Slay Riding to Oblivion

Slate has an article – The Digital Slay-Ride – that discusses the ways modern technology is revolutionizing our lives. As Jack Shafer notes:

Folks giggled at Wired founder Louis Rossetto's bombastic formulation in 1993 that the "digital revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon" and upsetting the old order. But Rossetto is getting the last laugh. Wherever digital zeros and ones can dislodge analog processes, they either have or are. Call it a digital slay-ride.

I think he is spot-on about how digital processes are changing our lives. But when it comes to identifying problems in the newspaper business, his analysis ignores other major issues besides technology – like greedy owners who are detached from the whole point of their business.

Shafer also seems rather cavalier about the fate of newspapers in general:

Before we get too weepy about lost journalistic jobs and folded publications, let's ask how often reporters lamented the decline of other industries, products, and services swamped by Rossetto's digital typhoon.

The thing is, newspapers are not just another industry. Since the very beginning of the US of A, they have been an integral part of our democracy. As Thomas Jefferson once wrote “I would rather live in a country with newspapers and without a government, than in a country with a government but without newspapers.” There might not have even been a United States of America if it wasn’t for newspapers’ ability to spread news about developments throughout the 13 disparate colonies.

The need for newspapers to keep citizens informed continues today. As Chris Hedges notes:

A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth. Take this away and a democracy dies. The fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind.

For any organization to survive and thrive there must be a healthy balance between the interests of individuals and the interests of the group. Too much individualism, and things fall apart; too much group-think and things become static and unable to respond to changes within and outside the organization.

The key ingredient for ensuring that healthy balance in any organization is the free flow of information that can accurately reflect the way things are. For the United States of America, that information has historically been provided by newspapers. If the decline of newspapers leads to a decline in the dispersion of accurate information about the way things are, the result will be a grave threat to our democracy.

It's A Wonderful Life

Back in 1997 I wrote a piece about the movie It's A Wonderful Life for my website, offering a Quantum Age perspective on this holiday classic. As one of our holiday traditions in the USA is to catch a rerun of the movie, I figured I'd take this opportunity to offer a rerun of my essay.

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It’s one of the all-time favorite holiday movies in the United States. While much of it dwells in a world that is dark and harsh, it delivers a message of hope. And it’s so straightforward in its intention, the name of the movie is also its message: It’s A Wonderful Life.

The main character in the movie is George Bailey, a lifelong resident of Bedford Falls who becomes so despondent about his life he wishes he had never been born. Miraculously, an angel named Clarence appears and grants him his wish. As a result, George sees what life in Bedford Falls would be like if he hadn’t existed.

And what a different life it is! His younger brother is dead because George wasn’t there to save him, and a naval transport and all on board are lost in a WW II battle because his brother didn’t live to save them. George’s wife Mary is a spinster librarian, instead of the mother of their children. And the charming community of Bedford Falls, in which many have realized the American Dream of a home of their own and a happy family life, has been replaced by Pottersville, a tawdry honky tonk town in which evil Mr. Potter owns everything and people are hardened and bitter.

Realizing that, as Clarence says, he really did have a wonderful life, George begs to be able to live again. And thus, to his joy and amazement, he finds himself back in Bedford Falls, reawakened to a life that’s both demanding and rich.

This movie is clearly not a reflection of the traditional Newtonian world view. That perspective, with its paradigms of clockworks and machines, removes the human element entirely from the landscape. In embracing the detachment of objectivity, it makes people’s lives irrelevant. The overriding message people receive is “You’re not important, the world can manage quite fine without you.”

It’s A Wonderful Life offers a very different message: one person’s life can make a huge difference in the world.

Even though it was released in 1946, this movie seems to be very much in tune with the quantum age. For one thing, a basic premise of both this movie and quantum physics is that life revolves around relationships. Nothing happens in a vacuum; everything is intertwined with, and interacts with, everything else.

Indeed, everything we learn about George Bailey is revealed in the context of his relationships with others. Much of the movie consists of scenes of his life in which he deals with family, friends and customers. Through these images we learn who George is, and what qualities of character he possesses. We learn that he’s honest, conscientious and caring. We learn that he is not afraid to speak his mind when confronted with injustice. And we learn that he puts the highest value on his relationships with those around him.

But relationships do not work in only one direction, and It’s A Wonderful Life is not just about George’s relationships with others. It’s also about their relationships with him. While he may have helped others in very many ways, they helped George as well. On George and Mary’s wedding night, his friends Bert and Ernie help turn their leaky and run-down house into a honeymoon suite. And when George’s uncle loses the bank’s deposits and it looks like the world is crashing around him, his friends and relatives come together to save him and the bank.

Contrast that to the solitary and amoral Mr. Potter, who seems to be an incarnation of the objectivist world view. Eternally detached from the world around him, Potter measures everyone and everything he encounters solely on the basis of what they can do for him. There is no feeling in his world; everything is viewed through the cold lenses of objectivity and materialism.

Clearly, relationships are the spring that nourishes George Bailey’s life. But by themselves, relationships would not seem to explain the dramatic changes that take place when his life is, as it were, “erased from the books.” Is it possible that any one individual could have that profound effect on the world around him or her?

Having lived for many years in a rationalist-objectivist world, our inclination is to devalue the impact an average individual can have on the world around him or her. We generally live with an image of the world as an immense machine, grinding inexorably along without any concern for, or input from, mere mortals like ourselves. With such a mindset, we tend to view the story of George Bailey as a charming fairy tale, heartwarming but unrealistic.

But if we view it from the perspective of chaos theory, George’s story becomes much more believable.

That is because according to chaos theory minute variations in initial circumstances can have profound effects on outcomes. The classic example is known as the Butterfly Effect - the idea that the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in Texas can eventually effect the formation of a hurricane off the coast of Africa. But an awareness of this dynamic can even be found in folklore:

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of a horse, the rider was lost;
For want of a rider, the battle was lost;
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost!

We experience examples of this everyday. We leave home for work a minute later than usual; we come to an intersection just as a slow driver passes by; we wind up behind this driver for two minutes; they turn down a side street and we soon after come to a traffic light just as it turns red; and things like this continue to happen so that we’re eventually twenty minutes late for work!

While we experience this all of the time, we usually don’t think about it, or consider such dynamics as important. But chaos science has found that this dynamic is present everywhere in the day-to-day world. From a curl of smoke to a massive hurricane, or from an electronic pulse in a computer processor to the world economy, minute variations in initial circumstances can create wildly different outcomes.

In such a world the existence, or lack thereof, of any individual becomes a critical factor in the unfolding of that world. Even further, any variation in the behavior of any individual can have vast and unforeseen repercussions. This is a common theme in modern entertainment. Michael J. Fox goes back in time in Back To The Future, and eventually his current family’s life is radically altered. Characters in Star Trek are frequently reminded of the importance of the Prime Directive, which is to avoid interference with any developing civilization, lest its developemental course be inadvertently altered. Such stories can sound fanciful, but we find them easy to understand intuitively because we experience the same dynamics in our daily lives.

The significance of their message, however, can be unsettling. It’s one thing to view ourselves as insignificant cogs in a vast machine; it’s something quite different to discover we are navigators on an unfamiliar road with no map to guide us. All of a sudden, every choice we make becomes tremendously important.

I believe much of the turmoil people feel in their lives today is a reflection of a dawning recognition of this truth. We are torn today between a well-worn sense of insignificance and futility, and a dawning intuition of great personal responsibility. Common reactions to this intuition are to attempt to resurrect institutions and values from the past in which we can once again lose ourselves, or to attempt to control every minute variable that might have a negative consequence for ourselves, our society, or our planet.

But perhaps we can learn to accept this new awareness, and live our lives like George Bailey: be true to ourselves, consider how we can make our world a better place, and find happiness in the small joys life offers. Perhaps, in living this way, we will come to the same realization that George Bailey came to on a fabled Christmas Eve: it really is a Wonderful Life.

© Dave Higgins, December 1997. All rights reserved.

What’s The Big Idea?

Watching the way politicians are struggling to deal with the current economic mess, it’s hard to avoid facing an unpleasant fact. While Republicans continue to base their arguments on discredited Big Ideas like “free market individualism,” Democrats still lack alternative Big Ideas that might guide them through policy minefields. Unfortunately, this isn’t new: the American Prospect had a cover story on the subject – “What’s The Big Idea?” – back in 2004.

Even though the Democrats “won” the national elections in 2006 and 2008, at times they still come across as feckless when addressing some major issues. An example of this was a recent News Hour interview with Democratic governors Granholm of Michigan and Ritter of Colorado, as well as Republican governor Sanford of South Carolina. Sanford based his opposition to a federal bailout of the Big 3 and of state governments on the usual free market arguments about people working hard, playing by the rules, and eventually being rewarded. (Somehow this apparently doesn’t apply to autoworkers.) Meanwhile, Granholm and Ritter’s argument seemed to be basically “we believe bad things will happen if a bailout of the Big 3 doesn’t happen.” Well, probably...but why?

As it happens, Robert Wright had an article in Slate back in November, 2001, titled “The Big Idea.” He contended that modern technology has brought us to a point at which we are all interlinked and interdependent. While making his case in the context of 9/11, this also can apply to our current economic crisis:

“The general principle is this. Technological evolution draws people into larger and larger non-zero-sum games that promise common benefit—win-win outcomes. But the ensuing integration can bring the threat of common peril, of lose-lose outcomes. Either way—win-win or lose-lose—the fortunes of people who live at great distances become more closely correlated. Increasingly, good foreign news (say, a Japanese economic rebound) is good domestic news, and bad foreign news (the spread of AIDS in Africa) is bad domestic news. And very often this correlation of fortunes—this non-zero-sumness—is an argument for more international cooperation.”

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, in his book “Linked - How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means For Business, Science and Everyday Life,” observes that today’s world is rife with networks. The auto industry would be just one example: the Big 3 depend on a common pool of parts suppliers, while those suppliers are dependent on the continuing business of the Big 3. A similar web of relationships exists between the Big 3 and their dealers around the country.

Barabasi notes that the most important parts of a network are those entities – or hubs – that have the most links to the rest of the network. However, such major hubs pose a significant risk: the collapse of just one or two can conceivably bring down a whole network. (Think of the Northeast blackout of 2003, for example.)

As we’ve seen in the debate about bailing out the Big 3, conservative free market types generally discount arguments of interdependence. As Wright said in his article, “Interdependence theory has a reputation on the right for being a namby-pamby doctrine for naive lefties.” That’s why conservatives were happy to see Lehman Brothers fail back in September: it was “the creative destruction of the market” at work.

Unfortunately, as economists and business experts like George Soros have observed, the demise of Lehman Brothers led to the meltdown of the entire financial system. Such an outcome might be inconceivable from a classic free market perspective, but it is easily understandable from an interdependent network perspective. Cascading failures are an inherent risk in networks, as anyone connected to a power grid knows.

The free market individualism espoused by conservatives and Republicans is a myth. (If they were really such individualists, why would they need a Club for Growth?) The alternative to this myth is not collectivism or socialism; the alternative is a recognition that we live in an interconnected, interdependent world. In this world, there is no contradiction between being an individual and being part of a group. Like a computer on a network, we are both simultaneously. And like a computer on a network, we are only as secure as the weakest link in that network. The failure of others can very easily lead to our own failure.

Perhaps, in fully recognizing the interdependent nature of our world, we will have found a Big Idea that can guide us in dealing with issues like the current economic crisis.

Got A Revolution

Look what's happening out in the streets
Got a revolution Got to revolution
Hey I’m dancing down the streets
Got a revolution Got to revolution
Ain’t it amazing all the people I meet
Got a revolution Got to revolution

- Jefferson Airplane – “Volunteers”

When the members of Jefferson Airplane recorded their song “Volunteers” back in 1969, they couldn’t have conceived of the scenes around the world the night Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election.

With the optimism of youth, they might have imagined a time when a black American could become President of the United States. After all, in 1964 Irving Wallace published his popular novel “The Man,” about a senator who through a series of freak events becomes America’s first black president. Given the state of race relations in the late ‘60s it might have seemed a stretch to imagine an African American winning a presidential election – as opposed to landing in the office through the obscure laws of succession. But it was still within the realm of imagination.

The phenomena of people around the globe reacting to such an event at the same instant, on the other hand, was unimaginable for most people back in 1969. Telstar, the precursor for all of the communications satellites that make global television transmissions possible today, had been launched only 7 years earlier. There were not yet such things as the World Wide Web or cell phones, and only the extremely techy had email. And while some people were beginning to talk about a “Global Village,” nobody really had a good idea what that would look like.

And yet, thanks to breath-taking advances in technology over the past forty years, we find ourselves in that Global Village. Not only do people around the world now know – in the same instant – the results of an American presidential election. They now also know, in great detail, about many of the events leading up to that election. In addition, they are very aware of how an election in a distant land can have a profound affect on their personal lives. And occasionally they can become so invested in that election’s outcome that they will joyfully stream out into the streets to celebrate its results.

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There was a lot of talk about revolution back in the ‘60s. But it was generally viewed as something to be done to the establishment's institutions by brave idealists, or something to be resisted by defenders of the status quo. Revolution was a matter of personal intention. As Jefferson Airplane sang: “Tear down the walls – won’t you try?”

These days we find ourselves in a world overflowing with revolutionary change. But it’s not the change 60's radicals imagined or pursued, and it’s not the change defenders of the status quo feared and opposed. Instead, it crept up on us while we were transfixed by the so-called cultural wars. While everyone was fighting over political and cultural revolutions, the world was upended by a revolution in technology.

The primary casualty of this revolution is our understanding about how the world works. In countless areas, from big stuff like economics, politics and international relations, to more personal stuff like everyday life, people tend to have the disturbing sense that the rules have somehow changed. The common question has become: what are the rules now?

Actually, we are not the first to ask this question. One hundred years ago, as the field of physics was undergoing a similar revolution in its understanding of how the world worked, Werner Heisenberg observed:

The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realizes that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science.

And yet eventually scientists moved beyond this feeling of disorientation, became more familiar and comfortable with the new rules of modern physics, and began the work that released the tsunami of new technology that overwhelms us today. They not only adapted to a revolution in their world; they thrived in it, transforming our world in countless ways that not too long ago were unimaginable.

If it was possible for them, why shouldn’t it be possible for us? Is it impossible to believe that there are new and creative ways for us to confront the problems we face in the world around us?

The key to understanding our world today is to realize that we really must let go of our outdated preconceptions about how things work. The reason why many familiar institutions and beliefs are failing now is precisely because they are operating under a failing mindset.

Albert Einstein once said: “No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. We must learn to see the world anew.”

Many of those people and organizations that are thriving today – and they are out there – are doing so because they have learned to “see the world anew.” Whether they are conscious of it or not, they are using ideas based in modern science to change the way they work and the way they approach problems.

It's a Small World After All

On election night 2008 I was at the Obama victory party in Albany, NY, to follow and celebrate the results. While it was a great evening, one moment in particular stood out. As we approached 11 PM, CNN showed a countdown clock for when the polls would close in California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii. As the last seconds elapsed, we all started counting down with the clock, as if it was New Year’s Eve. We all cheered when the clock hit zero, and then cheered much louder as CNN announced that Barack Obama had indeed just been elected President. It was a wonderful moment.

Only later did I find out that crowds of people around the world were doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same moment. It was yet another example of how much we are all interconnected these days - in our awareness of what’s going on and in our awareness that events on the other side of the world can affect our lives.

While young people today may think nothing of this state of affairs, it’s something I still view with a degree of amazement. I was 11 years old and living in Panama when President Kennedy was assassinated. Communications-wise, it was a very different era. While people in the US watched on TV events like Oswald’s arrest and subsequent murder, the American (Canal Zone) TV station just provided a static graphic with Kennedy’s name and dates of birth and death - a sort of video gravestone. The audio consisted of radio transmissions and reports; I didn’t see Oswald get shot, I heard it reported - kind of like play-by-play coverage of a baseball game.

For better or worse, with today’s technology we are now much more tightly linked together. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote, “...we are all caught up in a delicate network of interdependence, unable to celebrate fully our own heritage and place in the world, unable to realize our full potential as human beings, unless everyone else, everywhere else, can do the same.”

This is something we are still trying to understand and come to terms with. If the world is a network of links, how do we deal with it? The traditional way of dealing with things draws from a mechanical perspective of command and control that is pyramidal in form, with many down below and very few on top. In such a world, those with the most power control what happens. They are “the deciders.” But in a linked world, power is not pyramidal; it is networked, with everyone on basically the same plane. Clearly, this means the rules have changed. (An example of this change for military strategy is presented in the article “Command and (Out of) Control.”)

So what are the rules for a networked world? A useful resource for this is Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s book “Linked - How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means For Business, Science and Everyday Life.” One of his main points is that, while all nodes in a network may be equal in some respects, they are not equal in one key way. The difference between nodes is a question of how many links there are to a particular node. While there are many websites on the Internet, some receive a LOT more traffic and links than others. These popular nodes, which Barabasi calls hubs, are the power centers in any kind of network.

A key difference between traditional power centers and network hubs is defined by the source of their power. Traditional power comes from the hoarding of resources like money, weapons and control. Once one has the power, he or she can then dictate behavior to others. However, network power is more democratic: a hub gains or loses power based on the willingness of others to link to it. If something new and better comes along, a hub is likely to lose both links and influence. An example of this can be found with internet search engines: at one point AltaVista was one of the top search engines around; now Google rules the roost and AltaVista struggles to keep up.

In the traditional world, influence is something to be wielded: if you have enough power, you can influence the behavior of those you deal with. In a networked world, influence is something to be cultivated: the more connections you establish with others, the more influence you have. A great example of this from the music world is provided by songwriter Darrell Brown in “The Get-Out-the-Song Effort.”

Some may have wondered why so many people around the world were so excited by the election of Barrack Obama. Surely, there are many contributing factors. But one of those factors may relate to the perception of how Obama will use power compared to his predecessor.

The Bush-Cheney administration had a very traditional view of power: they felt America had the biggest military and economy in the world, so they could tell everyone else what to do. Judging by Obama’s campaign, it appears he has a better understanding of power from a network perspective. If he deals with the world and its problems from that perspective, America’s policies are likely to be very different.

At least, that’s the hope!

On Trees and Forests

I was kind of surprised when former Fed chair Alan Greenspan admitted to a Congressional committee that he was “in a state of shocked disbelief” over the current financial crisis. I know next to nothing about economics or the goings on around Wall Street, but I’ve felt for at least the past couple of years that something like this was coming.

Does that make me smarter than all the experts who claimed that everything was hunky dory over the past few years? Hardly. But it might mean that, unburdened by any expertise about lots of financial minutia, I was free to get a clearer sense of the big picture.

I didn’t know a lot of the fine points, but it seemed clear to me that much of what had been going on in the economy - all the spending, borrowing and general high living - was not sustainable. Possibly channeling Paul Krugman, I felt we’d been living lately in a “Wile E. Coyote economy”: we’d gone off a cliff and were suspended in mid-air, awaiting the moment of awareness that would send us plummeting down. From this perspective, it wasn’t a question of if things were going to crash, but when.

So why were the experts like Alan Greenspan so shocked by what happened?

At least a part of the problem might be that experts all to often fall into the habit of breaking complex systems down into smaller and smaller pieces, and then just focusing on some of those pieces. Some people may focus on the housing market, for example, while others may focus on how financial institutions evaluate their risk. But apparently few experts were looking at the financial system as a whole, including all the ways facets like the housing market and institutions’ risk management might relate. (This is an issue I touched on here.)

In cases like this, non-experts - not being focused on one particular facet or another - might be able to sense the big picture better than the experts. As the saying goes, the experts can’t see the forest for the trees. As with the wave/particle duality in physics, it sometimes requires a change in perspective for us to see two distinct but equally true facets of something - whether it is an electron or an economy.

A great example of experts being blinded by their expertise is offered in the movie “My Dinner With Andre,” when Andre Gregory talks about his experience in a hospital:

“You know, we'd gone to the hospital to see my mother, and I went in to see her. And I saw this woman who looked as bad as any survivor of Auschwitz or Dachau. And I was out in the hall, sort of comforting my father, when a doctor who is a specialist in a problem that she had with her arm, went into her room and came out just beaming. And he said: 'Boy! Don't we have a lot of reason to feel great! Isn't it wonderful how she's coming along!' Now, all he saw was the arm, that's all he saw.”

If experts want to avoid finding themselves “in a state of shocked disbelief” they are going to have to learn to view complex phenomena as a system, not as just an amalgam of a bunch of pieces. They will have to learn to see the forest as well as the trees.

Chaos On Wall Street

PBS' News Hour recently featured a Paul Solman interview of Benoit Mandelbrot, a mathemetician known for his work on Chaos Theory, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the book "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable." It offers unique insights into our current financial crisis, drawing from the perspectives of Chaos Theory and Complexity. Their joint message appears to be these are very disturbing and unsettling times - more than we even realize. (That's reassuring!) You can see it here.