Tonight, Zan Lynx and I went to BLUG. The usual crew showed up, and we got to learn about the much debated rival language known as Python. There were indeed many perl jokes and jabs, all in good fun and hilarity.

Afterward, Jaeger, bouncing, Zan Lynx, and myself stood around talking with each other and a couple other attendees, and later continued in the tradition of journeying to our favored Buchanan's Coffee Pub on The Hill. (So on the one in a billion chance that any of the other 6 people who were also in the place at the time are readers of this page, yes, the 4 computer geeks sitting at the table jabbering about processors, operating systems, and databases were us.)

Sit back and watch the fun.

[Bitscape surfs, reads.]

Ok, now this is just pathetic. Turns my stomach. With all the Free Dmitry headlines going around (which are needed), this one doesn't even hit the radar until k5 picks it up after the fact. Yet more proof that our government is corrupt as hell. [sigh] What else is new?

Of course, it really hits when you start reading the k5 comments by people who knew him on irc, and look at the history of articles he's posted. It's just insane that a so-called government for the people would fuck somebody over like that. I mean, we've heard about similar shit happening a million times before in a million different variations, but still... I'm not numb yet. Not completely. Everytime I think I've reached a new pinnacle of cynicism, something even more outrageous comes along to prove to me that no matter how awful I believe the institutions in power to be, they can and do get even more dispicable.

Fuck the FBI. Fuck the courts. Fuck congress. Fuck the corporate big wigs. Fuck Wall Street. Fuck the media mergers. Fuck this cancer that threatens to destroy every semblence of vitality and prosperous life on the planet.

...

For the past few evenings, I've been reading a book entitled The Post-Corporate World, by David C. Korten. It's divided into four parts. So far, I've read through the first and some of the second part. It is a book, which, if I may use the words from the Prologue, is "For those of us who beleive there is more to life than making money and shopping in megamalls for products we didn't know we needed until we saw them advertised on television".

Part 1, "The Deadly Tale", is simultaniously fascinating due its informative nature, and depressing as hell in a Neo-waking-up sort of way. It describes the history of our modern mindset, the way the thinking of the science which began during the Age of Reason (Newton, Galileo, etc), has shaped a view of the universe which is cold and mechanical, governed by laws of nature which are immutable. While this mode of thinking has brought about many technological advances, it ultimately leaves people feeling cold, emtpy, meaningless, and powerless in the grander scheme of things.

The history of our economy, currency, and the origins of the corporation are also examined (many many sources were referenced, some of which I think I'd like to look into a bit more), leading to what could lightly be described as a bleak view. The paragraph ending the first chapter, taken at face value, sounds Marxist. A few years ago, upon reading this, I would have concluded that this guy was off his rocker along with all the other liberal kooks. But now, in light of the numerous recent abuses of power we have witnessed in the online world? Somehow, the "big corps should be able to do whatever they want in a so-called 'free market'" argument loses its credibility.

The song of money calls us to experience life through the pursuit of material diversions -- all so real, so attractive, so immediate. Why not give it a try? Life will always be there.

But to follow money's song we must make money our measure of value and progress. Once we yield to its temptation, its imperatives become our imperatives. We find ourselves fulfilling the prophesy of death. But the Siren soothes our fears: "My way is natural, right, inevitable. The pain will soon be over -- and from here there is no return."

We yearn to believe the promises, even to give ourselves completely to her service, in an effort to banish from awareness the glimmerings of a terrible truth: the Siren who hides her true nature behind a false cloak of democracy and market freedom has laid claim to our soul and is feeding on our flesh. Her name is capitalism.

At face value, initially, it appears he is arguming for Marxism. (Not necessarily a bad thing, depending on who you ask.) Further reading makes it clear that a rising up of the proletariat is not what he's aiming for (Exactly what he is aiming for, aside from stimulating thought and discussion for its own sake, I shall have to progress further to find out).

In fact, the book is very pro-free market. Nearly an entire chapter is spend distinguishing between "capitalism" and "free markets". Capitalism is defined as a system in which the vast majority of the wealth and means to produce it is owned by a very few elite. In fact, capitalism as described here bears more in common with planned economies that true free markets. All the cards are held by 0.1% of the population, who dispense just enough currency to the workers to live day to day, but never enough to break out of the cycle or become independent. This is accomplished through price fixing, wage fixing, and highly concentrated control of the world's currency through many mergers and acquisitions. (Sound familiar?)

To define true free markets, he uses criteria established in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations as a basis, and explores how each major factor present in Smith's free markets is the exact opposite of what modern megacorps are aiming for, even though they talk the rhetoric of "free trade" in attempts to get their measures enacted. I don't really feel like typing all night to get it here. I'll just say that chapter 2 is full of examples to illistruate the point.

More deeply disturbing is the exploration of many of the foundations of the modern economy itself. Going back to the origins of the gold standard.

When viewed objectively, it seems illogical that a country becomes prosperous and powerful in proportion to the quantities of particular metals it has locked away in great vaults. Yet Spain's power and prosperity at the time were well known and they seemed to be the result of the vast flow of precious metals pouring into its coffers from its American colonies.

Uh huh. And wearing overly hot fabric in the middle of summer and strangulation devices around one's neck makes one a smarter and more competent "business man". I can see the parallels.

Money has such obvious benefits over barter for enabling trade that the expansion of its use was entirely natural. Yet the greater the extent to which human transations are mediated by money, the greater the power of those who create and allocate those priviliged numbers. This fact was not lost on the empire builders who colonized the lands of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Finding it difficult to control and extract the economic surplus from people whose economic relations were defined by tribal kinship ties rather than by money, the colorizers quite consciously set about creating dependence on money.

Their method was to impose taxes that could be paid only with money that they issued and controlled. That simple requirement forced the colonized to sell their labor and produce to the colonizers on whatever terms the colonizers chose to set. The village heads had to collect the taxes, thus undermining their legitimacy. The men of the village had to seek cash incom on the estates of the colonizers, breaking down family and community ties, substituting market relations for affective ties, and increasing the dependence on those who controlled the creation and allocation of money.

[Bitscape shakes head.]

The book goes on to make the next obvious leap: That in our modern times, we have all been "colonized". Conditioned to depend on currency for virtually every step taken in life. Currency created, controlled, and manipulated at whim by a select few who have done nothing to add to the tangible wealth of the world. (This indictment includes all those who spend their entire day on Wall Street, trading in stock which essentially amounts to idle gambling, except for the fact that its effects are far-reaching on the lives of millions of people. Ultimately, these effects leave the people at the bottom of the pyramid scheme on the short end of the stick. If Wall Street does happen to lose, taxpayer money bails them out. (He goes into a detailed explanation using the Asian currency crisis of 97/98 as an example.)) The end effect is to allow those who have themselves added nothing to the world's prosperity to lay claim (through currency) to the wealth of those who have.

Blah blah blah. Like a said, a few years ago, I would have been much more skeptical. But witnessing day to day over the past few years the systematic pattern of "huge corporations fuck the free Internet in every way they can", with more recent examples of people actually being hauled in by police and jailed simply for offending some company or another, and one starts to believe.

The book goes on to talk about many things (of which I hadn't planned to spend nearly as much time talking about as I have so far), including the truth behind the well-known fact that most startup businesses fail. They fail not necessarily because of incompetence or lack of customer interest, but because they are setup to fail.

In most cases, a business is started through a loan from a bank (with some exceptions, of course). The volume of currency in circulation is controlled by banks + government. Banks loan out a certain amount of total money during a given period of time, and then expect it all to be paid back, plus interest. Given that the amount of new currency put into circulation is largely controlled by governement (in bed with the banks), one can fairly easily see that if not enough new currency is issued to pay off all the combined parties' interest, somebody is going to take a hard fall. Whoever that somebody is, they end up losing the business, and possibly whatever they put up as collateral. (Depending on how good their lawyers and accountants are.)

Hmmm... I babble late into the night. I wonder if any of it makes any sense to any of the few people who actually read this. Eeek, this is terrible. A little more babbling.

Believe it or not, the whole book does not focus on a discussion of economics, corporations, and all that crap. The second part presents a fascinating romp through the pre-historical emergence of this solar system, the sun, earth, and life on this planet. The theory of evolution, from the big bang on.

It proceeds from the assumption that life on this world came into being the way mainstream science believes that it did -- evolving from single celled organisms into more complex patterns, plants, animals, dinosaurs, and eventually modern humanity. (Narrated in a beautiful chapter of prose, the reading of which I would rank, if I may copy the words of Ellie Arroway, as "A vision of the Universe that tells us undeniably how tiny, and insignificant, and how rare and precious we all are. A vision that tells us we belong to something that is greater than ourselves. That we are not -- that none of us -- are alone.")

Damn. Would that I could write dialog like that. Heh.

Anyway, the book makes the point that in order for life to have evolved in such a manner, it is virtually inconceivable that it could have happened without some greater force than our laws physics have been able to define. Simple laws such as gravety, magnetism, and conservation of momentum just don't do it (Or at least the odds are so astronomical as to make it very hard to conceive). That in order for life to have evolved in such a manner, something in the matter itself must have wanted to organise, driven by a force unknown and incomprehensible to the physics we know.

The book (yes, believe it or not, this is still the same book I was talking about a few paragraphs above) subtley and effectively makes the argument that if one accepts science's explanation for the universe, one must also believe that either (a) we are all just mere atoms and molecules, following the pre-destined laws of physics, in which case consciousness and self awareness, and choice are a contradiction, or (b) all matter in some way bears the stamp of life (or the potential thereof), and so is also governed by these forces which science cannot comprehend. The magic of life.

Quite thought provoking, and quite inspiring, really. I will be very interested to see how he ties all of this together in the coming sections. There's obviously much more to it than what I've outlined here, but I'm tired. If any idiots who read this want to here more, go get the damn book for yourself. :)

I was planning on reading another chapter after this rambling before bed, but at this point, I think that would be inadvisable. Goodnight, from he who was much more long-winded that he planned to be on this post-BLUG ramble.