Dreaming in Malaysia

Dreaming in Malaysia CHAPTER SIX: Dialectical Materialism Jay Jay had arrived in Nanjing in the late afternoon and checked into the Jinling Hotel. A woman in a blue business suit stood in the window looking out. Jay was sitting at the foot of the bed with a telephone next to him and an address book in his hand. He looked up from the address book at the woman and smiled. "Anything interesting?" He asked. She turned around and met his smile with her own. She shook her head and asked if he had any luck reaching his old friend at Nanjing University. Jay shook his head. Sulan Chen was a former classmate of Jay. She had attended Amherst College and graduated two years after him, in 1991. She had gone on to obtain an MBA at Wharton and was working as an economics consultant in Shanghai. She had come to Nanjing and met Jay at the airport. Jay checked his Rolex. "It's almost six. You want to get an early dinner?" "If you're buying." They had dinner at a small private restaurant, Swede and Kraut, owned and run by a foreign couple that Jay had met on a previous trip to Nanjing. They had Italian pasta and talked about old friends, shared experiences in college, and the future. Sulan was optimistic about eventually owning her own consulting firm. She believed that working for an American firm in Shanghai gave her excellent experience and, more importantly, good contacts to create her own business in the future. "What about your future, Jay? What are your plans?" Sulan asked, twirling Italian sphagetti on her fork. "Son demasiadas opciones," he said, knowing full well that she did not speak Spanish. She just stared at Copyright © 2000, Satyananda J. Gabriel. All rights reserved. Dreaming in Malaysia him, the way she had always done when he spoke Spanish. She knew to be patient with Jay. He was playful and stubborn, like most Westerners. "I don't know what I want to do with my life," he said, nearly laughing, knowing it sounded ludicrous. How could he not know? Was he some spoiled American brat, living out an extended childhood? He could almost read Sulan's mind. He smiled. "I'm just not career oriented, not the way you are," he said and shrugged. "I am quite confident that you will be very successful in your own consulting business and I'll do whatever I can to help." "Why don't you do it with me?" She asked. "We could be partners. You have a lot of experience with the Hong Kong Trade and Development Council and your computer expertise would be very valuable." He sighed. In some ways it wasn't that big a leap, from spy to consultant. "Then I'd be a capitalist." She shook her head. "Not unless we exploit workers," she corrected. "If we do the work and decide what happens to the profits, then we're a partnership, a commune of two, not capitalists. You wouldn't have to compromise your beliefs. And we could help build a new China, together. You once told me that you never wanted us to lose touch." He nodded agreement, remembering the conversation while they sat on a verdant hillside, looking down at the Amherst rugby team practicing. "It's a tempting offer, Sulan." This time she returned his smile. "Okay, then," she said and took a bite of her pasta. Samuel The argument began somewhere over the Pacific Ocean and continued for most of the trip from San Francisco to Hong Kong. They had argued throughout the two movies, despite complaints from neighboring passengers, and right through the last meal served on the jumbo jet. Samuel Maxwell drank tonic water with a twist of lime and his companion, who he had only met on the flight, drank another gin and tonic. "At the end of the day the big American companies, like General Electric and Grand United, perhaps in partnership with equally establishment European firms, like British Telecom, will dominate the Web," Samuel said, deliberately not mentioning Microsoft, which he was sure was just as establishment as the older, more crusty conglomerates, G.E. and G.U. but he did not want to muddy the waters with too much complexity, at least not in a conversation on an airplane. "Big American commercial banks like Chase and Citibank, along with the merchant banks, like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, will dominate the flow of money --- which is always a way to control people and ideas, and, along with the industrial giants, they will control the path of this new industry. The AOLs and Yahoos and Altavistas will either get swallowed up, controlled indirectly by the banks or industrial giants, or disappear. It always happens like that. The net start-ups will do all the heavy lifting, take all the risks, then when the road ahead is clear, the establishment companies will move in. It's a bit like one of those gangster movies where the Mafia boss tells the little independent gangsters to sign on as junior partners, move out of the way, or end up floating down the river." Copyright © 2000, Satyananda J. Gabriel. All rights reserved. Dreaming in Malaysia "No, no, I don't think so. Companies like Grand United don't understand this revolution," the young woman said. Her name was Darcy Carrington and she was an attorney working for Sunshine Systems, one of the fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley. Darcy was on her way to Hong Kong to ink a deal with New Territories Telecommunications. She had been sitting in a row all to herself when Samuel was bumped up to business class and a seat next to her. She was almost instantly pleased with her traveling companion. Among other things, she found Samuel's British accent very . what is the word . attractive, and in more than a nice-way-to-pass-the-time way. It didn't matter that most of what he was saying was Greek to her. He had been going on and on about capitalism, alienation, globalization, and the way technology was being shaped to meet the specific needs of exploitation. When he mentioned technology her antennae went up. This was something she knew intimately. She had to. Being an attorney for a high-tech firm meant that you had to stay immersed in the details of the latest technological advances, expecially those that directly related to your company's patents. So when he said that despite all the technological change that was taking place, exponential change, the capitalist giants, like America's Grand United, would, in the last instance, control these technologies for their own narrow purposes, she had to respond. "Technology is changing way to fast for these old foggie companies to keep up," she added. "Grand United, with its army of suits, is too bound to an old dog-eat-dog model of competition. Like you said, everything is changing so fast, exponentially, that the world today is nothing like the world that the suits were prepared for. Their MBAs and experiences are useless. I think you're giving the old white men running those companies way too much credit." Samuel blinked in surprise at the phrase "old white men," especially coming from someone who looked to him like a bleached blonde copy of Gwyneth Paltrow (he had once commented at an academic cocktail party in Birmingham on how the acting pool in Western cinema was rather narrow and incestuous, and how it wasn't surprising to find near duplicates among the similarly narrow and incestuous pool of upper class Americans). His tie askew (he always wore them when he traveled), he leaned back in his chair and took another sip of tonic water. He listened as she then said that the Internet revolution would completely change the list of firms that dominate commerce, implying that Sunshine Systems would be one of the winners. He was unmoved, considering all of this further evidence of the hubris displayed by most Americans, especially those involved in so-called high technology. "Doesn't matter whether Grand United can keep up," he said. "The establishment companies don't have to keep up. As a matter of fact, they never did. They will seize control of the technologies driving the Internet revolution, as you put it. The same group of stodgy old men or their sons and daughters will control the technology and the people who develop the technology. The same process that makes the Net entrepreneurs so keen to offer publicly traded shares will ultimately guarantee they lose control of their companies and the underlying technology. Most of these new companies will die and someone else will own their inventions." "That's very pessimistic, as well as wrong." "Look, I don't know all that much about computers, but it is quite apparent that the internet is a very powerful new technology. I can see things changing in the academic community. People are talking e-mail and the Web. Do you think anything as important as that would end up under the control of a bunch of computer geeks? Not likely. The Internet was developed by the military and at the end of the day it will be controlled by the same establishment that gave the military the go-ahead to develop it." "You have a very warped view of the way the market economy works. No one has the power to just walk in and take over the technology my company or any other company has developed.

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