The much-vaunted “freedom” of American life may be considered an illusion. Part of the reason is because we are the slaves of technology—technology is no longer an extension of ourselves. Other than that, we can only do what we are told, otherwise we have to fact the consequences for our actions. While outwardly participating in an activity within a social situation, an individual can allow one’s attention to turn from what one and everyone else considers the real or serious World, and give oneself up for a time to a playlike World in which one alone participates. This kind of inward emigration from the gathering may be called “away,” and we find that strict situational regulations obtain regarding it. Perhaps the most important kind of away is that through which the individual relives some past experiences or rehearses some future ones, this taking the form of what is variously called reverie, brown study, woolgathering, daydreaming, or autistic thinking. At such times the individual may demonstrate one’s absence from the current situation by a preoccupied, faraway look in one’s eyes, or by a sleeplike stillness of one’s limbs, or by that special class of side involvements that can be sustained doodling, drumming the fingers on a table, hair twisting, nose picking, scratching. (Incidentally, these fuguelike side involvements are also the ones that can convey that the individual has become carried far away by a meditative task one is performing in.) In any case, reverie constitutes an eloquent sign of departure from all public concrete matters withing the situation. The degree to which individuals ordinarily go away in situations in which they are participants whether concealing this disaffection from the others or not, is little known. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

It can be assumed, however, that every round of life provides at least a few places for getting away with going away. Some occupations are especially rich in this regard. In the tourist hotel on Shetland Isle, for example, dishwashers could keep pace with the work while allowing their minds to wander completely, and would sometimes end up in abstracted singing that was so patently away as to be cut short by the managers. So, too, at the community gatherings, local musicians on the stage were able to play while allowing themselves to drift quite far away; they would come out of their several reveries together at the end of a number with a little wave of joking that showed how far from the dancers they had actually been. Certain jobs, of course, such as that of night watchman, may be chosen with these away possibilities in mind. Some social establishments seem particularly plagued by the fact that members find too many opportunities for reverie. The biographer of an ex-nun, for example, writes as follows about a group of newly professed nuns in a convent: “Her companions came as usual with their little black bags, but some of them, she observed, had the look of sleepwalkers. Their wide-open eyes seemed to be focused on a distant glory as they made their bows to the presiding Mistress and took the nearest unoccupied chair without, as formerly, looking about to choose a place in the circle where their presence might do the most good. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

“The tendency toward mysticism is always a problem in a mixed Order such as ours where work and contemplation must go hand in hand. One sees this often in the newly professed and while it is a very beautiful thing to see a young nun apparently communing directly with God, she is nevertheless lost to the community when in that rapture and someone’s else mind, hands and feet must do her work meanwhile. One can never know, of course, if it is the real thing or simply one of those unconscious singularizations to which we all fall prey from time to time.” The silence of the preoccupied ones did not escape the attention of the presiding Mistress. She drew the dreamers back into the sewing circle with direct questions about their assignments. On some mental hospital wards, aways are not directly penalized and patients may spend years walking up and down the hallways ruminating on the relations they left behind them, coming out of their away only when hospital administration forcibly impinges on them. A good description of this state is called “chronically demoralization” and “despair.” In such settings, awayness may be not only tolerated but also engendered, as when a patient in seclusion finds nothing tangible in the cell to put one’s mind on, or when all the patients on a ninety-bed ward are herded into one of the two dayrooms in order that the other can be mopped or waxed, and thus find themselves bunched so closely together that a useful defense is to withdrawn into oneself and suppress orientation to the others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

In these contexts the participant-observer can soon learn to disattend to incontinence and hallucinations occurring eighteen inches away. And in such settings we know something about how hard it may be for the individual to bring oneself out of one’s away in order to participate in talk with others present. Perhaps these facts can help one to understand the classic back-ward phenomenon of the patient who is sufficiently preoccupied to let the cigarette burn short enough to char his fingers. As was suggested in connection with lolling, individuals develop many untaxing activities as covers behind which to go into a reverie. The coffee-and-cigarette break when taken by oneself is an instance of this. Public eateries have underwritten this practice by placing seats for lone eaters in front of a running mirror, thus enabling the patron to facilitate the away process by covertly looking at oneself. Persons who find themselves disenchanted with the whole system of situational obligations in society may seek out those places where reverie is likely to be tolerated. As one very literate patient in Central Hospital is recorded to have said: “To avoid gossip I began to frequently dives of every type, where I thought no one would see me. I merely sat there for hours thinking and looking off into space, entertaining a confused set of ideas.” While the silent or brown study kind of awayness is perhaps the main type, other kinds are also observable. First, there is what is usually called “talking to oneself,” which can be narrowly defined as holding a vocal or gestural conversation where the person with whom one is conversing is oneself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

On the stage these actions are termed soliloquies and have been institutionalized as permissible dramaturgical devices. In real life in our society, however, there tends to be the understanding that only the mentally ill, the not yet taught, and the foolish engage in this activity. Actually, there are many circumstances in which persons will talk to themselves and find that this is tolerated. For example, if an individual acts ineptly one may carefully curse oneself audibly to show that one, too, finds such ineptness unacceptable and, in addition, uncharacteristic of oneself, apparently preferring to be someone who talks to oneself rather than someone who characteristically errs as one has just done. Similarly, in what we call “muttering,” the individual seems wiling to be known as someone who talk to oneself rather than as someone who accepts affronts without taking action. Except when this kind of face-saving is occurring, however, persons who talk to themselves typically take care to do so only when they are certain of not being confronted with someone and hence with a social situation. Self-talkers who are particularly wary of being suddenly come upon may shield their potential impropriety by leaving their mouths open a little, so that signs of vocalization can be less readily detected by suddenly appearing witness. Another variety of away occurs when the individual audibly engages in rehearsing or reliving a conversation with a real person other than oneself who happens not to be there. Individuals, of course, frequently converse this way “in their minds,” as when practicing what they will say to their boss or to an audience. However, rarely, it would seem, do they audibly give the show away. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

There is a final type of away that should be mentioned. When an individual finds oneself in a gathering from whose activities one wishes to insulate oneself, one may give up one’s attention to an activity that is of fanciful, fantasy kind (and in this sense similar to the imagined World of the reverie), and yet use materials for the construction of this alienated World that are visible to others. A component of disinterested intellectual pursuit will be present. This type of activity is illustrated by the individual who constructs elaborate doodles, or piles matches on the top of a bottle, or works jigsaw puzzles, and by the child who walks in such a way as to avoid the cracks in the pavement, or hops for a distance on one foot, or hold a stick against fence posts as one passes by, or kicks a can along one’s route. In American society another instance is provided by the mother who takes interactional leave of the situation in which one is physically fixed by playing for a moment with one’s infant, even while another may be directing statements to the conversational cluster of which the parent is a ratified member. The positive sanction behind mother-love, and the nation that, ceremonially speaking, children are not complete persons and hence not complete distractions, help to give impunity to those who employ this strategy. In Shetland Isle the ubiquitous household cat was similarly significant: a Shetlander caught in a social gathering he found undesirable sometimes turned to teasing the cat, repeating half-aloud the responses one’s teasings would presumably call forth could the cat talk. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

Thus, a man who was drawn to the kitchen by the warmth and tea available there, but repelled by the circle of women present, could have his comfort in safety by using the cat as a means of removing himself from the women’s circle. Chronic patients in Central Hospital frequently employed these “toy-involvements” as a means of going away. Walking up to the steps in a line of patients coming back from lunch, one person would suddenly stoop and take delight in examining a small fleck of colour in the concrete. Other patients, especially one felt to be extremely regressed and deteriorated, would for long periods of time focus their total attention on little bits of grim adhering to the ends of their fingers, sometimes licking the specks, or, on little mounds of dust on the floor, or they would slowly and carefully trace with their fingertips the grain and other markings on the floor next to where they were crouched. In these ways they effectively pulled the whole World in on them until the circle of reality was not more than a foot in diameter around their noses. Of course, some of the toy-involvements used by the patients were not far from civil practices. For example, when a delivery truck would park outside the patient canteen building, one patient would draw finger patterns on the dust of the panel body; another, on the ward, would while away the time by cutting chains out of newspapers. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

A brief spate of behaviour can, of course, exhibit more than one type of improper involvement, showing in several different ways how the individual has insufficient situational presence. Improper creatures release, for example, are often associated with the state of being away. Thus, at Central Hospital it was possible to observe a patient ejecting chewed chicken from her overstuffed mouth and carefully examining it with both hands in a bemused way, or doing the same with the mucus one had removed from one’s nose. Another individual patient would then spit, but not far enough out to clear her dress, and would then show concentrated interest in watching the spittle slowly spread and disappear into the cloth. An angry elderly male patient would cough up enough phlegm and then play with it abstractly on the table before eventually wiping it off. One thing everyone needs to learn is when to be an expert and when not to be. When you are a guest in someone’s home or someone superior to you makes a statement that you know to be incorrect, the polite thing to do is to agree with them and let it go. Otherwise, you may make someone uncomfortable, and put others in an embarrassing situation. Often times, events will be so much better if one does not become argumentative. Make a note not to argue with people about everything under the Milky Way. The best thing to do is avoid an argument at all costs. Ninety percent of the time, an argument ends with each of the contestants more firmly convinced than ever that one is absolutely right. Young people sometimes like to argue because they do not have much experience in life and have had to be submissive so long, but after they grow up, they do not care to so much. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

You cannot win an argument, even when you are right, because it will make your relationship with another person become negative. So, unless you are paid to argue for a living, try not to. The goal for some people is to refrain from talking and to avoid verbal fights. Sometimes it is better to have one’s good will rather than an empty victory. Some people argue with you because they want a feeling of importance. As soon as they get their importance, they will become a reasonable human being again. Give your opponents a chance to talk. Let them finish. Do not resist, defend or debate. This only raises the barriers. Try to build bridges of understanding. Do not build higher barriers of misunderstanding. The first or the lowest state of consciousness is sleep. Man is surrounded by dreams…Purely subjective pictures—either reflections of former experiences or reflections of vague perceptions of the moment, such as sounds reaching the sleeping man, sensations coming from the body, slight pains, sensations of tension—fly through the mind, leaving only a very slight trace on the memory and often leaving no trace at all. The second degree of consciousness comes when man awakes. This second state—the state in which we are now; the state in which we work, talk, imagine ourselves conscious beings and so forth—we ordinarily call “waking consciousness” or “clear consciousness,” but really it should be called “waking sleep” or “relative consciousness.” In the state of sleep we can have glimpses of relative consciousness. In the state of relative consciousness we can have glimpses of self-consciousness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

However, if we want to have more prolonged periods of self-consciousness and not merely glimpses, we must understand that they cannot come by themselves. They need will action. This means that frequency and duration of moments of self-consciousness depend on the command one has over oneself. So it means too that consciousness and will are almost one and the same thing, or in any case, aspects of the same thing. At this point it must be understood that the first obstacle in the way of the development of self-possesses self-consciousness, or at any rate that one can have it at any time one likes. It is very difficult to persuade a man that he is not conscious, and cannot be conscious, at will. It is particularly difficult because here nature plays a very funny trick. If you ask a man if he is conscious, or if you say to him that he is not conscious, he will answer that he hears and understands you. And he will be quite right, although at the same time quite wrong. This is nature’s trick. He will be quite right because your question or your remark has made him vaguely conscious for a moment. Next moment consciousness will disappear. However, he will remember what you said and what he answered, and he will certainly consider himself conscious. In reality, acquiring self-consciousness means long and hard work. How can a man agree to this work if he thinks he already possesses the very thing which is promised him as the result of long and hard work? #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

Naturally a man will not begin this work and will not consider it necessary until he becomes convinced that he possess neither self-consciousness nor all that is connected with it, that is to say, unity or individuality, permanent “I” and will. The more successful we are in getting ourselves to substitute products for real satisfactions, the stronger becomes the desire to obtain pure and uncontaminated gratifications. The children must be trained into our competitive value system, in which it is immoral for people to hurt one another and immoral for them to give pleasures to one another. Our society was not designed for people. It was designed to make money at any cost, but some people get so caught up in the high that they get from being evil that they lose sight of how much money they are losing by being evil. Life no longer becomes about making profit, but instead making people suffer. Empirical research shows that surprising or important information, such as news about job opportunities, usually does not come from people who are part of your closet group of friends. Instead, it arrives from “acquaintances” who are on the edge of your social World. Frequent interactions among friends who all know one another apparently leads to reduced diversity of the information they hold as a group. Your current friends would tell you about a perfect job for you in a distant town, but they are unaware of it for the same reasons that you are. However, your old college friend, who lives there, can be a source of significant informational variety. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

As data on job-finding shows, a healthy social network should probably contain a mix of strongly and weakly clustered contacts. That is what would provide agents with a better balance of exploitation and exploration. And just such a mix is what is actually found in investigations of social networks. It is sometimes known as a “small-World property.” It can be shown that a modest proportion of ties to distant others suffices to “shrink the social World” dramatically. While individuals who are far apart in physical space or social class seems very unlikely to interact, in fact they are usually separated only by a short chain of social contacts. The research of Stanley Milgram in the 1960s first clarified this closeness. It has entered the language with the phrase “six degrees of separation” as a shorthand for the idea that a short chain of contacts (perhaps no more than six) will generally suffice to connect any two people in the World. An important question is now coming into focus as the Information Revolution penetrated our societies: Does this “distance independent” technology change the mix of clustering in our social networks, giving us more contact with distant persons who do not know the others that we know? The underlying issue is not new, of course. At least as far back as the Roman roads, each gain in information transmission has reinforced the shrinking of the social World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

The reduction of effective distance has continued with postal systems, telegraphs, and telephones. However, the concern remains that there could be a “threshold effect,” a level of connection among “distant” persons at which suddenly the total diversity of the World begins to decrease rapidly, even as the diversity impinging on individuals may continue to increase. Some fear that such a threshold might already have been crossed, even before we have seen the full potential of the Internet. Among the data they cite as evidence are the booming Worldwide markets for Euro-American cultural materials such as music, film, and clothing, which grow at the expense of local traditions, and the mounting rate of extinction among the World’s languages. It may seem a paradox that as individual agents experience more diverse contacts, the system can become less diverse. However, there need be no contradiction. As interaction patterns in a social system become less clustered, giving individuals the experience of interacting with more “distant” others, information (or rumor, or disease) moves more rapidly throughout the entire system. The World becomes so “small” that the sociological “islands” vanish, unable to keep their local ways and remain untouched by events elsewhere. Research has shown that—at least for biological populations—this is not the most favourable situation for adaption. Early innovations spread too fast, and variety that can provide later improvements is lost—the phenomenon we have called premature convergence. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

The ideal breeding ground for novel life-forms seems to be an archipelago or a network of mountain valleys. In these settings semi-isolated populations breed with relatively infrequent exchanges of animals. Improvements occur but spread slowly enough to avoid a too-rapid loss of diversity. Of course, we cannot choose actions based on a simple analogy of human social systems to breeding biological populations. The mechanisms of reproduction are very different, as are the criteria for assessing change. Nevertheless, lowered clustering of social networks may well increase homogenizing pressures. Comparing the costs of lost diversity with other effects is not our subject here. Deciding whether to resist or facilitate the loss of World social variety requires assessing the impacts on such dimensions as changes of nuclear war, spread of disease, efficiency of global business transactions, loss of cultural variety, or possibilities for concerted World initiatives on environmental issues. Our aim here is to pose the question in terms of the structure of human interactions, so that costs, benefits, and interventions can be thought through more fruitfully as issues arising in a Complex Adaptive System. Developing a new commercial airplane is a gigantic gamble. The cost of designing a new engine alone can reach two billion dollars. It is no exaggeration to say that building a new and better place requires “betting the company.” No wonder governments get involved, each trying to make a larger market for its domestic firm. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

Here we look at the market for 150-passenger medium-range jets: The Boeing 727 and the Airbus 320. Boeing developed the 727 first. Did it make sense for Airbus to enter the market? The primary market for these aircraft was in the United States of America and in the European Economic Community (E.E.C.) countries. We assume each of these markets is worth $900 million to a monopoly firm. Were the two firms to compete head-on, total profits fall from $900 to $600 million, divided evenly between the two firms. Although profits fall, competition results in less expensive planes and lower airfares, so consumers benefit. These benefits to consumers are worth $700 million in each market. Airbus Industries estimates that it will cost $1 billion to develop the Airbus 320. If they go ahead without any government assistance, they can expect to make a profit of $300 million in each of the markets, American and E.E.C. The total of $600 million is not enough to cover the development costs. The E.E.C governments cannot offer direct assistance in the form of subsidies because their budget is already committed to subsidizing farmers. In the traditional trade-off between guns and butter, the E.E.C. has gone for butter and has little left for either guns or Airbuses. You are called to Brussels and asked for advice on whether the E.E.C should assist Airbus by giving it a protected market, that is, requiring European airlines to buy the Airbus 320 over the Boeing 727. What do you suggest? How do you expect the United States of America’s government to respond? #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

If the E.E.C. protects its home market and the American market stays open, Airbus will earn $900 million as a monopolists in Europe and $300 million as a duopolist in the United States of America. This is enough to cover the development costs of $1 billion. Is this policy in the interests of the E.E.C. as a whole? We have to consider the gain to Airbus versus the loss to European consumers. Without a protected market, Airbus would not enter. Boeing would have a monopoly in Europe. Consumers would be no better off. Therefore there is no less to consumers. The economic gains to the E.E.C. as a whole coincide with the profits of Airbus. It seems that the E.E.C should support the venture by promising a protected market. It is important that the E.E.C. commit itself to protectionist policy. Suppose it keeps its options open, and Airbus enters the market. At this point it does not have an incentive to protect Airbus. Keeping the markets open will reduce Airbus’s expected profit by $600 million (from $200 million to negative $400 million), but the competition from Boeing will raise the E.E.C. consumer’s benefits by $700 million. Knowing this, Airbus will not enter, because it does not have a credible commitment that the E.E.C. governments will maintain a protected market. What about the American response? If the Americans act quickly, they too can commit to protecting their domestic markets before Airbus begins production. Let us look ahead and reason backward. If the American market is kept open, the picture unfolds as before. Boeing is shut out of Europe and makes $300 million in competition with Airbus in the American market. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

The American consumer gets an extra $700 million of benefits from the competition. The total gain to the U.S. economy if it maintains an open market is $1,000 million. Say the United States of America reciprocates and requires American airlines to purchase the Boeing 727 over the Airbus 320. Then even the monopoly profit of $900 million in Europe falls short of the Airbus development costs. So the Airbus 320 will never be built. Boeing will enjoy a monopoly in both markets, making profits of $1,800 million. This total economic gain to the United States of America is considerably higher than when its market is open. The United States of America can defeat the E.E.C support for Airbus by reciprocating protectionism. It is in its interest to do so. When considering the human body, it is important to discuss working outside tissues. One approach to nanomedicine would make use of microscopic mobile devices built using molecular-manufacturing equipment. These would resemble the ecosystem protectors and mobile cleanup machines. Like them, they would either be biodegradable, self-collecting, or collected by something else once they were done working. Like them, they would be more difficult to develop than simple, fixed-location nanomachines, yet clearly feasible and useful. Development will start with simpler applications, so let us begin by looking at what can be done without entering living tissues. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

The skin is the body’s largest organ, and its exposed position subjects it to a lot of abuse. This exposed position, though, also makes it easier to treat. Among the earlier applications of molecular manufacturing may be those popular, quasimedical products, cosmetics. A cream packed with nanomachines could do a better and more selective job of cleaning than any product can today. It could remove the right amount of dead skin, remove excess oils, add mission oils, apply the right amounts of natural moisturizing compounds, and even achieve the elusive goal of “deep pre cleaning” by actually reaching down into pores and cleaning them out. The cream could be a smart material with smooth-on, peel-off conveniences. The mouth, teeth, and gums are amazingly troublesome. Today, daily dental care is an endless cycle of brushing and flossing, of losing ground to tooth decay and gum disease as slowly as possible. A mouthwash full of smart nanomachines could do all that brushing and flossing do and more, and with far less effort—making it more likely to be used. This mouthwash would identify and destroy pathogenic bacteria while allowing the harmless flora of the mouth to flourish in a healthy ecosystem. Further, the devices would identify particles of food, plaque, or tartar, and life them for teeth to be rinsed away. Being suspended in liquid and able to swim about, devices would be able to reach surfaces beyond reach of toothbrush bristles or the fibers of floss. As short-lifetime medical nanodevices, they could be built to last only a few minutes in the body before falling apart into materials of the sort found in foods (such as fiber). With this sort of daily dental care from an early age, tooth decay and gum disease would likely never arise. If underway, they would be greatly lessened. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

One could list any number of additional advances in health care and many other fields as further evidence that things are actually getting better for more people. However, when future generations look back at today they may most value the extraordinary discoveries about the World that we, the first generation since the dawn of the knowledge economy, are making. Thus, the last half century has seen a profound reconceptualization of humanity’s place in the Universe. Since the first satellite was shot into the Heavens in 1957, astrophysicists have had access to massive amounts of new data with which to confirm or disconfirm earlier theories of the cosmos. And most of the new data have supported the finding that the Universe began with a big bang 14 billion years ago—an estimate experts believe is subject to an error rate of only 0.2 billion years. Like all scientific findings, this one may be revised in light of new evidence. However, so far, many different experiments have corroborated one another—and the big bang concept. The Universe did not, as many still believe, come into being roughly six thousand years ago, and it is not static. Like everything in it, including us humans, it, too, is subject to change. Not only is there no life without change; there is no Universe. Even while come scientists have been expanding our conception of the cosmos, others have been probing smaller and smaller bits and pieces of it and putting that knowledge to practical use. Thus we have the current breakthroughs at the nano level. Nanotechnology promises to do a wide range of things previously far beyond our reach—from the creation of new construction materials to precision drug delivery and diagnosis and the replacement of silicon-based chips. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

Thus, the coming leap to nanoproduction and nanoproducts—the source of so much stock-market excitement today—needs to be seen as only one step toward the manipulation of even tinier phenomena in the future. Still a long way off, these next steps may eventually make possible the creation of wealth at smaller and smaller levels, from those measured not just in nanos but in picos, femtos, attos, and zeptos to, who knows, eventually yoctos—a yocto being the term for 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,001 of a meter. What is so exciting about going to the nano level—grossly large by comparison with these—is that as we move down in scale, things are not only smaller but stranger and stranger. They behave differently. And if nanotechnology promises new cures for disease, imagine what the move to even smaller scales can do—negatively as well as positively. At the scale of both the most minute phenomena and of the cosmos itself, we, in this generation, have learned more about nature and our species than all our ancestors combined. We have taken up the ringing challenge of Francis Bacon set out for humanity in 1603—not to create some “particular invention, however useful,” but to succeed in “kindling a light in nature, a light which should in its very rising touch and illuminate all the border-regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

Having generated more new data, information and knowledge than all our ancestors combined, that we know of, we have organized it differently, distributed it differently and combined and recombined it in new and more transient patterns. We have also created entire new cyberworlds in which ideas, magnificent and terrifying alike, bounce off one another like trillions of intelligent Ping-Pong balls. We will, within the foreseeable future, through a combination of neuroscience, cybernetics and media manipulation, create far more realistic sensory, sensual and other virtual experiences. We will simulate future events personal or otherwise, in the digital World before participating in them “live.” And we will interact virtually or in the flesh with people from all over the planet. Criminals may have a field day. However, so will saints. Finally, we stand now at the time when even words like live and dead or human and inhuman may be redefined in the light of the new potentials open to our species, both on the Earth and in colonies in space. In short, nobody is promising utopia. The revolution now under way will not put an end to war, terrorism or disease. It cannot guarantee perfect ecological balance. However, it does promise that our children will live in an exciting World radically different from ours, with its own benefits and dangers and challenges. We cannot day whether this emerging World will be mostly “good” or mostly “evil,” because the very definitions of these terms will change, and it is not we but our children and their children who will do the judging, according to their own values. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

Living at the dawn of this century, we are direct or indirect participants in the design of a new civilization with a revolutionary wealth system at its core. Will this process complete itself—or will the still incomplete wealth revolution come to a crashing halt? The history of the industrial revolution provides a clue. Between the mid-1600s, when it started, and the mid-1950s, when the knowledge economy first began to overlap and supersede it, the World went through countless upheavals. Wars on end. Civil Wars in England. The Swedish invasion of Poland. The Turkish-Venetian war. The Portuguese-Dutch war in Brazil. All these and more in the single decade starting in 1650. Later came Queen Anne’s wars against the Spaniards, the French and Indian wars, the Cambodian war of succession and on and on—all before we even get to the American and the French revolutions, Napoleon’s sweep across Europe, the American Civil War, World War I, the Russian Revolution, and worst of all, World War II. These conflicts were interspersed with flu epidemics; stock-market crashes; the decline of the large, multigenerational family; economic depressions; corruption scandals; regime changes; the introduction of the camera, electricity, the automobile, the airplane, movies and radio; and a succession of schools of art in the West, from Pre-Raphealitism and romanticism to impressionism, futurism, surrealism and cubism. Yet through all these changes and upheavals, one thing stands out. Nothing, not all of them together, stopped the forward advance of the industrial revolution and the spread of the new wealth system it brought. Nothing. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

The reason was that the Second Wave was not just a matter of technology or economics. It originated out of social and political and philosophical forces as well, and out of wave conflict in which the holdover elites of the agrarian age gradually yielded to the forces of the new. The Second Wave led to econocentrism: The idea that culture, religion and the arts, were all of secondary importance and—according to Marx—were determined by economics. However, Third Wave revolutionary wealth is increasingly based on knowledge—and puts economics back in its place as part of a larger system, bringing, for better and worse, issues like cultural identity, religion and morality back toward center stage. These issues should now be seen as part of a feedback process with the economy, rather than subordinate to it. The Third Wave revolution wears the face of technology because the technologies that come with it are so spectacular. However, like industrialization or “modernization” it is an all-encompassing change of civilization. And despite stock-market swings and other distractions, revolutionary wealth will continue its inexorable advance across much of the World. As tomorrow’s economy and society take for, all of us—individuals, companies, organizations, and governments alike—now face the wildest, fastest ride into the future of any generation. It is, when all is said, a fantastic moment to be alive. Welcome to the rest of the twenty-first century! #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

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