The View from Nowhere

Ever since Keanu kung-fu’d his way out of the Matrix, everyone knows that “there is no there there.”  Everything that we understand as real is just a floating, disembodied symbol with no underlying meaning.  Even our own bodies are superfluous to our minds, soon we’ll download into new robot bodies, or maybe even black Trans-Ams, and drive off into the inevitable cyber-future of tomorrow.  I guess this all makes sense if you are into robots and talking cars but is it really accurate?

Sitting in the United States the undisputed bully, ehem, champion of the free-market, globalized, super-democracy it follows that goods and services and their corresponding price would be a good place to analyze the relationship between a symbol (its worth) and the thing itself (the commodity).  If we made 1995-2001 the focal point for our analysis, it seems the above holds pretty true.  Securities traded a zillion times above actual company profits.  Month old dot-coms IPO’d for tens of millions while still in the red and nary a business plan.  Actual value was so 1980’s man!  We’re post-modern!

Now, in the middle of a global credit crunch, the skeletized corpses of past dot-coms lining the shoulders of the information super-highway, and the ghouls of corporate scandal still haunting the media it seems that some of the hype, well, was just hype.  Sadly, market pressures really do seem to care about profits and earnings.  Business plans matter, and if the cost of oil and other natural resources is any indicator, demand for a thing and how much of that thing is available really are important factors in determining monetary value.

Herbert Schiller is one of those guys that people don’t talk about very much.  His ideas aren’t really cool, and so far, Keanu has yet to make a movie based on anything he wrote.  If beer goggles make every person super-hot and sexy, Schiller goggles make everything look like they would after a week long methamphetamine bender.  That is to say, all things appear intertwined, interrelated, and headed for disaster forcing the goggle wearer to become crippled by paranoia and fear.  Schiller stressed that things were not just “things” but instead symbols (and here is the critical part) and these symbols are critically related to labor, value, and exchange.  There is a there there and its everywhere man!

If 1997 is Baudrillard and 2007 is Schiller, it looks like Schiller wins, because in 2007 your house is worth less than it was last year, it costs 100 bucks at the pump, and the Canadian price on books really does seem expensive.  But wait, much like Mick Foley on that legendary day in June 1998, Baudrillard is not going down without a fight.  Even though goods are real, and have real value, the daily work for many Americans is more and more abstract.  TPS reports anyone?  Black clad superheroes and Baudrillard are both right when it comes to information.  Its not there and neither is the work that people do.  Project planning, logistics, databases, middle management; these things are very difficult to quantify.  Measurements such as tonnage, units shipped, gross, capacity, and so on cannot be easily applied to these disciplines.  Woah, so we are in the Matrix?  It sure looks like it.  As workers we are increasingly separated from physical products or even a tangible service.  As telecommuting becomes more common there isn’t even a there, work is just something that is done wherever and whenever it is needed.  Sounds cool on paper, but for my money there is something inherently satisfying in seeing “something” completed.  Even if the something is not  physical, process based activities where satisfaction comes in knowing that during your shift your duties were completed in a way that won’t get you fired are not that fulfilling.

A way out of this conundrum seems to take the abstraction further.  If work is decoupled from the product, why not make an abstract product?  If new measurements are defined that allow for the creation of an abstract thing that lost connection could be recreated.  I’m sure this chills some readers, but I’m not talking about big brother type supervision and relentless goal setting, I’m talking about a new system that taps the psychology of wanting to complete a goal in a way that brings out worker’s talent rather than restricting it.  Peter Drucker talked about management practices that enhanced individual performance, allowing each person’s ability to contribute to the aggregate rather than simply turning one bolt as dictated by a ridged, central plan.  Apart from some divine rescue from a pill-wielding religious fanatic, this is the only way that I can see out of my particular cubicle.