Imagine…someone comes into your home. They take a look around, and they have a very compelling appearance, and they are effective at demonstrating their care and concern for your well-being and the stability of your house. They look about and they say, “I would like to help you—I am a servant to the public. I notice this plate up here on your shelf is cracked. I can fix that for you—that is what I am here to do.”

They reach up, they take the plate off the shelf, and they open their hand so it falls to the floor and smashes to pieces.

“Oops”, they say, “those damn plate manufacturers! I can fix that for you…”

You, not really understanding gravity, say to them, “okay. I mean, you’re a public servant and all. Here: lemme give you the keys to my fine china cabinet so you can make sure all the plates have been manufactured according to reasonable standards…”

They take the keys, saying that is what you asked them here for in the first place, they take all the plates out and smash them one by one to the ground, and then, they declare with great indignation that they will hold public meetings to see just who caused this, and then they offer the manufactures some of your money to help them, since, you know, with all these plates breaking, their business seems to need some assistance.

You, feeling a bit confused mumble that you don’t really remember asking them here at all, but shrug it off, thinking they must be well intentioned, being a servant to the public and all…and so you, feeling delighted someone is taking your interests to heart, donate some money to the servant’s organization, and ask them to come back from time to time to make sure those darn manufactures are being kept in line.

And then, the servant’s organization hires one of the manufacture’s CEOs to help them design better policy to keep them in line. After they donate a very large sum of money to the servant’s organization—with no expectation of that influencing them, of course. That would be…well, unconscionable, they say with practiced righteous indignation.

One of the most unfortunate products of ignorance in our constitutional republic is the politicization of economics.

It is this Party’s or that Party’s “fault” for some economic crisis, recession, or a sector’s collapse. This is unfortunate because if there is one aspect of our culture that is truly bi-partisan it is economic policies, passed as feel-good measures, or patron pay-offs that will predictably lead to an eventual collapse.

This is further FED [no pun intended, but I’ll take it] by the ignorance of the populace when it comes to natural economic laws, which are as sound as the laws of physics—and equally as magical seeming to most due to [and sadly I have to repeat it] ignorance. Ignorance of not only history, which is a common and not-oft-enough area to educate people in, but also of economic cycles, the role of government, the efficacy of policy initiatives, and the confusion of what we wish were so and actual reality.

[to be cotinued in the coming weeks]…

And so it goes with a true emergent. Just like we can only guess what the techno-economic base will be in the Integral age…

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable by Clay Shirky.

Chilling [for those in the publishing busines] article on the internet and news distribution and the economics behind it.

Key Graphs:

Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

[...]

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

Yeesh. Chilling truth.

[...] And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

And:

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

Be sure to go read the whole chilling, exciting, wondrous thing.

via AnthonyBaker