Extraordinary Computerized Home-based Technologies™ (ECHT), Inc.

1. Better than awashing machine! Extraordinary Computerized Home-based Technologies™ (ECHT), Inc.

2. What? What are the goals of Extraordinary Computerized Home-based Technologies™, Inc.?

3. Extraordinary Computerized Home-based Technologies™, Inc. aims to provide the consumers of the world with a network for the quick distribution of the most advanced software technologies available anywhere. ECHT™ technologies will improve the world by establishing a reciprocal relationship of ECHT™ users, thus allowing ECHT™ to prosper and thus further deploy ECHT™ technologies, which will greatly improve the world and the world’s consumers.

4. Future ECHT™ users today look forward to a future suffused by ECHT™ technologies. Future ECHT™ users today will enable ECHT™ to attain such a future by enjoying ECHT™ fruits, by contributing to the ECHT™ image in various ways (including spiritual), and finally by voting in accordance with ECHT™-determined guidelines in all the democracies of the world. This will permit not only greater deployment of ECHT™ technologies, but the internal and external growth of the political structures that make ECHT™ growth possible.

5. Who? Who are the managers of Extraordinary Computerized Home-based Technologies™, Inc.?

6. ECHT™ managers are people—human and corporate—who believe that advanced computer technology will vastly improve the world in one way or another. Are you an ECHT™ manager?

7. ECHT™ managers come from all walks of life and commerce. Like its technologies, like its networks, ECHT™ is distributed—it is decentralized, non-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian, and automatic. ECHT™ is as intelligent as you or I. It has, however, some luminaries.

8. Here is Hans Moravec, one of ECHT™’s most prominent managers.

9. Hans believes that one day, trillion-armed robots will extract our brains and make us immortal. Also, he believes computers will one day get rid of entropy. How would you like to be immortal?

10. Another of our managers is Marvin Minsky. Marvin used to work for MIT, and now he works for Disney. Marvin really wants to get rid of his body—and yours! (Most of our managers likewise have a problem with their bodies, which they call “wetware.”)

11. You see, most of our managers grew up tyrannized by brawny types who had no problem at all with their bodies. Bodies came to seem... stupid. Our managers, understandably enough, feel that various things about the world ought to be re-engineered. Bodies, for instance.

12. How? How canExtraordinary Computerized Home-based Technologies™, Inc. accomplish its goals?

13. In the past, other industries have had ideas about radically improving the world, and have presented these ideas to the world’s consumers. Each time, the consumers of the world have shown their willingness to receive the promoted informations in a constructive and congenial manner. f Each time, the world’s consumers have absorbed the resultant “problems” graciously and with profitable humility.

14. That spells GO!

15. But the record hasn’t been perfect, and we must learn from these imperfections. For example...

16. 1. The automobile At the 1939 World’s Fair, the General Motors pavilion showed the benefits of a “city planned around a modern traffic system.”

17. Such a city, G.M. said, would be beautiful beyond compare. It would also be very safe. And clean.

18. G.M. and others spent a great deal of money on films, exhibits, and prototypes to show the American public how wonderful the car-centered city would be... to show them a better future through advanced car technology

19. Then, to bring their vision to life, G.M., Standard Oil and B.F. Goodrich spent the 1940s destroying the electric trolley lines of 54 U.S. cities. Verdict: “conspiring against the public good”

20. Verdict Fine:$5000 Public Relations disaster!

21. 2. Food Something similar happened with food. For decades, a few humanitarian voices (most recently, Monsanto et al.) have been promising to “feed the world.”

22. “Feeding the world” has been the stated reason for the development of pesticides, the hybridization of ever more profitable (but less diverse) crop varieties, and now genetic modification.

23. Unfortunately, the result of pesticides, excessive hybridization and now genetic modification has been disastrously bad for Third-World nations. It has also been rather unpleasant for First-World shoppers.

24. Genetic modification has also been bad for laboratory animals. It has, however, been good for companies like Monsanto, Novartis, Pioneer, etc., and also for First-World doctors and hospitals.

25. Today, some first-world countries are trying not to import genetically modified food.

26. While this does not affect the world’s hungry, it does throw a wrench in the works. Public Relations disaster!

27. 3. Primitive modern technologies Finally there’s the case of “modern” technologies—dishwashers, refrigerators, home PCs, cell phones, etc.:things once touted asleisure producers.

28. Home technologies were supposed to make life very easy for women, and give them unlimited leisure. In a Westinghouse movie about the 1939 World’s Fair, an old woman says “I like electrical engineers: they signed our Emancipation Proclamation.”

29. Wide access to computer technology, too, was supposed to reduce work for everyone, free up time, and generally make life richer and easier. It is now common knowledge that computers, cell phones, and so on have contributed greatly to the Waste! erosion of leisure

30. Public relations disaster! As for women, we all know they want to work sixty-hour weeks just like men—but what about men? Do they want to work more than their pre-“modern” forbears?

31. What now? Bearing these counter-examples in mind, what doesExtraordinary Computerized Home-based Technologies™, Inc. hope to do now?

32. ECHT™ distributes the most advanced technologies in the world via unusual social and technological networks whose results resemble those of yesteryear but whose nature differs from them in several important respects.

33. The ways in which ECHT™ differs from past industries are very important.

34. Whereas previous industries studied charts, assured shipments, and enhanced physical modalities, ECHT™ develops new modalities, assures collaboration, and studies those equations in which God plays dice, in which some things must even be free.

35. shaping infoflowexploring dependencieschanneling information establishing datamodes limiting choicesgenerating desiresconfusing the issuestrapping consumers Where previous industries were about ECHT™ software and networks are about In other words...

36. ECHT™is allabout

37. Yes, there is one way in which ECHT™ is superior to the industries of the past: Every single aspect of what we do involves people. People configure our product after they own it. People can even produce brand-new products and send them back into our network streams. People determine us, and we thus form a pure consumer democracy.

38. And ECHT™ itself involves people in all its decisions. People are at the root of our production systems, our decision-making process, and our systems for just kicking back and having a honking good time. In these ways, ours is different from all past industries.

39. But the ways ECHT™ resembles past industries is most important of all.

40. In one word, we can assure our investors that nothing has changed. The laws in which our industry operates are almost the same as those in which Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and all the other industrialists worked—except they favor corporate might even more.

41. Like our stupider, more prosaic forebears, we are all about profit, about making money no matter what, about the triumph of might: we’re just much more conniving, have more time to burn, and have even more resources at our disposal. Investors, do not be scared: these are the only differences between us and our forebears.

42. And this is why all of us here at ECHT™ can finally say, ECHT™ ist am echtest! (ECHT™ ain’t yellow!)