A recent observation at Rayne Today got me thinking about Futurism and the directions in which we are hurtling headlong. This is also the time of year for columnists to reflect back on the year that was and wrap things up in a bundle of simplistic assessments. In fact, we're always doing both at the same time—because you can drive fairly well with one eye on the rearview mirror.

Two persons who come to mind in any discussion of future studies are Alvin Toffler and Nicholas Negroponte. Both are proponents of an epicyclic Third Wave hypothesis that largely sees the history of the Western world as follows:

Wave One: Agricultural revolution
Once we were able to build cities and specialize labor, writing and printing became possible and culture was extensible beyond oral traditions.

Wave Two: Industrial revolution
Mass production and assembly-line efficiencies lowered the price of durable goods, raised incomes, and generated enough leisure time to support self-actualization on a broad scale.

Wave Three: Information revolution
The ramifications of this development remain to be seen, as we are in the midst of moving from stage 2 to stage 3. Key trends appear to be individualization, decentralization, and the tension between creativity and reproducability.

Suddenly, all of this digital fun and Internet technology developed a highly dangerous aspect, and our government has been eyeing it with suspicion. Empowered citizens aren't what you want during terrorist attacks, you want cowed, easily controlled people who queue up at checkpoints and show their papers quietly. Internal travel, thanks to TSA and TIA, is taking on that aspect rather quickly, wouldn't you say? Being on a wartime footing, our leaders are regarding the populace as potential enemies until proven loyal.

So now we have to contend with a radical re-thinking of the relationship between Americans (or Western citizens, in an extended sense) and their government, between the Western world and Islam, and do so while re-ordering ourselves from an industrial to an information-oriented society. At the cultural level, we might pause here and consider Michael Gerber's rather frightening E-myth philosophy. According to the "entrepeneurial myth," successful small businesses are the result of impassioned individuals with vision. Gerber holds that the reality is rather different: a business is a product. A business owner needs to perfect the model, design uniforms and codify all processes into employee manuals, then package and franchise the operation. A trip to any mall or gas station proves how commonplace this has become. The McJob is a hardy organism, and personal service, individual relationships, and quirkiness are being designed out of our culture at the organic level.

The Arts Section special at the NYT today has a clever end-of-year wrap-up for 2002 organized about the "most over-rated vs. most under-rated" ideas of the year. It's a good read, and not altogether disheartening. The tie-in, of course, is the number of places that overlap with our general discussion above. Key trendlines in 2002 show that traditional ways of thinking are under severe pressure: The very concepts of "parent" and "marriage" are taking on an ugly definition of intolerant hostility toward the common denominators of single-parent and adoptive "caregivers."

Generational differences are fracturing minority groups and the young are somehow coming to grips with a bewildering world that pays lip service to ethics while secretly punishing their expression. And a "career" is looking as quaint as a horse-drawn carriage, with corporations increasingly viewing the flesh-and-blood component as a liability to be expunged or outsourced wherever possible. These are the immediate challenges, together with all the usual AIDS, poverty, urban blight, teen pregancy stuff still with us.

The bright trends are largely the idea that consumers shape society actively, and that we can organize ourselves and exert political power more easily than ever before. Far from being helpless, we have more influence than we tend to realize. If I had to pick one theorist who seems to have nailed it better than anyone else, I'd nominate William Gibson for his Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties. The last 30 years show him to be right far more often than not, with his view of a highly personalized future where you can access a totally digitized reality in exchange for real-time labor.

12:18:09 PM