Posts Tagged ‘innovation’
“If you could choose only one of the following two inventions, indoor plumbing or the Internet, which would you choose?”*…
For years, people have bemoaned the sorry state of innovation. Compared with the great inventions of the industrial era, the inventions of our own time seem pathetic. In a short essay reprised from 2012, the estimable Nicholas Carr offers a different take: We’re as innovative as ever, but the focus of innovation has shifted…
… The original inspiration for such grousing… came from Robert J. Gordon, a Northwestern University economist. His influential 2000 paper “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past?” included a damning comparison of the flood of inventions of a century ago with the seeming trickle we see today. Consider the products invented in just the ten years between 1876 and 1886: the internal combustion engine, the electric lightbulb, the electric transformer, the steam turbine, the electric railroad, the automobile, the telephone, the movie camera, the phonograph, the linotype machine, the film roll for cameras, the dictaphone, the cash register, vaccines, reinforced concrete, the flush toilet. The typewriter had arrived a few years earlier, and the punch-card tabulator, the computer’s precursor, would appear a few years later. And then, in short order, came the airplane, the radio, air conditioning, the vacuum tube, jet aircraft, the television, the refrigerator, and a raft of other home appliances, as well as revolutionary advances in manufacturing processes. (And let’s not forget The Bomb.)
The conditions of life changed utterly between 1890 and 1950, observed Gordon. Between 1950 and today? Not so much.
So why is innovation less impressive today?… maybe it’s crappy education. Or a lack of corporate investment in research. Or short-sighted venture capitalists. Or monopolistic business practices. Or overaggressive lawyers. Or imagination-challenged entrepreneurs. Or maybe it’s a catastrophic loss of mojo. None of these explanations makes much sense. The aperture of science grows ever wider, after all, even as the commercial and reputational rewards for innovation grow ever larger and the ability to share ideas grows ever stronger. Any barrier to innovation should be swept away by such forces.
Let me float an alternative explanation: There has been no decline in innovation; there has just been a shift in its focus. We’re as creative as ever, but we’ve funneled our creativity into areas that produce smaller-scale, less far-reaching, less visible breakthroughs. And we’ve done that for entirely rational reasons. We’re getting precisely the kind of innovation we desire — and deserve.
My idea is that there’s a hierarchy of innovation that runs in parallel with Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. Maslow argued that human needs progress through five stages, with each new stage requiring the fulfillment of lower-level, or more basic, needs. So first we have to meet our most primitive Physiological needs, and that frees us to focus on our needs for Safety, and once our needs for Safety are met, we can attend to our needs for Belongingness, and then on to our needs for personal Esteem, and finally, at the peak of Maslow’s pyramid, to our needs for Self-Actualization.
If you look at Maslow’s hierarchy as an inflexible structure, with clear boundaries between its levels, it falls apart. Our needs are messy, and the boundaries between them are porous. A caveman probably pursued esteem and self-actualization, to some degree, just as we today spend time and effort fulfilling our physical needs. But if you look at the hierarchy as a map of human focus, then it makes sense — and seems to be borne out by history.
In short: The more comfortable you are, the more time you spend thinking about yourself.
If technological progress is shaped by human needs, as it surely is, then general shifts in needs would also bring shifts in the nature of innovation. The tools we invent would move through the hierarchy of needs, from tools that help safeguard our bodies or coordinate social groups on up to tools that allow us to modify our moods or express our individuality — from tools of survival to tools of the self. Here’s my crack at what the hierarchy of innovation looks like:
Innovation’s focus moves up through five stages, propelled by shifts in the needs we seek to fulfill. In the beginning come Technologies of Survival (think bow-and-arrow), then Technologies of Social Organization (think cathedral), then Technologies of Prosperity (think assembly line), then technologies of leisure (think TV), and finally Technologies of the Self (think Facebook, or Prozac).
As with Maslow’s hierarchy, you shouldn’t look at my hierarchy as a rigid one. Innovation today continues at all five levels. But the rewards, both monetary and reputational, are greatest at the top level (Technologies of the Self), which has the effect of shunting investment, attention, and activity in that direction. We’re already physically comfortable, so getting a little more physically comfortable doesn’t seem particularly pressing. We’ve become inward looking, and what we crave are more powerful tools for modifying our internal states or projecting those states outward to an audience. An entrepreneur today has a greater prospect of fame and riches if he or she creates a popular social-networking app than a faster, more efficient system for mass transit. Innovation, to put a dark spin on it, arcs toward decadence…
One might wonder why Carr doesn’t focus more (and more affirmatively) on information technologies– the emergence of personal computing in all of its form factors, the knitting together of the web and the advent of turbocharged connectivity, and on its back, the emergence of social media– all of which have been hugely impactful, perhaps especially in the 12 years since this essay was written: a “TikTok/YouTube/influencer election,” a social media fueled mental health concern, the proliferation of meme investing and online gambling, etc., etc… But then, one might conclude that they simply underline his point.
Why our innovations seem so small: “The Arc of Innovation Bends toward Decadence.”
Pair with Ted Gioia‘s painfully apposite “The State of the Culture, 2024.”
* Robert J. Gordon
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As we ponder progress, we might recall that it was on this date that an acute observer of this phenomenon, The Simpsons, made its debut as a full-length show. Originally a part of The Tracey Ullman Show, The Simpsons got their own Christmas special, which aired on FOX on this day in 1989. “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” (AKA “The Simpsons Christmas Special”– the first of an annual tradition) was created by Matt Groening and written by Mimi Pond (who only wrote the one episode). It was viewed by 13.4 million viewers, was nominated for two Emmy Awards, and hasn’t left the airwaves since.
“Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts”*…
In (what seems to your correspondent) a techno/progress-studies “update” of the Annales school of historiography) historian Stephen Davies argues that technology and ideas change our lives much more than politics do– and that history should reflect that…
Most of us recognize the following dates and years: 4th July 1776, 14th July 1789, 1914, 1933, 1917, 1215, 1815, and 1066.
But I imagine most readers will fail to identify what’s special about this second list of dates: 5th July 1687, 9th March 1776, and 24th November 1859. Or indeed this third list of dates and years: 22nd January 1970, 26th April 1956, 1st October 1908, and 1960.
Why are these first dates so recognizable and memorable? It is because the events in question (the adopting of the US Declaration of Independence, the fall of the Bastille, the start of World War I, Hitler’s coming to power, the Russian Revolution, the drafting of the Magna Carta, the Battle of Waterloo, and the Battle of Hastings) are seen as critical events or markers in a particular story. They are supposedly events that had a profound subsequent impact on the shape and destiny of society and so shaped the way that later generations lived.
Undoubtedly there is truth in this but what was the nature of the impact that these events had? What, if anything, did they have in common? The clear answer is that these are all political events. As such they are also thought of as being connected, as being key points or landmarks in a particular story that structures the past into a meaningful pattern and makes sense of it. It thus tells us what was important in bringing about both past worlds and the contemporary world and so, by extension, what we should see as important here and now.
This story is of the growth and development of government, the forms it has taken, and in particular the historical evolution of particular states or political entities, such as France, England/Britain, and the USA. Making these dates important and central to our understanding of the past implies that the driving force in history, the thing that shapes and determines the world we are in and that is crucial for our future, is politics and political power. The dates given are all about political power: Who has it, who contests it, and who wins it.
In this political story the important, memorable events are wars, revolutions, elections, the rise of certain kinds of governance and political institutions, and the doings of rulers – kings, emperors, popes, prime ministers, and revolutionaries. The fact that these kinds of dates are memorable and widely known shows us that this is the dominant way of thinking about history and of understanding the past…
… This predominant understanding of history is incorrect for three reasons:
- It places emphasis on the wrong events.
- It judges the relative importance of events incorrectly.
- It ultimately misunderstands which events had the most transformative effects on human life.
The political understanding of history leads us to view our situation in a distorted and inaccurate way. It implies that if you want to address social problems or challenges, then politics (whether electoral or revolutionary) is the only way to do it. It implies that the news and events we should pay attention to are political ones, because those are what will have the greatest impact.
But there may be other, better ways of looking at the past.
Let us return to our second list of dates: 5th July 1687, 9th March 1776, and 24th November 1859. These dates are associated with the publication of major works of intellectual inquiry that changed the human understanding of how the natural world works.
The first of these, 5th July 1687, has been rated as the second most significant date of the last millennium, as it saw the publication of the first edition of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The text brought about a revolution in the understanding of the nature and mechanics of the physical world…
[Davies explains the other key dates…]
… These are all landmarks in a quite different kind of story, one in which the driving force is not politics but intellectual inquiry and discovery. This story’s main figures are scientists and philosophers and thinkers, not politicians and generals. The story is about the gradual growth and deepening of human knowledge, and with it understanding and mastery over the physical world…
… However, there are other, even more important dates, if we think of the impact the events associated with them have had on everyday life and the nature of society, that are even less known and considered. Here we have yet another story or way of thinking about history, one that is almost completely ignored.
Consider our third list of dates and years: 22nd January 1970, 26th April 1956, 1st October 1908, and 1960. Even fewer people would recognize these. However, if you want to understand our world, these are more important than those on the first or second list.
What were they, and why so important? They are when the way we lived changed.
The first, 22nd January 1970, was the first commercial flight of the Boeing 747, the first jumbo jet. This was the outcome of an amazing project, led by figures such as the inspirational head of Pan American Airways, Juan Trippe, and Boeing’s coordinating engineer, Joe Sutter. The project involved the creation of several new technologies and came close to bankrupting Boeing. The jumbo jet transformed air travel from a luxury good to a mass-consumer one. In doing so, tourism, migration, trade, and the exchange of ideas have all been transformed. The world we live in is now far more interconnected and integrated because of this breakthrough. The modern global city is a product of the 747 and the aircraft that followed it. Trippe called the 747 ‘a great weapon for peace, competing with ballistic missiles for the future of humanity.’…
[Davies explicates the other dates]
… Why should we count these events as more important and significant than the iconic events in the political understanding? One reason is that politics is, in a sense, downstream of these technological breakthroughs, as politics is determined and driven by the changes in material circumstances and lived experiences that those events brought.
The forms that events such as wars and revolutions or peaceful politics took were both made possible by the kinds of events we are looking at here but were also limited by them. Certain possibilities were not possible or no longer possible because of the changes brought by these events and the way that they also created systems with limits or unavoidable requirements. For example, after the jumbo jet, containing pandemics with quarantines, as was common in the nineteenth century, has become difficult or impossible.
In this materialist way of thinking, it is material lived experience that determines consciousness and shapes things like culture and politics, and so things that influence or shape that material lived experience are what we should give more weight and attention to…
[Davies offers other examples– the telegraph, the telephone, and radio broadcasting, observing that “almost every aspect of our lives today is shaped in some way by these three events and what followed from them.”]
… If the shared element of the first set of dates was the part played by power in human affairs, what unites the latter ones? These are the dates when technological shifts changed our lives. Human beings, through cooperation, exchange, exploration, experiment, and inquiry, can create novel solutions to challenges and problems, with enormous effects. These are cases when those solutions worked, with predominantly good, but also bad, effects.
Certainly, on an initial comparison the fruits of technology seem to have created more good than the battles of history. This would be even clearer if we thought about other events that could be added to this kind of list, such as the discovery of anesthesia and antisepsis, the synthesizing of antibiotics by Ernst Chain and Howard Florey, the fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of the biology of infectious disease that were brought by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, or the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process for taking nitrogen from the air to create artificial fertilizer, which reduced the threat of famine and starvation to a historical low.
An understanding of the past in which not just our intellectual successes but our technological breakthroughs occupy pride of place would be very different from the political one that dominates now. Instead of politics and war, and the growth, rise, and decline of states and empires being the focus, the central story would rather be one of human cooperation and inventiveness, innovation and scientific and technological progress and discovery, and the improvement in human well-being than the deeds (often diabolical) of those with power…
If it is the case that human ingenuity solving problems is the most potent force in history, why do so many still fixate upon politics, wars, and revolutions?
Part of the reason is obvious: Those events are dramatic, as unpleasant things often are. A more cynical explanation is that this flatters the self-importance of the most immediately powerful people in society, and also causes the rest of society to see them as more important than they are. It also legitimizes and justifies the actually existing systems and institutions of political power by making it seem that these are the keys to human well-being and advancement.
If our alternative, technology-focused way of thinking about history became the default mode of understanding the past and how our world came to be, rather than the first, many things may change. We might pay less attention to politics and more to technology, science, and business. We would think more about trade and innovation. We might think of technological solutions to social and environmental problems…
… John F Kennedy memorably captured this sentiment in the peroration to his ‘Moon Speech’ delivered at Rice University in Texas in 1961. As he said:
If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.
The vision of history and the optimism for the future that he expressed that day is something we should recover…
Do we misperceive politics to be at the center of history? “History is in the making,” from @SteveDavies365 in @WorksInProgMag.
(Image above: source)
* “Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts — between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader… History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.” – Will Durant
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As we parse the past, we might recall that it was on this date in 1865 that the 27th (and conclusive) state (Georgia) ratified the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude (except as punishment for a crime). Proclaimed on December 18, it was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted following the American Civil War.
The Emancipation Proclamation (made in September 1862; effective January 1, 1863) had freed all current slaves in the U.S. (though as a practical matter freedom took years longer). The Thirteenth Amendment assured that it would never be reinstated.
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”*…
… so it’s useful to contemplate its beginning. David Rooney, in an excerpt from his book About Time…
Ömer Aga stood in the middle of Amsterdam’s Dam Square surrounded by his nineteen-strong party of advisers, interpreters and hosts, and gazed toward the huge new trading exchange that straddled the mighty Rokin canal, just to the south of the square. The year was 1614, and Aga was on a fact-finding mission to the Dutch Republic as the Ottoman Empire’s newest diplomatic emissary. Top of his list of must-see sights was this bold new building, completed just three years earlier. It was hard to miss, as it was the size of a soccer field and could accommodate thousands of traders in its 200-by-115-foot enclosed inner courtyard, but what Aga really noticed was the four-sided clock tower that loomed over the vast structure and the streets and canals all around, as well as the booming sound of its bell when they rang out the hours and then, at noon, tolled repeatedly for a few minutes before falling silent. Little did they realize it, but Omar Aga and his retinue were listening to one of the most significant clocks ever made. It was fitted to the world’s first stock exchange and sounded the birth of modern capitalism.
From the moment the Amsterdam exchange building first opened its doors in August 1611, traders were forbidden from trading anywhere else in the city. But the exchange did not just put spatial boundaries on trade. It concentrated traders in time, too. A few days before the new facility opened, the city council had issued a bylaw proclaiming that trading could only take place between the hours of 11 a.m. and noon, Monday to Saturday. At noon, the clock installed in the tower high above the exchange building would toll a bell for seven and a half minutes. If any traders were still in the exchange, or in the streets nearby, they would be fined. Additionally, trading was allowed between 6:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. during the summer months between May and August, and in winter evening trading took place for a thirty-minute period marked by a tolling bell at the city’s gates. At the end of evening trading, the exchange clock would again sound for seven and a half minutes and fines were issued for anyone caught trading after the bells fell silent.
Why were such strict limits placed on trading at the Amsterdam exchange? There were several reasons. One was a practical problem familiar to anybody involved with trade in a busy city center: time limits reduced congestion and disruption in the streets nearby. Another was that clocks made trading more efficient. Short, fixed trading hours concentrated buyers and sellers together, making it easier for each to find enough of the other. This increased the volume of trade, which was good for traders and for the city council collecting taxes on transactions. But clocks also helped prices to remain fair, as they could be used to regulate the people who occupied intermediate roles in the functioning of a market.
Some of the earliest references to mechanical clocks being used in towns and cities, in the Middle Ages and soon after, related to market restrictions. The first urban markets brought producers of food, cloth and so on into direct contact with the consumers of their wares. But as towns and cities grew, this model started to break down. It stopped making sense for every producer in the countryside to make the journey all the way to the center of towns. So, ‘intermediate trading’ emerged, whereby third parties might buy up the goods from several small producers somewhere on the edge of town, before bringing them in and selling them themselves at the market. Soon, a whole range of intermediate roles sprang up. Wholesalers, merchants, shopkeepers and peddlers were some, but intermediates also included financiers who advanced funds, and those speculating on the future in the hope of offsetting risk (whether because of bad harvests or other unpredictable events) and making more money. Some people occupied more than one role.
As populations grew and moved in increasing numbers to towns and cities, and markets began to sell more and more products, the rise of intermediate roles in market-based trade was inexorable, creating a new stratum of people who neither produced goods nor consumed them, but traded, speculated, brokered, hoarded, flipped and financed. Some market authorities feared intermediates would drive up prices or limit supplies and turned to clocks to control their involvement. Clocks meant that different groups could be treated differently at the market. In a sixteenth-century grain market, for instance, the first hours of trade could be restricted to residents, before bakers of bread could get in, and then the pastry bakers could enter. Only after several hours were wholesalers and other intermediate traders allowed in. But as societies and their market trading became ever more complex, the role of intermediates like brokers and financiers became increasingly important in keeping the flow of trading running smoothly. And, before long, finance became something that could be traded in its own right, and clocks took on a new regulatory role.
Amsterdam’s was not the first trading exchange. Antwerp and London had had exchanges since the sixteenth century where goods and money were traded, but Amsterdam was the first of a new kind of exchange: what became the modern securities exchange. As well as being a place to trade in commodities like salt or hides, people could also buy and sell financial assets. It started out as a place to buy and sell shares in the Dutch East India Company, an early joint-stock company and the first with freely tradable shares, but soon was used to trade other company shares, futures contracts and insurance policies as well as becoming the place to go for information about the state of the markets. The financial market had arrived, but its products, and the prices paid for them, which were time-dependent. The time at which each securities transaction was made, or would be enacted in the future, was central to this new type of trading to work fairly, everybody had to agree what time this was. In other words, trading needed time stamps, which is where the exchange clock came into its own. Clocks were no longer about excluding intermediates from the market. In the new exchanges, intermediates were the market — with the clock watching carefully over the whole thing…
The birth of modern capitalism and the role that timekeeping played in its nascence: The Amsterdam Stock Exchange, from @rooneyvision, via the invaluable @delanceyplace.
* Fredric Jameson (also sometimes attributed to Slavoj Žižek)
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As we examine enterprise, we might recall that it was on this date in 1937 that Sylvan Goldman introduced the first shopping cart in his Humpty Dumpty grocery store in Oklahoma City.
“If the world’s 223 international undersea cable systems were to suddenly disappear, only a minuscule amount of this traffic would be backed up by satellite, and the Internet would effectively be split between continents”*…
Your correspondent is hitting the road, so (Roughly) Daily will be a good bit more roughly than daily for a bit. Regular service should resume on or around May 6. Meantime, a fascinating– and meaty– piece to hold you…
Josh Dzieza goes deep on an undersung technology and the folks who keep it functioning…
The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.
If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”
Corporations would lose the ability to coordinate overseas manufacturing and logistics. Seemingly local institutions would be paralyzed as outsourced accounting, personnel, and customer service departments went dark. Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a percent of the traffic. Contemplating the prospect of a mass cable cut to the UK, then-MP Rishi Sunak concluded, “Short of nuclear or biological warfare, it is difficult to think of a threat that could be more justifiably described as existential.”
Fortunately, there is enough redundancy in the world’s cables to make it nearly impossible for a well-connected country to be cut off, but cable breaks do happen. On average, they happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks…
The internet cables that knit the world together and the people that keep them working: “The Cloud Under the Sea,” from @joshdzieza in @verge. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network
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As we dive deep, we might send effectively-transmitted birthday greetings to a pioneer of telecommunications, Granville Woods; he was born on this date in 1856. An inventor, he held more than 50 patents, for innovations that ranged from a locomotive steam boiler to an egg incubator. But he is probably best remembered for his Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph, a variation of the induction telegraph that relied on ambient static electricity from existing telegraph lines, allowing railroads to send messages between train stations and moving trains.
He is often referred to as the first African American mechanical and electrical engineer after the Civil War and as “the Black Edison” (sic).
“We all live in each other’s shadow”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post, Nathan Gardels, editor of Noema Magazine, on a new book by Children of a Modest Star, “A clear-eyed and urgent vision for a new system of political governance to manage planetary issues and their local consequences” by Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman…
Globalization was about markets, information flows and technology crossing borders. The planetary is about borders crossing us, embedding and entangling human civilization in its habitat. That, in a nutshell, is the core thesis of a new paradigm-shifting book by Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman titled “Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for the Age of Crises.”
The concept of planetarity describes a new condition in which humans recognize not only that we are not above and apart from “nature,” but that we are only beginning to understand the complexities of our interdependencies with planetary systems.
“If Copernicus’s heliocentrism represented the First Great Decentering, displacing the Earth from the center of the heavens, and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection the Second Great Decentering, then the emergence of the concept of the Planetary represents the Third Great Decentering, and the one that hits closest to home, supplanting the figure of the human as the measure and master of all things,” Blake and Gilman write.
As further argued by the authors in a forthcoming Berggruen Press volume, “the Planetary as a scientific concept focuses on the Earth as an intricate web of ecosystems, with myriad layers of integration between various biogeochemical systems and living beings — both human and non-human. Drawing on earth system science and systems biology, this holistic understanding is being enabled by new planetary-scale technologies of perception – a rapidly maturing technosphere of sensors, networks, and supercomputers that collectively are rendering the planetary system increasingly visible, comprehensible and foreseeable. This recently-evolved smart exoskeleton — in essence a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer — is fostering an unprecedented form of planetary sapience.”
The open question is how, and if, human governance in the late-stage Anthropocene can align with the knowledge we are now attaining.
Paradoxically, planetary-scale connectivity is also what divides us. Convergence entails divergence because the universalizing and rationalizing logic of technology and economics that ties the world together operates in a wholly different dimension than the ethos of politics and culture, rooted in emotion and ways of life cultivated among one’s own kind.
While the emergent world-spanning cognitive apparatus may be sprouting the synapses of a synchronized planetary intelligence, it clashes with the tribal ingathering of nations and civilizations that remain anchored in their historical and spatial identity.
Consequently, this new domain of encompassing awareness is — so far — as much the terrain of contestation as of common ground…
[ Gardel unpacks Blake’s and Gilman’s proposition, which would devolve some decision-making on some issues, even as it globalized others. By way of addressing the Herculean challenge of creating the equitable, workable global system for addressing global challenges they [propose– a task made the more difficult by the divergence in values discussed yesterday— he invokes an episode from American history…]
… At the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, America was morphing from an agricultural, largely rural society into an urban and industrial one. Cultural norms and familiar ways of living were in upheaval. Political institutions that had become dysfunctional were challenged — not so unlike the disruptive transition to digital society and planetarity we are experiencing at present.
The turmoil of transition in those days gave birth to what became known as the Progressive Era. Its progenitors sought to address the new social concerns of a more complex society — working hours and safety conditions in newfangled factories, women’s suffrage, public health exposure from mass food processing, poor urban infrastructure from housing to water and electricity, the concentration of power in the railroad and banking trusts as well as exploitative private utility companies.
The Progressive Era response in the American states was to move in two directions at once. The movement promoted direct democracy whereby citizens could make laws and enforce accountability directly, skirting the corrupt and bought-off legislators of the patronage machines, through the citizens’ ballot initiative, the referendum and the recall of elected officials. At the same time, elected Progressive governors delegated authority to nonpartisan experts for commissions that regulated commerce, banking, railroads and electric utilities on behalf of the public interest. Professional city managers, unelected but accountable to direct democracy and the elected officials who appointed them, came into being for the first time to competently administer ever more complex urban environments.
In time, the reforms that resulted from this pairing of citizen engagement and technocracy percolated up to the national level into institutions such as the Interstate Commerce Commission or the Food and Drug Administration and led to the abolition of child labor, the eight-hour working day and women’s right to vote.
The point of this brief detour into American history is not to suggest the unworkable proposition of direct democracy at a planetary scale, but simply to say that it is well within the capacity of the political imagination to marry modes of consent with delegated authority in a way that confers legitimacy.
The paradigm shift and governing innovations Blake and Gilman propose in “Children of a Modest Star” are no less realizable over time than what has come before because, now just as then, changing circumstances demand it…
A paradigm shift from globalization to planetary governance? “The Third Great Decentering,” @NoemaMag @JonathanSBlake @nils_gilman.
* Irish proverb (in Gaelic, “Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine”), quoted by Irish Prime Minister Michael Martin
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As we think systemically, we might recall that on this date in 1998 The Price Is Right aired its milestone 5,000th episode (the longest-running game show in history, it’s over 10,000 episodes to date, and still chugging along). Every prize given away on that episode was a car.
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