Funny that I should have quoted Nezahualcoytl before I read this post. This is a
pretty good representation of what I have been trying to say about the value of
art and identity. If you decide to pay for it then it will be valuable, is a
stupid way to live. It IS valuable and paying for it stimulates transactions but
has nothing to do with it's value.
Sometime ago one of the economists and I had an argument about value. He said
that people would buy what was valuable and that it didn't deserve to live if it
had no consumers. Since that time my tools have grown.
If all products were equally marketed then that might possibly be true. But with
the shift to economies of scale, products that cost a great deal sixty years ago
and are now mass produced cost next to nothing. While on the other hand labor
must either be degraded which destroys social harmony or it will cost six times
the amount today as it did in 1964. That means that it is only staying current
with inflation.
On the other hand, the mass produced item which is of a lower quality, and has no
spirit within it, cannot be sold without massive advertisement. Why? Classical
music will, according to the myth, be bought when it is desired. But it is never
marketed with the kind of advertising skills that accompanies a box of dishwashing
liquid. Because, even if wildly successful it would not, in the current
atmosphere generate enough profit to pay for the advertising much less the
labor. The same is true of health care, spirituality or creative science.
Identity is dead, only things are alive. REH
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:
> Tom Walker wrote:
> >
> > All else being equal, I must say that predictions of a global oil peak
> > sometime in the next 10-12 years look fairly credible. I'd even be sanguine
> > enough to say that given the oilternative of global warming, the end of
> > cheap oil may not be such a bad thing.
>
> Fund anything and there's profit to be made in it. Where
> there is funding there is hope.
>
> >
> > But a funny thing happens on the road to the peak. In seventeen more months
> > the odometer clicks over on the millennium clock and a cartload full of
> > cobol programs aren't supposed to hack the transition. One of the milder
> > scenarios of the y2k sees a moderate to severe recession resulting from the
> > confusion. I won't mention the doomsday scenarios.
>
> The one faint glimmer of hope I see in the Y2K thing is that,
> already, like the lights going on as the sun goes down, even
> today, computer systems are "tripping" (circuitry, not Linda...)
> on 1998+2 calculations, so that at least some of the problems
> are being dealt with on a "pay as we go" basis. (In my job,
> I am currently working on a project where the specs are so bad
> that I have concluded the best hope for the thing to "work"
> is to force a beta-test to *manifest* problems, so that
> they can be dealt with on a reality basis. When sleeping
> dogs cannot safely to be left to lie, it's best to sound the
> claxon....)
>
> >
> > Considering that a major region of the world is already in a 'recession' and
> > that the fallout from that is already causing a 'slowdown' in the rest of
> > the world economy, predictions of a y2k induced recession may even be a
> > little stale. A more likely -- but still moderate -- scenario is that y2k
> > will prolong and deepen the recession that will already be in progress as
> > y2k consequences begin to surface.
> [snip]
>
> Shift of topic: Let's assume civilization (or what rather
> too-optimistically calls itself that...) survives Y2K. I
> think one of the problems which the Internet sets for us
> (hell[o], freemarket swashbucklers!) is the issue of
> preserving a "noosphere" (the sum total of knowledge in
> circulation at the present moment, for each moment as
> presence).
>
> In the Gutenberg age, this problem was
> pretty well resolved (at least until the free market
> discovered acid paper!), for, as Elizabeth Eisenstein said:
> With uniform printed editions, no matter how many copies
> of a book were lost or destroyed, there would probably be
> some left (not all reproduction is bad!). But with
> the Internet, this material substructure ceases to be
> sedimented out of our cultural life, and so, in an
> ironic twist of the vaunted "secondary orality", we
> find ourselves in at least as precarious a position
> as primary oral humanity -- but with a difference:
>
> They had "singers of tales" (Homer, et al), who
> devoted their lives to passing on the community's
> accumulated memory (rhyme and rhythm are a kind of
> ECC -- error detection and correction code) --> WHEREAS
> WE AREN'T AWARE THAT HUMAN DISCOURSE IS THE SOLE
> ABODE OF TRUTH AND REALITY, and therefore we aren't doing
> anything to preserve our selves (instead, we're
> busy, like my cat frantically digging in today's newspaper
> instead of *reading* it! -- we're busy hallucinating
> that everything is material stuff, that we are
> brains and brains are computers, etc.).
>
> Yes, the Internet redoubles our need
> for "singers of tales", or, in a more
> enlightened(!) version: we all need to
> cultivate our narratives and share them
> with each other. For me, *this* would be
> a meaningful future for work (and works).
>
> \brad mccormick
>
> --
> Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
> Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world.
>
> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
> -------------------------------------------------------
> <![%THINK;[SGML]]> Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
