The Epoch of Incredulity

Naming an epoch using the superlative prefix of “post” — as in post-industrial, or post-modern, or the particularly unsatisfying post-millennial — is the one true indicator that we haven’t a clue. When I hear it, I tend to silently grumble the opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way. — In short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Wisely or foolishly, I think of this particular moment as a “time in between” – we’re no longer where we were and not yet where we’re going — both an age of foolishness and an age of wisdom.

It’s a time of great shifts; the rules of the great game are changing and the players are all different. Hell, I’m not even sure it’s the same game. The world may be “flat,” as Tom Friedman says, but it’s also very very bumpy.

Ok, “ho-hum,” you say. It’s no news to you that the forces of globalization, instantaneous and ubiquitous communications, and unparalleled technological innovation are tearing markets apart, changing global dynamics, and redefining almost every aspect of our lives — but, what may be news is that we “ain’t seen nothing yet.” There’s a revolution brewing in this epoch of incredulity.

I used to blame it all on the two seemingly contradictory effects of the Internet: the forces of disintermediation and the forces of aggregation. Simply put:

• The Net is a powerful disintermediating force, smashing the Taylor pyramid, revolutionizing “participation” and communications, and generally destroying the value of “brokers” and traditional intermediaries of all variety from travel agents to stock brokers to librarians. It’s all about removing the distance between markets, customers, politics, and people.

Simultaneously (and somewhat contradictorily)

• The Net is a powerful, anti-entropic force, aggregating the disaggregate, creating new “markets” – social, financial, and political – where previously they were too small or too distributed to matter — making collecting PEZ dispensers into a global marketplace, and increasing the value of so-called “infomediaries.”

But there’s another force at work here, a third force. It’s a force I’ve been trying to put my finger on for a while now, since I was part of the research team for the book Megatrends, about the ten trends that would shape the future. Then this third force was something I called the “Eleventh Megatrend.” It didn’t make the cut. It wasn’t that it wasn’t “mega” enough, or “trendy” enough; I think I just wasn’t able to articulate it well enough. Whatever the reason, author John Naisbitt said we only had room for ten anyway.

[I did once ask him once: "Why only ten?" He replied, "It was good enough for Moses." I was young and had no snappy come-back. I should have said something about the Code of Hammurabi. There were over 280 of those!]

Undaunted, I’ve always held this one in the back of my mind. Deep down, it seemed important. Now it’s here. In the last few years, it has started to shape and mold this bumpy world.

I see this third force everywhere. I see it hiding inside the inaccurately named thing called “social networking. I see it embedded in “American Idol.” It follows me to the grocery store. It wakes me up at night. It’s busy working away on web pages and formatting RSS feeds. It’s reading your electric meter. It’s even there when you drive into a parking lot. It’s monitoring air quality, or temperature, and it’s in that vending machine down the hall tracking the ever-so-important availability of cheese-doodles.

The third force is all about the network and it’s all about the collapse of time. It’s all about a new network of machines, sensors, monitors, and even some humans, that spend their days tasting the world, and talking to other machines about what they’ve tasted. Sometimes it’s frightening.

I once characterized the third force as the move “from sampling to monitoring.” I figured soon we wouldn’t need things like statistical sampling to measure our world. I argued that we were increasingly moving to “real-time” measurements to understand the world. The time and distance between action and feedback would disappear. It’s come true.

Day by day, step-by-step, we are closer and closer to having our grubby little metaphorical fingers on the pulse of the world, a live wire tapped straight into a global, wired, world nervous system —pulling out the real-time flow of public opinion, or market penetration, or product usage, or the number of parking spaces left in a parking garage.

This sort of stuff, this sort of information – and the underlying tools that let us manipulate it – makes possible real-time feedback about markets, or electricity consumption, or seats on an airplane. It also makes possible real-time plebiscites, voting on this or that idea or candidate, participatory democracy at its finest—or, at a slightly less noble end of the spectrum, “American Idol.”

So, what’s does this have to do with social networking?

People hear the wrong thing when they hear “social networking.” They hear the first word, and miss the second. They hear “social” and stop listening. Then they start thinking MySpace, or Friendster, or something weird like Twitter. That’s bad branding at work. It belies its power, masks its pervasiveness and importance, and makes it seem all together kind of silly. It’s not silly, but it’s also not that social.

We all know what happens once you start ambling down the mental road towards MySpace, you start thinking of pictures of people barfing at keg parties. I know I do. Now, don’t get me wrong, truly such photos are a gift to the world. But let’s not be fooled by this red herring. It’s not about the barf — herring or otherwise —it’s the “network.” Don’t mistake the application for the revolution. It’s also about the network.

Sure, part of social networking is about people being social, working together, and connecting for common purposes, sharing, barfing, mixing, and mashing and mapping. But, the true revolution is about network, and the true revolution is about the machines. It’s the machines that are social – and they are apparently real party animals, constant keggers.

Through their diligence, they’re delivering an increasingly real-time flow of data about the tiniest aspects of our world. They are the essence of the third force, my eleventh megatrend, the move from “sampling to monitoring.” These talkative, social machines are collapsing time, eliminating the distance between data collection, analysis, and reporting.

Moreover, the network is being potentiated this mystical thing called the “mashup” — machine-to-machine structured (and open) data exchange. It’s stuff like voting information from Catalist seamlessly “mashed” and mixed with DemocracyInAction’s magic advocacy engine – one system sharing with another, where the sum, and the power, if done right, is greater than the collective parts, heralding either the spring of hope or, perhaps, the winter of our despair.

It’s Google Maps and apparently just about everything in the universe. It’s my own true love, sweet Jane the GPS lady, loaded and locked with the locations of every Starbucks in the galactic federation. The revolution is all about the real-time flow of information about our world. We’re diving into that flow like we’ve never dived before. Hopefully it’s headfirst into the season of light.

Here’s a mundane, yet telling example: right now, like it or not, traffic congestion is being measured by monitoring your cell-phone. You’re just a little node, my friend, a simple single data point on the net. Unknown to you, your fancy-pants iPhone or your sleek Blackberry, is secretly working for Traffic.com. It, and thousands like it, they’re part of an active social network, busily creating their own “user generated content,” day in and day out, in the form of tiny data points that measure the traffic “flow” through our transportation veins.

Taken in aggregate, all that content, mixed and mashed with some mathematical magic and a map or two, becomes a real-time picture of vehicular time, speed, and distance. There is no wisdom to this crowd; it’s simply the ebb and flow that adds value. The wisdom of this crowd is the crowd itself.

What’s the end result of all this social networking? Well, the result is my Blackberry moans (kind of like a cow on Prozac). Up pops an email message telling me that my particular highway home is jammed — all before I’ve left the office. As a result, I sigh and work late once again. Heisenberg is now happy, as observation has once again changed reality. Meanwhile, “Captain Jack and SkyTeam Traffic Copter” — the old sampling system that had to wait politely for its broadcast time on the six o’clock news — is a relic of the past.

Here’s another: a social network that gets to the essence of this age of wisdom, and proves, in reality, that it ain’t really all that “social.” Like all social networks, this one is built around a common goal — the simple goal of not getting lost in Yonkers. In this case, TomTom has done it by turning their customers into thousands of tiny (or not so tiny) data collection robots.

I, Robot; I work for TomTom – more accurately — I volunteer for them. (Either that or my paychecks have gone missing in the mail.) I’m part of their distributed robotic army of sensors and monitors. Through my minute and irregular contributions, I maintain and update their database of roads and bridges and Starbuck locations. When I find a road closed, or a bridge under repair, Jane (the GPS lady) and I flag it, and the world is wiser.

Automagically, that data speeds its way (via Bluetooth) across my own tiny personal area network, into my cell phone. From there, it hops and jumps and snuggles its way through the ‘Net, eventually wending its way into the Borg-like shared collective machine consciousness. My contribution feeds the giant GPS Wiki, and benefits the collective.

I am but a social node on the network, helping monitor the ebb and flow of the reality called road repair (also called “summer” in Michigan). If they added pictures of people mooning me along my route, I might even contribute more often – social networking comes full circle. Well, maybe not.

With TomTom, once again, it’s not so much crowd-based wisdom as it is simply recognizing, enabling, and capitalizing on commonly held needs, and having the wisdom to know that your customers or constituents are your greatest asset. They’re the networkers feeding the machines that provide real-time data collection, real-time analysis and reporting, and innovative mashups between previously disconnected things, like pictures and maps, or voting records and campaign donations, or your membership, national or state voter files, census data, and, who knows, perhaps their petroleum purchasing habits. Together, we’re collapsing time.

This third force is all about collapsing the time between action and effect, between impact and reporting. Once collapsed, it’s about being able to mash that data up to show you new things, in new ways, or just so it lets you keep track of it a wee bit easier. It’s about turning data into information, and information into wisdom or foolishness, lightness or dark.

This third force is about our radical move from sampling our world in little bits and pieces to monitoring our lives in near-real-time, gulping it down in great big chunks, as it happens. And, it’s also about the distribution and representation of this new world of information – these great chunks of stuff – in ways that that change lives, change markets, or simply change the length of your workday. It’s about the network. We were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way. Whichever way we’re going, the traffic is moving briskly, or so says Jane the GPS lady.