Ideoculture

As if readers of this page couldn't figure it out already, I work as a peripheral staffer in and around the IT industry. It puts food on the table and a necessary degree of clutter in the mind. Personally, I feel that the current state of IT is in the same state as agriculture around 8000 BC: clumps of smart guys wandering around finding seeds that they can occasionally cultivate. They're smart, and they've got good seeds, but the culture they live in has not yet put forward the infrastructure to allow widespread cultivation to take place. It's not because there isn't a will to do so; it's because no one knows how. We haven't yet figured out what makes a good alluvial plain for the soul.

A lot of people gripe about the IT business for this reason. Without permanent capitalization- the irrigation of this field of ideas, as it were- the economy lies in the head of each seed-gatherer. It's not a comfortable situation. The environment that makes good seeds today can change overnight, and suddenly all that knowledge you had about where to find good seeds is worthless. Worse than worthless, because you're used to the old ways, and Johnny Grad Student isn't. Then there's resource conflicts, and you have to starve, steal, or form militaristic states of violent nomads. There's a reason we came up with agriculture.

There's a certain class of management books that says we should be happy in the pre-cultural world of seed hunting. If I were a more bitter and cynical man, I'd say, of course the elite want to give you this advice. International capital is the equivalent of the lean, mean nomad. They don't want to see the settlement grow into a city, not while there are all these vulnerable and exceptionally busy seed-gatherers learning the same damn thing every spring. If you're big and tough you don't have to learn a damn thing.

We like these nomads. They are , without exception, the primordial heroes of every human culture, with their high survivability, low birthrates, toughened from conflict with each other and with the experimenters, the seed-eaters. We love our raiders. That shouldn't blind us to one very simple truth: the nomads always lose. Eventually the seed eaters figure it out, and they build a structure called civilization that is more powerful than a whole roomful of legends. Sometimes the seed-eaters have a setback, but it's always limited and nearly always localized.

I hope this doesn't appear to advocate some sort of "us-versus-them" philosophy of anthropology and management (and what is management besides applied anthropology?). Historically, some of the nomad leaders became some of the greatest champions of the seed eaters. Those are the ones we remember. We remember them for their greatness, but also for their ability to let it go, to leave their heroic age and walk with us into the human one. They acknowledged the experimenters and their quest to build a greater world.

On the other types of nomad, however, history shows itself at its most cruel. The wrathful and ignorant have passed beyond memory, expressed in the human consciousness as the act of writing. We never even wrote those guys down, or, even more humiliating, we gave them a name of our devising.

In the world of ideas- essentially, the IT world- we must then look at our virtuous raiders and our seed-gatherers, and figure out how ideas grow. How can they coordinate? What do we irrigate with? How much can we expect per unit? How do we defend it from the barbarians sweeping down from the hills with subpoenas and hostile takeovers? Big expensive questions, but if you get it right, you have the ground floor of a new form of cultivation, flowers and kernels of pure mind, an alphabet to be spelled in souls.