Borg Hive
You maybe have been a little too busy lately with texting and Facebook updating, Google searching and e-mailing, to pay attention to the world accelerating at the speed of algorithms. You probably don’t remember exactly when you got your first calculator (I got one back in 1975) or your first computer (we got one in, oh, I’m guessing, 1988 or thereabouts). The point being, not that you can or can’t remember the date, but that it happened in recent history, it happened in our lifetime. And in the few intervening years, it became an integral part of modern living. It changed everything. It is, just as the invention of the spinning jenny and machinery was, a revolution. The world will never be the same.
Now we take it for granted. Only took a decade, maybe two. Future Shock, just as Toffler predicted, is here, picking up speed, faster than we Cro Magnons can possibly adapt to the changes. Oh, sure, you can send twitters, you can e-mail, you can download movies on your TV, easy as pie. And if it’s hard, the kids can show you how. My parents, not so much. They’re a bit too calcified in the Industrial Age to manage much more than the basics. Try to explain trickier navigations, they’re boggled immediately. The old man keeps a set of directions for operating his TV that his grandson wrote down for him five years ago. Oh yeah, he uses it every time he wants to switch from cable to DVD.
Everyone now, except me and two other Neanderthal knuckle draggers on the planet, carry a cellphone or a tablet or an I-pad everywhere they go. They’re ‘connected’ to the hive in ways that were unimaginable ten years ago. I don’t know if the world has shrunk so much as it has become denser, jammed with data and information, more coming in at the speed of light. If our attention spans have truncated to about 20 seconds max, it’s little wonder, we have to move on to the next new incoming. The world, once external in our early years, is now internal, virtual, digitized and flying at us at incredible speed.
If you’ve been around kids the past decade or so, you know they no longer live among us. They might be in the same room, sleep in the beds upstairs, mumble occasionally when they enter or leave the house, but no, they’re already gone. The Pied Piper of PC and Apple have taken them to a different place, one where you and I won’t be going. You might have learned a few tricks, but they’ve internalized the circuitry. They learned from the machine and the machine is how they think now. Eventually they will add chips to themselves, apps, all that stuff they carry in a box now but will soon be inserted into their physical body. You think tattoos or lip rings are invasive, you’ve got some shocks coming. It’s a brave new world, old timer, and we’re the last of the humans.