HEARD WE ARE HERD
Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - daily column #6678
Tell me, were you born before streaming?
Nearly everyone was.
And anyone born today will never know the time before streaming, or before the iPhone, before the fax machine, before LED calculators, before colour TV, before anyone on the block and a black and white TV – but I do.
We all have our time in history.
Were you here before the last pandemic?
If you answer yes, you’d have been born in 1917 or earlier – you would be at least 104.
But almost everyone is newer than that …
Since we arrived, babes fresh outta da womb, we’ve been nurtured by knowledge, advancements in every field of technology, entertainment, and design. Our fashion, our cars, electric toothbrushes, atomic power, atomic bombs, and Mad Magazine could never have been imagined by anyone outside a rubber room in 1917.
What will things be like next year, in 2022?
Or a hundred years on, in 2122?
What’s my point?
The pace of change has picked up; the new DNA is not rock and roll, technology and climate, and technology and lifestyle – it’s technology everything. The pace of change is a treadmill race for change in a pandemic-pushed Zoom reality of nearly everyone is working differently, playing differently and managing relationships differently. Mental health is in the news as much as vaccines and viruses. And one day soon, we’ll have the comfort of knowing the world of science and 8.5 billion folks will have herd immunity.
Herd-anything seems so raw and essential, so non-tech.
We separate the herd, or nature does the sorting, into strongest and fittest genetic survivors – separate males from females, young from old, meat-eaters from vegans. Not just on the plains of the Serengeti, but in the supermarket aisles too.
And every other market too. Crypto-this, crypto-that, social-media, and streaming everything give us the illusion that everything is new and must be 5G and Bluetooth friendly. In such a short time, we’ve come to think anything without a robust technology connects as being old-school, out of date, and irrelevant.
Texas’s recent learning for their power authority demonstrated what north-hemisphere residents ought to all know – plunging temperatures, snow and ice cause things to not work. And they had boil-water advisories everywhere. They’ll fix it for next time. Maybe. My thoughts drift to what it will be like when many self-driven electric cars find their way to a ditch in a blizzard. The technology has come together. For decades we never thought or dreamt a self-driven combustion engine car was a good idea. Suddenly the convergence of these is a good idea. I’m not convinced …
In the 1980s, we learned a term called telephony – the convergence of computers and phones, and more importantly, the intersection of providers, when technology was about wires vs. wireless, and yet here we are in the 2020s struggling to get high-speed internet at low cost into small communities that don’t have fibre-optic grade bandwidth. Soon we’ll all get everything from a low-orbit satellite system a la Elon Musk.
We are moving fast.
And slow.
The world will, one day, realize which forms of energy and what lifestyles best harmonize with our environment and climate. Probably about the same time as political boundaries vanish, all governments become filled with integrity and democracy – about the same time as we feed everyone a healthy meal, about the same time oceans are clean because cities stop dumping sewage into them, about the same time we have safe drinking clean water on indigenous reserves in Canada.
Change is neither good nor bad – it’s changed, and we have fostered societies of humans who are focused on transformational change through technology and medical science like never before. It will continue, probably at an accelerated pace – the illusion being that quality of life is improved. It is, but when the grail of healthy life is not the goal for its own sake, the results will play a different tune.
We enjoy privilege, seeing life through a lens of rights, liberty and entitlement.
Whether or not we are rich, every ordinary Canadian, American, or European is filthy-rich compared to most of the world. We need to see things better through their lens, make changes and innovations that better lift those at the bottom of the economic ladder than focusing so intently on those of us already on the upper rungs.
Are you with herd, or with the free thinkers?