Technology and Sanity: the Innovation Cycle

Warning:  I am here going to have the unmitigated gall to modify and expand the insights of the great economist Joseph Schumpeter concerning innovation and disruption.
The innovation cycle is necessarily limited by the plasticity of the human brain which is not pronounced in the average person and lessens with age. Therefore the course of successful innovation is generational and the cycle itself is roughly sixty years. The historical record bears this out. The cycle of the railroad and telegraph, a coherent technological set, lasted from approximately 1840 to approximately 1900. The cycle of the automobile, telephone and radio, another coherent set, lasted from approximately 1900 to approximately 1960. We are still in the cycle of the mainframe computer, the jet aircraft and television, once again a coherent set, which should last until 2020 and be superseded by a set of gadgets, cloud computing and robots including drones.
What is noticeable from this type of analysis is that in the railroad cycle there is a clear break in 1872 with the Long Depression. In the automobile cycle there is a clear break in 1929 with the Great Depression. This is the classic innovation cycle. Apparently, armed with Professor Schumpeter's insights about the importance of entrepreneurs, we sidestepped a significant recession in 1990 by implementing new technology like the PC before the natural end of what I am calling Innovation Cycle Phase One of the mainframe cycle.
These clear breaks indicate a bipartite innovation cycle. Phase One is implementation and Phase Two is exploitation. Phase One results in massive disruption that induces what can only be called madness. In the 1860's, Phase One of the railroad cycle drove the fine madness of the American Civil War. In the 1920"s, Phase One of the automobile cycle drove the fine madness of the Jazz Age with its artistic treasures. In the 1960's, in an accelerated manner, Phase One of the mainframe cycle drove the fine madness of the cry for humane behavior of the Age of Aquarius. The nature of disruptive technology is that of a severe information overload which does have psychiatric consequences. The more inhumane the technology, the worse the effect.
Railroads are hostile. There is no evidence that human beings were designed to go fifty miles an hour in an iron horse like a dog in a car. Automobiles are hostile. Travelling seventy or eighty miles an hour while at the limits of control with no control over other vehicles at all may be exciting but it doesn't fall in the comfort zone of human capability. Mach One in a jet cannot help but be a transforming experience with unpleasant consequences.
Fundamental of change hostile to humane values is Phase Two, exploitation. In the railroad cycle not only were the machine tools of the railroad exploited to create new technology but human beings themselves were exploited, a not so fine madness, in the Gilded Age. The same pattern occurred in the 1930's but having witnessed the chaos and irrationality of the 1890's, governments instituted policies to counter Phase Two of the automobile cycle. These policies were as a leaf in a strong wind to the forces of change but they provided temporary relief for a time.
Thus the classic pattern of implementation and exploitation was effectively short-circuited in the 1990's by improved research and accelerated implementation so that both Phases, One and Two, are now occurring simultaneously. As in linguistics, there is a deep structure of the sixty year cycle profoundly obscured by these concurrent processes. It becomes difficult to analyze and address the consequences of this phenomenon.
The result appears to be an improved humane aspect to consumer electronics as the market demands it. Gadgets operating on the cloud like the smart phone and IoT are infinitely friendlier and more humane than an IBM 360 and a card reader. We are apparently on our way, from 2020 to 2050, into a humane age unlike anything that has ever existed. We are finding refuge, in Shakepeare's words, 'a frighted peace to pant', from inhumane technology while still reeling from intense innovation. This may induce a madness finer than anything known. It may induce sanity. It is going to be interesting.

Markets and Moral Behavior

Following my petite rumination on the nature of moral behavior I am here going to examine market behavior as moral behavior. Assuming, from my previous blog, that moral behavior is that behavior which follows the dictates of self-interest and self-aggrandizement in terms of meaning and given a market that is an expression of human social existence operating solely in material terms, the problem is set before me. How do I rationalize such disparate universes?
The primary caution to any rationalization is that, as developed by Thomas S Kuhn, incommensurate systems exist. They are incapable of being rationalized one with the other. Market behavior and moral behavior may be, in fact, incommensurate as value systems. First, what do markets do? They administer human material existence at a very high order of efficiency. They discount every social contingency into the price of their products by the simple mechanism of 'moving' material plenty, real or virtual, 'to' material scarcity. Such 'movement' creates the opportunity for arbitrage, market profits. It is simple. It is effective. They do operate to self-interest and self-aggrandizement but only in material wealth and how that wealth is measured, today generally dollars.
What is a dollar worth in meaning? It is worth whatever the society it serves makes it mean. It has absolutely no intrinsic meaning. It is a piece of paper, a chunk of marginally worthless metal, an electron pulse. There is no meaning inherent in money.
What possible equation can be written to relate such different systems of behavior? The answer is simple. Talent. Just as language mediates thought and reality so talent mediates material existence and meaning. The worth of a dollar in meaning lies in the use societal talent makes of it. As finance has talent making markets and driving innovation and infrastructure so meaning has talent creating the possibility of meaning with vision and vocabulary. It is the task of this talent, in a sort of mission statement, to make money meaningful to, after Jeremy Bentham, the greatest number of citizens of that political economy to which it belongs, however defined.
Moral behavior in the world of markets, in the world of the incomprehensible demiurge creating order out of chaos, consists of material self-interest and material self-aggrandizement and a willingness to defer to legitimate talent. Life is not just about getting rich, money in such a system is almost worthless. Life is about meaning, living in it, creating it. Money, properly directed, can do that. As we arise from the ashes of the great Age of Nihilism, roughly speaking from 1872 to the present, let us concentrate on letting talent create meaning, not destroy it.

A View of Moral Behavior

The large context of human behavior consists of scalar fields (the dark), pure, unknowable energy, decaying into measurable particles (the light). Human beings are composed of such particles and, whatever the unmoved mover of scalar fields consists of - God, gods, or force, exist in the universe of the demiurge creating order, such as human beings, out of chaos.
In such mechanical confusion what moral compass exists that can guide human beings in their incidental and strategic behavior. That compass is self-interest, especially in the large sense, and self-aggrandizement, also especially in the large sense. Both of these prescripts are interpreted in terms of happiness, existence in meaning, and the pursuit of happiness, moving to the light, creating order out of chaos in order to be happier, to increase the possibility of meaning which is structural and contingent.
In contrast to this schema are unstable exercises of control that decrease meaning as well as the destructive madness of crowds undermining social structures, meaning, and happiness. The Twentieth century was a history of such anti-social, in the sense of moral behavior, exercises. The net result of this destruction of civilization is a great nihilist age in which meaning is dear and moral behavior rare.
We civilizados are in the position of an ancient Byzantine monastery in a hostile wilderness, carrying civilization without quite being civilized. The possible severely limits what moral action can be taken. Martyrs are useful to posterity in ennobling a social structure being set. A civilizado going away in a dark alley for no sustainable gain in meaning is not the stuff of martyrdom.
Thus, simply put, moral behavior consists of action, myth creation motivating such action, database creation, and paradigm development generating humane, sustainable order out of chaos to the limit of the possible. Neither grandiose ambitions nor libertine indulgence reference the limits of the possible, the first being routinely disastrous and the second being positively uncivilizing. If civilization is a vehicle for consistently moral behavior, then this is the essence of it.
Next: Markets and Moral Behavior
Be well and do well.

@BasilBrylcreem

Some Notes on Mental Illness

Current psychiatric theory deals with imbalances in neurotransmitters, imbalances in neural activity in the cerebral cortex, and actual damage to neural structures such as the hippocampus. Leaving experimental psychology to the qualified practitioners perhaps it is an appropriate moment in the development of neurophysiological knowledge to step back and use the brain to understand the brain logically.
Certainly the phenomenon of personal trauma resulting in psychosis is well known. Specific diagnoses such as PTSD are defined in those terms. It is generally agreed that the inability to process through trauma causes psychotic symptoms. This leads logically to an inquiry as to what an external trauma would look like in the brain. Hypothetically it would be an unintegrated structure of dendrites and synapses. If this is the case and one is intent upon curing this type of psychosis, what approach would be taken?
Obviously the object of psychotherapy in this case would be to integrate such a structure, a trauma fragment, into the greater neurology of the brain. There are many effective techniques for doing this which are based on conjectural psychological theory. Wouldn't it be easier to use a physiological model and address the mechanics of managed dendrite formation directly? Of course it would.
What would such a therapeutic regimen look like? Hyperconnectivity probably involves dopamine, HGH, vitamin B12, and neurostimulation. Such a regimen would involve, as any sufferer of psychosis will tell you, an espresso and a cigar. Properly practiced, it would also involve LDopa, 1000 mcg of B12, and exercise. There is no doubt in my mind that reading the right books, nonfiction and fiction, and regularly participating in appropriate conversation is required to fully integrate a significant trauma fragment.
One must think through personal trauma in order to fully integrate it into a healthy brain. Popular culture is not in the business of integrating trauma. At times it appears to be in the opposite business of incurring trauma. A healthy retreat from a constant diet of discomfort and shock can only improve the coherent structure of the brain, but this can only be a temporary withdrawal in the manner of a lion licking his wounds. At some point reality must be dealt with successfully as a criteria of recovery.

Personal Myth; Personal Canon

All readers have favorite books. Postmodernists deal in personal myth and each personal myth is symbol to a canon of theory, of philosophy, of experience. Significant to the writing of my novel in progress is that there is a gap in the canon implied by my personal myth in which an unknown volume fits and I am writing that volume, a simple and legitimate motivation.
Human knowledge increases by a process of 'puzzling', finding a missing piece that nears the larger puzzle to completion with Gestalt moments of paradigm shifts when puzzles are recognizably complete and perspectives shift. We live in such an age of perspective shift, a Gestalt moment. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are only a century old and the String Theory that unifies them less than that. Science is now working in Information Theory. It will be another century before we acculturate the descriptively powerful image of scalar fields decaying into particles and all that that implies, a century away from understanding these magnificent theoretical constructs in our cultural behavior.
I have a personal need to write this book and I perceive social value in its existence. This is a difficult and dark dystopian age where meaning is dear and found largely in personal terms. By examining the human condition within the framework of my personal canon and filtered by my personal myth, I might have the germ of idea that will provide the missing piece to someone's personal myth and perhaps contribute to a New Grand Narrative if such a thing is possible. And so I write.

http://www.amazon.com/author/johnfrazier

The Sport of Writing

I have always been fond of sports metaphors and quotes in casual conversation. However today I decided to write a blog comparing writing to sport. It is not far fetched. Sport requires talent, diligent practice, discipline, and will. I could be describing a good writer. The difference lies in the fact that the reader only sees the result of the writer's performance, not the performance itself. With sport, the game's the thing. It is an interesting difference.
Within the writing community, some do appreciate the game itself. We are aficionados of the writing game and it has been characterized as such. Writing is our sport however the reading public sees it and they generally see it in much more grandiose terms. An elegant sentence is the equivalent of a three point goal in basketball. No more. No less. When one is blessed or burdened with a deep understanding of the process of pen across page, it is an incredibly rewarding experience to get all the moving parts moving together like a Rolex and make that three point goal, write that elegant sentence.
Sports, however, are played against other players and here the metaphor gets a bit thin. Any self-respecting writer does play against a canon of similar talent. They wrestle in their own weight class but they do wrestle. I am no Hemingway or Nabokov but I do have writers in mind that I would like to match or better. To me and, in practice, other writers, writing is a sport.

The Fiction Narrative as Product

When I began conceptualizing the novel I am now writing, I first imagined a superb (Indie) bookstore and visualized the shelf on which I was trying to place this book. In other words, this novel is market-driven. Books are written to be read and writing with any other criteria then unit sales in mind makes no sense to the union of pen and paper. I do engage in writing exercises to hone my craft and develop form but always with an eye to saying something worth saying well enough for it to be read and enjoyed.
A generic book is a product in the same sense that a painting is a product. While the category, books by the pound, exists just as the product category, motel art, exists, the defining attributes of vision and talent select certain books for certain shelves in the book market, the universal bookstore.
Unlike some other writers, I appreciate Amazon's business model for the creation and marketing of books as products. They do make mistakes such as treating books as a commodity by lowering unit prices to increase volume of sales but, as it becomes obvious that this is a mistake, they will change their model. Theirs is a pragmatic, heuristic approach to selling more books and, since I want my novel read, I support their approach even when they make mistakes.
I will say that the Amazon search engine, which constitutes the shelves of that bookstore, is mysterious, even enigmatic. In my personal experience, it has behaved brilliantly in presenting certain books of interest to me and in a fairly mediocre fashion at other times. Writing for a search engine is a totally different concept than writing for a physical shelf and I admit that I am struggling to master it.