There are other ways in which the Council State may contribute to the flourishing of the Totality. One notable avenue involves facilitating the establishment of a National Culture through the creation of assorted media and publications. Aside from the usual State Media, the Council State should consider allocating a portion of its State Budget toward supporting Student Media and Social Media. Obviously, the narratives will not necessarily be the same, but at least it will support the Vocations of the personnel involved in their production processes.
Radio and television broadcasting stations, literature and newspaper publications, music labels, film studios, video game developers, museums, memorials, monuments, parks and wildlife preserves can all become potential sources of Actual Arbeit, Digital Arbeit or both. The corresponding Actual Geld and Digital Geld will not just come from the Totality and Foreigners purchasing the media and visiting the sites, but also the production processes associated with creating the National Culture and the subsequent efforts made to sustain it.
The most proper analogy that one should be thinking about when it comes to the need for the Council State to contribute to the National Culture is to think back to its roles within mass transportation and energy production. The Council State pours much of its State Budget into the construction and maintenance of highways, railways, seaports, airports, and other modes of transportation. They enable the Totality to commute to the workspace and bring the nation together by facilitating the flow of information from the countryside to the cities and back. A similar proportion of the State Budget goes toward the construction and maintenance of the electrical power grid. The sources of Arbeit here are not at all limited to what the Council State initially builds and maintains for the Totality insofar as those are the short-term, temporary contributions. The long-term, permanent contributions stem from the other sources of Arbeit that were made possible by the Totality, with or without the immediate participation of the Council State.
The recurring pattern shared by those economic activities is one of “Arbeit begetting Arbeit.” Somebody’s contributions of Arbeit to the Life-Energy Reserve eventually enabled somebody else to make their own contributions. The contributions of the latter could not have been achieved without the contributions of the former. While the Council State can achieve similar conditions by governing and operating the National Intranet on grounds of National Sovereignty, there will be circumstances in the Digital Tournament where the Totality will be able to repeat the same conditions for the Council State. It is under those circumstances where one could speak of the Life-Energization Reciprocal Electrification (LERE) Process as being the digitalization of the Life-Energization Reciprocity (LER) Process.
Thus, the Council State’s governance of the Digital Tournament among the Social Forums will facilitate the creations of new Professions and Enterprises as well as enable the expansion of existing ones from the VCS Economy. At the same time, the SSE will receive additional opportunities to broaden the capabilities of the Student Body and the Student Government, some of which will involve Student Media. In both cases, the Digital Tournament will be there to host the creations of Digital Arbeit and Digital Geld, both of which will be converted into Actual Arbeit and Actual Geld by the LERE Refineries by means of Blockcycle Technology. The National Culture is hardly an exception to these promising developments.
What is the Value of National Culture?
The National Consciousness of the Totality, which is characterized by shared senses of National Identity and a National Essence, becomes embodied by the National Culture. The Totality of every nation is bound to have a rich history, tradition, folklore, music, customs, norms, and festivities unique to them. The Council State encourages the Totality to cherish them, not just because they provide additional sources of Actual Arbeit and Actual Geld to the Life-Energy Reserve, but more so because they instill a sense of rootedness in a timeless, unchanging Destiny. The National Culture is how every Totality affirms its National Essence, defines its National Identity, and presents its National Consciousness to the rest of humanity.
It is through the establishment and facilitation of common National Culture that longstanding values and beliefs about the Constitution and the Legal Code are upheld. Such values and beliefs are passed down between generations both inside and outside the national educational system. Understandings about the roles and powers of the Self, Totality and State are recognized and eventually codified by law, drawn from past historical experiences and anticipations of what the future may have in store.
These values and beliefs cannot be sustained by the proliferation of “Memes” as they exist in the digital realm. The flow of information online cannot be reduced, let alone comprehended, to some Legal Positivist conception of Social Darwinist perspectives on Natural Selection. Memes, because they consistently fail to uphold the digital realm’s equivalent of a propaganda leaflet, are constantly struggling to retain their relevance, unable to persist in the National Consciousness of any Totality. This is partly due to the fact that Memes are the byproducts of subcultures unattached to any genuine National Culture. The ideas conveyed in any Meme does not inform the observer anything about the Totality for the exact same Intent behind why an Advertisement cannot inform the observer everything about the product being discussed.
At the same time, there are other issues which have become problematic in the State of Total Mobilization. The image of “starving artists” will cease to be relevant under the Work-Standard because the true wealth and economic growth of their Professions are not to be found anywhere within the transactional sales for their creations. It lies in their abilities to create new values and beliefs and to revere the older ones. Even as Technology destroys older ones, there will always be a need for those to replace the ones that could not otherwise be conserved by the Conservatives or restored by the Traditionalists. In a political process where the Left-Right Political Spectrum cannot be easily reapplied, the debate over the National Culture becomes intertwined with the ongoing developments of Technology.
As Technology continues to gain ever-increasing prevalence within the National Consciousnesses of all Totalities around the world, the distinctions between different Ideologies will start to blur. Such blurring of the Ideologies becomes more likely if the Ideologies in question all happen to share aspects of the same Weltanschauung among its various adherents. These effects may be discernible from the National Culture. While the Council State assists in these particular developments, the Totality will always be the final judgment on the entire matter.
What has been described so far are the political and social aspects of the National Culture. The economically-related ones have already been discussed elsewhere in previous Treatises. The topic itself was always given special attention with regard to the Council State issuing Stipends to those who find their Vocations in contributing to the National Culture. Similar to the delineations between State Enterprises, Social Enterprises and Student Enterprises, the Council State, Totality and Student Body are also responsible for their own contributions to the National Culture vis-à-vis State Media, Social Media, and Student Media respectively. There may be parallels across the various assorted media produced by all three, but there will always be a potential Intent to blaze a new path or two for the whole nation. Life does not have to be a boring affair; World History has its own ways of making things happen, of stoking excitement.
Even so, there is an important that could not have been addressed elsewhere because its implications were more so related to the digital realm and the purveyors of artworks among the museums and among the wealthy. There has been a belief within Production for Profit that Kapital investments in existing artworks, not the creations of new ones, can provide Incentives for “Economic Security.” The Price that artworks fetch in Kapital is based on their treatment as Commodities. The wealthy are particularly prone to investing in existing artworks because they enable to protect their Kapital against ongoing Currency Depreciation in the form of the Inflation Rate.
Artworks are not only the ways in which Kapital has been invested for the sake of Economic Security in Production for Profit. As evidenced by the earlier discussion of “Intangible Assets,” holding onto Intellectual Properties-as-Wealth has become far more valuable than investing in the creations of new ones. The original creation of an existing artwork fetches more Kapital in their auctioning, which in itself represents another conception of the transactional sale. It is simple unprofitable to reproduce the original artwork on the World Wide Web (WWW), even if doing so will ensure that the artworks will survive for future posterity long after the deaths of their original authors.
Producing New vs. Reproducing Old Media
Therefore, why else should the Council State, beyond supporting contributions of National Culture, be involved in the reproductions of existing media for the Totality? Why should State Media be allowed to reprint, republish, or recreate earlier works of art emanating from the National Essence? Would the reproduction of existing media on the National Intranet become more valuable in Digital Arbeit or will its Value be on par with that of Actual Arbeit?
Going back to the examples described earlier, the analogy that one should be thinking about in this context should be that of Arbeit begetting more Arbeit. There are the contributions of Arbeit whose Value is significantly larger over the short term, and there are the contributions of Arbeit whose low Value is compensated for by its own Value becoming compounded over the long term. Some famous artist or author may create a well-regarded painting or literature during their lifetime, but whose Value in Arbeit seemed rather small at first because few recognized its importance. Alternatively, the painting or literature was so popular during their lifetime that the Value in Arbeit was really high at first. Whichever the case may be, the Value to be gained from allowing the reproduction of such classics will enable the Council State, the Totality, and the Student Body to learn how valuable it has become over the years.
What has been said about paintings and literature can also be said about a variety of other media that can become potential sources of Digital Arbeit on the National Intranet. All kinds of movies, television shows, music, and video games can be streamed from official websites. People purchase them and in turn own the media. The Student Media, Social Media, or State Media that originally created it would receive Digital Geld from the transactional sale. The Digital Arbeit itself came from the production process for such media and their eventual release in the Digital Tournament of the National Intranet. This is only one way of envisaging how the Digital Economy behind the National Intranet’s Digital Tournament contributes Digital Arbeit and Digital Geld to the LERE Refineries under the LERE Process.
But what deserves to be said regarding those who, for one Intent or another, decide to reproduce the media in order to allow others to freely download and distribute them across the National Intranet? What happens if those same media become available free download and distribution in broader International Internet, where anyone from the other National Intranets could eventually acquire them through mirror sites and peer sharing services? Again, should transactional sales alone be the only way in which wealth and economic growth could be acquired from the creation of various assorted media for the National Intranet?
Here, it becomes imperative on the part of the State Commissariats to have their own roles on the National Intranet. The Social Forum becomes the means by which they could establish an official presence there. The going rates for contributions of Digital Arbeit and Digital Geld from the reproduction of existing media will almost always be less than the original production process. It is ‘almost always’ because there may be certain circumstances where the reproduction of existing media could actually be more valuable than the original production process because nobody at the time was able to anticipate how popular it would become over the long-term. Even so, the going rates for the contributions of Digital Arbeit and Digital Geld will need to be determined. If there are Foreigners interested in downloading the media for themselves or for others, they should only be able to do so under the terms of an existing Real Trade Agreement (RTA) between their government and the Council State.
The involvement of Foreigners downloading and distributing media enjoyed by the Nationals who comprise the Totality offers one possibility where either Digital Arbeit, Digital Geld or both could be obtained from the initial negotiations of RTAs. Something similar could even be envisaged involving Military Arbeit and Military Geld, where the Military-Industrial Complex of one nation sold weapons, munitions, vehicles, aircraft, and warships to another’s armed forces. Since it was already implied that RTAs consistently involved deciding which trade partners should receive a determined amount of Actual Arbeit and Actual Geld from International Trade, the same argument deserves to be asserted regarding Digital Arbeit and Digital Geld. Existing media whose Values can be reliably justified deserve to be preserved in some way or form on the National Intranet, if not on the International Internet. Such media will be preserved for future posterity, even though it may not leave any lasting influences on any Totality’s National Culture.
Categories: Digital Realm
The Fourth Estate 
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