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dot.com disaster: the new e-poor by Alex Burns (alex@disinfo.com) - January 07, 2001 |
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| Strange things happen to geo-economic ideas on their way to power. The 1970s socio-political upheavals subsequently produced an intense battle between rival ideologies. Sadly these policies have also produced new teflon-clothed business predators: the 'slash-and-burn' re-engineer, the technological snake-oil salesperson, the futurist whose scenarios direct you to solutions only they can provide. 'Free to choose' is their social mantra, but what happens when the collective result of these trance-inducing directives locks our society into bad results? The sudden free-fall of the Dow Jones and NASDAQ stock-market indicators on Friday 14th April, 2000 caused many info-tech analysts to pause and question the social mantras that they had long been conditioned with. Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) slowed, venture capitalists were more cautious in their investments, employees re-evaluated the stock-options that bind them to their lieges. The dot.com disasters glaringly highlight the distance between the chimerical Digital Age and what economist Paul Krugman lucidly calls "the Age of Diminished Expectations." Many e-commerce and e-tail companies are surviving on credit, doomed to extinction before they can 'cross the chasm' to the profitability paradise. Faced with the 'value migration' outflow of key staff and lucrative intellectual property to Germany, India, and Japan, companies become locked into ruinously intense Darwinian competition for faster R&D/product cycles, smaller market niches, and the fleeting attention of disloyal audiences. What the stock-market indicators don't reveal, but that the free-fall offered a rare glimpse of, is the disturbing growth of 'digital sweatshops', anti-union policies, mandatory urine testing, and harsh working conditions which would not be accepted in other professions. Slave-driven coders and programmers who are scrapped by age thirty-five, call center support staff, and marketing specialists trapped by their own psychographic profile are the new under-class. These truths must be unacknowledged by shortsighted management elites who deploy narrow interpretations of Adam Smith's Wealth Of Nations treatise, but remain unfamiliar with Smith's more egalitarian vision described in the Theory Of Moral Sentiments. Dot.com disasters are not simply the return of a repressed Industrial Revolution; they reveal that mercantile capitalism has become malignant, endangering society's cohesiveness. In his book Corporate Cults: The Insidious Lure of The All-Consuming Organization (New York: AMACOM, 1999), Dallas Baptist University professor of management Dave Arnott argues that many enjoyable dot.com staff perks - the sports facilities, endless parties, and video-game championships - "are not really altruistic, but designed to induce you to devote more and more of your time, talent, and emotional allegiance to the corporation." Whilst most dot.coms don't induce the full Stockholm Effect (the merging of predator-prey identities first noticed in terrorism), their leadership/staff motivation systems do employ many psyche-manipulative techniques that properly belong in the psycho-analysts' office, not the weekly staff morale rally. Dot.com staff will happily work eighty-hour weeks, pull all-nighters when asked, and give up holiday benefits to meet the latest 'hot-team' deadline. The same lure of eternal dot.com infamy that curtails stock-market slumps entraps many employees in cycles of infantile dependency. When Ronald Reagan assumed his presidential office, he brought with him a simplistic form of supply-side economics. Bill Clinton used rival strategic trader ideologies to lock the US economy into simplistic "win-lose" face-offs with other developing economies. In order to surf the chaotic migratory capital investment flows, we must outwit the business predators with values-systems attuned to surviving in a multi-polar world. The 1999 WTO Battle In Seattle was the first wake-up call. Will you heed the second? |
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Why The Bubble's In Trouble Going Public In A Lousy Week Going Out Of Dot Commission? Wall Street: What Bloodbath? As Wealth Goes, So May Workers Cheap Stocks, No Lock In Barrel Who's Richer, Larry Or Bill? Net CEOs: 'Shallow And Greedy' Little Gains? Nothing Ventured More Delays In IPO Land Justin Hall@HotWired Stoked Software Boot Camp Internet Democrats After The Fall Dot-com Party Madness Money For Nothing Dead Startups: Shrinking Violets Reactions To Stock Carnage: The Bubble Has Burst!: Alan Greenspan's Nightmare The Long Boom That Sound You Hear Is A Crash 24/7 And Loving It The WTO & E-Commerce Disinformation Dossier On Corporate Religions Disinformation Dossier On The Federal Reserve Disinformation Dossier On Old Tricks In The New Economy Startup Failures.com |
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