If human society is undergoing a metamorphosis, we would expect to see both profound changes in its developmental direction, as well as the emergence of new societal phenomena at a meta level. We see both. The development of human society in the information age shows a shift in emphasis from material development to development along a structural dimension, developments that have an informational quality. And there’s a new cohesiveness emerging at the structural and informational level in human society as a global system.
In physics, general relativity builds on the idea that all things can be viewed from (at least) three aspects, those of matter, energy and information, the three principal aspects, like dimensions, ever present everywhere. General systems theory, too, distinguishes matter, energy and information in breaking down complete systems into subsystems that process primarily matter, information, energy or a combination. In mammalian and insect physiology, most animals concentrate their nerve-sense organs, operating primarily electrically, in the head. Circulation and breathing, heart and lungs, operating rhythmically are located in a mid-section thorax or chest cavity. Most of the chemically based organs needed for digestion, blood work, and so forth are located in an abdomen or comparable body section. And yet, being holistic, in mammals, chemical digestion starts in the mouth, and the sense of touch covers the body. The three-way categorization is never clear cut but only a matter of emphasis, since everywhere all cells contain chemical, rhythmic and electrical processes.
Human society can be partitioned into separate realms of economy, dealing with material basis of life, government and law, which produce nothing but concern the structure of society, and culture, including science and religion, dealing with spiritual matters. Again, the realms are not clear cut but holistically interpenetrating, and every person deals with material, governance and spiritual matters, everywhere. And yet the analysis has practical applications, for example newspapers generally devote separate sections to business, arts and culture, and world and local affairs which generally concern governance matters. So there is something about this partition to be recognized and real.
Less widely acknowledged, if at all, we can also find a dynamic version of this tri-partite analysis, attributing primarily material, informational and dynamic qualities to early, middle and late stages of development or maturation across many types of systems. A caterpillar, busies itself eating, growing physically, and oriented to the earth. It climbs half way to the sky, often in the crook of a branch, cocoons itself as a pupa, dissolves its structure and transforms it to emerge as a butterfly, hardly eating anything, oriented to the sky, scent and color, reaching for its full potential in the spiritual business of reproduction. Companies often develop from an initial early pioneer phase in which the founder grows the business up from nothing. But at a certain stage it becomes too big and complex for the pioneer to micromanage. A formal governance structure is put in place and it enters a “scientific management” phase. Eventually, in its mature phase, if the company develops that far, the organization may decentralize its structure to simplify and improve minor decision making and empower individuals far from the executive suite, not only raising productivity but also enlivening the morale (enthusiasm, vitality, spirit) across all workers.
form, the caterpillar Human society on earth is maturing into a similar middle-phase developmental stage. We’ve made great strides in understanding the material world over the last few centuries, insofar as we can now identify and manipulate most everything down to sub-atomic particles. I dare say we’ve learned the bulk of what we’re ever going to learn about materiality, other than at sub-atomic and astronomical frontiers. But our societal structures, from governance institutions to communications technologies and conventions, are either in dynamic flux or in sore need of reconfiguration. Across the world we see various governance styles vying for supremacy — democratic, oligarchic, autocratic, religious, militaristic — with none the clear winner. As we enter and pass through the information age, our developmental task will be to design and build best governance practices and communications conventions guiding not only how we relate and are connected with each other through government laws, cultural institutions and conventions, but also how we relate to our natural environment and to future generations insofar as we bequeath them a changed environment, debts and institutional and hard infrastructures.
The metamorphosis has begun. The evidence is everywhere.
The Environmental Movement:
Humankind is awakening to its need to nurture rather than exploit the planet’s natural environment, a diametric masculine-to-feminine reorientation in our attitude and approach to the the relationship. This wide and growing recognition of this need to change course is emblematic of humankind’s adolescent metamorphosis. Humanity is beginning to take responsibility for its impact on its surroundings, for the sustainability of the planet’s environment and natural resources. In human adolescence, such a taking on of responsibilities for oneself and surroundings is a hallmark of the transition into adulthood. Until the mid-20th century the planet’s environment and resources were widely viewed as limitless, but global warming and climate change have by now proved the opposite. In the early decades of the information age Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”, 1962, and the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth”, 1972, brought the matter into mass awareness. From exploitation to nurturing, limitless to bounded, the relationship of humankind to its surroundings is metamorphosing.
A similar thesis forms the basis of Ulrich Beck’s “The Metamorphosis of the World”, 2016, wherein he argues from a purely sociological perspective that the gathering threats from climate change and environmental degradation are aligning thoughts and values globally into a new coherent consciousness. Beck limits his argument to sociology, but the metamorphosis reaches deeper and broader to include also the material and especially institutional accoutrements that global humanity has created and depends upon.
Female Empowerment:
Along with the feminization of humanity’s relationship to its natural environment, women are closing the gap with respect to men in their command of resources, political power and influence, especially in more affluent countries, signaling an unwinding and possible inversion of a still broadly prevailing patriarchal reality. Gathering momentum around mid-20th century, near the dawn of the information age, many factors came together to reset the gender balance. Career opportunities opened for women beyond the traditional nurturing professions of teaching and nursing. New technologies obviated the need for physical strength in some lines of work and chipped away at the need for laboriously acquired clerical skills in others. The pill freed women from the inevitability of childrearing responsibilities (Claudia Goldin, 2002). Domestic appliances freed time for women to enter the workforce and empowered men to more equally share in household chores, blurring the traditional difference between domestic gender roles.
Liquid Society:
Human society is liquifying. The institutional arrangements and conventions that connect people are loosening and shifting from the physical to the virtual plane. Before automobiles flooded the planet families used to live for lifetimes as neighbors, and most people never moved from the city or far from where they grew up. Car culture and migration to the suburbs spread in the 1950s as the information aged began to appear, and now with cheap air travel, families and childhood friends disperse globally. Work, family and social relationships have become unanchored geographically.
Social structure is liquifying, to where we all float in a sea of virtual connections. The telephone arrived in the 19th C., but in 1940 only about 36% of US households had them. Telephones became widespread and essential in advanced countries as the information age took off and now cell phones, untethered to land lines, are ubiquitous globally. Many jobs are now purely digital and more than a few are performed remotely and entirely virtually.
Zygmunt Bauman in “Liquid Modernity” (1999) characterizes our modern world as dominated by insecurity, uncertainty and individualism. Unanchored and insecure, we float, headed where we hardly know. Cut off and isolated from each other we wallow in individualism, according to Bauman. Christopher Lasch made much the same argument in his 1979 book “The Culture of Narcissism”, arguing that this inward turn has broad sociological impacts. And Hanna Arendt’s “The Human Condition” (1975) similarly argues that modernity leaves a shrunken arena for individuals to participate in public life, with the result that they increasingly turn inward and become mere consumers. We have become disconnected from our neighbors.
Many of society’s sociological problems today arise from this disconnection from place. People become isolated and lonely and lose the sense of community, and with it a sense of social responsibility. Despair, depression and mental illness have become a widespread health concern. Nuclear families fall apart, and divorce and single parent households have become commonplace, whereas both were relatively uncommon before the 1950s.
These social problems, however, point toward how society might structurally evolve for the better. If we can find ways to address alienation through structural reform of society’s formal and informal institutions, either with new social technologies or incentives or conventions at work or in socializing to rebuild community, we might be able to dramatically improve human life on earth at minimal material cost. To the extent that maturation implies learning, perhaps this is where societal development is headed.
Society’s liquification in the information age has an intriguing parallel in physical state transitions. Liquids are information saturated in the sense that they pick up and propagate vibrations particularly well and are therefore far better at storing information than solid or gaseous states. Before automobiles, when people stayed put, society more closely resembled a solid state. Again, the ease of communications in liquid society holds promise for rebuilding community and pulling people out of their isolation and alienation.
Globalization:
Globalization, the global integration both of economies and cultures, became a dominant phenomenon in mid-20th century. A higher order coherence in global human society is emerging. In human development, adolescence is a time when a child’s individuality begins to take shape and their personality starts to cohere as they focus their energies along a individually distinctive path in life. It’s also a time of socialization and acculturation when adolescents learn to conform with common conventions and fit into wider social norms.
Cosmopolitan urban centers increasingly spread and merge ethnic cultures from around the world. In this regard the major cities of the world are becoming similarly cosmopolitan and increasingly alike everywhere. The mingling of cultures, religions and ethnicities promotes familiarity, understanding and tolerance and from this comes reduced friction and conflict. This eases cooperation operates at all levels, from the individual to the group and nation.
Consumerist aspirations are much the same globally.
Media access and internet cultural offering are becoming increasingly alike globally, as movies and music increasingly play to and reach international audiences.
Best business practices and technologies have similarly spread and been adopted quickly around the world.
English has become the common language of business and international affairs, tightening the ties among institutions and people around the world.
The US dollar has become a global currency, bringing efficiencies and unity to the global system.
Globalization is bringing efficiencies, but also a loss of diversity, an increase in entropy.
International and global institutions have appeared. The United Nations was founded in 1948, and numerous international associations followed, with narrowed focus on everything from trade to environmental protection to cultural exchange and much more. Trade blocks and regional associations, such as the European Community, Common Market and European Union grew out of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, knitting European economies increasingly together. Other regional blocks with regional agreements have appeared since mid-20th century.
Europe has achieved significant unity since WWII. Military conflict between France and Germany is no longer imaginable. Around the world fewer national rivalries divide us than did under 19th century colonialism, nationalism and isolationism. Obvious points of cleavage and friction of course still remain.
The global existential threats of nuclear war and environmental destruction and have brought countries together since the 1950s to address their common interests. The problems remain but at least some agreement has been achieved. Mass migration is becoming another such global problem threat, the result of climate change, wars, social chaos and economic inequalities, and facilitated by the ease of global travel and the global awareness of opportunities.
A higher order of global society is emerging, but in what sense does this represent an adolescence? Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist wrote in 2023: “… during your adolescence a key brain region [is] still being constructed, shaped by socialization and acculturation.”, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. Just as globalization smooths the frictions between nations and cultures, socialization and acculturation in adolescence melds adolescents together toward social norms with social pressures.
The smoothing and blending is not so complete that adolescents and national cultures lose their individual identities, but enough melding occurs to suggest emergence of higher order coherence. Socialization melds adolescents together with conformist norms, but neither globalization nor adolescent socialization and acculturation deny national, ethnic, religious or individual identities.
As with globalization, human adolescence involves taking on responsibilities, for ourselves and those around us. Global human society is coming to grips with environmental threats and the realization that we share what’s become a small planet. Human society is recognizing it’s need to take responsibility for its collective environmental impact. Adolescence is also a dangerous and risky time, when behaviors can run amok, not unlike we are seeing wars and disfunction plague humanity around the world right now.
Global human society is being knit tighter into a unified system and the links are generally more cooperative than not, for that is where long-term mutual benefit lies. Of course nations and individuals still behave opportunistically, belligerently and selfishly, ignoring over arching environmental and other considerations, but such narrowly self-interested behaviors are called out, shamed and sometimes penalized. Multinational and transnational institutions, public and private, blossomed in the latter 20th Century, based on such cooperation. While globalization and transnational cooperation may be backsliding at the moment (onshoring, friend shoring, near shoring of manufacturig), as democratic and autocratic nations and political parities line up in opposing camps for their individual selfish interests, the bigger picture and longer time frame show cooperation to be growing among nations. The same goes for individuals and groupings of individuals, despite the recently polarizations.
Decentralization and the Flattening of Hierarchies:
Social stratifications by race, gender, ethnicity and religion are gradually dissolving. Individuals from formerly lower status groups are demanding and receiving a good measure of equality, at least in Western countries. People are increasingly learning to respect, approach and relate to each other as equals, independent of social status. The social structure is flattening, with social differences among people fading. Diversity, equity and inclusion programs support the trend, but more significantly, reflect it.
As contemporary management theories advise, leading corporations and other institutions where possible are decentralizing authority and decision making down the chain of command. Decisions made at the shop floor or consumer interface can better respond to local conditions. Delegating authority down the chain of command reduces the need for and streamlines the flow of information up and down the hierarchy. Decentralized decision making relieves leaders of micromanagement tasks, empowers mid-level and line employees, thereby boosting morale and productivity, and produces win-win efficiencies for the entire organization. Institutional hierarchies become more horizontal, less vertical, and authority extended centrifugally to the periphery instead of concentrated centripetally at the top. The shift marks a fundamental and polar reorientation of organizational structures.
Even the nuclear family is losing some of it’s hierarchical structure. Children are increasingly influenced by online media and become less responsive to parental influence. Father and mother play increasingly similar roles at home, including with child rearing. All family relationships have become more equal, as compared with the father-knows-best and children-are-meant-to-be seen-but-not-heard attitudes of not so long ago.
This flattening of hierarchies is metamorphic in its diametric reorientation of relationship and status structures across society. It has a parallel in adolescence in that when children become adolescents, the parental and school authorities that ruled their worlds hierarchically take a step back and children become more subject to influence by peers.
Demographics:
World population growth accelerated in the late 18th and throughout the Industrial Revolution but is now decelerating as we proceed through the Information Age, seemingly headed toward a level global population of about 10 billion people. Human society as a living system appears to be approaching full size in its complement of human beings, similar to how an human reaches full size in adolescence. Diametric reversals, in this case from accelerating to decelerating population growth, are typical of middle phase metamorphoses.
Urbanization is a salient feature of 21st century demographics around the world. In the US the urban population is already over 80% and in Japan over 90%. In 2018 some 55% of global population was living in urban areas in according to a UN analysis which forecast that number to be 68% by 2050. Urban population percentage began rising steadily in the mid-19th C in the US, but in most of the world including China and India it started accelerating after the mid-20th C. While urbanization metrics differ across countries and contexts, the data clearly show global society is now predominantly urban, in contrast with the predominantly agrarian and rural character of societies of the 1800’s. The densification that comes with urbanization adds manifold complexities to the structural web of connections among people and complexification is a key attribute of societal restructuring in the information age. Human adolescence is a time of manifold complexification as the child awakens inwardly to the vast world outside the confines of school and nuclear family.
Similarly caterpillars experience an inner densification and complexification when they retreat into the pupa to develop the structure the eventually emerges as a butterfly, as do flowering plants when they turn from further extending their branching structure and instead develop inwardly to develop the organs of the flower in support of procreative maturity. Cities are seemingly the mature form of human society, emerging from the innocence of rural childhood. Cities breed ideas and culture, and adolescence is the time when humans begin to explore such things. They are the natural form for global society in its adolescence and maturity.
The Nature of Work: a change of employment from manufacturing to services and the expansion of government.
Already in the industrial age a shift appeared in employment and output from agriculture to manufacturing, but in the information age services came to dominate, at least in advanced economies. Service industries serve customer relationships whereas manufacturing transforms physical materials. In 1840 22% of US jobs were in services. Services employed over 50% by 1930 and by 2015, 83%. [“Our World in Data”, based on Herrendorf et. al 2014.] This shift in economic production from making things to servicing relationships lines up with the metamorphosis from childhood to adolescence, from a developmental material centered early phase to a relationship centered middle phase.
Government, another sector not producing material output but concerned with how people and institutions are structured and connected, grew dramatically in both the breadth and depth of its reach in the US during the 20th century. By taking on social security, welfare programs, healthcare, education and civil rights enforcement, the Federal government extended its influence to individuals throughout society. By expanding its regulatory roles, it became omnipresent in all aspects of the economy. By taking the lead in building transportation infrastructure it streamlined how goods and people connect in the physical plane. Entering into international organizations and agreements built relationships globally. An increasing role in science research and education represented government’s extension into the cultural realm, a realm of spiritual output, as opposed to the production of material goods or servicing judicial or regulatory functions and relationships. With government’s expanded roles, Presidential and executive branch powers expanded. All these governmental roles and developments accelerated mid-century at the beginning of the information age. At the state and municipal level, the mid-20th century saw the expansion of employment in many Western countries, driven by the need for increased government services. Adolescence is a time when a child takes on more self-governance responsibility, directing themselves out into the world, but also learning to inwardly manage their emotions and impulses and to organize their thoughts. The increasing role and significance of government is appropriate for human society undergoing adolescence. Government and governance, and their restructuring, are of central concern as we proceed through society’s information age adolescence. They offer much room for improvement and progress, at perhaps minimal material cost.
Digitalization:
Digitalization quintessentially characterizes the information age. It has fostered a new layer of internet connections by which most everything is readily accessible to all everywhere all the time, thereby complexifying and reconfiguring how the various pieces of human society are connected and interact. We now leave digital footprints, extensive and public, that may last forever. Systematic record keeping has been with us since at least Ancient Egypt, but digital record keeping is now so rich as to become a parallel reality, like a multidimensional shadow but more extensive than the reality itself because it is stored and accumulates. Just as globalization has introduced a meta-level of unifying structure to global human society, so too has digitalization. The phenomenon is metamorphic in its emergence.
In what sense is it adolescent? Digitalization is restructuring how society works, and restructuring is characteristic of a middle-stage development. Inasmuch as the internet is broadly accessible it is integrative across society, another characteristic of middle-stage development. Adolescence is a time to for education, a time to assemble a stock of knowledge to be put to use later, just as like digitalization accumulates human knowledge in the cloud.
Substitution of Information for Materiality
Manufactured goods, both consumer and industrial, are being constantly redesigned to economize on material inputs while incorporating new technologies and increased functionality. The evolution of material goods along the information dimension as opposed to the physical dimension lines up with what we would expect in middle-stage development and societal adolescence.
Material goods have been getting smaller and lighter, adding portability while saving on material costs, but also economizing on storage and transport costs. Plastics replace metals, fiberglass and aluminum replace steel, and so forth. Manufacturing processes are being constantly tweaked for improved efficiency. Computer chips and technology add information based functionality at minimal additional cost.
For example, cars are now far smaller, lighter weight and vastly improved technologically than they were in the first part of the 20th century. Small European cars, especially VW Beatles became a anti-status status symbol in the 1960s, and then Japanese and other imports forced the American car makers to add compacts to their lineups, reducing the average size of cars on the road. Solid steel frames have been replaced with lighter weight honeycomb structures. Fiberglass and plastics have replaced steel. Chrome bumpers and trim gave way to plastics. Meanwhile, micro-chips enabled addition of countless entertainment, comfort and safety features, to where a Honda Fit today offers in many ways a better driving experience than a Cadillac from mid-20th century, at a fraction the weight. Admittedly, there’s been a counter-trend demand for larger SUVs and pick-ups, serving status and safety needs and complicating the underlying trend substitution of information for materiality, but the overall trend across manufactured goods is nonetheless undeniable.
Communication technologies exhibit the same trend. Telecommunications substitute for the physicality and expense of mailing letters or traveling to meetings. Cell phones do away wired infrastructure, the internet is replacing cable, and wifi replaces wired connections for the end user.
Forms of money have been dematerializing and adding information content since the beginning of the 20th century, and are becoming largely virtual. Paper currency first replaced silver and gold coins, adding serial numbers and information content while reducing weight and materiality. At first paper currency was convertible into gold and silver, then merely backed by gold and silver, and finally backed only by the faith and credit of the US government, i.e. it became fiat currency. Coins are being made with reduced metal content and less precious materials. Now credit cards and digital platforms are replacing paper currency and coins, while conveying and semi-permanently storing greatly expanded information content dovetailed into accounting programs. How crypto will play out as currency has yet to be determined.
Consumerism and Rising Living Standards
By a range of measures (extreme poverty, basic education, literacy, democracy, vaccination, child mortality), standards of living accelerated around the world starting around the 1950s, led by China and India. (Our World in Data, Gates Foundation, based on World Bank (2016) and Morrisson (2002)). The share of world population living in extreme poverty declined from about 70% in 1950 to less than 10% in 2015. Along with rising living standards, the nature of consumption is changing. In wealthy countries, too, living standards accelerated after 1950 (https://eh.net/encyclopedia/a-history-of-the-standard-of-living-in-the-united-states/).
Whereas consumption in extreme poverty purely addresses material survival, once a middle class lifestyle is achieved, it starts to address material comfort but then status. Status is a relational good, established in relation to one’s contemporaries. As we enter the information age, this shift in the nature of consumption and living standards, from material consumption to consumption of relational goods dovetails nicely with society’s metamorphosis in the information age. We’re also seeing that the younger generations in wealthier countries are increasingly turning their consumption habits away from material good, whether to serve survival, comfort or status needs, and toward travel, adventure and experiences generally, i.e. spiritual goods, in keeping with society’s overall maturation.
Emergent Cooperation
A key marker of metamorphic change would be a shift in the general tenor of human interaction across society, somehow indicated, from opportunistic to cooperative. Most human interactions naturally incline to cooperation, but competitive opportunism is also always present, perhaps encouraged in our day and age by materialistic values and corporate culture (Christopher Lasch, “A Culture of Narcisism”, 1979). Of course cooperation and competition go together like centrifugal and centripetal forces, sometimes in balance but sometimes not. Perhaps the cooperation/competition balance will be shifting toward more cooperative behaviors over the course of humanity’s information age adolescence.
Humankind’s exploitation of the planetary environment now threatens its sustainability on many levels, but we’ve begun to redress this balance in search for a more stable, balanced and cooperative relationship with our natural surroundings. Rising feminine empowerment, and with it the elevation of matriarchal vs. patriarchal values suggests a more nurturing and cooperative tenor to human interactions. Stephen Pinker has documented a decline in violence and war across global human societies. Falling murder and crime rates suggest a more harmonious society. Ben Friedman documented increasing tolerance, generosity and cooperative behavior to be associated with rising income and wealth. Apparently tolerance and cooperation are luxury goods, once survival is established.
Some of this increasingly cooperative less opportunistic behavior can be attributed a changing cost/benefit calculus. The loss of privacy makes it harder to hide illegal behaviors, as do increasingly sophisticated policing technologies. The increasing availability and transparency of information via digitalization and the internet levels the playing field of conflict or disagreement, reducing information advantage as a major incentive to opportunistic behavior. The increasing availability and lethality of guns in civil society and arms in international conflicts raise the costs to non-cooperative behaviors.
In game theory a marked and discontinuous shift from opportunistic to cooperative behaviors naturally arises in a basic prisoner’s dilemma game situation when opposing sides after repeated iterations can signal and then establish trust. Without trust, only the opportunistic outcomes are stable, but if trust can be established, a cooperative solution can take hold and become stable, to mutual benefit. Cooperation builds on shared information, communication and trust, and technologies facilitate them all.
Perhaps human society at various levels is becoming more transparent with the internet and digital records, will learn how to build trust and become more cooperative, smoothing human interactions, reducing frictions and benefiting all parties. Evolutionary biologists posit that naturally metamorphic path is how social insects evolved their cooperative habits, and that the same holds true for how socialization and cooperative behaviors evolved in many species, including mammals and humans (David Axelrod, ) Is there such a dramatic shift in store as part of humankind’s adolescent metamorphosis? Will global humanity’s emerging coherence involve increasingly cooperative human behavior?
To the extent human society evolves a cooperative coherence as it proceeds through the information age, institutions and interpersonal relations would run more efficiently, smoothly, with less friction, and presumably better outcomes. Society might be able to reduce resources devoted to policing, military, the judiciary, and similarly at an interpersonal level save time and resources. To the extent mental illness and alienation are widespread social problems, perhaps they will diminish.
Part of maturation in humans and a task for adolescence involves socialization and learning how to cooperate with others, to settle differences without fighting, cooperatively rather than forcefully. Were human society on earth to achieve such a structural development, it would represent a signal achievement for societal adolescence in the information age and perhaps mark the completion of society’s information age adolescence, and its maturation into solar age maturity.