OK. But I do not see a reduction in the consumption and waste producing qualities of the industrial age, nor do I see any reason to assume they will come. I see more and more signs that the planet and everything on it is seen as resource, interchangeable part and as 'really' tweakable information. The shift to information thinking by the technocrats has only enhanced this approach to problem solving. At the end of the discrete Industrial Age we had ever increasing dispensing of pharmaceuticals as the primary solution to anyone's problem in society. More and more people are medicated and seen as sick. Very little consideration was made of the possibility that society needed changes. The focus was on individuals who were pathologized. I can see benefits from that paradigm, but also enormous philosophical and real world problems that result from it. We have cut off a feedback loop. The profit motive, rather than any general consensus has been a major factor in this. My concern is that genetic technologies will continue this paradigm - which overlaps the industrial age and the information age - where instead of suiting society to us we suit us to society, precisely the same kind of thinking we were trained to think was so bad about the USSR. Nature is also being seen as replaceable and improvable in similar ways, now potentially in a complete and final way. I see reason to be concerned that it will not be humans who 'enjoy' the new age. My point is that I see no reason to share your optimism that it will fade away away like the communists thought the state would. Nor that the corporations will either. This seems the same kind of optimism the communists had. That is precisely what we are not - and from on high manipulated into not being - and the new tools give us ways of not being patient with us. We have not been patient with human emotional problems and are extremely quick to pathologize the individual and fix the problem via pharmacology, rather than seeing if these individuals are suffering public health issues related to society and if the problems are not 'in' the individuals. Genetic modification offers a way out that is radically more effective. Perhaps these are not the options. This has not happened. And the corporations are surpassing the states in power and influence and they are quite feudalistic. If you think they do not view us as serfs, I think you are missing something. I am not the one who is so optimistic, and optimism based on knowing what will happen. I do not accept the 'we' in the above. I do not think anything remotely to do with consensus is involved in the changes. I see a lot of top down control, manipulation and assumption in all this. I can't remember the discussion, as one example amongst many, that we would shift soybean production in the US to primarily genetically modified soybeans. Another example, I remember when wars had to be voted in by Congress - even if this was rubber stamping and could be manipulated. A large part of the motivation for this has be to isolate people, to create one herd. Some cells have vastly more power than other cells. These cells have a very poor understanding of what makes the body healthy. this is confused, oversimplified and just plain wrong in so many ways, it is hard to know where to start. The native americans, who had been radically devastated by European diseases - in number that the latest research are indicating was much more radical than previously known - were then approached genocidally by the newcomers. Certainly some NAs were attracted to portions of the newcomers technology. I think they saw these as enhancing their abilities IN THEIR OWN CULTURES. Some Europeans jumped over to the NAs, completely. We also are talking about members of societies that were in many cases half destroyed or worse by plague, conquest, relocation - not the same issue for NAs as it would be for Europeans - and direct genocide. I also have a problem with that last bit that I assume was meant a bit tongue and cheek and a bit provocative. Shall we make similar quips about the Holocaust or those who died in 9/11. The FBI agent who is pleased he can now use the Patriot Act and is happy to have traded in those lives? Further the Europeans were powerfully affected by NAs notions of the individual - let alone the democratic structure of some of the Eastern tribes that influenced the founders. A good case can be made for the NA notions of self, freedom and inherent democracy in the tribes was a paradigm that strongly affected americans and democracy and then the world via the budding little nation. Not that they go shit in acknowledgement for this until recently. the few who have the bulk of the power have a nasty history of not learning from what it encounters that is resistant to changes. This inablitity to learn from other cultures - whether formally distincty like the NAs or more individual like myself and others - under their jurisdiction is one of the reasons the great 'success' we have needed to be medicated so heavily and has so many stress related diseases. It seems like your primary message is It will be good. It is coming. Any problems are temporary. This seems speculative in the extreme in points 1 and 3. 2 is contributed to by people making it seem inevitable and good and that anyone who has a problem with it does not understand it as well as those who assume it will be good and is inevitable.
Business should be separated in its realtionship to Accounting and other specialized fields. I'm taking the CPA and let me tell you its just as hard as the MCAT and the LSAT. The MBA, CFA distinction is also a difficult one to attain. I wouldn't cross off business as a secondary last ditch effort to get "good at something". Some people have a passion for it.
Fragle, I think you delude yourself with this new informational paradigm and shift. It's not a revolution, it will never be, 1990s with this kind of enthusiasm are long time over. "New" informational era with all its outsoursing and employing third worlder to fulfill whims of the oversaturated NYC bitches is impossible without cheap transportation, a.k.a. cheap energy and here is where mankind hits the thermodynamic wall, no extended supply of information will overcome in the foreseeable future. Informational age offers nothing that industrial age did not offer before. It just extends and increase complexity, beyond human capacity to handle, of the supply chains etc.. That's not a revolution. Taylorism reached its new heights, but it's nothing new. Chosen (i.e. employed) humans can be exploited more efficiently around the globe, that's about it. The point? To create billion strong army of un(under)employed pet shit scoopers and slum dwellers? Division of labor, destruction of the traditional societies, rise of the wage earner class, fusion of banking/investors and science fueled industrial revolution, it continues to fuel "postindustrial" sham. Both will hit thermodynamic wall sooner or later, if ecological wall will not be hit first. And lastly, "information" age make people more stupid, humans are more and more like search engines. Search engines can't create new information. Human Search engines with fragmented knowledge/mind and no clear understanding of just about anything.
