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The internet boom in the late nineties threw up optimism of a new economy business models (which in the end turned out to be not that dissimilar from the old economy business models) but also the prospect of information economy lifestyles with radically shifted priorities with regard to the work/life balance.
I can't quite shake the feeling of disquiet that few people I met last week seemed keen to shift those priorities very far. I almost felt I had walked through a timewarp to late 1999.
End of History after all, then?
What I'm seeing at present is a new mode of economic production (okay, still relatively immature) but the same set of social relations in operation.
Either this is because I haven't scratched the surface deeply enough (or, as I say, I was standing in the wrong corner of the room). Or else, because with only nine years of ecommerce behind us, there are still relatively few people who are "thinking outside the box" in terms of why careers and workplaces don't matter anymore.
Or maybe careers and workplaces as such will always matter? That's my question.
I spoke to several, ahem, young people, and was pleased to hear that they weren't all slash and burn domain trashers. They were in it for the longer game and strived for quality. So they said, anyways.
Patronising enough, you reckon?
"the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.""End of History" (1989)
Fukuyama wrote "End of History" while he was employed by the United States State Department (came from RAND corporation). He uses "history" in a narrow sense in support of a specific ideology. The entire thesis is flawed propaganda and pure hubris. Nothing lasts forever, especially something human.
What the future will really bring I do not know. That the current economic political structures will change radically I do know because history proves it, again and again.
Ten/fifteen years is nothing - not even a generation. Ten or fifteen generations on - do you really think things will be the same? They never have been yet.
Indeed in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002) he acknowledges in a preface that he was wrong to talk about an end of history: a sudden? realisation that the world continues and change still occurs!
My personal hope is that technology continues to empower the individual and decentralise power within standards. An economic and political open source project for the world!
To boldly go where no man has gone before."Star Trek" (1966)
Exactly.
By that time, I'd pretty much given up wanting to talk about what I was doing because it seemed completely out of touch with what everybody else was doing and, like I intimated in the other thread, one guy I spoke to suggested I ought not be there which I took on the chin.
So I stopped talking about what I was involved in completely. As I recall I had you playing twenty questions for about fifteen minutes.
Then the dot com bubble burst -- and most of the business world ran shy of the internet. But I always believed that the potential of the internet had not even begun to be realised, and I suspected that others believed this too.
Meeting so many great people last Friday night, and having fascinating conversations with many of them, left me with a feeling that I was part of something that was clearly unique in history, almost revolutionary -- and yet it all took place in a relaxed atmosphere where people were enjoying themselves.
I don't know if this is what you're alluding to, but it certainly left a great impression on me...
Take a look at your brand new 2004 Corvette or other performance vehicle ... it's hard to imagine that one day those will be "classic cars", but they will.
I have a Smirnoff bottle that was made in 1864 that I was once offered $2,500 for. The thought that an empty bottle would have any historic or monetary value probably never crossed the drinker's mind as he tossed it down down the hole in the outhouse. He was living in the present - to him it was garbage.
The "End of History" point of view is wrong, but not because of business or the Internet. History is ongoing whether we have the Internet or not, whether we design our pages like 1996 or 2004. Things don't have to be invented, change, or cease to exist to become historic - afterall, we still have Corvettes and Smirnoff.
