Page 67 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire
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Homeostatopia
obligatory as well as clearly beneficial, then his plan would neither
mutate away from its original template nor encounter resistance.
But viral marketing resembles too closely another method of
exchange, one more obviously doomed to failure: the pyramid or
bubble. Here the product is spread more slowly through time, each
successive transaction resulting in an unwitting decrease in value for
the purchaser and a deliberate concentration of value for the seller.
Within weeks of Homeostatopia’s launch and the initial euphoria
induced by publicity, Gridley broke away from Peña and started
selling franchises to distributors. The latter, using cheap foreign
labor, flooded the market with solar units at a lower price than Peña’s
and without the requirement to pay for it by organizing into
communities and manufacturing more. Loans were made, smart
operators cornered the market, and people were encouraged to
become energy barons. Each time the units were turned around for a
profit the financing became more tenuous, following the time-
honored pattern of etherealized value and paper wealth.
Unsustainable for more than a few months, the market collapsed and
took down Peña’s plan with it. Nobody really wanted to work for
what they could get through easy credit, and if the commodity thus
obtained could not be sold at a profit, then they didn’t want it. The
contradictions of capitalism torpedoed Homeostatopia, aided and
abetted by the behavior of a population too conditioned to economic
models the plan was designed to circumvent.
I knew it was a sad day when America missed its chance to make a
fresh start, and would have felt some pride in being part of it, but I
could not believe in Santa Claus, no matter how plainly garbed.
Utopians searched for the keys to overcoming human nature on the
grounds that it is not natural at all, and will give way to better
behavior when we are placed in a foolproof means of living. But the
fools are too numerous to sway, even through a virus that should
have been irresistible. If I were one of these nutcases, it wouldn’t be
this type: abstract schemes and real populations never seemed to me
a good fit. In the end Peña was left with his dreams out in Nodal
Village number one, a greatly diminished prophet reduced to
peddling self-published books and videos online describing his grand
scheme to the morbidly curious and the next generation of naïfs.
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