The Information Age is showing signs typical of middle-phase metamorphosis in a holistic developmental path common to many organic and some non-organic systems. Characterizing many living systems is a triadic growth seqence, of expansionist, restructuring and actualizing life stages, with respective qualities of materiality, information/structure and energy/spirit. Global human society is undergoing a natural and necessary metamorphosis, maturing out of a material-focused Industrial-Age childhood, and recently entering an Information-Age adolescence, to be characterized by thorough redesign and upgading of the relational systems that determine society’s structure, i.e. its public and private governance institutions, laws, communications and transportation technologies, social conventions, shared values, and much more. The restructuring is well underway. In many respects the Information Age parallels human adolescence.
The defining feature of childhood is physical development, when the individual grows to approach full physical size. A salient feature of adolescence is the reorientation and restructuring of the personality, and thinking and relationships to the surrounding world. As physical growth plateaus, the adolescent directs their developmental efforts to training body and mind with skills and an education, reaching out to explore the world, and reorienting their web of social connections diametrically away from the nurturing nuclear family toward the indifferent wider world, in search of a romantic partner and a role in adult society. They build connections with the surrounding world and take on responsibilities. Eventually, in maturity the individual lives out and actualizes their spiritual potential, making a contribution to society in a career and/or raising a family and a next generation. Human society on earth, if it can successfully develop to its potential, may be headed toward a centuries distant Solar-Age maturity, hardly imaginable today and not my concern here.
Analogous early, middle and late developmental stages can be observed in the development of plants, insects, reptiles, mammals, humans and organizations. Butterflies present the clearest example, restructuring in the pupa stage, but many organisms transform themselves for reproductive maturity once they reach full size. Parallels can be drawn with business development models and with the phase changes of solid, liquid and gas.
Society’s information age restructuring manifests in technological, institutional, cultural, and other relational developments, transformational but with minimal dependency on material expansion. Human society’s continued physical expansion, in the form of consumerism, has limits. The environment can not support the extension of wealthy-country living standards to the entire world’s population. Ultimately, consumerist values must wane and society must and I believe will find a higher common purpose. There’s a cost-benefit logic to and impetus behind reorienting development away from never ending physical growth toward structural reform. And there’s a metamorphic quality to the diametric quality of this reorientation.
Society’s metamorphosis involves communications and transportation technologies, globalization of economies, cultures and governance. It involves restructuring humankind’s relationship with it natural environment. It involves rethinking and upgrading the institutions and relationships by which we are connected, especially governance institutions and conventions. As human society matures through the information age it will increasingly develop intellectually, informationally and structurally as material expansion levels off. The internet has already dramatically upgraded society’s informational structure and store of and access to knowledge. Globally, a new coherent structure is emerging, aligning around shared interests and threats and responsibility for our planetary environment in the face of environmental pressures. Globalization and cultural convergence are harmonizing us as members of a more unified planetary society. The metamorphic turn to structural and informational development touches every aspect of society’s continued evolution.
Humanity’s collective task in the information age, instead of being centered around economic growth and expansion, concerns the rationalization, streamlining and balancing of all those systems and institutions, formal and informal, public and private, which give order to our society. Of central importance to this endeavor are our governance institutions, formal, informal, public and private, which connect and weave us together through laws, regulations, and conventions. While humanity seems to have mastered manufacturing, now in many ways a science, much of governance remains dysfunctional. Political systems compete for primacy around the globe, including democratic, oligarchic, military, and religious. Being ripe for redesign, governance offers great opportunities for societal development and improvement. I hopefully imagine we will someday, probably centuries into the future, figure out and adopt best governance practices and relational institutions and structures and thus mature through adolescence as a system.
Structural reforms might also be able to address the waste of human spirit in alienation, a plague of modern life mainfesting in an epidemic of lonliness and sense of pessimism, meaninglessness, and apathy in civic life. People find meaning by being a part of the human project, and if that project is metamorphosis rather than unending consumerism, then societal metamorphosis will provide humanity with a shared sense of purpose. Can the institutions and conventions of human society solve the problem of alienation, to heighten human vitality and flourishing, enabling more people to achieve greater potential? Such structural reforms address the great still untapped potential for societal development, without involving economic expansion.
If this three-phase holistic developmental pattern – material, relational, and spiritual (matter, information and energy)– applies to society, then we may predict both the necessity and direction of transformative change in society’s extended information age adolescence and some of what will be its wide and profound changes. Appreciating that societal metamorphosis arises naturally out of developmental forces inherent in organic maturation provides context and clarity for many of the disruptive and/or chaotic developments we witness today. Once our formal and informal institutions become largely rationalized and restructured, human society may again metamorphose into some mature solar phase, to actualize its spiritual potential, a subject not to be considered here. Nor do I do explore the world’s ills and injustices with prescriptions for change. I can only suggest that as we collectively begin looking beyond materialistic values and work toward improved relational structures, as I believe we are in process of doing, that we are following a natural path of adolescent development and societal progress.
My thesis is speculative, residing beyond the reach of scientific proof or disproof. But phenomenological evidence supports it, and a metaphorical model of organic development explains it.