Digital & Analog Worlds. A Perfect Storm.
The storm has been brewing for decades. A fundamental, civilizational shift is underway. A new, brighter era will follow. But it will be bumpy for now.
It is a perfect storm that has been brewing for decades. A relentless, rumbling and roiling. A storm between the digital gods, the digerati, and the analog gods. An inevitable bashing of systems. The thunder clashes between them are growing louder, the clouds looming ever larger, fuelled by the heat of ever faster technologies meeting the cool air of the analog ways.
We have been through this before. The pressures of technology ever relentless in their hunger for more, faster. Inevitably they meet in a thunderous exchange. Lightning strikes upend the systems of the Old Ways, who crumble before the energetic onslaught of the progress of technology.
When the storm peaks, humanity is caught in the slaps and strikes. Desperately we cling to what we knew, fearful in the deluge of new knowledge, seeking comfort in the shelter of what was. But the baleful gusts of change rip away the fragile shelters of what was, laying bare a new landscape.
When the storm passes, humanity stands under the light of a warming sun. We wrap ourselves in the cloak of the new ways, in the ideas of what could be. Just as the winds always move the trees around us, so does technology always move the waves of culture.
“No reason to get excited
The thief, he kindly spoke
There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But, uh, but you and I, we’ve been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us stop talkin’ falsely now
The hour’s getting late...” — Bob Dylan, All Along The Watchtower
New systems always collide with old systems. It is part of the human experience. Just as technology is a part of what it means to be human.
When a wee spark flickered to life in our distant, non-human ancestors brains some 52 million years ago and then became what we call ourselves today, Homo Sapiens, to reveal that we survive better working together. We evolved sociocultural systems.
As we evolved, we created all kinds of systems such as economics, the rule of law, traditions, customs, ways to govern our growing societies. These are aspects of culture; the methodology we use to evolve faster than the plodding pace of biology.
Along with culture came technology. A perfect and imperfect symbiosis. Tool use, we figured out, is pretty cool. Except when you bang your thumb with a hammer and other unpleasantries. We also have, at the same time, this rather odd inclination to not want to change. Even though it is inevitable. Can’t we just Netflix and chill forever?
And so we are facing one of those momentous, civilization changing storms today. One law of technology is that it always speeds up our societies. The advent of sail sped up global trade, wars, empiricism, capitalism, the spread of disease and also the spread of ideas and human advancement. It hurt, but in the broader sweeping of history, we advanced.
The arrival of digitization, silicon, in the late twentieth century ushered in the glimmering dawn of the digital age. Society was already faster than it had ever been in human history. While some pundits dole out numbers of how fast new technologies have been adopted, it is a failure to understand how we got here and why these new technologies are adopted so seemingly quickly. They are not.
The digital age was birthed over half a century ago. It has taken a while for the storm clouds of massive civilizational change through technology to brew. Now, we are here.
For years, the analog gods plucked out the delicacies from the smorgasbord of the digital technology table. Ones that benefitted their analog systems, only changing what they wanted.
The digital gods had different ideas. Enamoured by the siren call of automation and the lofty ideal of creating a new form of intelligence, they rolled on. And societies, consumers and citizens, were enamoured with the glittery screens and the willo’w-wisp blinking of notifications in the misty swamp of technologies.
The first big rumbles of the coming storm can be heard today. In the creaking halls of government bureaucracy. The analog gods howl and call forth the digital gods, the digerati, to kneel before them and proclaim their reasons for what they do. The analog gods, slower, more plodding than running like the digital gods, struggle to understand this new language of zeroes and ones.
Even much of the citizens of the physical domain strive to comprehend the tentacles that reach into their minds through screens, even as they eagerly ask the digital gods the meaning of anything and everything. An unending search. They feed the digital gods with their innermost desires and secrets, revealing the intimate details of their lives. They create data, the mana that feeds the boundless, energy hungry gods.
These digital gods, they slip in through the cracks and pressure points of the systems the analog gods have built. Like capitalism and democracy. Subtly at first, until they gain a foothold. They feast on our data and push at the edges of the systems of the way things are. They stand defiant in the great halls of the analog gods, smirking at the fumbles of the analog gods.
Now, the thunderous clouds of two are entwining. They will battle. The digital gods to own the domain of data, a landscape unfamiliar to the analog gods. The torrential rains of the digital deluge will wash over society. Lightening strikes will shock industries and social systems. Some will recover, renewed, others will shrivel.
It is the nature of technology to cause these storms. Yet we humans, we somehow always seem to navigate these storms, testing ourselves in the brutal face of these winds of change. This storm too, shall pass. And as we have before, we will stand tall as a species. We will discover something new within us and we will create new systems, evolving what was to what could be, emboldened in the bright sun of a new era.
Well, uh, outside in the cold distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
And the wind began to howl…” — Bob Dyaln, All Along The Watchtower