Reflecting on the 2000s

on Dec 31 in Politics, Technology tagged by Trevor Hicks

First an aside to the pedants who insist on the decade ending next year, holy crap get over it already.  I know there was no year zero so a proper counting of ten year time spans would start with 1 and end in 10.  Nobody cares.  When the tens digit on the chronometer rolls over, it’s a new decade, that’s the way most humans like it.

A lot of people, myself included, are in the habit of marking time and perceiving how things are going for the nation through a political lens.  Our government schools see to that.  What did Bush screw up?  What is Obama screwing up?  Plenty I tell you, and I’ll get to that.  But culture, society, family, religion and increasingly technology are far more important to how we experience our lives.

As a people, we in the US are so much better off than we were ten years ago, frankly it’s difficult to imagine anyone would want to go back to 1999.  The thing is, we’re better off in ways that don’t necessarily show up in government economic statistics.  And these changes are due, quite frankly, to the continuous advance of information and communication technology.  Reach into your pocket, pull out your cool little iPhone or Blackberry or whatever and compare the power of what you possess in your pocket, easily affordable by the middle class, to what was available at any price 10 years ago.  I got my first cell phone in 2001, and I distinctly recall seeing it only as an unwanted corporate leash.  Now I would wonder what the hell was wrong with a company that didn’t provide my smartphone.

Granted there are some who see the ubiquity of mobile computing as isolating and there are some who use such devices as a shield from human contact.  I say first, to each his own, I’m not one to impose my preferences on others.  But I would also add that the ability to coordinate activities, to find things, to snap a few pics and instantly share them with friends and family means we waste much less time and have richer experiences.  Mobile computing, combined with the other huge trend, the evolution of the collaborative web, enhances our lives in many ways.  One example, how much do you know about your ancestors?  Maybe you have some names on a family tree, perhaps a few photographs.  If you’re lucky you might know a little about where they lived and their occupations going back up to about 4 or 5 generations.  Our descendants, our distant descendants hundreds of years from now, will be able to watch our home movies, look at our party pics, read our blog posts!  The Internet is forever, think about that next time you’re angling for beads at Mardi Gras and the cameras are out, they’ll see those pics too.

Think about Facebook and its cousins.  Not only does it allow me to enhance the interaction I have with my closest friends as we post our own pictures and thoughts on our shared experiences, but it strengthens the weaker ties we have as well in ways that email or even personal web pages never could.  By maintaining a single repository of our social lives it means there is one place for people to keep up with all of their second or third level connections.  For someone like me who frankly has not been willing to invest the time and effort in to maintaining those weaker relationships in my life, tools like this are a tremendous enhancement to my life.

I’ll take a second to plug Tyler Cowen’s book, Create Your Own Economy for further reading on this topic and pick up on another one of his themes.  The ubiquitousness of computing, the effectively infinite amount of content there is to explore on the web and the simple tools we have available to mash things up to our own taste means individuals have the ability to tailor the culture.  Back in the day you had three channels of TV and a choice of the morning or afternoon paper.  Now it’s a simple matter to snip a few 2 minute bits from TV, movies, the Web, your own home movies, to dub your own music or other soundtrack behind it to make your own story or commentary and share with your friends.

OK, so it’s well established that I’m a techno-geek.  I promised to talk a little about politics.  I think if you go back to the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999 through to our current crisis, you see a really disturbing evolution on the left that sees capitalism and economic freedom as existential threats, both to the environment and to the health and welfare of ordinary people.  Their remedy is more government control over the economy and industry.  If you go back to 9/11 through to the latest attempted terrorist attack, you see the right that increasingly sees existential threats from terrorism and personal freedom and their remedy is more government control over our lives.  I, on the other hand, see the existential threat coming from the increasingly heavy hand of government choking off both economic and social growth and I can’t remember the last time I heard someone say, “go ahead, it’s a free country.”  Unfortunately for both the left and the right, they want to increase the power of a government that is less interested in serving their ideological goals than in serving the interests of the politicians, bureaucrats and public employee unions.  People want to turn over control of things to government because of fear and they seek security from the reassurance that “someone” is in charge and will protect them.  On the left it’s fear about economic insecurity, on the right it’s fear about terrorism and violence.  And it’s the very technology that’s pushing more information to people that fuels those fears as the worst case scenarios are magnified in people’s minds, obscuring the fact that the risks that seem so ominous are generally pretty rare.

And I haven’t even mentioned the wars we started.  And what about our presidential candidates: Bush, Gore, Kerry, Obama, McCain - not a decent choice among them.  This past decade will have to compete with the 1970s and 30s for worst decade ever with respect to politics.

Fortunately government has not yet accumulated enough power to ruin what’s great about America, but the trend is in the wrong direction.  Indeed, as information and access to information is proliferating in ways that empower individuals to make truly informed and good decisions about their lives, we see a government that increasingly is trying to centralize regulation, power and decision making.  Decentralized decision making was already more efficient than centralized and it’s becoming even more so as technology improves the ability of individuals to get information and coordinate decisions with others.  I don’t know how things will play out, but I know that the more we are guided by fear and attempt to prevent anything bad from ever happening to anyone, the less secure we will all become.

There will always be problems and setbacks.  Still, I celebrate a decade, a culture and a nation that is indeed getting better all the time.