I grew up in a house where TV was banned. Sugar cereal and candy were frowned upon, but television, especially Saturday morning cartoons, was the ultimate forbidden fruit. Prohibition rarely works and in my case that proved true; I begged for gum in the line at the supermarket, enjoyed orange-flavored aspirin a bit too much and looked longingly at lollipops dropped in parking lots. But nothing trumped TV. I remember waking early and sneaking downstairs to illicitly watch as the test pattern segued into Looney Toons. Yet my stealth was insufficient -- one day in 1975 my mother caught me and kicked a hole in the TV's screen. I'll never forget the days as the shattered set lay on the curb waiting for the garbage crew to haul it away.
Her logic was pretty simple (I think the words "rotting your brain in front of that wretched tube" may have been used). She wanted me to read, to love books, to learn in a particular way. Was she right? Well she may have been and today I'll explore the affect that the evolution that media is having on the stories we tell, how we think and the culture that we create.
I said in the last post that this post would be a continuation of my thoughts on the Singularity. I've changed my mind for a few reasons:
The topic has humbled me. When I signed up to do a series of 23 daily posts called "Visualizing the Future" 11/11/11 , I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
I promised my wife not to stay up all night tonight. ;-)
I've been making these up as I go along.
I'm starting to appreciate just how interesting the Future is.
It's become clear to me that by definition, none of us has a clue what will happen in the Future, least of all me. It's why we talk, wonder, gamble, imagine and dream. It's what keeps life interesting and magical.
Let's begin today with a backwards glance. We're just over halfway through the 23 part series; so far we've covered quite bit of ground. Here's a quick graphic review:
Today's topic is a fun one, but before I start, here's BLATANT SCREAMING DISCLAIMER: (The title of today's post is intended to provoke thought and debate. I am well aware of the fact that this topic is often treated with starry-eyed breathlessness and a lack of scientific rigor. My intent is to simply to conduct a thought experiment, not to invite you to join the Borg)
First things first, let me explain what may otherwise feel like a jarring segue from Ponzi Schemes and the Financial System to a discussion of the internet as a brain. In developing this series, I've looked at how societies have developed, how technology has affected how we think about the future and the effect of these technical innovations on media and commerce. Once I reached yesterday's topic, I was surprised that how fuzzy the line was between a Ponzi or Pyramid scheme and the international financial system. I'm not yet sure where I come out with respect to the rage of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but something generationally defining is happening and about a broken economic system with a message spreading at net speed.
At a fundamental level (jump in here economists), both Ponzi Schemes or Health Finanacial Markets only work insofar as participants trust in the system and have faith that debts will be honored. (I covered this in detail in "The Future of Money") . I remember in 2008 during the Financial Collapse watching the headlines in the WSJ grow daily to larger and larger typeface. Running a startup at the time, each days headline made me queasier and queasier so I wrote a short piece for AdAge called "In Shaky Times, Relax". Looking back on it 3 years later, it seems both naively hopeful and creepily accurate:
"Financial institutions are repositories of trust, which they accumulate, hold and invest in the form of investors and depositors' money. As soon as the trust placed in them erodes, the funds quickly follow. The phenomenon we're witnessing right now is the result panic-amplifying feedback loops that happen in our highly networked world.This is the the societal equivalent of a healthy person who knows he will drop dead if his heart rate exceeds 160 beats per minute. Everything is good unless he starts thinking about it. And his heart-rate rises. Which worries him. And his heart rate rises and rises and then . . .pow.. . . . .The reality is that nobody will escape unscathed because we are all so fundamentally interconnected. "
No discussion of the web's evolution towards sentience would be complete without Kevin Kelly's epic talk at the 2007 TED Conference entitled "The Next 5000 Days of the Internet". In it he masterfully chronicles the first 15 years of the web and compares it's quantitative elements to the circuitry and memory of a brain. I recommend watching the whole thing, but for me the pull quote comes 5 minutes in - despite it's immensity, the Internet (in 2007) was roughly the size of 1 human brain.
Tonight's post involves some sleight of hand. If you've ever watch a shell game or 3 card monty, you know that being told you're going to be tricked doesn't help at all. You're still the shill and you always pick the wrong shell.
So I'll explain the trick quickly. Tonight, I will give you a brief introduction to the topic and hopefully, arouse your curiosity. The rest of the trick will wait until tomorrow. Here goes.
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.
