Welcome to the Age of Light

Peter writes...

Maybe it is intrinsic to us that we should fear the future. And maybe, it might seem, that there are particularly good reasons for disquiet over a technological future. For indeed, it may be that one day we have to share our planet with replicants, and that we sacrifice our last vestiges of privacy, to a suite of technologies more intrusive than ever imagined in Orwell's dystopian 1984 . Haven't we already given up some of our most prized manual and intellectual tasks to machines? Indeed, maybe the point is that it is our very rationality that seeds the pessimism. We are looking at ourselves and saying 'help.' After all, aren't we driven by email, overwhelmed by information, chided and nagged by popular media to the degree where we cannot separate our thoughts from theirs, our dreams from theirs. We cannot, actually, even tell what is real anymore, who is real, and why we are being told about this stuff. Its our very rationality that makes us gloomy. We have seen enough.

But then again, let's start again. Let's start again under a different light. It has never been easy. No-one ever said it would be. 'Survival of the fittest' isn't ever going to be adopted as a slogan for a holiday camp. And yet here we are, marooned on Planet Earth and, yes, it's true that it is a beautiful place. But its not an easy place. Ask any chelonioidea if a 1% survival rate is kind. Ask any dinosaur.

Putting it frankly, homo sapiens, has prospered ahead of all other species because of technology. As all children know, we describe human progress through history through the technology that humankind had and could use; stone age, bronze age, iron age etc. Major technological advance always signals the dawn of a new age, like the advent of the printing press or industrialisation. And so it has come to be that for many nations, the 21st century brings us benefits that our ancestors could not have imagined. We have lower mortality rates, greater life expectancy, health care, sanitation, less poverty, and much more wealth. We have education, knowledge, and rights. Emperors and kings would have swapped their lot for that of the most middling in today's leading societies. For the privileges of flight, heating, and mobility, surely even the most determined would have resigned her throne.

So, the serious point is that maybe the information age will be a great place. It will be a great time to be alive.

Can we make this case? Is it possible to be realistic and optimistic?

Of course there are winners and losers at the start of this new epoch. One hundred years ago, Fordism was not in the vocabulary. Now, the company that gave the name is fighting for its life. Like Fordism, many ideas that were once dominant are suddenly contested. New company names like America Movil, Apple, Microsoft, and Google now occupy the stellar positions in business life. With these, through these and before these, new ideas are springing to life bringing new models of networked business, .coms, e-democracy and social computing. The monoliths, the incumbents, even the elected representatives are looking to their foundations. The question is always the same: "By what right are we here?"

For we will see new business models in the new age. And we will see new skills and new interests. We are seeing new ways of communicating and new ways of doing things. We are seeing new things that can be done. And when we look across the whole panorama, we might just be able to call it all a significant advance in civilization. After all, today, we can all speak out. We can all cooperate. Many of the horrors that continue to haunt us are even more brutally exposed. Today, for example, we don't even need a journalist to tell us about the stupidity of war; the perpetrators expose themselves. Yes, the perpetrators expose themselves.

In an age of light things are revealed for what they are.

Can we make this argument?

Can we be upbeat?

This is a very big canvas for one little course! Let's reign it all in and be more modest. Let's just admit that something important is happening. Something unfamiliar is happening. For every link in this blog entry points to Wikipedia. Each one of the links was created by persons unknown, none of whom was paid for the entries therein. Only a few of the linked pages are controlled; in most cases the management of the page is entirely communal. And of course, it is all free to use.

Free-to-use, communally managed and unpaid labour. Now that really is a revolution.