If we can agree that ideological positions taken to the extreme serve little purpose beyond theoretical debates, then we can begin to consider the very real crisis that confronts American capitalism. In the 21st Century, will technology advance our interests as a nation and as global citizens or will we fail to harness the true potential of the tools that we have created?
The challenges that we confront today come both from within our borders and from beyond our shores. It is the story of problems of our own making interacting with the realpolitik that has guided global politics for the duration of recorded history. Within our borders, we face a slipping economy, rising psychological depression rates, growing discontent with our elected leaders, a polity disinterested in governance, and, a people that as whole are unwilling or unable to understand the issues that stand before them.
Outside our borders, global realignments, growing distrust of American politics, intentions, and influence, and of the American financial system, resurgent oil rich nations (Russia, Middle Eastern states, Venezuela) realize American dependence upon their fuel which supplies the blood to our economic body. Notice, I did not even need to mention the BP or the Gulf of Mexico to make my point.
The issues before us are limited not to just those that can be described in economic terms, but also in terms of the human costs, psychological and physical. As Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations more than 225 years ago, Adam Smith. “The real price of anything is the trouble and toil of acquiring it”. The consideration of human well-being, once at the heart of economic treatises such as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, seems forgotten by neo-Smithians, obsessed with short-term growth, and those who have conflated economic growth with human happiness.
In order for America to remain a beacon of self-realization and innovation, we must understand the unique technological gifts that are transforming our world. The future economy must be developed with knowledge of the modern-technology landscape, so that technology serves the interest of the greater good.
This article, here, is not intended to be an accounting of America, so much as it is an introduction to some of the trends, ideologies, ideas, systems, and techno-politics that define our age today. America is a nation that is still being born, and our actions today will determine her future. I want to examine American technology and business (innovation, products, the First Amendment, political economy, democracy), and learn what is good about it? what is bad? Where must the theories set forth by Adam Smith more than two hundred years ago be altered to fit the historical lessons that have emerged over the past two centuries?. I want to consider the influence of advertising on this capitalistic system, the intersection of the Free Press with technology, the way in which the certain Presidential administrations have managed to conflate corporate freedom with individual freedom, and how technology can contribute to our freedom. I hope you’ll join me in my quest for knowledge.
