Qua vadis, Homo S@piens? - Evolving on the fast lane

[Skybird]

The devil tipped my shoulder, and it is time for one longer essay again. :P So let thinking do some somersaults, and have a good time: no politics, no religion, no Islam, no America, no Iraq, no per-sonal bashing. Yes - that is possible, too!

Some days ago, in a thread launched by Neal, I said something like “we are in need for a substantial deceleration”. Last week, I was let down by trains, due to local strikes we have. Next I met with an old colleague, who meanwhile has become a philosopher. Then, last weekend I’ve read an essay in the FAZ, about the problem of a constantly accelerating society, and the strikes. And early this week I was told by my boss that she quits, and I saw a short film in a science docu about how information and culture get lost due to the digital revolution. All that is linked to each other, while all this is coming together in a relatively short time made me reflect for days about what is written in the following. Now you know why I did it! to me, it is fun. So feel invited, take some time, and have a look. Maybe you can use something of this. And if not: that does not hurt, too.

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If you're feeling low and lost today,
probably doing too much again,
spend all your hours just rushing around -
do you have a little time for me?
Dido


In Germany, the train drivers are on strike. Compared to their chaotic French colleagues, the Ger-mans are well-organised and highly disciplined even when striking, and there are many interrup-tions to allow the political opponent as well as the commuters to take a deep breath and start moving again, the body as well as the mind. There was an escalation ladder, and still they are hesi-tant to declare an unlimited strike. They take their time. So far eight months, to be precise. Germans cant give up to be disciplined, they even don’t strike without a plan A and a plan B and – one never knows - a plan C: in France, they had the maximum strike intensity from the beginning on, and it now is the tenth day in a row where nothing is moving on rails anymore. Instead, teachers and other job groups and governmental employees also have left their offices yesterday and joined the chaos of strikes on the street as well. Unimaginable in Germany! In Germany, you are expected to have a duty, you see. In Germany there also is the cliché of the French being hectic.

Darwinian thinking imagines evolution to be a rat race between prey and hunter, and who is able to add a new small advantage to his set of cards, wins precious split seconds that could prolong his life by getting his dinner in time, or escape his hunter in the last moment. The arrow of time had been fired with the Big Bang, so says contemporary thinking though it has no idea why, and thus it chases from the past towards the future in a long arch, before entropy will have eaten up all it’s bal-listic energy and forces it to fall back to the ground, bringing all time and all universe to the stand-still of perfect, feature-less energy balance where nothing moves anymore and all life and existence can no longer be imagined, having suffered the heat death of the universe.

There is a “law” by a gentleman named Moore, and it says that the progress of the past ten years compares to the progress of the one hundred years before, and that those one hundred years equal the progress of human evolution of the one thousand years before that. Shall we assume from that that the level of changes we need to expect in the next year will be so intense, so fast in pace and massive in sheer volumes that it compares to the amount of changes we have seen in the years since 1997? Where does it lead us, then? What comes next? And if it goes on like that: who should be able to keep up with this inbound time spiral, doomed to implode in its centre? How should we bear that exponential acceleration? How could our social communities, our communal structures adapt-ing so fast, and faster after that, and then: even faster? Our brains adapting to the exploding vol-umes of knowledge and pseudo-knowledge? When should we learn to make reasonable use of all the myriads of new technological gadgets we produce, when at the time we get them the next devel-opment circle already is raising at the horizon? When our efforts to adapt are already outdated in the very moment we start to get engaged with them? Will there be a time, close in the future, where we will need to spend more time for learning how to forget than we spend time on learning all the new things? With every new generation of knowledge content, it seems the knowledge is meant to last only for a fraction of the lifespan of the previous knowledge before. What do you do when you see your tail overtaking your front? Doesn’t this mean that you have lost grip, and are already turning and sliding? That you are out of control?


Slow down my love you're confusing me,
if you're feeling stressed just try calling..
Spend your time waiting for anyone to see -
Do you have a little time for me?
Dido


Ours is the era of digital time and information. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors painted the information of their culture onto cave walls. We still can decipher them today, centuries and thou-sands of years after these cultures disappeared. Today, we still can understand the scriptures and stone engravings, of the Romans and ancient Greek, and our ancestors transported them to other information carriers, and multiplied them, making them less vulnerable to getting lost in total. What the thinkers, inventors, philosophers and scientists of the past ten centuries had written down, often still exists, can be read, understood, made use of. And some of the books that survived from the time of Gutenberg’s life, have survived until today, usable.

But then came IBM, and the first personal computer. We had and have magnetic tape in cassette recorders to record music, and the Datasette for the Commodore VC20 and 64 to record informa-tion. 5 ¼ inch floppy disks. 3 1/2 inch disks. Streamers. Accessing information that was recorded on these, was possible in much shorter time, than to collect it and hand-copying it from books, on typewriters with a secretary sitting at them. Music cassettes now are almost fossils for the young ones, but they were in use for – 3 decades? Much shorter lifespan than a book. Now, CDs and DVDs are the current media status. They have been in place for not even as long as magnetic tape medias – and already the new generation of media is pushed to carry over from these “outdated” media: high density DVDs, blue ray, hard disk, flash ROMs. The infrastructure of data traffic also changes. Electronic, non-material delivery claims more and more shares of market distribution. But – we already are often no longer capable to recall the information we once stored on 5 ¼ floppy disks. And if we can, we run into trouble with the software needed to decode the recorded data. And how many of us are able to operate MS-DOS anymore…? Who of us still knows how to do it? Who of the youngsters here is trying to learn it anymore?

We rearrange more and more often in which way we filter and order our ever-growing information, our knowledge, our arts, our culture, our identity. Less and lesser time we need to invest in keeping the collecting process alive, but also more and longer efforts we need to manage the stock of data we collected, keep it accessible for the new generation of digital software and hardware, which fol-lows in always shorter and shorter intervals. We reduce the access time by that, but we also maxi-mize the administration effort, and in the end: we reduce the life span of the information we digitised. We accept that as long as we can keep up with the acceleration. But we are humans. We have a performance limit. There is a point beyond which we can no longer keep up with the devel-opment. Who benefits from this? The faster organising of greater amounts of quicker gained infor-mation just seem to lead to even faster progress with results of even higher data density. So more acceleration is needed to process them.

More and more people feel old while being young or of mid-age. Feel left behind, shaken off, old-ironed, incompetent, unable to keep up, unable to compete with this fast-flowing stream of ever faster, ever more information, requirements, qualification, skills, goods, items. Learning new, no: the latest skills becomes a highly temporary affair, and especially when being unemployed, you are easily get trapped in being handed around, from one training to the other. You keep running, but you do not get anywhere. Your life gets parked on a parking deck. Your life is run by the illusion of training for the chance in your life, the job offer, the better life. And standing on that parking deck, your life passes by, drop by drop. Flexibility as a precondition for getting a job, becomes the object of that precondition, in other words: it becomes purpose in itself. Adaptation processes are follow-ing so quickly each other, that all life becomes a constant adaptation. There is no more anchor point in your life, no certainty of having a chance to arrive, to settle, to sink in, to take benefit of what you have learned. What you learned already is outdated. Constant change, in ever increasing pace – this now is the purpose of life. You twist around constantly as long as you can afford it by life power and money. You get dizzy from constantly spinning around. So much to do, to see, to have, to hear! You can’t see clear details anymore, and you don’t even want to see clear anymore – you have to move on towards the new temptaions! Faster! Change! Try something new! And this one! And that! So much things to try, and they constantly become more and more! Your life‘s time is limited – so USE it! Manage that multitude of objects! Keep on searching your chances! Now! Make something of it! Get it! Enough, try something new, get there, try it, forget the old, forget yesterday, learn what is demanded today! Prepare for tomorrow! Your life is time! Time is money!

Ehem, sorry - may I ask you for a moment how much money makes up for your life?


You should stop for a while,
you will find me standing by
over here, this side of your life.
I'd like to hold you still,
remind you of all you've missed -
if you have time, that is.
Dido


Stress-related “civilization diseases” are spreading like epidemics. Pharmaceutical companies cele-brate one breakthrough in psychopharmacies after the other. They produce pils and injections for all and everything- but strangely, the problems spread at even greater pace, while more and more peo-ple live their life more or less sedated, or evade into illegal drugs. Even the children feel the burdens of future expectations being directed at them. And more and more break together – at younger ages. They do not feel fit to compete in this maelstrom. They seek escape. In capitulating and escaping reality. In total commitment to the system, uncritically, until they are burned out. The steep climb in psychological problems of schoolkids even from well-situated families rings alarm-bells (speaking on the situation in Germany). No wonder that more and more juveniles hang around with video games 10, 12, 15 hours a day. The life they can live there is so very much more attractive. Not to see the stereotyping and the superficial nature of these comes as part of the compromise that allows you entrance into the wonderland. No perspective for a bureau job or low-payed industrial job can compete with that.

( In Germany, health insurances consider to accept psychologist’s argumentation to accept exces-sive computer-gaming and craving for that as a disease like excessive gaming in casinos. From my ex-psychologist’s perspective, that is not as unreasonable and off reality as it may sound for many of the audience here. )

And while the inhabitants of our culture become more and more sick, their souls suffering from too many acceleration G’s, this very same culture is loosing itself – not by intentional deconstruction, but thoughtlessness.


Why do you still run when you can walk with me
Life will pass you by when you move this quickly
What can you see when spinning around
Do you have a little time for me?
Dido


Because where you have constant acceleration, the moment as a given quantity of “time” becomes smaller and smaller, as a result of more and more energy, time and effort being invested into man-aging the existing sea of data, and squeeze it into more modern media at increasingly shorter inter-vals. If this sounds abstract, consider this: where the life span of a book is measured in decades, when being taken care of: centuries, the lifespan of a CD is unknown and first was estimated to be 100 years, than 80, then 50, now 35 years. Introduced in the late 80s, since many years we hear peo-ple more and more often reporting that their CD have become unusable, and have produced data dropouts. And we see the innovation spiral at the consumer market revolving faster and faster, too. This has as a consequence, that practically all modern states have projects running that aim at not only preserving the existing treasure of literature, publication and written data records, but to copy them onto digital media as well.

Even more: the industry is pushing more and more for a digital culture that should not supplement but replace the existing analogue culture. Movies get produced with PCs, are not longer filmed at real sets. Data libraries get planned as digital projects completely, with digital, no analogue back-ups. Communication, communal administration more and more turns towards digital, non-analogue systems, structures, methods of functioning.

All that with growing acceleration, and less and lesser time to deal with the single information, which get minimized in its value and content. The speed a digital society could reach, is so many times faster than anything we could imagine within the boundaries of an analogue one. But the more info we try to handle, the less awareness we can spend on the single entity of information, content, whatever.

And the carrier media’s life span constantly falls. We cannot say that what we save in a given data format today, can still be deciphered in the near future of let’s say 20 years. Today there are compa-nies who make a fortune by helping customers to restore data from old Hard drives and floppies that are just 15 year old – no software around anymore to decode them is the only problem. We do not learn from that, instead enthusiastically create new data and format standards, a wide diversity of digital languages that live the shorter the more they become.
According to estimations from researchers and scientists from many different fields, this holds the very real danger that we simply loose growing parts of our culture, our history and identity- which become victims of the ongoing digitising of the intellect’s world. I saw a short movie on the na-tional library of Germany, based in Frankfurt. Other nations surely have similar projects. Their job is to keep a copy of ever print media, from daily newspapers over magazine, comics, public science publications and porno volumes to every book ever released, may it be stories, novels, non-fiction – whatever. Since some time they also have to collect every released digital media as well: bureau software, games, sims: all of that. And they already have problems, they report, being unable to access digital data media that are just a couple of years old. The problem is that the software and hardware needed to decode them and make them usable, has died out meanwhile. Gamers know this problem from their beloved games no longer running when migrating to a new platform or opera-tion system. But on the level discussed here, it has far more serious consequences than just some gamer’s disappointment.


Gone too far,
Gone too long,
messed it up completely,
‘til everything is wrong –
Stop!
Start over, start again.
You better stop, start over –
Start again
Chris Rea


Must it really be like this? Think of it on a principle level, not thinking in politics and business lob-bies and market demands. Keep it simple. The only certainty everyone of us has is the knowledge that one day it all comes to an end. That our time is limited. That we will die. This is what gives our lives meaning, and value. This is what should motivate us not to waste it heedlessly, by wasting our time heedlessly. Instead I am with D.H. Lawrence who wrote that the most noble duty of man must be to be happy. A happy life is a life well spent - this and helping others to be happy as well. Not necessarily we have access to the lives of others, so our primary focus must be with us. That is no egoism – that is simply a must. We cannot heal others as long as we ourselves are in disorder as well.

It is sometimes said, or expressed, that evolution means some sort of a chain reaction, in which status A leads to status B leads to status C leads to status D, by adding new features and characteris-tics to species that in that way always represent state of the art of a development strain. By that we are tempted to conclude that there is a progressive trend, from the lower to the higher order of com-plexity, and that all previous steps get wiped out once the current status has become dominant. But as a matter of fact species representing ALL previous development phases, or design phases, remain to exist parallel to each other. An increase of complexity must not be mistaken with “progress”. Consequently, Darwin nowhere ever talked or wrote of “progress”. Only of “selection” and “adap-tation”.

It took 4.5 billion earth years until the first ancestors of today’s homo sapiens appeared. And the homo of the “generation @” observed that first their were single cells, than organisms of multiple cells, than complex cell structure forming more complex organism, and by that he concludes that homo s@piens is the end product of a linear design line, representing the best of what life on earth has to offer. But there is no such linear trend. In fact we see evolution just adding new features to existing designs, or delete existing characteristics from such designs, which can improve or worsen their ability to survive. The dinosaurs, as one example, have died, but their smaller cousins, lizards, are still there. Only the most basic design decisions seem to be irreversible, but these exist and transform parallel to each other, sometimes leading backwards, sometimes forward, and sometimes it leads into a dead end. Then it is game over for that design line. Unlikely that it will be missed. The show goes on.

You think now I am totally off topic. But I am not, I am still about man’s concept of time, and how he perceives it. Our understanding of what nature and evolution is, reflects that, and at the same time feeds back into our thinking of time. We think there is a trend from primitiveness to higher complexity, and we define that as progress. But life on earth does not know a trend that lasted over millions of years. We must stop to think of ourselves being the temporary end product of a linear trend. We are one amongst many other designs that currently lay on Evolution’s design table, and sooner or later our sketchy blueprint will fall off the table again, maybe by a wind rushing through the window of Evolution’s house – a meteor hitting earth, that is. Our presence does not necessarily add to the superior development mode of life on planet earth – we only increase the quantitative catalogue of parallel existing species by a factor of one. It is possible that the complexity of possible life designs is increased by the design study named homo sapiens, but that still does not mean there is a linear, progressive development. T is a variant, not more, and there is reason to assume that there are species on this planet maybe as self-aware as we are, and maybe as intelligent as we are. Arthur C. Clarke once said that man probably would be unable to recognize an intelligence that is of equal or even superior quality than his own as “intelligence”. I think I have read something similar about Einstein saying that, too. Unfortunately this possibility does not lead us to approach the other species on this planet with a less bullying behaviour. Because we do not recognize intelligence as intelligence, maybe. Or maybe, as Frank Schätzing wrote in one book, we are the scientist who takes a spider and rips off its pairs of legs one by one, and after every pair tells it to run, and it tries to run away, until he has ripped out the last leg and telling it to run, which it of course does not anymore, then writing into his notes “Spiders without legs are deaf.”

tbc.