That's one facet. The other thing that this massive/parallel/complexity means is that if any critical "node" lays down their tools -- the system comes crashing down. All of the highly leveraged, complex, variegated, widely distributed hoo hah ....comes down.
You say that there won't be a "critical" node...because they can always keep switching to a new one...except that these "switches" are not transparent, they're not free...and also because the more they impoverish the working class, the weaker the base becomes.
...optimistically yours,
Joanna
Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>Joanna asked:
>
>
>I don't quite get the penultimate paragraph. What's
>the connection between "information technology" and
>outsourcing???
>
>====================
>
>
>I think the connection is this: IT, and the global
>telecommunications grid it's a part of, makes remote
>command and control (aka, 'management') possible.
>
>IT also enables capital to maintain extraordinarily
>complex - and widely distributed - process webs.
>
>Chuck Grimes wrote a fascinating post about this from
>a manufacturing point of view several months ago.
>The jist, as I recall, was that computer-network
>coordinated processes gave companies the ability to
>create a massive jigsaw puzzle, dispersing (and
>bringing back together into finished products) design,
>manufacture, assembly, back office and management
>tasks from various centers around the globe.
>
>
>A sort of ultimate atomization machine.
>
>Of course, none of this is entirely new but IT deepens
>and increases the complexity of global capital's high
>wire act.
>
>Which is how it facilitates outsourcing of all sorts.
>
>In the first stage of capital's computerization, the
>machines were used to duplicate and then replace - to
>whatever extent possible - human labor (auto assembly,
>secretary, file clerk).
>
>Now, in this second stage, capital is employing the
>machines - in their networked configuration (a
>different sort of animal from discrete devices) - to
>create almost wholly new methods of profit
>maximization that no reasonable number of workers
>could hope to coordinate and perform.
>
>To a large extent, Enron style deceptions are the
>result, not only of capital's long understood
>tendencies, but also of the ever more complex and
>difficult to track manipulations made possible by
>networked computing power.
>
>I predict the third stage will see businesses learning
>the uses of massively parallel and truly distributed
>processing (similar to SETI @Home's shared CPU cycle
>model) and well tuned 'expert systems'.
>
>
>
>.d.
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>
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>
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>