Signals for New Millennium

20, Dec 1999
'So come the dawn of the new millennium most of us shall merely be drunk earthlings. So what?'
'What are the new signals? That should be the only question. That is what the hype should be about'
Gradually the hype is dying! The $5,000 celebration parties all over are being quietly cancelled. Nothing more is being heard of the plan of the very wealthy to fly to Japan to celebrate the New Year and then fly back to catch a second New Year in the West.

One would have thought that people were losing their sense of reason given all the crazy marketing schemes that came to light in respect to the coming of the new millennium.

The dawning of January 1, 2000, shall be like all the New Year's Days bygone. The sun shall come up in the eastern sky. And mankind everywhere on this planet shall continue to do what he has being doing for centuries.

According to Keith "Fatboy" Felix , our mechanic in Diego Martin, "we are all earthlings, doing basically the same things to survive, so why all the fuss?"

The "fuss" is the projected marketing geared really to emphasise the differences in terms of our degrees of consumption. The wealthy shall consume champagne, the poor shall drink rum. In the final analysis it is all about alcohol, the spirits that remove inhibitions and bring the joyous mirth we require so essentially in order to ease the pain of boredom, and so come the dawn of the new millennium most of us shall merely be drunk earthlings. So what?

In a piece called "Dealing with the culture of humanity" we said the following: "...Human kind, since its initial appearance on this planet, Earth, has done or attempted to do three basic things in the quest to preserve themselves and subdue an indifferent or somewhat 'hostile' environment.

"First, there was established some form of husbandry and gathering with the aim to distribute and consume some part thereof, the rest to be saved as surplus to be utilised in the ongoing struggle for better food, clothes and shelter.

"Secondly, there had to be instituted some kind of rites of passage in which a philosophical view of the world and our relation to it was inculcated and passed on to guarantee the total well-being and development of offspring (and continuity).

"In other words there had to be some form of education in the broadest sense of the word, or some form of moulding, that prepares us to interpret our own experiences within our own specific environment to be able to deal with the realities therein and which thereby involved some form of school, church, artistic engagement, quality pastime and organised 'play'.

"Thirdly, in order to facilitate all that has been said above, there had to come some form of social engineering, the conceptualising, designing and constructing of tools, instruments, means of communication and infrastructure.

"In other words, the activity of living or the ideal and value of 'work', that comprised husbandry, rites of passage and social engineering, was established from time immemorial. It is this culture of work that is the culture of humanity. Everything else is peripheral. And this work, this act of living and of manifesting self within community, does not only produce goods and services, but most of all it reproduces society and is the vehicle through which humanity sends the signals of what it intends to make of itself..."

What are the new signals? That should be the only question. That is what the hype should be about. The last thousand years saw the realisation of this culture of work in the globalisation of a system of socialised production and reproduction.

That was the coherent purpose from the days of Columbus to the present epoch of multinational corporations, it was the enterprise of globalisation. But the very technologies that had to be developed to sustain this global socialised production has begun to tease at a new concept of production organisation.

The advent of the PC as the major tool of work, the establishment of the Internet and with it the predicted multi-billion dollar business of E-commerce has established a new departure for the new millennium. A "worker" tomorrow shall be anyone, anywhere, who "telecommutes" and is a free agent under contract.

Even the "factory" as presently known shall soon be destined to merely house a free association of self-managing contractors each with his own terms and conditions of employment.

The Hitler-type production manager shall be a phenomenon of the past. The technologies available shall bring the true democratisation of the production process. Once this is established then the next step shall be a world political superstructure to match what has come to exist within production.

Shall we then see in the next thousand years a federal world government of freely associated producing countries? Shall this be the much predicted millennium of peace? For sure all "earthlings" shall have their say.

brenco@tstt.net.tt