Uneven Distribution.

Looking back & thinking forward.

November 26th, 2008

I. Living in a future mindset.

In his recent post on Anachronistic Science, Kevin Kelly talks about knowledge gaps and the anachronisms in thinking prevalent throughout history. He uses the example in which a modern scientist could return to Aristotle’s time and still perform a huge number of experiments to prove theories only developed in the last few decades.

“If anachronistic science occurs in the past, then by definition there must be future technology that we are capable of creating today, if only we knew how.”

Which made me think, does this apply to online social tools? Have we created an anomaly in cultural development? Are the tools we are using today possible in the past? Are the social behaviours, insights and technologies they rely on anachronistic?

It would be wonderful to think that we’ve somehow created a glitch in the cultural matrix. That we truly are unique thinkers and pioneers of culture. But I honestly don’t believe this. The sheer limit of bandwidth makes many of the great ideas from the past 5 years impossible on a basic executional level, but the essence of most great ideas enabled by the internet have always been possible, we just haven’t had the mindset.

If this is the case, surely there is an argument for letting go of the boundaries we work within, and simply develop ideas regardless. If we can live in a future mindset, we can worry about executing the ideas later. Easier said than done, yes, but I don’t think this happens often enough.

II. Stop building spaceships.

Another area that Kelly only briefly touches on is that the development of pioneering thinking has, in almost every advanced civilisation, simply reached a point where it’s innovation slowed dramatically.

“Why didn’t China, which invented so many other things in the first millennial, just keep on going and invent science by 1000 AD? For that matter why didn’t the Greeks invent the scientific method during their heyday? What were they missing? “

I’m not sure that this question is really answered, and that is telling (Kelly simply states that they didn’t have the mindset). There is an argument here that intellectual, cultural development can eventually slow down, even when it has great momentum.

Like right now.

This argument is given further weight by ideas such as Richard Watson’s thoughts on Extreme Teens. We are simply so overwhelmed with new ideas now, that our ability to actually move forward cognitively in a meaningful, constructive way has been significantly diminished (how many new sites do you sign up to every week? Of those how many do you really understand?).

So where this gets interesting is in the startup industry. There are thousands of people and millions of dollars currently devoted to being “the next Facebook/YouTube/Twitter/X”. Perhaps we have evolved in this online space to a point where we are cognitively full? Perhaps we should be focusing more on understanding and refining exactly what we have created in the last 5,500 days?

Perhaps, just maybe, there is a wealth of ideas, information and insights already created online that are being ignored because we are so focused on driving forward. And if this is the case, the real innovators in the next few years may come from people that understand where we have been, not necessarily the ones that are blazing forward into the unknown.

Comments

I don’t feel that we are facing a slow down in cultural or intellectual momentum. In fact, it feels quite the opposite. However, over the last 100+ years we have relied on corporations to drive innovation. And in the last 30 those companies have relied almost completely on the “IT department”.

Now, for the first time in a generation, people are again leading the way. The technologies are now being wielded by people who don’t care for the strict “how-to” guides delivered with the latest video cam or PC. They don’t care so much about your brand. They have a desire to reach out and connect with others and are doing so with whatever tools they can lay their hands on.

If innovation isn’t taking the shape that we expect, maybe it really does require a change in the way that we think. And perhaps you are right, re-thinking our sense of agency and commitment to ideas could be the most important innovation of this new century. It’s just too soon to tell

Nic -

Thanks for directing me here - looks interesting. In a similar vein, I have always been interested by ideas that were developed before a suitable technology was available to implement them. One of my favourites is “Delilah and the Mobile Phone” - see:

http://delarue.net/blog/2007/06/chasing-the-will-o-the-wisp/

But going back to your point - I agree, most of what social software does is about people and relationships. I approached this by writing a fable about Knowledge Management - see:

http://delarue.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/ivory.pdf

- Keith

One of the cool ideas in the book Against The Gods (by Peter L Bernstein) is that the Greeks couldn’t come up with probability because they believed in fate. If you don’t think that Gods control the future, then you can speculate about the chance of different futures occurring. But without probability, we wouldn’t have statistics or scientific experimentation.

If you accept this, then it is a clear example of how the Ancient Greeks lacked the mindset required to do key parts of science.