Technology changes everything. But sometimes it takes awhile. Fire was mankind’s first technology. Gaston Bachelard, in the Psychoanalysis of Fire, says “If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire.” And now, technology is moving so fast that people, culture, places have been overtaken by its accelerating advance.
In his great three volume study of the networked society, sociologist Manuel Castells explains that contemporary places exist in two spaces at the same time: the space of flows and the space of places. The space of flows is defined by and takes value from the flow of information—including, crucially, financial transactions—across the network. In the space of flows New York City is closer to Tokyo and London than it is to Kingston a little way up the Hudson. The space of places is defined by and takes value from all the things that cannot be networked. Castells gathers those qualities under the rubric of identity. So places derive value both from connection to the network and from identity embodied in the things that are experiential. Yet the place system at this time has done little to understand the integration of the space of flows – their network presence with the space of places – the quality of place. In a world where places are constantly intertwined in a network of flowing information, and where places thus become more and more alike, a special value attaches to what cannot be digitized, exchanged, reduced to a model, and replicated.
In 1965, Gordon Moore (of Moore’s Law fame) wrote an Electronics article predicting that for the next ten years, “we would get more stuff on a chip and it would make electronics less expensive.”…”the original prediction looked at ten years which involved going from about sixty elements on an integrated circuit to sixty thousand.” “In 1975 he updated his prediction and said the doubling would happen roughly every two years and the price would stay almost the same.” “And it just kept coming true. The fact that something similar is going on for fifty years is truly amazing…there were all kinds of barriers we could always see that (were) going to prevent taking the next step and somehow or other, as we got closer, the engineers had figured out ways around these.” Friedman says Moore could fairly be said to have anticipated the personal computer, the cell phone, self-driving cars, the iPad, big data, and the Apple Watch.” “Given that,” Friedman says to Moore is there something that a man who predicted Moore’s law didn’t see coming …”The importance of the Internet surprised me,” Moore said.
Rather than betting where technology is leading, our hope for the future rests on understanding sustainability, regeneration and resilience. Systems science, the science of how systems actually work – not like machines, instead like ecosystems, provides the model for how to adapt, and how to thrive. It isn’t simple, but the “systems science” of what to do now is well understood. The choice is ours BUT there is an awful lot on the line.
It is unrealistic that a society as fast moving and diverse as ours would gather around a campfire and sing Kumbaya (a folksong, likely of African origins revived in the Civil Rights movement). The good news is that is not what is required for sustainability, regeneration and resilience in places. For those benefits, the first step is understanding how to create systems change. If that is not understood, systems do what systems do by design, thwart change.
Thank you for your interest
Would you like to provide few more details about you to assess more...
Your comments are important