Single Point Failure (Part III)

Continued from Part II

So, what creates a “Learned Helplessness Bubble”?

• Rewarding Over-Specialization
• Outsourcing of Critical Skills
• Relying on Non-Existent things
• Embracing the Illusion of Powerlessness 

We have already touched a little on the first two in the list. Let's talk a little about the third item – Relying on Non-Existent Things.

 More and more we are moving away from a solid, real world to something that is a spooky ghost-like after-image of itself.

 As a grossly oversimplified but still useful example, the economy used to be based on gold. Nothing more than an arbitrary (albeit pretty) rock but at least it is finite and rare and real. Then the gold standard went away and was replaced with paper. Then the paper “went away” and is currently just ones and zeroes. As ethereal as a happy thought and just as easy to wipe out.

 The loss of a hard drive could now be as devastating as a massive house fire. A nearby lightning strike could wipe out everything you hold dear – all photos, all your music, all your books – gone. All your work documentation, that novel you have been writing, with the added drawback of being practically uninsurable.

 It's hard to imagine how things get more unstable than reducing things to hunks of field/no-field, but we are happily headed in that direction.

 Entire worlds exist now that use a fake currency, like in Second Life or WoW. Property used to be something that you could touch and taste. Now you can buy things like houses and clothes that, in no real way, exist (Second Life, WoW, etc.). Real money and time are traded for ever-increasingly unreal things.

 Also, we have just started the primary push to taking all the ones and zeroes out of the local computers and putting them in a “cloud” run by someone else, somewhere else. Now you don’t have to pay for your IT infrastructure or even very fast computers. Everything is taken care of for us “out there, somewhere”. No fuss, no muss.

 Nothing is actually owned – just rented. That paperback on your e-reader isn't “yours”... not really. You probably can't give it to a friend, and you certainly won't be able to leave it to your children when you pass on or press a flower between its pages. Music and movies are no more real. Your private photos are probably all electronic and you don't even own the IP to the professional ones you have had taken.

 These are all intentionally negative examples, or at least examples where I have suppressed their positive aspects. Don't get me wrong – I'm no Luddite. I think using the virtual world to augment the real one is a great idea. It is convenient, educational, entertaining, and often just plain cool. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite apps is one that labels things in the night sky merely by holding your smartphone up to the object in question. But because I have the Night Sky app, should I get rid of my embarrassingly outdated Burnham's Celestial Handbook collecting dust on in my bookcase? No. What it lacks in downloadable updates and interactive content it more than makes up for (to me) with it's comforting solidity and it's historical value.

 The danger is that as we make these subtle improvements to the way we perceive the world around us we lose sight of the things that allowed us to get there in the first place. We are willfully knocking out the underpinnings of the real world because we convince ourselves that the virtual shorings that we have put in place are just as good or better than the now “unnecessary” or “redundant” old ones.

 Fine. Should we all go and learn every damn skill our ancestors knew? No. It's the appreciation of the path of progress that is critical, not the individual skills themselves necessarily. We didn't magically arrive here. We weren't dragged kicking and screaming. We strolled into the year 2010 willingly if not excitedly.

 But we need some (not all, granted) of those stodgy old-fashioned ways to stay put – just in case.

 I believe a conservative estimate of people in the U.S. that have vocations directly or indirectly tied to producing things that do not actually exist (or will probably never exist) is about 5% of the total US workforce. Designing moon bases or starships or writing books or CGI info-tainment on how to terraform Mars requires editors, producers, programmers, TV and newspaper reporters, academic professionals, scientists, conventioneers, etc, etc. How many people are “employed” by trying to figure out the “secrets” to Mona Lisa's smile, the Shroud of Turin, Area 51, the Tunguska blast, or the Zapruder film or do any of the countless “jobs” out there? What would be lost, other than jobs in an already shaky economy, if the self-generated demand for simply went away?

 We rely on non-existent things for our pleasure and convenience, but also turn to them in times of hardship and panic.

 Look at the things that people blame when things go wrong: society, the “culture” of an organization, the government, the public school system, big business. The list goes on and on. When something big and bad happens, the blame gets spread around so thinly that, magically, it turns out that no one is actually at fault for any given disaster.

 It is so easy to pin fault on them that no one seems to realize (or care) that none of these amorphous concepts actually exist. When “society” is blamed for a miscreant's horrific crimes, does it rise to defend itself? What actually changes when public schools are called out as causing America's slipping scientific leadership? “The government” is routinely called out as being the cause of everyone's personal woes in one from or another. They cannot and do not defend themselves and it makes us feel better for having them around to offload our anger to.

 

To be continued...