Category Archives: Writing

They said the second certainty would never end, but it was decisively ended three years ago. Death and… and what now? When voting rates had gone below four percent, there hadn’t been too much concern. But now that taxes were paid by fewer than one percent of people and only about a hundred thousand people in the entire U S of A worked for an organization of any kind, the concern was too late. It seemed like a slow leak, like the way unions were left behind. But this wasn’t planned and executed by the people who already didn’t pay their taxes. This wasn’t planned by anyone, from the looks of it. People realized, as in that mortgage crisis of fifty years back, that there really wouldn’t be any consequences if they stopped being members of organizations and stopped providing the internal revenue to the Service. Money was already a passé memory; after the great exchange explosion that followed the “crypto coin for every person” thing, currency didn’t have currency anymore. And people couldn’t understand why they would give the government one in five of the art pieces or homemade energy, when the government didn’t even create or manage a money supply anymore. So it was that the death of the dollar was the death of Uncle Sam; Hamilton would have been sad to see his monarchy of monies crumble in such a way. And why couldn’t organizations stay organized? Shouldn’t it still be necessary for managers to manage, even in a world where the universal solvent has itself dissolved? It turns out that no, people actually don’t need to be “managed”. People can make things, exchange things, show up to things without a person who is both dumber and less honest than themselves berating them (and rating them) when they don’t “perform”. The circus monkey thing that lasted so much longer than William Whyte would have thought acceptable had gone out with the sound of a gently closing automatic door: The Organization Man wasn’t showing up to the show anymore. “Society would crumble” they said. “The state of nature and the nasty, brutish, short life would return” they screamed. And yes, the lives of corporate leaders and passive investors became a little more taxing. But the ones that stopped screaming and participated in the new world order almost all wrote memoirs about how silly they were back in the day when they thought controlling people through wages and “strategy” was the thing to do (at least the ones that didn’t jump out of their office windows when all the peons walked out). Without organizations, people were there for themselves and each other (people wondered if it was a return to a better time, but then remembered that antibiotics, computers, a philosophies of peace rather than war didn’t exist in sufficient abundance “back then”). Sure, the certainty of being able to walk into a hospital and get treatment was missed. But without absurd licensing requirements, many more people learned how to take care of issues, even emergency ones, on their own. The Age of the Autodidact was upon the world. Everyone was a da Vinci now, roaming around and asking people how to correctly suture a wound or hoist a joist. And not just in the street; the Internet had evolved into the Interwebs, fulfilling the potential of connected computers in a way that the bureaucratically managed companies of the past had stymied (no one remembered Google fondly, search was so much easier in a world where thousands of people who enjoyed building algorithms and “manually” crawling could help anyone find anything, rather than sucking the juices out of searches and selling the juices to advertisers. Everyone kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. For someone to organize many people and take over all the individuals. But that had become far too difficult to do in a world in which the technology to stop anyone from coming within three feet was perfected and totally available. The only two things we now know for sure are death and personal space.