If human society is undergoing a metamorphosis, we can expect both profound changes in its developmental direction and the emergence of new societal phenomena at a meta level. We see both. The character of societal development in the information age is indeed shifting in emphasis from the material to a structural dimension. Social structure is informational insofar as it can be described in informational terms, stripped of its material basis and fixed in time, without movement or consumption or emitance of energy. A legal code can be defined in purely informational terms, while it structures society. It may evolve over time and change, but in the moment it lacks dynamism. It is fixed. It may be written down in a physical book and require physical aparatus for enforcement, but the code itself is purely informational. At the global level, treaties, business rules of conduct, and formal and informal conventions are settling into common agreement. A new cohesiveness is emerging at the structural and informational level in human society as a global system. A new global order is emerging out of economic and cultural globalization, a global restructuring. To better understand this transformation let us step back to appreciate the holism of matter, information and energy that course through the universe, and further, recognize the sequential pattern of growth and development that commonly appears within these holisms.
In physics, general relativity expresses the unity of matter, information and energy in the equation e=Mc2, finding both a unity and a tripartite division. The universal constant, c, the speed of light, a unit of information, stands between and connects matter and energy. The three dimensions are both separable and united. Matter, energy and information are ever present everywhere.
The theory of general systems keys off this analysis and insight in analyzing both physical and living systems in terms of how they process matter, information and energy or some combination of these. Living beings, from bacteria to people, take energy from their surroundings and process it, process information sensed from their surroundings, and exist as physical beings. Individual cells contain subsystems to metabolize fuel and process energy, grow and exist physically, and process information sensed from the surroundings. Insects and mammals have digestive systems to physically and chemically process fuel, nerve-sense systems to electrically process sensory inputs received from the environment. The digestive organs, operating chemically and physically, and generally located in an abdoman, although digestion starts withj saliva in the mouth, for humans. Most never-sense organs are located in the head — taste, smell, sight, hearing — but the touch organ, skin, covers the entire body. Thinking and nerve-sense activity is thus located primarily in the head, but occurs to a lesser extent in every cell of the body. Between head and abdoman is the chest or thoraz, where lungs pump in air and oxegen from the outside enviroment and the heart pumps blood internally. The pumping is rhythmic, and rhythm has an informational, structural quality. Every cell of the body lives rhythmicly, if for no other reason than it is rhythmically connected to the blood stream. The heart’s activity can characterized in terms of a pulse rate, lung activity in breaths per minute. These are numbers, i.e. information. Notice that these organs , heart and lungs, are located physically between head and abdomen in the thorax, intermediating between the locus of chemical and electrical organs, as the speed of light intermediates matter and energy in relativity. Notice another polarity, that the head is enclosed in a bone casing, the abdoman lacks boney protection, and the rib cage encases the thorax rhythmically. The three-way categorization is never clear cut but appears only as a matter of emphasis. The overall system is holistic, and every part is patterned on the whole. The earth spins through day and night, rhytmically alternating the power of the sun’s energy in opposition to the earth’s gravitational pull. All life on earth lives in this rhythmic environment of material and energy forces.
Newspapers generally have core sections for current affairs, business and culture, in addition to other feature sections. Newspapers, an informational organ, primarily follow the world of current events and the work of government. The business section focuses around the economy and the material basis of society. The arts and sciences sections report on these spiritual activities; spiritual activites comprise much more than arts and sciences, for example education and religion. Insofar as the economy is grounded in the material sustenance of society, goverance in its relational structure, and culture in its spiritual or dynamic actualization, a natural division of the holism takes shape. The arts can be a business and business an art and all institutions involve physical presence, spiritual activity and governance structures. Indeed, every person deals with material, and spritual existance as well as governance issues. The economic, goverance and spiritual realms are not clear cut but holistically interpenetrating. But economy, government and the spiritual sphere, which includes not only the arts but also science, education, religion, and more, locate the emphasis of these types of activities in human society. That newspapers find this division of societal affairs into those related to goverance, economics and culture is indicative of the reality of this holistic reality and the usefulness of the analysis and model.
Less widely acknowledged, if at all, we can also find a dynamic version of this tri-partite analysis, attributing qualitiess of primarily material, informational and dynamic emphasis 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, minimally disturbing its material surroundings. Oriented to the sky, scent and color, it reaches for its full potential in a spiritual quest for 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 the company becomes too big and complex for the pioneer motivator to micromanage, and a formal governance structure is put in place. The company enters a “scientific management” phase, characterized by this organizational structure. Eventually, if the company develops to a further stage, it may decentralize its employment structure to simplify and improve decision, empowering individuals far from the executive suite, therebyt not only raising productivity with more timely and precisely tailored decisions, but also enlivening the morale, enthusiasm, vitality and spirit of its workforce.
Human society on earth is maturing into a similar middle-phase developmental stage. Since the dawn of the industrial age in the 18th Cenbury we’ve made great strides in understanding the material world, inasmuch as we can now identify, manipulate, rearrange, redesign and rebuild most all of materiality 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, astronomical and biological 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 yet appearing as 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. The wide and growing recognition of this need to change course and adopt nurturing values is emblematic of humankind’s adolescent metamorphosis. Humanity is awakening to its impact on the planet’s environment, and from this recognition beginning to take responsibility. In the early decades of the information age Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring” in 1962, and the Club of Rome published “Limits to Growth” in 1972, bringing the matter to mass awareness.
Like in human adolescence, such a taking on of responsibilities for oneself and one’s surroundings is a hallmark of the transition into maturity and 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 contrary. 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 gathering threats from climate change and environmental degradation are aligning thoughts and values globally into a new coherent consciousness. Beck confines his argument to sociological relations and structures, but the metamorphosis can be shown to reach deeper and broader, to include also the material and especially institutional dimensions of human society. Many of society’s key relational institutions are either being completely redirected or inverting.
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 structures and conventions that long connected people are disolving and shifting from the physical to the virtual plane. Before automobiles flooded the planet, a pattern accelerating in the 1950s, families used to live for lifetimes as neighbors, and most people never moved far from where they grew up. Car culture and migration to the suburbs spread in the mid-20th Century, and now with inexpensive air travel, families and childhood friends disperse globally. Work, family and social relationships have become unanchored geographically. The telephone arrived in the 19th C., but in 1940 only about 36% of US households had them. They obviated the need for face-to-face contact, in business and social life. Now they are ubiquitous globally and as essential to a full life as an arm or leg. With the addition of messaging and email, people now communicate primarily virtually, even while in the same room. Jobs have become largely or entirely digital and many are performed remotely. Inserty AI into the mix and even the virtual connection becomes intermediated and more tenuous.
Many of society’s sociological problems today arise from this disconnection from place. Isolated people become lonely, lose the sense of commnity and with it a sense of social responsibility. Despair, depression and mental illness have become a widespread health concern. (cite government report) Nuclear families drift apart, and divorce and single parent households have become commonplace, whereas both were relatively uncommon before the 1950s.
Zygmunt Bauman in “Liquid Modernity” (1999) characterizes our modern world as dominated by insecurity, uncertainty and individualism. Unanchored and insecure, we float. Cut off and isolated from each other we turn inward and wallow in individualism, according to Bauman, with broad sociological effect. Others have made a similar point, for example Christopher Lasch in his 1979 book “The Culture of Narcissism”. Hanna Arendt in “The Human Condition” (1975) similarly argues that modernity leaves a shrunken arena for participation in public life, with the result that individuals increasingly turn inward and become mere consumers. Community life, once centered around ties to place, migrates to virtual groups connected by common interests instead of physical surroundings.
It must be within the terms of the information age that any solution to our alienation must lie. Humans are problem solvers, and if the sense of disconnection is a problem of relationships, we should expect humanity to eventually come up with new institutions, technologies, and social structures, in work and in socializing, to rebuild connections. Adolescense is a time of learning.
Are there conventions and incentive structures that can dramatically better human life at minimal material cost, an important consideration for progress in a world bumping up against its material limits? The problem of alienation presents an opportunity for progress and improved life through restructuring. This must be the way forward for society’s maturation. Solving, or at least ameliorating, the problem of alienation must be part of the task of our information age.
Incidentally, 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 solids or gases. Trees communicate physically from root to root through chemical diffusion, but the distance and speed of such communication is limted. By contrast, whales communicate across vast distances in the ocean because their medium is water. Birds communicate across distances, but not so far as whales.
Globalization:
Globalization, the worldwide integration of economies and cultures, became a dominant force in the mid-20th century. While people may feel increasingly unmoored from one another at the individual level, human society as a whole is becoming more interconnected, with a higher-order coherence emerging.
But in what sense does this suggest a metamorphosis, and in what sense is it similar to adolescence? From the young child’s perspective one moment follows another and action lacks coherent plan, other than as supplied externally by parents and teachers. Attention and intention flit widely and quickly. In the sense that nations and peoples across the globe are recognizing they have a common agenda in facing environmental and political threats and economic opportunities, a new coherence is appearing, whether or not they have the will to act on it. An adolescent, too, develops a plan and begins to acts on it, usually and if all goes right.
The threats and opportunities unite us. Environmental exhaustion, nuclear winter, and mass migration have newly since mid-20th century become commonly shared threats facing nearly all nations. The age-old threats of food security and pandemic are becoming less localized and more global due to the supply chain integration and the newly increased global flow of humanity with modern air travel. That these threats are shared globally was brought to mass awareness near the beginning of the information age with the 1973 publication of the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” by Meadow’s at al.
The economic opportunities in globalization vastly expanded in mid-20th Century with technological advances in communication and transportation. While global trade and colonialism have been with us for centuries, the era of multinational corporations only emerged in the 1950s. The law firm Sullivan and Cromwell pioneered the field of international law in representing the United Fruit Company. Then other multinationals emerged and sought their legal services. A body of precedents arose and the field international law was formed. In 1948 the United Nations was founded and numerous other international associations and organizations followed, each focused on specific areas such as trade, environmental protection, cultural exchange, and more, tightening ties among nations. Trade blocs and regional associations, such as the European Community, the Common Market, and the European Union, developed from the 1957 Treaty of Rome and have integrated economies across national borders.
Adolescence is a period of socialization and acculturation, when adolescents learn the common conventions necessary to fit into wider social norms. They build relationships and social structure. As Robert Sapolsky wrote in 2023, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, during adolescence a key brain region is still being constructed, shaped by socialization and acculturation. At the societal level, globalization homogenizes cultural differences, smoothing frictions, and then norms arise. English has become the shared language of global business and international governance. Similarly, adolescence uses socialization and acculturation to bend young people toward social norms through social pressure.
Adolescence involves the taking on of responsibilities, for ourselves, our material surroundings and for those around us. As a society it’s time for humanity to address our shared global threats and to embrace or collective opportunities, to live into our responsibilities. Will we do so? It’s an open-ended question. Adolescence is often volatile and risky, and behaviors can run amok, much like the wars and seeminglyu heightened dysfunction now troubling the world. But most adolescents mature into adulthood, suggesting hopeful possibilities for humanity. The dangers and risks are real, as are the opportunities. There is no reason humanity can awaken to these realities and figure out how to address them, eventually.
Globalization brings increased cooperation, at all levels from the individual in multi-cultural urban settings to nations negotiating from their differing perspectives. Lifestyles are converging worldwide and cultures are homogenizing. We all share the same global media and the internet, with relatively minor differences. Multinational corporations advertise and supply the same consumer goods to all, and our material aspirations and surroundings become increasingly alike. Property developers and architectural firms operate globally and cities increasingly look alike. Urban lifestyles are increasingly multi-ethnic and similar. Businesses adopt the same best practices worldwide in manufacturing, technology and institutional structure. English has become the shared common language and the U.S. dollar a shared global currency. The blending of cultures increases familiarity which then fosters understanding, builds trust and reduces friction and conflict. Trust breeds tolerance and makes cooperation easier.
Cooperation can arise discontinuously and metamorphically. In a simple prisoner’s dilemma matrix in game theory the selfish solution switches naturally and almost inevitably to the cooperative one as time passes, the parties gain experience each other and a threshold of trust is reached. Suddenly what was once a stable cycle of predatory opportunism switches to a mutually beneficial and cooperative one. Given repeated interactions and sufficient time the trust arises, and the cooperative solution appears, initially motivated and then maintained by its practical advantages. This evolutionary process is thought to explain how social insects and other social animals developed their cooperative behaviors. Does such a cooperative transformation lie ahead for humanity, hard as that might be to imagine? Could it be a societal rite of passage into maturity during its adolescence? Even rebellious teenagers often become contributing members of society in adulthood.
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, not to say without pushback and backsliding. The social structure is flattening, and 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 are decentralizing authority and decision making down the chain of command, where pracitcal and possible. It’s a trend that took hold with the management theories of Peter Drucker in mid-20th centuery and may be still in its early stages, advancing and retreating, but the vision and intention are clear. Decisions made at the shop floor or consumer interface can better respond to local situations and conditions. Technologies empowers mid-level and line employees in ways they never had before. Delegating authority down the chain of command streamlines and reduces the need for information flows up and down the hierarchy. Decentralized decision making relieves leaders of micromanagement tasks and boosts morale and productivity down the chain of command, offering win-win efficiencies for the entire organization. Recently corporations and other organizations may be tightening and recentralizing institutional hierarcies, but longer term over a span of decades and across society as a whole the leading institutions have become more horizontal and less vertical in their hierarchical structure, with authority extended centrifugally to the periphery instead of concentrated centripetally at the top. The long-term centrifugal to centripital shift, if it continues, is reflecting a polar and fundamental reorientation for societal institutions.
Even the nuclear family is losing it’s hierarchical structure. Children are increasingly guided by online media and less responsive to parental influence. Father and mother play increasingly similar roles at home, including in child rearing. Family relationships have become more equal, versus the father-knows-best and children-are-meant-to-be seen-but-not-heard attitudes of not so long ago.
The flattening of hierarchies is metamorphic in its diametric reorientation of social structure across society. It has a parallel in adolescence in that as children become adolescents the parental and school authorities that near completely ruled their worlds previously take a step back and children increasingly look to peers for guidance.
Demographics:
World population growth accelerated in the late 18th and throughout the Industrial Revolution and is now decelerating as we proceed through the Information Age, seemingly headed toward a level global population of some 10 billion people. Human society as a living system appears to be approaching full size in its complement of humans, similar to how a person approaches full physical 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 globally. The urban population in the US is already over 80% and in Japan over 90%. Some 55% of global population was urban in 2018 according to a UN study which forecast that number to reach 68% by 2050, i.e. we are still urbanizing. Percentage urban population in the US began rising steadily in mid-19th C, while for most of the world including China and India which comprise over one-third of the world’s population, it started accelerating only after the mid-20th C with advances in hygiene and healthcare. The global shift from a predominantly agrarian society in the industrial age to an urban one in the information age is clear, despite differing statistical methods across countries and contexts. Cities are the mature form of human society, emerging from the innocence of rural childhood.
The densification that comes with urbanization brings with it complexification. Complexification represents a development in the structural plane as opposed to the physical plane. Human interactions in an urban setting are closer and more frequent, facilitating the growth of institutions, i.e. new organs within the body politic. Specialization increases, among institutions and among individals within institutions. Cities breed ideas and culture, and adolescence is the time when humans begin to explore such things. Human adolescence is a time of internal complexification as the child’s physical growth slows and they awaken inwardly, stepping out into the world beyond school and family, while starting to specialize in their education and training.
Similarly, caterpillars go through an inner densification and complexification when they retreat into a pupa to restructure into what eventually emerges as a butterfly. Flowering plants complexify when they diametrically turn from extending their branching structure, i.e. physical growth, to flowering, i.e. developing the internal organs for reproduction. Mammals and other animals restructure internally to develop their reproductive capacity in an adolescence once they approach full physical size. Tadpoles develop into frogs. With plenty of exceptions, mid-phase metamorphoses are the general rule in organic systems.
The Nature of Work: the change in labor, from manufacturing to services and the expansion of government.
As the industrial age got under way in the 17th and 18th centuries employment began to shift from agriculture to manufacturing. In the information age it shifts from manufacturing to services. Service industries build and serve relationships while manufacturing builds physical goods. In 1840 22% of US jobs were in services. By 1930 services employed over 50% and by 2015, 83%. [“Our World in Data”, based on Herrendorf et. al 2014.] The shift from making things to servicing relationships lines up with the model of mid-phase metamorphosis. Society’s development shifts from physical expansion to relational restructuring.
Government, a balooning sector of employment in the US, makes few material things, but provides services and restructures income and wealth through taxes, spending and transfer payments. It is responsible for xx% of US GNP and xx globally. Government buys vast sums of equipment and other supplies for its military and all other agencies, but the goods are produced by the private sector. Governments, from local to national, provide services in performing their legislative, judical and executive functions. Police and military forces provide security through the executive. The executive is responsible for publicly owned natural resources and infrastructure and manages them as a service. Government is responsible for not just clean air and water, nature preserves and mineral resources, but also physical and social infrastructure. It shapes the larger society by determining which services it does and does not provide, shaping the playing field on which people play out their lives. And government redistributes wealth through its taxing and spending.
The net result of taxes and spending, fiscal policy, is a redistribution wealth and income, a restructuring of the society’s ownership of its private resources. Government is thus the central arena of transformation in society’s adolescent information age, both in terms of determining what public goods and services to provide and in shaping the distribution of income and wealth. To some extent the role and shape of government and society can be rationalized, but to some extent it reflects society’s values, particularly in the extent to which it shapes the distribution if income and wealth, thereby opining on fairness, an end result reflecting society’s values.
Beginning in the 1930s with Roosevelt’s New Deal but accelerating in the 1950s and 1960s the US government took on responsibilities for social security, welfare programs, healthcare, education and civil rights enforcement. By expanding its regulatory roles, it became omnipresent in all aspects of the economy, as the umpire in the compeition of economic activity. In building out the interstate highway system it streamlined how goods and people connect in the physical plane. An increasing role in science research and education represented government’s extension into the cultural realm, a realm of spiritual output, as opposed to that of goods or services. Entering into international organizations and agreements builds relationships globally. At the state and municipal level, governance employment expanded rapidly mid-20th century. With government’s expanded roles come responsibilities, and presidential and executive branch powers grew. The growth in all these aspects of government accelerated as the information age got under way.
As population grows and the society accumulates wealth its complexity grows more than proportionally. For example, the number of possible human interactions grows exponentially with the number of people. And as the stock of material goods and social infrastructure grows that requires oversight and regulation too. Together these factors suggest we should not be surprised that government has grown as a share of the economy.
Adolescence is a time when a child takes on responsibility, for themselves, for others and for their surrounding world. They learn, or are supposed to learn and master, self-governance of emotions, organization of thoughts and direction of will. They step out from the nuclear family, taking on responsibilities beyond those required in childhood around the household. They begin to take their place and and find a role in the community and beyond. In many religions and societies, adolescence is marked by rights of passage into maturity. Human society, as it adolesces, also faces new and growing needs for both responsible self-goverance and governance of society’s natural and material surroundings. This growth into our responsibilities must be the central business of our information age. The increasing role and significance of government in society is thus a natural development for human society in this day and age.
Goverance reform clearly offers much room for improvement and progress in today’s world. And we can imagine that it can be done with minimal expenditure of material resources. Technological upgrades and streamling of regulation need not bump up against the environmental pushback that society’s continued material expansion faces. Indeed, reform of government may and presumably will economize on its material needs. Governance reform thus faces, and presumably will be propelled by, the powerful ince ntives of both the carrot of opportunity and the stick of efficient material savings.
Digitalization and Electrification:
Digitalization quintessentially characterizes the information age. Digitalization depends on electricity. Global electrification began in late 19th century with the invention of electric lighting and industrial machines, which spread rapidly through major cities in the US, UK, Germany, and Japan. By the 1980s electrification had reached approximately half the world, a figure that has since risen to around 80%. Electronics grew with the invention of the transistor in 1947 and the integrated circuit in 1958, enabling smaller, cheaper, and more reliable devices, leading to the widespread adoption of personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s and now cell phones in the 20th century. Most mechanical devices now use digital instead of analog operating systems. The abacus is still around, in parts of Asia, Africa and East Europe but quickly disappearing. Electrification and digitalization have built and restructured a web of connections across society. The connections save society’s resources and enhance its capabilities, aligning with its developmental shift from expansion along a physical axis to integration along a structural one. Electrification itself is broadly dematerializing to the extent it economizes on fossil fuels. Nuclear, solar, wind and hydro have grown as proportionate shares of electricity generation. And at end use electric engines are replacing gas engines, notably for transportation, again conserving fossil fuels. Fusion holds out the possibility of reducing the material cost of energy dramatically further.
Information stored in physical writings and human memories is increasingly and rapidly being tranlated into electron bits and essentially dematerialized. This includes entire libraries as well as storehouses of business and personal records, all migrating to the cloud. It includes the knowhow recorded in youtube videos by those skilled in specialized trades or activities. The information is centripetally loaded up to centralized computers for Wikipedia, YouTube and other cloud computers and then flows centrifugally out to those who access it. The migration of society’s information from decentralized materiality to centralized immateriality is metamorphic, as is the diametric reorientation of queries, originally directed centrifugally to multiple decentralized sources and now to a few centralized sources.
The internet constitutes a metalayer of global connections, a societal superstructure With the ubiquity of cell phones and the spread of smart appliances, machines and infrastructure, it increasingly connects nearly every person and many things: humans, institutions, infrastructure, factory equipment, vehicles, household appliances, and more. The telegraph, which spread in US in mid-19th century was a precursor communications network, but the internet and cell phones have completed the connections out to nearly everyone and soon everything controlable over Wifi. The internet is integrative. A unified global web of digital connections is coalescing what used to be localized webs of physical connection. The connections are virtual, coded digitally. The emergence of this internet superstructure constitutes a discontinuous leap in society’s structural integration and complexification, and is quintessentially metamorphic.
At the same time, cloud storage is vastly expanding society’s memory, collecting highly detailed and extensive recordings of everything from metrics monitoring society and the environment, the written history of human doings, to countless personal messages and photos, and more. There are more people alive to day than existed through the entire history up to xxxx, and soon if no already almost all will be connected to the internet uploading information to it. The amount of information acumulating on cloud computers has exploded. Contributing to this have been advances in science, the global spread of literacy. Human adolesence is a time of for learning, education, and accumuating knowledge, a storehouse to be later available in maturity when the adolescent moves out into society as a contributing adult. Cloud storage and the individual computers connected to it are human society’s adolescing brain and connected ganglia, with the internet equivelant to the web of nerves.
Automation and AI
Perhaps pushing the analogy, but it fits: automation is like a human habit; habit formation accelerates in human adolescence, and automation is accelerating in societal adolescence. Both habits and automation control a repetitive action through time.
The origins of automation are ancient. Water mills and animal power automated grinding of grain and pumping of irrigation early on. The industrial age introduced steam power. Assembly line production harnessed laborers for specialize repetitive tasks in early 20th century. Automation reached a next level in 1961 when General Motors introduced a robot on its assembly line. Robots have since been adapted for multiple tasks in industry, in warfare, and in the household. These machines all automate physical tasks, but AI automates tasks that manipulate words, images, communication and social interaction. Automation first transformed industry and will now transform services. Since the services sector has grown relative to manufacturing, therefore AI’s replacement of jobs will likely be greater than that of robots. AI is rewiring the global economy.
According to internet sources, human habits first arise in early childhood and by around age 9 many of those related to physical, sedentary and dietary behaviors solidify. During adolescence habits undergo significant change due to ongoing brain development. The limbic system which governs emotions and rewards becomes highly active. By contrast, the prefontal cortex responsible for decision-making, impulse control and long-term plamming, is still developing and does not fully mature until he mid-to-late 20s. Because adolescents experience stronger dopamine spikes in response to novel experiences, excitement and peer approval, this heightened reward sensitivity makes habits related to social interaction, immediate gratification and thrill-seeking more compelling and easier to form. As teens gain independence, they must manage their own habits without constant parental oversight. This transition can make it harder to start good habits (like consistent studying) and easier for bad habits (like poor sleep schedules) to solidify, especially as new environmental cues and peer influences take hold. The habits formed during adolescence are particularly powerful because they are being laid down during a period of high brain plasticity. These patterns can become deeply ingrained and persist into adulthood. Habits continue to form through adulthood. Approximately 40% of daily acitivities are performed in consistent contexts, leading to automatic behaviors regardless of age.
Just as habit formation in human adolescence turns from the physical to the social, in societal adolescence automation is turning from addressing the physical world to that, with AI, of communication and therefore connections and relationships. Just as habit formation in human adolescence is more risky than in childhood because parental oversight and guidance fall away, in societal adolescence automation becomes more open ended and risky. The automation of physical tasks is guided by the material realities of costs and benefits, while AI’s automation of social interaction and social structure costs little once the infrastructure is in place. Anything and everything about social interaction is fair game. Without cost constraints the range of possible applications introduces risk. In the information age we are thus tasked with AI regulation to make conscious our own societal habit formation. Given the wide latitude in regulating AI, societal adolescence becomes a period of great plasticity. Both good and bad habits will form, and these patterns will become deeply ingrained. As with the acceleration of habit formation in human adolescence, automation, social restructuring, and governance reform and AI are also accelerating.
Automation is upending how people find their place and contribute to society. By disrupting employment it changes the roles by which they find purpose. As auotmation moves in on so many jobs, many people are needing to find new work and new purpose. Perhaps if we collectively appreciate that society is maturating through an adolescence, and needs to grow up, maybe we will collectively come to understand this overarching social project of maturation and find purpose in that collective task. We will be forced to explore what that might entail, and find common cause in bringing it about. The environmental movement, giving purpose to many around the world, addresses one aspect of that common task, but the job of societal maturation through adolescence is much broader.
Miniaturization and the Substitution of Information for Materiality
Since the mid-20th century, a number of trends have emerged in the artifacts, tools, and other material “things” that humanity builds and surrounds itself with at work, in industry, and in the home. These trends all point toward miniaturization, reduced materiality and increased information content. Imaterialization and information intensification line up with society’s metamorphic shift in developmental direction from the material to the informational. Advances in electronics, materials science, and design enabled these trends, while efficiency gains, cost savings, and pressures from population densification supplied the incentive.
In electronics, the progression from vacuum tubes to transistors and then integrated circuits made smaller, more powerful devices possible. Materials science invented stronger, lighter-weight, less expensive materials, such as plastics and metal alloys. Advances in design enabled compaction and aesthetic sophistication. Together, these developments brought increased capabilities, fewer moving parts, smaller size and reduced production, storage and transportation costs. The trends continue, for example, in phones, computers, sensors, and medical devices. Industry embraced the cost savings and efficiency gains. Consumers, pressured by urban crowding, embraced the miniaturization, higher functionality, and cost savings. In lifestyle purchases, the trend shows up in a preference for compact, efficient, and portable goods rather than simply large or heavy ones.
Beyond electronics, there has been a noticeable trend toward smaller, denser, and more efficient designs in housing and some vehicle segments. For housing, many markets, especially in cities, show pressure toward smaller homes and apartments, often paired with better layouts and design or access to outdoor/common space to compensate for less interior area. But the pattern is mixed, with a long-run increase in the size of many owner-occupied houses in the U.S. The main forces are economic and practical: housing affordability, urban density, land costs, changing household structure, and a desire to use space more efficiently rather than a universal desire for less space. Rising income inequality plays its part, with smaller homes mostly going to the less affluent and larger ones to the more affluent.
Compact cars entered the US market in the 1960s, with the import of VW Beatles. 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 were replaced with lighter weight honeycomb alloy structures. Fiberglass and plastics replaced steel. Chrome bumpers and trim gave way to plastics. Admittedly, there’s been a counter-trend demand for larger SUVs and pick-ups, serving status and safety needs and complicating the underlying pattern. But recent trends show a move back toward smaller sizes in the U.S. Again, economic and practical forces are at play: fuel and insurance costs, urban density, changing household structure, and a desire to use space more efficiently. That said, the market is still dominated by larger vehicles overall, so the trend is better described as a partial correction than a full return to small cars. In both vehicles and housing, manufacturers and builders pack more features into a smaller design while keeping total cost lower: more function per unit materiality, more information, less resource use.
Money and currency have been dematerializing and simultaneously adding information content since the beginning of history, but increasingly so since the mid-20th century. In ancient times people traded with trinkets and chattle and then coins made from precious metals. When paper currency replaced silver and gold coins it added serial numbers and thus information content while reducing weight and materiality. Coins are increasingly made with reduced and less valuable metal content. In 1973 the US dollar abandoned its gold backing, and since then credit cards have made payments largely virtual. Credit cards and digital platforms semi-permanently store and greatly expand information content and add convenience. It’s not yet clear that block-chain crypto-currencies will become true monies, because they are not yet used as a unit of account and only marginally as a medium of exchange and unstablly as stores of value, the three functions which define a money, but stable coins are becoming widely used as medium of exchange, stablely tied to national currencies as units of account and used temporarily as stores of value.
A metamorphic effect of miniaturization occurs when smaller size creates new behavior: pocketable communication devices or smaller homes that come with more shared or multifunctional space and amenities, increasing human interactions. The compaction of materiality, added features and intensified use of information technology are not just about the material layer of human society. They redesign behaviors and people’s expectations for the role of materiality in human life.
Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, published in 1973, reflected and amplified these broader shifts. He gave philosophical language to tendencies that later showed up in design and purchasing behavior. It captured a late-1960s and 1970s reaction against “bigger is better,” industrial gigantism, and wasteful growth, and helped legitimize ideas like “fewer, better things” consumption, human-scale systems, appropriate technology, decentralization, and sustainability. Schumacher’s framing fit the moment: smaller, more local, less wasteful technologies sounded morally and economically attractive just as miniaturized, less material-intensive devices became available.
Time Replacing Money as a Measure of Value
A downside to lighter-weight materials and reduced materiality, in many cases, was durability, but this became less important to consumers as lifestyles became more transient, mobile, and, in many ways, less stable. Built-in obsolescence became an advantage to manufacturers who gained repeat purchasers. Life quickened, time-saving devices proliferated, and time became increasingly valuable compared to material accumulation. The trends toward dematerialization and information intensification were accompanied by a shift in values from the accumulation of material goods to the accumulation of experiences. Small size and reduced materiality in some cases became prized for their own sake. VW Beetles became a reverse status symbol in the 1960s.
People want less clutter and more freedom. Stuff can now be rented instead of owned: tools at Home Depot, vehicles through car rental agencies, homes through AirB&B. Corporations increasingly lease equipment and space rather than owning it, allowing greater flexibility to scale operations up or down, and in some cases improving the balance sheet.
As material needs, as opposed to desires, become satisfied, younger generations have begun to realize that time is the truly limiting resource worth protecting. A shift can be detected, away from valuing material goods to valuing time and experience, from “more stuff” to “more time and meaning. People are spending more on travel, dining, events, and other experiences, while placing less emphasis on status goods as the main signal of success. Research and reporting also note that experiential purchases tend to be more satisfying and produce longer-lasting happiness than material purchases.
The trends toward substituting time and functionality for materiality and size are related in a deeper cultural sense: miniaturization in products and spaces often supports a life organized around mobility, convenience, flexibility, and time savings. Smaller, more portable devices, smaller cars, and more compact, efficient homes can all free up time, reduce friction, and make it easier to spend resources on experiences rather than on maintaining and storing things. In that sense, miniaturization and the substitution of information technology for materiality are enabling factors in a shift in values toward time, flexibility, and experience.
Consumer Habits Shift from Satisfying Needs to Marking Status
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. The share of world population living in extreme poverty declined from about 70% in 1950 to less than 10% in 2015. In wealthy countries, too, living standards accelerated after 1950. There has been a surge in the number of people graduating from poverty into what can be called a middle class life.
Along with rising living standards, the nature of consumption is changing. Whereas consumption in extreme poverty necessarily addresses material survival, food and shelter, once a middle class lifestyle is achieved, it starts to address comfort and then status. More of consumption, worldwide since the mid-20th century, has turned from satisfying absolute material needs toward signalling status. Luxury goods are no longer just for the very rich. They are marketed worldwide to almost everyone. They have become status markers among the rising middle class.
Status is a relational good. Status marks a hierarchical position in relation to one’s contemporaries. As we enter the information age, this shift in the nature of consumption from material consumption to establishment of status dovetails nicely with society’s metamorphosis from the material to the informational, relational, social structural.
And even status goods are becoming smaller, with the rising popularity of fashion, “small luxuries” and personalized add-ons. Instead of having to signal status with an expensive car or home, when budgets are tight consumers signal with cheaper, smaller indulgences, a pattern sometimes called the “lipstick effect”. The idea shows up in relatively inexpensive clothing and in accessories and compact lifestyle products that express identity without requiring a large expense. Miniaturization in lifestyle goods is not just about smaller physical size; it also means more targeted, personalized purchases that satisfy much more than a material need.
Emergent Cooperation
In a two-person game-theoretic Prisoner’s Dilemma, the opportunistic solution eventually gives way to the cooperative one as experience accumulates and trust reaches a threshold, enabling both sides to switch, not gradually but discontinuously, to the cooperative regime that yields mutual advantage. Both sides willingly give up some immediate advantage to gain in the long run.
Evolutionary biologists theorize that social insects evolved their selfless behaviors by gradually recognizing and embracing cooperation for the advantages it brings to their species’ survival. Many higher animals display altruism and selfless sacrifice, which are similarly hypothesized to have evolved to boost species survival. Human beings are already, by and large, generous and cooperative for mutual advantage. We specialize cooperatively in our work lives to achieve greater efficiency together. We are social animals and need each other to enjoy the benefits of family and community.
Cooperation among humans arises in either of two ways. Either individuals recognize the mutual advantage and come to trust each other enough to cooperate, or an outside authority enforces a regime to which both must align in lockstep. We cooperate horizontally because we can and vertically because we must. The same polarity appears between democratic and authoritarian governance. The one depends on horizontal cooperation, and the other on forced vertical cooperation and alignment.
Humans mature through adolescence, becoming less rebellious as they fit themselves into society. They outgrow the self-centeredness of childhood as their consciousness expands to see how the wider world works through cooperation. Part of human maturation in adolescence involves socialization and learning to cooperate with others toward shared objectives and to settle differences without fighting, cooperatively rather than forcefully.
The question facing society is whether, at all levels, from individuals to groups to nations, we will become more cooperative and thus mature as a species for collective benefit and survival. Might there be discontinuous tipping points at all these levels when self-centered behavior becomes cooperative? If humanity can reach such tipping points, as happens when a Prisoner’s Dilemma game is played repeatedly, it could mark our maturation as a society through adolescence. There is evidence that we have indeed become more cooperative, especially since the mid-20th century.
At the individual level, major crime rates have declined. This decline in violence may partly reflect surveillance technologies, digital records, and reduced privacy, which make it harder to commit crimes undetected. Additionally, we may have become wiser, developed greater emotional intelligence, and learned to resolve conflicts peacefully. As a scientific discipline, psychology, along with the spread of “pop-psychology” in mid-20th-century US culture, has provided models for settling personal disputes with humor.
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, in “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” documents reduced rates of homicide and war across global human societies in the modern era, attributing this long-term trend to historical forces such as feminization, cosmopolitanism, the rise of nation-states with a monopoly on force, and the escalator of reason.
Tolerance and cooperation are luxury goods, once survival is established. Benjamin Friedman, in “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth”, documents that a rising standard of living fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy. Once basic material needs for food and shelter are met, people focus more on social connections and their place in society. Volunteer work and philanthropy have come to play larger roles in middle-class culture in wealthy countries. Global living standards have risen dramatically since the mid-20th century, and so has the prevalence of cooperative behavior.
Humankind’s exploitation of the planetary environment now threatens its sustainability on many levels, but we’ve begun to redress this balance in search of a more stable, balanced, and cooperative relationship with our natural surroundings.
Steven Pinker, in “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, documents reduced rates of homicide and war across global human society in the modern era, attributing this long-term trend to historical forces such as feminization, cosmopolitanism, the rise of nation-states with a monopoly on force, and the escalator of reason. Feminization, and with it the elevation of matriarchal vs. patriarchal values, suggests a more nurturing and cooperative tenor to human interactions.
At the group level, industry organizations form in which corporations collaborate. Alliances form among political and religious groups. Most groups are driven by specific objectives, such as profit or membership numbers, and are generally not motivated by altruism beyond those goals. But in service of those goals, companies worldwide cooperate to secure supply chains or to merge or acquire one another, ultimately cooperating through vertical and horizontal industry consolidation. Nonetheless, economic competition and cooperation will always coexist in a dynamic balance, unified by the common pursuit of profit.
For nations, the goals toward which cooperation can yield mutual advantage range from climate change and environmental protection to trade, finance, immigration, nuclear proliferation, AI regulation, pandemic response, cultural exchange, and more. Many of these areas of potential cooperation emerged only in the mid-20th century. Tired of war, we formed the United Nations, a World Court, and numerous multinational governance institutions. Communications and transportation technologies brought us into closer contact. Climate change and environmental damage spurred global movements for environmental protection. Nations increasingly cooperate because growing external threats, such as climate change, force them to do so, and because economic opportunities have arisen from the globalization of cultures and the time-shrinking of distances.
The blossoming of cooperation across global human society is evident. Will it undergo a discontinuous metamorphosis to a higher level, as predicted by game theory? Is there a tipping point to be crossed as society matures? And if so, what form will that more cooperative society take?
But even in a Prisoner’s Dilemma game, stability is a matter of balance between cooperation and opportunism. In the opportunistic regime, there will always be probes of cooperation to test whether the opposing side reciprocates and is ready to move toward the cooperative solution. And in the cooperative regime, there will always be occasional transgressions of opportunism, seeking an immediate short-term advantage and probing the tolerance and trust that maintain and enforce that cooperation.
Similarly, society will always remain in dynamic balance between selfish and cooperative behaviors. War and peace will always coexist. Even in a predominantly cooperative society, hot spots of conflict will arise within a broader landscape of peace. Mature human beings do not always settle their differences peacefully, but they are significantly less prone to violence than adolescents. Perhaps the 20th-century reductions in violence at all levels have already demonstrated global society’s transformation toward a more cooperative balance. Perhaps these trends have further to go. That balance will depend on trust and enforcement, both of which forces continue to strengthen, with, on the one hand, rising living standards, cultural homogenization, familiarization, tolerance, and collective understanding and wisdom, and on the other, surveillance.
If humanity achieves a more peaceful and cooperative balance, will that be achieved by force of an external circumstance or authority, like AI, increasingly consolidated industry and concentrated wealth that enforces obedience, or will it arise through the collective construction of just and fair governance designed to enable individual flourishing, controlling AI, and redistributing that wealth, thereby achieving a collective swelling of human spirit? Will a peaceful and cooperative balance be supported by just and fair governments that responsibly serve humanity’s flourishing? Or will that cooperative society arise because we become enslaved and forced into cooperation by industry consolidation and a concentration of wealth that holds government and the economy in its grip, trampling justice and fairness, and by an AI that takes away jobs and molds us toward passivity and ever-striving consumerism? Is the future of humanity a blossoming of human freedom and self-actualization, or a dystopian one in which we live as slaves to our roles as cogs in the machine? The two options will always maintain a rhythmic balance, as they have at least since Athens and Sparta debated these governance issues.
Only government has a broad enough reach to regulate and enforce this balance. Will government serve humanity, or will it serve capital? This is the age-old Marxist polarity, ultimately the same polarity between matter and spirit that separated Cain and Abel. Which will control government, the voting masses, or the tentacles of wealth? What kind of cooperation will evolve?
Goverance Reform
Cooperation is the overarching marker. Governance is the central requirement.