tax and incentive schemes are beyond anything ever even admitted to before. These things were whispered about in the past. Now the oligarchs who are the puppet masters running our country have become quite full of themselves and very aggressive. This is nothing less than an attempt at a bloodless coup. The accusation against Obama that he is a socialist molding our future on a European model is ludicrous. In fact that is what Romney and Gingrich are proposing. Corporate welfare is a euphemism for tax reduction and incentives to bring jobs back to our shores. This is crazy thinking since the broad market for goods and services is a direct result of a thriving middle class. Even without home ownership as the home equity ATM. It’s the dream market countries all over the planet still aspire to serving.
The hope I have is that short of becoming the American version of the huddled gray masses of the Russian experience, Americans will rise up and revolt. That is still part of our DNA. The Occupy movement is a beginning. The Blade Runner image of walled cities protecting the rich are already in place. The middle class is being decimated without relief and even the most logical and simplest plans to retrain and revive these people are being assaulted as anti-capital. When in fact the result would be just the obvious. The question is whether we want to invest in that kind of future or give the money to Romney and Gingrich and trust them to invest it for us.
On a side note, I’ve been thinking lately about the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) as a paramilitary organization. They have much unquestioned control assumed during the time of hysteria over 9/11. But they are really a lot like those madcap Keystone Kops. I can see them someday morphing into the cadre of Storm Troopers under the command or one Dark Lord or another. The guys who can’t shoot straight. But flawless in their ability to follow orders.
I believe it’s time to change the form of leadership in this country. The two party experiment was tried and we now know that it is far too easy to both corrupt and invalidate. The congress is itself broken but we also know they can be swayed by good leadership supported by the voice of the people. This voice has been given a new channel, the internet, to bring immediacy and connectivity to this part of the process. One body that works is the Supreme Court. What the supreme court does is provide ideological leadership as it relates to the laws of the land. Cases are fed up to them by lower courts which from the political and governing perspective mirror local and state governments.
If we replaced the current office of president with a Council of Elders, we would probably have more representation and more discernable leadership than we have today. We could remove term limits which is something we all agree is counter productive. We wouldn’t find ourselves voting for the least undesirable candidate or as the phrase goes, “hold our nose and pull the lever.” Given the opportunity to choose four or five or even nine elders from a list of candidates for me would probably mean voting for Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and of course Obama (using the current options, flawed though they are as the examples for this discussion). But I might also choose Hillary and perhaps even Oprah. . . . There could be the pot candidate, the environmentalist, the financier. National conversations would be out in the open and the brilliance of the crowd might actually reach its apogee in this council. The so-called litmus tests candidates would also be embraced. We want our advocates to be fully engaged. The pro-pot hippy candidate (of the reconstructed or un-reconstructed variety) would be okay; the super-successful venture capitalist would also be great. We just don’t want their voice to be the only voice directing our future.
Elders would not have to live in Washington. Their daily meetings could be video conferenced and nationally broadcast. Their pay could be an incentive rather than a salary. No taxes for life or a yearly shopping spree at Best Buy. There must be something that a successful elder would really like having in their swag bag. But they would only get it if they served two terms.Getting re-elected equates to doing the job well, at least well enough to have made a positive contribution to the country by your involvement.
And of course the election process would be paid for by the government. With so many people running for a larger number of offices, some of them being incumbents, the power of the negative ad in my opinion would be blurred. C-Span can become the forum for discussion rather than us relying on the over-commercialized debate format that has arisen recently.
And last but not least, when we do make first contact with beings from other planets, wouldn’t you rather be represented by a council than an individual. I believe our visitors will expect it. An individual would be more likely to act impulsively rather than logically. Having only one person in charge itself implies WAR. In relationships between global, or in this case, universal entities, the question of dominance is always lurking under the surface. With a council format in place, we’ll all have a way to include a voice or a vote for the new entity. This will lay the groundwork for the federation. Of course that is a discussion for another day and Gene Roddenberry has already shown us that there are potential problems. But it doesn’t have to be and relying on a council provides a forum for conversation, leadership and enlightenment.
Editors
I’ve noticed lately that my online reading habits are changing and I’m moving from reading original sources directly, to reading them in aggregated or moderated sources. By that I mean that I find myself going to my customized iPad clipping service (Flipboard first, sometimes followed by Zite) and reading summaries of what’s going on and following that with linking to the original source. The new CBS moring show seems to know I do that and is compressing in 90 seconds all of the headlines that are trending in the world as the show opening segment.
The success of the aggregators is due to the competence of the editors acting in their role as moderators. While Google may be taking some heat recently for molding the search results we receive for our political, religious or other cultural queries, this is also what the aggregating editors mentioned above are doing. Controlling the flow of news in this way was a big fear once upon a time when, in the early days of the internet, the fear was that similar “clipping services” would be maliciously exclusive in how we were fed our information. Of course we also were afraid that the editors in that future scenario would be in the employ of Rupert Murdoch. It now seems like we have past that phase with blazing speed and the forces of competition and opportunities for presenting eclectic and boutique information has trumped attempts of restrict our wandering mouse clicks and eyeballs. Except when enforced by the state as in China, Iran, etc.
As content is more and more stripped away from its delivery mechanism it is coming down more and more to the collaboration of originator and editor. The degrees of separation between the writer and reader are becoming fewer and delivery is taking less time. More writers are editing themselves.
Hope
On another subject all together, it’s so easy to lose hope these days with all of the fear-mongering and uncertainty. It seems like a time of narcissism and self-indulgence. We’re supposedly waiting for some clever trick to solve our problems, political and environmental. Retirees are returning to work if they can find it. Young adults are returning to live with their parents. In all this it seems clear we are going through a transition. But we supposedly just made a transition from a manufacturing based economy to a service based one. Why are we not enjoying the bounty of a successful result? We’ve made similar transitions before. Do we blame the Chinese or the Indians?
I believe that focusing on a transition in the economy is a simplistic view of what is really going on. We are really making a cultural transition. It’s too easy to say that retirees are returning to work because their savings were diminished by the recent economic downturn. They are very clear in saying they find retirement boring and prefer to stay wired in to their previous life, a life that provided them with an identity. It’s simplistic to say that young people are returning to live with their parents because they can’t find jobs. They are returning because the actually like their parents and learn from them. Their parents emotional and financial support is reciprocated and is important to them as they continue to grow up. They don’t have the mommy issues and daddy issue that plagued previous generations. The family home is becoming more of a homestead.
The end result of this cultural shift is that another prejudice, agism, will probably be leaving this culture just as it has most other cultures on this planet. The wisdom and experience of our elders is becoming more valued as is the energy and impulsiveness of youth. Both are necessary for a vibrant society and to have generations in opposition is counter-productive. Such a change is an indication of the growth of our civilization. In a similar sense progressive leaders are turning to committees of elders to evaluate and propose ways to run companies and governments. This activity is post-congress and transcends political parties.
Like the internet age that is the backdrop for this change, it’s history happening at blinding speed.
So here it was, Sunday, 9 PM and I had a critical choice to make. Would it be Family Guy or Downton Abbey, Season Two, Episode One to finish the weekend. Should I save the 2-hour premier for Monday night since nothing else is on and it’s a Netflix travel day. As it turned out I should have gone with the humor followed by my standard before bed reading (currently Extra Virginity, Tom Mueller). I decided on PBS. Big mistake. In fact it took a liberal dose of Bach violin concertos and the entire podcast of Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me to pull me back from the edge. Downton Abbey played out like two solid hours of cut scenes of unrequited love with sprinklings of executions for cowardice, followed by cases of post traumatic stress, a suicide thrown in and a graphic bit of self imolation – and then it got emotional. I stopped eating my popcorn with a third of a bowl left. Unheard of! What is Becky Eaton (Patron saint of Masterpiece Theater from the beginning) trying to do to me. The first season was charming, funny, exquisitely art directed and well-produced. This episode played like a review of a season that never happened. I felt like they showed a season during the summer that I somehow missed. The people I learned to hate were somehow likable now. Continuity People! I don’t know what to do. Masterpiece Theater is like putting on a well-worn leather jacket and a pair of slippers with a favorite snack nearby. I expect to be warmed from the inside out not the outside in. Truth is, at this point I have too much invested. I’ll be back next week of course. The pros say ride it out. Over time I’ll at least make back at least 10-1/2 percent. I was hoping for so much more.
The following book includes Season Two spoilers:
For many years it seemed that every business conference I went to had entrepreneurship or innovation sessions where the old chestnut tale of Gillette’s clever scheme to “hook” men on a lifetime of blade use by selling them the handle at a loss was introduced to make some point or other. In time this case study myth would be shown to be false and the counter argument posited that men were buying the blades and handles as a unit based on value (Drucker, 1985). It did expose a rather cynical view that the unthinking public could, as a group, be so easily manipulated. It also overlooked the cultural shift involved of moving from the more dangerous use of straight razors to the safety razor as the way the typical sleepy male (and the shadow market – females) scraped hair from fragile skin areas.
A similar argument was made for computers and software. The case was advanced that the cost of the software would far exceed the cost of the hardware it ran on. Perhaps if you believe that the computer you used in 1985 was THE computer to base this proposition on the idea does holds true. Some, myself included, see computers only now transcending their status as glorified calculators and typewriters. But that is an over-generalization and discounts the amazing feats performed by software engineers using very rudimentary chipsets in years passed.
Let me throw in one more concept into this barrel I’m shooting into. The idea that content is king. This was a prevailing point-of-view among the publishing literati from maybe 1995-2005 give or take five years on either end. Of course there is no evidence among writers that they are actually treated as king makers in any royalty or contract terms way but that is what we were lead to believe.
So, in the interest of connecting the dots, the time seems right to look at the nexus of computing, ebooks, content, apps and so on.
Apple upends the shaver and blade myth. Without going into all of the goofy product decisions made by Apple, and Steve Jobs, over the years, I’ll just look at the current state and how it ties into what the computer is becoming. Apple does not take a loss on their tablet (including the iPhone). They do not take primary responsibility for the blades, represented here by content either of the informational variety or the application type. In fact they’ve taken $50 programs and squeezed the price down to a dollar or two by brute force. Making up for the disparity in volume. Great for some developers, death for others.
Amazon, it has been reported, breaks even on Kindles, and makes their margin on the sale of content. The original report was that they were taking a loss on the Kindle Fire. In internet time this was debunked and the cost placed right around the selling price. Some of the content they sell they underwrite or encourage development of, others they just distribute. A survey was taken to determine the number of apps a typical user had and the total was 120. Even if they cost $1 each it would not be a values equal to the cost of the tablet or phone. I would guess that the Kindles have a lower average app total since the inexpensive versions are really just readers and don’t even attempt to act like tablets.
There’s no cynicism there. In fact, it may actually be the ideal realization of the value of content. When you strip away the container all that is left is the content, the essence. Why does content need to be bound up in five pounds of processed wood pulp. I am quite pleased with the consistently sized type on my pearlescent background Kindle Touch (subsidized edition) as I move from book to book and only choose the printed form when it is something worth reproducing for beauty or illustration. In a year my device will have paid for itself in savings by choosing digital editions over printed ones and I will not have another shelf or two of books to deal with, or move. My favorite writers don’t sound any different in a digital edition than they do on a printed book. Unless of course you listen to a robotic voice read it to you.
So on this first day of 2012, it looks like we’re about a year or two from the final realization of the computer. If there is an insidious plot to it all it’s that futurists such as Ray Kurzweil has been discussing for years (see the link below). It’s that our smartphones and computers, regardless of the form, are computers at heart and at some point thanks to the advances of technology will become entirely capable of the content distribution and management tasks they were made for which they were made for. This is a great time for artists (of the fine and scientific sort), fiction and non-fiction writers, opinionators and imagineers and anyone else with something to say. Distribution channels seem to be emerging spontaneously and once the business models and technologies have stabilized will we live the realization of Johannes Gutenberg’s dream.
Link to: About the Progress of Technology by Ray Kurzweil from a TED talk
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