Outside The Box

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

This exchange is from Hemingway’s book, “The Sun Also Rises,” and it anticipates the more recent use of “slowly, then all at once,” which is a concise description of the way we often experience change. Things that seem to happen suddenly can be years in the making, like a rusted bolt that gives way unexpectedly or a seed that sprouts overnight after germinating underground for years.

Indeed, black swan events, unforeseen accidents, and chain reactions do exist. Disruptive technologies have the potential to transform the economic landscape almost instantaneously, and economics is closely intertwined with social change. Yet, even disruptive technology represents only the tip of the pyramid, beneath which is a broadening base that was essential for reaching the pinnacle.

Change was the topic of conversation recently as I chatted with a good friend of many years who, unfortunately and like too many others, lives too far away to get up to the mischief we once enjoyed. We were lamenting the national obsession with opinions, especially opinions about politics, and the persistent ill will which accompanies the ways and means the majority of us now employ to “be heard.”

“I don’t remember anyone who cared that much about politics ‘back in the day,’ do you? I mean, sometimes we would talk about it, agree or disagree, crack a joke or an insult and then go on. It never scratched the surface, but now you can’t say anything without cutting someone.”

“Maybe we had thicker skins back then, but I think it just wasn’t that important. You surely didn’t judge someone by how they voted, and the vast majority of the time you didn’t know how they voted because no one ever said. That was something private.”

The consensus among my handful of friends who pay attention, read history, and exercise reason, goats in a vast herd of sheep, is that this particular “slowly to suddenly” process began just over a generation ago when the first popular web browser, Mosaic, was released in 1993, the year that the World Wide Web became readily accessible.

A decade later, the trailblazing social media platform MySpace emerged, followed by the launch of Facebook the next year. Since 2007, Facebook has been a dominant force in social media, boasting 2.9 billion monthly active users. However, YouTube now draws 2.5 billion, Instagram also has 2.5 billion, WhatsApp has 2 billion, TikTok has 1.04 billion, WeChat has 1.3 billion, among others, totaling 5.17 billion people who publicly and frequently share their opinions. Currently, sixty-four percent of humanity is keen to tell you what it thinks and feels.

This is just another opinion among the billions, but I think that social media broke many things. It broke privacy. It broke discretion, and thinking before we speak. It broke accountability for what we say. It broke humility. It broke patience, and for many it broke peace of mind and mental health. Finally, as an amplifier of partisan politics, social media, along with the concentrated application of heavily manipulated information services, may be breaking our civil society.

As a disruptive technology, information technology certainly got the “disruption” part down pat. What will be rebuilt from the wreckage remains to be seen. I am often reminded of that cautionary tale in Genesis about the Tower of Babel. Substitute the World Wide Web for the Tower, and witness another unfolding of pride and arrogance ungoverned by humility. Witness also the inevitable grasping for power by those who seek to control this concentration of human energy and focus it on their own goals.

We can’t escape it, or at least the effects of it, even if we’re not actively contributing, and we ignore it at our peril. It’s like the rain that falls on the just and the unjust. But we can make sure our roof doesn’t leak, and we don’t have to go out into the storm unprotected. Nothing is forcing us to stare into the downpour until our eyes bleed, and perhaps the best shelter from the storm is all the things we did with the time we had before the rain started to fall.