Ever since brokers began congregating at Jonathan’s Coffee House in the eighteenth century and gave birth to what became the London Stock Exchange, the money eyes in each country in the West has had within it a financial-services industry handling the needs of borrowers and investors. This industry has relied on the most advanced data stores and communications available in each period. However, as late as the 1950s, that still meant file cabinets, the post office, rotary telephones and ticker tapes to manage money-relevant knowledge. The rise since then of the knowledge-based economy has been attended not merely by the extremely paid expansion of constantly changing data, information and knowledge but by the brisk growth of the middle class, burgeoning pension funds and insurance coverage, a vast increase in customers for financial services—and the need for an entirely new financial infrastructure. By 2022, financial services employed fully 5 percent of the entire U.S.A workforce. Put differently, more than one out of every 20 American workers were engaged in banking, insurance, pension management, mortgage companies, real estate investment trust and the securities industry. The average age of these workers is 43, estimated job growth 1.03 percent, average salary $91,866, average male salary $124,644, and average female salary $121,498. These businesses manage the flow of money through the money system, providing liquidity, assembling and allocating investments, rating and furnishing credit, maintaining secondary markets for stocks and bonds and grading and managing risk. In the United Kingdom, where the City of London is home to some of the World’s largest traders in Eurobonds, derivatives and insurance, more than one million people are employed in finance. Concentrations in financial services are also found in Zurich, Frankfurt (sometimes labeled “Bankfurt”), Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore. And new regional centers are springing up from Shanghai to Dubai. Linking all these and other nodes together are high-powered computers and high-speed networks that aggregate and disperse money for investment and credit, not to mention speculation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Worldwide IT spending in the banking and securities sector was $514 billion in 2020. And the demand for even more instantly available information, data, and knowledge is growing constantly. The effects of this shift from the industrial-age financial infrastructure to its near-instantaneous, almost global digital form are by no means understood as yet, either by its users or by its customers—and least of all by policymakers and the public. Only a small fraction of the sums exchanged each day on the World’s stock markets is actually channeled to companies on the basis of their needs and long-term prospects. Instead, pre-programmed computers simultaneously scan thousand of firms to identify the most minute variations in their stock prices and frequently “invest” funds not for months or years but for minutes or even seconds. The result in large part is no longer investment but mathematically based, hyperspeed electronic poker. And it is no secret that within these markets, one in particular has grown so fast and furiously that the Financial Times describes it as “virtually unrecognizable from ten years ago.” This is the global currency market—swollen to the point that the International currency market has an average daily trading volume (ADTV) of $5 trillion, more than 67 times the entire amount traded daily on the New York Stock Exchange. In it, the Financial Times adds, trades are often multibillion-dollar transactions that take less than a second. However, little if any attention has gone to an even more troubling issue. For here once more we see change at the level of the deep fundamental of time—and yet another case of de-synchronization. Theoretically, the value of a country’s currency reflects, in great measure, the strength of its underlying economy. The de-synchronization, however, between high-speed currency trading and the slower pace at which a country’s “real” economy operates has grown so pronounced that the polarities—at least in some countries—are reversed. That is why, it was not bad economics that destroyed Asian financial markets in 1997-98 but bad currency market that tore down one economy after another. Similarly, near-instantaneous currency markets that tore down one economy after another. Similarly, near-instantaneous currency markets have left not only real economies but financial regulators in the dust. The result of this lack of synchrony is a system regarded by many as a threat not merely to individual countries but to the World economy. Super-slow national authorities with different and conflicting rules cannot regulate superfast global networks. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Many economies and economists still have trouble coming to terms with immense sums of “money” that exist only as temporary ones and zeros continually zipping from one node to node in digital trading networks with minimal human interaction. The effects are abstract, seemingly impersonal. Yet once in a while a poignant image encapsulates the revolutionary shift from the old money infrastructure to the still-emergent new structure. World-renowned photographer Robert Weingarten recently decided to shoot a series of pictures of the World’s stock exchanges. Assuming that their trading floors would someday all be replaced by electronic markets, he wanted to record their twilight in a series called “The Closing Bell.” It would capture frantic traders shouting and rushing about to close sales while telephones rind endlessly and changing prices blink across overhead light boards. He would then shoot the rooms as they look after closing: empty and desolate. Because he is a Californian, his first stop was the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco. However, when he arrived to scout the location, he found the former stock-trading floor under reconstruction. The exchange had already converted equity trading to an electronic auction system called Archipelago, increasing the volume of its business twentyfold. The specialists and traders were already gone. The floor was on its way to becoming a gymnasium. And Archipelago was on its way to merging with the New York Stock Exchange. On its surface, today’s revolution in money—much of it still to come—seems chaotic. Yet if we look a bit closer, we discover a hidden motif. It is the same pattern of de-massification and diversification that we have already seen in production, markets, media, family structure—indeed, throughout the emergent new civilization. So profound are these changes—and those to come—that they challenge the very definition of money. Central banks have their own answers to the question “What is money?” #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

The U.S. Federal Reserve definition essentially bundles together actual currency with money in our checking accounts and traveler’s checks and calls this “M1” money. Add to M1 the sums in our savings accounts and money-market mutual funds and it is called M2. Add a basket of other, mostly arcane, items and it becomes M3. For ordinary people going about their daily lives, these distinctions do not exist. The basic unit of money in America is the “almighty dollar.” Few of those who use it every day know that until the industrialization of the nation was ramping up, the government-backed dollar was only one among as many as eight thousand different wildcat currencies in the United States of America issued by states, banks, individual companies, merchants and miners. The standardization of money imposed by the United States of America government in 1863 paralleled the standardization of products, prices, and consumer tastes that came as part of the process of industrialization. And the same was true in other countries as well. The Japanese yen did not become the national currency until 1871, as the Meiji restoration was starting the country on the path to industrial modernity. Similarly, the deuschemark did not become Germany’s monetary unit until 1872, as Germany raced to overtake Britain as the leading industrial power. China long suffered from monetary chaos—with warlords, states, revolutionary bases, foreign enclaves and others each issuing their own currencies—right down to December 1948, as the Communists took over and introduced the renminbi yuan. And Europe, of course, has only recently standardized on the euro. Ironically, this belated standardization—like must else in the European Union—comes just as the knowledge-based wealth system beings to move advanced economies in the opposite direction. In fact, homogeneous currencies are about to be challenged by a dizzying diversity of alternatives. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

In 1958—just two years after white-collar and service workers initially outnumbered blue-collar workers in the United States of America—a prototype for the first nationwide credit card was launched. This was the start of a Third Wave leap away from conventional money and into what today sometimes seems like a wilderness of “para-money”—a jungle of substitutes that have some or all of the characteristics of official currencies but are not. Money is fungible, meaning that it can be used in principle to buy just about anything. It can also be transferred to and from just about anyone. That near-universal applicability has made it very handy as a medium of exchange. However, a strange thing is happening. Today with more than one billion credit cards in use in the United States of America. American charge one trillion dollars a year on plastic—more than they spend in cash. And every day, it seems, we invent additional substitutes for money. Our airline tickets are often “free,” paid for with frequent-flier points. Originally, these points could be redeemed only for free seats on another flight. They were completely nonfungible—and not transferable to anyone else. They were unmoneylike. Before long, however, airlines permitted your points to be used by family members, friends—and anyone you choose. Beyond airline tickets, the points became redeemable for hotel rooms and rental cars, then an ever-widening range of merchandise—health-club memberships and hockey tickets, barbecues and wide-screen TVs, gardenias and garden hoses. What we say, therefore, was growing transferability and fungibility. Frequent-flier points were becoming more moneylike. They become actual money when they are sold to any of the various “milage brokers” who operate a gray market for points, over the objections of the airlines. True, given the financial shakiness of some of the issuing airlines, one might worry that the redeemability of all these points is in doubt. However, these intangible frequent-flier points may soon be worth more than the currency issues by some of the World’s dead-broke governments who still own airlines. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Of course, loyalty programs of various kinds, with greater or lesser degree of fungibility, are used not just by airlines. They are offered by everyone from InterContinental Hotels and Hilton to Neiman Marcus and Tesco Europe, from CVS drugstores and Chart House restaurants to BMW motorcycles. In the swirling, changing, milling marketplace they, too, perform some of the functions of plain old garden-variety money. However, this is only part of a larger change—the arrival of “flexible fungibility” in the form of programmable money. And your thirteen-year-old may not like it. The contest at the checkout counter has important implications for the consumer as well—and for the economy generally. Among other things it should help us rethink our obsolete assumptions about the respective roles of producers and consumers. For example, in a World in which money is “informationalized” and information “monetized,” the consumer pays for every purchase twice over: first with money and a second times by providing information that is worth money. The customer typically gibes this away for nothing. It is this valuable information that the retailers, manufacturers, banks, credit card issuers (and a lot of other people) are now fighting to control. In Florida and California, retail chains have fought blistering legal battles with banks over this issue. The central question their lawyers are asking one another is: “Who owns the customer data?” More consumers are becoming aware of just how much of their personal data has been collected. Consumer data ownership has reached a point that few people ever imagine it reaching. As a result, throughout the last decade, consumer data has become exponentially more valuable, and the tracking methods of social platforms have become exponentially more invasive. As a result consumers have a better understanding of their data’s value and the ways in which it is captured, there are two ways this may play out. First of all, no more tracking. With consumers and governments pushing for change in tech when it comes to data collection, we could see many brands change their business models to not relay on data as a revenue drive. For example, we could see social networks become pay-to-play. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Secondly, rewarding consumers for their data is an option. Some consumers—typically younger ones—are would accept their data being collected as long as there is a value exchange for it. However, at the end of the day, it comes down to ownership and control. If consumers own their data and are in control of how it is used, then everyone is happy. If a consumer prefers that their information be private and not make their data available to brands, that is their choice. However, if that consumer is not as concerned about their privacy, then they also have the ability to make their data available in exchange for some type of value—the level of which they are willing to accept in exchange for their data is up to each individual consumer. Yet, we still lack the vocabulary, let alone laws and economic concepts, with which to deal with these unfamiliar questions arising from the information wars. However, the issues involve the transfer of billions of dollars—and a subtle shift of economic and social bargaining power. What does a customer give away free to the store, the manufacturer, or his or her credit card company? Take the simplest of cases: A mother, home from work, in haste to make dinner, discovers she is out of margarine. Dashing into the nearest store, she snatches a pound of Fleischmann’s sweet unsalted margarine made by Nabisco off the shelf. Hurrying to the checkout counter, she waits her turn, grabbing a copy of TV Guide from the rack near the register, and hands her purchase to the clerk, who passes them over the scanner. In principle, she has communicated the following to the store computer: (1) a type of product she uses: (2) its brand; (3); its size or amount; (4) the fact that she preferred unsalted margarine to the regular; (5) the time of the purchase; (6) what other items, brands, sizes et cetera, she bought at the same time; (7) the size of her total bill; (8) the kind of magazine in which an advertiser might reach her; (9) information about where additional shelf space is now available; and much more besides. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

By combining all this, it will soon become possible to construct a surprisingly detailed picture of the individual’s life style, including driving habits, travel, entertainment and reading preferences, the frequency of meals outside the home, purchases of adult beverages, prophylactics or other contraceptives, and a list of favorite charities. Marui, a leading Japanese general-goods retailer which issues its own credit card, uses a system called M-TOPS. This permits Marui to zero in on families who have just changed residence. It does this by identifying purchases that usually go with furnishing a new home. On the assumption that a family buying air conditioners or kitchen cabinetry might be in the market for new beds as well, Marui has been able to achieve astonishingly high direct-mail responses. Leaving aside for a time the unsettling issues this raises about privacy in a super-symbolic economy, much of this information once in the hands of any commercial enterprise—supermarket chain, bank, manufacturer—can also be sold for a price of bartered for a discount on services. The market for such information is huge. “Data protection” laws in many countries now seek to regulate the uses of computerized information, but the data banks are filling up, the possibilities of integration are increasing, and the economic value of the information is soaring. All this, however, is only a primitive first approximation of the future. Consumers may soon find themselves in supermarkets lined with so-called “electronic shelves.” Instead of paper tags indicating the prices of canned goods or paper towels, the edge of the self itself will be a blinking liquid crystal display with digital readouts of the prices. The magic of this new technology is that it permits the store to change the price of thousands of products automatically and instantaneously as data streak in from the scanners at the front of the store. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Prices might plummet for slow-selling goods, climb for the hot items, rising and falling continuously in real-time response to supply and demand. Telepanel, Inc., a Toronto firm, estimates that such a system, capable of pricing 8,000 to 12,000 items, would cost the store in the range of $150,000 to $200,000 and pay for itself within two years. Carried only a short step further, the electronic shelf might also provide shoppers with nutritional and prince information at the touch of a button. Now are such systems contemplated only for supermarkets. Says Business Week: “Drug chains, convenience stores, and even department stores already are planning their own version of the system.” Down the line are even “smarter” shelves that would not merely send information to the customer, but elicit information from him or her. Hidden sensors, for example, make it possible to know when a customer passes a hand over a particular shelf or item, or when traffic exceeds or falls below expectation at a particular display. Soon the customer will hardly be able to blink in the store, or move his or her arms, without providing the storekeeper with more and yet more usable or salable data. The moral and economic implications of all this have hardly been explored by business or by consumer advocates. (Those interested in organizing consumer power had better start thinking about all this quickly, before the systems have been laid in place.) For now, it is only necessary to understand that profit margins today increasingly depend on information judo. Now, a college catalogue lists courses, subjects, and field of study that, taken together, amount to a certified statement of what a serious student ought to think about. More to the point, in what is omitted from a catalogue, we may learn what a serious student ought not to think about. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

A college catalogue, in other words, is a formal description of an information management program; it defines and categorizes knowledge, and in so doing systematically excludes, demeans, labels as trivial—in a word, disregards certain kinds of information. That is why “it makes sense” (or, more accurately, used to make sense). By what it includes/excludes it reflects a theory of the purpose and meaning of education. In the university where I teach, you will not find courses in astrology or dianetics or creationism. There is, of course, much available information about these subjects, but the theory of education that sustains the university does not allow such information entry into the formal structure of its courses. Professors and students are denied the opportunity to focus their attention on it, and are encouraged to proceed as if it did not exist. In this way, the university gives expression to its idea of what constitutes legitimate knowledge. At the present time, some accept this idea and some do not, and the resulting controversy weakens the university’s function as an information control center. The clearest symptom of the breakdown of the curriculum is found in the concept of “cultural literacy,” which has been put forward as an organizing principle and has attracted the serious attention of many educators. If one is culturally literate, the idea goes, one should mater a certain list of thousands of names, places, dates, and aphorisms; these are supposed to make up the content of the literate American’s mind. However, cultural literacy is not an organizing principle at all; it represents, in fact, a case of calling the disease the cure.  If it is to function well in the management of information, the point to be stressed here is that any educational institution, must have a theory about its purpose and meaning, mist have the means to give clear expression to its theory, and must do so, to a large extent, by excluding information. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

I suspect that if we were to make a law forbidding the use of any of the words on the imposing list in this section, a large part of the population would be silenced. Technical discourse would continue; but all that concerns right and wrong, happiness, the way we ought to live, would become quite difficult to express. These words are there where thoughts should be, and their disappearance would reveal the void. The exercise would be an excellent one, for it might start people thinking about what they really believe, about what lies behind the formulas. Would “living exactly as I please” be speakable as a substitute for “life-style”? Would “my opinion” do for “values”? “My prejudices” for my “ideology”? Could “rabble-rousing” or “simply divine” stand in for “charisma”? Each of the standard words seems substantial and respectable. They appear to justify one’s tastes and deeds, and human beings need to have such justification, no matter what they may say. We have to have reasons for what we do. It is the sign of our humanity and our possibility of community. I have never met a person who says, “I believe what I believe; these are just my values.” There are always arguments. Tyrant groups had them; Communists have them. Thieves and pimps have them. There may be some people who do not feel they have to make a case for themselves, but they must be either unethical or philosophers. However, these words are not reasons, nor were they intended to be reason. All to the contrary, they were meant to show that our deep human need to know what we are doing and to be good cannot be satisfied. By some miracle these very terms became our justification: nihilism as moralism. It is not the immorality of relativism that I find appalling. What is astounding and degrading is the dogmatism with which we accept such relativism, and our easygoing lack of concern about what that means for our lives. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

The one writer who does not appeal at all to Americas—who offers nothing for our Marxist, Freudian, feminist, deconstructionist, or structuralist critics to mangle, who provides no poses, sentimentalities or bromides that appeal to our young—is Louis Ferdinand Celine, who best expressed how life looks to a man facing to what we believe or do not believe. He is a far more talented artist and penetrating observer than the much more popular Mann or Camus. Robinson, the hero he admires in Journey to the End of the Night, is an utterly selfish liar, cheat, murderer for pay. Why does Ferdinand admire him? Partly for his honesty, but mostly because he allows himself to be shot and killed by his girlfriend rather than tell her he loves her. He believes in something, which Ferdinand is unable to do. American students are repelled, horrified by this novel, and turn away from it in disgust. If it could be force-fed to them, it might motivate them to reconsider, to regard it as urgent to think through their premises, to make their implicit nihilism explicit and examine it seriously. As an image of our current intellectual condition, I keep being reminded of the newsreel pictures of Frenchmen splashing happily in the water at the seashore, enjoying the paid annual vacations legislated by Leon Blum’s Popular Front government. It was 1936, the same year Hitler was permitted to the Rhineland. All our big causes amount to that kind of vacation. A government must deter its citizens from breaking the law. For example, to collect taxes effectively, a government must maintain a reputation for prosecuting tac evaders. The government often spends far more investigating and prosecuting evaders than it acquires from the penalties levied against them. The government’s goal, of course, is to maintain a reputation for catching and prosecuting evaders to deter anyone contemplating tax evasion in the future. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

And what is true for tax collection is also true for many forms of policing: the key to maintaining compliant behavior from the citizenry is that that government remains able and willing to devote resources far out of proportion to the stakes of the current issue in order to maintain its reputation for toughness. In the case of a government and its citizens, the social structure has a single central actor and many peripheral ones. A comparable social structure exists with a monopolist trying to deter entry into its markets. Still another example is an empire trying to deter revolt by its provinces. Boarder protection is a method for preventing an invasion and for determining other behaviors and actions that are not consider lawful. In each case, the problem is to present challenges by maintaining a reputation from firmness in dealing with people. To maintain this reputation might well require meeting a particular challenge with a toughness out of all proportion to the stakes involved in that particular issue. Even the most powerful government cannot enforce any rule it chooses. To be effective, a government must elicit compliance from the majority of the governed. To do this requires setting and enforcing the rules so that it pays for most of the governed to obey most of the time. An example of this fundamental problem occurs in the regulation of industrial pollution. As modeled by Scholz (1983), the government regulatory agency and a regulate company are in an iterated Prison’s Dilemma with each other. The company’s choices at any point are to comply voluntarily with the rules or to evade them. The agency’s choices are to adopt an enforcement mode in dealing with that particular company which is either flexible or coercive. If the agency enforces with flexibility and the firm complies with the rules, then both the agency and the firm benefit from mutual cooperation. The agency benefits from the company’s compliance, and the company benefits from the agency’s flexibility. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Both sides avoid expensive enforcement and litigation procedures. Society also gains the benefits of full compliance at low cost to the economy. However, if the firm evades and the agency uses coercive enforcement, both suffer the punishing costs of the resultant legalistic relationship. If the agency is using flexible enforcement policy which is unlikely to penalize evasion, the firm also faces temptation to evade. And the agency faces a temptation to use the strict enforcement mode with a complying company in order to get the benefits of encoring even unreasonably expensive rules. The agency can adopt a strategy such as TIT FOR TAT which would give the company an incentive to comply voluntarily and thereby avoid the retaliation represented by the coercive enforcement policy. Under suitable conditions of the payoff and discount parameters, the relationship between the regulated and the regulator could be the socially beneficial one of repeated voluntary compliance and flexible enforcement. The new feature introduced by Scholz’s model of the interaction between the government and the governed is the additional choice the government has concerning the toughness of the standards. To set a tough pollution standard, for example, would make the temptation to evade very great. On the other hand, to set a very lenient standard would men more allowable pollution, there by lessening the payoff from mutual cooperation which the agency would attain from voluntary compliance. The trick is to set the stringency of the standard high enough to get most of the social benefits of regulations, and not so high as to prevent the evolution of a stable pattern of voluntary compliance from almost all of the companies. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

In addition to making and enforcing standards, governments often settle disputes between private parties. A good example is the case of a divorce in which the court awards child custody to one parent, and imposes a requirement of child support payments upon the other parent. Such settlements are notorious for the unreliability of the consequent support payments. For this reason, If the other patent falls behind in the supper payments, it has been proposed reciprocal nature by allowing the custodial parent be given a reciprocal nature by allowing the custodial parent to withdraw visitation privileges. This proposal could amount to placing the parents in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, and leaving them to work out strategies based upon reciprocity. Hopefully, the result would benefit the child by promoting a stable pattern of cooperation between the parents based upon reciprocity that traded reliable support payments for regular visitation privileges. Governments relate not only to their own citizens, but to other governments as well. In some contexts, each government can interact bilaterally with any other government. An example is the control of international trade in which a country can impose trade restrictions upon imports from another country, for instance as a retaliation against unfair trade practices. However, an interesting characteristic of governments that had not yet been taken into account is that they are based upon specific territories. In a pure territorial system, each individual has only a few neighbors, and interacts only with these neighbors. “Having all manner of fruit, and of grain, and of silks, and of fine linen, and of gold, and of silver, and of precious things; and also all manner of cattle, of oxen, and cows, and sheep, and of swine, and of goats, and also man other kinds of animals which were useful for the food of man. And they also hand horses, and mules, and there were elephants and cureloms and cumoms; all of which were useful unto man, and more especially the elephants and cureloms and cumons. And the Lord did pour out His blessing upon this land, which was choice above all other lands,” reports Ether 9.17-20. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Surrealism is the last school to assert the political mission of art. Before trailing off into Tortskyism and/or art-World fame, the surrealists upheld chance and the primitive as ways to unlock “the Marvelous” which society imprisons in the unconscious. The false judgment that would have re-introduced art into everyday life and thereby transfigured it certainly misunderstood the relationship of art to repressive society. The real barrier is not between art and social reality, which are one, but between desire and the existing World. The Surrealists’ aim of inventing a new symbolism and mythology upheld those categories and mistrusted unmediated sensuality. Concerning the latter, Breton held that “enjoyment is a science; the exercise of the senses demands a personal initiation and therefore you need art.” Modernist abstraction resumed the trend begun by Aestheticism, in that it expressed the conviction that only by a drastic restriction of its field of vision could art survive. With the least stain of embellishment possible in formal language, art became increasingly self-referential, in its search for a “purity” that was hostile to narrative. Guaranteed not to represent anything, modern painting is consciously nothing more than a flat surface with paint on it. However, the strategy of trying to empty art of symbolic value, the insistence on the work of art as an object in its own right in a World of objects, proved a virtually self-annihilating method. This “radical physicality,” based on aversion to authority though it was, never amounted to more, in its objectness, than simple commodity status. The sterile grids of Mondrian and the repeated all-black squares of Reinhardt echo this acquiescence no less than hideous twentieth-century architecture in general. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Modernist self-liquidation was parodied by Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased Drawing, exhibited after his month-long erasure of a de Kooning drawing. The very concept of art, Duchamp’s showing of a urinal in a 1917 exhibition notwithstanding, became an open question in the 50s and has grown steadily undefinable since. Television is also considered a form of art. Popular wisdom hold that noncommerical public television competes so ineffectively, in terms of audience ratings, because of the “low tastes” of the viewing public. I have heard many a liberal put it that “we need to educate people to appreciate better sorts of programing.” I can barely restrain my anger at the arrogance, cynicism, and ignorance of this position. If you will go back to your television set and apply the Technical Events Test to your noncommerical channel, you will find that except for documentary footage there are usually only two or three technical events in every minute of programming and that these are more likely to be of the simpler sort: camera switching, panning and zooms. Because they are not as well funded as their commercial competitors, noncommerical television producers can afford only about 25 percent as much technical gimmickry as commercial stations. In the end, the ratio works out about this way: Advertising: 20-30 technical events per minute. Commercial program: 8-10 technical events per minute. Public television: 2-3 technical events per minute. The technical events are surely not the sole determinants of viewer interest and appeal, but they are far more logical an explanation for the popularity of certain programming than the assertion that people demand violent programs. What people desire is involvement and interest. In a World where real involvement and unique events are more and more remote from direct personal experience, and in a medium that is inherently dulling, it is a wonder that any people at all are able to make their way through any noncommerical programs with their small degree of technical effects. In fact, I find it a rather moving testimony to the vitality of people that they continue to seek content that has not been jazzed up and packaged. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

This is all aside from the question of whether public television programs are any better than commercial programs. In fact most public television producers have the same system of values as their commercial counterparts and for the same reasons. Recognizing that hype is needed for ratings in such an intrinsically turned-off medium, and that the ratings are just as much a determinant for funding in public television as commercial television, they put as much money as possible into technique. They operate out of the same standards of “good television.” They even gain support from the same corporations that dominate commercial television: oil companies and chemical companies. So the smokestack era power producers are also funding your educational TV and many of the programs you watch on cable and commercial TV. It is sometimes considered a mitigating factor that the commercial message in public television is limited to a low-key acknowledgement at the beginning and the end of the program. However, these companies are not attempting to achieve exactly the same effect on public television as they do on commercial TV. There is a different level of benefit to corporations who insinuate themselves into this so-called noncommerical environment. The benefit is company identification rather than product identification. This has long-run value in public relations terms rather than short-run gains in sales. In addition, having the name repeated in a noncommerical format can still set off the neuronal billboard that has been preciously implanted in the brain by commercial programs. Finally, the cost of these low-key acknowledgments is negligible. To have its name appear on the screen before and after a half-hour program may cost a corporation only a few thousand dollars. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Underwriting an entire half-hour program on public television usually costs less than one sixty-second spot in commercial television. Aside from these differences, public television is similar to the rest of television. Competing for many of the same dollars, the same ratings, the same markets, and operating in the same medium with the same technical limitations, the noncommerical producer must take very similar choices. The best proof can be found in the most successful public television shows. Sesame Street, for example, the most popular program in public television history, has a technical events ratio equal to and sometimes larger than its commercial competition. It is not well enough appreciated, I think, that Sesame Street was conceived, designed, and executed from its inception by ex-advertising people. Using every technique they learned in advertising—rapid cutting, interspersing of songs and cartoons, very short time spans—their show had been found more “interesting” than any public TV program that preceded it. This “interest” is based on technique and these are the same techniques used in advertising. A basic question about nanotechnology is, “When will it be achieved?” The answer is simple: No one knows. How molecular machines will behave is a matter for calculation, but how long it will take us to develop them is a separate issue. Technology timetables cannot be calculated from the laws of nature, they can only be guessed at. In coming reports, we will examine different paths to nanotechnology, hear what some of the pioneers have to say, and describe the progress already mad. This will not answer our basic question, but it will educate our guesses. Molecular nanotechnology could be developed in any of several basically different ways. Each of these basic alternatives itself includes further alternatives. Researchers will be asking, “How can we make the fastest progress?” To understand the answers they may come to, we need to ask the same question here, adopting (for the moment) a gung-ho, let’s go, how-do-we-get-the-job-done? attitude. We give some of the researchers’ answers in their own words. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

“It is true that the World was a solitude in the first days, but the solitude was soon modified. When we were 30 years old we have 30 children, our children had 300; in 20 years more the population was 6,000; by the end of the second century it was become millions. For we are a long-lived race, and not many died. More than half of my children are still alive. I did not cease to bear until I was approaching middle age. As a rule, such of my children as survived the perils of childhoods have continued to live, and this has been the case with other families. Our race now numbers billions,” reports Eve. We must speak in the forecourt of the soul. Here, with absolute clarity, there is, as it were, a static opposition, reminiscent of the Avestic opposition of “goodness of mind” and “badness of mind”: a distinction is made between a state of the soul in which it purposes good and one in which it does not, in fact therefore, not between good and an ungood “disposition,” but between a disposition to good and its absence. Not until we deal with this second state, with the lack of direction towards God, do we penetrate to the chamber of the soul at whose entrance we encounter the demon. Not till then are we dealing with the true edge of good and evil, and by man’s self-exposure to the opposites inherent in existence within the World, but now in its ethical mould. From quite general opposites, embracing good and evil as well as good and ill and good and bad, we have arrived at the circumscribed area peculiar to man, in which only good and evil still confront each other. It is peculiar to man—so may we late-comers formulate it—because it can only be perceived introspectively, can only be recognized in the conduct of the soul towards itself: a man only knows factually what “evil” is in so far as he knows about himself, everything else to which he gives this name is merely mirrored illusion. “Behold, there is a time appointed that all shall come forth from the dead. Now when this time cometh no one knows; but God knoweth the time which is appointed,” reports Alma 39.4. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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