A Weekend in Armageddon

I'm a little depressed this Monday morning.

Every Saturday I read Peggy Noonan's column in the Wall Street Journal, and, generally speaking, find that the sky is falling somewhere that she's visited.  Mostly it's falling on Democrats, but it's falling for sure.  And usually I don't think twice about it because I grew up on Chicken Little and know it all ends well.  However, she kind of laid it on the line this weekend, at least politically, when she wrote that "We are in a crisis.  Our spending is ruinous, the demands of government are too great. . .[and, agreeing with Rep. Paul Ryan] We have only a short time to fix things, we have to move now."

So, we've got that Armageddon scenario going for us politically.

Then, my other favorite Jeremiah, Thomas Friedman, goes to bat every Sunday and often piles on a dose of technological and geopolitical Armageddon.  This Sunday it was the good folks in India lecturing us on the American dream.   Amazingly, when they talk they sound just like a Tom Friedman book, as when a "few Indian business leaders want to ask the president. . .Didn't America export to the world all the technologies and free market dogmas that created this increasingly flat, global economic playing field--and now you're turning them against us?"  (See what I mean?!)  Meanwhile, an Indian journalist wrote that our country has "worn-out infrastructure, [a] failing education system and lack of political consensus."  Another says we've lost our self-confidence.  Another wonders if we're going to cede our leadership to China.

So, we've got that Armageddon scenario going for us geopolitically.

Then, in an essay in The American Interest, Sven Birkerts reviewed three books on internet and culture, including Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget (see here for an earlier post) and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows.  It's a very thoughtful essay, which is troubling because it ends with the conclusion that we are moving from Homo sapiens to Homo digitals.  The problem is, we don't know what Homo digital is, or if it's especially healthy.

First, Birkerts-cum-Lanier says that "the prospect that the digital revolution is not just the latest human adventure or the next transformation the species must adapt to, but a force created by humans that is in big ways rewriting the whole human script. . .We have adapted over these long millennia to the organization of agriculture, the standardization of time, the growth of cities, the harnessing of electricity, the arrival of the automobile and airplane and mass-scale birth control, to name just a few developments. But the cyber-revolution is bringing about a different magnitude of change, one that marks a massive discontinuity. . .We have seen more pressure applied to species transformation in the past century than in the previous several thousand years."

Then, Birkerts-cum-Carr reports that "Our consuming involvement with digital media is significantly altering our mental processes. And insofar as we are our mental processes (are we not?), this involvement is changing who we are."

So, we've got the Homo digital Armageddon thing going for us, too. 

If the politics don't eat us, the geopolitics will.  And, if the geopolitics don't eat us, the Web will.  Or, to be more precise, the Web is instructing us to eat ourselves from the inside out, so to speak.  Contrary to Peggy Noonan and Thomas Friedman, this is a scenario where the sky remains fully intact but Chicken Little's head explodes anyway.

All of which pales, frankly, in relation to the coming Singularity.  We tackled Ray Kurzweil and his followers just a while ago here.  Kurzweil says things like "Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020," and "By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate."  Kurweil's book, The Singularity is Near, condenses down to this: "At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and the most thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged, as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity."

I'm here to say that I'm not sure I like any of this.  I can't decide if I'd rather have a bunch of Tea Party people in office, or be lectured on the American dream, or allow my brain to turn to molten jello, or stand on the precipice of an era when we no longer even know what it means to be human. 

I just know I'm kind of pining for credit meltdowns, long airport security lines, Internet bubbles, full-on recessions, and concerns about whether Lindsay Lohan will get drug counseling or jail time--the kind of garden variety crises that well-meaning, democratic, capitalistic, biological human beings are capable of solving.

I have either seen the Four Horseman of the American Apocalypse this weekend, or I have seen the way modern mass media and publishing place absolutely everything on the brink to boost circulation.  Either way, I think I need another cup of coffee this morning. 

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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