Bruce Sterling's state of the world 2009
Bruce Sterling's doing his annual "state of the world" public interview on the WELL's Inkwell.vue conference, and taking all comers, dropping science and bon mots. I could read this stuff all day.
I'm a bohemian type, so I could scarcely be bothered to do anything "financially sound" in my entire adult life. Last year was the first year when I've felt genuinely sorry for responsible, well-to-do people. Suddenly they've got the precariousness of creatives, of the underclass, without that gleeful experience of decades spent living-it-up.Topic 343: Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2009 (via Beyond the Beyond)These are people who obeyed the social contract and are *still* getting it in the neck. The injustice of that upsets me. The bourgeoisie who kept their noses clean and obeyed the rules, I never had anything against them. I mean, of course I made big artsy fun of them, one has to do that, but I never meant them any active harm. I didn't scheme to raise a black flag and cut their throats because they were consumers.
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After growing up in Thatcher's Britain and watching my parents been put on a rack trying to keep a house over our heads, I vowed to never borrow money from banks for any reason what so ever.
I feel fully vindicated.
"These are people who obeyed the social contract and are *still* getting it in the neck."
That's actually more or less exactly what caused them to get it in the neck. The social contract is essentially an EULA - how often are those in your favour?
I'm loving the dialogue. It's very much like the Long Now talks - a bunch of very smart people with very little political investment having an honest debate about the state of the world.
"I am so much looking forward to getting past the old socialism/capitalism arguments, and having some new terms to work with that don't just provoke kneejerk reflexive reactions but actually require some thought and contemplation."
I'm down with that.
hear hear,
Which, while interesting, will last right up until each new term has an ardent adherent. After that it's mostly a matter of ego and being attached to the position, not thoughtful debate.
then maybe debate is the wrong format.
"I agree that there's an irrational panic now. There are also a large crowd of severe, real-world, fully rational, deeply structural problems that have gone unconfronted for years. These problems are not directly responsible for the money panic, but the blatant neglect there has created an atmosphere of crisis."
On point.
@#7 Assuming there's disagreement, anything done after that is essentially a form of debate, if only through selection.
I love the line about "The sheer galling come-down of watching the Bottom Line, the Almighty Dollar, revealed as a papier-mache pinata."
Great Sterling!!
I'm "preaching" the same things since few years ago probably beacuse down here in Italy the economic fuck*d up earlier than other developed countries...
fuck*d
Obfuscation FAIL!
WIN!
FrankieZ I hear you- but imagine how much worse it's going to get now!
Also LOVE fuck*d! Didn't even see it at first- good catch Arkizzle!
Meanwhile, here are Clay Shirky's predictions. It's interesting that the great panic is coinciding with the assumptions on which many business models have been built (i.e., scarcity, cost of organisation/communication) having been overturned. This fire is going to have a lot of deadwood to burn.
Look on the bright side: bohemians now have a chance to get into the bougie game as the economy rebounds.
"I didn't scheme to raise a black flag and cut their throats because they were consumers."
Should I be embarrassed? Because *I* did. I stopped putting the fruits of my labor into their pockets.
Strike ends Jan 21.
Ummm... For the most part, the responsible people are not in trouble. Responsible people actually paid for what they wanted instead of putting it all on credit with plans on paying it "someday." Responsible people didn't take out house loans that they couldn't pay, had adjustable rates that only went up, or loans that were for more than the house was worth. Same goes for car loans.
There are responsible people that are now in a jam because they lost their jobs, which does suck, but a majority of the people in trouble had bought into the irresponsible idea that "well, it's ok if you can't actually afford it, take it home anyways" that has permeated our culture for thirty years.
Oh, and yes... it's possible for "normal people" to live without piling up huge amounts of debt. Easy? No, but possible.
Oddball,
What about the responsible people who lost their jobs? Even if they were living within their means, they still probably have mortgage and car payments that they now can't pay. There was a line out the door at the supermarket the other day - applicants for a bagger job. And half of them were middle-aged business people.
My inner Ayn Rand (since reformed, but still heard from) says those people took on more responsibility than their world could actually support. They dug their own holes. They trusted the wrong system.
My inner environmentalist would prefer to see the stock market crash hard and curb our appetites rather than see the atmosphere crash hard from massively unsustainable overconsumption and curb our numbers.
My inner Boinger, however, is sad.
I think those declaring the end of capitalism are deluding themselves. I have heard a lot of people offering up solutions to the current woes, but I have yet to hear any person of credit (in the US) suggest that maybe what we need to do is have the state take over the economy and centrally plan it.
Central planning is dead and will continue to carry on being dead. What we are going to get are different banking rules that reign in various financial institutions and make them more like banks in terms of how much debt they are going to haul around. You will see a smattering of new regulation that will vary from effective and good to crippling and pointless.
Capitalism... the method by where markets determine the allocation of goods based off of price... is going to march on simply because there are no better alternatives. Markets deciding where resources go is better than the alternative. You are just going to see a few more rules slapped in place in the (mostly futile, IMO) attempt to keep the market's collective moments of insanity in check.
Rindan @20, if by "capitalism" you mean the system under which the US and various other western nations have been operating, then you're wrong, because there are going to need to be some serious changes.
If by "capitalism" you truly mean "the method by where markets determine the allocation of goods based off of price" then we've never truly been a capitalist country. Maybe we'll be better off becoming one, maybe not, but for a century or more "capitalism" has been a smokescreen word used by the private owners of large fortunes as they distort markets in their favor.
It's already started, folks. Alternative banking systems are already in place (see http://www.freelakotabank.com/) and I predict we'll rapidly see a nice variety of new currency models come into play as the old financial structure continues to deteriorate.
Free banking such as this is not a new idea, and was quite common in the decades before the Central Banking interests bought enough congressmen to railroad through the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. Prior to the creation of the Fed, lots of small banks existed and competed vigorously with one another. Sure, some of them were badly managed, and they failed, but as long as the banks were small institutions, bank failures were not catastrophic events. Yes, people lost money, and it hurt, but it didn't throw the entire economy into chaos.
Phil B., a gold bug friend of mine who is a savvy investor, explained it very clearly with a forest fire analogy. An unmanaged forest suffers natural wildfires regularly, which keeps the amount of combustbile matter from developing to dangerous levels. When the U.S. Forest Service decided to manage our National Forests more wisely, they suppressed as many natural fires as possible, leading to an overabundance of dry brush and now when lightning strikes cause wildfires, they rage out of control and spread through to urban areas (witness the catastrophic wildfires we regularly see every year in the Western United States). It turns out nature is a pretty good manager of forests all by herself.
Phil's point was that having many small, competitive banks in the market and allowing the poorly managed ones to fail makes an economy more stable, not less, while the mergers and acquisitions that created our mega-banks (CitiGroup, BofA, etc.) and the Wall Street investment houses (Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros., Morgan Stanley, etc.) can only increase the chances of a domino effect such as we are witnessing today.
His advice? There should be no institution in a free market that is "too big to fail." Let the banks fail. Let the Detroit auto manufacturers fail. It will hurt, but not as much as bailing them out, which will only prolong the pain. The failure of such ventures should serve as an example to the survivors of now not to make those same mistakes (and keeps a check on competing businesses to prevent them from also growing to an unmanageable size).