Change Observer just posted the first part of a conversation between me and Kurt Andersen, on the economy and just how big an opportunity this crisis might be affording us.
Andersen is smart – really smart – though a bit more sanguine about all that’s going on around us than I am. I think that might be, in part, because he has done so very well at everything he has tried. Maybe that’s a law of the universe, and one I should just follow (rather than letting my misgivings about “success” impede my own path toward it). But that’s a discussion for another day.
Some excerpts:
Andersen: I tend to agree with Doug’s major premises, such as the unsustainability of an economy dominated by financial speculators instead of “value creators,” and the fact that the particulars of our system are the result of human choices rather than immutable “conditions of nature.” And I see the gobsmacking crash and resulting flux as a rare limited-time-only opportunity to significantly update and reform the system and the habits of mind that are its cause and effect. Thus we now have a chance to remake our medical and energy and educational and urban planning systems along vastly more sensible lines. But for all my hopefulness about the possibilities of change — and my desire in some ways for radical reform — as a practical matter I do take as a given our basic market-driven political economy. The decline of manufacturing and the hypertrophied financial and marketing sectors notwithstanding, Doug’s assertion that “very few American businesses actually [do] anything, anymore” seems extreme to me.
Rushkoff: The reason I’m not as forgiving as Kurt, I suppose, is that I don’t see these cycles as weather or earthquakes. I see them as entirely predictable manifestations of the system we’ve adopted. People think they need cars because “how else would I get to work?” without understanding that they only need a car to get to work because the suburbs were zoned, in part, to promote car ownership (or, in most cases, promote real estate speculation). So we look at Europeans and think how lovely it is they get to walk home for lunch, and assume something about America’s geography made this impossible. Does this mean we can get rid of the car suburbs? Probably not. At least not in the short term.
And neither do we just retire the Fed and crash the banks. We can’t go back to the Middle Ages, and we don’t want to. What we can do is promote the development of complementary economic mechanisms. New ways (and old ways) of doing commerce.
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I haven’t been posting a lot of the interviews and reviews of my latest activity – mostly for lack of time. Janine and I have managed to get most of them up in the appropriate sections on this site. But I want to start sharing some of the interesting ones – both positive and negative.
While some reviewers from the Financial Times to Facebook get stuck on the fact that person still living in a first world nation (me) could have the audacity to criticize the process through which colonialism and, later, corporatism exploited people and the planet (if not we, then who?), writers in those regions are much more sympathetic.
Here’s a piece from a business publication, Gulf News, inspired at first by the Colbert appearance – but later by MadMen.
This guy gets it – and he’s writing for a business publication, the Gulf News.
Gulf News
“So after all the bailouts and the restructuring plans, we will be asked to go out there and buy new stuff again – just as we are being asked now to buy old stuff on discount. And so the idea that politicians and business owners are actually able to call on the public to “go out there and support the economy” is a very strange notion.
This is because the economy’s role, in addition to a number of things, is to essentially reflect the interests and preferences of the general public in commerce and trade on one hand and the corresponding entrepreneurial capacity to recognise and service those interests and preferences i.e. demand and supply.”
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Just posted this on FastCompany’s new “ethonomics” blog.
However comforting it might be to blame Southern California’s movie industry for unleashing Governor Terminator on the state’s economy, the real seeds of the current crisis were sewn further north, in the seemingly prosperous corporate parks of Silicon Valley. In fact, the dotcom boom and subsequent, inevitable bust are the real causes of our economic malaise. For while Californians were hit first, hardest and most directly by the rise of dotcom-style capitalism, the rest of us are soon to follow.
Put simply, California cannot afford to pay its bills because its tax base contracted at the same time as its investments tanked. Like any of us contending with the double-whammy of lower pay and shrinking portfolios, the state is getting slammed on both income and savings at the same time. Unable to secure credit, the state will instead be forced pay its bills to citizens and local governments with IOUs.
While the pundits point to real estate speculation and bank insolvencies as the chief cause of California–and the nation’s–financial distress, these are both direct results of the late 90’s explosion of computer innovation and Internet proliferation. That’s right: The Internet crashed the economy.
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The Guardian just devoted a whole lot of space to an interview with me about Life Inc, and how the sensibility of the book came from a tech-head like me.
Rushkoff says he started working on the book more than four years ago (although getting mugged brought the project into sharper focus). Back then, friends and acquaintances scoffed at his predictions that the housing bubble was going to hurt a lot further down the line. “It’s a little sad,” he says. “I wrote the book in the future tense, and then when I was editing I had to put it in the present, and then – in the last draft – I had to put it in the past.”
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Posted on 16 June '09 by Douglas, under articles. 1 Comment.
I’ve been writing some Life Inc-related pieces for Daily Beast this week.
Here’s one on Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, or How Google Trained Your Brain
And here’s another on Obama’s CyberDefense Czar, and the failure of Command and Control on a distributed battlefield.
I just published this essay on Arthur:
I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why President Obama’s approach to the economic crisis upsets me so much, so regularly, and I think I figured it out.
His impulse—perhaps as someone with more faith in the power of centralized, top-down decision-making than I have—is to fix our economic problems by supporting existing institutions. In the president’s view, the best approach now is to pump some necessary short-term assets into flagging institutions to help them make it through the rough patches in the economic road, and then get them to pay it back to the government once times are better. That’s the approach he’s taken to the banks, the automotive industry, and even the insurance industry.
What the Obama Administration doesn’t seem to understand is that the institutions they are attempting to prop up are the very ones whose solvency depends on the continuing extraction of wealth and value from the real people and places making up America.
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Great piece about my idea for CraigBucks, written by the brilliant sci-fi thinker Annalee Newitz:
The Future of Money: DIY Currencies
Futurist Douglas Rushkoff, famous for correctly predicting the rise of social media, is trying to convince Craigslist’s Craig Newmark to create “craigbucks.” He thinks it’s the obvious next step in the evolution of money. “People could buy and sell things exclusively on Craigslist using craigbucks,” Rushkoff enthuses. “Sure they’ll want to keep their Visas and their MasterCards, but they’ll want a specialized, alternative form of cash too.”
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Posted on 15 April '09 by Douglas, under articles, economics. 7 Comments.
My cover story for H+ magazine is right
here.
Hacking the economy is easier than it looks.
The first step, of course, is to remember that the economy itself is just a model. It’s a way of understanding the world as a series of transactions made by rational, self-interested beings working to maximize value for themselves. That’s supposedly the given.
Of course, it isn’t even true. We don’t live in an economy. Never did. If we were really all playing some sort of poker game for chips — and making all the right decisions —— then our world might behave like an economy. But seeing as how we’re really more concerned with our moment-to-moment experience, getting laid, or finding a private place to poop, the last thing on our minds is retention of value over time.
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