The Pace of Disruption
The general phenomenon is that society has not yet figured out how to deal with social media. I think in my kids generation they will be saying all kinds of crazy things on Twitter and nobody will care, nobody will lose a job over it, and nobody will get worked up over it because everyone will say anything crazy all the time. But right now we’re transitioning from a world of our thoughts being private to our thoughts being public.
People are still getting outraged. To me, the people who get outraged are sort of the most anachronistic, least intelligent ,members of society and I’m happy to leave them behind. The more easily outraged you get, the less I want to have to do with you. Be gone. If you think words can hurt you, you’re going to live in a world of misery and pain your entire life. — Naval Ravikant
This comment I heard on a podcast resonated with me and it made me wonder if maybe this obsession with social media is just the current generation’s blinking 12:00 on the VCR. The thing everyone sees, but few can change, so we just decide to live with the minor, but relentless annoyance. But it’s no longer minor, nor benign. And while it may be the new normal for many, the few that decide our futures may have absolutely no idea the extent of its power. Or more frightening still, maybe they do and the game of getting and keeping us outraged is deliberate.
There’s a preponderance of hate circulating today on social media, much of it emanating from both sides of the political elite. How these folks choose to talk about the world sets a standard for the public, but do they know their audience? The power of their words?
The average age of Members of the House at the beginning of this 114th Congress was 57.0 years; of Senators, 61.0 years. This means a large number of these people actually had blinking 12:00s in their living rooms and have witnessed the same explosion of technology. But because most of them have spent their entire adult lives in public service, it’s a good bet, they have little experience in the real world. And that world is vastly different from the one they left some thirty years ago. Like Rip Van Winkles in charge of so much, but so profoundly out of touch with just exactly what modern life is like, except maybe the divisive fallout that occurs when misinformation can spread faster than a tweet.
Combine that anachronistic, out of touch worldview with a 24 hour news cycle where the sheer absence of real news has spawned “fake news” written by “fake reporters” on “fake websites” and you wind up with a lot of the headlines are designed simply to get our attention; not inform our point of view with research and solid journalism. Paying attention to the facts, has taken a backseat to getting us to click. We are just bait.
On the bright side, yes I do believe there is a bright side, there is hope of something better coming out on the other side. Earlier in the same podcast Naval gave some insight on how he makes life easier in this transition period.
“I try to keep a very low level of mental surface activity for anything other than whatever I’m directly dealing with in the moment and one of the ways I am trying to do that is by stripping away layers of identity. So I don’t want to overly identify as Indian, or American, or Libertarian, or Democrat, or any of those kinds of things because one that sort of keeps me from actually engaging and thinking as I need to, it’s all preconceived beliefs, it makes me more defensive. The reason why you can’t talk about politics with anybody is because it attacks their identity at a core level. Every tweet I put out I now know that even if I attack a general class of activity all the people who are engaged in that activity will respond. So, like I put out a tweet about how value investing and venture investing are both long-term investing and trading is a get rich quick scheme, which doesn’t work, and so of course all of the people that got really angry about that (I just clicked through to their bio) and sure enough they are traders. That’s what they do, they trade all the time, and for Wall Street and that’s how they make a living. So if you attack someone’s identity you shut down all conversation with them. That’s why political conversations don’t work. So, conversely if you want to be rational and open-minded you should not have an identity and the less of an identity you can adopt the better.”
The ease with which private thought can now become public consumption through social media is a direct result of the exponential technology change that surrounds us all at every level. Facebook and Twitter are both on the order of ten years old. Yet look at the pace of disruption:
If one adds adds virtual reality, AI, robotics, CRISPR, it becomes quite plain that our vision of ourselves, what we put forth and how we relate to the wider world has changed and will continue to evolve into something none of us can imagine.
The attachment to how we believe the world works is something we all need to let go of if we are indeed going to see the light on the other side of what has become an unstoppable rate of change.
Still, change is opportunity and the real silver lining is more people globally now have access to the so-called, American Dream. But as a country, we are in a place of transition and not simply going through a “phase”. This is the Brave New World and we cannot simply rage against that machine. We must detach from the old and embrace and explore what is and what is to come. Scary? Maybe. Necessary? Absolutely.
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