Difference between revisions of "18: Slipping the DISC: State of The Portal and Chapter 2020"

Studying this work led to the idea of talking about EGOs, that is, Embedded Growth Obligations. Now, Embedded Growth Obligations are the way in which institutions plan their future predicated on legacies of growth. And since the period between the end of World War II in 1945 and the early 70s had such an unusually beautiful growth regime, many of our institutions became predicated upon low-variance technology-led, stable, broadly distributed growth. Now, this is a world we have not seen in an organic way since the early 1970s, and yet, because it was embedded in our institutions, what we have is a world in which the expectation is still present in the form of an embedded growth obligation. That is, the pension plans, the corporate ladders, are all still built very much around the world that has long since vanished.

We have effectively become a growth cargo cult. That is Once Upon a Time planes used to land in the Pacific. Let's say during World War II and Indigenous people looked at the air strips and the behavior of the air traffic controllers and they've been mimicking those behaviors in the years since as ritual but the planes no longer land well in large measure our institutions are built for a world in which growth doesn't happen in the same way anymore.

All right, what then happened was that a different structure which I have termed the Gated institutional narrative came to become repurposed. Now the Gated institutional narrative is like an exchange of financial exchange. If you will accept it's an exchange of information and ideas. And in order to actually participate in this particular special conversation, you need to have a seat on the exchange that is you need to write for an important paper like the Wall Street Journal where you need to be a senator or a congressman so that you can gain access to the news media where you need to be sitting at a news desk.

In any of these situations, whether you're a professor or a reporter or a politician, if you can gain a seat inside of the Gated institutional narrative you can attempt to converse with other people with in that particular conversation. The rest of us do not really have the same level or kind of access to this highly rarefied discussion, and I've previously compare this to what we would term a promotion inside of the world of professional wrestling. It's an agreed-upon structure in which people often agree to simulate dispute rather than actually have disputes because somebody could get some really seriously injured but they're in fact working together to produce a and engaging and regular product for Mass consumption problem with this gated institutional narrative. Is it in general? It doesn't contain the most important ideas and that is where the gating function comes in.