I’ve seen loads of articles lately about how the world isn’t changing at all — that none of the advances since the 1920s have really mattered in any way. That technology is and has stagnated. In some ways, I agree with some of this but in most ways I think it’s utterly delusional and extremely harmful to what happens next, bad or good.
These misguided ideas are all of a piece with the people who just can’t see social change no matter how quick or how drastic (and these people are the vast majority).
Sure, if you are just talking about physical characteristics of reality and meeting basic human needs (food, water, housing) then yeah, we pretty much got there by the 1930s.
But are humans — and is modern society — just an epiphenomenon of basic needs being met? Is that all that matters, all that is consequential to a life? To a society? To a polity?
No, of course not. This is obviously wrong. And pretty damn stupid.
To be clear, I’m not aligning myself with the singularity nuts or the Extropians or any of these also-delusional groups. They are just as useless for having any cogent thoughts.
Nor am I walking a middle ground. No, I am forging a new path that takes into account that what matters to most modern, non-impoverished humans is not some basic meeting of physical needs but in the informational spaces in which that person dwells and who controls, influences and corrupts those.
One of the reasons in fact for the narrative that nothing done since the 1920s matters is so that those who very much realize that is false can successfully monopolize and dominate what has become nearly — and in some cases more — important than food, water and housing.
We live in an information society. Yes, that is a cliché but no one repeating that cliché seems to actually know what it implies.
And technology of late has made the control of information the most important factor in success and flourishment on the micro and the macro scales.
Pretending that none of the absolutely amazing and information-space-enlarging technologies coming to fruition in the last 30-50 years — as Ian Welsh and most others do — don’t matter at all is so damn dangerous I don’t even have words for it.
(Also, I am glad I’m not an academic, because I don’t care about being published or even being widely read. But I do care about coming up with original ideas with no one’s sanction (yes, I intend both meanings of that contranym) and being able to call the stupid “stupid,” which unless you are very famous you cannot do in an academic paper.)
Great post. I also feel stunned by the sheer dumbness of people who refuse to see the enormous transformations we are witnessing.
Don’t know whether you read David Brin’s blog, but the present post reminded me of something in a recent one there:
A lot of the people who perceive stagnation see pure and applied sciences as having harvested all the “low-hanging fruit.” There’s probably some truth to that, but “low hanging” is relative. It may be that where we are right now, there are some fruits of discovery hanging just high enough to be a healthy level of challenge. My fear isn’t that they’ll fail to materialize, so much as my fear that they’ll materialize in classified and/or proprietary forms. David Brin, of course, believes transparent society is as inevitable as Marx believed communism was. I’m not quite that optimistic. Empirical evidence seems to indicate that information wants to be expensive. We won’t get a transparent society without a fight.
Lori, that’s a really good insight about “low-hanging” being relative. To us looking back from the future, agriculture seems to be “low-hanging.” And yet it took hundreds of thousands if not millions of years to develop between when it could have developed versus when it did actually transpire.
Not so low-hanging at all it seems to me! A lot of our perception of “low-hanging” is ignoring the mental, physical and logistical advances it took to get to a plateau and to start building another mountain with another plateau atop it — which in reality is a more descriptive way of looking at how progress actually works.
I think human nature is fundamentally and firmly opposed to the transparent society. But who’s to say human nature cannot be changed?
That might be one of those things that seems low-hanging to those a thousand years hence, but in reality was no more low-hanging than learning how to build an effective bow and arrows to go with it, or how to smelt steel. Or even how to knap flint.
I’m assuming that by “human nature is fundamentally and firmly opposed to the transparent society” you do not mean “human nature fundamentally values privacy,” as that would fundamentally contradict many paragraphs of text you have posted to the present blog, about how the sheeple passively accept spyware, the current state of play in market research, the Skynet of Things, etc.
I’m inclined to believe that human nature is fundamentally and firmly opposed to the transparent society because the game of poker (whose contributions to language include “bluffing” and “holding cards close to the vest”) seems an almost perfect model of how access to information is negotiated between humans, as well has how the element of chance enters into information theory and more importantly information practice. It took me until well into my 40’s to figure out that the mantra my mom pounded into my head–“never volunteer information”–was about information arbitrage rather than personal privacy. I’m guessing I’m a spectacularly late bloomer in that regard. If so that would be yet another data point in the general direction of a self diagnosis of autism, for whatever that’s worth.
Oh no, not about valuing privacy but rather it’s natural for people to want to hoard information if it profits them financially or otherwise.
That’s a good maxim about never volunteering information. With in person interactions, I try to hold to it myself. And in the workplace, volunteering information of knowledge often means you get assigned much more work than you can handle as you appear to have knowledge of something.