It is difficult to say whether Prof. Angell is playing prophet or satirist. He does seem to like Nietzsche, quoting him often, and his prose contains images that remind one of Schumpeter’s gales of "creative destruction". Nevertheless, his thesis seems too strong and too deliberately calculated to shock and enrage. It may therefore be in the tradition of Jonathan Swift’s "Modest Proposal", which argued that babies should be served up for breakfast because there were too many of them around.
Here are some Angell samplers:
From "The Real Politik of the Information Age", © I. O. Angell 1997, Original of the article appearing in Information Strategy, January 1998.
"Politicians, with louder and louder voices, parade and preen, and dabble on the world stage. As they pose with a false confidence for both the press and their constituents, computerization is deskilling, and far worse displacing, a large proportion of today's jobs. A conservative estimate from the banking sector is that in this decade more than 150,000 bank employees will have been made redundant in the UK alone, and more than half a million across Europe, which unfortunately for continental bank clerks is lagging behind the UK in the `rationalization' stakes. The vast majority of these losses were precipitated by technological innovations such as the ATM machine, and the need to restructure banking procedures in the face of frenzied international competition. Many more financial sector redundancies are to come when electronic money is accepted by the richer sections of society, and fully automatic banking becomes the norm. But the job losses lurking just over the horizon for some other business sectors, particularly in retailing, could be far, far worse.
"While the politicians are posing for the peasants, aggressive opportunists are carving out the New Order, as when money markets manipulate national currencies and pour scorn on the pathetic pleas of finance ministers, and drug barons flood the world with narcotics. They are sweeping away old moribund institutions, not in anarchy and chaos, but with new ideas, new moralities, new rituals and new power structures; subsequently laying the foundations for new institutions.
"Meanwhile impotent politicians worldwide want to appear moral in their power broking. They seek the justification for their selfish actions in an infinitely flexible `international law'. Don't they realise that their position is not based on morality or justice, it never has been? Power intrinsic in the institutions of the time, and that power alone, gave them their position. But now that power is in terminal decline. It comes as no surprise that they are thoroughly bewildered when the consequences of their actions finesse, even reverse, their best intentions."
From: "The signs are clear: the future is inequality" © I. O. Angell, 1996. An article from the Independent newspaper, Wednesday 25th September 1996.
""Many too many are born. The state was devised for the superfluous ones." With these pitiless words from another century, Friedrich Nietzsche heralds the demise of the nation state as we enter the next. The Industrial Age and its need for an over-supply of humanity spawned the nation state. But what is to be done with the glut as we enter the Information Age?
"There will be no nice tidy transition, rather a severe and total dislocation with the past. One thing is certain: the masses will not win in the natural selection for dominance of an increasingly elitist and cosmopolitan world. ...
"Despite all the patriotic bleating, companies know that to remain competitive they can no longer afford to carry a large and overpriced inventory of a national "people product" of varying value and quality. It is no accident that most companies are presently downsizing, delayering and outsourcing. Routine production jobs can be performed by robots or exported anywhere on the globe, so wages will converge worldwide to Third World levels. "Social dumping" is also dragging down wages for service work, a sector which is itself being increasingly automated. In 1994 the International Labour Organization claimed there were 800 million subemployed people in the world; the West must now suffer its fair share.
"Job losses are not the result of some temporary downturn in the economic cycle, but are the result of structural change. It is no good waiting for the upturn. Fundamental changes in the nature of work are taking place, changes as profound as when agricultural workers left the land for the cities and the whole fabric of society mutated. Now work is leaving the office and factory for cyberspace. ...
"Politicians, both the knaves and the naïve, incant the abracadabra words "training in New Technology" and "jobs through growth" to conjure up new jobs for the huge number of soon-to-be-unemployed. They will never learn that technology is the problem, not the solution. Today, productivity is delivered by a technology needing only a few machine minders. National economies can no longer grow themselves out of unemployment. Growth has been uncoupled from employment. It is created by the unique skills of a few entrepreneurial knowledge workers, not the labour of low grade service and production workers.
"The continuous innovation of entrepreneurs is the real generator of wealth. Their income will increase substantially as countries compete in a global market for their wealth generating services, without which states will drown in a whirlpool of poverty....
"The role of the state is to propagate, nurture and supply quality human raw material. Government is merely the supplier at the bottom end of the value chain that ultimately supplies wealth. Wealth is not the product of labour, but of individual intellect and determination. If a state cannot produce a quality "people product" in sufficient quantities, then it must buy them from abroad; scour the globe for élite knowledge workers, no matter what their age, sex, race or religion. ...
"The lights are going out for whole categories of employment. We are entering an age of hopelessness, an age of resentment, an age of rage. Whole sectors of society that previously felt their future secure can see it slipping away. Dissent is fermenting, and normally law-abiding citizens have nothing to lose and are being sucked into a culture of protest and crime. In the winter of 1995, French workers and students took to the streets against Alain Juppé's government in a futile defence of their cradle-to-grave health and welfare systems. But as the peasants were protesting in Paris, the "Gnomes of London" were profiting from speculation....
"Democracy will degenerate to being the means of governing the immobile and dependent service workers. That citizens elect their slave masters makes their democracy slavery none the less. Democracy is an artefact from a time when the masses were needed. The big political question of the coming decades is how to find a socially acceptable means of dismantling democracy."
It is fittingly ironic that Angell’s global corporation is called "Specter". The specter is that of a few big sharks and a whole bunch of little fish.
After reading Angell, it is hard to say "Happy New Year", but what the Hell, here goes! Happy New Year!
Ed Weick
