There is much in this (especially trhe firstr article) of interest to the most dedicated Y2K ostrich: From: "Douglass Carmichael" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Y2K Week" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [y2kweek] y2kweek x week 60 issue #11 Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 18:55:47 -0500 Reply-To: "Y2K Week" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Y2k week X week 60 issue # 11 "never more than four pages" - oops! Not compliant yet. Shakespeare and Tao Consulting http://tmn.com/shakespeareandtao Douglass Carmichael with Mark Frautschi These weekly notes are part of a dialog built around an evolving set of scenarios (see http://tmn.com/y2k where back issues are also archived). Consider this an impression from the week, sighting of early indicators, deeper theorizing..) REFLECTIONS ON THE WEEK (doug) I was in three very interesting scenario discussions last few weeks, taking a broad swath. The first was with a group of mixed American and Brit intelligence folks (don't ask) and they agreed that there were really two scenarios: either we have markets leading to wars, or we take human rights seriously around the world. The strength of conviction was powerful. Then at an international meeting with confidentiality as to source, a senior US military person, asked to describe his view of the world said "For five hundred years we have had nation sates motivated by greed and power, and science and the arts and humanities motivated by creating a better world and more equality. Those two are at war and determine the current world structure. "The third was at another conference where it was said by three speakers, "Human development becomes the mantra of the 21st century, or we drown in war." Y2k does have its contexts! ---Thinking about the post y2k world. The US is surrounded by a countries that have a more developed dialog about the relationship of economy to social and human development than we have in the US. We are, lets face it, a frontier society. Our market zeal and political primitiveness in the US are not the marks of maturity. Y2k occurs in the midst of this vigorous debate about the future, debate we are not yet as a country quite into. My own take is that the future will be, regardless of how intense y2k is, technology intense. We need to come to terms with this. Y2k will rationalize the use of tech for good or for bad. The negative scenario for me is just more of the same drive towards the use of tech to rationalize the economy, spur consumption, and maximize profit. The reason why this is negative is that, while it will use tech to clean the environment, fix medicine, distribute information, at the same time it will reduce all profit in jobs (by using computers to compare workers for the best deal, while workers do the same, driving out margins), and increase the flow of wealth towards the monopoly positions of large agriculture, telecom, finance, consulting. The move in the world is towards increased ownership of stock certificate paper elite, workers employed at lowest possible wages, and those marginalized. I was party to a discussion among CEO's, "if you are paying employees more than 30k you are making a mistake. Either replace them with a kid, a machine, or get the job over seas." More on y2k imagery. Last week I described the kind of market frenzy that may result as people with needs meet people trying to fulfill those needs. The first thing to note about y2k, if it gets severe, is that there are going to be very intense human needs but people will seek out ways of meeting needs in exchange for some of the incredible amount of stuff in this society. As a result we will get a frenzied market, more like a village fair than a mall, flea market at the bottom, PIM marketing in the middle and owner brokering on a 24 hour basis at the top. This suggests some different strategies for local contingencies than the one tailored to a passive population caught unawares and stunned. It suggests thinking through how to help such "emerging markets" do the job and create local wealth. This is a prelude to what I see as a fairly likely and optimistic outcome of y2k.The neo feudalism model - It implies courts at the top and local communities at the bottom, with less in between. We could be moving towards a "neo-feudalism", and I use that in the positive sense. For example, as we note that world wages are tending to even out, and y2k nudges towards decentralized technologies, we might see the time coming when production at a distance loses its advantage and local production gains. That means that education, employment, politics, and conversation could cohere locally for the first time since the great trading empires arose in the 18th century and dominated the 19th and 20th. Other forces are weakening the Nation state, and then the question is, what is the most likely social and political organization? The large institutions around quasi monopoly positions within or between countries will probably hold on for a while: finance, energy, telecommunications, software, chips, agribusiness. But they cannot employ those left out or dropped as y2k peels back purchasing power and production capacity. Local unemployment will be taken up in new ways to meet the emerging needs as international trade takes a severe hit. Perhaps an information rich world could emerge, combined with new local self reliance and self respect, and the great fortunes made by buying and selling huge institutional arrangements will become much less important. Will new hopes however come up against old money and power, and will a new politics of human development win out against such an alignment? Y2k raises these issues - fortunately <<snip>> The following raises the stakes. It's courtesy of Tom Carey, picked up from Russia, but could it not hopefully be from the US? http://www.alincom.com/russ/index.html#ov "What challenge? Simply put, it is to define herself as a Republic of Citizens who tolerate neither suffering nor submission, but who having been stripped of past illusions now take up the tasks of personal and political re-definition. There is only one way to do this: we must take full responsibility both for ourselves and for our political leadership. We can not afford the luxury of being bored by politics. "What does responsibility mean? That we must re-create ourselves and our government-and keep re-creating and re-creating forever. We must transform the way we look at politics, from an inherently corrupt activity that can only further debase us, to an activity that wrests power away from the hands of tyrants and places it securely in the pockets of The People, giving us some reasonable amount of control over the elements and decisions that affect our daily lives. We cannot avoid responsibility: we must seek it out. Politics must not be a tedious circus show for us but an active, positive, creative part or our lives. Impossible in Russia, you say? No. We must simply make it so. "Of course, those in power will not allow us to do this, you say. Then, I reply, we must treat them as we would treat employees who walk off with the goods. Fire them. Only one form of government can deal with a Russian Citizenry that is armed with determination to take responsibility for itself and for its leadership-- a Republican one. But the mere form of Republicanism will not be enough. Leaders must lead, and in Russia this means to lead the nation by example and with actions that express the greater virtues of the Russian People. Coincidentally, those virtues are the same ones by which a Republic is defined: integrity, honor, compassion alongside an unbending and ever-present commitment to ensuring freedom. Then, and only then, will we be Citizens. "Remember this, you who would govern, and you who would be ruled: there can be no Russia without Citizens. Neither citizenship nor freedom is possible without personal ownership for both. The People and the government must make themselves perpetual allies in the guardianship of liberty. Or we will have not citizens but slaves, not government but tyranny, not Russia but a Khanate." EARLY INDICATORS. (doug) ---Hints of barter economy are popping up all over. The idea is to replace central bank notes with local currencies. The logic is simple. 1. If there are local needs and local unemployed, why not put them together? Why need to import expensive capital that appears to be scarce, and pay interest to the outside, when local script could let the two parties start work right now? 2. In general, too large a percent of spending goes to interest, which means to parties that only participate through the use of their "wealth", mostly on paper. For example its been said that perhaps 80% of rent goes to service debt. Its obvious. The renting company borrowed the money, and needs the rent to pay the interest. Since most products are produced by companies that are in debt, you can see how this multiplies and deepens throughout society, much of it hidden, and helps crate the great concentration of wealth. I had not thought about these issues before y2k. ---Non-linearity in the economy: Even for a conventional company (or country or city government) y2k offers unprecedented challenges. Stock piling in a spike in 99 means its opposite as inventories return to normal post y2k. Any reduction in economic activity will have a multiplier effect downwards, and at the time cites are hard hit by y2k costs of getting their systems fixed, new costs of getting the community prepared will be staggering. Spread sheets of cash flow through the period will be mandatory, and I see little evidence of such thinking yet. Most organizations still assume that the costs are internal and that the surrounding world remains constant. I saw this when working with a newspaper which had not considered the effects of y2k on Christmas revenues in Dec 99, and universities that have no plan for the reduced numbers of students flying back to campus in the first days of 2000. Lots of work to do. --People are seeking good - and better - metaphors for what Jan 1 might be like (or the days on either side.). "Traffic jam", for example, as attempts to cope create gridlock. Phones asking for help or schedules or availabilities of service, messages on the internet, or on LANs, Of course such a metaphor is also real. People will be driving all over to find what seems scare. This means that local - very local - walking distance - meeting of needs is going to be very important. Because it simply cuts down traffic. <<snip>> ---Are we becoming more conscious of what creates quality of life? The text appeared on the cover of last week's New York Times Magazine. "We, the relatively unbothered and well off, hold these truths to be self-evident: That Big Government, Big Deficits and Big Tobacco are bad, but that big bathrooms and 4-by-4's are not; that American overseas involvement should be restricted to trade agreements, mutual funds and the visiting of certain beachfront resorts; that markets can take care of themselves as long as they take care of us; that an individual's sex life is nobody's business, though highly entertaining; and that the only rights that really matter are those which indulge the Self. " ---y2k is in several ways - source and extent - an issue of numbers. Numbers creep and we do not notice large effects will follow. Often nasty. First menstruation is earlier, kids living with parents till 26, life hard for young people to get a grip on with a secure enough income for independence. The 20's, the age of life's major drama, when identity, personality, and hormones drive towards despair and love, hope and ambition, is increasingly overlapping with the period of marginality. This is a dangerous situation, unrecognized, in a slow creep of demographics that includes the soul making years of young people capable of idealism and love, parenting and loyalty and commitment, cast into a chaos of partial realizable mediocre plans for careers, or worse. ---Things are not as speedy as we think. The internet is growing more slowly in percent penetration than did radio or electricity. From Shakespeare to Milton was twenty years. From the Merrimac and the Monitor to 300 foot long steam powered totally iron destroyers was 15 years. <<snip>> ---Overseas reactions to American y2k failures.. This from the World bank Global Knowledge Net y2k discussion, by Roberto Verzola of the Philippines. <<snip>> "We need to unlink our local currency from the U.S. dollar, so our economy can function reliably even when the dollar's value fluctuates wildly as the financial maelstrom whipped up by the M-bomb releases its full force. Forex controls and similar measures are a necessary short-term step. But over the long-term, unlinking can only be done by putting more importance to internal production for local markets and to internal trade, rather than export production and foreign trade. "Our country is heavily dependent on the foreign exchange sent home by the more than five million Filipino contract workers overseas. If their host countries face an economic crisis or slide into a recession, our OCW compatriots will have nowhere to go but home. We should have jobs waiting for them, not to mention the 10.8 million under- and unemployed we already have. "In short, we should be doing what it takes to keep an economy self-sufficient and self-reliant in the first place. Only such a shelter can protect us from the fallout of the millennium bomb." <<snip>> ON THE EMBEDDED FRONT: (mark) <<snip>> I plan to show these [electric company] brochures at the neighborhood meeting that we are having tomorrow night about Y2K at our home. <<snip>> I walked to each of the fifty houses in our neighborhood and left a reminder leaflet on Sunday. I spoke with a few neighbors I did not encounter when I left the first announcement a week before. One of them told me "You know, I heard that that thing had been solved - only problem is that it costs $7,000.00 for each PC!" We chatted a bit about the absence of "silver bullets" and embedded systems and he showed some interest in coming. I had the impression that if there was something good on television Tuesday evening that we would not be seeing him. Another neighbor said that she would be out of town that evening. I lent her a copy of the 9 minute video entitled "Y2K & You" from Public Technology Inc. (http://www.pti.org/) that was sent to 30,000 local and municipal managers this summer. She watched it last night and left it in my door this morning without comment. Another neighbor said that they would not attend since they were returning to Europe in two weeks. I invited them to come anyhow, to share that perspective, and to consider that the problem will also impact Europe. I said that in the US we have the perhaps self-centered perception that we are not as far behind as other countries… I have a sense of a very low level of neighborhood interest in tomorrow night's meeting. The question is how to communicate about the risks effectively. My sense is that the message others are getting from me is 'doom and gloom' and quite appropriately, no one wants to buy any of that. I'm looking at the question that so many of the people speaking out on Y2K face, which is how to communicate the risks and the opportunities for action effectively. I spoke with a FedEx courier last week. He was carrying a portable terminal / keypad / bar code reader used to track the packages he delivered and picked up. We chatted about the Year-2000 problem. I asked him whether his device could display a date. He obliged me and showed me "11/06/98." He asked me whether I thought y2K would be a big problem. I said I thought that it could be and that it was worthwhile to prepare for major disruptions, as insurance. <<snip>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, forward this message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
