2006 – Page 4 – Jonathan Rowe

The Missing Tail

Oh dear. Another red hot business notion that is going to level the old paradigm, change the world as we know it, and create piles of dough for those with the capacity to think outside the box and the gumption to stay ahead of the curve.

I’m losing track of all these paradigm shifts. But the new one is called The Long Tail, and it comes to us via a book of that name, written by a fellow by the name of Chris Anderson, who is the editor of – who would have guessed? — Wired Magazine. Anderson’s argument is that computers and the Web have changed not just the mechanics of selling but also the nature of what is sold. In the old days, people bought a lot of a relatively few things. It was the 80/20 rule: eighty percent of sales came from twenty percent of the stock.

Agents of Distrust

The intelligence agencies of the former Soviet Bloc were more than means of acquiring information. Equally important, they were agencies of distrust. When people didn’t know who was an informant, their inclination to confide was to that extent diminished. The risk of challenging authority was multiplied many times. When the friend to whom you might entrust an anti-regime manuscript, or even just a thought, might be in the secret employ of that same regime, you would think many times before doing it.

Distrust causes people to retreat into cocoons of self-interest and survival; and self interest ultimately is the friend of the powers that be. The corporate economies of the West have produced their own version of this socially corrosive function. An example appeared last week in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s how the story begins:

The Estate Tax and the Nature of Wealth

When I read last week that the U.S. House of Representatives had voted to eliminate most of the federal estate tax (75% of it to be exact), I was at a conference at the former Rockefeller family estate in Pocantico Hills, New York. There is a connection, but it is not the one that many assume.

One reason I never will be a bona fide member of the Left (at least as portrayed on the Wall Street Journal editorial page et. al.) is that I do not feel resentment of the very rich, nor for the most part do I envy them. More often I think how pathetic some people are, to feel compelled to pile up lucre upon lucre long after they have enough hundreds of times over. Donald Trump is in love with being Donald Trump; and I say he can have it.

“Jingoes Should Pay for Jingoism”

A couple of days ago I saw a story about a Texas family that just had lost a second son – second and last — in Iraq. That same day, I read that Republicans in the U.S. Senate have renewed their efforts to repeal the estate tax, or diminish it to practically nothing. I doubt those Republicans have thought much about the connection between the sacrifices they expect of others and the ones they are not willing to make themselves. They should.

There was a time, not that long ago, when military service was something the children of the rich did not entirely avoid. As recently as the 1950s, about half the graduating classes at Harvard and Princeton went on to serve. Bush Sr. left Yale to fly missions in the Second World War. His son of course used family connections to avoid Vietnam; and the distance between the two defines the distance between the father’s time, and ours.

A Captive Audience of Kids

Corporations seek to dominate space. First it was physical space, and now it is mental space – what is called, in marketing argot, “mindshare.” The political Right seeks to cut taxes to shrink the public sphere, or “starve the beast” in Grover Norquist’s phrase. Put the two together and what do you get? You get corporations laying claim to common space, and to the minds of those who occupy it.

The latest example is BusRadio, a company in Massachusetts that is going to install special radio receivers in school buses, so it can fill the airspace in them with ads aimed at kids. School districts starved for funds will get a cut of the ad revenues. BusRadio will get a captive audience of impressionable kids that it can sell to corporate advertisers eager to get inside their minds. The compulsory school laws will become the means to corral these captive kids and deliver them to the sponsors.

Go Martha

In the precincts of Rightward opinion, they dismiss concerns about the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else as the effluvium of envy and other base motives. But the problems are real, as a visit to most Third World countries would attest. One of the biggest, and least discussed, is the way vast wealth insulates people in high places from the impacts of their own decisions and behavior, and from the problems the rest of us confront every day.

People who fly in executive jets never experience the travail that air travel today has become. People with staffs to pay their bills miss the joy of dealing with credit card companies, with their multitude of tricky ways to extract more money from us. Dick Cheney and George W. Bush never will have to worry about medical insurance; and it shows in the ideological and cavalier way in which they purport to deal with the problem for everyone else. (I suspect neither has to wait in telephone help line queues either.)

Slouching to Enclosure Land: How We’ll Lose Those Parks

Most of life is habit. We like to think that we think and choose. Economists have made a religion out of this assumption. But in daily life, what we think, say and do is pretty much what we thought, said and did yesterday, and the day before. Is there anyone out there who could not predict how the Wall Street Journal editorial page would come out on a given issue, or the clerics in Iran for that matter? Most of us are less extreme versions; but still the mechanism takes over, and the grooves run deep.

Dictators and corporate marketers know how to use this to their advantage. Monsanto knows that if it gets genetically engineered seeds into the food chain, people will accept them sooner or later. Genetic engineering will become a new normal. The mental grooves will take shape around it, as will the practices of the food industry itself. PR can create an enabling mental atmospheric to ease the process. And once done it will be hard to reverse. Habits are easier to make than to break, as the old saying goes.

Bamboo for Who?

Once again the question: who would bother to develop a technology for which they didn’t hold a patent monopoly? And once again the answer: lots of people. Today’s case in point is bamboo scaffolds.

Bamboo is a wonderful material. It is a form of grass; so that when cut, it grows back again – and fast, in a matter of months where a tree takes many years. The wood is light, strong, and flexible. It has a multitude of uses, from houses and furniture to carabao (water buffalo) sleds and even bicycle frames. A bamboo house breathes; the slats feel cool under bare feet. And then there are scaffolds.

Cooperative Economy in the Great Depression

The mood at kitchen tables in California in the early 1930s was as bleak as it was elsewhere in the United States. Factories were closed. More than a quarter of the breadwinners in the state were out of work. There were no federal or state relief programs, nothing but some local charity—in Los Angeles County, a familyof four got about 50 cents a day, and only one in 10 got even that.

Not long before, America had been a farming nation. When times were tough, there was still the land. But the country was becoming increasingly urban. People were dependent on this thing called “the economy” and the financial casino to which it was yoked. When the casino crashed, there was no fallback, just destitution. Except for one thing: The real economy was still there — paralyzed but still there. Farmers still were producing, more than they could sell. Fruit rotted on trees, vegetables in the fields. In January 1933, dairymen poured more than 12,000 gallons of milk into the Los Angeles City sewers every day.

Why Don’t We Share the Toys?

We were in the sitting area of my in-laws’ home in La Castellana, a municipality in sugar cane country on the island of Negros. The television was on, as it always seemed to be; and my son, who is three, was playing with two small trucks we had bought for him in Iloilo. A group of kids appeared at the door to see these strange visitors from the place faraway, and the little boy who, though distantly related to them, did not look much like themselves.

The kids’ eyes fixed right away on the trucks; Filipino kids don’t have many toys, and they prize them in a way most American kids can’t They made gestures to join my son in play, which he did not welcome. He became agitated, and concocted a rule, as he tends to do in such situations. Those toys were only for kids who were three, he said, by which he meant himself. He said this over and over. The kids didn’t understand the words, but they got the drift. They retreated, bruised. And I felt something I rarely feel regarding my son – namely, shame.