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The Mouse, Hand-Axes and a Good Trade

7/14/2012

1 Comment

 
Picture
It's an interesting resemblance. A couple of iconic tools that have helped us make our way down the evolutionary road. The Aucheulean hand-axe is a marvelous tool that kept its value for about a million years, great for cracking bones, nuts and heads. A simple tool that any one person then or now is capable of making. The mouse however requires an army of workers...from miners to designers...and is already out of date. 

Ever wonder how our ancestors left the stone age behind and how we got to the age of the iphone. Was it language, fire, the wheel, microchips, the mouse? Our recent lineage is easy to trace...Steve Jobs was born and the world became a magical place overflowing with istuff - an app connected, interactive, seamlessly synched nirvana. So how did we make the leap from stones to silicon? I think the key was barter. The simple exchange of things and eventually ideas is the engine that drives us forward. From the first good trade the flood gates to the future blew open. It all started with a question, "What'll you take for that?" At that moment the iphone became inevitable...and probably greed too.

A lot is being said about greed these days...some like it some hate it. Oh yeah there are people who think greed is what makes us great. I take the opposite view, greed is our achilles heel. It will be our doom if left to our own devices. The greedheads tell the same story ad nauseum...mutual self interest, profit as motivation, innovation for personal gain, unfettered competition, the invisible hand of the market etc., etc., etc. What they have forgotten is the concept of a good trade. A good trade leaves all parties satisfied...not equal distribution, not communism, just plain old satisfaction.  What passes for a good trade these days is an inside job that satisfies a few and fucks all the rest. The good trade became the slick trade and it just snowballed. Now we are buried in an avalanche and the skiers are pissed because we're digging ourselves out and fucking up their slopes. I think they should tighten their bindings because its going to be a rough ride.

 
1 Comment
ann
10/23/2011 07:51:03 pm

another fabulous post...i, too, get so very tired of the this-is-human-nature argument. have leaned to the far left for as long as i've been old enough to think about it, but once had a teacher who said she was neither capitalist nor socialist. "i just can't accept that there are only two ways in this life." Maybe that third way could be called satisfism? or something like that...

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