2347) In a democratic society, it's dangerous for elected officials to ignore the body politic. But what if it has been driven mad by television? What if the duties of the citizenry have been abandoned by most of those that are still sane? Thomas Jefferson never imagined the conduct of democracy in the thrall of a mass medium.

John Perry Barlow
"The Netizen: The Powers That Were"
Wired (9/1996)

2348) That subset of Americans who still exercise their [voting] franchise -The Market, if you will - tend to be much older, whiter, and more socially conservative than the population in general. The live mostly in suburbs, shop in malls, work for large organizations, and go to church on Sunday. Creatures of a mass society, living in a culture created by mass media. Genericans. Not a bad lot, really. Decent people, most of them, with good judgment - if that judgment were well informed.

And that's the problem. For most of The Market, reality is, as I say, almost entirely based on The World According to Television. This has been the case since the Kennedy-Nixon debates and will continue to be the case for some time. The World According to Television is not a reality that arises from direct experience with events or phenomena. It is a processed world, both eviscerated of context and artifically fortified toward no greater purpose than entrancing the audience.

[... Television has] learned that fear, violence,and sex all fertilize attention marvelously, so it continually churns up virtual demons and scandals that not only jolt the audience into paying attention, but completely transform the political debate. Voters are now more concerned with imaginary threats than with real ones, and so they elect representatives who will address these "problems" without regard to their existence.

It's become a hung loop. Consider the process behind the following familiar example. Looking to raise share and beat back the future, the media raise an imaginary problem, say, a cyber-tsunami of online kiddie-porn. Out in Televisionland, parents who have already been driven into a state of omniphobia by TV depictions of kidnappers, child molesters, and Calvin Klein commercials, freak out and call their congressperson.

Of course, the congressperson doesn't actually know whether or not there's a flood of kiddie porn online. He (or she) has never been online and isn't about to go there. But he does know that his constituents have seized upon An Issue that they are truly passionate about. Under such circumstances, it takes a brave man to do nothing. So he gets together with his colleagues and passes a law that effectively addresses a problem almost no one has ever experienced, while issue forth a whole new set of real ones.

The is democracy in the Television Age, working with hideous efficiency. It is [...] Government by Hallucinating Mob. A push-me, pull-you that is self-contained and almost completely detached from anything that I would call "real." The US government has broken, the victim of television and of connection crash in general.

John Perry Barlow
"The Netizen: The Powers That Were"
Wired (9/1996)

2349) Stuart Kauffman at the Santa Fe Institute has studied "complexity catastrophe," in which an organism or natural system is forced by its context to process more information than it can. A frequent symptom of this kind of connection crash is fibrillation - a purposeless, resource-expensive quivering that usually culminates in system collapse. It could easily be said that Congress, indeed the entire government of the United States of America, has already reached this state. But however useless and wasteful I think it has become, there are enough Americans who believe in the comforting myth that their government still works, that its continued institutional existence probably contributes to a calm, however delusionary, among the People.

John Perry Barlow
"The Netizen: The Powers That Were"
Wired (9/1996)

2344) By and large, there are no more advantages to big business. There are only disadvantages. [...] Big companies had three advantages, and they are all gone. The first was that they could get transnational or international money that a medium-sized company could not. Now everyone can.

Number Two is information. It used to be that nobody had any information. But as you go more international, as the economy becomes more global, the access to good information becomes crucial. If you are a medium-sized company, then the CEO still knows every customer and still knows the industry. You can;t get that in the US$10 billion company; you get reports. Reports tell you what your subordinates want you to know.

The last and most important factor is that young, educated people do not want to work for the big institutions. That's true even in Japan today. [...]

[People who have chosen medium companies over big ones] often say, We would really like some security, but there ain't no such thing. All of them know those days are gone. So they say: If there's no security in the big companies, then why should I be bored to death? In that medium-sized company, I don't have the big job, but when somebody has to go to Shanghai to straighten out the distributor, I go. And I have fun.

Peter Drucker
interviewed by Peter Schwartz and Kevin Kelly in
"The Relentless Contrarian" in
Wired (8/1996)

2345) The model for management that we have right now is the opera. The conductor of the opera has a very large number of different groups that he has to pull together. The soloists, the chorus, the ballet, the orchestra, all have tocome together - but they have a common score. What we are increasingly talking about today are diversified groups that have to write the score while they perform.

What you need now is a good jazz group. And if you want to have a really good jazz group, how large can it be? How large can it be when you have people who improvise on their own and the group realizes that the trumpet player is now playing his solo and everybody needs to stop and support him? You can use seven to nine people - maximum. If you get more, you have to score.

So how can you have a big company or a very big organization when you have to develop the store as you go along? Today, you build different teams. Sounds beautiful. But nobody has found a way to do it.

Peter Drucker
interviewed by Peter Schwartz and Kevin Kelly in
"The Relentless Contrarian" in
Wired (8/1996)

2346) A lot of top [corporate] managers enjoy cruelty. There is no doubt that we are in a period in which you are a hero if you are cruel. In addition, what's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There's no excuse for it, no justification. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we'll pay a very nasty price.

J.P. Morgan, who certainly cannot be accused of not liking money, gave an order to his investment people never to invest in a company in which the CEO earned more than 30 percent more than the next layer. That CEO, he said, can't build a team, and the company is mismanaged. He also said once that the proper ratio for salaries for employed people, between the top people and the rank and file should be twentyfold, posttax. That's the highest. Beyond that, you create social tension.

Peter Drucker
interviewed by Peter Schwartz and Kevin Kelly in
"The Relentless Contrarian" in
Wired (8/1996)

2339) Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well done.

Ernie Kovacs (widely attributed)
quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (7/1996)

[Note: Occasionally attributed to Fred Allen. Kovacs is credited with it, without citation, in The Filmgoer's Book of Quotes (1973) L. Halliwell, ed.]

2340) Television, huh? TV coverage absolves absolutely anything in America. If these guys [the Survival Research Laboratories] have been on 20/20, then they must know what they're doing, right?

Bruce Sterling
"Is Phoenix Burning?"
Wired (7/1996)

2341) A Calculated Forecast of Ultimate Doom - Sickening Episodes of Widespread Devastation Accompanied by Sensations of Pleasurable Excitement

Mark Pauline
title of a Survival Research Laboratories performance
quoted by Bruce Sterling in
"Is Phoenix Burning" in
Wired (7/1996)

2342) [T]he whole deadly clutter of postmodern tech is inherently fascinating in a particularly sickening and dangerous way that most of us cannot rationally sense. It's fascinating and evil, with the same imp-of-the-perverse element that makes humanity's automatic rifles look as lovely as a sonnet while the homes and buildings and cities where we work and live look like the crappy cartons those rifles came in.

Bruce Sterling
"Is Phoenix Burning?"
Wired (7/1996)

2343) People talk about making computers easier to use, but it usually ends up that humans are made easier for computers to use.

Jesse Freund
"Natural Correction" in
the "Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (9/1996)

2338) Reality is not optional.

Thomas Sowell
(widely attributed - see note)
quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (7/1996)

[Note: The only citation for Sowell originating this quotes is a column "Riots in France: The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris" published in November 2005, well after the present instance of the quotation. Since many attributions refer to "paraphrasing" Sowell, this might be something he wrote elsewhere in somewhat different form. See #286 Dick, #739 Huxley and #770 Huxley]