Arcata, CA
Sunday September 28, 2003
9:32am I just woke up in the barn. Man, I love this barn and how you can just sleep in however late you want. You don't have to be out of here early like other squats in town. Home sweet home. I love this place.
11:16am We had a good little morning at the barn. We got 'ol pervert Jonathan over here dropping sexual innuendos towards Randi. We're walking into town. All three of us. Randi, Jonathan and I.
11:34am Phillip is hooking me up with some change for a donut. Badass. I appreciate it . . . whoa, that's very generous of you. Phillip just hooked me up with a five dollar bill. Donuts for everybody!
11:55am Man, that was cool. When I got to the donut shop the first guy I asked hooked me up. I'm kind of annoyed because Jonathan, who is nothing but annoying, was all talking about sex this morning with Randi. They were both following me this morning. The dude I asked gave me five bucks! But now I have to split it with these guys. That's alright. I'm sure he gave me that much because of the crowd. I bought me an apple fritter and a milk. I told the others, "Alright, here's the change. I'm going to keep a dollar, though." I gave them the rest. Randi got a little twist and Jonathan got an apple fritter, too. Now, I'm walking to the Safeway to use the phone at Round Table Pizza and I'm going to call Issa. She said she wants to crash at the barn tonight.
12:01pm I just called Issa and she said she's hanging out with her family and she's not going to crash at the barn tonight. She was still upset about her ex, so she's probably not going to go to the Bay area until next semester. That's out of the question, now. I'm going to go use the bathroom at the Safeway.
12:36pm I just got out of the bathroom at the Safeway. I took a shit, shaved, I had brushed my teeth in the morning at the barn. I shaved real good. I look real spiffy. Oh yeah, Long's Drugs. I wanted to check something there. Oh yeah, I need to see if they have a pocket calendar there. So I can get more email addresses.
12:40pm I just found me a Mead Memo Book for my email addresses. Now, I can put my pocket calendar that I've been collecting them on in my mission bag, so I'll still have it whenever I scan my shit for my webpage. It was 85 cents, so good thing I snagged that dollar this morning when I got that five bucks for donuts.
12:50pm Jeremy just gave me a cigarette. Thanks a lot, brother.
12:51pm Jeremy gave me a cigarette, but I'm going to wait to smoke it until after I get a donut. I'm going to get me a donut.
12:55pm Dee hooked me up with some change. I appreciate it, brother.
12:57pm I just bought me a donut. I'm going to sit down and read my book and eat a donut.
Remember to type up the Inter-weave Problem section on page 405.
"THE INTER-WEAVE PROBLEM
Our political institutions also reflect an our-of-date organization of knowledge. Every government has ministries or departments devoted to discrete fields suck as finance, foreign affairs, defense, agriculture, commerce, post office, or transportation. The United States Congress and other legislative bodies have committees similarly set aside to deal with problems in these fields. What no Second Wave government - even the most centralized and authoritarian - can solve is inter-weave problem: "how to integrate the activities of all these units so they can produce orderly, wholistic programs instead of a mishmash of contradictory and self-canceling effects.
If there is one thing we should have learned in the past few decades, it is that all social and political problems are interwoven - that energy, for example, affects economics, which in turn affects health, which in turn affects education, work, family life, and a thousand other things. The attempt to deal with neatly defined problems in isolation from one another - itself a product of the industrial mentality - creates only confusion and disaster. Yet the organizational structure of government mirrors precisely this Second Wave approach to reality.
This anachronistic structure leads to interminable jurisdictional power struggles, to the externalization of cost (each agency attempting to solve its own problems at the expense of another), and to the generation of adverse side effects. This is why each attempt by government to cure a problem leads to a rash of new problems, often worse than the original one.
Governments typically attempt to solve this inter-weave problem through further centralization - by naming a "czar" to cut the red tape. He makes changes, blind to their destructive side effects - or he piles on so much additional red tape himself that he is soon dethroned. For centralization of power no longer works. Another desperation measure is the creation of innumerable interdepartmental committees to coordinate and review decisions. The result, however, is the construction of yet another set of baffles and filters through which decisions have to pass - and a further complexification of the bureaucratic labyrinth. Our existing governments and political structures are obsolete because they view the world through Second Wave lenses.
In turn, this aggravates another problem.
THE DECISIONAL SPEEDUP
Second Wave governments are parliamentary institutions were designed to make decisions at a leisurely pace, suited to a world in which it might take a week for a message to travel from Boston or New York to Philadelphia. Today is an Ayatollah seizes hostages in Tehran or coughs in Qom, officials in Washington, Moscow, Paris, or London may have to respond with decisions within minutes. The extreme speed of change catches governments and politicians off guard and contributes to their sense of helplessness and confusion, as the press makes plain. "Only three months ago," writes Advertising Age, "the White House was telling consumers to shop hard before spending their bucks. Now the government is going all out to prod consumers into spending more freely." Oil experts foresaw the petroleum price explosion, reports Aussenpolitik, the German foreign policy journal, but "not the speed of developments." The 1974-1975 recession hit U.S. policy makers with what Fortune magazine terms "stunning speed and severity."
Social change, too, is accelerating and putting additional pressures on the political decision-makers. Business Week declares that in the United States, "as long as the migration of industry and population were gradual...it helped to unify the nation. But within the past five years the process has burst beyond the bounds that can be accommodated by existing political institutions."
The politicians' own careers have accelerated, often catching them by surprise. As recently as 1970 Margaret Thatcher forecast that, within her lifetime, no woman would ever be appointed to a high Cabinet post in the British government. In 1979 she herself was the Prime Minister.
In the United States, Jimmy Who? shot into the White House in a matter of months. What's more, although a new president does not take office until the January following the election, Carter became the de facto president immediately. It was Carter, not the out-going Ford, who was battered with questions about the Middle East, the energy crisis, and other issues almost before the ballots were counted. The lame-duck Ford instantaneously became, for practical purposes, a dead duck, because political time is now too compressed, history moving too fast to permit traditional delays.
Similarly, the "honeymoon" with the press that a new president once enjoyed was truncated in time. Carter, even before inauguration, was blasted for his Cabinet selections and forced to withdraw his choice for head of the CIA. Later, less than halfway through the four-year term, the insightful political correspondent Richard Reeves was already forecasting a short career for the President because "instant communications have telescoped time so much that a four-year Presidency today produces more events, more troubles, more information, than any eight-year Presidency did in the past."
This hotting up of the pace of political life, reflecting the generalized speedup of change, intensifies today's political and governmental breakdown. Put simply, our leaders - forced to work through Second Wave institutions designed for a slower society - cannot churn out intelligent decisions as fast as events require. Either the decisions came too late or indecision takes over.
For example, Professor Robert Skidelsky of the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, writes, "Fiscal policy has been virtually unusable because it takes too long to get appropriate measures through Congress, even when a majority exists." And this was written in 1974, long before the energy stalemate in America entered its sixth interminable year.
The acceleration of change has overpowered the decisional capacity of our institutions, making today's political structure obsolete, regardless of party ideology or leadership. These institutions are inadequate not only in terms of scale and structure but in terms of speed as well. And even this is not all."
Okay, I know I'm copying a lot of stuff out of this book, now. But I think it's all important. Every word reinforces the notion that change is long overdue. I mean, it's 2003 already. This book was written in 1980, for crying out loud. When will we ever learn? Okay, here's another relevant section, I think.
"THE COLLAPSE OF CONSENSUS
As the Second Wave produced a mass society, the Third Wave de-massifies us, moving the entire social system to a much higher level of diversity and complexity. This revolutionary process, much like the biological differentiation that occurs in evolution, helps explain one of today's most widely noted political phenomena - the collapse of consensus.
From one end of the industrial world to the other we hear politicians lamenting the loss of "national purpose," the absence of the good old "Dunkirk spirit," the erosion of "national unity," and the sudden, bewildering proliferation of high-powered splinter groups. The latest buzzword in Washington is "single issue group," referring to the political organizations springing up by the thousands, usually around what each perceives as a single burning issue: abortion, gun control, gay rights, school busing, nuclear power, and so on. So diverse are these interests at both the national and local levels that politicians and officials can no longer keep track of them.
Mobile-home owners organize to fight for country zoning changes. Farmers battle power transmission lines. Retired people mobilize against school taxes. Feminists, Chicanos, strip miners, and anti-strip miner organize, as do single parents and anti-porn crusaders. A Midwest magazine even reports formation of an organization of "gay Nazis" - an embarrassment, no doubt, to both the heterosexual Nazis and the Gay Liberation Movement.
Simultaneously, national mass organizations are having trouble holding together. Says a participant at a conference of voluntary organizations, "Local churches are not following the national lead any more." A labor expert reports that instead of a single unified political drive by the AFL-CIO, affiliated unions are increasingly mounting their own campaigns for their own ends.
The electorate is not merely breaking into splinters. The splinter groups themselves are increasingly transitory, springing up, dying out, turning over more and more rapidly, and forming a yeasty, hard-to-analyze flux. "In Canada," says one government official, "we now assume the life-span of the new voluntary organizations will be six to eight months. There are more groups and they are more ephemeral." In this way, acceleration and diversity combine to create a totally new kinds of body politic.
These same developments also sweep into oblivion our notions about political coalitions, alliances, or united fronts. In a Second Wave society a political leader could glue together half a dozen major blocs, as Roosevelt did in 1932, and expect the resulting coalition to remain locked in position for many years. Today it is necessary to plug together hundreds, even thousands, of tiny, short-lived special interest groups, and the coalition itself will prove short-lived as well. It may cleave together just long enough to elect a president, then break apart again the day after election, leaving him without a base of support for his programs.
This de-massification of political life, reflecting all the deep trends we have discussed in technology, production, communications, and culture, further devestates the politician's ability to make vital decisions. Accustomed to juggling a few well-organized and clearly organized constituencies, they suddenly find themselves besieged. On all sides, countless new constituencies, fluidly organized, demand simultaneous attention to real but narrow and unfamiliar needs.
Specialized demands flood in to legislatures and bureaucracies through every crack, with every mailbag and messenger, over the transom and under the door. This tremendous pile-up of demands leaves no time for deliberation. Furthermore, because society is changing at an accelerating pace and a decision delayed may be far worse than no decision at all, everyone demands instant response. Congress, as a result, is kept so busy, according to Representative N.Y. Mineta, a California Democrat, that "guys meet each other coming and going. It doesn't allow for a coherent train of thought."
Circumstances differ from country to country, but what does not differ is the revolutionary challenge posed by the Third Wave to obsolete Second Wave institutions - too slow to keep up with the pace of change and too undifferentiated to cope with the new levels of social and political diversity. Designed for a much slower and simpler society, our instituions are swamped and out of synch. Nor can this challenge be met by merely tinkering with the rules. For it strikes at the most basic assumption of Second Wave political theory: the concept of representation.
Thus the rise of diversity means that, although our political systems are theoretically founded on majority rule, it may be impossible to form a majority even on issues crucial to survival. In turn, this collapse of consensus means that more and more governments are minority governments, based on shifting and uncertain coalitions.
The missing majority makes a mockery of standard democratic rhetoric. It forces us to question whether, under the convergence of speed and diversity, any constituency can ever be "represented." In a mass industrial society, when people and their needs were fairly uniform and basic, consensus was an attainable goal. In a de-massified society, we not only lack national purpose, we also lack regional, statewide, or citywide purpose. The diversity in any congressional district or parliamentary constituency, whether in France of Japan or Sweden, is so great that its "representative" cannot legitimately claim to speak for a consensus. He or she cannot represent the general will for the simple reason that there is none. What, then, happens to the very notion of "representative democracy"?
To ask this question is not to attack democracy. (We shall shortly see how the Third Wave opens the way to an enriched and enlarged democracy.) But it makes one fact inescapably plain: not only our Second Wave institutions but the very assumptions on which they were based are obsolete.
Built to the wrong scale, unable to deal adequately with transnational problems, unable to deal with interrelated problems, unable to keep up with the accelerative drive, unable to cope with the high levels of diversity, the overloaded, obsolete political technology of the industrial age is breaking up under our very eyes."
5:25pm Okay, that's enough for now. Man, it's great being caught up. I'm typing this up on the 28th. It's 5:25pm right now and I'm going to leave the library. I'm going to walk out to the 101S onramp and try to hitchhike to Eureka. I'm going to go to The Raven House and take a shower. I'll finish typing up today tomorrow. Peace out.
Okay, it's 1:06pm on Monday the 30th.
On page 412:
"Traditionally, an incumbent president could cut a deal with half a dozen elderly and powerful committee chairmen, and expect them to deliver the votes necessary to approve his legislative program. Today congressional committee chairmen and women can no more deliver the votes of the junior members of Congress than the AFL-CIO of the Catholic Church can deliver the votes of their followers. Unfortunate as it may seem to old-timers and hard-pressed presidents, people - including members of Congress - are doing more of their own thinking, and taking orders less submissively. All this makes it impossible, however, for Congress, as presently structured, to devote sustained attention to any issue or to respond quickly to the nation's needs.
Referring to the "frenetic schedule," a report by the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future summarizes the situation vividly: "Increasing complexity and the speed-of-light crises, such as votes on one week on gas deregulation, Rhodesia, the Panama Canal, a new Department of Education, food stamps, AMTRAK authorization, solid waste disposal, and endangered species, are turning Congress, once a center for careful and thoughtful debate...into the laughing stock of the nation."
I skipped a couple paragraphs,
"What we confront is a new and menacing truth. The political shudders and crises we face cannot be solved by leaders - strong or weak - so long as those leaders are compelled to operate through inappropriate, broken down, overloaded institutions.
A political system must not only be able to make and enforce decisions; it must operate on the right scale, it must be able to integrate disparate policies, it must be able to make decisions at the right speed, and it must both reflect and respond to the diversity of society. If it fails in any of these points it courts disaster. Our problems are no longer a matter of "left-wing" or "right-wing," "strong leadership" or "weak." The decisional system itself has become a menace.
The truly astonishing fact today is that our governments continue to function at all. No corporation president would try to run a large company with a table of organization first sketched by the quill pen of some eighteenth-century ancestor whose sole managerial experience consisted of running a farm. No sane pilot would attempt to fly a supersonic jet with the antique navigation and control instruments available to Bleriot or Lindbergh. Yet, this is approximately what we are trying to do politically.
The rapid obsolescence of our Second Wave political systems, in a world bristling with nuclear weapons, and poised delicately on the edge of economic or ecological collapse, creates an extreme threat for the entire society - not merely for the "outs" but for the "ins," not merely for the poor but for the rich, and for the non-industrial parts of the world as well. For the immediate danger to all of us lies not so much in the calculated use of power by those who have it, as in the uncalculated side effects of decisions ground out by politico-bureaucratic decision machines so dangerously anachronic that even the best of intentions can eventuate in murderous outcomes.
Last paragraph of Chapter 27:
"As we are jolted by crisis after crisis, aspiring Hitlers and Stalins will crawl from the wreckage and tell us that the time has come to solve our problems by throwing away not only our obsolete institutional hulks but our freedom as well. As we race into the Third Wave era, those of us who wants to expand the human freedom will not be able to do so by simply defending our existing institutions. We shall - like America's founding parents two centuries ago - have to invent new ones."
Be sure to include that imaginary letter by Alvin Toffler to the founding parents. It's some really good stuff.
"To the Founding Parents:
You are the revolutionists dead. You are the men and women, the farmers, merchants, artisans, lawyers, printers, pamphleteers, shopkeepers, and soldiers who together created a new nation on the distant shores of America. You include the fifty-five who came together in 1787 to hammer out, during a broiling summer in Philadelphia, the astonishing document called the Constitution of the United States. You are inventors of the future that became my present.
That piece of paper, with the Bill of Rights added in 1791, is clearly one of the stunning achievements of human history. I, like so many others, am continually forced to ask myself how you managed - how you were able, in the midst of bitter social and economic turmoil, under the most immediate pressures - to muster so much awareness of the emerging future. Listening to the distant sounds of tomorrow, you sensed that a civilization was dying and a new one was being born.
I conclude you were driven to it - were compelled, carried along by the tidal force of events, fearing the collapse of an ineffectual government paralyzed by inappropriate principles and obsolete structures.
Seldom has so majestic a piece of work been done by men of such sharply divergent temperaments - brilliant, antagonistic, and egotistic men - men passionately committed to diverse regional and economic interests, yet so upset and outraged by the terrible "inefficiencies" of an existing government as to draw together and propose a radically new one based on startling principles.
Even now these principles move me, as they have moved countless millions around the planet. I confess it difficult for me to read certain passages of Jefferson or Paine, for example, without being brought to the edge of tears by their beauty and meaning.
I want to thank you, the revolutionary dead, for having made possible for me a half-century of life as an American citizen under a government of laws, not men, and particularly for that precious Bill of Rights, which had made it possible for me to think, to express unpopular views, however foolish or mistaken at times - indeed, to write what follows without fear of suppression.
For what I now must write can all too easily be misunderstood by my contemporaries. Some will no doubt regard it as seditious. Yet it is a painful truth I believe you would have quickly grasped. For the system of government you fashioned, including the very principles on which you based it, is increasingly obsolete, and hence increasingly, if inadvertently, oppressive and dangerous to our welfare. It must be radically changed and a new system of government invented - a democracy for the twenty-first century.
You know, better than we today, that no government, no political system, no constitution, no charter or state is permanent, nor can the decisions of the past bind the future forever. Nor can a government designed for one civilization cope adequately with the next.
You would have understood, therefore, why even the Constitution of the United States needs to be reconsidered, and altered - not to cut the federal budget or to embody this or that narrow principle, but to expand its Bill of Rights, taking account of threats to freedom unimagined in the past, and to create a whole new structure of government capable of making intelligent, democratic decisions necessary for our survival in a new world.
I come with no easy blueprint for tomorrow's constitution. I mistrust those who think they already have the answers when we are still trying to formulate the questions. But the time has come for us to imagine completely novel alternatives, to discuss, dissent, debate, and design, from the ground up, the democratic architecture of tomorrow.
Not in a spirit of anger or dogmatism, not in a sudden impulsive spasm, but through the widest consultation and peaceful public participation, we need to join together to reconstitute America.
You would have understood this need. For it was one of your generation - Jefferson - who, in mature reflection, declared: "Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment...I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions...But I also know that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind...As new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.
For this wisdom, above all, I thank Mr. Jefferson, who helped create the system that served us so well for so long, and that now must, in turn, die and be replaced.
Alvin Toffler
Washington, Connecticut
An imaginary letter...Surely in many nations there must be others who, given the opportunity, would express similar sentiments. For the obsolescence of many of today's governments is not some secret I alone have discovered. Nor is it a disease of America alone.
The fact is that building a new civilization on the wreckage of the old involves the design of new, more appropriate political structures in many nations at once. This is a painful yet necessary project that is mind-staggering in scope and will no doubt take decades to complete.
In all likelihood it will require a protracted battle to radically overhaul - or even scrap - the United States Congress, the Central Committees and Politburos of the Communist industrial states, the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the French Chamber and Deputies, the Bundestag, the Diet, the giant ministries and entrenched civil services of many nations, the constitutions and court systems - in short, much of the unwieldy and increasingly unworkable apparatus of supposedly representative governments.
Nor will this wave of political struggle stop at the national level. Over the months and decades ahead, the entire "global law machine" - from the United Nations at one end to the local city or town council at the other - will eventually face a mounting, ultimately irresistible, demand for restructuring.
All these structures will have to be fundamentally altered, not because they are inherently evil, nor even because they are controlled by this or that class or group, but because they are increasingly unworkable - no longer fitted to the needs of a radically changing world.
This task will involve multimillions of people. If this radical overhaul is rigidly resisted it may well trigger bloodshed. How peaceful the process turns out to be will depend on many factors, therefore - on how flexible or intransigent the existing elites prove to be, on whether the change is accelerated by economic collapse, on whether or not external threats and military interventions occur. Clearly the risks are great.
Yet, the risks of not overhauling our political institutions are even greater, and the sooner we begin, the safer we all will be.
To build workable governments anew - and to carry out what may well be the most important political task of our lifetimes - we will have to strip away the accumulated cliches of the Second Wave era. And we will have to rethink political life in terms of three key principles.
Indeed, these may well turn out to be the root principles of the Third Wave governments of tomorrow.
Okay, here's the first paragraph of this next section:
MINORITY POWER
The first, heretical principle of Third Wave government is that of minority power. It holds that majority rule, the key legitimating principle of the Second Wave era, is increasingly obsolete. It is not majorities but minorities that count. And our political systems must increasingly effect that fact.
On page 430 it says:
"This is only the first, most primitive indication of tomorrow's potential for direct democracy. Using advanced computers, satellites, telephones, cable, polling techniques, and other tools, an educated citizenry can, for the first time in history, begin making many of its own political decisions.
The issue is not either/or. It is not a question of direct democracy versus indirect, representation by self versus representation by others."
More on page 430:
"Many other imaginative arrangements can be invented to combine direct and indirect democracy. Right now members of Congress and most parliaments or legislatures set up their own committees. There is no way for citizens to force lawmakers to create a committee to deal with some neglected or highly controversial issue. But why couldn't voters be empowered directly, through petition, to compel a legislative body to set up committees on topics the public - not the lawmakers - deem important?"
"But we must begin thinking outside the worn grooves of the past 300 years. We can no longer solve our problems with the ideologies, the models, or the left-over structures of the Second Wave past."
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