The weapon used by retailers to hurl the big manufacturers back on their heels is a small black-and-white symbol. Ever since the mid-sixties a little noticed committee of retailers, wholesalers, and grocery manufacturers had been meeting with companies like IMB, National Cash Register, and Sweda to discuss two common supermarket problems: long checkout lines and errors in accounting. Could not technology be used to overcomes these difficulties? It could—if product could somehow be coded, and if computers could automatically “read” the codes. Optical scanning technology was still in its infancy, but the computer companies, sensing a major new market, gladly worked with the retailers. On April 3, 1973, the “symbol selection committee” agreed on a single standard code for their industry. The result was the now familiar “Universal Product Code” or “bar code”—the shimmery black lines and numbers that appear on everything from detergent to cake mix—and the swift spread of optical scanning equipment to read them. Today, bar coding is becoming near universal in the United States of America, with fully 95 percent of all food items marked with the UPC. And the system is fast spreading abroad. By 1988 there were 3,470 supermarkets and specialty and department stores in France using it. In West Germany, at least 1,500 food stores and nearly 200 department stores employed scanners. All told, not counting the United States of America, there were 78,000 scanners at work from Brazil to Czechoslovakia and Papua New Guinea. In Japan, where the new retail technologies spread like fire in a high wind, 47 percent of all supermarkets and 72 percent of all convenience stores were already equipped by 1987. The bar code did more, however, than speed the checkout line for millions of customers or reduce errors in accounting. It transferred power. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

The average U.S.A supermarket now stocks 22,000 different times, with thousands of new products continually replacing old one, power has shifted to the retailer who can keep track of all these items—along with their sales, their profitability, the timing of advertising, costs, prices, discounts, location, special promotions, traffic flow, and so on. “Now,” say the late Pat Collins, former president of the 127 Ralph’s stores in southern California, “we know as much, if not more than, the manufacturer about his product.” Ralph’s scanners scoop up vast volumes of data, which then helps its managers decide how much shelf space to devote to what products, when. This is a crucial decision for competing manufacturers who are hammering at the doors, pleading for every available inch of shelf on which to display their products. Instead of the manufacturer telling the store how much to take, the store now compels manufacturers to pay what is known as “push money” for space, and staggering sums for particularly desirable location. The result [of such changes] is a war over turf: product makers battling grocers—and fighting each other—to win and keep their spots in supermarkets. And it is clear who is winning—at the moment. Say Kevin Moody, formerly corporate director of Management Information Systems at Gillette: “We want to control our own destiny…but the trade is getting more powerful….They are looking for smarter deals and cooperative relationships. They are looking for better prices, which squeeze our margins…They buyer used to be the flunky. Now he’s backed up by all kinds of sophisticated tools.” Retail data become a more potent weapon when computer-analyzed and run through models that permit one to manipulate different variables. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Thus, buyers use “direct product profitability” models to determine just how much they actually make on each product. These models examine such factors as how much shelf space is occupied by a square package as against a round one, what colours in the packaging work best for which products. A version of this software is provided to retailers, in fact, by Procter & Gamble, one of the biggest manufacturers, in the hope of ingratiating itself with them. Armed with this software, P&G’s sales force offers to help the store analyze its profitability if it, in turn, will share consumer information with P&G. Retailers also use “shelf management” software and “space models” to help them decide which manufacturer’s lines or good to carry and which to reject, which to display in prime eye-catching space and which to put elsewhere. “Plan-a-Grams” printed out by computer give shelf-by-shelf guidance. Having seized control of the main flow of data coming from the customer, retailers are also beginning to influence, if not control, the influence going to the consumer. According to Moody, “The buyer can control the fate of a promotion….To a large extent, they dictate what the consumer is going to see.” At both ends, therefore, the big food and package-goods companies have lost control of the information that once gave them power. Beginning in the supermarket, the high-tech battle for control of information has caught fire elsewhere, too. Scanners, lasers, hand-held computers, and other new technologies are pouring into drugstores, department stores, discount stores, bookstores, electrical appliance stores, hardware stores, clothing stores, specialty shops, and boutiques of all kinds. In these markets, too, manufacturers suddenly face antagonists who are keener, more confident, sometimes just short of arrogant. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

“If you don’t have Universal Product Codes on your goods, don’t sit down, because we’re not going to write the order,” declares a peremptory sign in the buying office of Toys-R-Us, the 313-store chain. As power shifts, retailer demands grown aggressive. By-passing the country’s 100,000 independent manufacturers’ representatives, dealing direct with its suppliers. Wal-Mart, the United States’ fourth-biggest chain, insist that companies like Gillette change how they ship. Once more accommodating, Wal-Mart now demands that all its orders be filled 100 percent accurately—down to the numbers, sizes, and models of the products—and that deliveries be made to its schedule, not supplier’s. Failure to fill the order or deliver precisely on time could result in a supplier’s payments being held ransom or a “handling cost” being deducted. This puts manufacturers up against the wall: Either they increase inventories or they install new, more advanced technologies for de-massifying their factor output, moving to shorter rather than longer factory runs and faster turnaround times. Both are costly options. At the same time, retailers are imposing tighter quality standards—right down to the quality of the print on the packaging. This seemingly trivial matter is in fact critical, since much of the information on which retail power now increasingly depends is found on the bar code, and bad printing means that the scanners may not be able to read the code accurately. If the bar code on the package cannot be read properly by their scanning equipment, some retailers are threatening to hold the suppliers responsible. Millions of customers have waited at checkout lines while clerks have passed the same package over the electronic scanner again and again before the scanner picked up the print message properly. All too often the clerk is forces to ring the product price up manually on the cash register. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Some storekeepers, in effect, are now threatening, “If my scanner can’t read your code, it’s your problem. I’m not telling my clerk to try again and again, and keep the customer waiting. If it doesn’t scan, and we have to enter it manually, we’re going to toss the product into the customer’s bag and not charge for it. We’’ give the product away and stop payment to you!” Nobody ever talked back to the big companies that way. However, then nobody had the information that retailers now have. So vital is this information that some manufacturers are now paying the retailers for it—either directly, or in exchange for services, or through intermediary firms who buy the data from retailers and sell them to manufacturers. “The economies of the future are somewhat different. You see, money does not exit in the twenty-fourth century.” So said Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise in the science-fiction movie Star Trek: First Contact. Neither, perhaps, will capitalism exist by then—and its demise may arrive long before AD 2300. It is a strange new World we are entering as revolutionary wealth continues to unfold here on Earth, yet both enemies and defenders of capitalism still hurl centuries-old cliches at one another. If changes in the nature of property, capital and markets are not enough to shake their minds free of the past, perhaps a look at the future of money will. Like the other key elements of capitalism, money is undergoing the fastest, deepest revolution in centuries—one that will create radically new forms, new ways to pay and be paid, and more and more business opportunities that use no money at all. The invention of money clearly was one of the great World-changing events in human history, and all capitalist economies run on it. That indention, despite all its subsequent misuse, opened the path to tremendous advances in human well-being. However, running money, or more properly, the money system, imposes a heavy cost on society—and on each of our pocketbooks. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

We hardly notice this cost because it is usually embedded or bundled into the price we pay for goods, services, and other marketed items. Go to movie theater or a spots stadium. Part of the price you pay covers the cost of the person who takes your money and hands you the ticket. The same is true for the 3.5 million cashiers behind U.S. checkout counters at Wal-Mart, Home Depot, 7-Eleven, Office Depot and Office Max outlets; at supermarkets, department stores, and railroad stations. And this does not include the total number outside America. Then, too, at McDonald’s, Burger King, and other fast-food emporia, the person at the counter takes both your order and your money. It is true that taking your order and passing it to the kitchen is technically distinct from cashiering. That means that only part, rather than all, of his or her wages is attributable to time spent collecting money. However, collecting money is similarly part of the job for many other occupations—millions upon millions of waiters, barbers and salesclerks. All these costs, too, are passed along to the customer. And this is only the most visible expense of operating the World’s money system. Someone has to keep track of all the transactions. And that, too, costs money. So add at least part of these fees paid to bookkeepers and the World’s 2.5 million accountants. And someone has to actually print, store and transport the cash we use; protect it from theft and counterfeiting; authenticate documentation and so forth. These functions, too, cost money. Ultimately transferred to the customer, these costs are, in effect, part of the hidden “tax” we pay for the convenience of employing money. And they are only a small part. Which raises some important, mind-sparking questions. What if we could reduce or even eliminate this hidden “tax”? Is that possible? In fact, do we need money at all to run a knowledge-based wealth system? #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Now, when it comes to doing business, many companies, even if they are not owned by the person who does the hiring, use a form of nepotism. Nepotism is a form of favoritism shown to acquaintances and family members. It allows one to use one’s power or influence to get good jobs or unfair advantages for members of one’s own family. As favoritism is the broadest of the related terms, we will focus on this definition. Basically favoritism is just what it sounds like; it is favoring a person not because he or she is doing the best job but rather because of some extraneous feature-membership in a favored group, personal likes and dislikes, et cetera. Favoritism can be demonstrated in hiring, honoring, or awarding contracts. A related idea is patronage, giving public service jobs to those who may have helped elect the person who has the power of appointment. Favoritism has always been a complaint in government service. It was discovered that the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management believed that only 36.1 percent of federal workers promotions in their units were based on merit. They believed that connections, partisanship, and other factors played a role. Probably the biggest dilemma presented by favoritism is that, under various other names, few people see it as a problem. Connections, networking, family-almost everyone had drawn on these sources of support in job hunting in the private sphere. And everyone can point to instances where nepotism is an accepted fact of life in political sphere, as well. John F. Kenney, for example, appointed his brother Robert as attorney general. Every president and governor names close associates to key cabinet positions. Mayors put those they know and trust on citizens committees and commissions. Friends and family can usually be counted on for loyalty, and officeholders are in a good position to know their strengths. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

The first issue is competence. For cabinet level positions, an executive will probably be drawn to experienced, qualified candidates, but historically, the lower down the ladder, the more likely for someone’s brother-in-law to be slipped into a job for which he is not qualified. The American Civil Service Act was passed in 1883 in large part because so many patronage jobs, down to dogcatcher, were being filled by people whose only qualification for employment was their support for a particular party or candidate. Also, the appearance of favoritism weakens morale in government service, not to mention public faith in the integrity of government. Reasonable people will differ appointment of friends and family in high-level positions, but public officials should be aware that such choices can give the appearance of unfairness. According to the National Conference of State Legislature, 19 state legislatures have found the practice of nepotism troubling enough to enact laws against it. Others may restrict the hiring or relatives or friends in more general conflict-of-interest rules. Penalties for violating nepotism rules may be different depending on the state. A public official or employee violating a nepotism law may be required to reimburse the state for any payments made to relative by reason of the violation. Some states do not specify a penalty while others consider the act a misdemeanor punishable with fines, imprisonment, removal from office, or any combination thereof. In California, no explicit prohibition against nepotism in the legislative branch was located in the state’s statutes, although other rules or conflict of interest provisions may apply. An individual’s reputation is embodied in the beliefs of others about the strategy another person will use. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

A reputation is typically established through observing the actions of that individual when interacting with other individuals. For example, Britain’s reputation for being provocable was certainly enhanced by its decision to take back the Falkland Islands in response to the Argentine invasion. Other nations could observe Britain’s decisions and make inference about how it might react to their own actions in the future. Especially relevant would be Spanish inferences about the British commitment to Gibraltar, and Chinese inferences about the British commitment to Hong Kong. Whether these inferences would be correct is another matter. The point is than when third parties are watching, the stakes of the current situation expand from those immediately at hand to encompass the influence of the current choice on the reputation of the individuals. Knowing people’s reputations allows you to know something about what strategy they use even before you have to make your first choice. This possibility suggests that question of how valuable it would be to know for certain what strategy the other individual is about to use with you. A way to measure the value of any piece of information is to calculate how much better you could do with the information than without it. Thus, the better you can do without the information, the less you need the information, and the less it is worth. In instances of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, for example, TIT FOR TAT did well without know the strategy to be employed by the other individual. Knowing the other individual’s strategy were known to be TIT FOR TWO TATS (which defects only if the other defected on both of the previous moves), it would be possible to do better than TIT FOR TAT did by alternating defection with cooperation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

However, there are not many exploitable strategies in either round of the interaction, so knowing the other’s strategy in advance would not actually help you do much better than the all-purpose strategy of TIT FOR TAT. In fact, the smallness of the gain from knowing the other’s strategy is just another measure of the robustness of TIT FOR TAT. The question about the value of information can also be turned around: what is the value (or cost) of having other individuals know your strategy? The answer, of course, depends on exactly what strategy you are using. If you are using an exploitable strategy, such as TIT FOR TWO TATS, the cost can be substantial. On the other hand, if you are using a strategy that is best met with complete cooperation, then you might be glad to have your strategy known to the other. For example, if you were using TIT FOR TAT, you would be happy to have the other player appreciate this fact and adapt to it, provided, of course, that the shadow of the future is large enough so that the best response is a nice strategy. In fact, as has been said, one of the advantages of TIT FOR TAT is that it is easy for it to be recognized in the course of a game even if the individual using it has not yet established a reputation. Having a firm reputation for using TIT FOR TAT is advantageous to an individual, but it is not actually the best reputation to have. The best reputation to have is the reputation for being a bully. The best kind of bully to be is one who has a reputation for squeezing the most out of the other individual while not tolerating any defections at all from the other. They way to squeeze the most out of the other is to defect so often that the other player just barely prefers cooperating all the time to defecting all the time. And the best way to encourage cooperation from the other is to be know as someone who will never cooperate again if the other defects once. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Fortunately, it is not easy to establish a reputation as a bully. To become known as a bully one would have to defect a lot, which means that one is likely to provoke the other individual into retaliation. Until one’s reputation is well established, one is likely to have to get into a lot of very unrewarding contests of will. For example, if the other individual defects even once, you will be torn between acting as tough as the reputation you want to establish requires and attempting to restore amicable relations in the current interaction. What darkens the picture even more is that the other individual may also be truing to establish a reputation, and for this reason may be unforgiving of the defections you use to try to establish their reputation. When two parties are each trying to establish their reputations for use against other individuals in future deals, it is easy to see that their own interactions can spiral downward into a long series of mutual punishments. Each side has an incentive to pretend not to be noticing what the other is trying to do. Both sides want to appear to be untrainable so that the other will stop trying to bully them. The Prisoner’s Dilemma in business deals suggest that a good way for the individual to appear untrainable is for the individual to use the strategy of TIT FOR TAT. That utter simplicity of the strategy of TIT FOR TAT. The utter simplicity of the strategy makes it easy to asset as a fixed pattern of behavior. And the ease of recognition makes it hard for the other player to maintain an ignorance of it. Using TIT FOR TAT is an effective way of holding still and letting the other individual do the adaptation. It refuses to be bullied, but does not do any bullying of its own. If the other individual does adapt to it, the result is mutual cooperation. In fact, deterrence is achieved through the establishment of a reputation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

One purpose of having a reputation is to enable you to achieve deterrence by means of a credible threat. You try to commit yourself to a response that you really would not want to make if the occasion actually arose. The United States of America deters the Russians from taking West Berlin by threatening to start a major war in response to such a grab. To make such a threat credible, the United States of America seeks to establish a reputation as a country that actually does carry out such guarantees, despite the short-run costs. Vietnam had just such a meaning to the American government when the decision to commit major combat forces was being made in 1965. The dominance of the desire to maintain a reputation was expressed in a secret memo to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara from his Assistant Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara from his Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, John McNaughton, defining U.S. aims in South Vietnam: U.S.A aims: 70 percent—To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor). 20 percent—To keep SVN (and adjacent) territory from Chinese hands. 10 percent—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better freer way of life. Maintaining deterrence through achieving a reputation for toughness is important not only in international politics, but also in many domestic functions of the government. The most effective governments cannot take the compliance of its citizens for granted. Instead, a government has strategic interactions with the governed, and these interactions often take the form of an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Social institutions of all kinds function as control mechanisms. This is important to say, because most writers on the subject of social institutions (especially sociologists) do not grasp the idea that any decline in the force of institutions makes people vulnerable to information chaos. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

To say that life is destabilized by weakened institutions is merely to say that information loses its use and therefore becomes a source of confusion rather than coherence. Social institutions sometimes do their work simply by denying people access to information, but principally by directing how much weight and, therefore value one must give to information. Social institutions are concerned with the meaning of information and can be quite rigorous in enforcing standards of admission. Take as a simple example a court of law. Almost all rules for the presentation of evidence and for the conduct of those who participate in a trial are designed to limit the amount of information that is allowed entry into the system. In our system, a judge disallows “hearsay” or personal opinion as evidence except under strictly controlled circumstances, spectators are forbidden to express their feelings, a defendant’s previous convictions may not be mentioned, juries are not allowed to hear arguments over the admissibility of evidence—these are instances of information control. The rules on which such control is based derive from a theory of justice that defines what information may be considered relevant and, especially, what information must be considered irrelevant. The theory may be deemed flawed in some respects—lawyers, for example, may disagree over the rules governing the flow of information—but no one disputes that information must be regulated in some manner. In even the simplest law case, thousands of events may have had a bearing on the dispute, and it is well understood that, if they were all permitted entry, there could be no theory of due process, trials would have no end, law itself would be reduced to meaninglessness. In short, the rule of law is concerned with the “destruction” of information. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Although legal theory has been taxed to the limit by new information from diverse sources—biology, psychology, and sociology, among them—the rules governing relevance having remained fairly stable. This may account for Americans’ overuse of the courts as a means of finding coherence and stability. As other institutions become useable as mechanisms for the control of wanton information, the courts stand as a final arbiter of truth. For how long, no one knows. Many of us are still in the process of using the keys for unlocking the meanings of our dreams. Raw, physically unacceptable facts, inhabitants of the unconscious, express themselves in hidden ways, gaining covert satisfaction that way. They fasten themselves in hidden ways, gaining covert satisfaction that way. They fasten themselves on consciously acceptable material, which then no longer really means what it seems to mean. It now does and does not express the true meaning. Plato’s respectable dialogue is the intermediary between Aschenbach’s good conscience and his carnality. Plato found a way of expressing and beautifying, of sublimating, perverse pleasures of the flesh. So the story presents it. There is no indication that Mann thought that one could learn much directly from Plato about eros. One could learn something by applying Dr. Freud’s insights to Plato and seeing how desire finds rationalization for itself. Plato was vile body for scientific dissection. Mann was too caught up by the novelty of the Freudian teaching to doubt whether sublimation can really account for the psychic phenomena it claims to explain. He was doctrinaire, or he was sure we know better than did older thinkers. They are mythologists. Dr. Freud and Plato agree about the pervasiveness of eroticism in everything human. However, there the similarity ends. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Anyone who wished to lay aside his assurance about the superiority of modern psychology might find in Plato a richer explanation of the diversity of erotic expression, which so baffles us and has drive us to our present nonsense. He would see there a rewarding articulation of the possibilities and impossibilities of the fulfillment of erotic desires. Plato both enchants and disenchants eros, and we need both. At least in Mann the tradition in which we could refresh ourselves is present, if not exactly alive. With what he gives us we might  embark on our own journey and find more interesting prey than is an Aschenbach. However, in America that slender thread, which was already almost stretched to its limit in Mann, has broken. We have no more contact with the tradition. Eros is an obsession, but there is no thought about it, and no possibility of thought about it, because we now take what were only interpretations of our souls to be facts about them. Eros gradually becomes meaningless and low; and there is nothing good for man which is not informed by thought and affirmed by real choice, which means choice instructed by deliberation. Saul Bellow has described his own intention as “the rediscovery of the magic of the World under the debris of modern ideas.” That gray net of abstraction, used to cover the World in order to simplify and explain it in a way that is pleasing to us, has become the World in our eyes. The only way to see the phenomena, rather than sterile distillations of them, to experience them in their ambiguity again, would be to have available alternate visions, a diversity of profound opinions. However, our ideas have made it difficult to have such experiences in practice, and impossible in theory. How does a youngster who sees sublimation where Plato saw divination learn from Plato, let alone think Plato can speak to one? Souls artificially constituted by a new kind of education live in a World transformed by man’s artifice and believe that all values are relative and determined by the private economic or drives for pleasures of the flesh of those who hold them. How are they to recover the primary natural experience? #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Usually depicted positively, as a revelation of truth free of the contingencies of time and place, the impossibility of such a formulation only illuminates another moment of falseness about art. Kierkegaard found the defining trait of the aesthetic outlook to be its hospitable reconciliation of all points of view and its evasion of choice. This can be seen in the perpetual compromise that at once valorizes art only to repudiate its intent and content with, “We,, after all, it is only art.” Today culture is commodity and art perhaps the star commodity. The situation is understood inadequately as the product of a centralized culture of industry, a la Horkheimer and Adorno. We witness rather, a mass diffusion of culture dependent on participation for its strength, not forgetting that the critique must be of culture itself, not of its alleged control. Daily life has become aestheticized by a saturation of images and music, largely through the electronic media, the representation of representation. Image and sound, in their every-presence, have become a void, ever more absent of meaning for the individual. Meanwhile, the distance between artist and spectator had diminished, a narrowing that only highlights the absolute distance between aesthetic experience and what is real. This perfectly duplicates the spectacle at large: separate and manipulating, perpetual aesthetic experience and a demonstration of political power. Reacting against the increasing mechanization of life, avant-garde movements have not, however, resisted the spectacular nature of art any more than orthodox tendencies have. In fact, one could argue that Aestheticism, or “art for art’s sake,” is  more radical than an attempt to engage alienation with its own devices. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

The late nineteenth-century art pour l’art development was a self-reflective rejection of the World, as opposed to the avant-grade effort to somehow organize life around art. A valid moment of doubt lies behind Aestheticism, the realization that division of labor has diminished experience and turned art into just another specialization: art shed its illusory ambitions and became its own content. The avant-garde has generally staked out wider claims, projecting a leading rile denied it by modern capitalism. It is best understood as a social institution peculiar to technological society that so strongly prices novelty; it is predicated on the progressivist notion that reality must be constantly updated. However, avant-grade culture cannot compete with the modern World’s capacity to shock and transgress (and not just symbolically.) Its demise is another datum that the myth of progress is itself bankrupt. Dada was one of the last two major avant-garde moments, its negative image greatly enhanced by the sense of general historical collapse radiated by World War I. Its partisans claimed, at times, to be against all “isms,” including the idea of art. However, painting cannot negate painting, nor can sculpture invalidate sculpture, keeping in mind that all symbolic culture is the co-opting of perception, expression and communication. In fact, Dada was a quest for new artistic modes, its attack on the rigidities and irrelevancies of bourgeois art a factor in the advance of art; Hans Ricther’s memoirs referred to “the regeneration of visual art that Dada had begun.” If World War I almost killed art, the Dadaists reformed it. Many people are interested in nanotechnology. It is described as being a shotgun marriage of chemistry and mechanical engineering, with physics (as always) presiding. This makes a complete evaluation difficult for most of today’s specialists, because each of these fields is taught separately and usually practiced separately. Many specialists, having highly focused backgrounds, find themselves unequipped to evaluate proposals that overlap other disciplines. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

When asked to do so, they will state feelings of discomfort, because although they cannot identify any particular problems, they cannot verify the entire concept as sound. Scientists and engineers with multidisciplinary backgrounds, or with access to specialists from other fields, can evaluate the idea from side. Increased human abilities have routinely been used to damage the environment and to make war. Even the crude technologies of the twenty-first century have taken us to the brink. It is natural to feel exhilarated (or terrified) by a prospect that promises (or threatens) to extend human abilities beyond most past dreams (or nightmares). It is better to feel both, to meld and moderate these feelings, and to set out on a course of action that makes bad outcomes less likely. We are convinced that the best course is to focus on the potential good while warning of the potential evils. Those in failing health may be justified in saying this; others are expressing an opinion that may well be wrong. It would be optimistic to assume that benefits are around the corner, and prudent to assume that they will be long delayed Conversely, it would be optimistic to assume that dangers will be long delated, and prudent to assume that they will arrive promptly. Whatever good or ill may come of post-breakthrough capabilities, the turbulence of the coming transition will present a real danger. While we invite readers to take a “What if?” stance toward these technologies, it would be imprudent to listen to the lulling sound of the promise “not in our lifetimes.” Even today, public acceptance of man’s coming exploration of space is slow. It is considered an event we may all be able to experience in our lifetime, or that our children will surely experience. The opportunities of nanotechnology are enormous. The resulting changes will be disruptive, sweeping industries aside, upending military strategies, and transforming our ways of life. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Thinking about advertisement, when it is not in bas taste? Do they mean that interrupting people’s lives to start hawking products is not rude and offensive behavior at any time? If someone came to your door every night to do that, you would soon call the police. Advertising is always in bad taste. What advertisers mean when they use the “bad taste” excuse is that when something really real happens on television, it may affect how well the ad works. In the context of concrete reality, advertising can be understood as vacuous, absurd, rude, outrageous. Advertising can succeed only in an environment in which the real merges with the fictional, and all become semireal with equal tone and undifferentiated meaning. In that context advertising can use its technical tricks to jump forward out of the medium, creating its artificial unusualness. The best environment for advertising is a dull and even one, where it can become the highlighted event. This explains the tendency to sponsor programs that have that quality of even tone, from Walter Cronkite to Archie Bunker to Jensen Ackles. They all merge with each other, making an appropriate backdrop for the advertising. In probably the most brilliant article that has ever been written on television (“Sixteen Notes on Television,” reprinted in Literature in Revolution), Todd Gitlin said: “The commercial is the purpose, the essence; the program is the package.” The program is only the excuse to get you to watch the advertising. Without the ads there would be no programs. Advertising is the true content of television, and if it does not remain so, then advertisers will cease to support the medium, and television will cease to exist as the popular entertainment it presently is. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

While sleep is healing, Adam and Eve found their second-born son Abel sleeping day and night. He was lying by his altar in his field, one morning, with his head crushed and his face and body drenched in blood. He said his eldest brother Kain struck him down. Then he spoke no more, and fell asleep. They laid him in his bed and washed the blood away, and they were glad to know that the hurt was light and that he had no pain; for if he had had pain he would not have spelt. In was in the early morning that Adam and Eve found Abel. All day he slept that sweet reposeful sleep, lying on his back, and never moving, never turning. It showed how tired he was, poor thing. He was so good, and worked so hard, rising with the dawn and laboring till the dark. And now he was overworked; it would be best the he tax himself less. Still, all the day he slept. And Eve made food for him which he never ate. And still Able slept with his eyes wide; a strange thing, and it made Eve think he was awake at first, but it was not so, for she spoke and he did not answer. Eve kissed him on his cheek and he was cold. Adam and Eve tried to warm him up with sacks of wool, but he was still cold. They could not wake him! With Eve’s arms clinging about him, she looked into his eyes, through the veil of her tears, and begged for one little word, and he would not answers. “Oh, is it that long sleep—is it Death? And will he wake no more?” Eve wandered. Death has entered the World, the creatures are perishing, one of the Family is fallen; the product of the Moral Sense is complete. The Family think ill of Death—they will change their mind. If one’s purpose good, bear it aloft, but if one does not purpose good—sin before the door, a beast lying in wait, unto thee his desire, but prevail one over him. The word which is absent from the tale of the Fall, the word “sin,” and it is apparently the name of a demon who, by nature a “beast the lies in wait,” at times lurks on watch at the entrance to a soul that does not purpose good, to see if it will fall pray to him, that soul within whose power it still lies to overpower him. “O Lord, wilt thou grant unto us that we my have success in bringing them again unto thee in Christ,” reports Alma 31.33 #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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The word wealth—the last time we checked—turned up in 72 million documents on the Internet, clearly outranked by the 167 million references to God. Mammon, it seemed, was kept firmly in place. Or was it? The problem, it turned out, was the one other term turned up 420 million times—twice as often as God and wealth combined. That term was market. Regarded with reverence by mainstream business leaders, executives, economists and politicians in the West, and with hostility verging on disgust by critics of capitalism, markets—like property and capital—are being transformed by revolutionary wealth. To appreciate how truly striking these changes are—and especially those still to come—it helps to glance briefly backward. The colorful history of ancient markers includes camel caravans on the Silk Road between China and the West, piracy at sea, bazaars in Baghdad and bloody banking rivalries between Venice and Genoa. These stories have been told too many times over, and trade surely had political, military and economic effects out of al proportion to its size. Yet the single most important fact about markets, throughout thousands of years of human history, is not how important they were but how tiny and relatively rare they were. Until recent centuries, the overwhelming majority of our ancestors lived in a pre-market World. Pockets of commerce existed, but most humans never bought or sold anything during their lives. As we have seen in earlier discussions, our forerunners—with the exception of a minute minority—were peasant prosumers who subsisted by growing, building, sewing or otherwise producing most of what they consumed. Every village or manor was more or less autarkic (self-sufficient); money was rare and trade was extremely limited. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Even markets for land in the countryside, so central to agriculture, were few and far between. Most land was owned by kings or the state and only granted to noble families under terms that that restricted their rights to dispose of it. Land tended to pass slowly from father to son, generation after generation. Nor, except for slavery, was there anything approximating a developed market for labour. Labour was more commonly forced than hired and that along with slavery there were various forms of feudal serfdom. Wage work was uncommon at best. Even more remote from the life of the average person were financial markets. At least two cities in China, Chengdu and Pingyao, claim to have invented the World’s first bank years ago. Italians claim that the Banca Monte dei Paschi in Siena is “the World’s oldest,” having been founded in 1472. Other claims, no doubt, abound, but regardless of which bank was the first, financial transactions basically took place only among elites, beyond the reach of 98 or 99 percent of the total population, if that. In this sense, most humans lived in a World that was essentially not only precapitalist, but pre-market. It was the industrial revolution—bringing the Second Wave of revolutionary wealth—that transformed the relationship among markets, marketers and ordinary people all over the World. Industrial revolution transferred millions of peasants who had until then lived primarily as prosumers outside the money economy into producers and consumers inside the money economy—thereby making them dependent on the marketplace. Wage labour replaced slavery and feudal relations in the labour sector of the marketplace, and a large force sprang up. This meant that workers for the first time were paid in money, minimal thought it was. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

And as industrial mass production spread, it eventually brought with it the corresponding development of mass markets spurred by three converging forces. The first was urbanization, as peasants flooded the cities. Between 1800 and 1900 the population in London exploded from 860,000 to 6.5 million; in Paris from 550,000 to 3.3 million; and in Berlin, from 170,000 to 1.9 million. As city populations mushroomed, urban markets for mass-produced goods expanded; and they expanded yet again when the first railroads made possible a huge leap from local to national markets. Mass markets and mass production were, in turn, supported by mass media. Thus the early nineteenth century in England also saw the beginnings of the so-called penny press—publications carrying ads aimed at “the masses” as markets and marking. By 1852 Parisians could shop at Bon Marche, the first big store divided into many departments. Ten years later, the eight-story Cast Iron Palace was built in Manhattan. Downtown department stores soon became a routine feature of cities everywhere. To sell mass-produced goods to rural customers as well, Aaron Montgomery Ward invented the paper counterpart of a department store in 1872. Taking advantage of advances in postal service and transportation, he created a sell-by-mail business that by 1904 was sending three million potential buyers around the United States of American a fat, four-pound catalog divided into equivalent of departments. Eventually, as mass production, mass media and mass markets continued to fuel one another, innovative retailers and land developers invented those cathedrals of consumerism—shopping malls—spreading these, too, across American, Europe, Latin American and Asia. In short, the wave of interlaced changes we call the industrial revolution tremendously expanded the role of markets in the everyday lives of most people. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Today’s transition to a knowledge-based wealth system is once more transforming markets in response to changes at the level of deep fundamentals. Once we understand this, we can catch a glimpse of future. In high-turnover economies, markets are continually flooded with new products that are often interrelated in as yet unsuspected ways. As speeds continue to accelerate, with currency and securities markets already operating at blinding, blistering, blitzing rates, the market life of products (and products related to them) will continue to shorten. Synchronizing multiple markets, fed by seemingly unrelated companies, will become an urgent necessity. We are already seeing corporate collaborations along this line. The attempt, meanwhile, by some marketers to create enduring links between a customer and a brand or a product is likely to prove more and more difficult, if not impossible. Speed will shorten, not lengthen, temporal relationships—including customers’ loyalty to brands. Meanwhile, the spatial shift to global markets adds foreign to domestic competition, not just in fixed or familiar products or in prices but in rates of innovation. Companies on different sides of the World wind up racing one another in arenas so transient they could appropriately be termed “flash markets.” Simultaneously, rising levels of intangibility and complexity demand vast increases in flows of data, information and know-how. Markets will increasingly face consumers who are armed with their own arsenal of facts. Many will demand the right to participate in the design of their own products—and to be paid for the data, information or knowledge they supply. Marketers will also face the opposite—customers in a hurry who revolt against time-wasting surplus complexity and demand the unbundling of unwanted functions. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Smarter and smarter technologies will reduce the cost advantages of mass production, making the halfway step called mass customization obsolete, and true product personalization available at close to zero additional cost. Markets will thus continue to splinter into ever narrower, more temporary and more knowledge-intensive slivers. De-massification will continue to spread wherever there is a middle class or a culture that favors individuality over herd uniformity. In lowbrow industrial economies, wealth was typically measured by the possession of goods. The production of goods was regarded as central to the economy. Conversely, symbolic and service activities, while unavoidable, were stigmatized as nonproductive. (They sometimes still are by economists applying routine measures of productivity designed for the manufacturing sector and inapplicable to the services, which are, by their very nature, harder to measure.) The manufacture of goods—autos, radios, tractors, TV set—was seen as “male” or macho, and words like practical, realistic, or hardheaded were associated with it. By contrast, the production of knowledge or the exchange of information was typically disparaged as mere “paper pushing” and seen as wimpy or—worse yet—effeminate. A flood of corollaries flowed from these attitudes. For example, that “production” is the combination of material resources, machines, and muscle…that the most important assets of a firm are tangibles…that national wealth flows from a surplus of the trade in goods…that trade in services is significant only because it facilitates trade in services is significant only because it facilitates trade in goods…that most education is a waste unless it is narrowly vocational…that research is airy-fairy…and that the liberal arts are irrelevant or, worse yet, inimical to business success. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

What mattered, in short, was matter. Incidentally, ideas like these were by no means limited to the Babbitts of capitalism. They had their analogs in the communist World as well. Marxist economists, if anything, have had a harder time trying to integrate highbrow work into their schema, and “socialist realism” in the arts produced thousands of portrayals of happy workers, their Andrei Deui-like muscles straining against a background of cogwheels, smokestacks, steam locomotives. The glorification of the proletariat, and the theory that it was the vanguard of change, reflected the principle of a lowbrow economy. What all this added up to was more than a welter of isolated opinions, assumptions, and attitudes. Rather it formed a self-reinforcing, self-justifying ideology based on a kind of macho materialism—a brash, triumphant “material-ismo!” Material-ismo, in fact, was the ideology of mass manufacture. Whether voiced by captains of capitalism or by conventional economists, it reflects a view of the primacy of material product that would be appreciated by Russian planners. It is a cudgel used in the power struggle between the vested interests of the smokestack economy and those of the fast-emerging super-symbolic economy. There was a time when material-ismo may have made sense. Today, when the real value of most products lies in the knowledge embedded in them, it is both reactionary and imbecile. Any country that, out of choice, pursues policies based on material-ismo condemns itself to becoming the Bangladesh of the 21^st century. The companies, institutions, and people with a strong stake in the super-symbolic economy have not yet fashioned a coherent counter-rationale. However, some of the underlying ideas are falling into place. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

The first fragmentary foundations of this new economics can be glimpsed in the still-unrecognized writings of people like the late Eugen Loebl, who during eleven years in a communist prison in Czechoslovakia, deeply rethought the assumptions of both Marxist and Western economics; Henry K. H. Woo of Hong Kong, who has analyzed “the unseen dimensions of wealth”; Orio Giarini in Geneva, who applies the concepts of risk and indeterminacy in his analysis of services of the future; and the American Walter Weisskopf, who writes on the role of non-equilibrium conditions in economic development. Scientists today are asking how systems behave in turbulence, how orders evolves out of chaotic conditions, and how developing systems leap to higher levels of diversity. Such questions are extremely pertinent to business and the economy. Management books speak of “thriving on chaos.” Economists rediscover the work of Joseph Schumpeter, who spoke of “creative destruction” as necessary to advance. In a storm of takeovers, divestitures, reorganizations, bankruptcies, start-ups, joint ventures, and internal reorganizations, the entire economy is taking on a new structure that is light-years more diverse, fast-changing, and complex than the old smokestack economy. This “leap” to a higher level of diversity, speed, and complexity requires a corresponding leap to higher, more sophisticated forms of integration. In turn, this demands radically higher levels of knowledge processing. Without this higher coordination, and the mind-work it requires, no value can be added, no wealth created by the economy. Value, therefore, is dependent on more than the mixture of land, labour, and capital. If they cannot be integrated at a far higher level than ever before, all the land, labour, and capital in the World will not meet consumer needs. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

A recent report by Promethee, an independent think tank in Paris, put it this way: “Value is in fact ‘extracted’ throughout the production/provision of a product/service. So-called service economies…are not characterized by the fact that people have suddenly begun to fulfill their lives through non-tangible consumption but rather by the fact that activities pertaining to the economic realm are increasingly integrated.” Drawing heavily on the 17^th-century writings of Rene Descartes, the culture of industrialism rewarded people who could break problems and processes down into smaller and smaller constituent parts. This disintegrative or analytic approach, when transferred to economics, led us to think of production as a series of disconnected steps. Raising capital, acquiring raw materials, recruiting workers, deploying technology, advertising, selling, and distributing the product were all seen as either sequential or as isolated from one another. The new model of production that springs from the super-symbolic economy is dramatically different. Based on a systemic or integrative view, it sees production as increasingly simultaneous and synthesized. The parts of the process are not the whole, and they cannot be isolated from one another. Information gained by the sales and marketing people feeds the engineers, whose innovations need to be understood by the financial people, whose ability to raise capital depends on how well satisfied the customers are, which depends on how well scheduled the company’s trucks are, which depends in part on employee motivation, which depends on a paycheck plus a sense of achievement, which depends…et cetera, et cetera. Connectivity rather than disconnectedness, integration rather than disintegration, real-time simultaneity rather than sequential stages—these are the assumptions that underlie the new production paradigm. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

We are, in fact, discovering that “production” neither begins nor ends in the factory. Thus, the latest models of economic production extend the process both upstream and downstream—forward into aftercare or “support” for the product even after it is sold, as in auto-repair warrantees or the support expected from the retailer when a person buys a computer. Before long, the conception of production will reach even beyond that to ecologically safe disposal of the product after use. Companies will have to provide for post-use cleanup, forcing them to alter design specs, cost calculations, production methods, and much else besides. In so doing they will be performing more service, relative to manufacture, and they will be adding value. “Production” will be seen to include all these functions. Similarly, they may extend the definition backward to include such functions as training of the employee, provision of day care, and other services. An unhappy muscle-worker could be compelled to be “productive.” In high-symbolic activities, happy workers produce more. Hence, productivity begins even before the worker arrives at the office. To old-timers, such an expanded definition of production may seem fuzzy or nonsensical. To the new generation of super-symbolic leaders, conditioned to think systemically rather than in terms of isolated steps, it will seem natural. In brief, production is reconceptualized as a far more encompassing process than the economists and ideologists of lowbrow economics imagined. And at every step from today on, it is knowledge, not affordable labour; symbols, not raw materials, that embody and add value. This deep reconceptualization of the sources of added value is fraught with consequence. It smashed the assumptions of both free-marketism and Marxism alike, and of the material-ismo that gave rise to both. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Thus, the ideas that value is sweated from the back of the worker alone, and that value is produced by the glorious capitalist entrepreneur, both implied in material-ismo, are revealed to be false and misleading politically as well as economically. In the new economy the receptionists and the investment banker who assembles the capital, the keypunch operator and the salesperson, as well as the systems designer and telecommunications specialist, all add value. Even more significantly, so does the customer. Value results from a total effort, rather than from one isolated step in the process. The rising importance of mind-work will not go away, no matter how many scare stories are published warning about the dire consequences of a “vanishing” manufacturing base or deriding the concept of the “information economy.” Neither will the new conception of how wealth is created. For what we are watching is a mighty convergence of chance—the transformation of production coming together with the transformation of capital and money itself. Together they form a revolutionary new system for wealth creation on the planet. An excellent way to promote cooperation in a society is to teach people to care about the welfare of others. Parents and schools devote a tremendous effort to teaching the young to value the happiness of others. This means that the adults try to shape the values of children so that the preferences of the new citizens will incorporate not only their own individual welfare, but to some degree at least, the welfare of others. Without doubt, a society of such caring people will have an easier time attaining cooperation among its members, even when caught in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Altruism is a good name to give to the phenomenon of one person’s utility being positively affected by another person’s welfare. Altruism is thus a motive for action. It should be recognized, however, that certain kinds of behaviour that may look generous may actually take place for reasons other than altruism. For example, giving to charity is often done less out of a regard for the unfortunate than for the sake of the social approval it is expected to bring. And in both traditional and modern societies, gift giving is likely to be part of an exchange process. The motive may be more to create an obligation than to improve the welfare of the recipient. From the point of view of the genetics of biological evolution, altruism can be sustained among kin. A father who risks his own life to save several of his children can increase the odds that copies of his genes will survive. This is the basis of genetical kinship theory. Altruism among people can also be sustained through socialization. However, there is a serious problem. A selfish individual can receive the benefits of another’s altruism and not pay the welfare costs of being generous in return. We have all met spoiled brats, people who expect others to be considerate and generous, but who do not think of the needs of anyone but themselves. Such people need to be treated differently than more considerate people, lest we be exploited by them. This reasoning suggests that the costs of altruism can be controlled by being altruistic to everyone at first, and thereafter only to those who show similar feelings. However, this quickly takes one back to reciprocity as the basis for cooperation. We have a great opportunity, the opportunity to rise Heavenward, to gain the spirit of the gospel as we have never enjoyed it before. This we can do by developing among us that unity required by the laws of the celestial kingdom. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Having faith in Jesus Christ means relying completely on Him—trusting in His infinite power, intelligence, and love. It includes believing His teachings It means believing that even though you do not understand all things, He does. Remember that because He has experienced all of your pains, afflictions, and infirmities, He knows how to help you rise above your daily difficulties. “The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than He?” reports Doctrine and Covenants 122.8. The way we digest the European things is well illustrated by the influence of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice on American consciousness. The story was enormously popular with generations of university students, for it seemed to express the mysteries and sufferings of sophisticated Europeans. It fit in with our preoccupation of Dr. Freud and with the artists; its alternative lifestyle theme attracted curiosity, and much more than curiosity in some, at a time when imagination had little to feed on so far as forbidden themes were concerned. It was a little like compendium of the best that was being said around the turn of the century. In Death in Venice, with what I believe to be a rather heavy Freudian hand, Mann analyzes the favourite subject and hero of poets and novelists since the invention of culture—the artists, that is, himself. The setting and the action of the story suggest the decline of the West; and the decay and demise of its hero, Aschenbach, teach the failure of sublimation, the shakiness and hollowness of his cultural superstructure. Underlying it all are hidden drives, primal, untamed, which are the real motives of his higher endeavour. Awareness of this undermines his life work without providing any acceptable alternatives. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Much of this a gloss on Mann’s famous statement in Tonio Kroger that “the artist is a bourgeois with a guilty conscience,” which I take to mean that he was experiencing all the post-romantic doubts about the artist’s ground or his access to sublime, that he thought the reality is the bourgeois, but that the artist’s troubled conscience leads him somewhere out above, from the point of view of motivest. Aschenbach is a writer, an heir to German tradition, but clearly not the spiritual aristocrat Goethe was. His self-possession is based on lack of self-knowledge. In Venice he touches the roots, finds out what he really wants; but there is nothing noble or even tolerable he can do with his awareness. He withers away horribly, finally dying of the plague afflicting that beautiful but decadent city. Art is always about “something hidden.” However, does it help us connect with that hidden something? I think it moves us away from it. During the first million or so years as reflective beings, humans seem to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that “unfallen social reality” because there was no need for it. Though tools were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of form, the old cliché about the aesthetic impulse as one of the irreducible components of the human mind is invalid. The oldest enduring works of art are hand-prints, produced by pressure or blown pigment—a dramatic token of direct impress on nature. Later in the Upper Paleolithic era, about 30,000 years ago, commenced the rather sudden appearance of the cave art associated with names like Altamira and Lascaux. These images of animals possess an often-breathtaking vibrancy and naturalism, though current sculpture, such as the widely-found “Venus” statuettes of women, was quite stylized. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Perhaps this indicates that domestication of people was to precede domestication of nature. Significantly, the “sympathetic magic” or hunting theory of earliest art is now waning in light of evidence that nature was bountiful rather than threatening. The veritable explosion of art at this time bespeaks an anxiety not felt before: in Worringer’s words, “creation in order to subdue the torment of perception.” Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away. The rapid development of ritual or ceremony parallels the birth of art, and we are reminded of the earliest ritual re-enactments of the moment of “the beginning,” the primordial paradise of the timeless present. Pictorial representation roused the belief in controlling loss, the belief in coercion itself. In the earliest evidence of symbolic division, as with the half-human, half-beast stone faces at El Juyo, the World is divided into opposing forces, by which binary distinction the contrast of culture and nature begins and a protectionist, hierarchical society is perhaps already prefigured. The perceptual order itself, as a unity, starts to break down in reflection of an increasingly complex social order. A hierarchy of senses, with the visual steadily more separate from the others and seeking it completion in artificial images such as cave paintings, moves to replace the full simultaneity of sensual gratification. Levi-Strauss discovered, to his amazement, a tribal people that had been able to see Venus in daytime; but not only were our faculties once so very acute, they were also not ordered and separate. Part of training sight to appreciate the objects of culture was the accompanying repression of immediacy in an intellectual sense: reality was removed in favour of merely aesthetic experience. Art anaesthetizes the sense organs and removes the natural World from their purview. This reproduces culture, which can never compensate for the disability. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Not surprisingly, the first signs of a departure from those egalitarian principles that characterize hunter-gather life show up now. The shamanistic origin of visual art and music has been often remarked, the point here being that the artist-shaman was first the specialist. It seems likely that the ideas of surplus and commodity appeared with the shaman, whose orchestration of symbolic activity portended further alienation and stratification. When you are watching television, you are seeing images that are utterly impossible in nature. This in itself qualifies the imagery for your attention, even when the content within the image is nothing you would otherwise care about. For example, the camera can circle the subject. It can rise above it or go below it. It can zoom in or back away from it. The image can be changed in size or made to fade and reappear. Editors make it possible for a scene in one room to be followed instantly by a scene in another room, or at another time, or another place. Words appear over images. Music rises and falls in the background. Two images or three can appear simultaneously. One image can be superimposed on another on the screen. Motion can be slowed down or sped up. None of these effects is possible in unmediated imagery. When you lift your eyes from this paper and look around your room, it does not become some other room or some other time. It could not possibly do that. Nor does your room circle around you or zoom back away from you. If it did do that, you would certainly pay one heck of a lot of attention to it, just as you would to anything new and unexplained that appeared in your field of vision. Through these technical events, television images alter the usual, natural imagery possibilities, taking on the quality of a naturally highlighted event. They may it seem that what you are looking at is unique, unusual and extraordinary. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Attention is stimulated as though something new or important was going on, such as landslides, gigantic boulders or ten-foot daisies. However, nothing unusual is going on. All that is happening is that the viewer is watching television, which is the same thing that happened an hour ago, or yesterday. A trick has been played. The viewer is fixated by a conspiracy of dimmed-out environments combined with artificial, impossible, fictitious unusualness. Vitalized by such an information explosion, Western culture set itself upon a course which made technocracies possible. And then something quite unexpected happened; in a word, nothing. From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture undertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century, no significant technologies were introduced that altered the form, volume, or speed of information. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press. It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a heightened respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism. New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books. It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us our standard of excellence in the use of reason, as exemplified in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

I weight the list with America’s “Founding Fathers” because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation to ever be argued into existence in print. Paine’s Common Sense and The Rights of Man, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers were written and printed efforts to make the American experiment appear reasonable to the people, which to the eighteenth-century mind was both necessary and sufficient. To any people whose politics were the politics of the printed page, as Tocqueville said of America, reason and printing were inseparable. We need not hesitate to claim that the First Amendment to the United States of America’s Constitution stands as a monument to the ideological biases of print. It says: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” In these forty-five words we may find the fundamental values of the literate, reasoning mind as fostered by the print revolution: a belief in privacy, individuality, intellectual freedom, open criticism, and community action. Equally important is that the words of that amendment presume and insist on a public that not only has access to information but has control over it, a people who know how to use information in their own interests. There is not a single line written by Jefferson, Adams, Paine, Hamilton, or Franklin that does not take for granted that when information is made available to citizens they are capable of managing it. This is not to say that the Founding Fathers believed information could not be false, misleading, or irrelevant. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

However, they believed that the marketplace of information and ideas was sufficiently ordered so that citizens could make sense of what they read and heard and, through reason, judge its usefulness to their lives. Jefferson’s proposals for education, Paine’s arguments for self-governance, Franklin’s arrangements for community affairs assume coherent, commonly shared principles that allow us to debate such questions as: What are the responsibilities of citizens? What is the nature of education? What constitutes human progress? What are the limitations of social structures? Now, when we think about how electric motors spin, the mechanical vibrations must generate a lot of heat, so the electric motors must draw a lot of power. Nanotechnology and today’s crude methods are very different: Technology has never had this kind of precise control; all of our technologies today are bulk technologies. We take a big chunk of stuff and hack away at it until we are left with the object we want, or we assemble parts from components without regard to structure at the molecular level. Today, electronics are made from silicon chips. We have already seen the landscape of a finished chip. During manufacturing, metal features would be built up by a centuries-long submergence in an acid sea. From the perspective of our simulation, the whole process would resemble geology as much as manufacturing, with the slow layering of sedimentary deposits alternating with ages of erosion. The term nanotechnology is sometimes used as a name for small-scale mircrotechnology, but the difference between molecular manufacturing and this sort of microlandscaping is like the difference between watchmaking and bulldozing. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Today, chemists make molecules by solution chemistry. We have seen what a liquid looks like in our first simulation, with molecules bumping and tumbling and wandering around. Just as assemblers can make chemical reactions occur by brining molecules together mechanically, so reactions can occur by bringing molecules together mechanically, so reactions can occur when molecules bump at random through thermal vibration and motion in a liquid. Indeed, much of what we know today about chemical reactions comes from observing this process. Chemists make large molecules by mixing small molecules in a liquid. By choosing the right molecules and conditions, they can get a surprising measure of control over the results: only some pairs of molecules will react, and then only in certain ways. Doing chemistry this way, thought is like trying to assemble a model car by putting the pieces in a box and shaking. This will only work with cleverly shaped pieces, and it is hard to make anything very complex. Chemists today consider it challenging to make precise, three-dimensional structure having a hundred atoms, and making one with a thousand atoms is a great accomplishment. Molecular manufacturing, in contrast, will routinely assemble millions or billions. The basic chemical principles will be the same, but control and reliability will be vastly greater. It is the difference between throwing things together blindly and putting them together with a watchmaker’s care. Technology today does not permit thorough control of the structure of matter. Molecular manufacturing will. Today’s technologies have given us computers, spacecraft, indoor plumbing, and other wonders of the modern age. Tomorrow’s will do much more, bringing change and choice. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Upon the tale of the tree of knowledge follows in the Scriptures that of fratricide, different from the former in its style and the manner in which it is conveyed, without irony and without lingering; a brief, dry report, which has preserved archaic elements within it, but which, in its present linguistic version, is unmistakably linked up with the former. It and not the former is the story of the first “iniquity” in the universal human sense, that is of one which is, as here, it took place within the clan, would always be punished as such in every society known to us. The former describes an action which earns punishment, not of itself, but as disobedience, the latter a deed which is wrong by its very nature. However it may have been fashioned and intended in its original and independent form, only its combination with the tale of the eating of the forbidden fruit drew out of it an immense significance: this, we are now told, is how accomplished human “knowledge of good and evil” works out in the generations that come after—not indeed as “original sin,” but as the specific sin, only possible in relation to God, which alone makes possible general sin against the fellow-man and hence, of course, once more against God as his Guardian. The deed of the first humans belonged to the sphere of pre-evil Kain’s deed to that of evil, which only came into being as such through the act of knowledge. We who have been born late and are concerned to know that knowledge and at the same time to prevail over it, must stress the perspective founded on the combination of the two tales. Long ago Satan was in the bushes near the Tree of Knowledge when the Man and the Woman came there and had a conversation. They were innocently unconscious of their nakedness, lovely to look upon, beautiful beyond words. Satan listed again. Again as they puzzled over those words, “good,” “evil” and “death.” Adam and Eve tried to reason out their meaning but of course they were not able to. “Wo be unto him that shall say: We have received the word of God, and we need no more of the word of God, for we have enough!” reports 2 Nephi 28.29. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

Wow, we can’t believe it’s almost July 4th, either! 🇺🇸 That’s the thing about summer – it’s as short and sweet as a fireworks display…so we’re planning to live it up!

We’re bringing you inspiration for “Preparing the Perfect 4th of July BBQ.” Doesn’t have to be fancy – but we hope you’ll get excited to go a bit beyond sun-warmed ketchup and paper plates!

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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.
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The super-symbolic economy makes obsolete not only our concepts of unemployment, but our concepts of work as well. To understand it, and the power struggle that it triggers, we will even need a fresh vocabulary. Thus, the division of the economy into such sectors as “agriculture,” “manufacturing,” and “services” today obscures, rather than clarifies. Today’s high-speed changes blur the once-neat distinctions. It might surprise President Trump, who was concerned about too many Americans cutting each other’s hair, that the founder of one of Europe’s largest computer manufacturers has repeatedly said, “We are a service company—just like a barbershop!” Instead of clinging to the old classifications, we need to look behind the labels and ask what people in these companies actually have to create added value. Once we pose this question, we find that more and more of the work in all three sectors consist of symbolic processing, or “mind work.” Farmers now use computers to calculate grain feeds; steelworkers monitor consoles and video screens; investment bankers switch on their laptops as they model financial markets. It matters little whether economists choose to label these as “agricultural,” “manufacturing,” or “service” activities. Even occupational categories are breaking down. To label someone a stockroom attendant, a machine operator, or a sales representative conceals rather than reveals. The labels may stay the same, but the actual jobs do not. It is a lot more useful today to group workers by the amount of symbolic processing or mind-work they do as part of their jobs, regardless of the label they wear or whether they happen to work in a store, a truck, a factory, a hospital, or an office. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

At the top end of what might be called the “mind-work spectrum” we have the research scientist, the financial analyst, the computer programmer, or for that matter, the ordinary file clerk. Why, one might ask, include file clerks and scientists in the same group? The answer is that, while their functions obviously differ and they work at vastly different levels of abstraction, both—and millions like them—do nothing but move information around or generate more information. Their work is totally symbolic. In the middle of the mind-work spectrum we find a broad range of “mixed” jobs—tasks requiring the worker to perform physical labour, but also to handle information. The Federal Express or United Parcel Service drivers handles boxes and packages, drives a van, but now also operates a computer at one’s side, and they also perform security functions, such as watching who picks up the package after it is delivered and report potential thefts to the vendor and their managers. In advanced factories the machine operator is a highly trained information worker. The hotel clerk, the nurse, and many others have to deal with people—but spend a considerable fraction of their time generating, getting, or giving out information. Auto Science Engineers at BMW dealers, for example, may still have greasy hands (however, if you have your car’s scheduled maintenance done as required or suggested, your car may be so clean that their hands stay clean and you will never see a check engine light for the life of your vehicle’s life)  , but they also use computer systems designed by Hewlett-Packard that provides them with an “expert system” to help them in trouble-shooting, along with instance access to over one hundred megabytes of technical drawings stored in their computer system, which are constantly updated like the anti-virus program on your computer. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Scheduled maintenance is a lot like scanning your computer for viruses, and making updates and cleaning the system so your car is never “infected” parts that malfunction. They are replaced before any issue is detected. And your car, in most cases, will never be infected by a “virus” the check engine light because it is undergoing routine maintenance. Now, this will not only increase the trade-in, resale, and lease return value of your car, but it will also make sure it is always safe to drive, will decrease the probability of a death or injury caused by an accident, and will extend your vehicle’s life well beyond that 100,000-mile lifecycle. Some cars can last well over 500,000 miles on the same engine. The system asks Auto Science Engineers for more data about the car they are fixing; it permits them to search through the masses of technical material intuitively; it makes inferences and then guides them through the repairs steps. When they are interacting with this system are they “mechanics” or “mind-workers”? It is the purely manual jobs at the bottom end of the spectrum that are disappearing. With fewer manual jobs in the economy, the “proletariat” is not a minority, replaced increasingly by a “cognitariat.” More accurately, as the super-symbolic economy unfolds, the proletariat becomes a cognitariat. The key questions about a person’s work today have to do with how much of the job entails information processing, how routine or programmable it is, what level of abstractions is involved, what access the person have to the central data bank and management information system, and how much autonomy and responsibility the individual enjoys. To describe all this as “hollowing out” or to write it off as “hamburger slinging” is ridiculous. Such catch phrases devalue exactly that part of the economy that is growing fastest and generating the most new jobs. They ignore the crucial new role of knowledge in the production of wealth. And they fail to notice that the transformation of human labour corresponds precisely to the rise of super-symbolic capital and money. It is part of the total restructure of society in the 21st century. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

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. Question: How does an unemployed heating salesman, scraping by in the midst of the greatest economic depression the World has ever seen before, become a millionaire? Answer: By find a way for millions of others to get rich—with play money in a game called Monopoly. Since Charles Darrow sold his game to Parker Brothers in 1935, an estimated 500 million people in eighty countries have moved tokens across Monopoly boards printed in twenty-six languages including Czech, Portuguese, Iceland and Arabic. In playing the game, they were introduced to a white-mustached, tubby figure in top hat and tux, seen hauling a huge sack of money to the nearest bank. That cartoon figure and the acquisitive nature of the game itself commented wryly on reality in yesterday’s industrial America—a country shaped by the concentrated wealth and power of a few families with names like Winchester, Hearst, Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, Vanderbilt, Hilton, and Mellon. Pro-business Americans called them captains of industry—the great personages who built the American economy. Anti-business Americans called them robber barons—criminals who bilked, rather than built, the country. The one word on which both sides could agree was capitalist. During most of the industrial era, capital in the World’s most capitalist country was correctly seen as tightly concentrated. “Before the 1920’s,” writes Ron Chernow in The Death of the Banker, “Wall Street spurned the small investor as too trivial to consider.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

In the mid-1950s, as white-collar and service workers began outnumbering blue-collar workers, about 7 million Americans owned stock. By 1970, the number had soared to 31 million—mostly small accounts, perhaps, but no longer trivial in aggregate. And in the years since then, as the transition to a knowledge economy continued, direct and indirect ownership of financial assets by the public skyrocketed. Company after company, starting out in private hands, reached out to a broader and broader public for financing. The Ford Motor Company is typical. Wholly owned by Henry and Edsel Ford as of 1919, Ford went public in 1956 and now boasts 950,000 shareowners. Today, writes veteran business analyst James Flanigan, the owners of America are the “more than 100,000,000 Americans who hold more than $5 trillion worth of company stock through their pension funds, retirement plans and individual retirement accounts…American workers own more than 60 percent of the stock in all U.S.A. public companies.” That averages out to $50,000 each, not counting equity in the houses owned by nearly 70 percent of them, plus additional assets in the form of health, life and property insurance. However, these ownership statistics tell only half the story. Americans, including a huge percentage of that 100 million, also carry on their backs, like the capitalist’s money bag, an immense, ever-ballooning burden of household debt that can all too often outweigh these assets. Despite record unemployment and widespread financial struggle in 2020, some consumer markets have remained remarkably intact. Home loans are one of them—and even with physical limitations temporarily hampering in-person homebuying, overall mortgage debt in the U.S.A. reached record highs in 2020. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

In the midst of the pandemic, outstanding mortgage debt rose to over $10.3 trillion in the third quarter (Q3) of 2020. That is up from $8 trillion in 2005. Not only has mortgage debt grown by 7 percent ($703 billion) from 2019 to 2020, but it grew at the fastest rate it has in at least 10 years. As of 2020, approximately 44 percent of U.S.A. consumers have a mortgage. This has led to 20 percent of homes to sell above their listing price. This indicates that competition and ample demand may have driven purchase prices up, and in combination with other factors, may explain why average mortgage balances are climbing up. With highly inflation in the economy, 44 percent of Americans also reported that they are only partially filling up their gas tanks. Our research found the median debt per American family to be $2,700, while the average debt stands at $6,270. The average balance for consumers is $5,315, although some of that debt may be held on joint cards and thus double-counted. Overall, Americans owe $807 billion across almost 506 million card accounts. 45.4 percent of families carry some sort of credit card debt. The West holds the highest average credit card debt, averaging over $7,000. Total outstanding U.S.A. consumer debt on credit cards, car loans and other consumer debt is $4.2 trillion. This is up from $2 trillion in 2005. Even so, wide distribution of company stock and other assets makes American workers “owners” to a degree unique in a major capitalist country, including Western European nations under social democratic governments. To those in the poor World, these numbers are unimaginable. Ironically, if even 10 percent of China’s population bought shares in publicly traded stock of non-state-owned companies, its Communist Party could boast of extraordinary success in transferring ownership of what Marx called “the means of production” to working class. At present, that number is more like 1 percent. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

If the future is sufficiently important relative to the present, mutual cooperation can be stable. This is because if the interaction will last long enough to make a threat effective, individuals can each use an implicit threat of retaliation against the other’s defection. Suppose that a payoff received in the next round of trades or negotiations is worth only some fixed percentage of the same payoff received in the current term. Therefore, the future is typically less important than the present for two reasons. In the first place, the interaction may not continue. One or the other party may die, go bankrupt, move away, or the relationship may end for any other reasons. Since these factors cannot be predicted with certainty, the next more is not as important as the current one. There may be no next move. A second reason that the future is less important than the present is that individuals typically prefer to get a given benefit today, rather than having to wait for the same benefit until tomorrow. Both of these effects combine to make the next move less important than the present one. In most cases, mutual cooperation is the best strategy. When the future casts a large shadow as reflected in the high discount parameter of 90 percent, then it pays to cooperate with someone using TIT FOR TAT. And because of it, it pays to use TIT FOR TAT. And therefore with a large shadow, cooperation based on reciprocity is stable. When the shadow of the future is not great, the situations changes. To see this, suppose the discount parameter were changed from 90 percent to 30 percent. This reduction might be due to a greater likelihood that the interaction will end soon, or to a greater preference for immediate benefits over delayed gratification, or to any combination of these two factors. Even if the other player will reciprocate your cooperation, as the shadow of the future becomes smaller, it stops paying to be cooperative with another party. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

And if it does not pay for you to cooperate, it does not pay for the other party to cooperate either. So when the discount parameter is not high enough, cooperation is likely to be missing altogether or to disappear fairly quickly. This conclusion does not depend on the use of TIT FOR TAT because any strategy that may be the first to cooperate is stable only when the discount parameter is high enough; this means that no form of cooperation is stable when the future is not important enough relative to the present. This conclusion emphasizes the importance of the first method of promoting cooperation: enlarging the shadow of the future. There are two basic ways of doing this: by making the interactions more durable, and by making them more frequent. The most direct way to encourage cooperation is to make the interaction more durable. For example, a wedding is a public act designed to celebrate and promote the durability of a relationship. Durability of an interaction can help not only lovers, but enemies. The most striking illustration of this point was the way the live-and-let-live system developed during the trench warfare of World War I. What was unusual about trench warfare was that the same small units of troops would be in contact with each other for extended periods of time. They knew that their interactions would continue because no one was going anywhere. In more mobile wars, a small unit would meet a different enemy unit every time there would be an engagement; consequently it would not pay to initiate cooperation on the hope that the other individual or small unit will reciprocate later. However, in static combat, the interaction between two small units is prolonged over a substantial period of time. This prolonged interaction allows patterns of cooperation which are based on reciprocity to be worth trying and allows them to become established. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Another way to enlarge the shadow of the future is to make the interactions more frequent. In such a case the next interaction occurs sooner, and hence the next move looms larger than it otherwise would. This increased rate of interaction would therefore be reflected in an increase in the importance of the next move relative to the current move. It is important to appreciate that the discount parameter is based on the relative importance of one move and the next, not one time period to the next. Therefore, if the party regards a payoff two years from now as worth only half as much as an equal payoff two years from now as worth only half as much as an equal payoff today, one way to promote cooperation would be to make their interactions more frequent. A good way to increase the frequency of interactions between two given individuals is to keep others away. For example, when birds establish a territory it means that they will have only a few neighbours. This, in turn, means that they will have relatively frequent interactions with these nearby individuals. The same could be true for a business firm that had a territorial base and bought and sold mainly with only a few firms in its own territory. Likewise, any form of specialization tending to restrict interactions to only a few others would tend to make the interactions with those few more frequent. This is one reason why cooperation emerges more readily in small towns than in large cities. It is also a good reason why firms in a congenial industry try to keep out new firms that might upset the cozy restraints on competition that have grown up in the restricted industry. Finally, if the customers see the worker on a regular basis rather than only at long and unpredictable intervals, an itinerant trader or day worker will have an easier time developing cooperative relationships with customers. The principle is always the same: frequent interactions help promote stable cooperation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Hierarchy and organization are especially effective at concentrating the interactions between specific individuals. A bureaucracy is structured so that people specialize, and so that people working on related tasks are grouped together. This organizational practice increases the frequency of interactions, making it easier for workers to develop stable cooperative relationships. Moreover, when an issues requires coordination between different branches of the organization, the hierarchical structure allows the issue to be referred to policy makers at higher levels who frequently deal with each other on just such issues. By binding people together in a long-term, multilevel game, organization increase the number and importance of future interactions, and thereby promote the emergence of cooperation among groups too large to interact individually. This in turn leads to the evolution of organizations for the handling of larger and more complex issues. Concentrating the interactions so that each individual meets often with only a few others has another benefit besides making cooperation more stable. It also helps get cooperation going. Even a small cluster of individuals can invade a large population of meanies. The members of the cluster must have a nontrivial proportion of their interactions may be with the general population. It is easy for a small cluster of TIT FOR TAT individuals to invade a populations of individuals who always defect. The cluster needs just 5 percent of their interactions to be with other members of the cluster in order for the cooperation to get started in a mean World. Concentrating the interactions is one way to make two individuals meet more often. In a bargaining context, another way to make their interactions more frequent is to break down the issues into small pieces. An arms control or disarmament treaty, for example, can be broken down into many stages. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

This would allow the two parties to make many relatively small moves rather than one or two large moves. Doing it this way makes reciprocity more effective. If both sides can know that an inadequate move by the other can be met with a reciprocal defection in the next stage, then both can be more confident that the process will work out as anticipated. Of course, a major question in arms control is whether each side can, in fact, know what the other side actually did on the previous move—whether they cooperated by fulfilling their obligations or defected by cheating. However, for any given degree of confidence in each side’s ability to defect cheating, having many small steps will help promote cooperation as compared to having just a few big steps. Decomposing the interaction promotes the stability of cooperation by making the gains from cheating on the current move that much less important relative to the gains from potential mutual cooperation on later moves. Decomposition is a widely practiced principle. Henry Kissinger arranged for the Israeli disengagement from the Sinai after the 1973 war to proceed in stages that were coordinated with Egyptian moves leading to normal relationships with Israel. Businesses prefer to ask for payment for large orders in phases, as the deliveries are made, rather than to wait for a lump sum at the end. Making sure that defection on the present move is not too tempting relative to the whole future course of the interaction is a good way to promote cooperation. However, another way is to alter the payoffs themselves. In reflecting on language about which, the thought behind it and the way it has been received in America, I am reminded of one of my teachers, who wrote a Ten Commandments for Americans that began, “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the house of the European tyrants into my land, America: Relax!” #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

As we have seen, these words we have half digested are the distillations of great questions must be faced if one is to live a serious life: reason-revelation, freedom-necessity, democracy-aristocracy, good-evil, body-soul, self-other, city-man, eternity-time, being-nothing. Our condition of doubt makes us aware of alternatives but has not until recently given up the means to resolve our doubt about the primacy of any of the alternatives. A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear. That is what tragic literature is about. It articulates all the noble things men want and perhaps need and shows how unbearable it is when it appears that they cannot coexist harmoniously. One need only remember what the choice between believing in God or rejecting Him used to entail for those who faced. Or, to use a lesser but equally relevant example, think of Tocqueville, one of the rarest flowers of the Old French aristocracy because he believed it to be juster, even though it would bever be salubrious for a Pascal, a man who consumed himself in the contemplation of God’s existence, and even though the absence of such intransigent confrontation with the grounds of all things would impoverish the life of man and diminish his seriousness. These are real choices, possibly only for one who faces real question. We, on the other hand, have taken these words, which point toward a rich lode of serious questions, and treated them as though they were answers, in order to avoid confronting them ourselves. They are not Sphinxlike riddles to which we must play daring Lestat, but facts behind which we need not go and which structure of the World of concern to us. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

What has existentialism done to being-nothing for us? Or value to good-evil; history to eternity-time; creativity to freedom-necessity; the sacred to reason-revelation? The old tragic conflicts reappear newly labeled as assurances: “I am OK, you are OK.” Choice is all the rage these days, but it does not mean what it used to mean. In a free society where people are free—responsible—who can consistently not be “pro-choice”? However, when the word still has some shape and consistency, a difficult choice meant to accept difficult consequences in the form of suffering, disapproval of others, ostracism, punishment and guilt. Without this, choice was believed to have no significance. Accepting the consequences for affirming what really counts is what gives Antigone her nobility; unwillingness to do so is what makes her sister Ismene less admirable. Now, when we speak of the right to choice, we mean that there are no necessary consequences, that disapproval is only prejudice and guilty only a neurosis. Political activism and psychiatry can handle it. In this optic Hester Prynne and Anna Karenina are not ennobling exemplars of the intractability of human problems and the significance of choice, but victim whose sufferings are no longer necessary in our enlightened age of heightened consciousness. America has no-fault automobile accidents, no-fault divorces, and it is moving with the assistance of modern philosophy toward no-fault choices. Conflict is the evil we most want to avoid, among nations, among individuals, and within ourselves. Nietzsche sought with his value philosophy to restore the harsh conflicts for which men were willing to die, to restore the tragic sense of life, at a moment when nature had been domesticated and men become tame. That value philosophy was used in America for exactly the opposite purpose—to promote conflict-resolution, bargaining, harmony. If it is only a difference of values, the conciliation is possible. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

We must respect values, but they must not get in the way of peace. Thus Nietzsche contributed to what he was trying to cure. Conflict, the condition of creativity for Nietzsche, is for us a cry for therapy. I keep thinking of my Atlanta taxi driver and his Gestalt therapy. Kant argued that men are equal in dignity because of their capacity for moral choice. It is the business of society to provide the conditions for such choice and esteem for those who achieve it. With the intermediary of value relativism, we have been able to simplify the formula to: Men are equal in dignity. Our business is to distribute esteem equally. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is the instruction manual for such distribution. Kant’s theory of justice makes it possible to understand Anna Karenina as a significant expression of our situation; Rawls’s does the same for Fear of Flying. With events separated from the time and place in which they occur, it becomes possible to condense them in time. It is not only possible but inevitable that this be done. Unlike print media, or even film, television information is inherently limited by time. It is impossible to present all of most events, so what is presented is always condensed. Most of the event is squeezed out. The result of this condensation is distortion. If you have ever participated in a public event of any sort and then watched the news report of it, you are already aware that the news report barely resembles what you experienced. You are aware of this because you were there. Other viewers are not aware. When television describes events that happened at some other historical time, no one can know what is true. The best article I ever read on the inevitable distortions resulting from television’s inherent need to condense time was written in TV Guide by Bill Davidson (March 20, 1976). Writing about the new spurt of “docudramas,” which represent themselves as true versions of historical events, he said, “Truth may be the first victim when television ‘docudramas’ rewrite history.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Davidson analyzes some half-dozen docudramas for inaccuracy and distortion and then asks, “Does this mean that docudrama is more drama than docu? Probably yes. Is the American public deliberately being misled by representations that these films are in fact true stories? Probably yes.” In fact, however, the distortions are less deliberate than they are inevitable. Davidson interviewed David Rintels, who wrote the docudrama Fear on Trial, which purported to be a true account of the blacklisting of John Henry Faulk in 1956. He quotes Rintels as saying: “’I had to tell a story condensing six or seven years into a little less than two hours, which means I could just barely hit the major highlights. I did what I think all writers would do—present the essence of the facts and capture the truth of the general story….Attorney Louis Nizer’s summation to the jury took more than 12 hours. I had to do it in three minutes.’” Davidson points out that since television docudramas have condensed such complex subjects as the career of Joseph McCarthy, the Attica prison riots, and the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., the problems is virtually beyond control. Davidson quotes psychologist Dr. Victor B. Cline of the University of Utah, who says: “’The very real danger of these docudrama films is that people take it for granted that they’re true and—unlike similar fictionalized history in movies and the theater—they are seen on a medium which also presents straight news…I think they should carry a disclaimer to the effect that the story is not totally true but based on some of the elements of what act actually occurred.’” I think so too. However, if there should be disclaimers for documdramas there should be many more for news. As prominent San Francisco journalist Susan Halas once put it: “There is no news, there’s only media.” Where docudramas reduce the same event to thirty seconds, eliminating most of the information that a reasonable, thinking person who consider necessary to any understanding of events in the process. What is left is the skeleton of events, making only scraps of knowledge available for people’s perception and understanding. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

The inevitable need to condense information in time is the cause of this. The way the information is condensed—what is left in and what is deleted—will be described in upcoming dates. As with so many of the features of all that is modern, the origins of information glut can be traced many centuries back. Nothing could be more misleading than the claim that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age in the early sixteenth century. Forty years after Gutenberg converted an old wine press into a printing machine with movable type, there were presses in 110 cities in six different countries. Fifty years after the press was invented, more than eight million books had been printed, almost all of them filled with information that had previously been unavailable to the average person. There were books on law, agriculture, politics, exploration, metallurgy, botany, linguistics, pediatrics, and even good manners. There were also assorted guides and manuals; the World of commerce rapidly became a World of printed paper through the widespread use of contracts, deed, promissory notes, and maps. (Not surprisingly, in a culture in which information was becoming standardized and repeatable, mapmakers began to exclude “paradise” from their charts on the grounds that its location was too uncertain.) So much new information, of so many diverse types, was generated that printers could no longer use the scribal manuscript as their model of a book. By the mid-sixteenth century, printers began to experiment with new formats, among the most important innovations being the use of Arabic numerals to number pages. (The first known example of such pagination is Johann Froben’s first edition of Erasmus’ New Testament, printed in 1516.) #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Pagination led inevitable to more accurate indexing, annotation, and cross-referencing, which in turn was accompanied by innovations in punctuation marks, section heads, paragraphing, title-paging, and running heads. By the end of the sixteenth century, the machine-made book had a typographic for and look comparable to the books today. All of this is worthy mentioning because innovations in the format of the machine-made book were an attempt to control the flow of information, to organize it by establishing priorities and by giving it sequence. Very early on, it was understood that the printed book had crated an information crisis and that something needed to be done to maintain a measure of control. The altered form of the book was one means. Another was the modern school, which took shape in the seventeenth century. In 1480, before the information explosion, there were thirty-four schools in all of England. By 1660, there were 444, one school for every twelve square miles. There were several reasons for the rapid growth of the common school, but none was more obvious than that it was a necessary response to the anxieties and confusion aroused by information on the loose. The invention of what is called a curriculum was a logical step toward organizing, limiting, and discriminating among available sources of information. Schools became technocracy’s first secular bureaucracies, structures for legitimizing some parts of the flow of information and discrediting other parts. Schools were, in short, a means of governing the ecology of information. With the rise of technocracies, information became a more serious problem than ever, and several methods of controlling information had to be invented. For a richly detailed account of what those methods were, I refer the reader to James Beniger’s The Control Revolution, which is among the three or four most important books we have on the subject of the relation of information to culture. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Most of the methods by which technocracies have hoped to keep information from running amok are now dysfunctional. Indeed, one way of defining a Technopoly is to say that its information immune system is inoperable. Technopoly is a form of cultural COVID-19. That is why it is possible to say almost anything without contradiction provided you begin your utterance with the words “A study has shown…” or “Scientists now tell us that…” More important, it is why in a Technopoly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no cultural coherence. Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves. Such information is “inert.” However, information without regulation can be lethal.  While on the subject of puzzling chains, taking the advice of the tourguide, you grab two molecular knobs on the protein and pull. It resists for a moment, but then a loop comes free, letting other loops flop around more, and the whole structure seem to melt into a withering coil. After a bit of pulling and wrestling, the protein’s structure becomes obvious: It is a long chain—longer than you are tall, if you could get straight—and each segment of the chain has one of several kinds of knobs sticking off to the side. With the multicoloured, glassy-bead portrayal of the atoms. The protein chain resembles a flamboyant necklace. This may be decorative, but how does it all go back together? (Much like what are the benefits of the words coming out of people’s mouth?) Then chain flops and twists and thrashes, and you pull and push and twist, but the original tight, solid packing is lost. There are more ways to go wrong in folding up the chain than there are in solving Rubik’s Cube, and now that the folded structure is gone, it is not even clear what the result should look like. How did these twentieth-century researcher ever solve the notorious “protein objects problem”? It is a matter of record that they started building protein objects in the late 1980s. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

This protein molecule will not go back together, so you try to break it. A firm grip and a powerful yank straightens a section a bit, but the chain holds together and snaps back. Though unfolding it was easy, even muscle with the strength of steel—the strength of Superman—cannot break the chain itself. Chemical bonds are amazingly strong, so it is time to cheat again. When you say, “Flimsy World—one second!” while pulling, your hands easily mov apart, splitting the chain in two before its strength returns to normal. You have forced a chemical change, but there must be easier ways since chemists do their work without tiny superhands. While you compare the broken ends, they thrash around and bump together. The third time this happens, the chain rejoins, as strong as before. This is like having snap-together parts, but the snaps are far strong then welded steel. Modern assembler chemistry usually uses other approaches, but seeing this happen makes the idea of molecular assembly more understandable: Put the right pieces together in the right positions, and they snap together to make a bigger structure. Remember the “Whoa!” command, you decide to go back to the properly scaled speed for your size and strength. Saying “Standard settings!,” you see the thrashing of the protein chain speed up to a hard-to-follow blur. Not only the ownership of capital but the way it is collected, allocated, and transferred from pocket to pocket, much like the puzzling chains of the protein molecule, are undergoing unprecedented change. The financial infrastructure in the United States of America—the beating heart, as it were, of World capitalism—is being revolutionized, its operations altered to adapt to changes in the deep fundamentals of knowledge, time and space. Investments can be made within milliseconds. Spatially, they can reach around the globe. And investors have easier access to ever-faster, more diverse, more customized, more accessible data, information and knowledge. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The main function of this fast-growing infrastructure is to make it easier to convert property into capital and, theoretically, to allocate the resultant capital to those who can make the most efficient use of it—with efficiency measured by profits returned. The new infrastructure offers a dizzying range of risk-reward choices, including high-yield bonds, venture capital, mutual funds and funds that parallel the performance of stock-markets indices. Investors are offered derivatives, securitized mortgages, and financial packages with evocative names like Spyders, Vipers, Qubes, and Cocos, as well as funds that offer “socially responsible” investment vehicles, environmental portfolios, microfinance and countless other options. On the environmental front, microfinance is, in and of itself, “green” in that it promotes businesses that can be sustained indefinitely. Example over example over the last three decades have proven the concept that when less affluent people are given opportunities to earn a living in a legitimate and sustainable fashion, they have little or no need to pillage their surrounding natural resources to shelter or feed themselves. Also, most of the financial institutions involved in microfinance hold up sustainability as a precondition for awarding loans. Others encourage greener businesses by offering lower interest rates to borrowers with sustainability-oriented plans. World Bank statistics show that more than 7,000 microfinance institutions serve some 16 million people in developing countries with $7 billion in outstanding loans, 97 percent which are repaid. With the use of microloans and business education, two pillars of the microfinance process, loanees are provided a safety net that will protect them and their economic future in times of hardships. In addition, microfinance tends to have a ricochet effect in the communities that run microloan operations. If one family in a town begins to become more prosperous, they will spend more money in their communities, buying more supplies for the business or simply just raising their standard of living. Either way, the prosperity of one translates into increased economic success for all those they interact with. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

Nestled at the southern end of Plumas Lake, bordering an orchard to the west, Cresleigh Riverside is home to the largest home sites in the three Plumas Ranch communities.

Its executive-style residences feature space and amenities that are well beyond the norm – many on country lots that back up to the Ranch’s adjacent fruit orchards. With four floor plans available, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.

The kitchen, dining, and indoor/outdoor living areas transition gracefully into each other, making entertaining a pleasant experience. Plenty of room and open spaces give natural light the chance to flow through this beautiful home.

Cresleigh Homes offer incredible versatility with a seemingly endless number of architectural and design options. The single-storey model home or one very similar to it is 3-4 Bedrooms – 3 Bathrooms – 2,627 square fert – $667,190. (Larger two-storey homes are also avaliable.) https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/move-in-ready-homesite-70/

Please contact us today for a private appointment and tour of this model home. Thank you!

Location, amenities, style. A brand new home means there is opportunity to customize design features to your preference.

CONTACT

530-870-8748

PlumasRanch@Cresleigh.com

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