Neal Cormier’s Weblog

Decentralization of mass media into a shattered niche market with global over-bearings will automate the corporate experience, and end the corporation as we know it.

Its obsolescence has been antedated by electronic destabilization. A centralist entity such as the corporation and the already obsolete nation states, could never hope to survive in an environment of the nascent chaos and subjectivity inherent in the decentralizing process of the internet and related technologies.

As Marshall McLuhan says himself ‘an environment where everything affects everything else, all the time, the most familiar emotions will be that of anxiety and terror.’

Currently the nation states such as the US, and corporations such as Microsoft are enjoying a brief hiatus before they are completely swallowed up by the new pedestrian city as all pervasive environment, and the end of capital to digital form.

This will run perpendicular to a few other facts to come:

1. Mass society is saturating, i.e. having too many babies from its ‘route’ labor force, vs. creative members of the populous, hence causing mass society to spill over its own brim.

2. We have almost reached what Ray Kurzweil calls the ‘telescopic peak’ or moment where manual labor will be completely replaced. But not just manual, but manual for blue collar, and route or left brained labor for white collar work, will reach its apex very soon.

3. This will in turn cause mass sudden unemployment at a certain point which will then mark the collapse of centralist institutions under the burden of their own weight.

4. The speed at which this happens will be far too quick for the new mob to catch up, causing chaos beyond the control of centralist institutions.

This is pretty much what guarantees a chaotic transition into the tribal future of pocketed societies. What will happen at that point will most likely be the shake down of all life on Earth, and it will be a wonder if we can keep the nuclear power plants from meltdown.

Just as any medium or ‘form’ is largest in popularity just before its complete obsolescence, so too will the nation state become fascistic again, engulfing the whole world in the ‘new world order.’

But this will be illusory.

Just as the painting gained unprecedented popularity when the camera took its place, so too will the nation and its invisible puppeteer: the trans-international corporation, will both enter a stage of swelling until the wound begins to scab up and individuals hooked up to personal computers will end the reign of the company, the office, the house, the car, the TV and its environment of passivity…

References:

‘The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,’ (1999) 2005, Ray Kurzweil

‘War and Peace in the Global Village,’ 1968, Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore