Hi Keith:
Thanks so much for your ongoing commentaries and your pulling up
of so many items of great interest.
Your most recent, the "The dumb-bell shaped economy"
piece, caught my eye. You said (pardon my edits):
"All institutions take a long time a-dying and so we can't expect
a brand new sets of specialised transnational governances in the world
for perhaps two or three centuries."
I wonder about this assertion because it strikes me that although
there is no denying we have historically designed and defaulted our
systems of governance by virtue of the full extent and nature of our
human proclivities, things have changed, and, I would suggest, changed
very rapidly and dramatically in a very short period of time.
For example, we have only recently engineered a great many new and
very interesting communications technologies, and, more recently,
computer-mediated and globally-networked communications technologies
which have never before been seen or used on the planet to the extent
that they are today. These new technologies have affected and
continue to dramatically shape what almost all of us both as
individuals and cultural participants see, hear, exchange, think,
understand, decide, and reflect upon -- in short (to gently borrow a
thought or two from our old friend, Marshall McLuhan), our new
technologies powerfully define who we are, what we do, how our
institutions evolve, and how much (or how little) of a player we shall
remain in any of them.
My musings and wanderings here are not new by any means.
Many would say that they speak the obvious, and that the name of the
game has always been to understand how advantage can be gained from
successfully navigating such waves of change. And it is the case
that the emergence, layering and generative nature of diffusing new
technologies appears to have always been a feature of humanity's
capacities for inventiveness, and it seems we are forever a part of
the endless feedback loops that link our emerging technologies with
the shaping of our societies, of which governance is such a
fundamental part. Emergence in complex adaptive systems is a
wonderful thing -- and if Marshall was right and the medium is the
message, I'd go just a bit further and offer that we are that
emergence.
But what is truly interesting and different about such emergence
in our current era (and, have you noticed that our eras are getting
shorter, and that they are getting shorter at an increasingly faster
rate?) is that we have in just the past 150-odd years created wave
after wave of unprecedented new information and computing technologies
that show no signs of non-proliferation or slowing down, and do such
an increasingly great job of speeding things up and mixing things in
new and unique ways that we couldn't have imagined scant decades ago.
Within just the past five or so years, James Gleick suggested things
are faster, and Davis and Meyer held up a mirror so we could see the
blur. They, along with so many others, were absolutely right,
and it's quite clear that what they thought was solid ground isn't.
Let's not forget the well-informed and deeply-thoughtful commentaries
of others such as Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil who contemplate both our
plight and our very plausible futures.
This brings me back to where I started, to what caught my eye in
your piece. My question is as follows: if we have indeed
engineered the almost incomprehensible technical advances in
computing, communications and networking that, in harness with almost
every other aspect of what we do, have in relative terms so very
rapidly redefined (and continue to redefine) every aspect of the world
in which we live, as well as who we are, who we think we are, and who
we might turn out to be, what factors do you see that would maintain
the evolution of governance at the glacial pace you have specified --
in other words, what would prevent the evolution of transnational
governance from accelerating and inter-linking at similar speeds and
in the same ways that so many other aspects of our world have recently
done?
Conversely, by suggesting that such changes might take two or
three centuries, are you looking at the governance speedometer and
saying that 200-300 years is in fact quite speedy, and that we should
ensure our seat-belts are buckled up more securely than ever?
Cheers / Bob Este / Ph.D Candidate / U of Calgary
