{"id":10524,"date":"2007-05-22T22:25:21","date_gmt":"2007-05-23T02:25:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/05\/22\/10524.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:56:28","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:56:28","slug":"but-there-have-always-been-sta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/05\/22\/but-there-have-always-been-sta\/","title":{"rendered":"But there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger just read Charlie Stross’s essay on Shaping the Future<\/a>, which has some things in it that are quite interesting and provoking. In a general sort of way, I think he makes the mistake that people tend to do with futurism, which is that even if the three strands that you predict come with, say, 80% confidence (which is a lot), the chances of all three<\/I> coming true are around fifty-fifty. So when Mr. Stross looks at the combination of advances in computing power, storage and mobile phone distribution, he comes up with some startling extrapolations. But they ain’t necessarily so. And, of course, as he says, he is leaving out some major strands (global warming, bioengineering, etc) and assuming no major breakthroughs (real AI, real nanotech, etc), and at least some of that stuff will have a substantial impact on the stuff he is<\/I> dealing with. Still, it’s a fun essay.\n

The thing that struck me, though, and as usual YHB is distracted by a minor point, was his reference to the telephone:

Traditional fixed land-lines connect places, not people; you dial a number and it puts you through to a room in a building somewhere, and you hope the person you want to talk to is there. Mobile phones in contrast connect people, not places. You don't necessarily know where the person at the other end of the line is, what room in which building they're in, but you know who they are.<\/blockquote>\n

So, what I was wondering—when people wired up the cities and towns, a hundred years ago or less, did they think Well, that’s it, then. That’s permanent. That’s a room that will always have a telephone.<\/I> I’m particularly imagining the smallish towns where there was one telephone first, probably in the store\/post, and then a few in some important businesses such as banks and whatnot, and then a few in the rich men’s houses, and then a few more in business, and so on. And I wonder, when they were put in, whether anybody thought well, that’s a good solution for a few generations, and after that, there’ll be something new<\/I>. I doubt it.\n

I’m inclined, perhaps only because I am tired and a trifle cranky, to make pronouncements about Human Nature, and say that People are Like That. Nobody builds a house and thinks that’ll be nice, until the people want something different<\/I>. If I opened a business, say a bookstore or a restaurant, I doubt I would think this is a business that will last for thirty years<\/I>. I would imagine it there forever<\/I>, even knowing that the street corner hasn’t been there forever, that there’s no reason to believe that it will be there forever, that there will be streets in a hundred years, or restaurants, or bookstores.\n

Recently, Howard Kurtz wrote a Washington Post column headed Interviews, Going the Way of the Linotype?<\/a> The first sentence? “The humble interview, the linchpin of journalism for centuries, is under assault.” Centuries? There hasn’t even been journalism<\/I> for centuries. Andrew Cline writes<\/a> that “We have to get into the late 1910s before interviewing becomes anything like what we understand it to be today.” Less than a hundred years. The interview<\/I>, less than a hundred years old. Think of that. And it doesn’t have to last.\n

Every now and then I ask people, Gentle Readers or other acquaintances, whether they think that the United States Constitution will be essentially the same for another fifty or a hundred years, meaning to ask, do you think our federal and local legislatures, executives and judiciaries be on the whole chosen the same way they are now. Most people seem to think they will be, with some (to my mind) small changes likely. I don’t know.\n

But I’ll say this for a cliché: life is change. One reason people fight so hard against the global warming suggestions is that they mean a substantial dislocation in the next generation. But there is always a substantial dislocation, in every generation. The trick isn’t to prepare for what happens, it’s to prepare for whatever happens. Perhaps the thing to do is to say, when we make our big plans, our universal health care or our blogger code of ethics, our biodiesel or our mobile telephony, to be able to say well, that’s a good solution for a couple of generations, and after that, there’ll be something new<\/I>.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger just read Charlie Stross\u2019s essay on Shaping the Future, which has some things in it that are quite interesting and provoking. In a general sort of way, I think he makes the mistake that people tend to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10524"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18032,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10524\/revisions\/18032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}