"Paradigm" is the fifty-cent word for a model. A paradigm has a philosophy, and it has rules by which it should work.

The paradigm for the Industrial Age has run out of gas. It has been sputtering for the last fifty years and its shortcomings are painfully obvious. In the Industrial Age, scale was everything. Make it bigger, make it faster, make it cheaper (because you control the resources) then run rings around the pack like a Ford Roadster.

The industrial paradigm gave us economic giants like General Electric, General Motors, US Steel and International Business Machines. The specialization of these industrial giants became the seeds of their destruction. They became helpless giants, inflexible and vulnerable to minor perturbations of supply and demand. One by one, they each met a turn in the road they had not seen coming.

Lower wages and extreme regimentation allowed the Japanese auto industry, the Asian electronics industry, and the Third World manufacturing industries to out-compete on economies of scale. The stage was set for catastrophic economic failure. The Asian Tigers and the Third World piranhas were winning the war of commerce.

The free market industrial paradigm was seriously wounded. Ultimately, even tigers and piranhas were at risk of being consumed as scarcities arose. Like a drunk thrown from a pub, the major industrial nations swore they'd be back someday. The service industry or financial expertise would come to the rescue, they swore.

Then suddenly technology loomed. Giant savings could be made as fewer managers managed smaller pools of workers. Masses of data and a plethora of production could be handled by a few computerized people. "Downsizing" proved that service and high finance were an employment pipe dream. In truth, fewer people -- not more -- were needed to provide services.

What is a confused multinational corporation to do, in the face of such confusion and uncertainty? The future seems to lie in something called "information technology" and the "information super-highway (which everyone currently holds to be the World Wide Web).

Like a herd of Ford Roadsters trying to climb onto a monorail track, the wounded giants each desperately forge their way into "e-commerce," and "high tech" strategies. Each one seems to be high-centered and immobilized by a path for which they have no discerning.

The old paradigm is dead, and the new one is not yet clear. We cannot yet say what it will be when it grows up, but it may look more like a flock of unicycles than a thundering herd of Ford Roadsters.

I offer the following vision: a future where recycling and synthetics provide the basic resources. A society where nothing is stocked, but instead everything is made on demand. A world that has less trash and less human labor; and a world where creativity is the most valuable commodity.

I see a world that uses and reuses elements like carbon, hydrogen, and silicon, endlessly recycling these fundamental molecules. Carbon and silicon and hydrogen are abundant. Scarcity could finally be relegated to the domain of quaint, antique concepts beside those like courtly love and royal deity.

The next paradigm will include rules that preclude profiting from the ignorance of consumers and likewise expose motives such as greed and nefarious acts like misappropriation. The economies will be those of efficient use of materials and man-hours rather than scale. The best ideas will win because they can no longer be suppressed and hidden.

We may still have senseless death, violence, hatred and other human failings. It is my hope that, with abundance and sufficiency, we will have less reason for them by the Third Millennium of the Gregorian Calendar.

Old paradigms do not shift, but rather fail and fall over like ancient oak trees with their heartwood rotted away. The religious system that has explained the origins, purpose, and workings of the universe has collapsed entirely. The new wood of science and technology performs this function now. The old paradigm of yeoman agriculture, still idealized in the midst of the industrial age, has given way to the factory farms of the present. Genetic engineering may point to the extinction of farming altogether.

The current business model of ruthless competition in a rapacious free market will be replaced. IBM knows it, as does International Paper. They drive on, with Fear riding shotgun. The new business paradigm is just around the next blind corner of the road. This is the point at which the simile of industrial giants as Ford Roadsters breaks down. They become derelict panhandlers, instead.

"Hey buddy! Can you spare a paradigm?"

Copyright © 2000 Robert Marcom All Rights Reserved

Robert Marcom is a writer, and the Moderator for Net Author. Robert's writing credits include both print and electronic publications. He resides in Houston, Texas.

ROBERT MARCOM
Writer - Researcher - Photographer - Illustrator

*Author: "A Voyage Through The Cosmos"
(ISBN 1-930430-03-5)

"The Earth Rocks!"
(ISBN 1-930430-04-3)

*Moderator: Net Author Writers' Community
*Vice Chairperson: Eguild

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