For Final Seminarians
Draft Advice
Annotated Bibliography
Article Assignments
Position Paper 2
Possible Article Topics
Position Paper 1
Reading Responses
Syllabus
Class List
Course Overview
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Final ReflectionsSome thumbnail notes on major themes and ideas in this year's course: 1: "A naturally occurring Ponzi effect..." Robert Shiller on the dot-com bubble: a self-reinforcing mass delusion whose time has come and gone. See also Carton: short-term thinking leads to short-term businesses. The age of "dot-communism" has passed. No more fast companies. 2: Everybody has a story But the Internet experience wasn't and isn't meaningless. See the Cluetrain Manifesto for a vision of radically personal media and related businesses. Not just "stuff" but stories. A "new economy" is meaningless without a new culture. 3: The end of capitalism Peter Drucker, the man who is the 20th century: forget Marx and Darwin; get to know Frederick Taylor. Scientific management as the key to the future: knowledge workers, lifelong learning, smart companies, and the end of education as we know it. The "end of capitalism" is the beginning of employee-invested democracy. (A nice dream.) 4: The end of work Like Drucker, Jeremy Rifkin sees the eventual disappearance of human labor from productive processes; but Rifkin laments the change while Drucker celebrates it. See also Sterling: "money doesn't need people anymore." What happens to a consumer society when it can no longer relate to consumers? 5: The Fear Economy September 11 changed much, but as Paul Krugman points out, it didn't cause the current economic troubles by itself. There are good signs, such as new belief in government and a willingness to spend in the public interest; but there is also a danger of ending up in the Japanese death-spiral. Security is the key to much of the future. 6: Code is Law Lawrence Lessig believes that, left to themselves, government and industry will destroy the open, largely frictionless Internet. The terror war accelerates this process--note the potential danger of FBI Carnivore technologies and questions about terrorist use of steganography to hide communications in Internet content. We will have to decide how much authority we want government to have: but what standards can we use to judge? We won't be able to answer this question without an enlightened understanding of code. 7: Reputation and other games Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, J.P. Barlow, int. al. on Open Source and other alternatives to the traditional canons of intellectual property. Could "gift economies" displace exchange economies in some spheres? Compare Pierre Lévy's concept of "molecular culture," where personal relations scale up via network effects into post-national societies. Also see Sterling's nomads and their "reputation servers." 8: Blue skies Meanwhile the technology continues to evolve. Tim Berners-Lee wants to do for expert systems what he once did for hypertext: the Semantic Web, which moves from a network of documents to a social system of information available to software agents. The Internet would become less a medium than an environment. On a related note, see Kevin Kelly's "neobiological civilization," with smart machines that behave like organisms, and Donna Haraway's concept of the Cyborg, a meeting-point of animal, human, and machine. 9: Let me gaze into your... eye... Grand finale--Sterling's Distraction: a portrait of America at mid-century, totally out of its collective mind; but on the brink of a new kind of intelligence. Previous revolutions, whether industrial or cybernetic, have all ended up in a self-created dustbin. Could the next frontier be the Cognitive Revolution? Could it spell the end of the "human condition?" Who wants to sign up for posthumanity? |
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