Friday, December 10
Ripples: We live in unstable times...
From Ripples: We live in unstable times...:
Tom Peters opines that ninety percent of white-collar jobs as we know them will be disemboweled in the next 15 years. Done. Gone. kaput. This is just one of the fascinating topics dealt with in his new book, Project04: Snapshots of Excellence in Unstable Times.The question is, can the people take to living that fast in Internet time? Is society ready, able and willing to deal with the issues that are going to arise because everybody (and I do mean everybody, not just here in the US, or the G8) will be living in Internet time?
I happen to think that Tom is right on the percentage, but his time scale is way off. I see the change happening in the next five to seven years. I don't take this change as doom, gloom, and disaster, it is change, as in obsolescence, renewal and growth. It is a natural process, just speeded up by the internet. Like it or not, we are all living on internet time now, which is generally 5x faster than conventional, pre-internet time.
With the intolerance that I see happening everyday, living in or on Internet time means that we might get up to speed, but the friction is going to tear everything apart, and what might have been gained in the short run will eventually be totally lost and reversed. Basically, if we don't have all our ducks in a row, I don't care how good the excellence is for some people, if the majority aren't also on board when this happens, it is something that could be over before it truly does begin.
It also means that long term planning can only look forward about 15 years, shorter if Mr. St. Lawrence is correct. You say SSI needs to be fixed, how can you know? That's 40-50 years away from breaking at the current system. That's past the curtain of knowability, going by Internet time, so is SSI really broke then? Man on Mars? Well, we can try to plan for it, but whatever we plan today, won't be the plan we actually follow when it happens, since the curtain of knowability is shorter than the actual time period that we are looking at. Unstable times indeed!
The US, being the tech power house that it is, should be ready for Internet time. I posit that it is not. Living in Internet time demands a lot of trust that that the information you are given to process is basically correct. In a nation where the difference in choosing one leader over the other is 51% to 49%, and 119,000 votes cast differently in one state would have changed the result, even with that small difference there is no trusting information. When a majority of voters just months before the election thought that Saddam Hussein had some kind of responsibility for the attacks on 9/11/2001, when the facts repudiated that, let alone did not even hint at that, just where does that leave information believability? Totally out the window. The problem with the mass media outlets is that they are now more interested in making money instead of trying to inform the population.
You have right wing and left wing bloggers going at each other. The right wingers go after the Dan Rather story about how some memos have been manufactured, but totally disregard if the information is actually true. Of course, the right wingers proceed to push the Swift Boat Vets against Kerry, and totally accept that pablum as complete truth, despite multiple people waffling back and forth on what they said, which had they been for Kerry, would have instantly tarnished them forever. I'm sure the left wing blogs pulled similar stunts. But the truth, and the truth was out there to be told, was totally ignored, as the reasons for Bush to go to war were total lies and myth. Either people didn't care, or the message was so drowned out by the other crap it never registered. Truly sad.
There are other signs that we are not prepared to live in Internet time, but those will have to wait for another day. Relevant Link Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 12/10/2004 03:08:00 PM
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