Whether it's a roll of the dice, flip of a coin or an ace on the river, the concept of "Chance" is more central to the "Future" than any other. In Greek mythology, Zeus, Hades and Poseidon divided the Universe with a roll of the dice. Religions focus on the role an individual plays in determining his fate; so much so that the word "divine" can either refer to holiness or an ability to predict the future. In some ways, you could argue that chance, whether referred to in literate as Fate or Luck or in philosopy as Free Will or Determinism, is THE central concern of modern society. And why not? What could be more important or as interesting as understanding what will happen next?
I've touched on a breadth of large subjects in this series but none of them has proven to be as large, difficult or interesting as Chance. For this reason, I've decided that it deserves more than a single post. How many, I don't quite know -- if you have yet realized, I have only a vague roadmap on this trip and when I reach areas requiring more time than my midnight oil will afford, I might as well just extend them. So strap in for an extended, potentially meandering journey. I've also figured out that these posts are more fun to write when they stem from personal stories. I hope the same is true for you, the readers .
In 2003, I had recently moved from New York to California and gotten married. My business partners were back East and after a few months of trying to make a startup work remotely I received a stern talking to from my wife. I needed a job. My network in San Francisco was fairly lean and as I began to look around, my sister-in-law mentioned that she had a friend who needed someone to build a website for his project. She put me in touch with her former colleague, Andrew Pascal who had recently been lured back to Las Vegas to help his uncle launch an ambitious new casino on Las Vegas Boulevard. His uncle's name was Steve Wynn.
Where do companies that change the Future come from? These days the answer almost always begins with the seed of an idea, followed soon by an infusion of Venture Capital. Silicon Valley legend has it that the VC phenomenon is an American concept, a mid-20th century phenomenon that paired the founders of companies like Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, and HP with George Doriot and his proteges. As always, it depends how you look at it, but I'll argue that venture capital is much older and much more interesting.
As an entrepreneur, I've always thought of starting companies in nautical terms. It starts with an idea. (For me, I can usually tell it's decent if I'm still thinking about it weeks or months later). Once the idea becomes an obsession, all the seafaring metaphors begin. A voyage must be planned, the ship designed, a crew assembled and finally, when the winds are right, launched. If you're lucky, fortune smiles and years later, you return from distant shores with the hold laden with exotic treasures. Or you're never heard of again and people assume that the Davy Jones, the sharks or cannibals got you. But before any of this is conceivable, someone's got to foot the bill. To invest.
In yesterday's post, I brought up the Golden Age of Holland; an era marked by an explosion of scientific and economic innovation. At the heart of this innovation was the Dutch East India Company, the world's second multinational corporation (the British East India Corporation was formed 2 years earlier in 1600). It was also considered the world's first Megacorporation (just in case you were wondering - it's a real term). The VOC, as it was known, survived for 200 years and paid an 18% annual dividend to shareholders over that period. In modern terms, that's the equivalent of extrapolating Warren Buffet's performance at Berkshire Hathaway (current market cap is $198B) for another 150 years. Not bad.
In the fall of 1982, my sixth grade Science teacher lowered the lights and turned on a reel-to-reel film. I remember vividly the sound of the spinning spools and the flickering effect as the film began. Within 20 seconds, all else receded and we were transported on a journey to the outer edges of the Universe and then inward, to the center of a carbon atom. For the next 9 minutes we were transfixed. When it was over and the lights came on there the room was silent. The film was called "Powers of Ten" and it changed the way I thought about everything from that day forward.
The full film is below. It was made in 1968 by the renowned husband and wife design team of Charles and Ray Eames and inspired by the work of Dutch educator Kees Boeke, father of the "Sociocracy" movement . Whether you watch before finishing reading this post, I hope you'll find it both as humbling and wonderful as I do.
Yesterday's post about the OneCosmos project discussed the concept of Space; how it has inspired great curiousity, audacious ambitions and sometimes, folly. Today, I hope to take things a little further by using the Eames film as a guide. My goal is to look at how science has impacted our perspective, quite literally. More importantly, I plan to explore how the of the concepts of scale in "Powers of 10" might be applied in the decades to come.
Yesterday's post ended by concluding that future optimism often overlooks social changes by focusing on technological advances. Clearly, progress is multifaceted but today I'm going to begin where we left off. The 1939 World's Fair marked the beginning of 30 years of global mood swings. From the optimistic uplift of the Fair to the despair of the WWII and Holocaust to the Cold War, the word plowed forward technologically, in large part fueled by the tension bewtween the USSR and the US. Whether fueled by fear of ideological aggression or by the surplus of the post-war era, the dawn of the space era represents one of our species' finest achievements.
From the earliest of times, space has inspired us - looking up at the stars simply inspires wonder. But rather than delve into the Space Program, I'd like to begin this with a personal story about a project I was involved in 2000 called OneCosmos. It's an odd tale that I haven't talked about for a while. Despite being having happened during the of the Dotcom Boom, (and perhaps because of it) the project shaped my life immensely.
The 1939 New York World's Fair was the among the most momentous assemblies of peaceful global assembly -- it was the first exposition to focus on the future and was billed at the time as the "Dawn of a New Day". The Fair is fascinating in two key respects, both related to time and how we view progress. Presciently aware of the narrowing gap between sci-fi and reality they invited companies to use storytelling to cast their products as Heroic enablers of possibility in a future of prosperity.
The promotion of the fair was the work of PR pioneer Edward Bernays (who happened to be Sigmund Freud 1st cousin). Together with the day's leading advertising minds, he told a saw of the future as something enabled by science but not beholden to it. Despite of the vocal objections of eminent scientists such as Einstein, Bernays managed to inspire an entire generation of scientists to fulfill the promises of the Fair (including Carl Sagan who'll I'll cover in the days to come). Most inspiring to me is that the '39 Fair was dreamed up in 1935, at the very height of the Great Depression. That alone is a testament to the power of optimism.
As Wikipedia puts it, "The main purpose of the fair was to lift the spirits of the United States and drive much-needed business to New York City".
206K people attended the opening ceremony at a speech delivered by FDR. The exhibition's first year was dedicated to the impact innovation would have on the middle class. As is so often the case, the Future was viewed more through the lens of technological innovation and less from a not social or political angle. But politics have a way of exerting themselves and by 1940 the organizers altered the theme to "Peace and Freedom" to address the growing war in Europe. This meant more emphasis on the international pavilions (which notably included the Israel Palestine Pavilion; the first time the Jewish state was mentioned on the world stage - a longer story for a different time).
The story of the Fair has been told far better than I will in books like E.L. Doctorow's classic "World's Fair" and David Gelernter's: "1939: the Lost World of the Fair" (a slightly odder and crankier take). Earlier this year, a company named iPotion created an amazing site for the New York Public Library's Biblion project, combining articles and commentary with lost materials and ephemera from the NYPL's collections. lost. One can literally get lost in it for hours.
Before getting to my point (if indeed I have one) I'd like to just isolate some bizarre facts about the Fair:
1. 60 foreign government collaborated for the event.
2. The Fair marked the first time the British royal family ever visited the United States since the rogue colony declared independence.
3. A copy of the Magna Carta left Britain in 1939 for the first time to be in the British Pavilion at the fair. Within months Britain joined World War II and it was deemed safer for it to remain in America until the end of hostilities. It therefore remained in Fort Knox, next to the original copy of the American constitution, until 1947.
5. The central images of the fair were the Trylon and the Perisphere, two structures that formed the end-points of the train tour over a massive diorama of the idealized future the organizers named Democracity. Below is an iconic film that shows this tour; it's tone has such a dated and breathless quality and yet predictions it makes about the impact of cars, the rise of suburbia and development of industrialized agriculture are amazingly accurate.
The Fair remains forever poignant, for it's hope amidst the swirling global currents of that pivotal year of 1939. Despite being 71 years ago, I'm reminded of it every time I drive past Flushing Meadows and see the giant globe that still remains. More importantly, I think of the Time Capsule buried 50 feet below that site. Sponsored by Westinghouse, this time capsule is not intended to be opened for 5000 years. Inside are a variety of items, ranging from seeds to essays on microfilm to an RKO newsreel. Finally there are 3 messages to to citizens of the years 6939 - by Einstein, electron pioneer Robert Millikan and finally, by writer Thomas Mann. All three are hopeful, but Mann's words are the most moving. He wrote:
"We know now that the idea of the future as a "better world" was a fallacy of the doctrine of progress. The hopes we center on you, citizens of the future, are in no way exaggerated. In broad outline, you will actually resemble us very much as we resemble those who lived a thousand, or five thousand, years ago. Among you too the spirit will fare badly it should never fare too well on this earth, otherwise men would need it no longer. That optimistic conception of the future is a projection into time of an endeavor which does not belong to the temporal world, the endeavor on the part of man to approximate to his idea of himself, the humanization of man. What we, in this year of Our Lord 1938, understand by the term "culture" a notion held in small esteem today by certain nations of the western world is simply this endeavor. What we call the spirit is identical with it, too. Brothers of the future, united with us in the spirit and in this endeavor, we send our greetings."
Progress creates many illusions, but the essential but human nature changes very little. I have read and reread his words many times; I think what he means is that optimism is both dangerous and necessary. The paradox is that if the world ever reached a point of perfection it would did NOT require an optimistic spirit and the result would be a terrible descent. Humans, in other words, are humans, halos and warts. With optimism, we can, and must, strive to make a better world while remembering that the journey is long.
Each year the OEDC publishes a study which examines the average level of happiness amongst citizens of various countries. They measure 11 key data points" "housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance".
The results are surprising and revealing. One might expect the US. to do well yet we don't even place in the top ten. Denmark wins almost every year. Lots of reasons for this are obvious; the state is well-run, equitable, with good work life balance and a high standard of living. But the big secret may lie in how they view the Future -- they have low expectations and therefore are usually pleasantly surprised how well things turn out.
Hans Rosling's astonishing video below tells most of the story as quickly as possible. Broadly, it makes sense that table-stakes for Happiness are health and wealth. But there's more to it than that.
So yesterday's post ended with a question: "What does the future look like if we stay the course and allow short term desires to override long-term sanity"? I'll try to handle tonight's post by outlining the plot of one of the stupidest, funniest and gigglingly prophetic films out there, Idiocracy.
A man is chosen for an Army experiment to test the effects of cryogenic freezing. He is supposed to be in suspended animation for 1 year, but bureaucracy fails and he is left untouched for 500 years. When he awakens in 2505, society has changed slightly. The more intelligent folks in the human race have somehow clued into their collective plight and damped down on breeding quickly. At the same time; the less intelligent have had ever more children. This process runs several iterations. The world lies in ruin. (The movie is ridiculous enough that the shallow-end-of-the-gene-pool metaphors don't offend)
Bad news can be expressed as facts or feelings. Our current predicament has lots of both. The Times or WSJ can give you all you need; for the truly masochistic I recommend either Dmitriy Orlov or James Howard Kunsler (the latter is vastly more amusing). Today let's do a quick inventory - getting your bearings is critical or its easy to panic and sail straight back into the eye of the storm.
So said the sage Yogi Berra. Like all "Yogi-isms" , we know what he meant to say. But the subject of today's post goes a little deeper than that. Quite literally, humans have not always had a conception of the "Future". It required great thought and sophistication to produce enough food to last beyond the next day. Clearing this granted us the luxury tothink about the future beyond our next meal. Over the next few days, I plan to explore the relationship between surplus and future planning. Suffice to say, excess has many obvious benefits and some not-so-obvious perils.
Tonight I'll keep things relatively brief (both because it's late and also because I know that I'm going to touch on the subject of human evolution and will be scolded for glibness tomorrow by my mother, the archaeologist - corrections will follow). Tonight I'd like to make a simple, though interesting point - that the transition from hunting to farming transformed mankind's ability to think about the future. If we are interested improving our next 50 or 5000 years, we need to think hard about hunting, farming and our ability to create, manage and share our surpluses.
Any journey into the Future requires a good Time Machine. While this is a relatively modern metaphor, it may be the most fantastic thought experiment ever conceived. Popular movies, sci-fi books and TV shows have played with it for ages but it remains open for more.
This theme will persist throughout this series; the constant drumbeat will be that we have to think about the Past, contemplate the Present and create the Future. I realize this smacks of a bad episode of Quantum Leap (which I loved by the way). That said, we've recently entered an era where thinking like this is possible and increasingly critical. Yes, last week's news that some particles travel faster than light was likely a false alarm, but folks like the Long Now Foundation and the Institute for the Future (among many others) have dug deep here. In this month's Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis gives a phenomenal summation on the difficulty of incenting long term thinking over the instant gratification that is digging us ever deeper into debt, obesity and environmental ruin.
I'll close today's chapter with a thought based on a conversation I had with Philip Rosedale two years ago. Often when we've talked, he gets a wild look in his eyes that might otherwise signal delusion. Unfortunately, he's got a knack for being right. What he pointed out was that the length of time between an idea appearing in Science Fiction and becoming real is growing rapidly shorter. In other words, imagine something necessary, write it down and work like hell to make it real. That's the future.
Finally, more folks are starting to read and comment. Spread the word and keep up the feedback! Maybe your favorite time machine stories?