The Role of the Stock Market in the Computer Economy

I never gave any thought to this, when I was working in the Computer Industry, from 1980 to 2000. Everything was just too crazy for me, or anyone else, to understand it.

We were there, because Money was there, and that meant Jobs were there also. We didn't try to understand what was going on - in fact, we were forbidden to. We just did as we were told.

And that meant that, in my job as a technical writer - my job was to make the company I worked for, look good. Because that would make the value of its stock go up.

The primary purpose of any company, was to make money - and the easiest way to do that, was to situate it in a market of rising expectations - in a bubble, where everyone made a lot of money, in a hurry. No one thought about what would happen when the bubble popped - as it did, in 2001 and then in 2008.

Making a bubble, could be done most easily in the Stock Market where value was created out of nothing. Its model was the Movie Industry, that created alternative realities, that if successful - were extremely profitable. The trick, of course, was to create a fictitious reality that the moviegoers believed in.

And people back then, believed in the Computer - even though they had no idea what it was. They knew, whatever it was - it was creating its own reality - and they wanted to be part of that.

The Computer did not disappoint them - it exceeded their expectations beyond their wildest dreams. And created a reality so different - they didn't know what to make of it.

I am speaking of the Internet and Cellular networks - and the Cloud. That I am using, right now, to write in this blog. And you are using to read it.

The amount of computer hardware and software we are using, staggers the imagination. But we carry on, as if nothing unusual was happening.

When, in fact - the election of Trump has happened. We now have two kinds of people - the Computer people, who know what is happening, at least in computers - and the rest, the 99 percent, who know they are out of the loop, and don't know how to get back in.