DISQUS

sounds familiar :P http://www.metafilter.com/60092/Did-it-matter-l... - "[what] if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?" cheers!

so more like Varian (GOOG's economist) and Goldhaber then?

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2/differ...
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_4/gold...

cheers!

Roger Ehrenberg's written a lot about this...
http://www.google.com/search?q=GSTrUE&sitesearc...

another analogy might be CEO or prez as dungeon master; like if you think about it Hitler was just a super-charismatic lawful evil DM who convinced his role-playing PCs -- ein Volk -- they were living in a chaotic neutral world http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYvZnTFpip0 (it works on so many different levels and translations!) /self-Godwin :P

and that mythos, apparently, is what Tolkien et al were aiming to counter
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/ID24Aa0... and 'psychological warfare' (Cordwainer Smith literally wrote the book on it) has been an aspect of SF/fantasy ever since; notably PKD -- viz http://www.defectiveyeti.com/moy.pdf -- Vance, Herbert, Moorcock, Brunner etc; cf. Stapledon...

so 'campaign' could work as well in addition to 'franchise'?

well the Fed, Wall Street & DC are of course trying to preserve the (BWII) system --
http://www.investorsinsight.com/blogs/thoughts_... -- but is the status quo sustainable in the face of widespread panic^H^H^H^H^H (but slow) realisation that 'free' markets aren't the same thing as _efficient_ markets?

http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_...
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/...

these three leading lights, at least, presumable edge thinkers or conduits of such, say nay; reformulating Obama, we are the system and we can do it better -- if there's a 'betr' (technological/cultural) alternative that coercion/cynicism/apathy is impotent against, then the path of least resistance follows -- voila, we've (re)created the creative class...

or, if you want it in business terms, if fixed/replacement cost (capital) [path dependence] is no longer prohibitive -- and indeed, can be replicated many times over w/ relative ease -- and marginal cost is next to zero (and we're talking about the _entire_ system: worlds, universes, _realities_) then PKD-like [We Can Build You] 'simulations'* proliferate [witness China/Second Life/Solaris] and start encroaching on what was consensus/convention; we've started living in subjunctive (meta-)time** and it's opening up another _dimension_***

what's more, it calls for a new kind of statistics :P

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-02/...
cf. http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/thesis/

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/...
cf. http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/tsal...

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0412194 & http://www.vsppub.com/books/mathe/bk-IntPro.html

cheers!

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* http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/...
** http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/History%20of%...
*** http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scienc...

um, isn't he just catching up w/ Benkler* et al, e.g. Moglen and Lessig? like starting with Saxenian and Drucker [sort of already prefigured by Wilson/Bey (viz TAZ)] and extending thru to ESR (The Cathedral and the Bazaar) and RMS (GNU) -- even Shirky has a pop-tech book out on it now -- http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/book-re...

if you're thinking post-capitalism-as-we-know-it (Obama) change, then 'deconstructing' (I know po-mo terms are out of favour -- teasing out 'hidden assumptions'** behind) the "market" and the "state" is a nice exercise in seeking a workable first order paradigm realignment; (read Gellner’s Plough, Sword and Book and DeLanda's A New Philosophy of Society)

go back to Locke on currency...
http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/book/
cf. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/8/26/172939/637

DeLong on the corporation...
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/...
cf. http://interconnected.org/notes/2006/02/scifi/?...

and the market...
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/OpEd/virtual/t... & http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/...

so you probably wind up with something like economically feasible socialism*** (Nussbaum cosmopolitanism) or Stephensonesque burbclaves/phyles (deterritorialised balkanisation a la B.Anderson) before entering the Eganian/Dysonian post-human far future :P

cheers!

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* http://www.creativecomponent.com/2007/03/19/ste...
** http://allaboutalpha.com/blog/2008/03/09/shadwi...
*** http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/s...

yea, that's what i was thinking; they sound like paul simon's graceland :P admits the influence here! http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/4...