6.8.1 . . . we discover the billions of hours sacrificed daily by people whose time is of high value. Those (waiting) in lines are being legally robbed of billions of their life-hour dollars, which go to the corporate profit account as savings in labour costs. (Fuller, 1981, pg. 221)

6.8.2 As Michael Goldharb points out, although our economy is called the Information Economy, it is not really that. Economics is a study of how to utilise our scarce resources. Information is not scarce, especially on the Net. [4] But time is scarce, and the more information we have at our disposal and the larger our field of influence grows, the harder it becomes to economise time. Goldharb, along with a number of people writing for Wired magazine such as Thomas Mandel and Gerard Van der Leun have defined the scarcity not as time but as attention; as a result, the term attention economies has surfaced. Attention economy is loosely based on similar concerns that advertisers have when paying enormous sums of money for a particular time slot on television. It is speculating on strategies of how to design spaces to attract people's attentions and keep them there. Thus the time spent on a site, for instance, would be measured and commodified.

6.8.3 It is interesting to note the contradictory nature of the new economists who have caught on to the universal law that generosity pays off. This philosophy falls short, however, of viewing the big picture and considering some of the global problems that Fuller felt were essential when thinking of "wealth." Community is largely being built through the establishing of consumer preferences of "users." Agent technologies such as Firefly are utilised by more and more companies who are joining the growing net commerce. Firefly and similar agent technologies supposedly empower the user and create community. In reality, these agent systems are a continuation of the "credit card" system that Fuller so vehemently criticised at the end of his life. Kelly sums them up appropriately: "It takes a village to make a mall. Community precedes commerce." (Kelly, 1998, pg.104)

6.8.4 It will be interesting to see if there is indeed an interruption in these systems due to the Y2K bug and if this presents itself as an opportunity for people to come together to share their knowledge to reinvent some of the obsolete systems. If nothing else, the moment will raise awareness of our interconnectedness and how much we depend on computers to hold up our infrastructures. Perhaps it will have us reconsider playing the World Game. [top]