Seemingly
intensifying troubles all over the globe—and just yesterday at the University
of Missouri—produced the almost random thought this morning: global energy is
rising—and it’s been going on for a while.
Behind
that thought was the commonplace observation that uncontrolled, un-channeled
energy almost always causes huge amounts of damage—as we know from tornadoes,
earthquakes, and the like. Therefore what I’m observing across the world—be it
in the middle-east, in Africa, and the Americas, not least a drum-beat of
shootings, killings, and upheavals here—must be the consequence of extra energy.
But
when I look at that, I noted that we’re in the gradual process of consuming
what little is left now of global
hydrocarbon energy. By all accounts we should see the Age of Oil end by the end
of this century. So where does this new energy come from?
Next it
occurred to me that this New Energy is not of the fossil kind—or the candidates
to replace it. Rather that it is new human energy chaotically “doing work,” and
mostly destructive work, outside the old-fashioned institutional systems of
family, markets, education, and government. Can we actually see it? Yes. We see
its tooling almost everywhere except in the pools of swimming pools. That
tooling is the cell phone. People use it taking the dog for a walk, driving,
waiting for the doctor, while shopping, just before falling asleep and first
thing after waking and on the toilet.
The
cell phone, to be sure, is but the most visible icon of very rapid
communication between individuals; it rests on digital technology and systems
developed for its exploitation, most centrally the many different kinds of
social media enabling people to form ad-hoc group that, when moved by some
strong emotion of idea, take on the character of an institution of the
old-fashioned, regular kind like a government or an army.
The
difference between what I’ve been calling “old-fashioned” institutions and
these new ad-hoc groups is that institutions require major investment,
employees, work space, routine missions, and central administration. The ad-hoc
groups have no office buildings, payrolls, or, often, recognizable leaders; but, often, they can actually function
almost without titular leadership altogether. Rapid communication can gel into consensus; action then follows quite spontaneously.
The
various emotions or ideas that move these groups may be quite innocent—like
entertainment; but when the emotions are rebellion or opposition, they can and
do become quite effectively aggressive and take over (often violently, as is
the case with ISIS) all traditional institutions and come to dominate entire
regions. The earliest of these groups were called flash mobs and date to the
early 2000s.
The
energy comes from the concerting of individual actions—individuals whom, before
the cyber revolution, it would have taken monumental efforts to recruit to
coordinate if they were physically
close. Such efforts once took significant time to accomplish and could be
relatively easily disrupted. The cyber revolution annihilates both space and
time—space by being able to coordinate people at great distances and time by
doing it in hours or days rather than months or years. Open communications—on an unimaginable scale—make
it almost impossible even to detect the formation and intensification of these
groups until they have begun to act. There is also that first amendment
guarantee of free speech and assembly to make action countering their
destructive efforts difficult. At present this new energy looks like a
permanent feature of modern life putting all sorts of institutions at risk. But
stable institutions are necessary for order. It is order that has begun to
yield—and will fill our media with chaos until a new order, after all kinds of
transformations, once more takes hold.
