By
Sohail Inayatullah
The conventional view of the future assumes that life will keep on getting better. Income will go up, houses will increase in value, new technologies will make life better for all, even if in the short run some of us have to retrain. Our children’s lives will improve. To be sure, there will be difficult times, but challenges will be solved, either through government or through entrepreneurial activity. OECD nations will remain fair societies, where the most vulnerable will be taken care of.
This incremental view of the future is being challenged with claims that we are in the midst of the emergence of a post-industrial knowledge economy, a postmodern future. Indeed, this is a time of many “posts”, meaning that the new era we are in is still being created, its outlines not yet clear, the institutional arrangements (what will government look like, who will watch over whom) still being sorted out.
Deeper changes
But perhaps the transformation is even deeper, challenging not just industrialism, but the entire rise of capitalism and the long term ascension of Western civilization, the Colombian era.
Nano-technologies and artificial intelligence might make production on a scale never before possible. Of course, these technologies are not yet on line but we are seeing hints of a post-scarcity society, challenging the idea that poverty will always be with (well at least because of technological reasons).
Smarter markets, meaning all products bar-coded with complete pricing details (how much the Indonesian worker was paid, how many trees were cut down, how much the middle-man made) will soon be possible, allowing consumers to vote with their dollars. Standards will then continue their transformation from merely the product’s physical quality (what it looks like, is it safe and safely made) to its functional quality (how well it does what it claims to do) to its context (ethical quality).
By giving accurate information to consumers, the Internet could level the inequalities of capitalism, creating a giant peoples market. Capitalism could also transform through another depression, a global one once the speculative bubble of the world’s financial markets finally bursts.
Equally transformative is the rise of multiculturalism. Taken to its full extent it shatters any notion of one culture, one state, one knowledge system, and one view of science. Can nations adequately organize the emergent differences being created, the vision a world of many cultures – a gaia of civilizations – of an ecology of different worldviews?
Proudly negotiating the tensions between the local and the universal (between feudal and empire/world church), even if the passport office remains its power to deport, the nation-state as the sole holder of power has entered a terminal process. Whether it will take 50 years or a hundred, we know well that revolutions from below (nongovernmental organizations), revolutions from above (international institutions), revolutions from capital (globalism), revolutions of culture (new ways of seeing self and other, of boundaries) and revolutions of technology (air travel, the Net) all make the nation-state deeply problematic. Of course, the Hansons, the Milosevics, the brahmins and mullahs will not disappear. With no place to hold onto, they will fight until the bitter end, hoping that enough of us will retain sentiments of ethno-nationalism, of patriotism (and be willing to kill for it). They will hope to transform the quite legitimate concerns of individuals fearing change, corporate control, foreigners and loss of jobs into a politics of exclusion, of attacking the other.
Governance
What world is likely to result from these historical revolutions in governance? There is a range of historical-structural possibilities. Either one religious system dominates creating a world church, temple or mosque or one nation dominates creating a world empire. The former is unlikely, as reality has become too fragmented. Neither christians nor muslims (or buddhists) are likely to convert en mass tomorrow, even if Jesus, the madhi, or amida buddha return. The problem of universally recognizing God is not likely to be solved in the year 2000, even if the Redeemer does return.
A world empire is difficult given the democratic impulse. The only nation currently vying for the job is caught by its own democratic participatory language. Disney and Microsoft are far more likely victors than the US state department, irrespective of what conspiracy theorists in Belgrade, Baghdad, Beijing and Kuala Lumpur believe.
But can the world capitalist economy – the third alternative – remain the hegemonic definer of identity? It has flourished because the economy has been global, expanding, while identity has been national, fixed, and thus has politics. With the nation in steep trouble, can a world economy with national identity politics continue? Localist – the fourth alternative – movements hope to capture the spaces being created by the loss of national identity. However, in their attempts to be authentically local, to challenge corporatism, they find themselves forced to link with other environmental, spiritual, labor, organizations. Cyberlobbying, the politics on the Net, too, forces them into global space indeed, all forces do. Localism only succeeds when it becomes global.
Globalisms
In this sense while we are half-way through the first phase of globalization, that is, of capital, phase two is likely to be the globalization of labor, Marx’s dream all along. If capital can travel freely, why not labor? Already, elite intellectual labor does, and soon other forms will as well. At the very least information the conditions of labor will via “the smart products method” become global. The next wave will be the multicultural. News – not the details of reporting but what we report about – will begin to flow not just downwards from Hollywood, New York and London upward as well. Already, the best newspapers are those that include the feeds of many cultures. The Pakistani paper, The News, for example, far exceeds any reporting The New York Times might manage, largely, as it is weaker, and thus to survive gets feeds from Arab, South Asian, East Asian and Western sources. Not just news, but ideas, language, culture is beginning to filter all around, and even if Murdock is likely to standardize, still standardization is being challenged throughout the world. Customization is the likely future, technology allows it so, and postmodernism provides the cultural legitimacy for it. The search for authenticity in postmodern times, even if largely about style, forces a questioning of one’s once presumed universal values. To question: the male, western, technocratic, linear, capitalist basis of reality. History books (why are muslims seen only as threats, why is the Pacific, the water continent seen as irrelevant?) and children’s stories are all being deconstructed (why are witches constantly portrayed as evil?) and seen as particular of a worldview (Europe defining what is true, good and beautiful), and not as universal. Facts come to be through narratives, or at the very least, what meanings we give to the facts change.
The final phase of globalization is likely to be a world security force, inklings of which we are already seeing (although certainly still within the hegemonic framework).
With empire, one church, localism and a world capitalist economy around nation-states nearly impossible to sustain, what this means is that we will soon move to a world government system with strong localist tendencies, with thousands of bio-regions. The guiding ethic will be a move from strategy as our foremost paradigm to that of health and healing (of negotiating reality, difference, of reconciliation, and of having a big stick, ie the world security force) along with a neo-Magna Carta guaranteeing the right of culture, language and income.
The details are terribly important and burdensome, and how the Chinese will get along with the Americans is difficult to predict (just as the modern era was not possible to articulate from the feudal), but the structural forces are such that the only solution to the future is that. Many hope for a world governance system with strong localism. But this is unlikely, as localist systems alone do not survive because they get taken over. It is not love alone that will create this new world system.
Aspirations
That said, aspirations for what people all over the world fall into three scenarios.
The first is the globalist scenario. A jet plane for each and every; the capacity to speak many languages; multicultural; postmodern; Net-hip, and no more scarcity.
The second is the organic scenario. Community and connecting with others is far more important. Relationship is not just about communication but it is a way of knowing. Slowing time down from the fast, always-one, always-everywhere, globalist world is a priority. Good sex, good food, and regular exercise and meditation also rank high. The image of the future is that of self-reliance electronically and spiritually (through the medium of microvita, Indian Philosopher P. R. Sarkar’s notion of the basic units of life).
The third scenario is the collapse, the return of Mad Max, the end of capitalism, tidal waves galore, escaped viruses (of the internet and biological types), airborne AIDs, and thank god for it since we have collectively sinned – mixed species, mixed marriages – forgotten what reality is really about. The aspiration dimension is that after the collapse, a moral order, with a strong father figure, returns.
There is a generational aspect to the future as well. Generation X is concerned about ethics, about the environment, about others. The globalist scenario is loved by the .Com generation. Growing up where difference is essential, they surf culture and the Net.
But there is more to the globalist scenario than just the freeing of capital and information. Indeed, that is why many believe we the transformation we are witnessing is far more fundamental than the victory of liberalism, the end of industrialism, and even the ascension of progress and the West.
End of Nature
For the first time we are on the verge of changing nature. Technology is the verge of the rapid redesign of evolution itself. Imagine a hand, writes information evolutionist Susantha Goonatilake, wearing a glove, writing with a pen. The hand represents the stability of evolution, our body constant over time; the glove represents culture, our meaning systems, our protection, our method of creating shared spaces and creating a difference between us and nature; and the pen, technology, representing our effort to create, to improve, to change culture and nature. While the traditional tension was between technology and culture with evolution “stable”, now the pen (technology) has the potential to turn back on the hand and redesign it, making culture but technique, a product of technology. Thus the traditional feedback loop of culture and technology with biology the stable given is about to be transformed.
Evolution ceases to be something that happens to us but becomes directed. Add the Internet revolution, and suddenly we have information and genetic technologies or IGTs. Through the web we’ll be able to order children. But isn’t this far far away? Not say geneticists such as Leroy Hood, William Gates Professor of Molecular Biotechnology and Bioengineering. He argues that we are in the midst of a dramatic paradigm shift in the sciences, specifically the ascendancy of biology and the movement from hypothesis-based science to discovery science. Once the human genome is mapped, the first stage of application will be genetic prevention, the friendly visit to the local genetic doctor (or genedoctor.com). This is something we all would agree to, well, except the disabled, who now find themselves in a double whammy, says David Turnbull, made irrelevant by globalism, now they will be soon as the genetic discards of history, to be forever removed, like a bulldozed slum. But as with all slums, they will come back, and in far more problematic forms.
But we can now engineer intelligence, that is, genetic enhancement, making us all smarter and thus be able to deal with the externalities we create. If needed, we can make some of us stupider to do the dirty work. But ideally the dirty work will be done by the robots. And if the robots are not quite ready, the traditional solution of immigration remains. Indeed, for the West with rapid ageing soon to challenge economic growth, immigration will decide with OECD nations prosper and which decline. The ones that let in young Asians and Africans will have bright futures, others will slip away, lag behind. However, along with immigration there are two other possibilities. One: increase production through the Net. Two: create new humans, genetically.
Thus, after genetic enhancement, genetic recreation. The issue of whether we should do this, that is, ethics, unfortunately remains the endnote to the science and technology revolution. When you are changing the very nature of nature, why let a bit of ethics comes in the way between old and new species.
And ultimately that is what it will soon be about. Once genetic inequality becomes a main issue – that is the right to genetic enhancement – the world state will come in and regulate not if we should have baby factories but that they are safe and nicely air-conditioned.
Can anything be done to avoid the baby-factory future, or is the conflation between Big Science, Big Business, State, and our own materialistic urges so strong that the future will be one where we exist in not an ecology of types of life, but one where “we” as natural humans will be circumspect. Doyne Farmer of the famous Sante Fe Institute describes it in these apocalyptic terms:
If we fail in our task as creators (creating our successors), they may indeed be cold and malevolent. However, if we succeed, they maybe glorious, enlightened creatures that far surpass us in their intelligence and wisdom. It is quite possible that, when the conscious beings of the future look back on this earth, we will be most noteworthy, not in and of ourselves, but rather for what we gave rise to. Artificial life is potentially the most beautiful creation of humanity.
Along with Nature, reality, truth and sovereignty are equally contentious.
Reality once given, is now made. As we learn in Blade Runner, the toy maker to the question of what do you do, says. “I make friends,” meaning not relationship and communion but the manufacture of others.
Once we knew what was real, now we have the virtual. What is maya and what is not. The Matrix ceases to be entertainment becoming a profound critique of what is to be.
Truth has already been deconstructed. Postmodernists, feminists, postcolonial theorists have rampaged across the globe questioning the epistemic basis of modernity, leaving all in tatters.
And sovereignty is already long gone, not just of the nation, but of the self. We have become many selves, many identities, numerous communities. While some hold on to the 9/5 job, living in the Pleasantville of work and home, others have become far more fluid, traveling in many spaces, many cultures.
Genetics or microvita?
Where then is home? Where in the future is our resting space? And who will create it? Will it be those who are part of the current system, those in the Continued growth model of the future? Government leaders and corporate CEOs? Or will it be the “bedouins”, those imagining a more organic connected future, those outside of official power. Will the current bedouin members and members of the social movements create a new future. Will their challenge for new rights (for humans, animals and plants), for gender partnerships (womanists and feminists), for spirituality (seeking to transcend religion and secularism, finding meaning in a lived relationship with the infinite) and for social activism (a moral not amoral economy and politics) and against 500 years of continued growth be successful?
But instead of the bedouins, the “others” – steeped in ancient cyclical time – the likely future remains that of speed, the teflon postmodern self, and our genetic recreated offspring, the double helix generation to come. They imagine a future with no limits and have the wealth to create it.
Are there any limits to the technological changes ahead? Gordon Moore, founder of Intel – and Moore’s law (that the number of devices on a piece of silicon doubles every year or two), when asked about the pace of change says:
We’re working with feature sizes that are so small, they’re hard to imagine—you could say that the features are about the size of a … virus, …We currently use visible light to etch components on the semiconductors, but now we’re getting down to wavelengths for which essentially no materials are transparent. You can’t make lenses any more. We’re looking at three major alternatives to go beyond what we do now—X-rays, electron beams, and something called extreme ultraviolet … The next problem we run across is the fact that materials are made out of atoms. I don’t see a way around that one.
But perhaps the solution to these limits will be from outside the material, outside our expectations. P.R. Sarkar writes that the very nature of reality must be ideational and physical at the same time – microvita. At the crudest form they are viruses, at the deepest, they are pockets of energy that can be used to direct evolution that can carry information. Like the geneticists, he believes we are directing evolution but it is being directed through our creative collective unconscious, through our aspirations for a different world. These aspirations become not mere visions of dreamers but the program for, at least, our social, if not, biological evolution.
Which future will it be then? Incremental Change? The globalist artificial society? The organic global community? Or a collapse followed by a strong moral order?
Will the technocrats or humanists win this one, or are we creating a world where neither one has the current metaphorical capacity to recognize the future?
Dr. Sohail Inayatullah. Professor, Center for Future Studies, Tamkang University, Taiwan; Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of the Sunshine Coast; and the Communication Center, Queensland University of Technology.