Reality is what you can get away with

Credit to the late Robert Anson Wilson, the author of the Illuminatus Trilogy.

With Youtube and the Net, we're treated daily to politicians either reversing positions, downright lying or having tin-ears to the issues of the day. Easy to pin blame if one looks at the world through political lenses but what if there is something more profound going on. James Bamford, an expert on our NSA, writes in The Shadow Factory that the NSA has stored more information in their computers than contained in all the libraries of the world. Alvin Toffler called this period The Third Wave, the information civilization. It is now a cliche to talk about the profound rate of change in the world but no one considers the implications for our economy and political system.

Computer scientist Dr. Jacques Vallee claimed in the early 1990s that information is nearly doubling every 18 months. At Valee's calculations it's possible that by 2012 information will double a million times a second. According to mathematicians, this would mean that everything must become steadily more unpredictable or more or less "chaos". This chaos may be expressed as a breakdown in the society or economy and in violence such as increased wars. Chaos also may be expressed instead as a rapid acceleration toward a more stable and coherent world. This acceleration in information can lead to social and political transformations we can't even begin to foresee.

Robert Anton Wilson foresaw both economic global collapse and recovery as well as breakthroughs in nanotechnology that would make most advanced scientific gadgets cheap. I suppose how we look at this depends on,as William James used to say, our different temperaments.

A few months back I read a piece that the economic recovery will be quicker than in a traditional depression because of the speed of communication, which the author believed was one of the root causes for the sudden collapse of the world financial system and would be one of the causes for its rapid recovery. I hope so.

But it's apparent from the shaningans of our elected leaders that my generation and those older have not assimilated the networld into their behavior. The first 21st century campaign was that of Barack Obama ,mainly because the driving talent in his operation were people who have grown up digital. Now he and his Administration confront trying to manage a system that a younger generation consider antediluvian.

Critics of a younger generation claim they lack concentration, are too easily distracted, am multi-task too much. Don Tapscott is the author of Grown Up Digital, which is his follow-up study of 11,000 young people betweeen the age of 11 and 30. This is the most comprehensive generational study ever conducted and the first on the world's first generation who have grown up completely digital. He disputes the critics of this generation,claiming that their brain chemistry has literally changed from previous generation and that their brains can assimilate these multiple electronic inputs in new creative ways. He believes they are a generation more adept and scientifically knowledgeable than the older generation. They literally know more and are more accomplished with the technology we need for the future.

But then, what happens to the rest of us? Do we have to settle in lifestyles based on ability to assimilate information? Does it mean that whole sectors of our society ,once geared to manufacturing jobs, are beyond redemption and must remain unemployed or underemployed? Have we become a more sophisticated version of an under-developed society? And if the United States-Europe-Asia is the axis of this accelerated information civilization, how then do we cope and deal with areas such as the Middle East where political structures have been created to deliberately slow change and the penetration of information from abroad? Must our foreign policy seek the lowest common denominator?

In a strange way, we are seeing the results of this information acceleration in our own culture wars that are pitting old authoritarian structures and values against more progressive or liberal beliefs. These are all reactions to the future shock.