Living

I’d like to ask you all to take a few moments of your day and take time to watch this. It’s worth it.

Good, now that you’ve watched Chris Anderson’s talk on the long tail of technology, reflect with me a moment.

The DVD player killed the VCR. MP3 is slowly killing (and it’s almost dead) traditional music distribution. We’re running out of oil and we’ve already succeeded in frying our own planet. These are, if you’ve not had your head buried in the sand, facts. If you don’t believe me, there’s plenty of scientific data out there you can research (but if you don’t believe me already, you probably never will.) Yes, I’m preaching to the choir.

Now stop for a moment to think about the patterns of change outlined in Chris’s talk. Cycles, up and down, waves. So let us venture for a moment that societies, their quality of living, their numbers, and pretty much everything else about them moves in cycles as well. We’ve got war in Iraq, Darfour, Columbia and Palestine as well as many other places around the globe. War. Not get up and go to work, come home, watch TV and go to bed, but War. And yes, it’s terrible and in many cases we should do something about it (what motivates that is an entirely different thing, “world cop”?) But stop a moment and think, back to history and gradeschool. We’ve all been here, Civil war in the US. Napoleon and various other empires blazing a trail and killing millions in the name of some chosen ideal. Was it wrong? I’d flinch and say yes until you realize that our very way of living was built on these actions. So was it wrong? No… was it right? No.

War is a constant; it’s moving in fact where it happens moves, but it is the catalyst for change. And change is really the only constant. In fact, the rate of change and the amount of information we’re pounded with seems to be ever increasing, to the point where I at least am starting to be worn by the amount of information available to me, and confused as to what’s really worth looking at. So the cycle is starting to turn downwards, and it will eventually implode on itself. Most would say it’ll eventually even out, become common place and accepted.

It might, if we can afford to or are even able to power it with Electricity, which is generated using natural resource — like oil and gas — which we’re currently at war over. Maybe some genius will unlock the key to fusion or perfect highly efficient solar power, or (more likely) we’ll eventually have to accept that Nuclear is actually pretty safe and fairly clean when properly maintained. There are a lot of maybes, but the overall trend (especially since the industrial revolution, but basically since dawn of the time) is downwards. More people, fewer resources, and a finite time limit on how long it can go. Unless we get off this rock, but with NASA losing funding like the SR-71 loses fuel on the ground, it’s not likely. And even the private sector is focusing on non-interplanetary travel. With global oil production peaking at 2015, and a no-doubt-about-it global economy crushing energy crisis to follow, it’s too little too late.

We’re screwed, and it’s highly unlikely that any technology will save us. Or maybe that’s just me being pessimistic – it’d be nice to be wrong. That’s all for now, thanks for reading through my reflection.