The class war has begun

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So says Frank Rich in this NY Magazine piece. A little long (by web standards) but worth a read. To wet your whistle:

“Elections are supposed to resolve conflicts in a great democracy, but our next one will not. The elites will face off against the elites to a standoff, and the issues animating the class war in both parties won’t even be on the table. The structural crises in our economy, our government, and our culture defy any of the glib solutions proposed by current Democrats or Republicans; the quixotic third-party movements being hatched by well-heeled do-gooders are vanity productions. The two powerful forces that extricated America from the Great Depression—the courageous leadership and reformist zeal of Roosevelt, the mobilization for World War II—are not on offer this time. Our class war will rage on without winners indefinitely, with all sides stewing in their own juices, until—when? No one knows. The reckoning with capitalism’s failures over the past three decades, both in America and the globe beyond, may well be on hold until the top one percent becomes persuaded that its own economic fate is tied to the other 99 percent’s. Which is to say things may have to get worse before they get better.”

The Class War Has Begun – And the very classlessness of our society makes the conflict more volatile, not less.

Scott Adams: The Evolve Button

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“The most objective explanation of our problem is that the economy is changing faster than humans can adapt. We have more high-end jobs and fewer unskilled opportunities. That’s not anyone’s fault. And obviously we have a smattering of rich crooks and rich people taking advantage of the system. That has to be addressed, but it’s not the underlying problem.”

“Some say the government is the problem. But I think it is more accurate to say the government is failing to offer a solution. And that’s because the government has also evolved more slowly than the world in general. It’s an anchor on the economy. What we need is a form of government that is more nimble, and designed from scratch to support the economy.”

“*And for that we need a constitutional convention*. The genius of our constitution is that it has a big red button labeled “evolve.” We just need to push it.”

Scott Adams: You are what you learn

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“It’s easy to feel trapped in your own life. Circumstances can sometimes feel as if they form a jail around you. But there’s almost nothing you can’t learn your way out of. If you don’t like who you are, you have the option of learning until you become someone else. Life is like a jail with an unlocked, heavy door. You’re free the minute you realize the door will open if you simply lean into it.”

Are jobs obsolete?

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That’s the bold question posed by Douglas Rushkoff. I know this is heresy for many, but as Kevin Kelly might suggest, this is “what technology wants.” A few snippets from the CNN op-ed:

I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks — or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?

We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.

Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff — it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do — the value we create — is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.

This sort of work isn’t so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations.

I plan to eat right, exercise and live as long as I can because I can’t wait to see how this comes out.

Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work

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I knew of Marshall McLuhan as the cultural icon of the 60s. Was familiar with a few of the more popular quotes. But like the subtitle says, I knew nothing of his work. And I probably wouldn’t have read this biography had it been written by anyone else. I’ve read several of Douglas Coupland’s novels and enjoy his style. Some insight into what we are experiencing now can be found in this slightly depressing story of a brilliant man, waaay ahead of his time. Continue reading →

Life in the Meta City

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I found the following in a brief Q&A with William Gibson (Scientific American):

“The Internet, which I think of as a sort of meta-city, has made it possible for people who don’t live in cities to master areas of expertise that previously required residence in a city, but I think it’s still a faith in concentrated choice that drives migration to cities.”

I paid $6 for the PDF of Gibson’s article (September issue). A few nuggets:

“Cities afforded more choices than small towns, and constantly, by increasing the number and randomization of potential human and cultural contacts. Cities were vast, multilayered engines of choice, peopled primarily with strangers.”

“Cities, to survive, must be capable of extended fugues of retrofitting.”

“Relative ruin, relative desertion, is a common stage of complex and necessary urban growth. Successful (which is to say, ongoing) cities are built up in a lacquering of countless layers: of lives, of choices encountered and made.”

If I wore a younger man’s clothes, I think a city would be the place for me.

“Google+ is a bank”

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Dave Winer believes Google+ wants to “move money around the same way Amazon does. They need your real name because it’s a business.”

“Google-Plus is their integrated communication system. Over time, it’s going to be at the core of everything they do, from auctions, to paying for things with Android phones, to their groupon and yelp clones. They’re going everywhere, and this is the system that will tie it all together. So, at the outset, of course they need real identities. That Google-Plus account you’re playing with today is going to be your bank account next year.”