Meeting notice: The 9.21 meeting will be held at 7:30 
p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block 
down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new 
and can't recognize us, ask the manager.  He'll probably 
know where we are. 

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NT and class

Perhaps the most demoralizing scenario for the development of 
NT is the possibility that it might lead to a new, and potentially 
permanent, class tyranny.  

To a first approximation, growth in inequality (defined as the 
multiple in either income or wealth between the top and bottom 
1/N of the population) is correlated with peace, and growth in 
inequality with plague, war, and depression (and revolution, of 
course).  Peace allows the time required for slight differences 
in situations to be leveraged into large ones, which is why the 
aristocratic classes of Ancient Egypt and China, among other 
examples, were so dominant.   If one sees NT as a time of peace 
and plenty (other views are possible), then the conditions for a 
steady growth towards greater and greater inequality would seem 
to be in place.   Further, the development of a single global 
society means that  the richest and poorest classes will be 
defined globally, not nationally, which will amplify the "gap" 
between these fractions enormously over those relatively small 
differences that so occupy the culture at present.

The traditional escape value in a highly inequitable society, at 
least in this country, has been social mobility.  However the 
positive effect of social mobility might not be as helpful if the 
multiple between the class of the average citizen and 'the upper 
class" grows by one or two orders of magnitude.  In a world in 
which the upper classes count their wealth in the trillions of 
dollars, a person's income might grow rapidly for all his life 
without moving him any social distance at all to speak of.  This 
effect would be amplified by the very long life spans anticipated 
with NT, since the contribution to social mobility made by 
estates falling in the hands of wealth- dissipating successor 
generations would  be reduced. 

On the other hand, the effect of a technological society is to 
constantly lower the value (in terms of class assertion) of what 
money can buy.   This observation has often been made about the 
nature of technological change to date; poor people can now buy 
food, clothing, water, power, communications, recreation, and a 
degree of sanitation  that once was not only available only to 
the rich but defined class itself.  Today the rich can and do buy 
$50 bars of soap, $3000 suits, and water that has been gathered 
from deep springs rising from the chakra points of the Earth by 
singing Druid priestpersons clothed only in the fibers of 
naturally killed plants, but such expenditures do not have 
anything like the same impact. 

It is hard not to see NT powering the same trend over many new 
issues.  Today, one of the primary advantages and reinforcers of 
class is access to the most attractive sexual partners, both for 
personal pleasure and purposes of social advertisement.    
However, in an age where cosmetic surgery is infinitely 
ingenious, superlatively attractive partners will be a 
commonplace (perhaps ugliness will become a class identifier in 
reaction, but then that is accessible to all as well).  Certain 
kinds of real estate will remain genuinely scarce, but they may 
be hard to leverage.  While a rich person might buy Mt. Everest, 
or indeed Nepal, so as to host his teleconferencing sessions from 
the roof of the world, I can do the same, using archival footage.

(There are other advantages to class, including celebrity and the 
privilege of acting outrageously in public, that need to be 
considered.  Perhaps we can do so at the meeting.  Arguments can 
be made that any culture defined by NT might end up diluting the 
effect of these as well. ) 

In any event, it does seem that the long-term trend over the last 
fifty years in this country has been steady increases in economic 
inequality combined with equally steady decreases in the social 
and cultural meaning of that difference.   If NT accelerates the 
trend, which it might, a point should come when the motivating 
effects of price signals will weaken.   When and if that happens, 
we will indeed face a crisis, since the price mechanism is now 
the load-bearing  member of the world society.  Perhaps we could 
retain the basics by programming our robots to have economic 
interests, then stepping aside and letting them carry on the 
class dialectic.


	-- Fred Hapgood



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