The information age is middle stage developmental phase for human society on earth, a time when material expansion and growth approach natural physical limits, and the axis of development pivots to integration and structural transformation. The industrial age has brought human society to near physical maturity in the sense that the planet is now flooded with consumer goods and resource depletion, including air and water resources, and environmental degradation are constraining continued material growth. For sure many people still suffer material deprivation and lack basic housing and modern conveniences, but private vehicles and household durables are more common and widespread than not. For sure such conveniences can be imbued with more technology, information and sophistication, as would be appropriate in an information age, but as physical objects, they are now abundant.
Population growth leveling as human society approaches its full material extension: With population growth slowing and diminishing potential to increase the average material standard of living, society’s developmental focus in search for progress must turn, by necessity, to improving the relational and informational aspects of human society, how we interface with each other and with the planet’s natural environment via communications technologies and governance institutions. Such progress includes imbedding technology, i.e. information, in the products and physical output of our economy. And with the increasingly efficient use of materials, we will in many cases have to shrink material intensity of living standards, reduce our carbon footprint, eventually reaching a sustainable relationship with the planet’s natural environment. Kenneth Boulding has suggested we reconceive Gross National Product as Gross National Waste, the amount of materiality we consume to get through the year. The task of unwinding our consumerist values is but one of the challenges we face as a society trying to mature through adolescence.
Maturity not guaranteed: Furthermore, life is inherently risky and many living beings never reach maturity. Maturation depends on both internal and external environmental factors, but the possibility lies inherent in the immature form. Most human now do, but not long ago many perished in childbirth or from childhood diseases or as youth fighting wars.
Snippets
As adolescents socialize and acculturate, their generation comes to take on its own character, its own higher-order coherence. Generations cohere into their own sub-systems with distinct values and ways of behaving.
Emergence: Emergent feminism, cooperation, other
Break point, fail safe, discontinuity.
Ice caps melting.
Nuclear proliferation.
Ubiquity of cell phones and internet access.
Declining population below replacement in China, Europe, elsewhere
Inflection Points:
Living standards in US
Life expectancy in US.
Out-of wedlock births in US
Notes to self:
Themes and Arenas
Diametric reorientation, evolving cooperation/consciousness, dematerialization, liquification/decentralization/unification.
Realms of individual experience, governance at local to international levels, corporate and private institutional hierarchies, raw capital, culture and mores.
Systems may come into being or cease to exist, and it is the mid-18th Century simultaneous flourishing of industrial capitalism, colonialism, democracy, science and concomitant transformations throughout society that mark global human society’s current incarnation in my view and for purposes of understanding its metamorphosis in the information age.
Date the beginning of the information age from Post WWI, with the coming of IBM, the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the Interstate Highway System (economic turnpike theorem) and Levittown, in Nassau County, NY, planned and constructed from 1947 to 1951. Named after the firm Levitt & Sons, Inc. founded by Abraham Levitt, the settlement was built for returning World War II veterans and is today considered one of the first mass-produced suburbs in the country. Levittown brought about a new post-war culture emphasizing conformity and uniformity, with many women returning from their manufacturing jobs during the war to a more traditional motherly role.