the sacred nature of money in american capitalism

*so happy to be back. sorry for the delay.

in a society which values, forthrightly, money as the razon'det (sp?) for labor, which I think we can say is for most the body of everyday existence, that is, that labor and the struggle for the means to continue (whose exchange form is money) is the major pursuit of life, money is neverthess hidden and not discussed directly. This secrecy gives it the characteristics of the sacred, so that conversations regarding employment, which is of course essential to everyday existence as it does, for the majorety of people, determine who they will be spending their time with every day (this must be considered of major importance to their lives), that although these conversations have money as their foundation and are essentially negotiations about money, the money is never mentioned until the very end, the climax, of the discussion (said discussion possibly lasting months). the secret nature of the dollar ammounts being alluded to gives them a sacred tinge: that these are the all powerful figures, that are so powerful they must not be mentioned outside of the sacred context (the closing negotiation), that they have the power to eliminate people from your life as surely as if they ceased to exist. breaking the taboo regarding their sacred context, also, results in excommunication as a candidate "only" concerned with money should not be considered.

at the edges of employment, when one is changing jobs, for example, the sacred figures are called to mind in a daily existence that tries to forget their importance for it's own protections, because the stress of having the higher world looking down over your shoulder would makes life working life too difficult: the stresses, rivalries and competitiveness of open salary negotiations are so important and so powerful to the worker that the work itself is in eminent danger of being neglected in favor of them. They are the true work which is after the true purpose of all such work--the money. therefore, no one is supposed to know anyone eleses salary, and salaries are never to be discussed or mentioned, but rather forgotten, as the steel bars that hold up the office tower are ignored behind the drywall. at the edges of employment, when one is looking at new jobs, the comparison of salaries is unavoidable and the money shines through the cracks and colors everything nearby.

This can cause people to behave in strange ways, as the presence of the sacred often does, by imputing a feeling of powerlessness to those who have to bow before it's might and resentment in those who forgot that this arbiter of their lives and the people in them was always lurking behind the scenes, validating or invalidating everything, to those who feel extraordinary worth when their communion with the divine comes out in their favor, regardless of the relationships that they have trampled, former benefactors spit upon, human interactions and dependencies, build over months or years, ripped out by their roots.

I should also note that the extremely stressful environment surrounding the sacred dollars does benefit the employer (who creates it) because the stress level associated with dealing with is make employees less likely to question their underpinnings and ensures that only the strongest and most determined, most ruthless, most phsychotic, or simply most able to deal with the stress, will demand more money, risk the unknown, and meet emplyers closer to their true dollar limit.

ANARCHY

Anarchists, like the black box, the kind that go to protests with socialists and have a vague luddite/marxist platform, seem to think that without corportate america there would be peace on earth. no wait, that's naive i have to give them more credit than that:

without any coroporate or government structures and without money, there would be peace on earth. or at least, what the young could build from the blank slate would be better than the built-up system.

when I was younger, stronger, and in better health i agreed with them. but i didn't think that there would be world peace, i thought that in the shuffle i could grab a bigger slice of the pie for less work by virtue of being fit and smart. i was probably wrong, but let me tell you what i would do if the world capitalist system collapsed along with all national governments and religions, tomorrow:

1. get together as much money as possible while the banks are going bust, convert it to gold, and bury it.

2. gather as many guns, body armour, and other weapons as possible

3. find some people i could trust, and arm them

4. find the most stable/promising rising warlord

5. pledge our support to him

6. help him sieze control of as large a territory as possible

who's with me?

the rule of expansion

i'm going to drop some knowledge here that you can chalk up with Murphy's Law, Moore's Law, and the Competitive Principle.

Expanding human systems are much easier to maintain and therefore more reliable and durable than equilibrium systems--as long as they can continue to expand. This is because as long as the expansion, or surpluss that is the goal of the system (the surplus that the system is designed to achieve--expansion systems tend to be designed to achieve as much as possible, as opposed to equilibrium systems, which try to NOT achieve surplus in order to conserve resources and achieve stability)--as long as this surplus is large enough to cover the vagaries of variation within the system and support structure (and in a large enough system this is very possible) the continuation of the system (give continued expansion) is virutally assured.

The classic example of this is the military empire. say you have one empire that is aggressively expanding it's borders by conquering it's neighbors. the goal of the conquering is to send the pillage from conquered provinces back to the capital to train new armies. In a stable empire the goal is to not incur expenses greater than your income to ensure continuous smooth functioning. However, if you have a few bad years, if your stable empire has a famine or is attacked by a neighbor, it could be possible for your resources to be depleated suddenly and for your empire to collapse. The expanding empire, however, always has surpluss flowing in that it can divert from creating new armies (capital investment) to disaster management. Not to mention that all those armies would come in handy in fending off invaders. Also not to mention that your neighbors can't suddenly attack you when you are constantly fighting them anyway. The expansion empire is unstoppable and immune to disaster or bad luck as long as it can find profitable new provinces to conquer.

This is qhy markets must expand--if they have stability as their goal the minuite something goes wrong they could completely collapse. the point is that the capital generated by the expansion continually outstrips expenses because the of continued expansion.

this is also the beauty in the military industrial complex because the ammount of goods produced can be continuously increased leading to greater need for increase (arms race).

This is also why we need to build space colonies capable of self expansion.

more notes on the salesman

the sales personality is never happy or kind except when it is trying to convince you of something. they get a pretty big rush just off of the attempt (which makes them glow and serves the purpose, see "sales"). but also, this is how they measure their self worth--by seeing how many people they can make "like them" emough to sell them on their message. this serves a very valid function in terms of telling them if they've "still got it" as anyone makeing a living exclusively on an elusive talent should certainly want to know. However, I think that they also determine their personal esteem on this measure, and so when they are not working their magic on someone they feel lost and uncertain and walk around looking gruff.

the greater the challenge the greater the rush, so maybe that's another reason for aggressive sales tactics that seek to lie as much as possible.

perhaps in their personal lives also they may resort to convincing people of things that aren't true just for the sake of it--it should be a short step from sales to at least mild pathological lying, once you associate lying with such a positive rush (as making a sale--the main way you get approval from yourself and others).

this is also why they "get hot" and "slump". when a lot of sales are going through, the salesman gets so giddy on his/her godlike powers of persuasion that they have redoubled energy to be even friendlier and more aggressive, make more sales. when serveral of their pitches go badly, they begin to doubt themselves, their abilities, their very worth as people, and so can barely smile at the next potential cutomer (who now looks rather like the next certain rejection).

I'm also sure the commision system arose because the sales personality is so imprecise (see "sales") that he/she would treat a verbal commitment to buy just like getting the dollars themselves, and so basing their pay on dollars received is the only way to get them to apply their powers to this comparatively mundate detail.

**as an addendum, i'm working with a salesperson now who i like and respect, who doesn't seem to be an idiot at all, and who seems to pretty much keep his word. lucky me.

The Future of Advertising

a few months ago i was on acid and i had the following epiphany

i saw the internet browser screen as a fountain of water, with two distinct streams. the first is the content, which flows down in the middle of the screen. the second is the advertising, which flows all along the edges according to the efforts of designers, advertising salesmen, and executives.

i have been thinking a lot lately about how crucial advertising is to a free internet and how i really want to embrace the fact that the advertising is what drives the content and makes it possible by fishing for the funds that pay for the server space. just as the content brings the readers that makes this fishing possible.

so anyway my vision of this symbiotic animal was of the rippling waves of advertising are constantly above and to either side of the content you are trying to look at, and as you scroll down the page the ads flash and change according to their own perverse logic. sometimes the ads even swell and splash to cover the content, but only for an amount of time just short enough so that you don't quit the page in disgust.

as long as we can get used to this frothing border we should be able to have just about anything be free and still profitable from the internet, from videos to books to music, computer programs, various administrative, organizational, and informative services.

in the eyes of the young, the two streams (content and advertising) are immediately distinct, but to those not raised to the new medium they seem hopelessly entangled.

google is trying to trick our young eyes by making the ads look almost as austire as the content, because the overt graphical aggressiveness of most ads is their deadist giveaway.

how old people can't understand computers

i recently experienced a full does of the smugness and frustration that comes from the generation gap. a certain superior here at the company asked me for "all the updated electronic sales report for this month". As i have explained to him countless times, this cannot be run as one report (because of the archaic nature of the accounting software "reports", ie, printable text document versions of the data, can only be run in specific ways according to a series of DOS prompts--indeed most accounting programs seem to work this way, but more on this later) so the "report" is actually 3 separate reports, and they don't just print, i have to email them to my gmail account (my office outlook blocks the impersonal emails with attachments that come from the accouting sofrware program, and when i complain to the IT manager he just says, "earthlink sucks, what do you want me to say?") so i have to send them go gmail, hit "view", copy, past into notepad, save as a txt, and email to this certain superior. so anyway he expects that i'll be able to run these three reports immediately, but then, when he asks for a report "of all sales made by all salespeople for all of 2006" he is very appologetic and sorry that he needs it on such sort notice.

but running that report is exactly the fucking same steps as running any ONE of the three that he just seemed to think i could make magically appear out of my ass and why hadn't i sent them over ALREADY...

and so, you see, the problem is that in his mind logically a small ammount of recent data must be easier to fetch than a large amount of old data. lord, he probably is imagining me rummaging through dusty filing cabinets, sweating over missing pieces of paper. but no, you dummy, i just type in the dates and there it all is.

and if any of it's not there it's not MY problem because it's not like i'm the one who entered that stinky old data anyway. plus if i had data entry is so far beneath me now that it's serve you right if i was careless and got it wrong.

on drinking coffe and putting off eating

it makes me see things. the edges of objects are more easily burned into my eye and shift and float when i look away. time also slips by very fast. very very fast. have to be careful to remember to go out to lunch before 3 (coming back from lunch at 4 looks so shabby). after eating day slows down again, becomes very boring again. also, wouldn't want to work too hard. also, wouldn't want to be obviously so much smarter than coworkers. hungry = stupid = humble = interested = 5:30pm allready.

Sales

i've been working with salesmen for some time now, and hard-core salesmen, too, and it occurs to me that although i know their ways very well some of you may not. i am going to attempt to convey, therefore, how thuroghly despicable actions can be carried out by person who are not, in themselves, despicable.

do not be fooled. the smile in the eyes of the sales person is genuine, and so is his or her charm and ebullient hope to help you. the value of his or her offer, however, is most certainly trash if it requires someone as talented and aggressive as the person you are talking to to pitch it.

the first thing to understand is that sales people, or rather, people who are good at selling things, are much more charismatic than you or i and so are able to get away with much more. i think that this gives them a warped sense of consequenses and of truth. they are specialists at convincing others of things, and they also have a great facility for either not knowing the exact truth themselves or at least not being able to figure out what it is. icorrigible optimism is also a great sales tool, so these also tend to be the type of people who ignore bad indications at all cost, just like you fools who continuosly underestimate subway transit times.

this frees them from having to specifically lie most of the time. they don't know anything, and if anyone does know they can convince them that they are wrong, so their lack of knowledge gets spread as though it really were something, and then it starts to really seem true.

for example: my hypothetical company offers some crappy service. I'm the salesman/woman for my company. I just don't have it in me to really asses the service and determine it to be crappy. even if it is obviously more expensive than the superior product of a competitor, I will be likely to say to myself that everyone really would be better off buying from me because "I provice better customer service anyway" or "it will be more valuable for them to develop a relationship with my company in the long run". these are the kind of vague statements that i am certainly not going to have the patience or pessimistic knack to recognise as either boldfaced lies or pitifully empty hopes.

and its a good thing that i don't, because that would definitely hurt my chances of making a sale. the kind of people who are good at poking holes in company services and policies never make it as sales people. rubes can smell cynicism, see it in the eyes.

given this protectively un-cynical personality to provide a basis of deeply fuzzy morality, combined with the pressure and perception of victimization that comes from living on commision (living, "on a smile and a shoeshine" [death of a salesman]) your typical sales person is likely to be thorougly not-evil, and yet still engage in what someone else might label vicious deception in order to get people to give up their $. in companies that employ salespeople but are not run by them (most business owners are former salespeople--being able to convince people to give you money is a big advantage to have if you own a business), this tendancy is encouraged to the fullest extent possible in much the same way that normally friendly dogs are teased and starved so that they become vicious.