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Shattered Windows, Part 1: the Death of CraftsmanshipEnter the Shattered Windows Bookroom
What this book is aboutShattered Windows, Part 2: the Potemkin School
How I figured out the paradigms in this book
Book Excerpts
(Pretending to Educate the Disorderly Mind)
What this book is aboutShattered Windows, Part 3: TBD
How I figured out the paradigms in this book
Book Excerpts
What this book is about
How I figured out the paradigms in this book
Book Excerpts
Shattered Windows, Part 1: the Death of Craftsmanship
What this book is aboutShattered Windows, Part 2: the Potemkin School
Being caught up as we are in the almost narcotic allure of "freedom of speech," our society -- and in this era, society is essentially global -- has lumped all forms of human expression into the category of speech. This includes movies, art, dance, music, and other forms of expression that are essentially different from "speech" in one important way: they are based on visual and emotional stimuli, not on the intellectual stimulus of textual writing the way literal speech and books are. "Entertainment" speaks to the eyes and to the heart, that is to say, to a different part of the brain from classic text. This implies that the different forms of "speech" as we call them are neurologically different, and we can expect that varying the relative amounts of each of these stimuli will produce different kinds of persons -- neurologically different people.
The peer pressure among today's youth generally involves increasing the emotional content of life, not the literary content. The pressure is to do something exciting and rule-breaking; there is no pressure to conform to intellectual greatness, and darn little pressure to adhere to moral strictness. As mass-media has become more graphical, it has encouraged the production of a visually-oriented populace. This means that people today are neurologically different from their grandparents and their great-grandparents. This, I propose, is one of the subtle, unnoticed reasons why what we call "values" and "morals" are changing. What this means to the inherent quality of the educational process, particularly in the face of advancing graphicalization of computers, is that a massive neurological meltdown is now in progress throughout society.
Furthermore, once these young people grow into adulthood and become workers, their indoctrination into neurological stupor runs into direct conflict with the corporate maxim of increased profits at all costs. The result is that people are becoming inherently less productive in the substance of their work, even as they become more productive in its volume and in its outward manifestations of color, graphical intensity, and media savvy. To make up for this downward spiral in intellectual capacity -- the capacity which we have found to be centered in the left-brain -- corporations are using computerization to obtain a form of uncompensated servitude beyond the normal bounds of a nine-to-five workday. Meanwhile, the tools which people use are themselves becoming less reliable, less predictable, less "left-brained." This adds to the level of frustration in the workplace and in the home.
Driving these trends, by the clever salesmanship of its products as solutions instead of mere narcotic fixes, is Microsoft. To attack Microsoft on the basis of a generalized desire for freedom of choice is itself a sensible line of reasoning. To expose the neurological effects of their monopoly of the computing experience is, I believe, a deeper and more significant line of thought which will give substance to these philosophical discussions.
How I figured out the paradigms in this book
It all started when I asked my self one simple question: "If God gave mankind the Bible, why is it only in text format?" It seemed to me to be a relatively simple question. Maybe it was because there just were not enough artists around to keep a pictorial Bible alive from generation to generation. But that's not so -- look at the volume of artwork produced by ancient societies that is extant, although damaged, even after centuries of conquest, weathering, and neglect. There must always have been a surplus of artisans and sculptors and the like. So that was not a satisfying answer.
In fact, quite the opposite is the case -- most ancient societies were populated by illiterates. A handful of literate elites ran the whole empire -- in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, all over the ancient world -- while the "masses" were indoctrinated through song, dance, and ritual. Ancient Hebrew society was a dramatic exception, because everyone was expected, and ever required by law, to be literate and to ensure the literacy of their children. Whatever we may think about elitism among a particular religious or cultural group such as the Jews, the fact remains that their culture was the first intellectually and neurologically democratic society in the world.
This means that the foundation of law, order, principle, and a common code of ethics -- the foundation of constitutional law and the rule of principle instead of the law of the jungle -- is based on the simple premise that TEXT is the most important form of human communication. What would happen to a so-called "advanced" society if the majority if its citizens reverted backwards to the visually-oriented mentality of the ancient monarchies? I began to ask myself if just maybe we might be observing such a neurological collapse in society right now. I began comparing what I would expect to see from such a collapse -- disrespect for law and order, a hatred of work and responsibility, a reduction in the effective standard of living -- with observed realities. I concluded that the "effective standard of living" meant the number of hours one would have left as "free time" after caring for the responsibilities of work, childraising, sleep, and personal care. I noticed that people would sacrifice their children's care to a centralized commercial or political entity in order to spend more time at work. I noticed that people became more sedentary and overweight, cared less about their physical appearance, and cut off their sleep time -- all in the name of staring at a computer screen at work, or a television screen at home. With the new portable computers and cheap home PCs, the trend was accelerated.
I came to the conclusion that intense, electronically-generated visual stimuli are essentially a form of narcotic.
I asked myself what kind of management regime would put their workers on a narcotic. The dehumanization of the worker has come about as a direct result of removing the value of the work each person does. This means that computerization has been used to eliminate the interesting work because work that is interesting -- craftsmanship -- is the only kind of work that is expensive. Entertainers and sports stars are not paid on the basis of the inherent value of their work, but rather on the basis of mass-duplication of televised copies of their actions. Real work that produces great, long-lasting things for use by appreciative people is the essence of job satisfaction. It became necessary for the growth of stock markets and superrich corporate elites to sacrifice job satisfaction and to substitute computerized narcotic stimuli in its place.
I found it useful to derive the legal basis and the economic rationale that could make this kind of substitution financially practical. I discovered that it was not some theoretical "advanced technology" that drove this degradation of product quality and worker satisfaction, but rather a set of intellectual property "rights" that were invented by government and are enforced by the so-called justice system -- the very system which is now investigating Microsoft with apparent vigor. Talk about the left hand and the right hand not being on speaking terms! I finally came to the conclusion that the key element of class warfare is control of intellectual property -- whether that control is exercised by a cloistered clergy, a band of Marxist despots, or a power-mad technological monopoly.
Book Excerpts
"Those persons having some publicly visible skill, some attribute such as speed, power, beauty, or other physical virtue are to be remunerated in the tens of millions of dollars, whether their physicality is shown in sports or movies or some other form of entertainment; those with the invisible qualities of intellectual capacity or brute force doing real work in laboratories or offices, assembly lines, farms, or workshops, are becoming the drones of society, worker bees shuffled about like office furniture or lawn chairs, paid a substinence wage, the dregs of humanity." - page 11
"A so-called 'convergence' of television, computers, and entertainment threatens to swamp the brains of the next generation, yet it is being blindly accepted as good and necessary because the label 'computer' conveys an almost saintly exemption from critical analysis." - page 25
"In an era of false abundance -- surrounded as we are by many possessions, nearly all of them worthless trinkets, plastic fakes, and veneered substitutes -- the greatest effect of managerial obsession with productive efficiency has not been to increase real wealth. The obsession with mass production has caused people to waste their time shopping, transporting, cleaning, repairing, dismembering, and finally shopping again. Nobody shops twice in a lifetime for a classic Steinway piano, but people are obliged to buy new radios and lawn chairs more regularly than they pursue medical care. People have learned to be satisfied with a poverty of time and a wealth of temporary fixes." - page 56
"The technologist should by all rights be the craftsman's friend, discovering new tools and methodologies to empower the craftsman in his work, but in the regime of the legalistical manipulators, the corporate technologist is the enemy of the craftsman. Instead of being passed from father to son in the classic family-owned craftworks, the knowledge, the skills, and the experience of the craftsman are absorbed by a patent application, blessed by the State, locked in vaults, and used as leverage to put the next generation of craftsmen out of business." - page 60
"This is the information surplus of the information rationers, the class that for the first time in human history sells the ideal product: labor licenses for a zero-labor product -- most obviously, software licenses. People now pay Microsoft for the right to perform the labor of product installation. - page 62
"....in due time the truth came out, but it was largely ignored. In late 1993, one Microtimes magazine editorial reported that actual productivity under the graphical regime was down 33% for word and number processing activities. One InfoWorld article showed a survey of 600 corporate PC managers of which 50% showed zero or even negative growth in productivity after spending an average of $3500 per computer to downshift to Windows. .... As late as the fall of 1995, Nicholas Petreley of InfoWorld admitted that long-term user productivity is best served by character-based DOS applications." - pages 97-98
"The only suitable word is FEAR: stark, raving FEAR on the part of managers, fear that somebody might actually find out that a mistake was made, or that the manager was not really so smart.... How can they admit that they were bamboozled, fooled, deceived, hoodwinked, scammed, huckstered by a smooth-talking hotshot half their ages?" - pages 102-103
"The most insidious example of the free time stolen from white-collar workers is the term "on-call," in which an information worker devotes an average of two weeks each month, each composed of seven days of 24-hour availability to the company, usually with zero compensation. In other words, the new software has made computers so unreliable that a massive cover-up is underway.... by requiring workers to use laptop computers, cellular phones, and beepers to become robotic substitutes for the lost reliability of computers." - page 109
"The real, unmeasured economy goes nowhere, it just crabwalks; it is only by our reduced expectations of free time and family time that we have deceived ourselves to the contrary." - page 110
"Under the cunning guidance of former Proctor & Gamble marketer Steve Ballmer, software at Microsoft has been dumbed down to the level of corn chips and Twinkies." - page 116
"Microsoft is a cancer on America." - page 119
"This is not an argument for or against capitalism; this is merely a summary of the active measures taken by Microsoft in the marketplace. For Microsoft, failure of the competition is not merely "collateral damage," it is a direct business goal. Victory consists of strangling the cash flow of the competition, putting everyone else under, making themselves the winner by default. Microsoft will never be satisfied with being Number One, as long as any Number Two's exist. This is not free-market economics; this is supplanting the free market with corporate Marxism." - page 123
"Perhaps the electronic video pipes of our disinformation sewer lines, like the plumbing of the ancient Romans, dement the brain like poisonous lead." - page 138
Enter the Shattered Windows Bookroom
What this book is aboutTO BE CONTINUED!
"School" has become one of those hot-button words that leads to immediate visions of political activism, hand-wringing worry, technological wonder, and a growing sense of fear. Whereas the etymological origin of the word "school" is a European term for leisure (that is to say, free time), school today has become a big business. Billions of dollars are at stake each year for contracts to supply such trinkets as class rings, yearbooks, sporting goods, uniforms, fashion accessories, and other trendy paraphernalia. Other billions of dollars involve school breakfast and lunch programs, still other billions are raked in annually for textbooks, school supplies, furniture and more.
But where the really big money is being spent -- tens of billions of dollars, perhaps more -- is on classroom technology. Elementary schools, middle schools, junior and senior high schools, private and public schools, expensive private-tutor learning centers: nobody seems exempt from the tidal wave of electronic gadgetry that is flooding into the educational establishment. Any voices which rise up to question this escapade are immediately branded as narrow-minded opportunists seeking some sort of hidden agenda, or perhaps just old-fashioned anti-technology bigots. The time has come to stand up to the wonks, to analyze the cultural imperatives behind this techno-business assault on the schools, to find out what's really behind this craze -- and to expose the erroneous assumptions that guarantee its failure to improve education.
Possibly this is the first book to actually address the effects of the social environment on education in terms of a specific neurological pattern of chaos, instead of merely droning on about some oppressed groups and the assumption of decadence due to some generalized principle of "low self-esteem." It is not the self which is held in low esteem, but rather the concept of an orderly, rational universe with laws, principles, and standards -- that is what is held in low esteem. The idea that obedience, punctuality, and orderliness are oppressors from which to flee instead of safe, reliable guideposts -- that is what is at the core of the total meltdown of the educational process which is now underway.
How I figured out the paradigms in this book
I have always noted with disgust the tendency to put down the father figure as a form of oppressor. It seemed to me that this was, after thirty or forty years as a stock comedy feature of cartoons and sitcoms, no longer funny. Yet Hollywood and its peers continued to mine this empty stone pit as if they had just uncovered some great new paradigm, or had discovered some massive societal keystone that would liberate humanity -- and keep a smile on our faces for the whole journey. I began to note that the pattern seemed cast in stone: Dad was evil, Mom was merely bad, children were wise, animals were Gods.
It seemed to me that somebody had a lot at stake in trying to disrupt all the normal patterns of life, without providing any real answers or solutions to replace the old order that they were so intent on decrying. This could only lead to societal chaos and disorder. Maybe that was the goal, then.
After enduring psychological examinations that consistently proved me normal, I began to realize the problem: the definition of "normal" was changing, and (fortunately for me!) the testers had not yet figured that out. Whereas an examiner would tell my parents that there was nothing wrong with me, just some other students being jealous of my intelligence and therefore trying to make trouble for me, I knew he was wrong. Nobody was jealous of academic success; they hated the idea that anyone would dare to conform to parental or teacher expectations of goodness. Academic mediocrity and behavioral shenanigans had quietly become the new norm or standard -- a standard dictated by children instead of by adults.
"Normal" now meant rebellious and disorderly -- in a subtle manner, or course, so as not to be sent to detention too often. "Normal" now meant fun-loving and lazy instead of diligent and scholarly. People who were intent on achievement were to be ostracized and isolated, much as a viral invader is isolated and discharged by the human body's defensive mechanisms, the immune system. The pop culture had enshrined entropy as the ultimate good.
Of course, none of this could be publicly acknowledged, or else the philosophical charlatans who were raking in money on this scheme would be exposed. So they decided to call it Freedom and Progress.
Book Excerpts
"Somehow obedience to a clarion of orderly behavior seems more frightening than the fear of getting AIDS, or of becoming pregnant, or of being abandoned for some cheap tramp. The thought of being permanently obedient to a precise moral code is somehow felt to be smothering, an imprisonment, a defeat, even if it is a life-preserving course." - page 11
".... numerical systems are being taught as extensions of cultural imperialism, as if precision and logic were the province of a small clique of 'dead white males' and to progress in mathematical skill would be a condition of 'victimhood.' Clear speech and grammar are signs of being a 'sellout' and 'thinking White.' Ebonics enshrines disorder by declaring it to be merely an alternative form of order." - page 15
".... the reality of the situation is that the professional sports industry is a one-in-a-million chance at real, long-term success, whereas a student devoting three hours a day to homework, study, and advanced scholastic endeavors has historically been almost certain of a 40-year career of steadily increasing wages, and in many cases financial superstardom." - page 22
"About that same time, I glimpsed in the other direction (out of the corner of my eye) a young man, perhaps twenty years of age, shuffling a newspaper to block his identity from view.... That young man was once a high-school sports hero. Now he was a grease monkey, a gopher, a gas station flunkie with a dead-end job in a no-name station under the railroad trestle of life. He had been fooled, he had been sold down the river, and he knew it." - page 23
".... imagine starting with a whole onion, safe and intact. This is the extended family structure.... first goes the outer layer of distant relatives.... Then remove the Dad layer.... Now remove the inner layer, the Mom layer, as women head to the workplace in droves and leave their children to be educated en masse like some kind of cheap furniture cranked out of a third-world sweatshop. The family has been neatly peeled to the core, leaving the children unprotected and now available for fleecing by the media, the school systems, and the entertainment world." - page 41
