delorean/Reuben Yau (Flickr)

Forward to the Past!

Or how the world is becoming one big (nomadic?) village

Many things we’ve come to know recently are really only short blips in the story of our species. Things like privacy, property ownership, and isolation. You see back several hundred years, sometimes more, many of these things did not exist.

Take privacy for example. We all wish to have privacy, and perhaps with things like getting dressed without everyone seeing you naked, perhaps we always had it. But who you were sleeping with, what your political beliefs were, and all manner of other sorts of gossip, were not private. We lived in small towns, villages really, where everyone knew everything about everyone else. We are returning to these days. Facebook is currently leading that charge.

Now take another example. Property ownership. According to Veblen, it is believed that nomadic people had little understanding of personal property. This is still true to a lesser extent in some cultures today and is something which is slowly eroding again in the west.

How many people have an album or song they own which was bought in the past year? What about all your music? My guess is, with the rise of Spotify, Pandora, and many others, that the percentage is a small one, even for digital albums. This is true even among people who only listen through legal means. This trend has moved to movies, and will continue to consume all manner of digital goods.

It won’t only have an effect on the digital. Uber and Lyft have begun to take away our ownership of cars. How long until Airbnb and Breather take away ownership of homes and offices for all of us? You won’t give up owning your companies office you say? Ok, Maybe, but most will and with the continuing fragmentation of the enterprise your company may need a lot less space in the future than you imagine. Bits into Atoms as they say.

Now about that isolation. If you imagine what the world was like when we lived in small villages, one of the reason you had such little privacy, is that everyone knew everyone else. Now most people don’t even know their neighbor. It is common to lament that once you leave school it becomes difficult to create new friends, or meet anyone new. Alas, for many of us new friends come in the form of work relationships which are often overly complicated. In particular many people still try to keep professional and personal circles separate.

The reason it becomes difficult to make new friends after graduation, and outside of work comes from our primitive selves. It was necessary then for survival to be suspicious of those outside your tribe. Yet for many of us, the tribes we’ve happened into weren’t always the tribes that fit best with us. Especially 10, 20,or 30 years later. Now we have the freedom to leave tribes where we don’t fit, but lack the access to new tribes.

This access is something which is changing slowly. We are slowly able to enter into new tribes through the internet. This is currently through interacting with people on Twitter, friending people you just met on facebook, or blogging your thoughts. These means though are still relegated to the tech comfortable. Still to this day I have people who I would run into on a weekly basis, talk with at length every time I saw them(15-30min), and still they worry I would find it creepy if they commented or liked one of my posts. (!?)

This is changing slowly though. You can see it simply by looking to the technological future that is San Francisco. People add people whom they just met, comment on their photos, and interact far more often than those outside of facebook. Even the rest of America is ahead of many countries internationally.

As this continues to change, the end of isolation will come. No longer will a person be left alone, with no one similar to them. While we are all unique, we are not able to live alone. We are a social animal, and we need tribes.

These are only three examples, and only looking at already accepted technology. As things like Google Glass, 3D printing, and even the Hyperloop become more present in everyday life, the world will go back even further in time. So if one wants to understand what future technology is taking us to, one needs only to look to the past.