Yesterday, a friend asked me who I view as my role model. My immediate response (in the context of that discussion) was Wittgenstein. Now that I reflect on it with a little more distance, I would perhaps name Benjamin Franklin, who wrote in his autobiography that he aimed to imitate Jesus and Socrates. There are indeed an ample supply of old white dudes who seem to fit the bill quite nicely. E.F. Schumacher, for example, or maybe someone like Jean Baptist Say (though I actually know very little about his skin color or other visual characteristics). Generally, I really couldn’t care less about the dozens, hundreds or thousands (or millions or more?) of people who have influenced my thinking. I prefer to focus simply on clearly expressing my own ideas — and that can already be quite a challenge, as “it’s complicated” seems to be the most appropriate answer to almost any question.
Today, I would like to (re-) consider Mr. Say’s Law (which is, simply stated, little more than an expression):
Supply creates its own demand.
See “Supply, Demand, Natural Language & Free Markets — Some Preliminary Thoughts & Ideas“
Over the past few decades, the supply of written texts has been vastly expanded. Today’s economists would normally refer to a “shift” in supply. Accordingly, the equilibrium price of writing has plummeted. As I myself wrote in “Supply, Demand Natural Language“, supply and demand actually use different types of scales: supply is expressed in linguistic terminology and demand is expressed in numeric terminology (granted, this way of expressing Norbert’s Law [for want of better terminology] is quite sloppy — but so was Mr. Say’s expression).
Indeed, I do not mean to say that I feel differently than Mr. Say apparently did (in his “Say’s Law”). I wish to mash up both laws. And this is indeed not at all difficult.
Imagine you want to a book store and told the clerk that you wish to buy $100 of literature. Um, … I certainly hope this sounds as ridiculous to you as it does to me. The clerk could simply present you with any book for $100 or any random sample of 10 books priced $10 each, or innumerable variations on that entirely random theme. Totally absurd!
Indeed, in this situation: money is of little help.
Instead, I see in this scenario an early indicator of something which I have been predicting for several decades already — namely: (“In the long run,”) Language will replace (other forms of) money.
Since the volume of texts (including, by the way, any / all recorded information) has become so enormous, I believe the time has come to develop new and improved tools for text selection. [1]
People who continue to stick their heads in the sand and ignore the value of natural language as an information technology are doomed to be drowned by wild ranging torrents of ASS (“Artificially Sentient Slop”) flooding into subterranean spaces. The comfortably numb will soon die off, as the rising floods of ASS will teach the rest of us another lesson from Darwin’s Law.
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