Mark Wilson I am the creator of TopXML. I am available for international and local (Australia) contracts. I am a Solution Architect/Business Analyst. I have worked in IT in several countries (NZ, Australia, South Africa, UK) building and training teams for government and very large non-governmental organizations. I am ex-Microsoft Consulting Services. I wrote the first book on Microsoft XML published in 2000 called XML Programming with VB and ASP. Most recently I have been building tools for the SEO industry. Ask me for a 37 point SEO health-checkup for your website.
I am very happy to have the
opportunity to write this foreword as I share the same thoughts and feelings as
Kurt does. I hope that by writing this foreword, I can encourage readers
of this article take the time to understand what is written here: we
may be entering a time in the world when supply can accurately meet demand,
wherever that demand may be around the world. XML can achieve this, and
the result could be new, empowering and wonderful!
The
article begins at the beginning and covers a few hundred years of commerce...
and postulates at the end that perhaps (finally!) the hierarchies and management
theories will begin to fade and dynamic streams of data will become the
norm. He also suggests that we could even be entering a time when those
who create the wealth actually begin to earn the wealth they create
rather than have management and huge corporations gather the benefits!
These
concepts, as Kurt will agree, are not new. There are many other thinkers
who are tinkering with these empowering concepts and we are all influenced by
the seeming success of Apache and Linux.
Corporations (who have the same rights and protections as people do), are
they too powerful? Do they need to be treated as humans and given the
same rights?
The internet is a great leveller, and websites like WTOWatch.COM have sprung up
to prod our thoughts.
But above all, the possibilities for the use of XML to ensure supply meets
demand and to enable the new economy is exciting.
Read on...
Money, Money, Money
For several centuries, Western economy has been predicated upon the notion
of competition. The American capitalistic society is perhaps the ultimate
embodiment of this notion -- we compete for money and power, and the captains
of industry that are most lionized are those that are best able to "defeat"
the opposition -- to put competitors out of business, to win market share, to
beat your business rival in securing a deal. The companies that survive -- the
people that survive -- reap the material rewards of such battles: the million
dollar homes, the sports cars, the lavish lifestyle, the adulation of a press
hoping to secure more advertising dollars from your company.
That is to say, this economy uses monetary compensation both to reward
success and to indicate it. The culture promotes it, of course -- those with
more money can purchase more goods, and the goods that are purchased are often
valued far beyond their cost of manufacture and distribution. Thus in all of
advertising a subliminal message gets passed: monetary success is desirable,
to be rich is to be young forever, to be famous, to be powerful. It is a
message that is seen in every car ad, every fashion spread, nearly all
television shows.
Capitalism has defeated its most obvious enemy: Communism. The danger in
the Communist model was not in its insistence that labor take control of its
own destiny and throw out the elitists (though that may have been the
perceived danger). Rather, the danger comes from the underlying principle of
Communism that wealth and status were unimportant, that all tasks are
fundamentally equal, and that the state rather than the individual should
control the distribution of goods. Ultimately, each of these points were
flawed. In particular, Communism makes the erroneous assumption that status is
itself unimportant, when in fact it is one of the most central themes that ran
through the human psyche.
At a science fiction conference many years ago I argued with author Brad
Strickland for a number of hours about a point that he felt was crucial -- if
you restored the imbalance in equity between people, then you'd have a truly
just and fair society. I felt (and still feel) that the argument was fatuous
-- there will always be those people who will seek to take advantage of others
to gain some measure of power, just as there will always be those people who
will willingly give up some measure of power for security. In a capitalist
society, that power is measured by the ability to buy and sell; in a communist
society, the same power had to be gained by force and the threat of force,
because the mechanism for measuring status had been knocked out of the system.
That is one of the reason that most communist countries end up becoming
totalitarianistic.
Yet Capitalism is not without its problems. In a totally capitalistic
state, most of the advantages go to those who start advantaged, and those who
survive are the ones that are most ruthless -- the ones who will use every
weapon in their arsenal to defeat an opponent, who work first towards their
own betterment before the betterment of others. Over time, those that seek to
help others, that work toward the betterment of society first are often
marginalized, and more often than not very poor materially in comparison. A
typical CEO of a company will make as much as a thousand times the salary of a
teacher, even one who is considered a leading authority in his or her field.
Indeed, in this day and age the disparity in wages between those people who
create the products to be sold (which frequently require complex technical
knowledge) and those who manage the companies that produce the products (which
typically involves what amounts to a basic degree in applied sociology) is so
great that the compensation packages of the hundred top senior managers in a
region is roughly equivalent to the anount of wages of a million workers.
In a way, though, what is most worrisome here is not the unfairness of the
inequity, but rather the effect of the imbalance. In a capitalist society,
money is the primary avenue of power. For all that the official stance has
been saying that the economy has been doing well, it is largely improving the
lot of a very small proportion of the total population. Indeed, as measured
against inflation, real wages have been falling steadily since the 1970s, and
the disparity between the mean wage (the total compensation produced divided
by the working population) and the median wage (a wage calculated by taking
the wages earned by each individual then finding the wage of individual who
falls at the midpoint between the poorest and richest person) has been rising
at an alarming rate. What this means is that monetary wealth (and hence power)
is becoming concentrated in a very small portion of the total population, at
the expense of the rest of the population.
This has a very corosive impact upon society, effects that are evident
around us. The cost of housing increases out of proportion to demand, and the
size (and hence resource use) of those house have also ballooned. This makes
it more difficult to buy houses, and those who do buy often have less left
over to build their own personal fortunes. Speculation on everything from the
stock market to lottery tickets goes up, not because people have the money to
invest, but because there is an increasing sense that only by gambling your
money will you have even a chance at financial security (what's wrong with
this picture). Large corporations, which represent the interest of the monied
class, contribute large amounts to campaign coffers to get legislation which
favors them, usually at the expense of individual rights. Insurance companies
make it impossible for all but the most well connected to be treated for
illness, because they wield the money that runs the health system. The media
promulgates this, playing on our desperation for becoming rich ("Who Wants To
Be A Millionaire?"), interviewing the barely post-pubescent software mogul,
making actors and athletes into icons to sell their next hundred million
dollar film or product line.
Basic civil liberties erode. When people can see that large monied
interests set the political agenda, determine who the candidates are, and can
effectively enact legislation, the act of voting becomes largely a hollow
exercise ... which helps to explain why voting has been declining steadily.
When you realize that your vote is meaningless, why do it? The media pundits
view this as voter apathy, yet most people do care about their future and
their governance -- they just recognize a futile gesture when they see it.
Corporations know more about you than the most secretive police state ever
could. Every financial transaction that you make locates you in space, time
and interest. Your personal history is bought and sold every day by marketing
companies without compensating (or even acknowledging) your interest in this
information. To know everything about someone is to have power over him or her
-- the power to threaten or compel without compensation, to punish someone by
making it more difficult for them to make a living, to even shape the messages
around a person so that he or she is coerced into actions without realizing
that they are doing so.
This is perhaps one of the greatest curses of the information age: those
who control the message and the pipes control the population, usually at the
cost of making it impossible for those people who don't have the advantages to
start with to make their way to the top. Without some check, such systems
eventually become dystopian nightmares, where the vast majority of the
populace is powerless to affect their own future.
