Change

If all you learned from Toffler’s writings was that we are suffering from “change”, and “transience of relationships”, you haven’t understood a goddamn thing.

Change, transience (of relationships, places) are merely symptoms of what is going on in today’s world. We need to dig deeper for greater understanding.

Technology shapes the power structure, and the “kind” of technology we have is of utmost importance. Each breed of technology influences power structure differently. 19th century industrial, smokestack technology forced people to work in big numbers, caused a huge number of the populace to be mindless automatons, hence the power structure of that century. This structure allowed, caused “connectors”, “integrators” to hold real power. Everything else flowed from there.

Today’s technology empowers individuals directly. Then what does “change” mean? 21. century tech gives people more freedom (you have a laptop on your lap), you have more choices, starting with mobility. Take this increased freedom, scale it up to entire populace, the result is “accelerated change” we are witnessing today. When everyone is creating one way or another, the overall result is a maddening pace of change. When everyone moves / can move around because of new tech, what you get is increased transiance of relationships.

If we forget the root causes, that opens a gaping hole in future projections, and we cannot adapt to changing conditions. Let’s remember this, and try to delineate clear boundaries on what today’s world is, and what it is not, always taking the breed of our current technological infrastructure into account.

Let’s not forget the chain reaction any solution creates in society. People love to copy, love to apply principles from one aspect of life to another. In our post Grading we saw how the grading system in schools essentially originated earlier in the factories, as a way of determining if the shoes, for example, made on the assembly line were “up to grade.” Our schools, bureucracies, hospitals all copied their approaches from industrial production. The rest simply fell in line to allow the main parts of the system to operate – families became “nuclear” because workers needed to be close to a factory. Education not only copied methods from industrial era, but provided trained bodies to the assembly line.

Seeing this will also let us see where, when and why our current system is obsolete. If we cannot identify problems properly, we will never be able to imagine new solutions. If we do not know school system is based on the obsolete industrial order, we will keep talking about “better teachers”, which later will force us to achieve the impossible (like aiming for hundreds of thousands of quality teachers).