1. Root economic change
2. What is a job?
3. The death of US manufacturing
4. The death of traditional media (newspapers, etc.)
5. Monetizing manufacturing/media's replacement (in the US at least) - Web 2.0 and higher.
The point is simply (or not), that things are not disappearing, so much as they are changing. Now, people don't like ONE change at a time, but we have several (there are many more than the five I have screeched about), and that is what is imputing the sense of "dis-ease" we all feel today. It's like related rate problems in calculus - it's not the rate of change that's accelerating... it's the rate of the rate of change that is accelerating. Maybe even the rate of the rate of the rate!!!
You've heard your friends talk about it - they have a sense of doom. It’s like the 1930’s. Everyone knows there’s going to be a war with Germany. Some, like Chamberlain, deny it. They don’t want to believe it. Others, like Churchill, are clear that we must not appease the Nazis.
I'm not talking about the spectre of the disaster of the week - climate change, ecological implosion, terrorists with nukes, Bush/Cheney/Haliburton (wasn't Bush supposed to declare martial law a few years ago?), Religious zealots oppressing the atheists, Militant atheists calling on burning churches and killing priests (1789 anyone?), children being exploited by radical gays and lesbians, radical gays and lesbians being exploited by everybody, Bush/Cheney/Haliburton being exploited by children - AAARRRRGGGHHH!
EVERYBODY JUST SHUT UP!
It's not just the spectre of CHANGE, and the execution of change, but the sheer number of things changing and we are having a real hard time dealing with it all.
Root Economic Change - As I said "My contention is that these eight conditions are contributing to the real economic tsunami that is about to hit us. And like the Industrial Revolution before (the so-called "information revolution" is just a preliminary ripple), it will affect everyone on the planet, with the attendant "law of unforeseen consequences" vaporizing our current world view of the nature of work." (see Part I for detail on the 8 points)
What Is A Job? - " today's organizations are trying to use outmoded and underpowered organizational forms to do tomorrow's work. They insert an empowerment program here and a new profit-sharing plan there and then announce that those things aren't so great after all because profits are still falling. Such organizations won't have better results until they do two things. First, get rid of jobs. Second, redesign the organization to get the best out of a de- jobbed worker. A big task, sure. But like any evolutionary challenge, it will separate the survivors from the extinct." (see Part II for details)
The Death Of US Manufacturing - " the coming transformation will be painful, but we will get through it. We will have a money economy of highly intelligent machines (robots, if you will) manufacturing goods for sale here and abroad, designed built and maintained by American workers and a huge non-money economy of DYI types using the technology the money economy provides, to provide for themselves. - IF and only if, we have the guts to be flexible, agile and swallow our stupid pride and re-tool out skills to meet the paradigm shift. Or wallow in your "I'm a victim" status and become a ward of the state." (see... well you know what to do).
The Death Of Traditional Media (newspapers, etc) - " The simple historical fact is that mass communication technologies are never replaced by newer technologies. They co-exist, while continuing to evolve. We still have the newspaper, the telephone, the radio, and the movies, despite the fact that each of these was at the time of introduction viewed as the beginning of the end for the other. The only mass communication medium in history to have been replaced by another is the telegraph, a service which began in 1851 with the founding of the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company and spanned 150 years, ending finally on January 27, 2006".
Monetizing manufacturing/media's replacement (in the US at least) - Web 2.0 and higher. - " How is all this supposed to make me any money!"
The unifying factor of all this crap, is that this transformation requires the evolution of information into knowledge, and it's capture, storage, use and re-purposing - this is a continuum process. All of you computer science and IT majors my remember the progression you learned in those interminable classes on " the profession" - facts are processed into data, data is processed into information, information is processed into... what? Knowledge, that's what! And as the late, great Peter Drucker said in "Managing in a Time of Great Change", when you apply knowledge to knowledge, you should get wisdom...
Remember that, besides its great flexibility, knowledge has other important characteristics that make it fundamentally different from lesser sources of power in tomorrow’s world. Thus force, for all practical concerns, is finite. There is a limit to how much force can be employed before we destroy that we wish to capture or defend. The same is true for wealth. Money can't buy everything, and at some point even the fattest wallet empties out. By contrast, knowledge does not. We can always generate more.
The Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea pointed out that if a traveler goes halfway to his destination each day, he can never reach his final destination, since there is always another halfway to go. In the same manner, we may never reach ultimate knowledge about anything, but we can always take one step closer to a rounded understanding of any phenomenon. Knowledge, in principle at least, is infinitely expandable. Knowledge is also inherently different from both muscle and money, because, as a rule, if I use a gun, you cannot simultaneously use the same gun. If you use a dollar, I can’t use the same dollar at the same time. By contrast, both of us can use the same knowledge either for or against each other—and in that very process we may even produce still more knowledge. Unlike bullets or budgets, knowledge itself doesn’t get used up. This alone tells us that the rules of the knowledge-power game are sharply different from the precepts relied on by those who use force or money to accomplish their will.
But a last, even more crucial difference sets violence and wealth apart from knowledge as we race into what has been called an information age: By definition, both force and wealth are the property of the strong and the rich. It is the truly revolutionary characteristic of knowledge that it can be grasped by the weak and the poor as well. Knowledge is the most democratic source of power, which makes it a continuing threat to the powerful, even as they use it to enhance their own power. It also explains why every power-holder—from the patriarch of a family to the president of a company or the Prime Minister of a nation—wants to control the quantity, quality, and distribution of knowledge within his or her domain.
The control of knowledge is the crux of tomorrow’s worldwide struggle for power in every human institution.
That's all for now --- now I have to take my medication and relax through Christmas.
Merry Christmas everybody!
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