Phantom Industry - Part 2 of 3

3. Once the Dust Had Settled Once More

When it was all over, and the daze wore off, and the calamity of the 400,000 dead was somehow accepted, United States establish herself in a state of mindless euphoria. Some old age later, the fog lifted, revealing a new challenge and a new and astonishing field in which folks could now do a living.

Computers looked very promising at first, the manner Ford's assembly line had looked promising one-half a century earlier. Some economic experts objected, realizing that just as Ford's invention had done billions of manual laborers out of a job, so would the computing machine alleviate (interesting word) clerks of their business (a batch of whom would have got been mill workers in a different epoch: the rapid proliferation of so-called office occupations was the first postwar repeat of Roosevelt's New Deal, contorted and hardly inspiring, even though pencil pushing is easier, to be sure, than span and railway construction). Then person had the bright thought to allow the democratic (or was it Communist?) rule take over: share and share alike. Instead of replacing a thousand workers with one mainframe computer machine and one operator, why not give each of them a terminal? Later on, the conception was additional developed by introducing every clerk to his or her ain Personal Computer. Every twelve clerks required a technician to keep their computing machines for them, and every five technicians a supervisor to supervise the care and go to to the employees' morale.

The difference between the New Deal and this was that computers, when all is said and done, offering just one type of activity to those who wish to be utile outside of the production of basic staples. Called upon to work out the jobs of many, the new industry quickly hit the bounds of utility and continued to spread out into the cloudy country where production is replaced by something called, in lawyers' lingo, work creation, ceasing to be a echt industry and attaining phantom qualities far quicker than the economists, who always necessitate a century or two to set to new ideas, expected.

The long-awaited new epoch took clasp painlessly and smoothly. Unfortunately, while inaugurating it, its advocators (or those at the helm, or whoever the hell's occupation it was or should have got been to supply justification and encouragement) neglected to flip in some new criteria to travel along with it. The codification of ethical motive created specifically for the Age of Industry and inapplicable in any other epoch still predominates today. Relics of an era long gone by are still present in every facet of our quite modern, and quite different, lives.

Each new era inherits some of the former one's customs duty and mores. Feudalism cheerfully adopted facets of slavery. The Age of Industry gladly accepted the bondage and the kin outlook from the feudalistic lords. Nevertheless, every historical time interval should have got its ain notions of such as substances as honor, propriety, courtesy, education, and so forth. Throughout history, each era knew enough about itself to be able to confront facts when the going got tough. Except ours.

4. Defining Factors

Our era appropriated the Industrial values and mores in toto simply because, what with all the wars, revolutions, bootleggers, Aluminum Capone, unkeyed music, corny pictures and cornier politics, affirmatory and option action, and what not, it did not have got adequate clip to work out any new standards. As a result, we still see ourselves as members of Capitalist society.

Nothing could be additional from reality. A kid of Industry, Capitalism concerned itself mostly with production of goods. Look around you, metropolis dweller. How many people make you cognize who actually bring forth anything tangible? We are told repeatedly that our coevals have witnessed the Informational Revolution. How many well-informed people dwell in your building? We are told that the service sector is critical to our economy, but the thought that 20% of the population producing and delivering the commodity (not really - a great trade of the commodity is actually produced outside the Republic, in topographic points that tin be called industrial or democratic lone in a coquettish context) while the remaining 80% are involved, in one manner or another, in the service sector is, well, absurd. A maestro who uses twenty manual laborers and 80 retainers is not bad or inefficient, he is a madman.

The Phantom Industry is, apart from other things, aggressively anti-Capitalist. It resents competition and happens the thought of private endeavor distasteful. The truly enterprising spirit will seek to increase the quality of his merchandise to acquire ahead of the competitors. The Phantom Industry thought of good concern is to increase the promotional campaign's hypnotic consequence by pasting up the full human race with vulgar advertising. Traditional business community seek to make new marketplaces for new products. The Phantom Industry seeks to shed blood the already existing marketplaces dry. A good husbandman cognizes when to give a subdivision of his land a remainder for a while. Like land, marketplaces sometimes necessitate respite. Instead of giving them a rest, the Phantom Industry military units them artificially to work by increasing the amount of advertisement. Opening their the living dead wallets, billions of brainwashed zombies purchase the living dead merchandises with the living dead money. The the living dead chief executive officer smilings at the the living dead shareholders, and somewhat obsequiously they smile back. It works.

It might be possible to turn out that the current state of personal business is somehow okay, just as it was possible 150 old age ago to turn out that bondage was somehow okay, if it weren't for the fact that the service sector employees, who are busier than an norm nineteenth century baron ever was, working long hours to supply the so-called services, weren't so onerous - not to the economic system - after all, the economic system will reconstitute itself around almost anything you flip it - but to the ecosphere and the stock of natural resources that cannot be replenished.

Whoever committed us to the car civilization - Benz, Ford, or Henry Martin Robert Moses - could not possibly have got envisioned the consequent mess. The initial thought was to shorten the gainfully employed citizen's trip to the workplace to 10 minutes. As soon as mass production of autos took off, though, metropolises began to distribute out to counterbalance for the private car's considerable speed, and the congestion did the rest. Instead of an hour's walking to work, it is now an hr and a half's ride, with the miserable rider stuck in a pathetic present behind the plastic guidance wheel, inhaling exhaust and getting more than dissatisfied by the minute. Because most auto purchasers be given to buy on recognition autos they cannot afford (credit, incidentally, is a manner of mortgaging one's freedom), the merest abrasion or dent on his "vehicle" can deject them for months, marring even the ridiculously few holiday years the Phantom Industry still lets them to take. In bigger cities, in improver to the car traffic, billions of people utilize railroad trains and buses, shuttling between place and workplace. While immeasurably more than fuel-efficient than the automobile, our urban mass theodolite is bowed down by billions of commuter trains whose work could just as easily be performed from place or, for that matter, not performed at all. Millions of business offices across the state are illuminated and air-conditioned every day. Bulky aeroplanes (fuel efficiency be damned, the guzzlers' methods of combustion combustible have got not been improved in more than than one-half a century, they are still the aluminium barrels filled with kerosine they were 50 old age ago) boom into the skies, carrying Phantom Industry employees to conferences that, for some fragile reason, cannot be conducted over the phone. Thousands of hotels have invitees who are neither tourers nor explorers. Business travellers (Phantom Industry, for the most part) outnumber tourers in the air - five to one? Seven to one? Because the service sector is anything but an exciting topographic point to be and hardly more than than a sinecure masquerading as business, the norm clerk's self-esteem makes endure a great deal.

Case in point: What makes one state one's children when they inquire what their important-looking parents make all day? The truth, i.e. nil meaningful, is hardly a good answer when you're facing your ain children or the mirror. "You wouldn't understand, honey. It's too involved," is something 1 will fall back on sooner or later. Most children vaguely surmise that anything too involved must be meaningless. Inexperienced and lacking in basic cognition as they are, children are known occasionally to possess, and do first-class usage of, unfiltered wisdom. No matter. Sooner or later the small sodomites will learn! They are, after all, future employees of the Phantom Industry. Today's instruction standards, computing machine games, and sanitized telecasting shows will go forth them unfit for anything else.

Case in point: However disbelieving and naively sarcastic they may be, our children already know, and are resigned to, the fact that the most of import thing in the world, in the short run, anyway, is to have got a job. The full rentier social class have been stigmatized to a point where a fairly well-educated and amicable individual is loath to acknowledge he or she have no lasting business for fearfulness of being ridiculed as a useless freeloader. The great ruin of fine art can be at least in portion attributed to the fact that the once glorious grouping of people who did nil all twenty-four hours but go to exhibitions, visit the opera, and read books have all but ceased to exist, leaving all artistic and semi-artistic matters to the ill-informed and corrupt caprice of Phantom-Industry sponsored critics.

Case in point: The personal computing machine have been bought by, and is set to good usage in, every school in the nation. They have got yet to calculate out how to utilize it as a instruction tool. Some of the streamers and cartridge holder fine art expression existent cool, though.

Unreasonably loud, absurdly inflated, firmly entrenched in every civilised state on the planet (while the so-called underdeveloped states dreaming of it and are oftentimes quite murderously covetous of those who already have got it), the Phantom Industry necessitates astronomical amounts of energy to prolong itself. It is a wonderment how Islamic dictators, who have most of the energy sources, still pull off to maintain all of the consequent wealthiness to themselves instead of sharing some of it with their subjects. The current state of personal business benefits them, not us. If we used the resources sensibly, they would not have got the money to purchase our arms and engineering to endanger us and their ain people with. In that sense, they are far more than matter-of-fact than the Western leaders.

5. Extremum Oil.

Needless to say, none of this Phantom Industry material would be possible without oil and its stopping point philosophical relative, natural gas. There are indicants that we may be running out of it. Option beginnings of energy are only possible with the oil-based substructure already in place. They are offshoots, by-products of the age of oil. Back in the Nineteenth Century, Dmitry Mendeleyev, the Godhead of the Table of Elements, said, "Burning oil is as good as to using hard cash as firewood." The dramatic effects of the looming crisis might fill up Christian churches around the Earth with new converts who currently happen the thought of religion unworthy of their sophisticated attending ("What makes Supreme Being do for me?" - i.e. what services makes He provide?), but it is dubious they will make anyone recognize that certain things could have got been prevented.