The Winds of Change
Two events that occurred (one was a precursor) in 1989 that have changed us all were these: The Berlin wall fell, and there was no internet. The first marked the end of the Cold War, and the second saw the portals of the information age right before they were blown to bits. In the following years the course of human events veered in a new direction, and the world became better interconnected. Today our troubles persist; it’s just that we know about them sooner, with greater clarity, and with a bit more understanding. Therein lie our hopes for a better tomorrow. Freedom means little without openness, knowledge, and the means with which to tap into them.
With the fall of the wall, the old Soviet Union fell also. Its 30 satellite countries gained a much larger degree of freedom. This entire network of nations began a slow walk into a time and place that had been closed to its residents. Few of us had ever heard of Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan back in 1989. Many still have not heard of them. But those who live there today know a lot more about us. Who would have guessed that a gangly albeit fictional person such as Borat would venture beyond his heretofore closed world and pursue the likes of Pamela Anderson in an odyssey across America that left some of us roaring with laughter?
Well, walls come and walls go, but the internet stretches toward infinity. The tiny devices and their capacity that exist today are barely understood about how they can be used for good or ill. And we are all struggling to discover what they portend. But this much is certain: A hand-held connectivity device today can find and link us to one another in the blink of an eye, it can tap into virtually all of our knowledge sources around the world, and it can get us into trouble faster than a speeding bullet. Information leakages via credit and identity theft were nonexistent in 1989; today they are insidious and everywhere. A mortgage application can be made and approved or rejected in a moment while walking down the street. And I shudder to think that I used to keep my date of birth cleverly concealed; today everyone knows I am a walking fossil of antiquity with just a few strokes of their fingers. It’s the speed at which information flows that gives us the potential to move mountains that we are just beginning to understand how to use and to misuse.
Tomorrow is now coming at us so fast that we need to think not so much about next month or next year, but 30, 50 or 100 years ahead. And that awakening did not come too soon. We know that climate change is a fact, and we had damned well better start making changes today to accommodate some of it and forestall the rest of it. Our intentions also should be matching up with our knowledge base about new ways to capture and to use the energy from our sun to let us heat, cool, and otherwise better put to use this endless flow of energy before we freeze or burn ourselves into extinction. Even our forecasting models today can enlighten us about such realities with lightning speed.
Now I need to go back and “fact check” myself to make certain that I haven’t outpaced myself by either overstating the obvious, or in being too late to even mention what I have already written. It’s that speed thing again that is disrupting my morning.
Most of my contemporaries are fossils, except in a few wonderful cases, like you. I already had a network of Macintosh SEs operating at work in 1989 with the capability of networking and a program called Timbuktu that allowed me to actually run any other computer on the network from mine. When I found out that email was free and long distance telephone cost me an average of $300 a month, I switched immediately. Unfortunately, I had to drag my extended family and my contemporaries into this magic world kicking and screaming because, it seemed like they didn't want to communicate. It's safer, I guess, to be ignorant? The only innovation I haven't embraced is social media. Like gossip, a real time waster when there are real problems to solve.
Ron