092603

 

Arcata, CA

Friday September 26, 2003

     8:53am  I woke up in the barn. What's today? It's Friday.

     10:26am  I've decided I'm not going to pursue anything with that cute girl Allie. My reward for bringing world peace will be a traveling partner/girlfriend. I'm not going to pursue anything. I haven't done it yet, so I don't deserve it yet. I gotta keep doing this all on my own . . for now.
                     I think I have mentioned the prerequisites a girl needs to meet to be my girlfriend on this mission. She has to one, first off, believe in me and not think I'm crazy. She has to enjoy walking and ultimately, she needs to help me on my mission. Be it telling my scripts and spreading my word, or her individual scripts that convey the same points more or less, or just being there to support me and letting me do most of the talking. Also, she needs to be trustworthy. I am, so she should be. I am still not certain how comfortable and efficient I would be teamed up with another person. I keep telling myself that it hasn't happened yet because alone is the only way I will get this done. I don't know. I may be surprised.

                     Another group picture in the barn. That's Allie in the middle.

     10:54am  Cocapelli just gave me a good quote. What was it again? Actually, it's a Bazooka Joe fortune. It says, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step - or you could just buy a plane ticket." Good one. I got one too from my gum. It says, "Bring your teeth up for air - smile."

                     Randi's says, "Opportunity knocks once- temptation barges in."

                     Good 'ol Bazooka Joe.

     10:55am  I just took a picture of everybody at the Cash Oil in the morning.

Drinking coffee.

     11:25am  We are walking to The Endeavor, to eat. We had a nice big morning family party at the Cash Oil.

     11:30am  We're walking to The Endeavor. Jonathan and this sister just pulled up in a car with Lefty. They gave me a beer. Cool, New Castle Brown Ale, badass. I appreciate it, guys.

                     Page 367. The Attack of Loneliness

                     To create a fulfilling emotional life and a sane psychosphere for the emerging civilization of tomorrow, we must recognize three basic requirements of any individual: the needs for community, structure, and meaning. Understanding how the collapse of Second Wave Society undermines all three suggests how we might begin designing a healthier psychological environment for ourselves and our children in the future.

                     To being with, any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the technosocieties. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.
                     From Los Angeles to Leningrad, teen-agers, unhappy married couples, single parents, ordinary working people, and the elderly, all complain of social isolation. Parents confess that their children are too busy to see them or even to telephone. Lonely strangers in bars or launderettes offer what one sociologist calls "those infinitely sad confidences." Singles' clubs and discos serve as flesh markets for desperate divorcees.
                     Loneliness is even a neglected factor in the economy. How many upper-middle-class housewives, driven to distraction by the clanging emptiness of their affluent suburban homes, have gone into the job market to preserve their sanity? How many pets (and carloads of pet food) are bought to break the silence of an empty home? Loneliness supports much of our travel and entertainment business. It contributes to drug use, depression, and declining productivity. And it creates a lucrative "lonely-hearts" industry that purports to help the lonely locate and lasso Mr. or Ms. "Right."
                     Community demands more than emotionally satisfying bonds between individuals and their organizations. Just as they miss the companionship of other individuals, millions today feel equally cut off from the institutions of which they are a part. They hunger for institutions worthy of their respect, affection, and loyalty.
                     The corporation offers a case in point.
                     As companies have grown larger and more impersonal and have diversified into many disparate activities, employees have been left with little sense of shared mission. The feeling of community is absent. The very term "corporate loyalty" has an archaic ring to it. Indeed, loyalty to a company is considered by many a betrayal of self. In The Bottom Line, Fletcher Knebel's popular novel about big business, the heroine snaps to her executive husband: "Company loyalty! It makes me want to vomit."
                     Except in Japan, where the lifetime employment system and corporate paternalism still exist (though for a shrinking percentage of the labor force), work relationships are increasingly transient and emotionally unsatisfying. Even when companies make an effort to provide a social dimension to employment - an annual picnic, a company-sponsored bowling team, and office Christmas party - most on-the-job relationships are no more than skin-deep.
                     For such reasons, few today have any sense of belonging to something bigger and better than themselves. This warm participatory feeling emerges spontaneously from time to time during crisis, stress, disaster, or mass uprising. The great student strikes of the sixties, for example, produced a glow of communal feeling. The antinuclear demonstrations today do the same. But both the movements and the feelings they arouse are fleeting. Community is in short supply.

                     One clue to the plague of loneliness lies in our rising level of social diversity. By de-massifying society, by accentuating differences rather than similarities, we help people individualize themselves. We make is possible for each of us more nearly to fulfill his or her potential. But we also make human contact more difficult. For the more individualized we are, the more difficult it becomes to find a mate or a lover who has precisely matching interests, values, schedules, or tastes. Friends are also harder to come by. We become choosier in our social ties. But so do others. The result is a great many ill-matched relationships. Or no relationship at all.
                     The breakup of mass society, therefore, while holding out the promise of much greater individual self-fulfillment, is at least for the present spreading the pain of isolation. If the emergent Third Wave society if not to be icily metallic, with a vacuum for a heart, it must attack this problem frontally. It must restore community.

                     How might we begin to do this?
                     Once we recognize that loneliness is no longer an individual matter but a public problem created by the disintegration of Second Wave institutions, there are plenty of things we can do about it. We can begin where community usually begins - in the family, by expanding its shrunken functions.
                     The family, since the industrial revolution, has been progressively relieved of the burden of its elderly. If we stripped this responsibility from the family, perhaps the time has come to restore it partially. Only a nostalgic fool would favor dismantling public and private pension systems, or making old people completely dependent on their families as they once were. But why not offer tax and other incentives for families - including non-nuclear and unconventional families - who look after their own elderly instead of farming them out to impersonal old-age "homes." Why not reward, rather than economically punish, those who maintain and solidify family bonds across generational lines?

                     The same principle can be extended to other functions of the family as well. Families should be encouraged to take a larger - not smaller - role in the education of the young. Parents willing to teach their own children at home should be aided by the schools, not regarded as freaks or lawbreakers. And parents should have more, not less, influence on the schools.
                     At the same time much could be done by the schools themselves to create a sense of belonging. Instead of grading students purely on individual performance, some part of each student's grade could be more dependent on the performance of the class as a whole or some team within it. This would give early and overt to the idea that each of us has responsibility for others. With a big of encouragement, imaginative educators could come up with many other, better ways to promote a sense of community.
                     Corporations, too, could do much to begin building human ties afresh. Third Wave production makes possible decentralization and smaller, more personal work units. Innovative companies might build morale and a sense of belonging by asking groups of workers to organize themselves into mini-companies or cooperatives and contracting directly with these groups to get specific jobs done.
                     This breakup of huge corporations into small, self-managed units could not merely unleash enormous new productive energies but build community at the same time.
                     Norman Macrae, deputy officer of The Economist, has suggested that "Semi-autonomous teams of perhaps six to 17 people, who choose to work together as friends, should be told by market forces what module of output, and then should increasingly be allowed to produce it in their own way."
     Indeed, continues Macrae, "those who devise successful group friendship cooperatives will do a lot of social good, and perhaps will deserve some subsidies or tax advantages." (What is particularly interesting about such arrangements is that one could create cooperatives within a profit-making corporation or, for that matter, profit-making companies within the framework of a socialist production enterprise.)
                     Corporations could also look hard at their retirement practices. Ejecting an elderly worker all at once not only deprives the individual of a regular, full-size paycheck, and takes away what society regards as a productive role, but also truncates many social ties. Why not more partial retirement plans, and programs that assign semi-retired people to work for understaffed community services on a volunteer or part-pay basis.
                     Another community-building device might draw retired people into fresh contact with the young, and vice-versa. Older people in every community could be appointed "adjunct teachers" or "mentors," invited to teach some of their skills in local schools on a part-time or volunteer basis or to have one student, let's say, regularly visit them for instruction. Under school supervision, retired photographers could teach photography, car mechanics how to repair a recalcitrant engine, bookkeepers how to keep books, and so on. In many cases a healthy bond would grow up between mentor and "mentee" that would go beyond instruction.

                     It is not a sin to be lonely and, in a society whose structures are fast disintegrating, it should not be a disgrace. Thus a letter writer to the Jewish Chronicle in London asks: "Why does it seem 'not quite as nice' to groups where it is perfectly obvious that the reason that everyone is there is to meet people of the opposite sex?" The same question would apply to singles' bars, discos, and holiday resorts.
                     The letter points out that in the shtetls of Eastern Europe the institutions of shadchan or matchmaker served as a useful purpose in bringing marriageable people together, and that dating bureaus, marriage services, and similar agencies are just as necessary today. "We should be able to admit openly that we need help, human contact and a social life."
                     We need many new services - both traditional and innovative - to help bring lonely people together in a dignified way. Some people now rely on "lonely-hearts" ads in the magazines to help them locate a companion or mate. Before long we can be sure local or neighborhood cable television services will be running video ads so prospective partners can actually see each other before dating. (Such programs, one suspects, will have enormously high ratings.)
                     But should dating services - or places - where people might come simply to meet and make a friend, as distinct from a lover or potential mate? Society needs such services and, so long as they are honest and decent, we should not be embarrassed to invent and use them.

     11:46am  I'm standing in line at The Endeavor and I'm reading my book. I saw a quote in here I wanted to get. On page 373 it says,

                     "Individuals need life structure. A life lacking in comprehensible structure is an aimless wreck. The absence of structure breeds breakdown."

                     On page 374 it says,

                     "Today the breakup of the Second Wave is dissolving the structure of many individual lives before the new structure-providing institutions of the Third Wave future are laid into place. This, not merely some personal failing, explains why for millions today daily life is experienced as lacking any semblance of recognizable order.
                     To this loss of order we must also add the loss of meaning. The feeling that our lives "count" comes from healthy relationships with the surrounding society - from family, corporation, church or political movement. It also depends on being able to see ourselves as part of a larger, even cosmic, scheme of things.
                     The sudden shift of social ground rules today, the smudging of roles, status distinctions, and lines of authority, the immersion in blip culture and, above all, the breakup of the great thought-system, indust-reality, have shattered the world-image most of us carry around in our skulls. In consequence, most people surveying the world around them today only see chaos. They suffer a sense of personal powerlessness and pointlessness.
                     It is only when we put all this together - the loneliness, the loss of structure, and the collapse of meaning attendant on the decline of industrial civilization - that we can begin to make sense of some of the most puzzling social phenomena of our time, not the least which is the astonishing rise of the cult.

THE SECRET OF THE CULTS

                     Why do so many thousands of apparently intelligent, seemingly successful people allow themselves to be sucked into myriad cults sprouting today in the widening cracks of the Second Wave system? What accounts for the total control that a Jim Jones was able to exercise over the lives of his followers?"

                     Page 375

                     "For lonely people, cults offer, in the beginning, indiscriminate friendship. Says an official of the Unification Church: "If someone's lonely, we talk to them. There are a lot of lonely people walking around." The newcomer is surrounded by people offering friendship and beaming approval. Many of the cults require communal living. So powerfully rewarding is this sudden warmth and attention that cult members are often willing to give up contact with their families and former friends, to donate their life's earnings to the cult, to forego drugs and even sex in return.
                     But the cult sells more than community. It also offers much-needed structure. Cults impose tight constraints on behavior. They demand and create enormous discipline through beatings, forced labor, and their own forms of ostracism or imprisonment. Psychiatrist H. A. S. Sukhdeo of the New Jersey School of Medicine, after interviewing survivors of the Jonestown mass suicide and reading the writings or members of the Peoples Temple, concludes: "Our society is so free and permissive, and people have so many options to choose from that they cannot make their own decisions effectively. They want others to make the decision and they will follow."
                     A man named Sherwin Harris, who's daughter and ex-wife were among the men and women who followed Jim Jones to death in Guyana, has summed it up in one sentence. "This is an example," Harris said, "of what some Americans will subject themselves to in order to bring some structure into their lives.
                     The last vital product marketed by the cults is the "meaning." Each has its own single-minded version of reality - religious, political, or cultural. The cult possesses the sole truth and those living in the outside world who fail to recognize the value of that truth are pictured as either misinformed or Satanic. The message of the cult is drummed into the new member at all-day, all-night sessions. It is preached incessantly, until he or she begins to use its terms of reference, its vocabulary, and - ultimately - its metaphor for existence. The "meaning" delivered by the cult may be absurd to the outsider. But that doesn't matter.
                     Indeed, the exact, pinned-down content of the cult message is almost incidental. Its power lies in providing synthesis, in offering an alternative to the fragmented blip culture around us. Once the framework is accepted by the cult recruit, it helps organize much of the chaotic information bombarding him or her from the outside. Whether or not that framework of ideas corresponds to outer reality, it provides a neat set of cubbyholes in which the member can store incoming data. It thereby relives the stress of overload and confusion. It provides not truth, as such, but order, and thus meaning.
                     By giving the cult member a sense that reality is meaningful - and that he or she must carry that meaning to outsiders - the cult offers purpose and coherence in a seemingly incoherent world.
                     The cult, however, sells community, structure, and meaning at an extremely high price: the mindless surrender of self. For some, no doubt, this is the only alternative to personal disintegration. But for most of us the cult's way our is too costly.
                     To make Third Wave civilization both sane and democratic, we need to do more than create new energy supplies or plug in new technology. We need to do more than create community. We need to provide structure and meaning as well. And once again there are simple things we can do to get started."

                     Okay, I'm typing this up on the 27th and I copied that whole section about cults. It pretty much explains cults inside and out. I thought it all to be important and I want to reassure everyone that I am not, in no way, trying to start a cult here. I'm just trying to bring some truth out of hiding. It made sense to me.

                     I want to copy some of the end of chapter 25 out, too, If you like the stuff from this book, go out and obtain a copy of it. It's called The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler. This is the sequel book to Future Shock. Read that one, too.

                     "In addition to providing useful services and a degree of life-structure, such organizations could also help bring much-needed meaning into the lives of their members - not some spurious mystical or political theology but the simple ideal of service to the community.
                     Beyond all such measures, however, we shall need to integrate personal meaning with larger, more encompassing world views. It is not enough for people to understand (or think they understand) their own small contributions to society. They must also have some sense, even if inarticulate, of how they fit into the larger scheme of things. As the Third Wave arrives we will need to formulate sweeping new integrative world views - coherent syntheses, not merely blips - that tie things together.
                     No single world view can ever capture the whole truth. Only by applying multiple and temporary metaphors can we gain a rounded (if still incomplete) picture of the world. But to acknowledge this axiom is not the same as saying life is meaningless. Indeed, even if life is meaningless in some cosmic sense, we can and often do construct meaning, drawing it from decent social relations and picturing ourselves as part of a larger drama - the coherent unfolding of history.

                     In building Third Wave civilization, therefore, we must go beyond the attack on loneliness. We must also begin providing a framework of order and purpose in life. For meaning, structure, and community are interrelated preconditions for a livable future.
                     In working towards these ends, it will help to understand that the present day agony of social isolation, the impersonality, structurelessness, and sense of meaninglessness from which so many people suffer are symptoms of the breakdown of the past rather than intimations of the future.
                     It will not be enough, however, for us to change society. For as we shape Third Wave civilization through our own daily decisions and actions, Third Wave civilization will in turn shape us. A new psycho-sphere is emerging that will fundamentally alter our character. And it is to this - the personality of the future - that we next turn."

     11:24am  Padagonum(or however you spell it) hooked me up with a donut at The Endeavor. Hey, I wanted a donut, but I didn't want to stand in line for seconds. I appreciate it, brother.

     1:35am  I just walked to the school. I'm going to go do my bathroom routine.

     1:50am  I didn't do much in the bathroom. I thought I had to go poop. I thought I had to go over when I was at The Endeavor, but umm, I just sat there and read my book. A whole chapter. I'm reading some really good stuff around chapter 25. Dude, I don't have to write a book. It's already been written for me. Everyone just has to read this one. Anyway, I'm going to go to the computer and type up my stuff. I don't have much to do. I just have to log my email addresses and type up yesterday. Oh yeah, I need to remember to get a picture of my workstation.  

     5:32pm  I just now finished up. Not only did I type up yesterday, but I also backed up all my email addresses in case I lose my book again. I'm going to get my stuff together and go smoke a cigarette.

                   Okay, Chapter 26 is looking good, too. I'm going to end up copying the entire rest of the book, hehe. Just kidding. Here's the beginning of Chapter 26, though.

"THE PERSONALITY OF THE FUTURE

                   As a novel civilization erupts into our everyday lives we are left wondering whether we, too, are obsolete. With so many of our habits, values, routines, and responses called into question, it is hardly surprising if we sometimes feel like people of the past, relics of Second Wave civilization. But if some of us are indeed anachronisms, are there also people of the future among us - anticipatory citizens, as it were, of the Third Wave civilization to come? Once we look past the decay and disintegration around us, can we see the emerging outlines of the personality of the future - the coming, so to speak, of a "new man"?"

 

                   Page 381,

                   "It would be foolish, therefore, to herald yet once more the birth of a "new man" (unless, now that the genetic engineers are at work, we mean that in a frightening, strictly biological sense). The idea suggests a prototype, a single ideal model that the entire civilization strains to emulate. And in a society moving rapidly toward de-massification, nothing is more unlikely.
                   Nevertheless, it would be equally foolish to believe that fundamentally changed material conditions of life leave personality or, more accurately, social character, unaffected. As we change the deep structure of society, we also modify people. Even if one believed in some unchanging human nature, a commonly held view I do not share, society would still reward and elicit certain character traits and penalize others, leading to evolutionary changes in the distribution of traits in the population."

                   Oh yeah, I wanted to get this Growing Up Different section on page 383 in my log.

                   "To begin with, the child of tomorrow is likely to grow up in a society far less child-centered than our own.

                   The "graying" or aging of the population in all high-technology countries implies greater public attention to the needs of the elderly and a correspondingly reduced focus on the young. Furthermore, as women develop jobs and careers in the exchange economy, the traditional need to channel all their energies into motherhood is diminished.
                   During the Second Wave, millions of parents lived out their own dreams through their children - often because they could reasonably expect their children to do better socially and economically then they themselves had done. This expectation of upward mobility encouraged parents to concentrate enormous psychic energies on their children. Today many middle-class parents face agonizing disillusionment as their children - in a far more difficult world - move down, rather than up, the socio-economic scale. The likelihood of surrogate fulfillment is evaporating.
                   For these reasons, the baby born tomorrow is likely to enter a society no longer obsessed with - perhaps not even terribly interested in - the needs, wants, psychological developments, and instant gratification of the child. If so, the Dr. Spocks of tomorrow will urge a more structured and demanding childhood, Parents will be less permissive.
                   Nor, one suspects, will adolescence be as prolonged and painful a process as it is today for so many. Millions of children are being brought up in single-parent homes, with working mothers (or fathers) squeezed by an erratic economy, and with less of the luxury and time available to the flower child generation of the 1960's.
                   Others, later on, are likely to be reared in work-at-home or electronic-cottage families. Just as in many Second Wave families built around a mom-and-pop business, we can expect the children of tomorrow's electronic cottage to be drawn directly into the family's work tasks and given growing responsibility from an early age.
                   Such facts suggest a shorter childhood and youth but a more responsible and productive one. Working alongside adults, children in such homes are also likely to be less subject to peer pressures. They may well turn out to be the high achievers of tomorrow.
                   During the transition to the new society, wherever jobs remain scarce, Second Wave labor unions will undoubtedly fight to exclude young people from the job market outside the home. Unions (and teachers, whether unionized or not) will lobby for ever-longer years of compulsory or near-compulsory schooling. To the extent that they succeed, millions of young people will continue to be forced into the painful limbo of prolonged adolescence. We may, therefore, see a sharp contrast between young people who grow up fast because of early work responsibilities in the electronic cottage and those who mature more slowly outside.
                   Over the long pull, however, we can expect education also to change. More learning will occur outside, rather than inside, the classroom. Despite the pressure from unions, the years of compulsory schooling will grow shorter, not longer. Instead of rigid age segregation, young and old will mingle. Education will become more interspersed and interwoven with work, and more spread out over a lifetime. And work itself - whether production for the market or prosumption for us in the home - will probably begin earlier in life that it has in the last generation or two. For just such reasons, Third Wave civilization may well favor quite different traits among the young - less responsiveness to peers, less consumption-orientation and less hedonistic self-involvement.
                   Whether this is so or not, one thing is certain. Growing up will be different. And so will the resultant personalities."

                   All this just supports my theory that kids have always known better, and always will. It's simple evolution. This guy Alvin Toffler saw it in 1980, when the book was written, and it still holds true today in 2003. Why is it taking us so long to learn?

     5:40pm  I've left the school. I scored me some snipes in the smoking posts, but I don't have a lighter.

     5:56pm  I walked in and used the restroom at The Alibi.

     5:57pm  I'm at Don's Donuts. I see some brand new apple fritters in there. I'm going to get me one. And a thing of milk, hopefully.

     6:00pm  I was standing in front of the donut shop and I saw Liron(8-6-03, 3:07pm), this guy I had met in Berkeley.

                   Whoa, Liron bought me my apple fritter. Awesome! I'm going to sit in the donut shop and eat my fritter. I'm reading my book and I'm just reminding myself to include a lot of this New Worker part in my log. On page 384.

"THE NEW WORKER

                   As the adolescent matures and enters the job arena, new forces come into play on his or her personality, rewarding some traits and punishing or penalizing others.
                   Throughout the Second Wave era, work in the factories and offices steadily grew more repetitive, specialized, and time-pressured, and employers wanted workers who were obedient, punctual, and willing to perform rote tasks. The corresponding traits were fostered by the schools and rewarded by the corporation.
                    As the Third Wave cuts across our society, work grows less, not more, repetitive. It becomes less fragmented, with each person doing a somewhat larger, rather than smaller, task. Flextime and self-pacing replace the old need for mass synchronization of behavior. Workers are forced to cope with more frequent changes in their tasks, as well as a blinding succession of personnel transfers, product changes, and reorganizations.
                   What Third Wave employers increasingly need, therefore, are men and women who accept responsibility, who understand how their work dovetails with that of others, who can handle ever larger tasks, who adapt swiftly to changed circumstances, and who are sensitively tuned in to the people around them.
                   The Second Wave firm frequently paid off for prodding bureaucratic behavior. The Third Wave firm requires people who are less pre-programmed and faster on their feet. The difference, says Donald Conover, general manager of Corporate Education for Western Electric, is like that between classical musicians who play each note according to a predetermined, pre-set pattern, and jazz improvisers who, once having decided what song to play, sensitively pick up cues from one another and, on the basis of that, decide what notes to play next.
                   Such people are complex, individualistic, proud of the ways in which they differ from other people. They typify the de-massified work force needed by Third Wave industry.
                   According to opinion researcher Daniel Yankelovich, only 56 percent of U.S. workers - mainly the older ones - are still motivated by traditional incentives. They are happiest with strict guidelines and clear tasks. They do not expect to find "meaning" in their work.
                   By contrast, as much as 17 percent of the work force already reflects newer values emerging from the Third Wave. Largely young middle-managers, they are, declares Yankelovich, the "hungriest for more responsibility and more vital work with a commitment worthy of their talent and skills." They seek meaning along with financial reward.
                   To recruit such workers, employers are beginning to offer individualized rewards. This helps explain why a few advanced companies (like TRW Inc., the Cleveland-based high-technology firm) now offer employees not a fixed set of fringe benefits but a smorgasbord of optional holidays, medical benefits, pensions, and insurance. Each worker can tailor a package to his or her own needs. Says Yankelovich, "There is no one set of incentives with which to motivate the full spectrum of the work force." Moreover, he adds, in the mix of rewards for work, money no longer has the same motivating power it once did.
                   No one suggests these workers don't want money. They certainly do. But once a certain income level is reached they vary widely in what they want. Additional increments of money no longer have their former impact on behavior."

                   I skipped a paragraph,

                   "Meanwhile, the most ingrained patterns of authority are also changing. In Second Wave firms every employee has a single boss. Disputes among employees are taken to the boss to be resolved. In the new matrix organizations the style is entirely different. Workers have more than one boss at a time. People of different rank and different skills meet in temporary, "ad-hocratic" groups. And in the words of Davis and Lawrence, authors of a standard text on the subject: "Differences...are resolved without a common boss readily available to arbitrate...The assumption in a matrix is that this conflict can be healthy...differences are valued and people express their views even when they know that others may disagree."
                   "This system penalizes workers who show blind obedience. It rewards those who - within limits - talk back. Workers who seek meaning, who question authority, who want to exercise discretion, or who demand that their work be socially responsible may be regarded as trouble-makers in Second Wave industries. But Third Wave industries cannot run without them.
                   Across the board, therefore, we are seeing a subtle but profound change in the personality traits rewarded by the economic system - a change which cannot help but shape the emerging social character."

                    Okay, once again I felt like that entire section was relevant to things I am trying to point out, so I included most of it.

                   On page 387 there is even more stuff I want to include.

                   "Instead of ranking people by what they own, as the market ethic does, the prosumer ethic places a high value on what they do. Having plenty of money still carries prestige. But other characteristics count, too. Among these are self-reliance, the ability to adapt and survive under difficult conditions, and the ability to do things with one's own hands - whether to build a fence, to cook a great meal, to make one's own clothes, or to restore an antique chest.
                    Moreover, while the production of market ethic praises singlemindness, the prosumer ethic calls for roundedness instead. Versatility is "in". As the Third Wave bring production for exchange and production for use into a better balance in the economy, we begin to hear a crescendo of demands for a "balanced" way of life."

                   Be sure to include the last part on page 391.

                   "If our assumptions are even partially correct, individuals will vary more vividly tomorrow than they do today. More of them are likely to grow up sooner, to show responsibility at an earlier age, to be more adaptable, and to evince greater individuality. They are more likely than their parents to question authority. They will want money and work for it - but, except under conditions of extreme privation, they will resist working for money alone.
                   Above all, they seem likely to crave balance in their lives - balance between work and play, between production and prosumption, between headwork and handwork, between the abstract and the concrete, between objectivity and subjectivity. And they will see and project themselves in far more complex terms than any previous people.
                   As Third Wave civilizations mature, we shall create not a utopian man or woman who towers over the people of the past, not a superhuman race of Goethes and Aristotles (or Genghis Khans or Hitlers) but merely, and proudly, one hopes, a race - and a civilization - that deserves to be called human.

                   No hope for such an outcome, no hope for a safe transition to a decent new civilization is possible, however, until we face one final imperative: the need for political transformation. And is it this prospect - both terrifying and exhilarating - that we explore in these final pages. The personality of the future must be matched by a politics of the future."

     6:21pm  I stopped on page 392, new chapter.

     6:43pm  I'm bored and don't have anything to do, so I came over to the spanging spot right in that alley by the donut shop. I'm going to try to spange up some change, Since it's Friday, for some marijuana.

     6:50pm  I just got some guy's email address who recognized me from Telegraph. That's cool, people just keep seeing me. That guy was all, "Hey, I saw you in Berkeley, right?"

     6:55pm  I'm bored. I don't want to spange. I'm going to go talk to kids in the plaza and see if somebody will smoke me out.

     7:13pm  Barry was nice enough to give me a cigarette. I appreciate it, Barry. Barry said, "Oh, and here's Barry's little bit of wisdom, too. The more you give, the more you get back."

     8:00pm  The coolest shit. I wanted another cigarette and I had a quarter in my pocket. I saw some girl getting into her car and I held the quarter and asked her, "Can I give you a quarter for a cigarette?" She said, "You can have a cigarette, but you don't need to give me a quarter." Her name is Lynn and she let me roll a cigarette.

     8:07pm  After noticing my recorder, I told Lynn what I was doing and guess what. Her friend in the car hooked me up with a fat nugget of weed! They even hooked up my homeboy Jonathan up, too. Now, we're going to smoke some weed as soon as we find a device to get it in our lungs.

                   Umm, Jonathan is getting seriously annoying. He's following me everywhere I go. Even when I went to spange for a donut, he was there, which makes it even harder.

     8:15pm  Carly just bought Randi's hat for fifteen dollars! Randi is the chick I told my story to one morning in the barn. Before, Carly was looking at it, but wouldn't dream of paying fifteen dollars for it. But, in the end, since Randi needed fifteen and the hat was so perfect for Carli, she forked over the fifteen bucks.

     8:32pm  Ian pulled out his bagpipes and he's playing in the plaza. Jonathan thinks it's some mildly annoying shit.

     9:10pm  I just ran into Eric, one of the guys I smoked with and told my stuff to last night by the Co-op. He was telling me shit like, "I am glad to be in your presence. You're going to be the one that actually makes a difference. I was really moved by your story, etc." Wowsers, there is nothing I love more than making a difference.

     9:11pm  Some dude just said, "Hey Victor, what's up?" I didn't recognize him, but he was yet another dude I smoked out with by the Co-op. He asked me, "Are you ready to go to the party? It's this one dude's eviction party. Eviction parties are good. You need to go so you can spread your word there."

     9:41pm  Everybody was talking about this party in Eureka. All the street kids. Tree is supposed to be taking us all over there in the big white hippie bus that we took to Clam Beach a while ago. They said they weren't going to leave for a while, so I came over to the plaza. I'm going to sit down and read my book. I sat down on a bench next to Scott and Rivers. Right when I first sat down, they handed me a pipe and gave me a hit of weed. I appreciate it, brothers.

     10:02pm  I am almost finished with The Third Wave. This book has been so good. When I finish it, I can start reading Future Shock, which Third Wave is a sequel to. I had only read like a third of Future Shock before I left it in Berkeley. I got a copy back though. It seems like I am supposed to read it.

     10:20pm  Jill just gave me some change for a donut. Thank you, Jill. That's very generous of you. Everybody gets credit in my game.

                     Shweet, a whole dollar!

     10:48pm  James just hooked me up with a cigarette. I appreciate it, brother.

     10:55pm  We are all walking to where Tree's bus is. We're going to the party in Eureka. Mud, this dude who kind of resembles Geba(only brown hair instead of blonde), is telling everyone about the party at the top of his lungs. It's a good Friday night in Arcata.

     11:26pm  We just rode Tree's hippie bus to this guy's house in Eureka. Fifteen people. This guy is getting evicted and he's throwing a huge eviction party.

                      I didn't make any more entries for the remainder of the night. The party was so-so. I just stood around not doing much the whole night. I kind of regretted going and wished I could go crash in my barn. This dude was playing guitar downstairs and he was really good. When we had first got there, this one homeless guy who stunk like crazy, was forced into taking a shower by everyone else. I never got a whiff of him, but I'm not complaining. I was wondering if it was ok that people crashed at their house. I had left my bags upstairs, so I went to go get them. In the room where I had left my bag, there was a big bed. Since no one was up there, I just laid down and dozed off. Before I knew it there were people in the room making all this noise and keeping me from sleeping. I remember the owner of the house coming in and asking me for weed. I was half awake and wanting to conserve the little I had, so I told him I didn't have any on me. Then he started saying how messed up it was that I was sleeping on his bed and I wouldn't share, so I ended up just giving him all of my weed, in hopes I would get some sleep. I eventually did, like around 3am, I'm guessing. Okay, that's it for the 26th. There's a lot of reading to this day. I hope patient people are reading my stuff.

Next day..