Here on Continuations I have covered a lot of seemingly disparate topics such as the end of work, government surveillance and the digital balkans. They are, however, all part of my fascination with the transition from the industrial age to the information age. While that latter term was coined all the way back in the 1960s, there is reason to believe that the transition is beginning to happen now.
Today I want to provide a large scale historical context, taking us all the way back to hunter gatherers and looking at the three “Ages” that we have gone through so far. I am using “Age” to define the time period during which the respective mode was dominant. Historians among my readers will hopefully forgive me the following gross simplifications.
1. Forager Age
This hunter gatherer (or forager) age was essentially all of human history starting with Homo Erectus about 1.8 million years ago up to the Bronze Age. The dominant organizational mode was the tribe with a mostly flat structure and communal approach to life. The primary motivation seems to have been survival. Tribes were itinerant as they moved around by foot to areas that provided nutrition (that also drove the spread of humans across the earth). As far as I can tell, there was no notion of privacy.
2. Agrarian Age
The transition to the agrarian age happened sometime around 3000 BC and was the consequence of a several non-linear and complementary technological innovations. Key ones that stand out are the domestication of animals, farming, writing, government and seafaring. Farming provides an increase in nutritional density of 10-100x over foraging. Horses gave those who had them a 10-100x advantage in battle and were of course also critical for agriculture. The food surplus from farming allowed for specialization which included the rise of rulers and soldiers.
The organizational model became the fiefdom, then the kingdom and eventually the empire, leading all the way up to the British Empire. Personal property came about first as the right of rulers and gradually claimed further down. With relatively few exceptions (such as soldiers and government) people lived from what they made through either trade or sale in a market. In addition to survival, religion became a critical driving force. Privacy mostly meant being unimportant and disposable (as in the “private” in the army).
3. Industrial Age
I think there is good reason to argue that the agrarian age went to almost 1900. Yes it’s true that during the 1800s manufacturing was emerging but I am interested in the dominant mode and even in the late 1800s about half of all work was in agriculture. Again, there were several non-linear and complementary technological innovations behind the transition. Engines (steam, electric and gasoline) provided reliable power and speed far in excess of humans and domesticated animals. The telegraph allowed for the rapid transmission of information across great distances. The assembly line let work be broken down into many small steps that could be rapidly learned by humans.
The organizational model moved, through two world wars, to the Nation State. Making a living shifted to selling one’s time and effort as opposed to the product of one’s work. In addition to survival and religion, keeping up with the Jones’s became a critical motivator. Personal property was extended heavily into intellectual property. Having one’s own home and individual rooms was a major goal and privacy an important construct.
These three previous ages and two big preceding transitions have some interesting characteristics:
First, the technological innovations always preceded the resultant social and organizational transformations. Early signs of agriculture exist as far back as 11000BC and animals started to be domesticated significantly before 3000BC. Steam tractors go as far back as the late 1700s but cars didn’t become a meaningful mode of transportation until after World War I.
Second, technological innovations introduced important non-linearities in capabilities, in particular because of complementarity between different innovations. Complementary organizational innovation plays a particularly important role here. Writing is great for storing and transmitting information, which became especially handy when you have government and an army. It is not enough to have machine power, you also needed the assembly line for mass manufacturing.
Third, in each transition it first got worse before it got better. There is evidence that early farmers lived shorter lives than hunter gatherers and worked much, much harder. The early period of industrialization was marked by child labor, squalor in the cities and terrific pollution.
Fourth, seemingly defining aspects of human culture including intellectual property and privacy have arisen only relatively recently and substantially in response to technological innovation.
Why does that matter? Because it could and should inform how we approach the coming transition to the Information Age (I am calling it a coming transition because the dominant mode is still that of the industrial production).
First, we have now had a few decades with a key new set of technological innovations, including computers, mobile phones, the Internet, additive manufacturing (3D Printing), molecular and cellular manipulation (DNA). All of these are going from something that “can be done” to being done at scale.
Second, these innovations are non-linear and complementary with each other. For instance, being able to transmit mega bytes of model data across the Internet makes it much more valuable to have a 3D Printer. That is why they are highly likely to help bring us into the Information Age. Lightly organized global networks are emerging as a critical complementary organization innovation.
Third, we are definitely seeing some things getting worse. This is where my writing on income distribution and the end of work fits in. As does the concern around both the rise of surveillance and the threat of the cyber balkans.
Fourth, we should not assume that concepts such as intellectual property or privacy are immutable. We have made them up and we can and will over time redefine them.
This then leads to the key questions about what the Information Age might look like.
How will we organize ourselves and will we transcend the Nation State? How will people “make a living”? What will be the motivating force for people? What are we trying to accomplish with privacy and intellectual property and how should these change?
Much of what we believe to be true about society is informed by the more recent historical record. But the forager age might be more informative going forward. Why? Because both the agrarian age and the industrial age were fundamentally marked by scarcity. Only the forager age had a relative sense of abundance. In the digital realm, however, we are dealing once again with abundance and we are gradually extending that to the real world.
That leaves us with two more critically important questions about the transition to the Information Age. First, do we need a catalytic event or can we get there without it? Past catalytic events were largely wars, revolutions and plagues. It would be good to avoid both of these. Second, what are you and I personally doing to help navigate the transition?
