Fortune Cookie: Weapons of Mass Education

[qaexl]

From the beginning, there was purpose behind forced schooling, purpose which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead, this grand purpose was forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of finance bent on internationalizing itself was thought to need; that, and what a strong, centralized

Comments

Rambling

[qaexl]

I have only read the introduction of Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. He chose 1500 as an arbitrary cut-off dateline for his survey. Industrialization created this huge leverage in resource control and production, until the very ideas of Progress and Productiveness have become modern mythic figures.

I'm circling around to those ideas I only had superficial understanding of when I was a teenager -- ideas about the Internet changing the world, that decentralization (and therefore, the overthrow of the previous generation of Authority). At what point can we say that Information-centric (or rather, Information-decentric?) technologies have trumped Industrial-centric technologies. For now, I think Buckminster Fuller is on to something -- that when technological progress becomes small enough to become invisible, it will accelerate faster than humans are capable of keeping up with. (And again, I wonder how many of the Technology Singularity folks have actually studied Fuller?)

Fuller had created a simulation called the World Game. That game probably illustrates the relationship between the industry and the military of a power. He designed that game before the IBM PCs were around. I think he was trying to demonstrate some key ideas to game participants. Nowadays, we have 4D Empire games such as Civilization or Victoria. Hell, the MMO strategy game Kingory shows the balance of industry and military thoroughly, even though it is set in the Three Kingdoms era of China.

There's another secret though. How has decentralized information networks changed the power balance between individuals and organizations?

-Qaexl

Re: Rambling

[qaexl]

Example. Blogging and internet news has seriously disrupted the current journalist traditions, to the point where graduates with Journalism degrees are using the same words trade unions were using to protect their craft being made obsolete by the industrial machine. You would think that the power was given back to the individual bloggers, that now we are coming back to the older ideals of democracy, where a single individual can make a difference with his voice.

Yet I had worked a contract with a company that has a blogging machine. There were a number of "SEO specialists" hired specifically to write blogs, to increase Google search rankings. The articles were vapid, at best, and on average, nonsense. Yet they worked. The SEO campaign was the only thing keeping the company alive, driving 80% of their revenue to their flagship product.

So who ate who, the Industrial Juggernaut or the Information Ninja?

-Q

Re: Rambling

[thewronghands]

Many of the vapid blogs get highly linked because of keywords and such, but that's not really the same as having heft. Cross-linkage is a part of a solid reputation in a reputation economy, but is itself insufficient. So they may get some product sales, but I'm not sure that's the same as enduring market dominance over time or an actual powerful reputation.

Re: Rambling

[qaexl]

So I guess the question is this: if people were to affect change and do not have access to the levers of Industrial Power, do they have access to post-Industrial powers instead? How would one identify them?

If a person wanted to make changes to the education system today, for example, would we play by the new rules? I think so. I think the secret is to see what can't be seen, because that is where and how information technology trumps industrial organizations.

More thoughts on this later.

-Q