I grew up as a liberal scientist. There's a lot of altruistic, whizbang, Carl Sagan germs still lying deep within my mental genetics. I grew up in California and was a member of the Sierra Club. When I was a kid I used to go hiking just about every weekend during the summer. Our family even invented an anti-pollution song which follows the tune of Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer:
Back to the dirty city where the smog pollutes the air
And if you ever saw it, I bet you wouldn't even care
Some people throw their rubbish all around the neighborhood
We ought to start a program and make them do the things they should
Cigarette butts and paper cups thrown into the street
Candy bars and jelly jars right beneath your feet
We gotta catch polluters and help to keep the city clean
Lock them in jail and beat them; serve them rotten bread and beans
As you can imagine, I was something of a longhaired radical environmentalist as a youth. The liberal impulse towards utopia is a strong one, and it can obviously be authoritarian. I had the bug for wilderness and blue skies, less for furry animals. I'm a bit less defensive of the planet these days, and I have more confidence that the criminalization of polluters can only be partially effective. But there are a number of assumptions buried deep within this ethos which temper my vision of the future and of the relative peril of oil dependency, and I'm not sure I've given them all up. Many are bound up in my choice of profession.
I'm living in the information age. I feed my children and my ego on dollars made in the business of negotiating information which is and industry inheriting of all of the arts and letters of literate people since the cave drawing. Law, philosophy, religion, literature, language arts, social studies, history... all of these are being sustained by the new media of information technology. That's my business. It is practically inconceivable that the continuity of this human enterprise will ever be broken.
I have always looked at the invention of computer mediated communication in the same context as that of the printing press, that is to say with an eye towards what universal computing can do in the future as universal literacy has done in the past. Martin Luther's Reformation is Stuart Brand's Disintermediation. I'm going to hand it to Brand & Rheingold because we talked about this a long time ago on The Well.
So I've always been interested in promoting the idea of universal computing in the same way I promote universal literacy and the rise of democracy. Empowerment by mind. In every regard I see the progress of mankind in terms of the rising opportunity of more and more people to live the intellectual life and profit from the life of the mind, and the quality of life is directly tied to their ability to access newly created economic markets for processing and handling of this intellective work. As far back as 1986 I was predicting the possibility of things like eBay and Amazon.com, because these were the kinds of transactions we did socially with each other at Xerox. We had client server email long before the masses, back when selling typewriters was still a profitable business.
Working at Xerox was a microcosm of the replacement of physical with virtual economies. It was perfectly evident to large numbers of us that there were reasons to send emails beyond 'saving a tree' by not typing a memo or a large document, but the environmental implications were not lost on us. It was perfectly evident to us that there were reasons to use distributed computing instead of large data centers beyond the costs of housing and air conditioning waste, but we were aware of relative power consumption advantages. It was perfectly evident to us that there were reasons to champion telecommuting beyond the environmental benefit of obviating oil-dependent transportation, but we were certainly not blind to that particular impact. The same thing goes for videoconferencing, online banking, e-commerce and gaming. There has rarely been a time when I was stuck in traffic because of a sports event when I didn't think derisively of all the blue collar bohunks and their pickup trucks that could all be home playing a virtual baseball game instead of wasting, time, money, space and fuel going to sit on their asses to watch somebody else play.
However, as some romanticize the fate of subsistence farmers in Chiapas as poor victims of globalization, I recognize that there are legions of people around the planet who are two generations less digital than I. And I realize that they still fall in love and have babies. I'm cool with that, but I am not blind to their evolution and it doesn't surprise me at all that they continue to adopt to the paradigms that my peers have established in the digital realms. I continue to scoff at 'digital divide' critics. The very existence of their criticism underscores how right we are thought leaders on the cutting edge have been. Too bad they didn't quite understand Moore's Law.
So understand that I have seen the digital economy grow by leaps and bounds and take larger and larger shares of an expanding GDP. We are the engine of worker productivity and we continue to grow.
Oil is just fuel for automobiles. We don't need automobiles. We need trucks and trains and jets and tanks, but we need autos and motorcycles much less. We need RVs, sports watercraft and snowmobiles even less. Understand that I know and predict that virtual gaming will be for my children everything that NASCAR is today and more. So I really, really don't worry about oil shocks. I've seen the future of the work of literate societies, I'm part of making that future.
So all the oil dries up. So what? So long as there is enough coal and hydro to keep the computers and networks running, I'm cool. And so are you. You just don't know it yet.
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