There may be a business model there – it certainly occurred to me while at CDC during the late 1970s that it might be possible to cultivate fertility as a business model with someone like Norris at the helm given his various statements and, in particular, “Back to the Countryside Via Technology”:
However, as you have noticed, there is an overall dynamic which I call “The Unfriendly AGI known as The Global Economy” that places everyone on a de facto war footing. In the particular case of media, this gives rise to something else you have noticed and about which I wrote in 1982 while at the Knight Ridder joint venture with AT&T to provide the first mass market electronic newspaper:
Mass-media influences cultural evolution in profound ways. Rather that assuming a paternalistic posture, we should be objective about these influences in making policy and technology decisions about the new media. It is important to try and preserve the positive aspects of extant media while eliminating its deficits. On the positive side, mass-media is very effective at eliminating “noise” or totally uninteresting information compared to, say, CB radio. This is accomplished via responsible editorial staffs and market forces. On the negative side, much “signal” or vital information is eliminated along with the noise. A good example of this is the way mass-media attends to relatively temporal things like territorial wars, nuclear arms, economic ills, social stratification … etc. to the utter exclusion of attending to the underlying cause of these events: our limits to growth. The need for “news” is understandable, but how long should we talk about which shade of yellow Joe’s eye is, how his wife and her lover feel about it and whether he will wear sun-glasses out of embarrassment before we start talking about a cure for jaundice?
Mass-media has failed to give appropriate coverage to the most significant and interesting issue facing us because of the close tie between institutional culture and editorial policy. Institutional evolution selects people-oriented people – individuals with great personal force. These people are consumed with their social orientation to the point that they ignore or cannot understand information not relating in fairly direct ways to politics or the psychological aspects of economics. Since institutional evolution is reflected in who has authority over what, editorial authority eventually reflects the biases of this group. They cannot understand life, except as something that generates politics and “human interest” stories. They may even, at some level of awareness, work to maintain our limits to growth since it places their skills at a premium. In a people-saturated environment (one at its limits to growth) people-oriented people are winners.
Actually, this is an ancient problem that keeps rearing its ugly head in many places in many forms. In my industry its called the “Whiz Kids vs. MBAs” syndrome. Others have termed it “Western Cowboys vs. Eastern Bankers”. The list is without end. I prefer to view it as a more stable historical pattern: “Pioneers vs. Feudalists”.
It took me another decade, and experiencing the passage of a law to ban NASA from competing with private launch services before I conceived and wrote up a political economic reform to strike at the root of the problem: Centralization of positive network externalities whether in the public or private sectors:
To that end, this white paper argues for the adoption of the
following policy reform:The government should tax net assets, in excess of levels
typically protected under personal bankruptcy, at a rate equal to
the rate of interest on the national debt, thereby eliminating
other forms of taxation. Creator-owned intellectual property
should be exempt.
…
With the exception of basic functions of government and the pay
down of debt, the government budget should be dispersed to
citizens as cash, rather than being spent in government programs
or even limited in the form of vouchers. This is “market
democracy” in which the citizens and their markets, rather than
central planning and politics, influence the selection of goods
and services to be capitalized and provided.
…
Millions of
potential families, not to mention tens of millions of children
aborted for financial reasons, have been lost to our society
forever.In short, our social contract has been breached and the angry
plaintiffs are about to realize they can sue.This is a politically explosive situation.
It took me another two decades before I figured out that this could provide a monetary system backed by the net asset tax – which I attempted in 2014 to get put into place as county currency in Fremont county Iowa and finally got around to writing up as “Property Money”.
It took me another decade before realizing that property owners were so addicted to centralization of positive network externalities in the private sector that they’d block any attempt at the county level, let alone national level, to do any of the above, and that I’d have to appeal directly to the young men they were castrating hence replacing with foreign labor – and implement property money as militia money – placing all positive network externalities only in the hands of military aged men. I realized this would have to await a collapse scenario in which the forward-deployed cartel soldiers posing as “doing jobs those lazy good for nothing young men of Iowa won’t do” offered “protection” to the large land owners and other traitors posing as “capitalists”.
The response of The Powers That Be?
Flood the US with FOREIGN military aged men!
Offering guys like Trump or even Musk is a bad joke.
You guys think I’m not being watched? It sure seems like it to me.