Older (and Longer) Writings
Last revised 7/3/06
This blog (see “home“) is about the Attention Economy, etc.
Note: This site is in process of updating, so this is a temporary, partially improved and updated version
HERE ARE LINKS TO SOME OF MY OLDER WRITINGS
The entries below may be drafts, rough sketches, outlines or more finished words., starting with the most recent
The Real Nature of the Emerging Attention Economy talk at E-tech conference on the Attention Economy, March 8, 2006,
A Coloring–book Theory of Modern War in Kritikos, February 2005
Toto, We’re Not In Oz Anymore: A Critique of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? (August 2004) [pdf]
The mentality of Homo interneticus: Some Ongian postulates First Monday, volume 9, number 6 (June 2004)
Draft on Values, Technology, the Internet, and a New Opening for Humane Socialism September 15, 2003
My talk at e-Vision in Wellington, NZ: Aotearoa-New Zealand in the Global Attention Economy”
March 2002
My thoughts on Terrorism, on Homeland Security, on the Iraq war, and other apsects of the Bush administration and my work on the Napster Wars, and on Art and the Internet, are to be found among
My Columns in Telepolis (search “Goldhaber” and select English versions)
The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net First Monday, 1997
OLDER WRITINGS;
Viewpoint (of this site)
Attention, Meaning and Meaningfulness
Advertising in Cyberspace (addenda to a conference at the Aspen Institute)
The Attention Economy and the Net (draft of talk at Harvard Conference (125/97)(A slightly more formal version of 10.)
Attention Apothegms
Cyberspace and its relation to the economy)
Science: in what sense it leads to truth; its drawbacks; and how it’s changing in the new era
Heresies Related to Technology
Miscellaneous Thoughts, mostly related to politics
“Language as a Public Good Under Threat: The Private Ownership of Brand Names”
The Viewpoint That Guides this Site
What will guide many of these offerings are the principles I have worked out as to what is really going on in cyberspace. Let me start by listing some of these principles.
Cyberspace today is a mess, yet it’s going to be even more of a mess — like life itself. Which is no coincidence, since, more and more, this will be the space in which life as a whole is lived.
The move to cyberspace parallels the move from old feudal Europe to the New World of the Americas five centuries ago. That traverse both set the stage for and was an early indicator of the rise of the new market-based/ money-based/ industrial/ mass-production economy. Yet leaders of old feudalism didn’t see that. They thought the new space, the new world, was for them; so they set up dukes and earls and viscounts to govern it for them, until they all fell.
Likewise the grand panjandrums of the money economy think the new space today, this space, cyberspace is for them, that it will just be part and parcel of that now-old system. But the parallel is that cyberspace is really arising for different reasons; to give birth to a completely new economy — an economy that is like feudalism in one way: it has little to do with money. (Though it is unlike feudalism as can be in most other respects.)
A Caveat
I’ll come to what this new economy is, how it’s different and unexpected, how it operates. But first, let me be clear: it is no utopia. Embrace this new system, but not wholeheartedly, I would say. See its strengths, yes. But see its weak points as well, and its evils too. Fight those as best you can. Or try to ameliorate the worst drawbacks somehow. But don’t believe that by trying to turn back the tide you would be a savior, because the old system can’t really stand much longer in any case. Should it survive, somehow, it would putrefy. We have to go forward, and this appears to be the best chance we have.
For morePrinciples of the New Economy look here.
–Michael H. Goldhaber / mgoldh@well.com
More later
NOTE ON PERMISSIONS TO QUOTE: In this intermediate period, when the new economy is not yet fully established, I unfortunately must limit permission to quote any of the pages in this directory as follows.
Short (under 200 words) properly attributed quotes are permitted. Whole sections or articles (files) may be published by non-profit groups provided the publications in which they appear have a total circulation of under 2,000, with proper attribution, and payment at highest rate any author is paid.
I RETAIN COPYRIGHT IN ALL CASES.
For other permissions, or in case of doubt, contact me.
michael@goldhaber.org