Ewan.net

Years ago, I came across this following piece of text from an article in the Independent newspaper. I actually typed it out — manually — and saved it as a word document, I was that taken with it.

It’s authored by Professor Ian Angell (website) of the London School of Economics. I suspect he takes a certain amount of satisfaction from being referred to as the ‘Angell of Doom’ because of his (accurate) ‘doomsday’ predictions.

I was recommending Professor Ian Angell’s book to a friend today — the New Barbarian Manifesto — when I remembered I had this article stored away.

I was about to reproduce it in full here, until I managed to find the article on the Independent website.

Here, then, are the first three paragraphs to get your appetite flowing.

`Many too many are born. The state was devised for the superfluous ones.” With these pitiless words from another century, Friedrich Nietzsche heralds the demise of the nation state as we enter the next. The Industrial Age and its need for an over-supply of humanity spawned the nation state. But what is to be done with the glut as we enter the Information Age?

There will be no nice, tidy transition, rather a severe and total dislocation with the past. One thing is certain: the masses will not win in the natural selection for dominance of an increasingly elitist and cosmopolitan world.

Because of new technology the costs of production have dropped to a point where a billion new workers have entered the job market. Companies are globalising and mobilising, chasing “spot markets” in cyberspace. The costs of overcoming time and space no longer buffer the impact of cheap labour. The state has to be part of the global economy, so it is incapable of fending off foreign incursions. Mass unemployment is a cancer infecting every nation state, sending shock waves through their workforces.

Read the rest at the Independent site here.

The article resonated with me back when it was published in October 1996. I think I’d just started studying Information Management at University College London and was one of the only students in my year working with a distributed team (a guy in Manchester, a guy in the States, a guy in Australia — all running my site) — which was hugely remarkable because one of the professors insisted that virtual teaming was completely impossible.

I liked this piece by Angell primarily because he was future gazing. Back in 1996, PCs and Macs didn’t talk to each other very well. I had a heck of a time trying to get anything printed at the local print shop where they were all Mac. PC Photoshop files rarely ever worked on Apple laptops. The internet was 28.8k for most people — 33.6 or 56k if you were a geek. I had to get special dispensation to install a telephone line into my college dorms. I’ve been continually reminded of Angell’s predictions across my adult working life. For example, at one point we had, I dunno, 100+ UK based people working for us, performing all kinds of services (e.g. moderation and content control). Very quickly, though, the market began to demand cheaper and cheaper services which made it hugely difficult for us to provide ‘quality’ British labour.

The market demanded cheaper labour… which my colleague Keith, in Canada, went on to directly address, whilst we simply stopped playing in the marketplace.

Another example: Instead of employing three really inefficient British assistants to manage one of my companies, we decided to hire one girl from the Philippines. She’s a quarter of the cost and about 10 times more efficient.

Check out Angell’s book — The New Barbarian Manifesto. Genius.

I can’t remember what I’ve done with my copy so I’ve just ordered another from Amazon.