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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cresleigh Homes

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

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

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

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

#PlumasRanch
#CresleighHomes

Soren Viggo, a pharmacist in South Sacramento, California, makes more than $100,000 a year and owns his own homes. However, Mr. Vigo, age 30, struggles to afford the basic necessities, including groceries, utilities, insurance, and gasoline. “When you are used to spending a couple of dollars per gallon on gasoline, and the prices nearly quadruple, then you are paying a lot more, and it stressed you out,” he said. “I actually started taking the lightrail and walking to work to save money.” With gasoline prices going from costing about $300 a month, to nearly $1,000, many people who recently bought new cars and trucks are cutting costs by driving less, getting mileage-based insurance from Metromile, and are using Repair Smith for trusted auto maintenance and reapirs to making owning the vehicle of their dreams more affordable in the high inflation economy. Several people are also asking their employers if they can continue to work at home so they do not have to quit their jobs, sales their cars, and find a job closer to home because the cost of fuel every month is significantly decreasing their actual wages and living standards. Some day the high cost of fuel and the President Biden refusing to help Americans with a stimulus program is just a ploy to force people to abandon smokestack plants, and force them to buy electric cars, which they do not want and cannot afford anyway. With about $15,000 in savings and no private retirement plan, child support and medical bills, Viggo says he contemplates every purchase, from a night out on the town, to how much he can afford to spend on food. An estimated 71 percent of Americans said they know that their paycheck is not keeping up with inflation. And approximately 35 percent of people surveyed said they expect they will not be able to make ends meet month to month because budgets suggest their spending will most likely exceed anticipated costs. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

 Roughly 65 percent of the American population is living pay check to pay check. And wealthier Americans are having a difficult time paying bills. In fact, 50 percent of workers warning more than $100,000 said they have little to nothing left in their bank accounts at the end of the month. The challenges people are facing in Biden’s economy is that it requires them to deplete their savings and their retirement accounts so they can afford to live. Many Americans are becoming financially vulnerable. Wages have not kept pace with inflation, which is now rising at the fastest annual pace in approximately 40 years. There is a presumption that as the cost of goods and services increases, income tends to rise as well, but that is not true. However, by any material standards, most Americas today are far better off than, say, their grandparents and great grandparents were in the 1950s, when the “new” economy began. At that time the ordinary American paid out nearly a fifth of its disposable personal income just to feed itself. In the 1950s, the average annual family income was $3,300 (2022 inflation adjusted $40,023.93), so $660 went towards food every year (2022inflation adjust $8,004.79). If we listen closely to what ordinary Americans are saying today to one another, we hear countless gripes about the rising inequality of incomes, about too much traffic and too little time, about computers that freeze up and mobile-phone conversations that break up. Listen longer, though, and a pattern emerges. We hear complaints about the growing inefficiency, greed, corruption, fecklessness or stupidity they encounter daily in the school, the office, the hospital, the media, the airport, the police station, and the polling booth—in almost all their day-to-day interactions with America’s imploding institutions. Emotions rise, however, when talk turns to values. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

 In private conversation and in political rhetoric, we hear deafening diatribes about the death of “family values,” “constitutional rights,” “moral values,” “traditional values,” “religious values” and personal and corporate ethics. What few seem to notice, however, is the direct linkage between the implosion of institutions and the implosion of yesterday’s value system. Values arise from many sources. However, in any society institutions reflect the values of their builders, and those serving the institution justify its existence by promoting values that do so. If our key institutions cannot survive in their present form, neither can the values and norms these institutions embody and promote. We should expect some values to break down and new ones to arise. However one may define vice or virtue, why should one expect a family system that now encompasses a wide variety of formats to inculcate or express precisely the same set of values that the one-size-fits-all nuclear-family system did when America was still an industrial society? Or the values of large multigenerational families common in pre-industrial agrarian societies? Why should we expect corporations that no longer depend on muscle to reflect the macho values of those companies or industries that do? These days, most big companies in the west want to be loved. The whole vocabulary of business has changed. Bosses who were once gruff, tough, macho, dominant and bold are now expected to be open, approachable, caring, persuasive and kind. Command and control systems of management, with their rigid hierarchies and strict rules have given way to flexibility, collaboration and teamwork. The is an egalitarian approach to management. The shift in values is related to the need for physical labour and the new importance of such intangibles as brands. What more and more companies are really selling these days, is the set of emotions, ideas and beliefs that their brands convey. One may quibble, but one has an important point. So, however, do those who see more sinister implications in the implosion of the value eyes. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

Take institutionalized sports, for example. One played by amateurs for their own amusement, and later organized more formally into clubs and leagues, it is only in recent decades that sports have become truly global institutions, a multibillion-dollar marketing industry busy selling all kinds of products—and itself largely subordinated to the needs of the television industry. Corruption in sports, of course, is hardly new. Boxers “throwing” a match and the Black Sox scandal in baseball? Ancient history. The use of drugs by Olympic athletes? Old hat. Even bribery in the megabusiness known as the Olympics has made headlines for years. However, corruption in the Little League? Among boys too young to shave? Or the chain of arrests among top athletes for drugs, rape, violence, even murder—all loudly decried by officialdom but recognized by at least one club owner as marvelous for TV ratings and financial returns? If the institution is sick, what kind of values does it propagate? Much of the seemingly bizarre behaviour around us reflect the battle raging in society today between decay and revolutionary rebirth. Throughout history, the search for extremes has been a feature of both decadence and renaissance. Today it is reflected in the application of the adjective extreme to every imaginable noun. Thus we are offered “extreme sports,” “extreme software,” “extreme fashion,” “extreme makeovers,” “extreme pumpkin carving,” and, of course, “extreme Beyonce” online, where you can learn more about her than even she knows. All this is the prelude, as it were, to “extreme celebrity culture.” Celebrities, diversity and experiments are made more and more publicly visible. Thus television programs feature more same gender couples, and alternative lifestyles. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

In print, the Paris Hilton Guess 2009 Spring/Summer ads would not have been complete without her adorable little chihuahua lounging next to her. Paris is featured stretched out on a pristine white lounge chair in a disco gold string bikini, her cute puppy seated delicately beside her. The gallery shows some of the Paris Hilton Guess 2009 Spring/Summer pictures, as well as some from her stint as the Guess girl in 2004. This was definitely one of the most stunning campaigns in history. Abercrombie & Fitch catalog and stores aimed at teenagers and young adults subtlety recreated “Sweet Valley High” with a cast of young men who looked like surfers from Orange County, California, with golden tans, sun bleached blonde hair, wash board abs, and the bodies and faces of Michelangelo’s David. This enticed young women to visit the stores and flirt with the boys, while they bought the hottest trends for their boyfriend, and also compelled young men to not only want to buy the clothes, but get their bodies beach body perfect. Since campaigns like Guess and Abercrombie & Fitch, and with the invention of social media, many guys are now feeling their pressure that young women only felt, the need to look like the model in the store window. As a result, now you see young men on social media with perfect bodies and hair, and more women wanting the bodies and faces of Paris Hilton and Beyonce, as well as their designer looks. And no matter what skin colour the people are, they all look beautiful in these fashions. Their focus is not on colour, but having the face, body, and hair of these young women and men. The Abercrombie & Fitch models all look like Brad Pitt in with various skin tones. And with the launch of 24-Hour Fitness gone wild in 2000, more men got into bodybuilding, started eating healthier and drinking Jamba Juice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

Therefore, celebrity and pop culture can be healthy for people. Instead of sitting around envious of others, it inspired men and women to work hard, get in shape, and buy the latest fashions so they could feel good about themselves. All this, of course, aroused predictably extreme reactions from outraged religious groups and other bluestockings eager to restore Victorian virtue—which, as historians pull back the sheets, turns out to have been not so virtuous after all. Pleasures of the flesh is one thing, violence another. What should one make of the hit online game called Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, in which players win points for terminating specific groups, selling contraband and barbiturates and violently assaulting individuals until they end their lives on the screen? Or of rappers “about that life,” who record for companies with charming names like Murder, Inc., or Death Row and rose to fame by singing about killing specific groups of people or abusing women? And what about the German cannibal who, on the Internet, recruited a partner supposedly willing to be eaten alive so one or both of them could share a truly extreme experience? Bon appetite! (German legal institutions found themselves unprepared for this novelty, since there was no law actually banning cannibalism.) One does not need a Ph.D. to recognize that a lot of extreme behaviour is intended to jolt parents, society in general and any remaining rubes among us. Rubes, however, are increasingly hard to find. They form a tiny, dwindling group, having been replaced by a growing middle class immunized to shock through overexposure. The French used the term epater le bourgeois—meaning “to shock the middle classes.” What is different today is that the middle class now spits on itself and laughs uproariously about it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

These examples are part of a much broader testing of all the behavioural limits imposed by industrial-era institutions. And not just by the usual bohemians and activists. In the words of BlackBook magazine, “Movements in culture point to many people living the life of a misfit. It is not just the rebels and outcasts anymore, now it is the bankers, the Wall Streets, the suits and the blue collars. Where will it all lead?” What is reflected here is the decay or breakdown not just of yesterday’s institutional infrastructure but of the dying culture, value system and social character that grew up with it. The stench in the air is the smell of decadence. However, there is also a faint scent of renewal. Revolutions always wear two faces. And today is no exception. One is the angry face of disintegration. Old things tear apart and crash. The second is the smiling face of reintegration. Things, both old and new, are plugged together in novel ways. Today change is so rapid that both processes occur almost simultaneously. Along with anti-social trash and decadence, countless positive innovations are appearing as well—pro-social adaptations to the emergent knowledge economy. Even rap groups are having second thoughts. Having become big commercial enterprises that now peddle fashions, deodorants and numerous other products, some rappers have begun changing their names and image. Or as Anonymous put it: “Now we let our diplomas show, instead of pushin’ guns and blow. It may just be a temp’rary blip but rap is on a clean-up trip. Several rap groups have recently launched innovative campaigns to offer college scholarships and to register young voters—a far cry from urging them to terminate the lives of certain people. Some innovators reach into the distant pre-industrial past for models, then revolutionize them so that any resemblance to yesterday is more cosmetic than real. Matchmaking provides a case in point. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

In village life, couples are often brought together by a local matchmaker. Under urban-industrial conditions, daily life is more anonymous and contacts are more impersonal. Lonely young people make the bar scene in search of Mr. or Ms. Right. Millions are reduced to desperately searching classified ads to find a potential life partner. Today the village matchmaker is back in electronic form, as growing millions search for mates on the Web and online matchmaking becomes more sophisticated. Instead of throwing Kevin and Stacy together based on a handful of supposedly common traits, eHarmony requires a user to answer 480 questions designed to profile twenty-none characteristic that its psychologists regard as crucial to long-term success in marriage. This very process would seem at least in theory, to help individuals clarify and prioritize their own values. In a society torn between the values of the past and uncertainties of a fast-arriving future, such self-examination can itself prove useful to the individual. Matchmakers of the future may go farther and ask clients to play specially designed Sims-like online games to identify their thinking style and unconscious behavioural biases before introducing them to other clients. And if marriage results, they may charge a bonus, or arrange the wedding for an extra fee. Online services that help people locate friends or friends of friends may develop similar games to bring like-minded people together. Still others, perhaps marketed by travel agents, may introduce an individual prescreened traveler arriving in a new city to a family of equally prescreened “welcomers” for a home-cooked dinner and an evening of bowling or chamber music. Multiple online sites such as meetup.com are already brining together, face-to-face, all sorts of people, from political activists to poker player, foreign-language students to film buffs (of course, consult trusted guardians first). #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

Meanwhile, recognizing the widespread hunger for community and social contact, companies such as Starkbucks and Borders promote themselves as places where people can come together. This is the old Mitteleuropa coffee shop of the past—only now providing a WiFi hot spot for your laptop so that you can communicate with the World while sipping your monkey mocha. All these are efforts to heal the pain of loneliness caused in good measure by the breakdown of familiar institutions that, until recent decades, provided places, contacts and a sense of community for lonely hearts. There are today some 300 million Visa credit card holders in the World, using their cards are some 8 million retail stores, gas stations, restaurants, hotels, and other business, and running up bills at $808,191,705.07 per day, 365 days a year. Visa is only one credit card firm. When a restaurant owner transmits your card number to Visa or American Express, the credit cad company’s computers credit the restaurant account with the appropriate amount, deduct an amount from its own books, and increases the amount you owe to it. This, however, is still primitive play. With what is called a “smart card,” the very act of handing it to a cashier who runs it through an electronic device from your bank account. You do not pay at the end of the month. Your bank account pays right away. It is like a check that clears instantaneously. Patented by Roland Moreno, a French inventor, the smart card had been pushed by French banks, along with the French postal and telecommunications services. The card, made by the Bull group, has a microchip embedded in it, and is claimed to be virtually fraud-proof. Some 10 billion are already in use. Eventually, as electronic record keeping and banking become more integrated, the store’s bank. As charges are deducted from the customer they will instantly be credited to the retailer’s account and start earning interest immediately—reducing the bank’s “float” to zero. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Simultaneously, instead of customer paying bills at fixed intervals—say once a month—rents, charge accounts, and similar regular expenses may be paid, bit by bit, bleeding electronically from one’s bank account in tiny droplets, as it were, on a minute-by-minute basis. Paralleling developments in the manufacturing sector, such changes promise to move the financial system further from batch processing to continuous-flow operation and toward the ultimate goal of real-time or instantaneity. Someday, with the even smarter cards to come, you may, if you so wish, deduct the price of a meal or a new car not from your bank account but from the equity in your homes—or even, in theory, from the value of jewelry of Japanese prints you may own. Coming down the pike is the “super-smart card,” otherwise called the “electronic bank-in-your-wallet.” Made experimentally by Toshiba for Visa International, the plastic card contains a microchip that allows the user to check one’s bank balances, buy and sell shared, make airline reservations, and perform a variety of other tasks. The new technologies also make it possible a dialectical return to a condition that existed before the industrial revolution—the coexistence of multiple currencies in a single economy. Money, like breakfast foods and a thousand other artifacts of daily life, is becoming more diversified. We may be approaching the age of “designer currencies.” Supposed a country had privately issued money alongside the official stuff….Consumers in many countries already have this parallel money—otherwise known as the pre-paid magnetic card, virtual card, digital currency, whose store of value runs down as it is used. However, because of fluctuations in value, many make an enormous about off of digital currency. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

  Once can imagine many highly specialized types of para-money. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is has successfully piloted a program that replaced food stamps issued to the needy with a smart card programmed with one month’s worth of benefits and personal identification number. The use runs it through the supermarket checkout terminal, which then verifies identification before deducting the purchase from the user’s remaining balance. The system is aimed at providing better accounting while reducing fraudulent use, illegal marketing, and counterfeiting. This is only a step away from what might be called a “Basics Card” for all people receiving transfer payments. It would help reduce the need for affordable housing by eliminating the housing agencies, which would save the government and taxpayers money because they would not longer have to pay for housing staff, maintenances, construction, or renovations. Instead, people would have a card that they could use in the private rental market to pay rent with, buy food, and access public transit. And with the economy experiencing such high inflation, this could also help many renters and homeowners stay in their houses. Another example of para-money is as close as the nearest school cafeteria. Thirty-five U.S. school districts are already preparing to launch a school lunch card system designed by Prepaid Card Services, Inc., of Pearl River, New York. Paid for weekly or monthly in advance by the parent, the kiddie-card is linked to a school computer, which keeps a running account of purchases at the lunch counter. (By stretching the imagination only a little, one can also picture a programmable card, for example, that would permit parents to customize diet. One child’s car might by invalid, say, for soft drinks. If a child had a milk allergy, the card would be invalid for foods containing dairy products, and so forth.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

One can also picture special cards issued to children that could be used in movie theaters or video stores but would be electronically unacceptable for X-rated films. All kinds of custom currencies are possible, including what might be called “programmable money.” In short, once a symbol of middle-class arrival, cards are becoming ubiquitous. U.S. federal agencies also use credit cards for both buying and collecting funds. In fact, the United States of America’s Government is the largest credit card user in the World. Nowhere in any of these transactions does anything remotely like “money” in the traditional sense change hands. Not a single coin or piece of paper money is exchanged. The “money” here consists of nothing more than a string of zeros and ones transmitted by wire, microwave, or satellite. All this is now so routine, and accepted with such confidence, that we hardly stop to doubt it. On the contrary, it is when we see large sums of paper money change hands that we suspect something is fishy. We assume that cash payment is intended to cheat the tax collector or that someone is in the drug racket. While foresight is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation, it can certainly be helpful. From an individual’s point of view, the object is to score as well as possible over a series of interactions with others who are also trying to present the best person they can be. People are used to thinking about zero-sum interactions. In these settings, whatever one person wins, another loses. A good example is a job interview. In order to do well, the contestant must do better than the other applicant in the interviewing process. A win for one candidate is usually a loss of another. However, most of life is not zero-sum. Generally, both sides can do well, or both can do poorly. Mutual cooperation is often possible, but not always achieved. This is why the Prisoner’s Dilemma is such a useful model for a wide variety of everyday situations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

The object in life is to score well for the individual, as if having successful and pleasant interactions with others is like getting a dollar a point. It should not matter to an individual whether one does a better in life or a little worse than other individual, so long as they can collect as many “dollars” or reward points for themselves as possible. However, these instructions do not always work. People often like to see if they are doing well or poorly as a standard of comparison. The standard, which is readily available to them, is the comparison of their score with the score of their other individual. Sooner or later, one individual defects to get ahead, or at least to see what will happen. Then the other usually defects so as not to get behind. Then the situation is likely to deteriorate with mutual recriminations. Soon the players realize that they are not doing as well as they might have, and one of them tries to restore mutual cooperation. However, the other is not sure whether this is a ploy that will lead to being exploited again as soon as cooperation begins once more. People tend to resort to the standards of comparison that they have available—and this standard is often the success of the other player relative to their own success. This standard leads to envy. And envy leads to attempts to rectify any advantage the other individuals have obtained. In this form of Prisoner’s Dilemma, rectification of the other’s advantage can only be done by defection. However, defection leads to more defection and to mutual punishment. So envy is self-destructive. Asking how well you are doing compared to how well the other individual is doing is not a good standard unless your goal is to destroy the other individual. In most situations, such a goal is impossible to achieve, or likely to lead to such costly conflict as to be very dangerous to pursue. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

When one is not trying to destroy the other individual, comparing one’s success in life to another’s simply risks the development of self-destructive envy. A better standard of comparison is how well you are doing relative to how well someone else could be doing in your shoes. Given the strategy of the other individual, are you doing as well as possible? Could someone else in your situation have doe better with this other individual? This is the proper test of successful performance. TIT FOR TAT is so consistent at eliciting mutually rewarding outcomes that it attains a higher overall success rate in life than any other strategy. Of course that is as long as one is kind to others when they are kind to you and even kind to people who do not wish you will. One never wants to return evil with evil because it creates a dangerous cycle that could lead to serious consequences, such as time in prison or not getting into Heaven. So in a non-zero-sum World, you do not have to do better than another individual is doing, you have to do well for yourself. This is especially true when you are interacting with many different individuals. Letting each of them do the same or a little better than you is fine. As long as you tend to do well yourself. There is no point in being envious of the success of another individual, since in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma of long duration the other’s success is virtually a prerequisite of your doing well for yourself. Congress provides a good example. Members of Congress can cooperate with each other without providing threats to each other’s standing at home. The main threat to a legislator is not the relative success of another legislator from another part of the country, but from someone who might mount a challenge in the home district. Thus there is not much point in begrudging a fellow legislator the success that comes from mutual cooperation. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

Likewise in business. A firm that buys from a supplier can expect that a successful relationship will earn profit for the supplier as well as the buyer. There is no point in being envious of the supplier’s profit. Any attempt to reduce it through an uncooperative practice, such as by not paying your bills on time, will only encourage the supplier to take retaliatory action. Retaliatory action could take many forms, often without being explicitly labeled as punishment. It could be less prompt deliveries, lower quality control, less forthcoming attitudes on volume discounts, or less timely news of anticipate changes in market conditions. The retaliation could make the envy quite expensive. Instead of worrying about the relative profits of the seller, the buyer should consider whether another buying strategy would be better. In his novel Being There, Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski describes a man who is born and raised in a house that he never leaves. His only contacts with humans are occasional encounters with a half-crazy maid, a crippled, senile old man confined in a room upstairs, and a television set. He watches television constantly. In middle age the hero is suddenly thrown out of the house into the city. Attempting to deal with a World which he has seen only as reproduced on television, he tries to apply what he has learned from the set. He adopts television behaviour. He tries to imitate the behaviour of the people he has seen on the screen. He speaks like them, moves as they do, imitates their facial expressions. However, because these people were only images to him, and he has never experienced real people, save for the crazies in his house, he does not know anything beyond the images. He does not know about feelings, for example. He adopts the movements of the images but cannot connect this with anything deeper inside himself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Because he has not exchanged feeling with a live human, his ability to feel has atrophied. He is a mechanical person, a humanoid. He is there physically, but like the television images, he is also not there. I would if you would be willing to try another little experiment. Please go look into a mirror. As you gaze at yourself, try to get a sense of what is lost between the mirror image of you, and you. You might ask someone to join your facing the mirror. If so, you will surely feel that other person’s presence as you stand there. However, in the reflection, this feeling will be lost. You will be left with only the image, possibly an expressive one, but only an image. What is missing from the reflection is life, or essence. Finally, place an object in front of the mirror: a hair dryer, a chair, a vacuum cleaner, a comb. What is lost? I will not say nothing is lost in the reflection, a mirror image does slightly alter the dimension and the colour of an object. However, life has not dropped out, because the object did not have any life in it. Nothing enates from it. More information is lost in the reflection of a living thing than of an object. In the living creature, there is something which can be experienced only in person, no matter how vivid the attempt at visual reproduction. The inanimate object, on the other hand, has only its form. If not perfectly, this can be reflected at least very well in the mirror image. What applies to a mirror applies even more to a photograph or a film, and still more to a television reproduction. Because television cannot coney the essence of life, it makes sense for television producers to concentrate on information in which life essence is not required for the message to be communicated. You do not need to “feel” the essence of a football player or a bomber pilot or a police attack squad to follow the action. And you surely do not need to feel the life in the product that is advertised, since the product has no life to begin with. And so football games, action dramas and product commercials, in which the image can carry the story, obtain a degree of communications efficiency that is not possible with humans, animals and plants. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

Fakir Musafar has done much to research and even to act upon the ancient fascination with the surgical and subtractive. His novel, Prince of the Pain, explores radical surgical alterations of the body and its concomitant erotic/altered states of awareness in the context of a hidden society whose members are bound and controlled by physiological, mental and spiritual domination, as well as by their own peculiar fleshly conditions…very much in the spirit of our central thesis. Gnosticism posits the concept of flesh as a prison, or binding of the soul. In subtractive fetishes, the removal of flesh becomes akin to the opening of prison doors. At the extremes of the subtractive, rumors persist of secret surgical clinics in Mexico, where operations of any kind can be had at the right price. Whether or not such underground surgery actually exists, the fantasy of it is strong and pervasive, as much so as the rumors of extreme cases of force-feeding and obesification. A regular column in the tabloid-style Fetish Times is entitled “Amateur Surgeon,” written especially for those who thrill to the ultimate asceticism of amputation and surgery. Fantasies of beautiful women driven by lust to get severe cosmetic surgeries performed, are the staple fare of these types of fetishists. While you would not ordinarily believe that this intensely neurotic fixation has too many devotees, there are enough to give rise to the publication of a magazine called Amputee Times. (Offended amputees have petitioned the publish to change the title of his magazine to something on the order of Physically Challenged.) One adult actress, Long Jean Silver, has carved quite a career out of her amputated foot. While this peculiar descent into the atavistic and Neolithic mentality might seem a phenomenon restricted to the dark underworld of fetishism, it has also invaded the World of “high” art. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

Will has become the key word, both Right and Left. In the past it was, to be sure, thought that will is necessary but secondary—that the cause came first. Nietzsche formulated the new way most provocatively when he said, “A good war makes sacred almost any cause.” The causes have no status; they are values. It is the positing that is essential. The transformation of violence from a means to at least a kind of end helps to show the difference, and the link, between Marxism and Fascism. Georges Sorel, the author of Reflections on Violence, was a man of Left who influenced Mussolini. The crucial thought goes back to Nietzsche by way of Bergson: If creativity presupposes chaos—hence  strife and overcoming—and man is now creating an order of peace in which there is no strife, is successfully rationalizing the World, the conditions for creativity, id est, humanity, will be destroyed. Therefore chaos must be willed, as against the peace and order of socialism. Marx himself recognized that man’s historical greatness and progress came from contradictions he had to struggle to overcome. If, as Marx promises, there are to be no more contradictions after the revolution, will there be man? Older revolutionaries were willing peace, prosperity, harmony and reason, id est, the last man. The newer breed wills chaos. Hardly anyone swallowed what Nietzsche prescribed whole, but the argument was infectious. It surely was impressive to Italian and German intellectuals in whose eyes the Fascist and Nazi “movement” found favor. Self-assertion, not justice or a clear view of the future, was the crucial element. Thus determination, will, commitment, caring (here is where this now silly expression got its force), concern or what have you become the new virtues. The new revolutionary charm became evident in the U.S.A. in the sixties, much to the distaste of old Marxists. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

There is also something of this current sympathy for terrorist, because “they care.” I have seen young people, and mature people too, who are good democratic liberals, lovers of peace and gentleness, struck dumb with admiration for individuals threatening or using the most terrible violence for the slightest and tawdriest reasons. They have a sneaking suspicion that they are face to face with men of real commitment, which they themselves lack. And commitment, not truth, is believed to be what counts. Trotsky’s and Mao’s correction of Marx in calling for “permanent revolution” takes account of this thirst for the act of revolution, and its appeal lies therein. The radical students of the sixties called themselves “the movement,” unaware that this was also the language used by young Nazis in the thirties and was the name of a Nazi journal, Die Bewegung. Movement takes the place of progress, which has a definite direction, a good direction, and is a force that controls men. Progress was what the old revolutions were evidence of. Movement has none of this naïve, moralistic nonsense in it. Motion rather than fixity is our condition—but motion without any content or goal not imposed on it by man’s will. Revolution in our times is a mixture of what it was earlier thought to be and what Andre Gide called a gratuitous act, represented in one of his novels by the unprovoked and unmotivated murder of a stranger on a train. Now, as we look toward the future and explore the molecular World, we see Joel Gregory manipulating molecules in virtual reality of a simulated World using video goggles, tactile glovers, and a supercomputer. The early twenty-first century should be able to do even better. Imagine, then, that today you were to take a really long nap, oversleep, and wake up decades later in a nanotechnological World. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

In the twenty-first century, even more than in the twentieth, it is easy to make things work without understanding them, but to a newcomer much of the technology seems like magic, which is dissatisfying. After a few days, you want to understand what nanotechnology is, on a gut level. Back in the late twentieth century, most teaching used dry words and simple pictures, but now—for a topic like this—it is easier to explore a simulated World. And so you decide to explore a simulation of the molecular World. Looking through the brochure, you read many tedious facts about the simulation: how accurate it is in describing sizes, forces, motions, and the like; how similar it is to working tools used by both engineering students and professionals; how one can buy one for one’s very own home, and so forth. It explains how one can tour the human body, see state-of-the-art nanotechnology in actions, climb a bacterium, etcetera. For starters, one decides to take an introductory tour: simulations of real twentieth-century objects alongside quaint twentieth-century concepts of nanotechnology. After paying a small fee and memorizing a few key phrases (any variation of “Get me out of here!” will do the most important job), you pull on a powersuit, pocket a Talking Tourguide, step into the simulation chamber, and strap the video goggles over your eyes. Looking through the goggles, you seem to be in a room with a table you know is not really there and walls that seem too far away to fit in the simulation chamber. However, trickery with a treadmill floor makes the walk to the walls seem far enough, and when you walk back and thump the table, it feels solid because the powersuit stops your hand sharply at just the right place. You can even feel the texture of the carvings on the table leg, because the suit’s gloves press against your fingertips in the right pattern as you move. It is also like visiting the Winchester Mystery House. However, the simulation is not perfect, but it is easy to ignore the defect. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

On the table is (or seems to be) an old 1990s silicon computer chip. When you pick it up, as the beginners’ instructions suggest, it looks like it looks like the circle in the center of the spider web pattern of the Winchester Mystery House window. Then you say, “Shrink me!” and the World seems to expand. You feel as though you are falling toward the chip’s surface, shrinking rapidly. In a moment, it loos roughly like the zig zag stair case in the Winchester Mystery House, with your thumb still holding it. The World grows blurrier, then everything seems to go wrong as you approach the molecular level. First, your vision blurs to uselessness—there is light, but it becomes a featureless fog. You skin is ticked by small impacts, then battered by what feel like hard-thrown marbles. Your arms and legs feel as though they are caught in turbulence, pulling to and fro, harder and harder. The ground hits your feet, you stumble and stick to the ground like a fly on flypaper, battered so hard that it almost hurts. You asked for realism, and only the built-in safety limits in the suit keep the simulated thermal motions of air molecules and of your own arms from beating you senseless. “Stop!” gives you a rest from the suit’s yanking and thumping as you walk along the staircase, and “Standard settings!” makes the World around you become more reasonable as you move along the corridors of this mystery. The simulation changes, introducing the standard cheats. Your simulated eyes are now smaller than a light wave, making focus impossible along the uneven floor as surreal doors that open to nowhere, open to a wall, stairs that go nowhere, and hidden doors, but the goggles snap your vision into sharpness and show the atoms around you as small spheres. (Real nanomachines are as blind as you were a moment ago, and cannot cheat.) Once you get to the Y shaped staircase, you are on the surface of the 1990s computer chip, between a cell and two blocky nanocomputers. Your simulated body is 50 nanometers tall, about 1/40,000,000 your real size, and the smaller nanocomputer is twice your height. At that size, you can “see” atoms and molecules, in the most Mrs. Winchester’s favorite window. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

The simulation keeps bombarding you with air molecules, but the standard settings leave out the sensation of being pelted with marbles. A moment ago you were stuck tight to the ground by molecular stickiness, but the standard settings give your muscles the effective strength of steel—at least in simulation—by making everything around you much softer and weaker. The tourgide says that only unreal features of the simulation have to do with you—not just your ability to see and to ignore thermal shaking and bombardment, but also your sheer existence at a size too small for anything so complex as a human being. It also explains why you can see things more, something about slowing down everything around you by a factor of 10 for every factor of 10 enlargement, and by another factor to allow for your being made stronger and hence faster. And so, with your greater strength and some adjustments to make your arms, legs, and torso less sticky, you can stand, see, feel and take stock of the situation from the fourth-floor balcony. The Winchester Mystery House represents America. The American lives in a land of wonders, everything around one is in constant movement, and every movement seems as advance. Consequently, in one’s mind the idea of newness is closely linked with that of improvement. Nowhere does one see any limit placed by nature to human endeavor; in one’s eyes something that does not exist is just something that has not been tried, as with Mrs. Winchester’s architectural style. This feature of the American ethos is plain to everyone who has studied American culture, although there are wide variations of the explanation of it. Some attribute it to the immigrant nature of the population (represent by the spirits in the Winchester Mystery House Mrs. Winchester is trying to appease with the construction of her estate); some to the frontier mentality; some to the abundant nature resources of a singularly blessed land and the unlimited opportunities of a new continent; some to the unprecedented political and religious freedom afforded the average person; some to all of these factors and more. It is enough to say here that the American distrust of constraints—one might even say the American skepticism toward culture itself—offered encouragement to radical and thoughtless technological intrusion. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

Cresleigh Homes

Heaven is in your eyes. On paper, #Havenwood Model 1 is the smallest home in the community – but you’d never guess from this photo! Our homes are designed for maximum livability, and the 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom home lets the whole family spread out.

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