The increased diversity of financial products and instruments is matched by increased access to them. Thus the United States of America has seen what John C. Duca, a research vice president in the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, refers to as “the democratization of America’s capital markets.” In the past, if they needed capital to expand a company or start a new one, entrepreneurs and even long-established firms had few doors to knock on. At the top end, a few moguls fared better or used their own money when investing in a railroad in Argentina, a meatpacking plant in Chicago or some company claiming it knew how to cash in on “oil for the lamps of China.” For everyone else the doors slammed shut. As for bonds, even healthy mid-sized firms were regarded as “below investment grade,” and many institutional lenders were prohibited, either by law or regulations, from investing in them. However, several factors helped free up investment. One was the development of a market for high-yield bonds. Another was the introduction of advanced I.T., which not only cut back-office expenses but radically increased the information available to investors. At the level of small or mid-sized business, entrepreneurs once had to rely on their own saving or go hat in hand to some wealthy person or family members for capital. Today, the increased openness, or democratization, of U.S.A. capital markets means that household have a wider array of investment choices and small businesses have more sources of capital. Most investments are still made through intermediaries—institutional investors, investment bankers, stockbrokers and others—who either allocate it according to the owner’s wishes or who make choices for the investor. However, today’s investors large and small can end-run the middleman, using the Internet to trade on their own account, directly allocating capital to companies of their own choosing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

When Google, the search engine started by two Stanford University students, decided to sell share to the public in 2004, it announced to surprised observers that it would let a public action, rather than an investment bank, set the share price. It would, moreover, give average investors the same opportunity to acquire shares as major investment banks and insiders. So intense was the public interest that, reversing common practice, Google actually took steps to prevent its stock price from opening on an unsustainable high. Wall Street investment bankers and stock exchanges, having suffered blow after blow, scandal after scandal, in the previous ten years, pooh-poohed Google’s end run around them—but worried in private about other companies’ raising capital directly, without signing up for their expensive services. These cumulative and interrelated developments in the way capital is raised and allocated do not take place in a vacuum. They closely parallel changes in other sectors of the economy. Manufacturers, too, as we have seen, are moving toward greater diversity and customization of their products. And retailers are multiplying the pathways by which customers can access them—including shopping online. All these are part of a societywide conversation to a knowledge-based wealth system. So, too, is the marriage of finance and the media—and its impact on capital flows. The U.S.A. media have become, inadvertently, a vital part of the country’s financial infrastructure. As investor hunger for information has grown, so, too, had Econo-Land—the pseudointellectual agora where economists, business pundits and politicians expound daily on finance and economics. They help fill the ravening hunger of television and the Net for twenty-four-hour programming with chatter about institutional and personal finance. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Round-the-clock stock-market reports, interviews with CEO’s, discussions of mergers and acquisitions, with stock prices crawling continuously across the bottom of TVs and computer screens, are now all but unavoidable—along with a carnival of competing commercials for banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, mortgage brokers and other financial services. The combination of broadcast, satellite and cable television and, even more important, the Internet, makes millions or ordinary Americans aware of financial alternatives never before available to anyone but the super-rich. Much of this media coverage in Econo-Land is superficial, misleading and highly conventional. However, its glaring presence changes the field of play in unanticipated and unanalyzed ways, influencing the amount, forms and directions of capital investment. Cable TV is capable of whipping amateur investors into a frenzy and has essentially put a ticker tap into every American homes. If nothing else, this bombardment of financial facts and pseudofacts aimed at the American middle class focuses unprecedented public attention on the economy. Every word spoken Jerome H. Powell, as chair of the Federal Reserve, has become countertop conversation in highway truck stops and hospital waiting rooms. Warren Buffet’s slightest mumblings about the stock market are passed along by schoolteachers and taxi drivers like biblical wisdom. The increasing public mind-share devoted to economics in general and capital investment in particular impacts everything from consumer confidence to outsourcing, trade policy and daily politics. Thus the campaign waged by FOX News against outsourcing work from the United States of America to India, China and other countries allegedly fueled Democratic Party attacks on the White House. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

And at one point the White House protested to two cable news channels for showing stock-market prices start to plumet as President Biden holds forth on the economy. Like other changes in the financial infrastructure, the kudzu-like growth of Econo-Land also reflects change at the level of deep fundamentals. Its near-instantaneous effects on capital market behaviour are part of the acceleration of all economic activity—changes in the dimension of time. Constant reports on global capital markets—Japan’s Nikkei, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng, Britain’s FTSE, Germany’s DAX or Mexico’s Bolsa—alongside the latest numbers on NASAQ and the New York Stock Exchange—reflect the incomplete, but growing spatial integration of capital markets. And fire-hose flow of data, knowledge, information and misinformation about capital markets is a clear reaction to the rise of the knowledge-dependent wealth system. We are only beginning to see the effects of this transformation. One of the most significant is the foot-tapping impatience of capital. With capital more mobile, it does not stay locked up in bad investments for as long as it once did. Capital commitments are becoming increasingly transient. The increased mobility of capital and the dispersal of risk may have prevented the U.S. economic recession during the 2020 COVID pandemic from spiraling downward. Another effect of the shift to the new capital infrastructure is less positive and more problematic. It can de-synchronize high-speed finance from the operations of the lower-speed “real” economy. In the 1997-98 Asian crisis, the Indonesian exchange rate plunged about 70 percent almost overnight. “Hot money” zipped out of the country almost as though 70 percent of its workforce had gone on strike and 70 percent of its stores had closed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Nothing of the sort occurred. It was the speed and hyperactivity of finance that brought the economy down rather than reverse. Clearly, more side effects—both good and bad—of the revolution in capital and the financial infrastructure lie in wait. Where, then are we headed? Straight-line continuation of these changes could, at least in theory, lead to a single, completely integrated Worldwide capital marketplace. One can imagine, at some point in the future, 20 million or, for that matter, 100 million Indian investors suddenly pouring into a British stock on Monday and out again on Tuesday. Or frenzied overnight global auctions that would dwarf the Google experience. However, trend projection is a poor tool for forecasting, especially in the midst of a transformation like the one we are living through. Neither history nor the future moves in straight lines. An alternative, more complicated scenario would alter the very meaning of capital by recognizing and perhaps in some way monetizing other forms of it—knowledge capital, social capital, human capital, cultural capital, moral capital, environmental capital and especially contributions now made by unpaid prosumers. Creating para-currencies and markets for them, all linked to existing financial markets, would transform World economics and further integrate the money and non-money components of the future wealth system. Even short of this, however, we have already changed capital to the point of near unrecognizability. We have changed who provides it, how it is allocated, the way it is packaged, the speed with which it flows, the places it goes, the amounts and kinds of information and misinformation about it and the ratio of tangibility to intangibility in the property from which capital is derived. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

As both property and capital morph into something drastically new, however, even more wide-reaching changes are remaking capitalism’s other crucial features: markets and money. Such immense changes cannot come without power conflict, and to anticipate who will gain and who will lose, it may help to think of companies on a similar mind-work spectrum. We need to classify companies not by whether they are nominally in manufacturing or services—who really cares?—but by what their people actually do. CSX, for example, is a firm that operates railroads throughout the eastern half of the United States of America, along with one of the World’s biggest oceangoing containerization businesses (CSX brings Honda auto parts to the United States of America). However, CSX increasingly sees itself as in the information business. The information component of CXS’s service package is growing larger and larger. It is not just enough to deliver products. Customers want information. Where their products will be consolidated and de-consolidated, what time each item will be where, prices, customs information. Where their item will be where, prices, customs information, and much more. CXS is an information-driven business. Which means that they proportion of CSX employees in the middle and higher ranges of the mind-work spectrum is increasing. What this suggests is that companies can be roughly classified as “highbrow,” “midbrow,” or “lowbrow,” depending on how knowledge-intensive they are. Some firms and industries need to process more information than others, in order to produce wealth. Like individual jobs, they can be positioned on the mind-work spectrum according to the amount and complexity of the mind-work they do. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Psychiatrist Donald F. Klein, director of research of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, carries this idea one step further and insists that these differences, in turn, are reflected in the general levels of intelligence required of workers. “Do you really think that the average worker at Apple is not smarter than the average worker at McDonald’s?” he asks. “The top management at McDonald’s may be just as smart as the top management at Apple, but the proportion of the staff of these corporations who require high IQ and symbolic skills surely differs considerably.” According to this reasoning, one should be able to arrive at a collective IQ score for each company. Are Chrysler workers inherently smarter than those at Ford or Toyota? (Not are they better educated, but are they natively more intelligent?) What about IQ rankings, say, for Apple versus Compaq, or General foods versus Pillsbury? Carried to absurdity, one might imagine a new ranking for the Fortune 500—according to collective IQ. However, do high-IQ firms necessarily produce more wealth than low-IQ firms? Are they more profitable? Surely, other qualities, like motivation and drive or, for that matter, the intensity of competition, may have more to do with corporate success. And how should one measure intelligence in any case? There are strong reasons to believe that conventional IQ tests are culturally biased and take too few aspects of intelligence into account. We do not need to entertain fanciful scenarios, however, to notice that, quite apart from the intelligence level of individual employees, highbrow firms behave differently from firm that are less knowledge-dependent. Lowbrow firms typically concentrate mind-work in a few people at the top, leaving muscle work or mindless work to everyone ese. Their operating assumption is that workers are ignorant or that, in any case, their knowledge is irrelevant to production. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Even in the highbrow sector today one may find example of “de-skilling”—simplifying jobs, reducing them to their smallest components, monitoring output stroke by stroke. These attempts to apply methods designed by Frederick Taylor for use in factories at the beginning of the 20^th century are, however, the wave of the lowbrow past, not the highbrow future. For any task that is so repetitive and simple that it can be done without thought is, eventually, a candidate for robotization. In contrast, as the economy moves more toward super-symbolic production all firms are being compelled to rethink the role of knowledge. The smartest firms in the highbrow sector are the first to rethink the role of knowledge and to redesign work itself. They operate on the assumption that productivity and profits will both skyrocket if mindless work is reduced to a minimum or transferred to advanced technology, and the full potential of the worker is tapped. The goal is a better-paid but smaller, smarter work force. Even midbrow operations that still require physical manipulation of things are becoming more knowledge-intensive, moving up the mind-work spectrum. At GenCorp Automotive in Shelbyville, Indiana, the plant costed $65 million to build. It employs five hundred workers making plastic body panels for Chevrolets. Each worker, not just supervisors and managers, receive approximately $10,000 worth of training. In addition to leaning the physical tasks required, they were trained in problem solving, leadership skills, role playing, and organization processes. Workers are to be divided into teams. Supported by computer, they learn many different tasks, so that they can switch jobs and minimize boredom. Team leaders receive a full year’s training, including visits abroad. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

GenCorp did not invest so heavily for altruistic reasons. It did so as an investment to enable quick start-up at the plant, as well as better quality, less waste, and more output per worker. Highbrow firms, in general, are not charitable institutions. Although the work in them tends to be less physically onerous than in lowbrow operations, and the surroundings more agreeable, these firms typically demand more of their employees than lowbrow firms do. Employees are encouraged to use not only their rational minds, but to pour their emotions, intuitions, and imagination into the job. This is why Marcusian critics see in this an even more sinister “exploitation” of the employee. Our desire for conflict reduction accounts for the great popularity of the word “dialectic”—in our sense, the Marxist sense—for, beginning in opposites it ends in synthesis, all charms and temptations united in harmony. In philosophy and morals the hardest and most essential rule is “You can’t eat your cake and have it too,” but dialectic overcomes this rule. Socratic dialectic takes place in speech and, although drawn froward by the search for synthesis, always culminates in doubt. Socrates’ last word was that he knew that he knew nothing. Marx’s dialectic takes place in deed and culminates in the classless society, which also puts an end to theoretical conflicts, now known as ideologies. Historical dialectic provides an absolute ground and happy resolution for out relative lifestyles. Marx’s formula that “Mankind never sets problems for itself which it cannot solve” suits one side of our national temper. Roosevelt said much the same thing when he announced, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” This optimism is a national strength and is connected with original project of mastering of nature. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

However, that project itself is not unproblematic and makes sense only when kept within limits. One of these is the sanctity of human nature. It must not be mastered. Roosevelt’s dictum is nonsense when blown up into cosmic proportions. Human nature must not be altered in order to have a problem-free World. Man is not just a problem-solving being, as behaviourists would wish us to believe, but a problem-recognizing and -accepting being. Marx’s appeal does, nonetheless, touch us close to home as the fulfillment of what we set out to do—solve problems that God and nature had previously seemed to make insoluble, and earlier men had made a virtue of living with. Man has always had to come to terms with God, love and death. They made it impossible to be perfectly at home on Earth. However, America is coming to terms with them in new ways. God was slowly executed here; it took two hundred years, but local theologians tell us He is now dead. His place has been taken by the sacred. Love was put to death by psychologists. Its place had been taken by pleasures of the flesh and meaningful relationships. That has taken only about one hundred years. It should not be surprising that a new science, thanatology, or death with diginity, is one the way to putting death to death.  Coming to terms with the terror of death, Socrates’ long and arduous education, learning how to die, will no longer be necessary. For death is not what it used to be. What will take its place is not yet clear. Engels had a divination of what is needed when he said that the classless society would last, if not forever, a very long time. This reminds us of Dottore Dulcamare in The Elixir of Love, who says that he is known throughout the whole universe—and elsewhere. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

All one has to do is forget about eternity or blur the distinction between it and temporality; then the most intractable of man’s problems will have been resolved. On Sunday mornings educated men used to be harangued about death and eternity, made to give them a bit of attention. This is not a danger to be run in doing battle with the Sunday New York Times. Forgetting, in a variety of subtle forms, is one of our primary modes of problem-solving. We are learning to “feel comfortable” with God, love, and even death. The knowledge acquired by man through eating the miraculous fruit is of an essentially different kind. A superior-familiar encompassing of opposites is denied to one who, despite one’s likeness to God, has a part only in that which is created and not in creation, is capable only of begetting and giving birth, not of creating. Good and evil, the yes-position and the no-position of existence, enter into one’s living cognizance; but in one they can never be temporally coexistent. One knows oppositeness only by one’s situation within it; and that means de facto (since the yes can present itself to the experience and perception of human in the no-position, but not the no in the yes-position): one knows it directly from within that “evil” at times when one happens to be situated there; more exactly: one knows it when one recognizes a condition in which one finds oneself whenever one has transgressed the command of God, as the “evil” and the one one has thereby lost and which, for the time being, is inaccessible to one, as the good. However, at this point, the process in the human soul becomes a process in the World: through the recognition of oppositeness, the opposites which are always latently present in creation break out into actual reality, they become existent.  #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

The Savior has commanded us to become perfect, as He and our Father in Heaven are. To become like them, we must learn and grow in the knowledge of truth. Of all of the knowledge we can gain, the most important is a testimony of Jesus Christ, His divine mission, and His gospel. To gain this testimony, we should continually study the scriptures, ray, and live righteously. All the knowledge we obtain will not matter unless we have understood and obeyed the saving principles of the gospel. In just this manner the first humans, as soon as they have eaten of the fruit, “know” that they are naked. “And the eyes of both of them were opened”; they see themselves as they are, but now since they see themselves so, not merely without clothing, but “naked.” Recognition of this fact, the only recorded consequence of the magical partaking, cannot be adequately explained on the basis of sexuality, although without the latter it is, of course, inconceivable. Admittedly, they had not been ashamed before one another, but with one another before God because, overcome by the knowledge of oppositeness, they feel the natural state of unclothedness, in which they find themselves, to be an ill or an evil, or rather both at once and more besides, and by this very feeling they make it so; but as a countermeasure they conceive, will and establish the “good” of clothing. One is ashamed of being as one is because one now “recognizes” this so-being in its oppositional nature as an intended shall-be; but now it has really become a matter for shame. In themselves, naturally, neither the concept of clothed- and unclothedness, nor that of man and woman before one another, have anything whatsoever to do with good and evil; human “recognition” of opposites alone brings with it the fact of their relatedness to good and evil. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

In this lamentable effect of the great magic of the becoming-like-God the narrator’s irony becomes apparent; an irony whose source was obviously great suffering through the nature of man. However, does not God Himself confirm that the serpent’s promise has been fulfilled? He does; but this most extreme expression, this pronouncement, “Man is become as one of us, to know good and evil,” is also still stepped in the ironic dialectic of the whole which, it here shows most clearly, does not emanate from an intention freely formed by the narrator, but is imposed upon one by the theme—which corresponds exactly to one’s suffering through the nature of man—at this stage of its development. Because man is now numbered amongst those who know good and evil God wishes to prevent him from also eating of the tree of life and “living by aeons.” The narrator may have taken the motif from the ancient myth of the envy and vengeance of gods; if so, it acquired through him a meaning fundamentally different from its original one. Here there can no longer be any expression of fear that man might now become a match for the celestial beings: we have just seen how Earthly is the nature of man’s knowledge of “good and evil.” The “like one of us” can be uttered here only in the ironic dialectic. However, now it is the irony of a “divine compassion.” God, who breathed His breath into the construction of dust, placed him in the garden of the four rivers and gave him a helpmate, wanted him to accept his continued guidance; He wanted to protect him from the opposites latent in existence. However, man—caught up in demonry, which the narrator symbolizes for us with his web of play and dream—withdrew at once from both the will of God and from His protection and, though without properly understanding what he was doing, nevertheless with this deed, unrealized by his standing, caused the latent opposites to break out at the most dangerous point, that of the World’s closet proximity to God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

From that moment on, oppositeness takes hold of him, not indeed as a must-din—of that, and hence of original sin, there is no question here—but as the ever-recrudescent reaction to the no-position and its irredeemable perspective; he will ever find himself naked and look around for fig leaves with which to plait himself a girdle. If no end were set to it, this situation would inevitable develop into full demonry. Lest the thoughtless creature, again without knowing what he is doing, should long for the fruit of the other tree and eat himself into aeons of suffering, God prevents his return to the garden from which he expelled him in punishment. For man as a “living soul” known death is the threatening boundary; for him as the being driven round amidst opposite it may become a haven, the knowledge of which brings comfort. This stern benefaction is preceded by the passing of sentence. It announces no radical alteration of that which already exists; it is only that all things are drawn into the atmosphere of oppositeness. When she gives birth, for which she was prepared at the time of her creation, woman shall suffer pains such as no other creature suffers—henceforth a prince must be paid for being human; and the desire to become once more one body with the man shall render her dependent upon him. To the man work, which was already planned for him before he was set in the garden, shall become an affliction. However, the curse conceals a blessing. From the seat, which had been made ready for him, man is sent out upon a path, his own, the human path. That this is the path into the World’s history, that only through it does the World have a history—and an historical goal-must, in his own way, have been felt by the narrator. “And the Lord would not suffer that they should stop beyond the sea in the wilderness, but He would that they should come forth even unto the land of promise, which was choice above all other lands, which the Lord God had preserved for a righteous people,” reports Ether 2.7. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

A common reaction of someone caught in a Prisoner’s Dilemma is that “there ought to be a law against this sort of thing.” In fact, getting out of the Prisoner’s Dilemmas is one of the primary functions of government: to make sure that when individuals do not have private incentives to cooperate, they will be required to do the socially useful thing anyway. Laws are passed to case people to pay their taxes, not to steal, and to honor contracts with strangers. Each of these activities could be regarded as a giant Prisoner’s Dilemma game with many players. No one wants to pay taxes because the benefits are so diffuse and the costs are so direct. However, if each person has to pay so that each can share the benefits of schools, roads, and other collective goods, everyone may be better off. This is a major part of what Rousseau meant when he said that government’s role is to make sure that each citizen “will be forced to be free.” What governments do is to change the effective payoffs. If you avoid paying your taxes, you must face the possibility of being caught and sent to jail. This prospect makes the choice of defection less attractive. Even quasi-governments can enforce their laws by changing the payoffs faced by the individuals. For example, in the original story of the prisoner’s Dilemma, there were two accomplices arrested and interrogated separately. If they belonged to an organized gang, they could anticipate being punished for squealing. This might lower the payoffs for double-crossing their partner so much that neither would confess—and both would get the relatively light sentence that resulted from the mutual cooperation of their silence. Large changes in the payoff structure can transform the interaction so that it is no longer even a Prisoner’s Dilemma. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

If the punishment for defection is so great that cooperation is the best choice in the short run, no matter what the other play does, then there is no longer a dilemma. The transformation of payoffs does not have to be quite this drastic to be effective, however. Even a relatively small transformation of the payoffs might help make cooperation based on reciprocity stable, despite the fact that the interaction is still a Prisoner’s Dilemma. The reason is that the conditions for stability of cooperation are reflected in the relationship between the discount parameter, and the four outcomes of payoffs. What is needed is for one’s cooperation or information to be large enough relative to these payoffs. If the payoffs change, the situation may change from one in which cooperation is not stable to one in which it is. So, to promote cooperation through modification of the payoffs, it is not necessary to go so far as to eliminate the tension between the short-run incentive to defect and the longer-run incentive to achieve mutual cooperation. It is only necessary to make the long-term incentive for mutual cooperation. It is only necessary to make the long-term incentive for mutual cooperation greater than the short-term incentive for defection. “For behold, this is a land which is choice above all other lands; wherefore he that doth possess it shall serve God or shall be swept off; for it is the everlasting decree of God. And it is not until the fulness of iniquity among the children of the land, that they are swept off,” reports Ether 2.10. There are technical limitations that conspire to create a far deeper and much more serious problem for television: It is inherently boring. With information confined to only two sensory modes, with sensory synesthesia shifted, with low-definition imagery, with the total loss of context (aura and time), and with viewers whose thought processes are dulled, the producers of television programs begin with a difficult task. How to create interest through a medium that is predisposed to turn people off? #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

My friend Jack Edelson has put it this way: “It’s the most curious thing; when I watch television I’m so bored and yet fixated at the same time. I hate what I’m watching and I feel deeply disinterested but I keep watching anyway.” His statement was echoed by dozens of letters I have received, and children describe their TV experience in similar terms. The hypnotic-addictive quality of the medium goes a long way to keep the bored viewer fixated before the screen. So does the fact that our mediated environments do not offer much by way of stimulation. TV is the only action. However, there is much more to this bored fixation than that. Television producers and directors, deeply aware of the inherent limitations of the medium, have developed a vast technology of tricks—a technology of attachment, actually—that can succeed in keeping a viewer engaged despite the lack of any real desire to be watching. Most of the techniques were originally developed by advertising people, who have always had vast amounts of money available for experiments and whose raison d’etre is to develop technologies to fixate the viewer. Most of the techniques are rooted in an exploitation and inversion of a single emotionally based human tendency: interest in “highlighted moments.” We talked about Amazon Indians’ means of discovering, understanding and interacting with their forest environment. The events that caused them the greatest alarm were the unique, the out of the ordinary: a broken twig that could not be explained, or a distant sound that had no been heard before. It is the unusual that stimulates heightened attention. You can experience this yourself the next time you are out walking. Whether in a city or in a country meadow, the field of images, sounds, smells proceed into you without your particularly noticing them. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Then, an extraordinary event will occur A bird will dive nearby, a boulder will roll across the path, a car will screech to a halt. You snap into a more alert condition, a decision may be required. A thought results. Obviously being alert to the unusual moment is useful for survival. However, aside from survival, the sensory interest in the unusual is a means toward gaining knowledge and pleasure. Knowledge is gained by discerning change, by noting the event that is different from all others, by making distinctions and establishing patterns. The fiftieth time you watch a field of daisies you can still learn something new about natural form since no two observations are alike. Then there is the clearly special event: the single ten-foot daisy or the hole appearing where none had been the day before. In both cases, the extraordinary induces notation, study, and eventually knowledge. “Sometimes in a field of daisies,” one might say, “one daisy will grow abnormally large.” That is knowledge. “It is the same with bears and foxes.” This is a second level of knowledge. “Perhaps animals are like plants; I must watch for further examples of this.” A process of self-education about planetary patterns has begun. The observation of differences is at the heart of the knowledge. These senses are just as attuned to differentiation as the mind. We notice water or someone else’s skin against our own because the moment of touch is different from the moment before the touch. As the same touch is repeated over and over, we slowly sink back into automatic pilot. Although there can be comfort and security in the routine and the repetitive, the most stimulating event is the creative one, the new one. Television is an exceedingly odd phenomenon. On one had it offers non-unique, totally repetitive experience. No matter what is on television, the viewer is sitting in a darkened room, almost all systems shut down, looking at light. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

However, within this deprived, repetitive, inherently boring environment, television producers create the fiction that something unusual is going on, thereby fixing attention. They do this in two ways: first, by outrageously fooling around with the imagery; second, by choosing content outside of the ordinary life, thereby fitting the test of unusualness. These two tactics combine to create a hierarchy of production standards that in the trade are lumped together as “good television. Many people’s bodies ache for relief from television, but they cannot slip away because the show is too good to miss. The waves of terror that pass-through parts of an individual, while watching TV, let them know that they are still alive. People become trapped watching TV, unable to get themselves loose—self-sentenced to whatever come next. Even when something deep inside suddenly shits to a feeling of indifference, one gives up fighting. They are just watchers now, unaware of breathing or any other direct physical sensation. Only their heads seem to exist. Some people could be floating in a pool of warm, sticky glue, uncaring as long as they were being entertained by the screen. I have often wondered where the Silicon Valley gets its name from? Well, the Nanofab engineers of the Santa Clara Valley make computer chips by melting silicon, freeing it into lumps, sawing the lumps into slices, polishing the slices, and then going through a long series of chemical and photographic steps. When they are done, they have a pattern of lines and blobs of different materials on the surface. Even the smallest of these blobs contains billions of atoms, and it takes several blobs working together to store a single bit of information. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

A chip the size of your fingernail could store only a fraction of a billion bits. However, bare silicon chips are used, in many cases, for building up nanomemory. The nanommory, even in the early days, stored thousands of billions of bits. A Pocket Library is not only the size of a wallet, but about the same weight. Yet it has enough memory to record every volume in the Library of Congress. The total amount of energy is trivial, because the amount of product is trivial: at the end of the process, the total thickness of nanomemory structure—the memory store for a Pocket Library—amounts to one-tenth the thickness of a sheet of paper, spread over an area smaller than a postage stamp. If the telescope was the eye that gave access to a World of new fact, and new methods of obtaining them, then the printing press was the larynx. The press not only created new sources of data collection but vastly increased communication among scientists on a continent-wide basis. When we consider that Vesalius, Brahe, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, and Descartes were all born in the sixteenth century, we begin to grasp the relationship between the growth of science and the printing press, which is to say, the press announced the advent of science, publicized it, encouraged it, and codified it. It was a mystery to people how many books, newspapers, magazines and documents were published and spread to so many placed. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, an entirely new information environment had been created by print. Astronomy, anatomy, and physics were accessible to anyone who could read. Vernacular Bibles turned the Word of God into the words of God, since God became an Englishman or a German or a Frenchman, depending on the language in which His words were revealed. Practical knowledge about machines, agriculture, and medicine was widely dispersed. Commercial documents gave new form and vigorous impetus to entrepreneurial adventures. And, of course, printing vastly enhanced the importance of individuality. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

Customization wins the day in our community! 🙌 Our home at Residence 1 includes 3 bedrooms, but you’ll also have the option to convert the den to a fourth.

We provide the canvas, 🎨 and you add the details; it’s the perfect match. 👏

Maximize your living space by opting for a fourth bedroom and enjoy outdoor living year-round with the covered patio.
#Havenwood
#CresleighHomes