Electronic Night of the Living Dead

It’s sort of burned into your head, for those of us from the days before video on demand, the Midnight Cult movies and the screaming radio commercials and posters. Among those, a personal favorite line from the radio ad for George Romero’s 1968 horror classic, “Night of the Living Dead” was “The dead return to life, what will they eat?  they’ll eat YOUUUUU!” The idea of the dead devouring the living has (pardon the pun) lived on in such media as The Walking Dead and I Am Legend. But now the electronic dead seem to be coming for the living too. A recent paper supposes that somewhere in the next 50 years, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. There are few among us who have not had the particular horror to get birthday reminders from Facebook friends who have passed or the invitation to share photos of smiling friends and family who may no longer be with us. We may like French peasants after the Hundred Years’ War, find ourselves wondering if the living are really alive or an imposter, like Martin Guerre, to capitalize on the electronic chaff left by those no longer (possibly) among us.  Not only do we need to wonder if we are chatting with AI bots or humans but if those who have passed can drift into an electronic afterlife of obscurity.

The Shareholder Mentality

Its not hard to understand Bernie Marcus’ comments that Home Depot’s model would never work today, that todays workers are “too lazy, too fat and too stupid”. It’s not hard to believe that people no longer want to work in the manner that our parents did, possibly a long commute followed by a 9-5 drudge with the uncertainty of being let go for any reason and at any time. It seems that workers have begun to take a shareholder mentality to their work/life. Where do these workers get off behaving like shareholders! Don’t they know that the sweat of their brow is insignificant when compared to shareholders moving their assets with a mouse click to move their funds from one mutual fund to another. The idea of shareholder supremacy seems to be running its course with articles starting the shocking news that employees are important to the long term success of a company  indeed, (gasp) possibly three times more important than shareholders. Fortunately there are some who are ahead of the curve noting that putting profit above product is an exercise in folly. Indeed they say the true evil coming for American jobs are not immigrants. It’s not evil offshoring CEOs either. It’s the shareholders.

Time is the new Money

I have been thinking about something a friend in college once said, Time is that which separates order from disorder by keeping everything from happening at once”. I like the thought but the more I think about it I realize that this whole idea of time is something that we have come up with to make this life a bit easier to understand. The truth is that this idea of time is a pair of handcuffs we have put on reality- it makes it easier to understand but it has a much to do with real reality as a tiger in the wild has to a tiger in the zoo. Try to think of time as a helpful construct a tool we use to make something easier to understand but not a definition or property of the thing itself. They say time is the new money, if that is the case wouldn’t you like to be in control of it? Then again, if it isn’t real, do we have to play by its rules?