Will clearcut for food

Turning points

The significance to mankind of the fifty or so years following 1975 cannot be overstated. Those who sat back and watched, or even those who went about their lives oblivious to the uber-revolution – those who did not actively participate – missed one of the three great transformations in the age of man. Those involved helped to shape no less than the long-term destiny of our species. Us involved and aware witnessed change on the same scale as mankind’s move from hunter-gatherer to agrarian and then to industrial. Oddly, though, few or none realized the true significance until decades after. We saw the changes and the effects, but did not see, as they say: “the forest through the trees.” We did not understand the impact relative to our species as a whole, that this time period was a shift evolutionary in scale.

I suppose that’s to be expected. Werner Hiesenberg postulated that on certain scales, it is not possible to observe without impacting the outcome.  Certainly, he was speaking of photons and other subatomic quantum particles, but a logical corollary would state that on certain scales, it is not possible to recognize events while on the inside. You see this all the time in individual lives. How many times have you known a friend or family member to leave a relationship or a job and shortly thereafter, comment that they didn’t know how bad their situation was until they got out? As my good friend Mark Rules is so fond of saying: “Observation alters outcome. Involvement inhibits observation.”

The bigger the event, the more difficult it is to see. I’ve always suspected that physicists and cosmologists are unknowingly limited by this very problem as well. They try their best to understand this universe we are contained within, devising grand and complex theorems to describe our surroundings and the foundations of matter and existence. Their ideas certainly make sense. Yet, they are no more likely to really describe our universe than a life-long citizen of an overpopulated totalitarian state is to understand the sensation of true freedom.

If we ever break through the limitations of our physical bodies and venture beyond this universe, we will discover that the greatest of theoretical minds were doing little more that drawing extraordinarily complex and logical correlations based on carefully observed relationships. The conclusions seem accurate because they came to light in the brain of man and are devised from the basis of observations by the brain of man. They are interpretations rather than explanations. They are solution declared when we have yet to see the problem. It’s only natural of humankind to try and explain things. We have an instinctual fear of the unknown and an instinctual drive to understand. Yet, we are woefully ill equipped to relate to the size and scales on an infinite or near infinite nature.

The transformation I am speaking of is the beginning of the digital age of man. This is not something so simple as “a computer on every desk” any more than the industrial revolution was just about a broken down Buick in every backyard. This is a top-to-bottom shift in the very fabric of our tiny lives. The after, when compared to the prior, could very well lead an outsider to conclude that a new species of man had arrived to take up residence on the planet we call Earth. While the agrarian age gave man an amount of control and the industrial age added the ability to impact, the digital age is one of relinquishing control over self.

Every lifetime has a watershed, or turning point. Every generation has its pivotal moment and humanity, itself has experienced a number of major shifts. When all is at end and the last conscious soul looks back, perhaps few or none of these transitions will have had the significance as the one that began in the nineteen seventies. 1975 was the precise year when man began ceding the reins of existence to machine. It wasn’t an instant capitulation, but that year will come to be known as the start. The logarithmic curve of evolution toward digital manipulation shifted from mostly horizontal to mostly vertical in that year.

Prior to ’75, human activity, whether direct or mechanically assisted was brute force based. Systems were largely analog and passive. They were effected as a whole and by estimation. Technique and finesse were more concepts of wishful thinking than reality. 1975 was the beginning of the time of breaking systems and processes down into their component parts and actively controlling and managing piecemeal. Prior to that, bigger was better. We built bigger power plants, huge earth-moving machines, absurdly tall buildings and massive transportation systems. We pushed big chunks of things around. We impacted the whole rather than the parts.

Heisenberg may have been right

Generally accepted convention holds that what has been known as the office automation/ computer/ Internet/ communications/ nano-scale revolution(s) to be the actual object. This “revolution” is thought to be the major event of our lifetime rather than a small component of something far more profound. Someday, it will be seen as merely the start of something on a scale several orders of magnitude greater. It is no more than a starting point. The birth and broad-based proliferation of digital technology is not a revolution, but a false summit in the foothills of said revolution. In fact, it is probably better described as control technology, for that is what this change is all about; control and direct manipulation. It is a melding of man, man’s environment and man’s products.

The counter concept to “can’t see the forest for the trees” is not as much a part of the language but is just as real. Most people fall somewhere in the middle between the two states, slightly toward the former. But those of us stuck on the outside are an interesting lot. We understand much of the complexity around us, but can’t quite put our hands on the stratagem required to take advantage of that knowledge. We know the path is there someplace, but we are hyperopic and only see the minutia as it has already passed behind us. We must and do understand the “why” and the “how.” We just incapable of fully grasping the “what.”

Typically participants in a society in flux, do not reach a state of awareness of the extent of the disarray within their living years. Very few understand and even fewer hold their understanding within conscience thought. Conceivably Werner Heisenberg understood this so many years ago as he postulated that certain actions can not be both observed and measured.

Those that propel this transformation cannot know and those that know, can not possibly drive the adventure. A succinct distillation of Heisenberg’s most famous work: “The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa” indicates principle concern with the behavior of subatomic particles. Though, such a concept may very well apply to far more than just electrons, photons and close relatives.

This key to Quantum mechanics may also be key to societal dynamics. I’m not sure weather he ever documented such an extension, but I find it difficult to believe that the iconoclast Heisenberg would have closed his mind to the possibility. Certainly it has been the subject of many an inside joke within the scientific community.

“Oh Ginger, you are the one for me.”
“But professor, in a quantum world, how can we be sure?”

Isaac Asimov used a fictional science called psychohistory  to describe something very similar to this concept. Statistics deals with the prediction or estimation of individual scale events while psychohistory concerns the opposite. Psychohistory deals with the prediction or estimation of global-scale or humanity-wide events and trends.

As with religious faith, one does not need to understand Heisenberg’s Nobel Prize winning theory of quantum mechanics, nor comprehend how it could apply to sociology, but just to accept it as probable truth. Some level of ignorance may, in fact, be an advantage. The division of man into the farsighted and nearsighted is a key foundational concept to the understanding of these macro scale events presently unfolding.

A postcard from Atlantic City

The colloquialism "Can't see the forest for the trees" indicates an inability to see the actual or overreaching occurrence due to distraction by the near components. While it has roots in the capacity for distraction built in at earliest stages of sentience of our species, it has become a trite, frequently used phrase that even impacts its own meaning.

It refers to having attention focused so tightly on individual details that the overall scope is not perceived. You spend so much time at the office insuring that your employees are happy that you don't notice that your products don't work, your customers wouldn't want them anyway, your financial situation is running headlong to ground zero and you are about to be sued by your shareholders.

You watch your almost-empty gas gage and don't notice traffic stopping in front of you as you plow into the Toyota at 65 miles per hour. By the grace of Carl Clark, inventor of the first practical airbag safety system, you manage crawl out with little more than a red face, a slightly sore chest and a lawsuit in waiting.

You worry about what your wife makes for dinner every evening and don't notice her drifting farther and farther from you, eventually running off with her bowling coach until you get the postcard from Atlantic City. This is distraction referred to by that trite phrase. This is the anti-skill that humans have become so good at over the last few millennia.

The state of evolution taking place in the last quarter century of the Anno Domini bimillennia slipped by with little notice by the dwellers of this earth for three principle reasons. The European and North American minds were concentrating on extraction from decades of hair-trigger-to-extinction nuclear madness. Much of Africa and selected areas of Asia Minor were staggering backward towards the Dark Ages, often through action of their own design. The remainder of the world existed on the precipice between the two states, so focused on the struggle to migrate upwards, yet always so close to a fall backward.

With little notice from the human objects of the conversion, this period was the start of one of the great transformations of mankind. It was an exit from the Industrial age developmental-plateau into a headlong race to the next state of humanity. It was the beginning of a change on an evolutionary scale as has occurred only twice before in the annals of what we would refer to as modern man.

The Robinsons will all be there

In 1967 Mike Nichols said that young America went to dinner wearing white suits and drove convertible Alpha Romeo sports cars. To him, counter culture meant hair down to the ears and sunglasses worn with a three button suit. In his movie "The Graduate" he depicted an idealistic Middle America that may have existed to a degree in the fifties, but by 1967 was long since dead. The fictional young Benjamin would greet his parents for breakfast wearing a sport jacket. Elaine Robinson's 1967 Berkeley campus was clean and devoid of male long hair, with the stars and stripes proudly waving. I don't know what planet he thought he was on, but it certainly couldn't have been this one. Perhaps it was just that the world had changes that much in the few short years between his writing the book and release of the movie.

"Death is a banjo player." So sang Solomon at the Berkeley Folk Festival in July 1967 on the steps of the Moffitt Library. 1967 was the summer of love. 1967 was the summer of Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, sex, drugs and rock and roll. 1967 was not the summer of Benjamin Braddock, but that's what a good portion of America wanted it to be. We wanted the mother/ daughter/ neighbor love triangle to be shocking. We wanted to lose our innocence poolside with a martini in hand. We wanted our rebels to be clean-shaven and frustrated but not drugged out with greasy hair like Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in the 1969 movie "Easy Rider".

We didn't want to hear Country Joe and the Fish singing "Well there ain't no time to wonder why, Whoopee! we're all gonna die." For 9,378 young Americans and somewhere around 150,000 Vietnamese, that verse was truth in 1967. Unfortunately, though, try as you may, denial rarely changes reality.