The intangibles we attach to tangible property are still rapidly multiplying. Every day there are more legal precedents, more real-estate records, more transactional data and the like. Each piece of tangible property, therefore, contains a higher component of untouchability. In advanced economies the degree of intangibility in society’s property base is spiraling upward. What is more, even industrial-age manufacturing giants now depend on ever-growing inputs of skill, R&D findings, smart management, market intelligence, et cetera. Their upgraded assembly lines are loaded with digital components busily communicating data back and forth. Their labour force is increasingly people with individuals who think for a living. All this changes the tangibility ratio in the economy’s property base, further reducing the role of touchables. Now add to this the rapid rise of what should be called “double intangibility”—that is, intangibles attached to property that is intangible to begin with. The hordes who clamored to purchase shares of Google in 2004 were prepared to buy into a company whose property and operations are almost entirely intangible, in turn protected and enhanced by other intangibles. Investors in Oracle software or in information markets, online auction sites, business models or billing systems do not worry about not owning physical raw materials, furnaces, coal, railroad sidings or smokestacks. Property thus comes in two distinct forms. In one, the intangibility is wrapped around a tangible core. In double intangibility, it is wrapped around a core that is itself intangible. Today we do not even have a word that differentiates property according to these two classes. Combine the two, however—and their rapid rates of growth—and we gain fresh insight into the massive “intangibilization” that accompanies the advance to a knowledge-base wealth system. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

The knowledge economy is a system of consumption and production that is based on intellectual capital. In particular, it refers to the ability to capitalize on scientific discoveries and applied research. The knowledge economy represents a large share of the activity in most highly developed economies. In a knowledge economy, a significant component of value may consist of intangible assets such as the value of its workers’ knowledge or intellectual property. A knowledge economy depends on skilled labour and education, strong communications networks, and institutional structures that incentivize innovation. Developing economies tend to be heavily focused on agriculture and manufacturing, while highly developed countries have a larger share of service-related activities. This includes knowledge-based economic activities such as research, technical support and consulting. The knowledge economy is the marketplace for the production and sale of scientific and engineering discoveries. This knowledge can be commodified in the form of patents or other intellectual property protections. The producers of such information, such as scientific experts and research labs, are also considered part of the knowledge economy. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 was a major turning point in the treatment of intellectual property in the United States of America because it allowed universities to retain title to inventions or discoveries made with federal R&D funding and to negotiate exclusive licenses. Thanks to glocalization, the World economy has become more knowledge-based, brining with it the best practices from each country’s economy. Also, knowledge-based factors create an interconnected and global economy where human expertise and trade secrets are considered important economic resources. However, it is important to note that generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) do not allow companies to include these assets on their balance sheets. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

The modern commercialization of academic research and basic science has its roots in governments seeking military advantage. The knowledge economy addresses how education and knowledge—that is, “human capital”—can serve as a productive asset or business product to be sold and exported to yield profits for individuals, businesses and the economy. This component of the economy relies greatly on intellectual capabilities instead of natural resources or physical contributions. In the knowledge economy, products, and services that are based on intellectual expertise advance technical and scientific fields, encouraging innovation in the economy as a whole. Knowledge economics are defined by four pillars: Institutional structures that provide incentives for entrepreneurship and the use of knowledge. Availability of skilled labour and a good education system. Access to information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures. A vibrant innovation landscape that includes academia, the private sector, and civil society. Example of a knowledge economy is academic institutions, companies engaging in research and development (R&D), programmers developing new software and search engines for data, and health workers using digital data to improve treatments are all components of a knowledge economy. Property in today’s U.S. economy is already surprisingly less touchable than most people imagine. A Brookings Institution study found that, as early as 1982, intangible assets even in mining and manufacturing companies accounted for 38 percent of their total market value. Ten years later—still long before the dot-com climb and crash—the intangible component represented fully 62 percent—nearly two thirds of their value. These remarkable numbers, however, hardly hint at what lies ahead. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

In the wake of the late-1990s stock-market dive, investors were told to seek safety in tangibility. However, no matter what Wall Street’s “back to fundamentals” stock pitchers may say, all advanced economies will relentlessly resume their march toward the untouchable. A key reason for this is acceleration—a change, as we have seen, in our relationship to the deep fundamental of time. As it reduces product life, hastens technical obsolescence and makes markets more temporary, today’s speed-up of change requires companies to innovate. The life and death of corporations is now based on innovation, and that means a huge growth in intangibles. What is more, innovation is contagious. Leading-edge firms force others to keep up. Even small low-tech supplier companies are compelled by their customers to adopt and redesign I.T. systems, communicate by e-mail, get on the Internet to connect with their networks, transact business electronically and do more research. In other words: Intangiblize or die. To survive today, smart companies systematically shift toward higher and higher value-added production. That strategy, too, almost always increases the need for more data, information, knowledge and other intangibles. Further, managers trained to deal with familiar business matters increasingly find themselves confronted by unfamiliar social, political, cultural, legal, environmental and technological issues of ever-increasing transience and complexity. And the first step in making decisions about novel or unusual circumstances is the call for yet more intangible data, information and knowledge. Then note the fact that in all the advanced economies, produced good account for declining fractions of spending. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

By contrast, spending is shifting toward the services that are becoming more expensive. These clearly include the high-intangibility fields like health and education, media, entertainment and financial services. Finally, there is an even more powerful reason why we should expect both kinds of intangibility—single and double alike—to become a larger and larger part of the society’s property base. That reason is simple: As we have previously seen, fast-breeding intangibles are essentially limitless. And that fact alone puts a dagger at capitalism’s throat. The assumption of limited supply, after all, is at the very heart of capitalist economics. No capitalist “law” is more sacred than the law of supply and demand. Yet if intangibles of both kinds are, for all practical purposes, in inexhaustible supply, can a maximally intangible economy coexist with capitalism? How intangible can the property base of an economy become—and still be capitalist? As the entire property base grows more intangible, hence more inexhaustible, a larger and more expansive part of it also becomes non-rival. Knowledge products as we have seen, can be exploited by millions of people at the same time without being depleted. All those music swapper-swipers downloading songs for free so not consume those notes. This change, too, has system-shaking implications. Whole industries confront death staring them in the face as new technologies make it possible to end-run the traditional intellectual-property protections—copyrights, patents and trademarks—on which they have based their very existence. Media corporations watch their movies and music instantly stolen and shared for free around the World and circulated freely on the Internet. Pharmaceutical firms, having spent hundreds of millions to research and test a new drug, see it pirated by others, who, having spent nothing to create it, peddle it at pennies on the dollar. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Other companies have their heavily promoted products copied right down to the brand name and huckstered cut-rate in street carts and at swap meets. They argue that failure to police and protect their right will dry up incentives for innovation and even destroy their industries. Their armies of well-tailored layers and lobbyists flail about in a revolutionary environment, but their proposals so far are anything but revolutionary. They are instead incremental attempts to stretch yesterday’s Second Wave legal codes to meet the challenges posed by an endless, fast-arriving succession of explosive new Third Wave technologies. Incremental stretching of old models is what lawyers do with a chortle. However one thing is clear, the battle comes out, property is going to become more, not less, intangible—and that means less easily protected. Which perfectly suits John Perry Barlow, once a lyricist for the Grateful Dead and now a leader in the fight against the further extension of intellectual property protection. “Otherwise intelligent people,” Barlow says, “think that there’s no difference between stealing my horse and stealing my song.” As property, the horse is both tangible and rival. The song is neither. Millions cannot saddle and ride the same horse. By contrast, Barlow has argued, sons, as it were, “want” to be free, and composers should not depend on copyright royalties to earn a living. Further, Barlow and others regard extending copyright and other protections as part of a larger, indeed sinister, strategy of giant firms to impose or extent content control over the Internet and other media. They argue that the new media demand radical change. On the intellectual-property issue, both sides claim they wish to preserve imagination and innovation—though the debate has reflected neither. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

The war over intellectual property shows no signs of reaching a truce. It has not yet reached its climax, because it does not yet include coming battles over the ownership of age-old ideas or concepts developed by non-Western cultures. Digital computation depends on switching between ones and zeros. If we can patent new life-forms—an idea until recently utterly unthinkable—how long before some fanatic ethnic, national or religious group shows up at WIPO, the World of Intellectual Property Organization of the United Nations, to claim it “owns” the zero? Or, for that matter, the alphabet? (Think of the royalties!) Whether we measure intangibles well or poorly, whether we protect them or not, nothing like this has ever been seen in the history of capitalism. And nothing challenges the very concept of property as deeply. However, the shift toward revolutionary intangibility is only step one in the extreme makeover of capitalism that is now under way—a makeover it might not survive. Much of the lamentation over the “decline” of manufacture is fed by self-interest and based on obsolete concepts of wealth, production, and unemployment. As early as 1962, a seminal work called The Production and Distribution of knowledge in the United States by the Princeton economist Fritz Machlup laid the foundation for an avalanche of statistics documenting the fact that more workers now handle symbols than handle things. Throughout the fifties and early sixties, in books, articles, reviews, monographs, and in at least one internal white paper prepared for IBM, a small band of futurists in the United States of America and Europe forecast the transition from muscle work to mental work or work requiring psychological and human skills. At the time, these early warnings were largely written off as too “visionary.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

Since then, the shift away from manual labour toward service work and super-symbolic activity has become widespread, dramatic, and irreversible. In the United States of America today, these activities account for fully three quarters of the work force. The great transition is reflected globally in the surprising fact that World exports of services and “intellectual property” are now equal to that of electronics and autos combined, or of the combined exports in food and fuels. Because the early signals were ignored, the transition has been unnecessarily rocky. Mass layoffs, bankruptcies, and other upheavals swept through the economy as old rust-belt industries, late to install computers, robots, electronic information systems, and slow to restructure, found themselves gutted by more fleet-footed competition. Many blamed their troubles on foreign competition, high or low interest rates, overregulation, and a thousand other factors. Some of these, no doubt, played a role. However, equally to blame was the arrogance of the most powerful smokestack companies—auto makers, steel mills, shipyards, textile firms—who had for so long dominated the economy. Their managerial myopia punished those in the society least responsible for industrial backwardness and least able to protect themselves—their workers. Even middle managers felt the hot scorch of joblessness and saw their bank accounts, egos, and sometimes their marriages collapse as a result. Washington did little to cushion the shocks. The fact that aggregate manufacturing employment in 1988 was at the same level as 1968 does not mean that the workers laid off in between simply returned to their old jobs. On the contrary, with more advanced technologies in place, companies needed a radically different kind of work force as well. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

The old Second Wave factories needed essentially interchangeable workers. By contrast, Third Wave operations require diverse and continually evolving skills—which means that workers laid off in between simply returned to their old jobs. On the contrary, with more advanced technologies in place, companies needed a radically different kind of work force as well. The old Second Wave factories needed essentially interchangeable workers. By contrast, Third Wave operations require diverse and continually evolving skills—which means that workers become less and less interchangeable. And this turns the entire problem of unemployment upside down. In Second Wave or smokestack societies, an injection of capital spending or consumer purchasing power could stimulate the economy and generate jobs. Given one million jobless, one could, in principle, prime the economy and create one million jobs. Since the jobs were either interchangeable or required so little skill that they could be learned in less than an hour, virtually any unemployed worker could fill almost any job. Presto! The problem evaporates. In today’s super-symbolic economy this is less true—which is why a lot of unemployment seems intractable, and neither the traditional Keynesian or monetarist remedies work well. To cope with the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes, we recall, urged deficit spending by government to put money into consumer pockets. Once consumers had the money, they would rush out and buy things. This, in turn, would lead manufacturers to expand their plants and hire more workers. Goodbye, unemployment. Monetarists urged manipulation of interest rates or money supply instead, to increase or decrease purchasing power as needed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

In today’s global economy, pumping money into the consumer’s pocket may simply send it flowing overseas, without doing anything to help the domestic economy. An American buying a new TV set or mobile phone merely sends dollars to other countries like China, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, or elsewhere. The purchase does not necessarily add jobs at home. However, there is a far more basic flaw in the old strategies: They still focus on the circulation of money rather than knowledge. Yet it is no longer possible to reduce joblessness simply by increasing the number of jobs, because the problem is no longer merely numbers. Unemployment has gone from quantitative. Thus, even if there were ten want ads for every jobless worker, if there are 10 million vacancies and only one million unemployed, the one million will not be able to perform the available jobs unless they have skills—knowledge—matched to the skill requirements of those new jobs. These skills are now so varied and fast-changing that workers cannot be interchanged as easily or cheaply as in the past. Money and numbers no longer solve the problem. If they and their families are to survive, the jobless desperately need money, and it is both necessary and morally right to provide them with decent levels of public assistance. However, any effective strategy for reducing joblessness in a super-symbolic economy must depend less on the allocation of wealth and more on the allocation of knowledge. Furthermore, as these new jobs are not likely to be found in what we still think of as manufacture, what will be needed is not just a question of mechanical skills—or, for that matter, algebra, as some manufacturers contend—but a vast array of cultural and interpersonal skills as well. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

We will need to prepare people, through schooling, apprenticeship, and on-the-job learning, for work in such fields as the human services—helping to care, for example, for our fast-growing population of seniors, providing child care, health services, personal security, training services, leisure and recreation services, tourism, and the like. We will also have to begin according human-service jobs the same respect previously reserved for manufacture, rather than snidely denigrating the entire service sector as low wage employment. Some of these service jobs, while they do require a high degree of skills (these is no such thing as “unskilled” labour) cannot stand as the symbol for a range of activities that necessarily includes everything from teaching to working at a matchmaking service or in a hospital radiology center. What is more, if, as often charged, wages are low in the service sector, then the solution is not to bewail the relative decline of manufacturing jobs, but to increase service productivity and to invent new forms of work-force organization and collective bargaining. Unions—primarily designed for the crafts or for mass manufacturing—need to be totally transformed or else replaced by new-style organizations more appropriate to the super-symbolic economy. To survive they will have to stop treating employees en masse and start thinking of them as individuals, supporting, rather than resisting, such things as work-at-home programs, flextime, and job-sharing. In brief, the rise of the super-symbolic economy compels us to reconceptualize the entire problem of employment from the ground up. To challenge outworn assumptions, however, is also to challenge those who benefit from them. The Third Wave system of wealth creation thus threatens long-entrenched power relationships in corporations, unions, and governments. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Usually one thinks of cooperation as a good thing. This is the natural approach when one takes the perspective of the players themselves. After all, mutual cooperation is good for both players in a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Yet, there are situations in which one wants to do just the opposite. To prevent business from fixing prices, or to prevent potential enemies from coordinating their actions, one would want to turn the approach around and do the opposite of what would promote cooperation. The Prisoner’s Dilemma itself is named for such a situation. The original story is that two accomplices to a crime are arrested and questioned separately. Either can defect against the other by confessing and hoping for a lighter sentence. However, if both confess, their confessions are not as valuable. On the other hand, if both cooperate with each other by refusing to confess, the district attorney can only convict them on a minor charge. Assuming that neither individual has moral qualms about, or fear of, squealing, the payoffs can form a Prison’s Dilemma. From society’s point of view, it is a good thing that the two accomplices have little likelihood of being caught in the same situation again soon, because that is precisely the reason why it is to each of their individual advantages to double-cross the other. As long as the interaction is not iterated, cooperation is very difficult. That is why an important way to promote cooperation is to arrange that the same two individuals will meet each other again, be able to recognize each other from the past, and to recall how the other has behaved until now. This continuing interaction is what makes it possible for cooperation based on reciprocity to be stable. In general, sophisticated Marxism became cultural criticism of life in the Western democracies. For obvious reasons it generally stayed away from serious discussion in Russia. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Some of the criticism was profound, some of it superficial and petulant. However, none of it came from Marx or Marxist perspective. It was, and is, Nietzschean, variations on our way of life as that of “the last man.” If we look again at that psychology so influential in America, we are now in a position to see that tradition-directed, other-directed and inner-directed are just slight modifications of Weber’s three kinds of legitimacy, with other-directed (read bourgeois) derived from economic or bureaucratic rationality guided by the demands of the market or public opinion, and inner-directed identical to charismatic, to the value-giving self. Weber’s prophet is replaced by the socialist, egalitarian individual. There is not a single element of Marx in any of this, other than the absolutely unsubstantiated assertion that the socialist is the self-legislator. Discussion of the inner-directed man is empty. There are no examples that can be pointed to. Weber at least provided some examples, even though his definition may have been problematic. One wonders whether Weber’s contention that the value giver is an aristocrat of the spirit is less plausible than that of those who say that just anyone is, if he has the right therapist, or if a socialist society is constructed for him. This egalitarian transformation of Weber permitted anyone who is not to the left to be diagnosed as mentally ill. Left critics of psychoanalysis called it a tool of bourgeois conformism; one wonders, however, whether the critics are not manipulators of psychological therapy in the service of Left conformism. Adrono’s meretricious fabrication of the authoritarian and democratic personality types has exactly the same sources as the inner-directed—other-directed typology, and the same sinister implications. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

So Nietzsche came to America. His conversation to the Left was easily accepted here as genuine, because Americans cannot believe that any really intelligent and good person does not at bottom share the Will Rogers Weltanschauung, “I never met a man I didn’t like.” Nietzsche’s naturalization was accomplished in may waves: some of us went to Europe to find him; he came with the emigres; and most recently professors of comparative literature have gotten heavily into the important business, getting their goods from Paris, where deconstructing Nietzsche and Heidegger and reconstructing them on the Left has been the principal philosophical metier since the Liberation. From this last source Heidegger and Nietzsche now come under their own names, treading on the red carpet rolled out for them by their earlier envoys. Academic psychology, sociology, comparative literature and anthropology have been dominated by them for a long time. However, their passage from the academy to the marketplace is the real story. A language developed to explain to knowers how bad we are has been adopted by us to declare to the World how interesting we are. Somehow the goods got damaged in transit. Marcuse began in Germany in the twenties by being something of a serious Hegel scholar. He ended up here writing trashy culture criticism with a heavy interest in pleasures of the flesh in One Dimensional Man and other well-known books. In Russian, instead of the philosopher-king they got the ideologist tyrant; in the United States of America, the culture critic became the voice of Woodstock. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

In April of 1976 the Chicago Daily News reported that Central Intelligence Agency operatives located in parts of the World where there are no journalists—central Africa, South American jungles, and so on—had been feeding totally fictitious stories to two hundred newspapers, thirty news services, twenty radio and television outlets and twenty-five publishers, all foreign owned. These stories, sometimes concerning fictitious guerrilla movements, would be reported as real in these countries and then would be picked up by the American media (fake news). Eventually you read these stories in your newspaper or saw them reported on the evening news. The purpose of the false stories was to manipulate information so that foreign governments and our government would think some event was happening when it was not or vice versa. Policy decision would be made based on this information. Public understanding would be distorted. The course of World politics would be altered. Can you recall the Mayaguez incident of 1975? Walter Cronkite announced that Ford has authorized Kissinger to undertake a rescue off the coast of Cambodia because the crew of the Mayaguez had been assaulted and seized. Kissinger sent the air force to bomb some island where the crew was presumably detained (but actually was not). Did you stop to realize at any point in the following story or in developing your opinion about it that every person and detail in it were media images describing media actions concerning other media images based on earlier media information? Tragically, this is the case with virtually all news that is carried in the media. It exists outside of your life. Often it exists outside the lives of the people who report it and the government officials who act upon it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

However, for most people sitting at home viewing the news, there is no way at all to know what is true or correct and what is not. If the news has a certain logic to it, we believe it is right. If it seems to follow from the logic of the previous say’s events also carried in the media, we can determine the logic of one day’s events.  Under such circumstances, it becomes possible for new to exist only within the media and nowhere in the real World. That was the situation that Orwell posited in 1984. Did Goldstein exist? Was there a war between Oceania and Eastasia? How could anyone possibly know, since it all concerned events in distant places, and it all arrived on television. With information confined to the media, totally separated from the context of time and place, the creation of reality is as simple as feeding it directly into our heads. An earlier lie can become what Werner Erhard calls the “ground of reality” for the newer lie. We do not need the CIA to prove the point. Any evening’s new is filled with information that we cannot possibly know is true. How could we know? If something happened, the only way to know for sure is to be present at the time and in the place of the event. If not, you are taking the information on faith. This problem of uncertainty, caused by disconnection from time and place, applies to all media. For example, I had a correspondence with anthropologist friend. Neal Daniels, concerning the importance of light in many cosmologies. I also took a trip to Micronesia and had a conversation with a man I met there. I also talked to a woman at an environmental conference, using her words to support my arguments. If any of these things happened, how can you know? How could you possibly know? Well, you could go to the American Anthropology Association, track down Neal Daniels and ask him. If he exists. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

You could write the University of Michigan and ask for a roster of attendees at that environmental conference, seeking a woman who the description I spoke of. You could do that only of the conference itself happened. However, would you? What a lot of trouble that would be. And yet, perhaps I made up those stories to fill out some points. Perhaps I made up one of them. How can you know? Whenever you engage with the media, any media, you begin to take things on faith. With books you are at least able to stop and think about what you read, as you read. This gives you some change to analyze. With television the images just come. They flow into you at their own speed, and you are hard pressed to know a true image from one which is manufactured. All of the images are equally disconnected from context, afloat in time and space. Perhaps I can get a bit closer to the point with an analogy. If you open a brand-new deck of cards and start turning the cards over, one by one, you can get a pretty firm idea of what their order is. After you have gone from the ace of spades through to the nine of spades, you expect a ten of spades to come up next. And if the three of diamonds appears, you are surprised and wonder what kind of deck of cards this is. However, if I give you a deck that had been shuffled twenty times and then ask you to turn the cards over, you do not expect any card in particular—a three of diamonds would be just as likely as a tend of spades. Having no expectation of a pattern, no basis for assuming a given order, you have no reason to react with incredulity or even surprise to whatever card turns up. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

The belief system of a tool-using culture is rather like a brand-new deck of cards. Whether it is a culture of technological simplicity or sophistication, there always exists a more or less comprehensive, ordered World-view, resting on a set of metaphysical or theological assumptions. Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design of the Universe, but they have no doubt that there is such a design, and their priests and shamans are well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not wholly rational, at least coherent. The medieval period was a particularly clear example of this point. How comforting it must have been to have a priest explain the meaning of the death of a loved one, of an accident, or of a piece of good fortune. To live in a World in which there were no random events—in which everything was, in theory, comprehensible; in which every act of nature was infused with meaning—is an irreplaceable gift of theology. The role of the church in premodern Europe was to keep the deck of cards in reasonable order, which is why Cardinal Bellarmine and other prelates tried to prevent Galileo from shuffling the deck. As we know, they could not, and with the emergence of technocracies moral and intellectual coherence began to unravel. What was being lost was not immediately apparent. The decline of the great narrative of the Bible, which had provided answers to both fundamental and practical questions, was accompanied by the rise of the great narrative of Progress. The faith of those who believed in Progress was based on the assumption that one could discern a purpose to the human enterprise, even without the theological scaffolding that supported the Christian edifice. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Science and technology were the chief instruments of Progress, and in their accumulation of reliable information about nature they would bring ignorance, superstition, and suffering to an end. As it turned out, technocracies did not disappoint Progress. In sanitation, pharmacology, transportation, production, and communication, spectacular improvements were made possible by a Niagara of information generated by such institutions as Francis Bacon had imagined. Techocracy was fueled by information—about the structure of nature as well as the structure of the human soul. However, the genie that came out of the bottle proclaiming that information was the new god of culture was a deceiver. It solved the problem of information scarcity, the disadvantages of which were obvious. However, it gave no warning about the dangers of information glut, the disadvantages of which were not seen so clearly. The long-rage result—information chaos—has produced a culture somewhat like the shuffled deck of cards I referred to. And what is strange is that so few have noticed, or if they have noticed fail to recognize the source of the distress. You need only to ask yourself, What is the problem in the Middle East, or South Africa, or Northern Ireland? Is it lack of information about how to grow food that keeps millions at starvation levels? Is it lack of information that brings soaring crime rates and physical decay to our cities? Is it lack of information that leads to high divorce rates and keeps the beds of mental institutions filled to overflowing? The fact is, there are very few political, social, and especially personal problems that arise because of insufficient information. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Nonetheless, as incomprehensible problems mount, as the concept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the Technopolist stands firm in believing that what the World needs is yet more information. It is like the joke about the man who complains the food he is being served in a restaurant is inedible and also that the portions are too small. However, of course, what we are dealing with here is no joke. Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates, stores, and distributes more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before. To the question “What problem does the information solve?” the answer is usually “How to generate, store, and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than every before.” This is the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity. In Technopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to “access” information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented. The World has never before been confronted with information glut and has hardly had time to reflect on its consequences. Beside you, the smaller nanocomputer is a block twice your height, but it is easy to climb up onto it as the tourguide suggests. Gravity is less important on a small scale: even a fly can defy gravity to walk on a ceiling, and an ant can lift what would be a truck to us. At a simulated size of fifty nanometers, gravity counts for nothing. Materials keep their strength, and are just as hard to bend or break, but the weight of an object becomes negligible. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Even without the strength-enhancement that lets you overcome molecular stickiness, you could lift an object with 40 million times your mass—like a person of normal size lifting a box containing a half-dozen fully loaded oil tankers. To simulate this weak gravity, the powersuit cradles your body’s weight, making you feel as if you were floating. This is almost like a vacation in an orbital theme park, walking with stickybooks on walls, ceilings, and whatnot, but with no need for antinausea medication. On top of the nanocomputer is a stray protein molecule This looks like a cluster of grapes and is about the same size. It even feels a bit like a bunch of grapes, soft and loose. The parts do not fly free like a gas or tumble and wander like a liquid, but they do quiver like gelatin and sometimes flop or twist. It is solid enough, but the folded structure is not as strong as your steel fingers. In the 1990s, people began to build molecular machinery out of proteins, copying biology. It worked, but it is easy to see why they moved on to better materials. From a simulated pocket, you pull out a simulated magnifying glass and look at the simulated protein. This shows a pair of bonded atoms on the surface at 10 times magnification. The atoms are almost transparent, but even a close look does not reveal a nucleus inside, because it is too small to see. It would take 1,000 times magnification to be able to see it, even with the head start of being able to see atoms with your unassisted eye. How could people ever confuse big, plump atoms with tiny specks like nuclei? Remembering how your steel-strong fingers could not press more than a fraction of the way toward the nucleus of an argon atom from the air, it is clear why nuclear fusion is so difficult. In fact, the tourguide said that it would take a real-World projectile over a hundred times faster than a high-powered rifle bullet to penetrate into the atomic core and let two nuclei fuse. Try as you might, there just is not anything you could find in the molecular World that could reach into the middle of an atom to meddle with its nucleus. You cannot touch it and you cannot see it, so you stop squinting through the magnifying glass. Nuclei just are not of much interest in nanotechnology. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

Cresleigh Homes

Show of hands…do you prefer a bath or shower? 🤔

Both options are equally inviting in our bathroom at Riverside Residence 1 – and those tiles are hand-set! 🛁

And don’t worry – the other bathroom in this model is just as lovely. See more pics on our website!

Enjoy the shopistication as you’re welcomed into an spacious great room, bright dining and gourmet kitchen space, just inside of the covered porch entry.

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