There's much more technology involved than Cochrane acknowledges. Alex didn't on-sight that climb: he practiced, over and over again, using ropes and gear that have existed in their current form for 60 years at best. The same goes for how he got so good: he climbed with ropes and gear (well, sometimes), and learned from people who used gear nearly all the time.
Much of that technology looks old, but isn't: ropes have been around a while, but modern climbing ropes stretch so as to drastically lower the peak forces on your protection. For example. Modern climbing exists in large part because we developed technology that lets you try to climb hard high stuff without dying.
Now, you could also get good just by bouldering, staying close to the ground. But that's not how actual existing climbing developed: bouldering grew out of crag climbing, which grew out of mountaineering. It's a little silly to wonder why people weren't very good at a game we just invented, before we invented it.
Another point. We don't actually know how good the best climbers were throughout history. There's a clear upward trajectory to 19th-century British mountaineering and its descendants. But how good were the best Incan climbers in 1350?
> Another point. We don't actually know how good the best climbers were throughout history. There's a clear upward trajectory to 19th-century British mountaineering and its descendants. But how good were the best Incan climbers in 1350?
Even through the early 19th century climbers were much better than given credit for, part of this is also how grading shifts over time. I've experienced this first hand, climbed some old "HVS" routes (fairly easy grade) established in early 19th century in wales (UK), only to find them in the low extremes by modern standards, maybe E2/3 (no this wasn't mere sandbaging), on top of which they were using heavy gear, unsafe gear and mountain boots!
I have much respect for forgotten pioneers of climbing, they were much tougher than they appeared on the face of their accomplishments.
We all have little jokes in climbing when conditions make routes harder like rain, cold, dirt, birds whatever, "oh this bird shit turns it into a VS / E12 today".. it's silly, but when applied generally, it's true - every aspect that is different can make the same climb significantly harder or easier for others, those pioneers probably were climbing E9 for them.
Pre-modern climbers were likely much worse, for a variety of factors. First of all, in agrarian societies only a small segment of the population (mostly nobles) had any significant amounts of free time to pursue activities unrelated to food production. So the population of climbers was much smaller. On top of that, nutrition in general was a lot worse. Most of the population lived on diets just enough to survive. And lastly, literacy and information transfer was highly limited so climbers would not be able to teach each other their techniques as effectively and couldn't google the best climbing places.
I was looking for the source, I can't find it, but there was a (I think 17th century) French monk was into climbing, and based on his diary entries and the local crags near the monastery they guessed he was pulling 5.13a, which, for climbers today usually it takes several years of dedicated training to get to that level.
As a climber this hurt me a bit to read. They're not boots, they're shoes John!
Also I'm glad that the movie is successful, and that the sport of climbing is getting mainstream attention, but personally I'm more impressed by the accomplishment of Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson in free-climbing the dawn wall with protection. In my mind that is a better representation of the highest level of achievement within the sport. Climbing without protection has more to do with being a daredevil than a climber, and while I understand why it's so impressive, I am conflicted about this particular achievement being celebrated and potentially emulated.
Pedantry aside, the article makes some interesting points.
Mislabelling climbing gear doesn't bug me, but this:
>
Likewise, nobody in 1958 had any idea that you could hang by your thumbs and fingers to exploit little pieces of rock. This knowledge, demonstrated in the movie, emerged from the community of rock climbers and boulderers over time.
John Gill was sending V9 Boulder problems in 1958, in tennis shoes! He was off in his own little world and climbing way beyond the standards of the greater climbing community at the time.
Gill is regarded as the father of modern bouldering. He began as a gymnast and adapted modern training techniques from gymnastics to bouldering. He never had much interest in roped climbing or long routes, he was all about doing the hardest possible moves on stone.
> Climbing without protection has more to do with being a daredevil than a climber.
I think it's important to recognise that there are many different ways to get up a piece of rock, these are a choice in "style", and each style has different challenges, different qualities etc. No one style is better than another, they are a personal choice, and this is part of what makes the sport so great... if you want to invent a new style, you can, it can be completely made up and personalized and obscure, perhaps it is even a one time thing, climb route x in slippers on christmas. People only argue about the validity of the most common styles, but they often forget they are only a style.
I would also highly recommend The Dawn Wall: https://www.dawnwall-film.com/. I watched it and Free Solo at around the same time, and The Dawn Wall is a much better movie in my mind
Not to detract too much from the author's point... But as a climber myself, I think climbing technology does actually contribute to advances in pure climbing skill more than you might think.
Take just a single aspect of the gear - climbing rope, modern rope is a technological wonder, light, super strong and extremely dynamic, it's part of what makes it possible to push yourself to the limit and repeatedly fall off routes safely, with zero injury. After a certain point you cannot improve in climbing without pushing beyond your limits and failing, modern technology allows you to push further and further and survive and retain your skills, and this is a significant part of why the pure climbing skill of climbers today is so advanced.
The author has made the same observation but ignoring climbing technology and focusing on internet etc for spread of knowledge - but there are many skills that do not survive conceptualization and communication in tact, for those, you need specialist technology to advance your learning beyond the basics.
Go back 80 years, you will find weak, heavy hemp rope, rope harnesses that will probably kill you, and people literally carried rocks as gear, shoving them in cracks with the rope behind them. It's not hard to see how limiting this is in learning the skill, as you move forward in time gear becomes more advanced but still very heavy.
I agree that more modern climbing gear is fantastic and definitely gives me a great deal of confidence when I am pushing my limits, I don't think that it would stop me from pushing at all.
Even using gear from 30-40 years ago, it is possible to climb with relative safety, the new gear is mainly only an incremental improvement in safety.
That's not to say that I would happily take a fall on older equipment, just that the main element of danger is generally not the equipment but the surrounding environment.
You should detract from the author's point, because it only works if you are largely ignorant of how things like this actually happens. It is essentially always not generics, but specifics. Specific people doing specific things in specific places with specific technology and culture. Without knowing much of the "extreme climbing community" I would bet that it is a rather specific group of people and largely non-existent outside of that.
The author is largely trying to sell exceptionalism. That everything will be fine with generic improvements. Yet, of course that isn't true. Both state of technology and the economy is probably better than ever yet deliver less and less value. Chances are people like Alex Honnold did it despite of the policies of this economist.
> And now, the technology of the internet. Each new idea in rock climbing is accessible quickly all over the world. Without that large group of interested people, this communal knowledge would not have advanced so far. [The Article]
> After a year, he dropped out of Berkeley and spent time living at home and driving around California to go climbing. "I'd wound up with my mom's old minivan, and that was my base," he said. "I'd use it to drive to Joshua Tree to climb or I'd drive to LA to see my girlfriend. My orbit was tiny and really cheap. I destroyed that van fairly quickly; it died on me one day, and for the next year I lived just on my bicycle and in a tent." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Honnold
Hmm, weird article - I wish the author knew more about climbing, as they are getting it a bit wrong.
Alex couldn't have been birthed 100 years ago and climbed El Cap. The route he used still needed to be established by others. Alex climbed that already-established routes dozens of times before committing to not use all the tech the author thinks he doesn't need. The rehearsal was key. If there's a takeaway from him, it's: "practice".
The route also had to be modified to allow anyone to climb it free - I'm talking about modifying the rock itself. 100 years ago, the climb would have been different. Not hugely so, but one key handhold present that was there before could have made all the difference.
The happened in the first free ascent of the Nose too - an entire pitch was chipped in an attempt to free it, by a different person. They failed, but the route, once chipped, cannot be healed.
Fun bit of trivia on this topic:
Alex was the first person to climb El Cap with no protection.
The first person to climb The Nose route without using the gear for aid, was a woman, Lynn Hill.
So El Cap went from a weeks long project using anything they had for aid, to climbed with rope used only for protection by a woman, in a day, and now to Alex climbing El Cap (via an easier route than Hill) with no protection at all.
The first two people to free El Cap were Todd Skinner and Paul Piana. The climbed the Salathe Wall in 1988. In 1993 or so Lynn Hill free climbed the Nose.
Regarding economic growth and growth theories, I found Dr. Paul Romer's (2018 Economics winner) Nobel Prize Lecture on his work, economic growth theories, and hope for the future to be excellent and stimulating.
In the video the economist talks about progress just as if progress is the end in itself, but is not. We need to have a goal in order to progress to that goal. To have infinite progress is the same to say that at least one of this things:
We don’t know where we want to go;
We are infinitely greed;
We are infinitely incompetent;
We can use the example of the rope. There was many technological progress in the last decades to manufacture good gear for climbing, but as time goes by we will need to spend much more resources in research to get less and less improvements on the rope. There will be a time were the climber needs are fulfilled and we could just spare the nature (ex: the mountains that they like to climb) and enjoy what we have accomplished.
I watched and really enjoyed this movie. Essentially for both of these reasons.
1. The psychology of fear and how we can learn to overcome fear. I think there is a lot to say about the tantalising experience of facing death.
2. The evolutionary nature of a discipline. Some disciplines improve with technology, others with knowledge.
I really love technical sports and am inspired by the amount of sharing in the communities. It is also easy to see in the newer sports how much progress has been made.
It's exciting seeing how far we can push ourselves through what we previously thought was difficult/impossible and redefine the frontiers of the sport
There's a couple the things the author missed - not that it changes the conclusion that much, but adds more context.
The first is how the rise in indoor rock gyms in turn gave rise to youth leagues and competition. This has created a huge leap forward in the skills of elite climbers because many today (the "gym rat" generation) have been climbing only slightly less longer than they've been walking.
The second is how the funding of outdoor adventure/exploration has evolved through the last couple of centuries, from securing precious resources (though mountaineering never had much of that), to a sort of angel/philanthropic model (geographic societies and alpine clubs), to government backed nationalism, to the current gear branding and sponsorship that is fueled by social media. This current model drives a huge amount of activity in outdoor endeavors that have helped create the crowd sourced effect he's talking about.
This analysis is great, but I think there's a highly underrated economic point to be made; technology has unlocked crucial business innovations for climbing. 50 years ago, if you are into climbing, others might hear about it in a specialized tv show or magazine. You also needed to be very rich to be able to afford the time and equipment costs of climbing.
Now with social media driven by the internet, the sponsorship model has enabled people with a passion to be able to sustain a living pursuing that hobby. Independent of the knowledge transfer, deeper knowledge is being created from more people being able to devote their lives to the hobby.
> I think that in studying economic growth, we (and especially we in the Silicon Valley) focus way too much on gadgets, and too little on the simple fact of human knowledge of how to do things.
This is a major component of software's power – it's a tool for formalizing knowledge and skills permanently and distributing it rapidly at ~0 marginal cost. If a piece of software is both correct and performant, it can last a very, very long time, possibly outliving its creators. And the best software composes, so one program can build on top of another to build up a massive skillset.
This is a very interesting look at climbing as it relates to knowledge transmission.
Prior to YouTube, learning proper form really required you to probably take lessons and live/breath/be super friendly with some really good climbers as a necessity. Now, you can watch a number of good climbers online on having proper technique to get 70% there.
Stuff like this was nearly impossible to convey by book. If you want to learn how to be a better swimmer for example because you didn't take up swimming until you were in your 20s, it was very difficult. I did this as an adult, and each private lesson with an instructor to improve my form was $100 in recession dollars. Now, you can gather so much online and iron out the wrinkles with live instruction.
Disclaimer: the video linked above is my friend's YouTube channel.
I might be biased since I learned to climb before YouTube, but I find it quite difficult to learn or teach others through coaching or watching. Although I don't think that holds for the basics, if someone doesn't know what a drop knee is then a video of one would be helpful.
But past that, so much depends on subtle weight shifts and tailoring moves to ones specific body; it's hard to learn that stuff outside of just trying hard moves yourself and making small adjustments.
I would have named this article, “Free Solo Market Cap”.
Also disappointing read. What about comparing climbers to day traders or investors that take economic risks that often have very real consequences in other people’s lives.
The author's point about dissemination of information is spot-on.
A couple of years ago, I read Medieval Technology and Social Change, by Lynn White (https://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Technology-Social-Change-Whi...) as recommended by PG. Technically a textbook, it was a dry and drab look at the history of various innovations during Midlevel times - the stirrup, the windmill, etc. The 30,000ft view is that when innovations are introduced it takes a long time both for them to spread and for someone to finally exploit them to their greatest contributive state. While the steam engine was not invented until 1712, all of the components had been available since Roman times. It took quite a long time to find one of the greatest uses of those innovations. At least, it used to take a long time -
Now, information and innovation spread much faster. Society moves much faster. The innovation of the stirrup took a thousands years to propagate. The innovation of the internet took less than 50 years; Smartphones took 5. The pace of global change is increasing exponentially. A modern entrepreneur must have line of sight to the latest innovations in order to anticipate their impact on his or her society, industry, business, and personal well being. No one wanted to be the new Nokia, Borders Books, or Woolworths.
But, let's take a step back from specific innovations, and look at global mega-shifts in society. From the agricultural revolution, to the various metal ages, through the industrial revolution we are now being lapped by the waves of the Information Age.
As humans we quickly absorb each individual change brought forth in the information age - email, cellular connections, the world wide web, the smart phone, etc. Can you imagine running your business without your iPhone? We very quickly adapt to the here and now and forget the way it was (Thank you evolution!). However, what we are not good at perceiving is the systematic, second-order changes that the Information Age will bring. The Agricultural Age brought these changes over thousands of years. The Industrial Age brought them over generations. The Information Age will bring them with alarming speed that we may not be prepared for:
* Retailer's monopoly on local distribution was destroyed by Amazon.com + UPS
* Newspapers have been shattered by the internet's ability to breakdown their stranglehold on the distribution of information.
* The telecom world was turned upside down by the introduction of the cell phones, the internet, and the disruption of their monopoly on land-lines (Note that AT&T is a mere brand name, which was purchased on the cheap by SBC).
* The traditional media world felt this shock earlier this year when a man with a twitter account was able to upend their distribution monopoly on the news and they were left reacting and pandering instead of dictating.
But these are a number of examples in the commercial world. What about society itself? What about the global financial systems? What about governments?
[+] [-] zopa|6 years ago|reply
Much of that technology looks old, but isn't: ropes have been around a while, but modern climbing ropes stretch so as to drastically lower the peak forces on your protection. For example. Modern climbing exists in large part because we developed technology that lets you try to climb hard high stuff without dying.
Now, you could also get good just by bouldering, staying close to the ground. But that's not how actual existing climbing developed: bouldering grew out of crag climbing, which grew out of mountaineering. It's a little silly to wonder why people weren't very good at a game we just invented, before we invented it.
Another point. We don't actually know how good the best climbers were throughout history. There's a clear upward trajectory to 19th-century British mountaineering and its descendants. But how good were the best Incan climbers in 1350?
[+] [-] tomxor|6 years ago|reply
Even through the early 19th century climbers were much better than given credit for, part of this is also how grading shifts over time. I've experienced this first hand, climbed some old "HVS" routes (fairly easy grade) established in early 19th century in wales (UK), only to find them in the low extremes by modern standards, maybe E2/3 (no this wasn't mere sandbaging), on top of which they were using heavy gear, unsafe gear and mountain boots!
I have much respect for forgotten pioneers of climbing, they were much tougher than they appeared on the face of their accomplishments.
We all have little jokes in climbing when conditions make routes harder like rain, cold, dirt, birds whatever, "oh this bird shit turns it into a VS / E12 today".. it's silly, but when applied generally, it's true - every aspect that is different can make the same climb significantly harder or easier for others, those pioneers probably were climbing E9 for them.
[+] [-] manfredo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fricken|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skohan|6 years ago|reply
As a climber this hurt me a bit to read. They're not boots, they're shoes John!
Also I'm glad that the movie is successful, and that the sport of climbing is getting mainstream attention, but personally I'm more impressed by the accomplishment of Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson in free-climbing the dawn wall with protection. In my mind that is a better representation of the highest level of achievement within the sport. Climbing without protection has more to do with being a daredevil than a climber, and while I understand why it's so impressive, I am conflicted about this particular achievement being celebrated and potentially emulated.
Pedantry aside, the article makes some interesting points.
[+] [-] Fricken|6 years ago|reply
> Likewise, nobody in 1958 had any idea that you could hang by your thumbs and fingers to exploit little pieces of rock. This knowledge, demonstrated in the movie, emerged from the community of rock climbers and boulderers over time.
John Gill was sending V9 Boulder problems in 1958, in tennis shoes! He was off in his own little world and climbing way beyond the standards of the greater climbing community at the time.
Gill is regarded as the father of modern bouldering. He began as a gymnast and adapted modern training techniques from gymnastics to bouldering. He never had much interest in roped climbing or long routes, he was all about doing the hardest possible moves on stone.
[+] [-] tomxor|6 years ago|reply
I think it's important to recognise that there are many different ways to get up a piece of rock, these are a choice in "style", and each style has different challenges, different qualities etc. No one style is better than another, they are a personal choice, and this is part of what makes the sport so great... if you want to invent a new style, you can, it can be completely made up and personalized and obscure, perhaps it is even a one time thing, climb route x in slippers on christmas. People only argue about the validity of the most common styles, but they often forget they are only a style.
[+] [-] timerol|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinator|6 years ago|reply
"rock boots" is a perfectly fine name for climbing shoes. I think "climbing boots" is just fine
[+] [-] blackguardx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrick5415|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Reedx|6 years ago|reply
That said, I'm not sure I'd rank one over the other. Both feats are incredibly impressive, albeit for different reasons.
[+] [-] oftenwrong|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomxor|6 years ago|reply
Take just a single aspect of the gear - climbing rope, modern rope is a technological wonder, light, super strong and extremely dynamic, it's part of what makes it possible to push yourself to the limit and repeatedly fall off routes safely, with zero injury. After a certain point you cannot improve in climbing without pushing beyond your limits and failing, modern technology allows you to push further and further and survive and retain your skills, and this is a significant part of why the pure climbing skill of climbers today is so advanced.
The author has made the same observation but ignoring climbing technology and focusing on internet etc for spread of knowledge - but there are many skills that do not survive conceptualization and communication in tact, for those, you need specialist technology to advance your learning beyond the basics.
Go back 80 years, you will find weak, heavy hemp rope, rope harnesses that will probably kill you, and people literally carried rocks as gear, shoving them in cracks with the rope behind them. It's not hard to see how limiting this is in learning the skill, as you move forward in time gear becomes more advanced but still very heavy.
[+] [-] moredhel|6 years ago|reply
Even using gear from 30-40 years ago, it is possible to climb with relative safety, the new gear is mainly only an incremental improvement in safety.
That's not to say that I would happily take a fall on older equipment, just that the main element of danger is generally not the equipment but the surrounding environment.
[+] [-] njepa|6 years ago|reply
The author is largely trying to sell exceptionalism. That everything will be fine with generic improvements. Yet, of course that isn't true. Both state of technology and the economy is probably better than ever yet deliver less and less value. Chances are people like Alex Honnold did it despite of the policies of this economist.
> And now, the technology of the internet. Each new idea in rock climbing is accessible quickly all over the world. Without that large group of interested people, this communal knowledge would not have advanced so far. [The Article]
> After a year, he dropped out of Berkeley and spent time living at home and driving around California to go climbing. "I'd wound up with my mom's old minivan, and that was my base," he said. "I'd use it to drive to Joshua Tree to climb or I'd drive to LA to see my girlfriend. My orbit was tiny and really cheap. I destroyed that van fairly quickly; it died on me one day, and for the next year I lived just on my bicycle and in a tent." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Honnold
[+] [-] gameswithgo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinator|6 years ago|reply
Alex couldn't have been birthed 100 years ago and climbed El Cap. The route he used still needed to be established by others. Alex climbed that already-established routes dozens of times before committing to not use all the tech the author thinks he doesn't need. The rehearsal was key. If there's a takeaway from him, it's: "practice".
The route also had to be modified to allow anyone to climb it free - I'm talking about modifying the rock itself. 100 years ago, the climb would have been different. Not hugely so, but one key handhold present that was there before could have made all the difference.
The happened in the first free ascent of the Nose too - an entire pitch was chipped in an attempt to free it, by a different person. They failed, but the route, once chipped, cannot be healed.
[+] [-] gameswithgo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StevenAS|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinator|6 years ago|reply
Alex has also climbed that same route, in a comparable style, in under two hours.
[+] [-] dpflan|6 years ago|reply
> Paul M. Romer: Lecture in Economic Sciences 2018 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZmgZGIZtiM
> Nobel Page: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2018/rom...
[+] [-] lpcam33|6 years ago|reply
We don’t know where we want to go; We are infinitely greed; We are infinitely incompetent;
We can use the example of the rope. There was many technological progress in the last decades to manufacture good gear for climbing, but as time goes by we will need to spend much more resources in research to get less and less improvements on the rope. There will be a time were the climber needs are fulfilled and we could just spare the nature (ex: the mountains that they like to climb) and enjoy what we have accomplished.
[+] [-] moredhel|6 years ago|reply
1. The psychology of fear and how we can learn to overcome fear. I think there is a lot to say about the tantalising experience of facing death.
2. The evolutionary nature of a discipline. Some disciplines improve with technology, others with knowledge.
I really love technical sports and am inspired by the amount of sharing in the communities. It is also easy to see in the newer sports how much progress has been made.
It's exciting seeing how far we can push ourselves through what we previously thought was difficult/impossible and redefine the frontiers of the sport
[+] [-] trollied|6 years ago|reply
If you haven't seen Free Solo (because you're not interested in climbing, or whatever) it's still worth a watch.
https://www.redbull.com/int-en/tv/show/AP-1MD65N6X92111/reel...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2545428/
[+] [-] mbostleman|6 years ago|reply
The first is how the rise in indoor rock gyms in turn gave rise to youth leagues and competition. This has created a huge leap forward in the skills of elite climbers because many today (the "gym rat" generation) have been climbing only slightly less longer than they've been walking.
The second is how the funding of outdoor adventure/exploration has evolved through the last couple of centuries, from securing precious resources (though mountaineering never had much of that), to a sort of angel/philanthropic model (geographic societies and alpine clubs), to government backed nationalism, to the current gear branding and sponsorship that is fueled by social media. This current model drives a huge amount of activity in outdoor endeavors that have helped create the crowd sourced effect he's talking about.
[+] [-] temporalparts|6 years ago|reply
Now with social media driven by the internet, the sponsorship model has enabled people with a passion to be able to sustain a living pursuing that hobby. Independent of the knowledge transfer, deeper knowledge is being created from more people being able to devote their lives to the hobby.
Here's an article about FreeSolo's earnings from sponsorship: https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-us/magazine/money-diary-alex...
[+] [-] amsha|6 years ago|reply
This is a major component of software's power – it's a tool for formalizing knowledge and skills permanently and distributing it rapidly at ~0 marginal cost. If a piece of software is both correct and performant, it can last a very, very long time, possibly outliving its creators. And the best software composes, so one program can build on top of another to build up a massive skillset.
[+] [-] burritofanatic|6 years ago|reply
Prior to YouTube, learning proper form really required you to probably take lessons and live/breath/be super friendly with some really good climbers as a necessity. Now, you can watch a number of good climbers online on having proper technique to get 70% there.
For example this video demonstrates how climbing crimps (a specific type of hold) requires more than just finger strength: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws06PjI4FTU
Stuff like this was nearly impossible to convey by book. If you want to learn how to be a better swimmer for example because you didn't take up swimming until you were in your 20s, it was very difficult. I did this as an adult, and each private lesson with an instructor to improve my form was $100 in recession dollars. Now, you can gather so much online and iron out the wrinkles with live instruction.
Disclaimer: the video linked above is my friend's YouTube channel.
[+] [-] rurp|6 years ago|reply
But past that, so much depends on subtle weight shifts and tailoring moves to ones specific body; it's hard to learn that stuff outside of just trying hard moves yourself and making small adjustments.
[+] [-] crimsonalucard|6 years ago|reply
See this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Information-Grows-Evolution-Econo...
The author of this book not only thinks about the economy in terms of knowledge but he relates it to information theory and entropy.
[+] [-] cookingoils|6 years ago|reply
Also disappointing read. What about comparing climbers to day traders or investors that take economic risks that often have very real consequences in other people’s lives.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] JacobDotVI|6 years ago|reply
A couple of years ago, I read Medieval Technology and Social Change, by Lynn White (https://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Technology-Social-Change-Whi...) as recommended by PG. Technically a textbook, it was a dry and drab look at the history of various innovations during Midlevel times - the stirrup, the windmill, etc. The 30,000ft view is that when innovations are introduced it takes a long time both for them to spread and for someone to finally exploit them to their greatest contributive state. While the steam engine was not invented until 1712, all of the components had been available since Roman times. It took quite a long time to find one of the greatest uses of those innovations. At least, it used to take a long time -
Now, information and innovation spread much faster. Society moves much faster. The innovation of the stirrup took a thousands years to propagate. The innovation of the internet took less than 50 years; Smartphones took 5. The pace of global change is increasing exponentially. A modern entrepreneur must have line of sight to the latest innovations in order to anticipate their impact on his or her society, industry, business, and personal well being. No one wanted to be the new Nokia, Borders Books, or Woolworths.
But, let's take a step back from specific innovations, and look at global mega-shifts in society. From the agricultural revolution, to the various metal ages, through the industrial revolution we are now being lapped by the waves of the Information Age.
As humans we quickly absorb each individual change brought forth in the information age - email, cellular connections, the world wide web, the smart phone, etc. Can you imagine running your business without your iPhone? We very quickly adapt to the here and now and forget the way it was (Thank you evolution!). However, what we are not good at perceiving is the systematic, second-order changes that the Information Age will bring. The Agricultural Age brought these changes over thousands of years. The Industrial Age brought them over generations. The Information Age will bring them with alarming speed that we may not be prepared for:
* Retailer's monopoly on local distribution was destroyed by Amazon.com + UPS
* Newspapers have been shattered by the internet's ability to breakdown their stranglehold on the distribution of information.
* The telecom world was turned upside down by the introduction of the cell phones, the internet, and the disruption of their monopoly on land-lines (Note that AT&T is a mere brand name, which was purchased on the cheap by SBC).
* The traditional media world felt this shock earlier this year when a man with a twitter account was able to upend their distribution monopoly on the news and they were left reacting and pandering instead of dictating.
But these are a number of examples in the commercial world. What about society itself? What about the global financial systems? What about governments?
Note: this was part of a letter I sent out with a Christmas gift a few years ago. Full letter here: https://blog.jacob.vi/the-sovereign-individual/