The Coming Leisure Society

The last few days I've become increasingly obsessed with where the global economy is going and it's effects on the labor pool. After days of contemplating the large number of variables I now believe that a leisure society is inevitable, short of global catastrophe. Futurist and optimists have been dreaming about it for years, but I think we are likely to see it in our lifetimes, regardless of how bankrupt governments and social programs become in the interim.

One undeniable trend that almost every business guru agrees on, is that companies will have to become increasingly accountable and transparent to their investors and more responsive to their customers if they want to survive. As the power of the network grows, making it possible for more real-time information of a companies operations, the Board of Directors and the CEO are going to increasingly become accountable to investors and customers until they are almost superfluous in the organization. The current juggernaut of centralized and corporate behemoths, obscene executive salaries, and hierarchical organizations cannot withstand the power of the network much longer. I think the massive swindling is happening in part because of fear of their inevitable demise.

HERE IS HOW

Imagine you have two publicly traded companies that are both competing in the same sector. One of these companies is completely transparent throughout the entire enterprise - finances, hiring/firing, supply-chain, everything is open for review. One possible way to visualize this is to imagine a sophisticated 2D/3D real-time interactive animation display of every area of the companies operations. You could tell exactly how many people are working where, who is being hired, fired, expenditures for everything from trash bags in the company lunch room, to how much is being spent on advertising. All of it will be completely displayed in dynamical real-time techni-color graphics. The second company is just like most any company now doing business as usual (circa 2003).

In this competitive environment, the first company will be far more likely to attract investors than the second, but more importantly the first company's functioning will be so transparent to the people running it that clear communication and knowledge will available to everyone, even the customers and investors. Such a company will make it very easy for anyone to communicate, ideas to be exchanged across company lines, problem areas to be easily identified and resolved. The level of innovation and efficiency, not to mention the very attractive capital inflow from investor confidence, will easily out compete a company more worried about keeping things secret - regardless of whether its their books or intellectual property.

With the proliferation of RFID, good or bad, it will enable everyone, you and me to identify every product that we buy and automatically, and in real-time shopping mode, purchase only those products that come from companies who adhere to our ethical/corruption index, details of which I have blogged about earlier:

These types of measurements would be made via decentralized, ad-hoc, smart mobs in conjunction with individual reputation systems. So, not only will you be able to vote with your pocketbook, but also you will be able to make informed, even ethical consumer decisions based on people you trust. I can see this web-of-trust rapidly superceding top-heavy "consumer" capitalism, transforming it into a bottom-up grass-roots participatory capitalism.

As time goes on, and it won't take long in this nanosecond, increasingly automated and accelerated economy for this ecology of transparent companies to fine tune the very essence of what a company/economy does. By definition the economy itself will become utterly response to investors and customers who increasingly become the same person. These so-called ad-hoc transient companies will increasingly blur the line between one company and another, employees and investors, customers and executives, that such distinction will become meaningless. No longer will we have distinct "solid" and separate companies and consumers, but an evolving complex decentralized ad-hoc network of capital, people, ideas, innovation and wealth responding in real-time to the people it serves. It will mark the end of the corporation as we know it and the beginning of a truly support economy.

These responsive, transparent companies will become the economic and wealth producing engines that take all of us participants, along with their increasing automation into a full-time leisure economy. Already we are seeing massive outflow of labor to India and elsewhere. This unfortunately is the result of the power of the network. However, it's only a matter of time before even the cheapest of labor will no longer be necessary. More and more of the economic engine will become automated. It's inevitable, always has been. Initially such displacement could be very painful for a large number of people. However, these transparent companies won't survive if they are not responding to it's customer base. And without customers the company itself doesn't survive. So it will continue to make products cheaper and cheaper, continually improving the ease of investment, making it increasingly easier to move your money where its most needed and where it will provide the largest return. Everyone will be making less money from lack of employment and things getting cheaper, but everything will be getting cheaper at the same rate. So my theory is this time, this inevitable global depression will result in a leisure economy for everyone.

Oh, and green companies will out compete polluting companies, simply because they are more efficient. Such distinctions are not sensitive enough yet to tip the scale, but the real-time transparent economy will make every last shred of efficiency matter. End result, green and environmentally friendly companies win out.

Eight Basic Winner Scripts

Here is Robert Anton Wilson's eight basic winner scripts for each circuit of Leary's 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness.

The Eight Basic Winner Scripts

I. The biosurvival winner:

"I will live forever, or die trying."

II. The emotional-territorial winner:

"I am free; you are free; we can have our separate trips or we can have the same trip."

III. The semantic winner:

"I am learning more about everything, including how to learn more."

IV. The sociosexual winner:

"Love, and do what thou wilt." (Anon. of Ibid)

V. The neurosomatic winner:

"How I feel depends on my neurological knowhow."

VI. The metaprogramming winner:

"I make my own coincidences, synchronities, luck, and Destiny."

VII. The neurogenetic winner:

"Future evolution depends on my decisions now."

VIII. The neuroatomic winner:

"In the province of the mind, what is believed true is true, or becomes true within limits to be learned by experience and experiment." (Dr. John Lilly)

Before The Beginning Was the Void

By John Lilly

Before the beginning was the VOID.

Out of the void came the First Distinction, the Star Maker, the Creator, the Decision Maker.

Then came the idea of self, the consciousness without an object, the consciousness of itself without an object, the consciousness without consciousness, self.

From consciousness without an object came the object, the first object, space a space to vorticize, a space to whirl, a space to turn upon itself, a space to turn upon itself and then in addition turn upon itself in the other direction, opposite, expanding.

On the microlevel, the smallest vortex, the smallest quantum of space, the smallest of the smallest unit out of which all else would be built - the smallest vortex reproduced itself, reproduced in pairs, opposite, swinging oppositely, making sure to balance, so that the sum over all the integral of ALL was zero, as if not real. God created AS IF, the as if conscious as real, made hardware out of software, software out of hardware, creating nothing, casting ALL to destruction back in the VOID. Everywhere the VOID. Anything, everything, all of it can dump, at any moment, any instant, any eternity, any past, any future, into the VOID to zero out SAFE PLACE.

The integral of all the summed aspects of averaging through all the new creation, is all the little vortices and their dances to make larger vortices and their dances to make still larger vortices till finally a universe.

In the beginning was the point, the smallest possible point, the H nu, "h(v)," the quantum of action.

Also at the beginning was the quantum of love expanded, L star, L*, expanding becoming the idealized abstraction of universal love, filling the new universe, yet also filling the old consciousness without an object. The true prime abstract compassion working its own thing out there with nothing else to refer to. With NOTHING to refer to except ALL, which included it, itself, Lovestar, L*.

The random dance of E star, E*, entropic energy, totally random, having no point, no place, pure, pure energy, pure randomness, pure destruction burning all else into itself, becoming entropic, running down isothermally as high a temperature as it could achieve out of all the organization around it that it swallowed up.

N star, N*, negentropic energy, the big N, the Network, the intelligence, the organizer. That which comes, takes entropic, makes it straight, straight lines, points, planes, solids, cubes, crystals, computers, brains, life. The organizer. Building, building out of nothing everywhere, using entropic energy in its service, creating, creating straight lines, crooked lines, curves, surfaces, beautiful nonlinear spaces, Reimannian surfaces, pure mathematics.

Minus star [-]*, negative energy star. The pure negative energy, the destroyer of the creator. Negative opposite the positive energy.

Plus star, [+]*. Pure positive energy, the rejuvenator, the pusher, the creator, opposite of the destroyer [-]*.

Zero star, Z*, nothingness, the void, the absence of all, negative absence of the positive, the positive absence of the negative, the where with all, the opposite of all, from all, the zero place, the safe place, the nothingness from which all came and back to which all goes. Nothingness. Zero star, Z*.

[-+]* -> Z* -> [+-]*

All is nothing, nothing is all.

C* pure consciousness. The pure aspect of it, itself, before it thought of itself yet after it thought of itself. The distinguisher yet the non distinguisher. The pure high indifference HIND which is without the necessity of any of the others in this cosmic dance. The beginning, the end, the be all in C star, C*.

C*, [+]*, [-]*, L*, Z*, the five energies, the five sources. Opposite these from the left hand we go to the right hand. God starts with nothing, with zero, with Him before Him out of which He came, as well as everything else.

In his aspect as the Star Maker, N star, N*, the creator, that which created everything else including itself, N star, pure negentropic creativity. The organizer on the pure organization level. That which came and managed all else.

L star, L*, the lover. That which feels compassion is the L star trip for all the others, making sure that love permeates everywhere, keeping the atoms dancing and the vortices whirling, keeping space intact, not allowing zero to take over yet, yet compassionately reducing to zero that which is too much in the negative region.

Plus star, [+]*, pure positive energy seeking, always seeking, the positive, the orgiastic, the orgasm, the fucking of the universe fucking itself, always doing the fucking. The female fucker, the cunt, the cock, the male fucker. That which is so positive that it's unbearable. So anti-negative that it's euporhic, it's orgiastic and it's ananda, it is beyond comprehension in the positive realm. Pure positive abstraction.

Randomness, E star, E*, that which is totally unorganized, not allowing any organization to appear, destroying all organization that does appear. The shiva-shakti dichotomy to the nth power. Pure random organizer and anti-organizer that tears it all down, that destroys the whirlings, takes the vortices, converts them into pure electromagnetic energy by the collapse of anti-matter and matter into the energy space into the N* space and then reducing that itself. Pure randomness with photons no longer photons. With thermal photons no longer thermal photons and the isotropic eternal dance of nothing taking place in any direction with no space, no time, ten to the minus thirty-third centimeters, indeterminacy of space itself, of topology. Indeterminacy, the quantum of indeterminacy, raised everywhere supporting ten to the ninety-fifth grams per cubic centimeter of density, of apparent density and yet totally random.

Yet, God is beyond all this he is ALL, Allah, singing the praises of his creation, living through his creation, differentiating, unifying, diversifying, making further distinctions among ALL in order to differentiate, in order to start wars, in order to destroy in order to create, in order to be human, in order to make man, in order to make dolphins, to make animals, to make, to make, to make and unmake in turn ALL. Summing it all up including nothing. Nothing encompassing ALL. All encompassing nothing. That which became, that died and became ALL, then died again and become zero.

Table of Energies - Agents

Symbol     Energy			            Agent


C*        Consciousness, High Indifference	   Creator

L*        Love, Pure Abstract Involvement          Binder

N*        Negentropy, Pure Information		   Knower

[+]*      Positive Plus Energy		           Increaser

[-]*      Negative Minus Energy		           Decreaser

Z*        Zero, Nothing			           Voider

E*        Pure Entropy, noise, chaos		   Randomizer

A*        ALL, Everything			   Includer

U*        Unity				           Unifier

D*        Diversity			           Diversifier