Post-Industrial Economics

Global Supply and Demand

The Unites States has historically addressed the problem of poverty by the exporting it. In Smith's economic model of the Wealth of Nations, "all boats rise" towards egalitarianism with the rise in the wealth of that society. Scarcity is a (relative) constant, however, and will become more glaringly so in direct proportion to the rise of the Earth's population. When one nation's wealth increases, by necessity the wealth of another decreases relatively. Smith fully endorses the notion that economic trade is purposefully disadvantageous to one trading partner in discrediting the notions of trade restraints presented by duties and tariffs.

In a global sense, this disparity is apparent by second and third-world "boats falling" while first-world "boats rise." Restricting globalization to the fluid export of goods keeps this imbalance in place. Fluidizing the market for labor (such as through NAFTA and the WTO), however, causes the water under first-world boats to flow to second and third-world countries, however, in that the means of a nation's production are no longer controlled by that nation. The Wealth of Nations becomes the Wealth of the Global Nation. This globalization has three stages, each roughly corresponding to a Gaussian curve.

Global Transportation and Communication

The first stage of globalization started with the fluidity of the market for physical goods beginning early in the 15th century, but gaining critical mass with the advent of globalized transportation. This enabled societies to buy and sell things with other societies not geographically bordering their own. The transformative aspect of this process has peaked, though, through industrialization, and will continue until all nations are industrialized.

With the advent of global transportation, labor markets began to become more fluid. This began with the labor markets emergent from global trade of human slaves as property, but came to a peak with the advent of globalized communication. Building on global trade, labor markets became inherently more fluid. This process is peaking with global trade-unionization which permits the export of labor (and therefore also poverty), oftentimes without regulating the process, such as NAFTA, WTO, the EU, and the CIS. This is happening primarily as a reaction against the first stage, in that nations can become more economically profitable on the short-term by exporting industrialization (not just goods) to developing nations, along with massive debt managed by the World Bank. This stage will continue until all industrialized nations are capable of global labor trade.

This process of outsourcing began with production of commodities from natural and trade resources, but becomes weighted in favor of nations with more fundamentally scarce natural resources, namely oil. At the outset of industrialization, it would have been laughable to propose that the Petronas Corporation would build the largest skyscrapers in the world in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. During the formative years of industrialization (the middle of stage one and beginning of stage two), the Middle East and Pacific Rim were at the disadvantageous end of trade inequalities. During industrialization of the extraction and refining producing of oil, however, gross profits have come to those in control of the means of its production, often at great expense to those not in control of the means of production.

Petrosociety, Information Society

In oil-producing nations, gross national wealth is being built through industrialization, with the recipient of the trade inequality becoming those who lack the natural resource upon which industrialization itself is built: crude oil. Shale and bitumen can be processed to fuel traditional oil-based technologies, but not at a cost which benefits its extraction and production in trade. This produces a shift in social, political, and economic power from those to benefit those who control the flow of oil. Wars are, obviously, still being fought over this, and will continue to be fought until another commodity emerges in competition - whether that be a physical commodity (a viable alternative energy source) or a social one.

With industrialization of technology, however, comes the industrialization of communications. Recent decades have seen the monetization of information in the same manner as the monetization of oil. Oil isn't intrinsically capital any more than information is, because you cant use it as a means of production until you process it. Information economies have emerged around intellectual "property," and the political systems that manage those economies have realized that by controlling the flow of information (frequently at the expense of personal social liberty), they can not only profit by its trade, but obtain political stability through enforcement of internal cultural hegemony. China arguably leads the world in this form of information control (though the case could be made to put North Korea in the lead) through tight governmental control of news sources, education, and communication. Australia and America have been following China's lead in this economy, however, with the government censorship of information (in the case of the former,) and the DMCA, COPA, and MAPA (in the case of the latter.)

The pattern of outsourcing of industrialized aspects of economies continues from that of the generation of technology to the outsourcing of the generation of information. When the factories go to developing nations, the managers, designers and engineers soon follow. This happens because tight controls over the flow of information tend to foster fiat education systems. When an educational system is financially threatened for teaching unpopular subjects, it can no longer offer a complete education to its students. This happened at Columbia University just two weeks ago. This happens in American primary schools every day. This trend, taken alone, leads to totalitarianism. Taken as a part of the behavior of industrialized societies, however, this trend is also self-defeating. People will communicate and socially preserve their ideas in their social marketplace thereof, even if unpopular.

Emergence of the Global Society

With the pervasiveness of global communications, however, the third stage of market globalization is beginning to occur, that of the globalized society. This is happening as a reaction against the second phase, in that the poverty exported by first-world nations in the form of industrialized labor markets is coming full-circle, forming a global equilibrium of inequality. Recognizing that these inequalities cause grave deficits in human rights worldwide, new conflicts are erupting between isolationist and globalist perspectives on trade. Given that a purely isolationist perspective is fundamentally intractable with the notions of global transportation and communication, this phase of globalization will continue until all industrialized, fluid-labor nations are capable of guaranteeing basic human rights to all of its citizens - those traits common to human societies of all eras and populations, or anthropological universals.

The economics of attention

Information economics approach a global model, but the atomic monetary unit of a social economy (including the global one) isn't information or financial instruments - it's attention. Attention, however, consists of at least two components: trust, and self control.

Trust, as a verb, I would argue is fundamentally ditransitive - that is it has no grammatical interpretation without both a direct object and an indirect object. This operates along the same lines as the verb "give" -- you can give someone something, but you can't "give someone" without some fundamental notion of the recipient of the action. Trust is typically given to an entity in a cognitive domain, but always given as something. I trust my computer to store my data - simply "trusting my computer" is ill-defined and ungrammatical. In order for attention to be defined, sensation and perception must be trusted to be accurate, and in order for those sensations and perceptions to be considered accurate, they must be able to generate a cognitive linguistic form compatible in discourse with a language community. To this end, attention requires society (and not simply being) in order to exist - even if that society is a mentally internal dialog.

The common recipient of "trust," is another person. I can trust a person to be a faithful romantic partner, entrepreneurial business leader, or social friend, but I can never fundamentally assume trust of a person's trust. This leads to the second part of the definition: "trust," as a noun, is not fundamentally transitive. I can trust a person to produce for me a non-poisonous taco when presented with some monetized unit in exchange for the goods and services rendered, but not necessarily need to trust that person's trust in other people to perform any given service.

The dissemination of this understanding of trust leads to the notion of social capital, that form of economic capital which can be used for causal productivity. A person's social capital can be understood to consist of the trusts that person has invested in aspects of members of their societies, and by derivation the trusts their societies have made in aspects of other societies. These trusts overwhelmingly emerge from congruencies in observed behavioral patterns, and affect the amount of attention a person is willing to "pay" to another person or society.

Attention is economically atomic in that it's the fundamental functional unit of a person's cognitive domain. Time is an abstract, qualia can be relative, and property is an illusion (because objective control is intractable.) Attention is the fundamental property of cognition that allows value to be given to observations. It is these values that form the basis for language, cognition, and the emergence of society on any scale. Tversky and Kahmeman's Prospect Theory models the applications of these attentions to the definition of social judgments, which in turn assist in defining social capital and social contracts.

The emergent prominence of social capital in a post-industrial economic model comes from the next stage in cultural evolution: we have global transportation and global communication. This communication, however, is in the process of forming a global society. In order to economically process social transactions on a global scale, however, societal attention emerges from individual attention, with the former bringing the latter into prominence.

Sowing seeds of dissatisfaction

As supplies of goods and labor increase proportionate with industrialization, whether by discoveries of new production techniques, or by exporting our market for cheap labor, we are forced to create demand for new products by advertising - creating dissatisfaction. Analogous with Smith's creation of disadvantageous trade relations, advertising is self-defeating. People have a finite capability for need, governed by their personal ability to be socially productive in a capitalist economy, and governed by their society's ability to produce for a person in a socialist one.

In order to create this dissatisfaction, however, advertising is traditionally used. This typically exists voluntarily (i.e. through a social contract,) in that a person will willingly subject herself or himself to advertisement in exchange for lower financial cost for a good or service rendered. Attention is a finite resource, however, arguably the only finite resource over which a person has direct control. In the economy of attention, then, giving attention to an element of a cognitive domain is analogous to transfer of a monetary instrument. By this understanding, involuntary advertising is theft.

This form of theft is already being addressed politically, in the form of no-call lists and spam legislation, which carry in some jurisdictions heavy fines and imprisonment. This definition, though, should be extended to include any form of advertising extant within a cognitive domain, but outside a social contract. When I read an article on a website that's subsidized by advertising, I voluntarily subject myself to that website's advertising in exchange for not having to transfer other financial instruments to that website in exchange for the viewing of their content. When I'm driving in a city and see the names of stores emblazoned high above the freeway, this is also voluntary, in that my cognitive domain is intersecting with the cognitive domains of others who are transacting business in the locations by which I'm driving. If I choose to listen to a radio program or watch a television show which advertising interrupts, the same voluntary notion applies.

Junk mail, billboards, spam, telemarketing, fliers. on telephone poles, and any other form of involuntary advertising, however, constitute attention theft. This model of revenue generation, as mentioned previously, is self-defeating through the organization of global societies.

Medieval Icelandic Minarchocapitalism

Medieval Iceland had what was arguably the best example of pure market capitalism. Before the introduction of Christianity, or its conquering by the Norwegian crown, Medieval Iceland has a political/economic system based on what were called temples. These temples controlled all aspects of dispute arbitration and governance, but it was completely at-will. If you wanted the protection of a temple, you sought membership and gave tribute. If you weren't in a temple, you were considered an outlaw. All crimes, therefore, were served by a fine - including rape and murder. When disputes arose between two people or groups, the heads of their temples would decide who pays what to whom - and if they didn't like the decision, they could find a new temple to take their membership (and dispute), or they could become an outlaw. As an outlaw, however, anyone could kill them without penalty. Consequently, these systems of temples flourished, even meeting periodically at Thingfellir to recite the "laws of the land." Any law they couldn't recite didn't apply.

In this (almost) pure market minarchocapitalism, the purely voluntary existence of the state caused two traits to emerge: church became the state, and unions (sharing some functional analog with temples) became the church. In its purest known form, Capitalism proved unable to provide for three fundamental human aspects: national defense, baseline welfare of its governed (through egalitarian distribution of wealth), and separation of church and state. When the politicization of society fails to account for the well being of its most impoverished, they become slaves (in an almost literal sense) to the society which does take care of their welfare: a church. Separation of church and state, however, is fundamentally important to modern societies. It's not just a nice saying, it's grounded in centuries of war and conflict between two different ontological approaches to truth and knowledge. This form of government of a society also fails to account for forceful (if necessary) preservation of itself, due to almost complete decentralization.

Current Successful Systems

More politically centralized forms of Capitalism (such as the government of America) address these shortcomings through legislation and the existence of a centralized military force. This is one of the reasons the main weaknesses in the Articles of Confederation which was fixed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights - centralizing of revenue and establishing the necessity for a "well-armed militia" (which eventually became the voluntary military system as we know it.) Even dominantly centralized forms of capitalism have institutional problems, though - price fixing, monopolies, market flooding and cornering, recessions and depressions. Many of these secondary problems can functionally be addressed by a well-behaved executive and federal reserve, but two problems remain. Maintaining a well-behaved government requires a well-educated population, and social institutions aren't easily modeled in a capitalist-style political system emerging from a non-heteronormative society.

We saw isolationist communism also fail with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, under the weight of its military inflation against the west (specifically America). The two most powerful remaining governments in the world to date, then, are a heavily socialized capitalist system (America), and a heavily capitalized communist (socialist) system (China). Those systems that balance the two border cases effectively, then, are the most egalitarian - EU nations in Scandinavia and central Europe. It becomes clear that an integration of these two perspectives is key to the amelioration of infringements on human rights, because this integration leads to political and economic power when approached from socialism, and the egalitarian distribution of wealth when approached from capitalism.

Skill and emergent labor mobility

Central to this process of post-industrial social/political/economic emergence is the broad re-skilling of the workforce through professional mobility. During the post-Fordian era of traditionally recognized industrialization, the behavior was common in America to get some form of education (whether professional or trade,) get a job with a corporation, and remain with that same corporation through retirement and pension. Recently, however, that pattern has begun to shift to post-industrial professional behavior: the dynamic (predominantly on-the-job) acquisition of professional skills commensurate with the rapid change in professions. Fifty years ago, to see "25 years at the same company" on a resume was seen as a sign of stability and dedication. Recently, however, it's being seen as a symbol of stagnation tantamount to unemployability.

This fundamental shift in behaviors has a convergence-point, however, which we haven't yet reached as a society - the unity of the workers of the world through trade unionization and collective bargaining and action. Post-industrial professional behaviors involve a broad shift in the patterns within productive environments, not in the environments themselves. Factories will still exist, but employment by them will be at-will, driven by unions. Furthermore, this high professional mobility can be considered a product of the modern attention market - the overwhelming attention deficit of western societies. When attention is modeled as a monetary instrument, it emerges that the wise investment of attention (through education and productive social integration) yields further availability of attention.

This is the process of the Prussian-style schooling system hitting its critical mass - that system which breeds humans into workers (rather than thinkers, thanks to the Rockefeller-Wilson administration for selling our children to the factories in 1919) through the industrialization of education will collapse under its own weight. When breeding children to be bored, and only to pay attention to faster, flashier perceptual qualia, they in adulthood have high vocational turnover, and the subsequent re-skilling during life that they didn't attain during their formative years. This has bred medium-scale dissatisfaction with remaining in a single place (mentally, socially, or physically) for too long, with ends that defeat its beginnings:

We, who seven years ago
Talked of honour and of truth,
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.

~~ William Butler Yeats, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen

This process of moving from a Industrialized / Prussian-style schooling system back to a socially-oriented one begins with the formation of skill-competitive trade unions commensurate with the remonetization of skills (in addition to traditional education) as a bargaining asset during negotiation for a job. In America, the university degree which used to separate working class from middle class has overwhelmingly become little more than a "middle class bragging right." This is a product of the de-skilling of our society commensurate with the establishment of fiat degrees (those college degrees whose only intrinsic worth is the name of the institution on the degree itself). This process involves a fundamental shift of education from non-productive institutions to the emergent global societies from which they came.

With the re-emergence of these skill-oriented trade unions (whether that be a software engineering union or a auto mechanic union), by necessity emerges governmental controls on the behavior of that union, so not to form lobbies for policies which place a disproportionate burden on the societies in which they exist and interact.

Agile development and "Web 2.0"

This humanization process is already apparent in the global technical sector, and is presently spreading to others. The emergence of agile methodologies fundamentally shifts the process of software design and development towards more human-compatible patterns of attention investments. In traditional development methodologies such as the waterfall model, a big-design-up-front (BDUF) is required - that is a customer has to completely and unambiguously know and be able to communicate what they want in order to get it on time and under budget. This methodology typically devolves into "rock management," however - a phrase coming from a story of bringing a customer a rock, and the customer expressing dissatisfaction with that rock and asking for another rock.

Agile methodologies account for this fundamental disconnect in human function by eliminating the BDUF, however, in exchange for "user stories." These methodologies more tightly bind customers to their products though close communication (daily stand-up meetings) close supervision (on-site customer,) and functional flexibility, rather than traditionally matrix or pyramid-organized roles. In an agile method, a person can function as a designer, tester, programmer, and documenter on each different day of the week, operating typically in pairs. This on-the-job training is part of the inherently competitive re-skilling we're seeing in the professional world.

Partially a product of these agile approaches, however, is the phenomenon of "Web 2.0." Nobody (including O'Reilly, the folks who coined the term) can define "Web 2.0," but descriptions of the phenomenon abound. Two major components of Web 2.0 are harnessing the collective intelligence, and leveraging the long-tail. Some of the most successful Web 2.0 companies are web-based social networks such as Myspace, Facebook, and Linkedin, (leveraging the long tail,) but the collaborative intelligence is probably best seen in Wikipedia.

If the first phase of the internet as a communications technology was about the central control of information, the second phase (Web 2.0) is overwhelmingly about social control of information. This gets into ethical discussions such as that of Google's behavior in the Chinese market, and privacy concerns as evidences by the recent NSA wiretapping scandals, but overwhelmingly the second generation of web technologies center around social intelligence. This can be seen by the abundance of weblogs, the popularity of community-written works (such as the myriad of wikis online), and the subsequent re-emergence of online socialized education. If I want to know the electronegative properties of Molybdenum, that information is available to me immediately (1.8 on the Pauling scale, by the way - thank you Wikipedia.) If I want an integrative analysis of a behavior (rather than sterilized data), many web2.0 sites exist for that as well, such as MetaFilter, everything2, and kuro5hin. If I want socially-driven news, the likes of Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, Del.icio.us, and furl are readily available to me, each with a different attenuation to signal versus noise. Furthermore, if I don't like any of these implementations, it's becoming borderline trivial to implement my own, through rapid web-based application development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Drupal.

When technology becomes pervasive, by necessity the skills are commoditized which drive those technologies - that is, when everyone can write a web application, social normative functions converge towards meritocracy, or a "marketplace of ideas" rather than the industrialized oligarchy of Prussian-style education.

Solution to Attention Theft

With the advent of this social form of education comes the breaking point for involuntary advertising. When a band can get more economic utility by posting their concert dates on last.fm or upcoming.yahoo.com, the process of polluting flagpoles with their advertisements will cease under economic burden (or, more likely government intervention). When retailers begin to realize that the reviews of their products on Amazon, Newegg, and other online retailers carry more weight than the fliers they stuff into our mailboxes each week, this process should likewise cease under economic burden (or, again more likely, government intervention.) If I realize I need a new pair of shoes, there are any number of retailers I can visit online to show me the relative merits of various types of shoes, many with brick-and-mortar stores I can visit locally to try on and buy shoes. When the availability of communications technology becomes pervasive, I won't need the weight of involuntary advertising in my physical mailbox each week. Instead, more functional will be the voluntary advertising in which I participate while viewing shoes online - this is how I should find out about shoe sales, not through junk mail.

In the post-industrial economy, then, advertising exists in two places: through online opt-in communities such as mailing lists or websites ("tell me which stores in my area are having shoe sales this week"), and through voluntary participation (as discussed previously, the notion of voluntary intersection of a buyer's cognitive domain with the seller's.) In the same manner by which slavery was eliminated in the United States, when a societal behavior begins to collapse under its own economic weight, it's traditionally made illegal before the effects of its collapse cause economic conditions that overwhelmingly endanger the human rights of those who participate in that socioeconomy. Early last century, we proudly witnessed the liberation of physical human slavery. Early this century, we should proudly witness the liberation of attention slavery.

Education reform

More than half of the college graduates I know in America can't carry on a ten-minute conversation in their area of study. I know "economists" who don't know the definition of laissez-faire, English teachers who don't know that English is of Germanic roots, Geologists wit no perspective on the peak oil phenomenon, and "computer scientists" who couldn't define "Turing machine". These people all have American fiat degrees. During the course of their education, it didn't matter if they actually learned the material, so long as they could pass the tests and get a job.

Examples of such gross educational incompetence are equally legion in primary and secondary schools in this country. Our schools produce children who can name dozens of film stars or species of dinosaur, but lack basic abilities in literacy, composition, and mathematical reasoning. This is also a function of the No Child Left Behind act that emphasizes the importance of standardized testing (now more tightly tied to finance) over the education itself. This addresses the symptom (low metrics) of industrialized education, rather than the problem of industrialized education itself. The children raised in this system can arguably get a better education online and through their extracurricular societies than they receive in American primary schools. Thankfully, this is the direction in which Education is headed - globally and locally social education.

This education reform isn't without a price, however. Our pattern of fiat degrees has caused a massive shift in intellectual power from America to other nations more serious about comprehensive education than we are. Our mid-level jobs are being exported not only to third-world countries through the monetization of skill, but also to first-world countries through out-competition. As our population ages, this trend will continue until it hits the dinner plate of the average CEO. The poverty we exported at the outset of industrialization is coming back uninvited, and we have to be ready to deal with it, or substantially lower our expected standard of living commensurate with the devaluation of our currency. This, again, is already happening as a component of our thin-spread military activities in the Middle East, and through waning foreign confidence in American fiduciary instruments.

This reform begins with the encouragement of equally subsidized social education (home schooling). If the state is going to give money to an industrialized (Prussian-style) education system to raise our children, that state should be equally prepared to give equal subsidy on a per-capita basis to those who wish to take part in other educational systems. If the children learn, they'll be able to pass the tests. If not, those institutions will fall under their own weight as well. This form of educational natural selection won't be without its shortcomings, but those will be boundary cases (and still in smaller population than those extant) until the industrialized education system tailors itself to the needs of the society. When a child has completed their primary education (required to be "compulsory" by the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights), that child should be given the option to attend comprehensive higher education (high school and college) or specialized technical education (trade school.) Indicentally, this already happens in many parts of Central Europe, whose basic literacy and reasoning abilities outperform America's time and again.

Prejudice and Practice

Social systems aren't easy to implement in a non-heteronormative environment, however. Unity comes from diversity, in the convergence of behavior from the divergence of opinion. This divergence in opinion is rooted in the application of practice to prejudice, and these prejudices are culturally transmitted through the inherent difficulty in simply explaining cultural differences to children: it's easier to call all Arabs "terrorists" or all Frenchmen "snobs" than to explain the intricacies of the history of Moslem cultures and the subsequent emergence of Islamic extremism, or to explain the base inflection differences between French and English that send the wrong signals to those native speakers of French who aren't yet native-level fluent in English.

In French, it's common to end statements with a rising vocal inflection, whereas this is the signal of a question in English. Consequently, when French speakers are learning English, but don't have the inflection patterns mastered yet, every statement they say in English can come across with questioning inflection, which is typically assumed to be condescending behavior to a native English speaker. This behavior isn't intended, but is perceived, which contributes to the perpetuation of prejudice against Frenchmen in English-speaking nations.

The other basic difficulty in minimizing prejudice (recall, please that prejudice can't be objectively eliminated - only functionally minimized), is a parent's fundamental control of a child's cognitive domain by bridging their access to sociolinguistic communities during the ages in which the effects of neural plasticity play the largest role in cerebral cortical brain development. If a child hasn't been exposed to a foreign language before the end of puberty, that child's chances of ever attaining native-level fluency in any second language diminish in comparison to the population of those who had this exposure. The same principle applies to sociological communities, in that prejudice in a child can only effectively be minimized by immersing that child in a foreign culture at a young age. In Europe, this is far simpler than it is in America - the average citizen of Europe is geographically much closer to "foreign cultures" than the average citizen of America. This gap is bridged, however, with the prevalence of global communications.

Multiple societal perspectives can be effectively integrated through online communication with members of different societies, cultures, and social classes. This form of perspective integration attains prejudicial minimization while avoiding hegemony - forced cultural heteronormativity. By giving a human face to those outside of your culture, the social vilification of "us versus them" is also minimized.

Intellectual Property and Pareto

Finally, the last-mile problem (the application of the Pareto principle to socio-georaphic problems) is addressed by social media control, rather than corporate. The RIAA and MPAA in America have already begun to see the decay of their business model through the advent of online communications, and soon after their final bankruptcy, we'll see the major multinational media conglomerates follow the same path through the advent of online media... media delivery services such as YouTube, Joost, and Videocasting; in combination with social news services such as Digg, Slashdot, and Reddit form the socialization of the modern world media. Much like the atomic bomb, the only secret to YouTube is that it could be created. Their business model is spreading, and major media conglomerates will have to adapt, or fail under their fundamental incongruence with social weight.

The socialization of media is beginning to become incongruent with the culturally heteronormative (Hegemony) drives of state-controlled or sponsored news agencies such as Xinhua (in China) and Fox (in America). They can make every attempt to sue or silence social media, but it won't be any more effective than the RIAA and MPAA suing their own fans for infringement of intellectual "property" rights. Recall the previous discussion of the illusory definition of property due to the lack of the fundamental ability for control. When discussing intellectual "property," this divergence is yet more prominent. The RIAA can't control the social dissemination of their works any more than the Anglo-Norman aristocracy could control the language spoken by the agricultural population of England in the 9th century AD. The latter brought us Middle English. The former brings us the free flow of knowledge through the global society and the final realization of the marketplace of ideas as the marketplace of application of ideas. The attitude is becoming more prevalent in modern business that managers don't care what you know, they care what you can do. This moves the value previously given to information to the value of the flow of (and derivative application of) that information.

This form of global communication won't be fully pervasive until the advent of fluently-effective machine translation, but that's on the horizon as well.

The unbearable lightness of attention

As with any system, how it breaks is equally important as how it works. In the United States (as in Medieval Iceland), those with tighter control of monetized instruments overwhelmingly dictate the behavior of the society on the whole. This build the United States of Corporate America, for the Stockholders, by the Stockholders. We're ostensibly allowed to vote with our dollars (from whom we purchase products) and feet (for whom we choose to work), but that only further individualizes and politicizes corporate entities. This begins with the political recognition of business as "individuals" with human-convergent rights but a few steps away from being able to vote. This forgoes rational decision making in favor of tyranny of the minority, and is one of the many steps towards a fascist state, and the serfdom of the population on the whole.

We're already seeing this in the creation of the coming recession - when people are afraid of losing their jobs, they willfully subjugate themselves to their corporate and government leaders, exchanging personal liberties time and time again to attain temporary security. This can be seen in the PATRIOT act in America (of which Orwell himself would have been pressed to more appropriately name), and the BSA(OS) in Australia. By de-skilling the American workforce through industrialization of economics and education, by the administration of John D. Rockefeller / Woodrow Wilson selling our children's future into the interests of industrialization, modern society has made every attempt to remove from its population its most basic source of power: free attention. With the coming transition of industrialization to a global scale, however, this grievance is slowly being redressed.

Overwhelmingly, there exists the misconception that the American political construction resembles a democracy. When corporations and lobbyists exercise more influence over congressional and executive decision than do voters, both politicians and constituencies are alienated by the cognitive dissonance deciding which society to serve - those who paid (exchanged fiat-monetized instruments) to give them their position, or those who voted (exchanged social capitalized instruments) to do so. This problem stems from the traditional exorbitant expense required to run a political campaign. This involves taking money from corporations and lobbyists and paying giant multinational media conglomerates for airtime to spread their candidacy. The effect we're seeing on this process now, with the socialization of media, is that intellectual freedom-of-expression is becoming financial freedom-of-expression. Politicians can access MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook as easily as you or I can, and connect directly to their constituency without the substantial capital outlay required traditionally by media conglomerates. This results in the normalization of class participation in governmental structures as well as the previously described egalitarian distribution of wealth of the global society.

In the post-industrial socioeconomy, the problem of the flow of currency is addressed by realizing we haven't been monetizing all salient instruments of power. The ultimate form of scarcity in any society of selves is attention, which contributes to information. Information isn't power, though - the application of knowledge as a skill is power. Power is the exertion of influence over another person or society: the intentional, causal exchange of capital (whether that be attention capital, monetary capital, social capital, or some other form such as biological/psycho-economic capital) for personal or social gain. In the attention economy, this trade in attention is modeled in social capital, and monetized in skill.

The exertion of power becomes unethical, however, when it alienates a person or society from their fundamental human rights. Unethical behavior in humans (as well as other evolved primates) eventually collapses under its own sociological weight (in that it traditionally works against the constructive ends of a society), and we're seeing this happen in American politics as well:

When politicians can run a campaign on a layman's salary (through social media and online communication), they can express the values they stand for, rather than the values for which they're being offered large sums of money. The behavior of lobbying and corporate participation in political models should be made illegal, but along with other institutions of disproportionately high social costs to low productive social returns, it will eventually collapse on its own. This started to happen in the 2004 American Presidency elections with the candidacy of Howard Dean, and is gaining momentum in the 2008 American Presidency elections with the candidacies of Obama, Clinton, Paul, and Giuliani. Next month, a multinational media conglomerate (CNN) will be sponsoring presidential debates on a socialized media platform - YouTube. In future elections, this process should allow greater prevalence of third parties in this country, crucial to the integration and expression of perspective in a non-heteronormative state such as America.

The Function of the State

Fully public (i.e. state) ownership of means of production and fully private (i.e. individual) ownership of the same are both fundamentally intractable because of their inhibitions of social progress. Public ownership lacks the capability for uninhibited social progress because the cost of innovation (research, development, and rework) is more often spent equalizing income levels for the population at large. Fully private ownership lacks the same capability in that a single person can't typically research, develop, and rework the means of production, without submitting themselves as a wage-slave to an employer for unreasonable durations of time, alienating them from natural societies by creating inbred social systems involving the loss of natural human behavior into the framework of a capitalist-style productive business society.

The fundamental disconnect between the socialist and capitalist notions of control of means of production (capital) doesn't stem from social binary systems of "individual" or "group" control (an illusion at any rate) - the disconnect comes from an incomplete definition of capital. Social capital and attention trade are the forces by which economies are constructed and normalized - physical capital grows through the normative effects of social capital. Technology (the application of attention to an object to solve a human problem), and by derivative physical capital grows much more rapidly through a society than it does through an individual.

In the post-industrial economy, the purpose of the state remains the protection all basic human rights of its constituency. In a large-scale (emergent global) society, however, preservation of all human rights is fundamentally intractable, because rights, on some level have to be sacrificed to participate in any society. A person's extant rights decrease proportionally with that person's memberships in a society: Thoreau was mentally free but physically and socially imprisoned, whereas citizens of many western-style democracies are physically free, but mentally and socially imprisoned.

Post-Industrial socioeconomics will bring greater freedom to all three personal aspects (mental, social, and physical function), through the formation of a global society based on communications technologies. The process of industrialization inevitably leads to these ends. Human societies, when allowed to congregate, communicate, and trade, will overwhelmingly pursue pleasure (in a socioeconomic model, this correlates to capital gain) in ethical balance with the avoidance of pain (the amelioration of infringements on basic human rights.) In America, this emergence comes about entirely within the framework laid out in the Constitution. This behavior is biologically emergent from that of any human (or other primate), which is in itself emergent from the behavior of any neuron. The same laws and models that apply to the tiniest of cells apply equally to the largest and most integrated of global cultures.