070605

 

Ruidoso to Socorro, NM

Wednesday July 6, 2005

                     I don't know what time it is because I left my watch in my room. Ha, like I have a room in this house. The room I sleep in. It's morning. I just came over and made me a bowl of Maruchan Instant Lunch that Shane gave me yesterday. The backpack that Shane gave me wasn't nearly big enough for me. I told Raymond that and he said, "Oh, I have a big backpack." He showed me this big one he had that he used in school. It's huge. I was all excited thinking I got a new backpack. Then I realized that I couldn't attach that big rainbow poncho my mom gave me to it. But, this morning I saw lying on this chair that he has here a badass Gilligan hat. It's size small, but it fits me good. I just fell in love with it. It even still has the pricetag on it. It's like brand new. It's only $9.99, so when he wakes up I'm going to tell him, "Hey man, I'll give you a five dollar bill and a trade-in hat if I can have it." Raymond is really nice to me. I hope he lets me have it. It's a cool hat. It would be a cool part of my uniform.

                     Page 232. Tomorrow's Wealth.

TOMORROW'S WEALTH

                     In earlier pages we sketched elements of this new wealth creation system. It is now possible to put all the pieces together into a single coherent frame. Doing so makes clear how revolutionary this new way of making wealth really is—and how starkly different it is from the ways wealth was produced in the past.

                     1. The new accelerated system for wealth-creation is increasingly dependent on the exchange of data, information, and knowledge. It is "super-symbolic." No knowledge exchanged, no new wealth created.

                     2. The new system goes beyond mass production to flexible, customized, or "de-massified" production. Because of the new information technologies, it is able to turn out short runs of highly varied, even customized products at costs approaching those of mass production.

                     3. Conventional factors of production—land, labor, raw materials, and capital—become less important as symbolic knowledge is substituted for them.

                     4. Instead of metal or paper money, electronic information becomes the true medium of exchange. Capital becomes extremely fluid, so that huge pools of it can be assembled and dispersed overnight. Despite today's huge concentrations, the number of sources of capital multiply.

                     5. Goods and services are modularized and configured into systems, which require a multiplication and constant revision of standards. This leads to wars for control of the information on which standards are based.

                     6. Slow-moving bureaucracies are replaced by small (demassified) work units, temporary or "ad-hocratic" teams, increasingly complex business alliances and consortia. Hierarchy is flattened or eliminated to speed decision-making. The bureaucratic organization of knowledge is replaced by free-flow information systems.

                     7. The number and variety of organizational units multiply. The more such units, the more transactions among them, and the more information must be generated and communicated.

                     8. Workers become less and less interchangeable. Industrial workers owned few of the tools of production. Today the most powerful wealth-amplifying tools are the symbols in side workers' heads. Workers, therefore, own a critical, often irreplaceable, share of the "means of production."

                     9. The new hero is no longer a blue-collar worker, a financier, or a manager, but the innovator (whether inside or outside a large organization) who combines imaginative knowledge with action.

                     10. Wealth creation is increasingly recognized to be a circular process, with wastes recycled into inputs for the next cycle of production. This method presupposes computerized moni toring and ever-deeper levels of scientific and environmental knowledge.

                     11. Producer and consumer, divorced by the industrial revolution, are reunited in the cycle of wealth creation, with the customer contributing not just money but market and design information vital for the production process. Buyer and supplier share data, information, and knowledge. Someday, customers may also push buttons that activate remote production processes. Consumer and producer fuse into a "prosumer."

                     12. The new wealth creation system is both local and global. Powerful microtechnologies make it possible to do locally what previously could be done economically only on a national scale. Simultaneously, many functions spill over national boundaries, integrating activities in many nations into a single productive effort.

                     These twelve elements of the accelerative economy are interrelated, and mutually reinforce the role of data, information, and knowledge throughout the economy. They define the revolutionary new system of high-tech wealth creation. As pieces of this system come together, they undermine power structures designed to support the wealth-making system of the industrial age.
                     The new system of wealth creation as summarized here helps explain the tremendous upheavals now spreading across the planet—premonitory shudders that herald a collision of wealth creation systems on a scale never before seen.

                     Chapter 20, The Decisive Decades. That whole first section is damn good.

THE DECISIVE DECADES

                     In Bluefield, West Virginia, on November 9, 1989, a schoolteacher wept. All across the world, millions shared her moment of joy. Glued to their television screens, they saw ilic Berlin Wall brought down. For an entire generation, East (Germans had been imprisoned, maimed, or shot for trying to get past that twenty-eight-mile wall. Now they were pouring through it into West Germany, eyes gleaming, faces registering everything from exhilaration to culture shock. Soon the hammers went (o work. And today remnants of the wall that once bisected Berlin, and indeed all of Germany, are souvenirs of stone and cement gathering dust on countless mantelpieces.
                     Because it concretized, one might say, the end of Soviet-imposed totalitarianism throughout Central and Eastern Europe, (he downfall of the wall drew an elated response in the West. Shortsighted intellectuals and politicians joined in an ode to joy that would have done Beethoven proud. With Marxism on the ropes, they chorused, the future of democracy was now assured. We had reached the very end of ideology itself.
                     Today Eastern Europe seethes with instability. Poland faces total economic breakdown. Romanian crowds clash in the streets. And Yugoslavia's president warns that "extremist right parties" and "revanchist forces" could ignite "civil war and the possibility of foreign armed intervention." Anti-Semitism and ancient ethnic hatreds run rampant. Post-war borders are called into question. The collapse of Soviet power over Eastern Europe, far from assuring democracy, has opened a combustive vacuum into which fools and firebrands seem ready to rush. Western Europe's drive toward integration has been thrown into confusion.
                     Looming over this vast continental spectacle are threats of a Soviet split-up that could easily trigger a generation of wars, raising anew nuclear dangers that were supposed to have been relaxed.
                     Ironically, even as millions who have never had it grope for freedom, the established democracies in North America, Western Europe, and Japan themselves face an expected internal crisis. Democracy is entering its decisive decades. For we are at the end of the age of mass democracy—and that is the only kind the industrial world has ever known.

     11:24am  Oh yeah, I had just gotten ready to take off. I had gone to say bye to Raymond in his room and he was awake reading. He let me have the hat for free! I love this hat. It makes me feel like Indiana Jones. Right when I was coming down the steps Raymond's friend pulls up. He's going to give me a ride to the Walmart. Perfect. See, I wasn't sure if I had brushed my teeth already, so I brushed them again. If I hadn't brushed my teeth twice, I would have left Raymond's trailer a lot sooner and never met my ride to the Walmart. Do you see how I was meant to brush my teeth twice?

     11:36am  I am at the Walmart. I got a ride from this dude. This guy ended up being Raymond's roommate who's never there, who's bed I slept on. I told him my story and he loved it. We're going to Walmart now.

     12:13pm  I just spent ten dollars at Walmart. I got a big bag of twelve tennis balls for $6.84, and some lotion for two-something. I got some lotion to put on my feet.

     12:18pm  I just walked out of the Walmart and I see some lady sitting down next to a truck. I walked up to her and gave her my presentation and Kathy Vega hooked me up with some money. She's from Beaumont, California.

     12:32pm  I stopped by the laundromat where I met that nice lady Susie(6-23-05, 10:06am). I went in there and she was there. She was sick and she just did jury duty. I'm going to sit down and smoke a cigarette and smoke some weed.

     1:10pm  I'm at Raymond's and I just made me another bowl of Ramen Soup. I asked Raymond's roommate if he could spare a cigarette and he gave me like five of them! 

     1:33pm  I am leaving Raymond's. Hopefully Lee's phone will work when I call him from the Blockbuster. I found a Nutrigrain bar I had forgotten.

                   I had eaten those two bowls of Ramen Soup this morning.

                   Page 243

                   "The attempt to deal politically with such problems will not only fragment old alliances, but breed more zealots—world savers for whom environmental requirements (as they define them) supersede the niceties of democracy."

     2:20pm  Page 248

                   "Because of an out-of-date conception of progress, many in the West assume that fanatic, irrational, hate-mongering ideologies will vanish from the earth as societies become more "civilized." Nothing, says Professor Yehezkel Dror of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is more misleadingly smug. An internationally respected policy analyst and futurist, Dror contends that "confessional conflicts, 'holy wars,' committed crusaders and martyrdom-seeking warriors" are not merely relics of the past. They are portents of the future.
                   His study of "high-intensity aggressive ideologies" analyzes the international threat posed by them. But for the democracies, the threat is domestic as well, for as culture and economics are fused in the new economy, and new emotionally charged issues arise, the dangers of pivotal minorities and global fanaticism escalate in tandem.
                   The rise of a new kind of economy, never before known, threatening to many, demanding rapid changes in work, life style, and habits, hurls large populations—terrified of the future— into spasms of diehard reaction. It opens cleavages that fanatics rush to fill. It arms all those dangerous minorities who live for crisis in the hopes of catapulting themselves onto the national or global stage and transporting us all into a new Dark Age.
                   Instead of the much-touted "end of ideology," we may, in both global and domestic affairs, see a multiplicity of new ideologies spring up, each inflaming adherents with its single vision of reality. Instead of President Bush's famous "thousand points of light," we may well face a "thousand fires of fury."
                   While we are busy celebrating the supposed end of ideology, history, and the Cold War, we may find ourselves facing the end of democracy as we have known it—mass democracy. The advanced economy, based on computers, information, knowledge, and deep communication, calls into question all the traditional defenses of democracy, challenging us to redefine them in 21st-century terms.

                   To do that, we need a clearer picture of how the system works and how it is already changing."

     2:48pm  I am leaving from in front of the Blockbuster. I tried calling Lee and his phone still doesn't work. I'm thinking I'm going to have to ride the bus. I have seven bucks. I'm going to go to the Greyhound station and talk to Vicki. I want to see how much a ticket to Socorro is and maybe I'll go bum some change. Spare change for bus fare?

     3:06pm  Bill and Don hooked me up with some change for bus fare. I need five dollars to get to Alamogordo.

     3:19pm  I am leaving the Greyhound station. I got some spare change from some guys here so I have a total of nine now. I need two more for my ticket to Alamogordo. It's $38 all the way to Socorro. $23 to Truth or Consequences. Ugh, I hate backtracking.

                   Claralyn just invited me to lunch at the McDonald's! Cool. Great, I'll get good publicity there. I called the manager a greedy ass the other day because she tried to charge me for water.

     3:59pm  I just took a picture of Rebecca and Charlotte at the Blockbuster. Rebecca is all dressed up like a hottie. She's the one with that awesome tattoo who works at Blockbuster.

                   I have an update to make. I got a hold of Lee! He hadn't left town yet. He said he was going to pick me up in like half an hour. That's awesome. I get to spend this money on weed, cool.

                   I went into Walgreen's and bought me a can of Eclipse mints, just for the can.

     4:03pm  Oh yeah, right now in front of the Blockbuster there was this old lady getting out of her van with her dog. She fell down on the ground so I ran over to help her. She was all grateful and holding my hand. She sees my weed pin underneath my chin and points to it and says, "I love it." It was hilarious.

                   Oh, did I tell you I bought tennis balls at the Walmart too? I have a total of fourteen balls.

                   What was your email? cgs7@dana.ucc.nau.edu

     4:40pm  Kevin hooked me up with a cigarette in front of the Blockbuster. I appreciate it, Kevin. Everybody gets credit, thanks.

     5:55pm Adam gave me a cigarette in front of the Blockbuster. I appreciate it, brother.

     6:00pm  Adam is going to give me his email. tnchi623@hotmail.com

     6:38pm  I am still waiting for Lee. He hasn't shown up yet. Good things come to those who wait. I am so glad I have this haven here at the Blockbuster. All these kids love me. That Rebecca girl looked hot today. She said she was a manager. Oh yeah, Johnny gave me another cigarette. I appreciate it, Johnny.

                   Man, it still pisses me off that I never tagged up that fence by my mom's house with "OLD TEZEL NEEDS A SIDEWALK." That is one of my biggest regrets. I knew I forgot to do something before I left. I bought a can of spraypaint and everything.

     7:05pm  Dieter hooked me up with a cigarette in front of the Blockbuster. He works next door at some auto place.

                   At the last minute before he went inside I asked him if they had a water fountain or anywhere I could get some water. He promptly handed me his twenty ounce water bottle.

     7:37pm  This one girl in a white Toyota told me no thanks to my story. Thanks anyway. Ignorance is bliss.

                   I called Lee and he said he would be here in a minute. Cool.

     8:24pm  I had the most attentive listener right now. She was staring at me the whole time. I loved her eyes. She volunteered me five dollars after the story! Oh yeah, and Lee showed up.

     8:29pm  What a great time I just had. That pretty girl, I think her name is Lillian. I just love people who just stare into my eyes while I am telling my story. I could just tell she wanted more. If Lee wouldn't have pulled up I could've talked to her all night long. Oh yeah, and Lee told me that he had been sitting there for five minutes watching me talk to her.

                   I am loving every bit of this adventure.

     8:35pm  I forgot to tell you, right after Lee showed up. You see, after I finished talking to the girl I went inside to call Lee. Oh wait no, Johnny came outside and told me that somebody had called the Walgreen's and asked to talk to the guy standing outside. I'm sure I was who they were talking about. I'd been standing in front of Walgreen's for like three days now. Well, when I went to go talk, nobody was on the line. They hadn't hung up, just weren't saying anything. Then out of the blue Lee shows up! He told me he had been watching me to talk to the girl. I asked him if he had just called the Blockbuster and he told me no. Hmm, that's really weird. Who could have called for me?

                   We just came right now to the Shell station. He's gassing up his Civic Del Sol. It hauls ass.

     10:37pm  Oh yeah, I never mentioned. We're back in Socorro!

                     I'm not sure what time it is, but we stopped at his friends to get some really good weed. Some chronic. One of the dudes there ended up recognizing me. He had seen me at The Black Hole last year. When I walked in he said, "Victor." We're taking off now. Lee is going to take me to some squat house.

     1:45am  I have to make an update. We came to Socorro and went to his friends house. They reluctantly sold me this tiny bit of chronic for ten bucks. It's some really good weed. Lee just dropped me off at this squat house. It's some empty, abandoned house down Reservoir Road. It's all dark. Damnit, I left my lighter in Will's car. Then I remembered I had an extra one that Shane included in that backpack he had given me. I found it and entered the house and it's awesome. It's all cleaned out. Not dirty at all. Big living room to crash in. This is where Phil crashes I was told. Phil who used to sleep on the roof at The Black Hole. This is just perfect. I went where I was meant to go. You see how I am taken care of so good? Every step I take. I am loving every minute of it. Time to make my bed.

Next day..