In The End It's The People Who Count
Sun Herald
Sunday January 16, 2000
IF the last century ended up marked by excess in almost every field, the one which has just begun already seems likely to eclipse it by a long way.
The merger between America Online and Time Warner which had the cyber world and the sharemarkets all a-twitter last week involves numbers and customer reach which, until a few years ago, would have seemed beyond the ken of any entity short of a sovereign nation.
The deal is worth $530 billion. Its potential customers are most of the world's population.
Relative to the information/entertainment environment of the day, the Internet could be seen as comparable to the effect of the rotary printing press in the 19th century or the spread of television and telecommunications in the late 20th century.
Sure, AOL-Time Warner is a big merger, but whether its portents are simply a fad along the rocky road of capitalist evolution or something with deeper social implications for our way of life and politics is by no means so clearcut.
Back in the 1960s getting on for half a century ago there was also a frenzy of what then seemed to be gigantic company deals which were said to signal a new era of management.
The buzzword then was ``synergy" and the end result was the conglomerate, or companies which had vastly different types of businesses merging in the belief that their very disparity would help generate growth and protect them against downturns in one class of activity.
As a result, we had American corporations like LTV (whose interests included steel, aircraft and electronics) and Litton Industries (defence manufacturing, cash registers and shipbuilding) which perpetually chanted the dogma of synergy as their collective profit margins and share prices went down.
In their day they were relatively just as big and powerful as Time Warner or AOL are today, yet it transpired that they had found no magic formulas and no lasting answers.
From the point of view of the general public (i.e. the human societies which provide big corporations with their raison d'etre) they added little, if anything, to the general welfare.
Like AOL-Time Warner, their prime motivation was to improve their profitability, their return on funds employed, the size of the share options and bonuses their top executives creamed off and their standing in the sharemarkets.
A natural and wholly respectable target, but hardly one to grab people with the idea that a golden age has arrived.
The obvious questions which need answering amid all this excessive self-praise from an industry which is really in its infancy are:
1. Does the world really need the overwhelming torrent of information which we are now assured is about to engulf it?
2.What value resides in companies which depend almost wholly upon such intangibles as human communications skills and clever (and often deceptive) marketing?
The answer to (1) is surely that while useful information is fragmented into smaller and smaller pieces and more and more specialised customers, the mass of material which now spews forth virtually uncontrollably is a total waste.
As for (2), the endless merry-go-round of one megastar executive or actor or writer or financial guru lured from one employer to another demonstrates that the new cyber world has few assets other than its pool of talented or ephemerally popular human beings.
Far from the world descending into a milieu in which machines have superseded people, the opposite process is occurring: the more the fanatical cyber people assure us that a new world has opened up, the more it is apparent that it is actually old values and talents which reign supreme.
The new century will see unimaginable levels of wastefulness and extravagance, but it will also be an age in which the individual human being acquires a true and universally recognised value.
That, rather than the toys of technology, is theessage of the new age.
© 2000 Sun Herald