I hope this is wrong. I'm still trying to recover from the Windows 2000
upgrade. The idea that every new, and forced, MicroCrap upgrade increases
productivity is some kind of cruel joke. I, and 99% of users, do
essentially the same kind of thing with word-processing and slide making
that we did 20 years ago with programs like wordstar. It's just twice as
hard and expensive now than it was then and there is this god-damned little
paperclip animation that keeps irritating me AND WON'T GO AWAY.
We also have half a dozen redundant systems of "enterprise software" that
has forced all the administrative work on to the professional staff while
the administrative staff is off in training to learn all about the next more
elaborate and useless system. Yes, this would help the economy, just like
Military Keynesians.
On the bright side, there are some really neat, innovative and useful
Web-based technologies that rely on and take advantage of cooperative,
interactive information exchange. These are NOT the programs, however, that
get installed as the core enterprise software. Of course not, they do not
cater to the hierarchical management model of corporate capitalism (also
imported into government organizations. Thanks to f***ing Al Gore for
"reinventing" government).
BTW, has anyone looked at the reality behind the "productivity miracle" of
information on the Internet. I know that today I can access huge amounts of
information very efficiently compared to 5 or 10 years ago. That's great.
But as one of the "content providers," I also know that a huge amount of
human work is required to get that information up on the Web page in the
first place, and a whole lot of this work is done basically by forced
overtime by public sector workers (oh yeah, another new job forced on
people, add Web master to your job description). Also the best presentation
of this information come from individuals with long and deep institutional
knowledge and experience, that is, the information is a product of their
efforts and the accumulated social labor of their organizations. I find it
a kind bizarre reification that the productivity is all attributed to
computer hardware and software when, in fact, the real value of the Internet
is in the information that can only be produced by the human (intellectual)
labor that is embedded in it. This is why thousands of private sector
dot-coms are going down the drain and the most valuable aspects of the
Internet to survive will be governmental and non-profit sector run sites.
Of course the next strategy, will be for private Web firms to find ways to
expropriate the publicly produced information, gain bogus copyright
protection and then make it into a commodity for sale while forbidding the
original sources of the information from distributing it.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Devine [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2001 11:12 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [PEN-L:11903] technology as a reason for hope?
[was: Re: [PEN-L:11900] Re: Re: Re: Re: Paul Krugman: no energy crisis]
Andrew wrote:
>... One thing to look at this year is Microsoft Windows XP, the new
>operating system version. If it forces a lot of hardware and software
>upgrades, that will help the economy quite a bit. It's scheduled for a
>third quarter release, but Microsoft has a tendency to miss its
>deadlines.
of course, when times are tight businesses may delay "upgrading" to XP
because they don't want to upgrade their hardware and their other
software... Households are even more likely to follow this strategy. BTW,
I'm told that Windows ME is a disaster -- that the best thing to do is to
install it (to get the bug fixes for Windows 98) and then to un-install it.
If this is true, it will encourage folks to delay...
>Although I've been pretty pessimistic over the last two years, I'm
>becoming less so. The technological outlook is getting much more
>interesting over the next 5 to 10 years. There are some new,
>interesting ideas on the horizon.
of course, during the 1930s, there were a lot of technological advances.
But many of them weren't put into practice because demand was depressed.
Supply doesn't create its own demand.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
