Industrial mutation - if I may use the biological term incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within,
incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new
one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact
about capitalism.
- Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.
Following the cyclical exhaustion of the first cyberspace boom
artificial winter set in throughout the capitalist world. Investors'
'animal spirits' retreat and the shadows of the Yin World stir.
As the economy slithers in the abyss the dusty grimoires of
modernity's arch-magician JM Keynes are once again being
perused for policy conjurations to exorcise the darkside of the
wave.
Conceived amidst the traumatic economic upheavals of the
1920s and 30s, Keynesianism is an art of governmental
jugglery designed to levitate economic demand through the
power of belief. It is structured as an elaborate confidence
trick, and all rigorous economic analysis exposes its policy
prescriptions as sheer illusionism. The ultimate ambition is a
vanishing act, aimed at disguising capitalism's intrinsic
cyclicity. The typical outcome is a sleazy pork-fest, as pay-offs
to special interests ensure the degeneration of the invisible
hand into a hermetic sociology of secret handshakes.
The primary target of Keynesian High-Magic is the
abominable Cyberhype sorcery of 'creative destruction' which manifests through Schumpeter's "wave-like movement
of alternating periods of prosperity and depression [that] has
pervaded economic life ever since the capitalist era began …"
Social innovation requires that existing arrangements and
hierarchies are thrown into disorder and shattered, making the
downturn no less functional than the boom. The dynamic of
capitalism eventually trashes each and every 'capitalist
system' that manages to constitute itself, plunging its
ever-expanded sphere of influence into the episodic tumult of
creative destruction, where it converts established structures
into resources for metamorphosis. That is why the cyclical
trough typically triggers a range of 'gothic affects' related to
vampiric contagion and possession by alien forces.
In the depths of the economic darkside the world becomes a
puppet for things yet to come. It is here that future-positive
'disruptive technologies' are spawned, where labor, capital,
and markets are cheap to acquire. Take-overs of every kind
are easier on the darkside.
If the Keynesian magus is a policy-maker and overseer, the
Schumpeterian sorcerer is an entrepreneur, adept in the
shadowy arts of recombination. Enterprise invokes an
abstract power of productive synthesis by channelling the
latest and most intensely virtualized modalities of
credit-capital into the initiation of experimental business
activities. The entrepreneur is a carrier, avatar of the
intrinsically transient "social function of innovation," and
cannot be defined either as a specific person or member of a
distinct class. Enterprise is an anomaly from the darkside,
populating the future with its "swarming of new combinations."
Each wave arises at the edges where the equilibrium state is
most unformed. Only the paranoid survive, says Intel's
(Schumpeterian) Andy Grove, because there is always
something stirring on the margins that threatens to devastate
the existing order of economic interests. Because the old core
is relatively insulated from information, it is desensitized it to
the emergence of its most dangerous competitors: the new
products, production processes, markets, supply sources, and
business organizations that flow in subliminally from the
periphery.
The high-magicians of demand management try to prevent
the new economy from sliding into darkness, but it is already
too late for that. Even as the shadows thicken something
unimaginable is arriving from the edges of the world.