Don't Blink

My senior year of high school, I took a class called History of the 60s as an elective. Great class, with a great teacher as well, but she always started class with a certain song, a song that no matter how hard I tried would always get stuck in my head.

I apologize for what I am about to do.

We didn’t start the fire.

It was always burning, since the world been turning. 

We didn’t start the fire.

No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it.

If you don’t know, that is the chorus of Billy Joe’s classic hit We Didn’t Start the Fire, and if you did know the song, I’m sorry for putting that into your head for the next couple of weeks. 

The song details all the major events from the beginning of Joel’s life in 1949 to when the song was written in the late 1980s. This includes the Civil Rights protests and the eventual passing of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, the counterculture movement and the Summer of Love, the first man on the moon, an assassination and then an impeachment of a president (no, not the same one), not to mention a couple of wars that were definitely not against Russia. Billy Joel had a lot to talk about.

The story goes that Billy Joel was inspired to write We Didn’t Start the Fire after meeting a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon well after all these events happened in 1989. They were commiserating about the politics of the day; talking about the revolutions in Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the impending invasion of the Persian Gulf in Operation Desert Shield when the 21-year-old remarked that it was “a terrible time to be 21.” Joel agreed that he had said something similar when he was in his early twenties to which the young man retorted “Yea yea but it’s different for you.” 

I think that every generation has had that thought. That its a really shitty time to be coming of age, more so than any other generation. Mine is joining the workforce in the midst of Covid, climate change, and a shitty economy, but the generation before mine was invading Iraq and Afghanistan in the midst of a real estate crash, and the one before that in whatever theatre the cold war was currently going on, and the ones before that in the world wars and the great depression.

Each generation thinks that they are unique in their thinking, that their time is the worst, and honestly, I think at the time, each person had a pretty valid argument (especially the people that had to go through WW1, that shit was brutal). But that's not the point of this article.

The point of this article, a point that I believe is perfectly illustrated by Billy Joel’s song and the reasoning behind it, is that the rate at which the world is changing is starting to increase at a rapid pace, and with that increase, there is going to be a lot of side effects.

Let’s back up and get some perspective. The first modern humans appeared around 60,000 BC. For the next 50,000 years, there was for the most part almost no change. They lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, painted pictures of saber-tooth tigers in caves, and generally did the same thing over and over again. This period takes up about 85% of human existence.

Credit to Tim Urban’s Wait but Why website.

Then someone had the bright idea of planting their food in one place instead of walking all over the place trying to find it. Farms were born, which grew into towns, which grew into civilizations with technology and trade and bureaucrats. Empires rose and fell, language was codified into these strange shapes called letters, but for the most part, the rate of change and innovation remained relatively stagnant from the bronze age to the beginning of the common era (1 AD). It’s happening, just slowly.

Then you had the Islamic Golden Age which is followed by the Renaissance. Then you had the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. Small city-states united into alliances, and then into countries, and finally into empires.

Then we invented the computer. Then came the internet. Now technological innovation is happening at a pace never before seen in history, blowing periods like the renaissance and the Islamic Golden Age out of the water. 93% of the information generated by humans in their entire period of existence has happened since computers, which have only been around for the last 40 years. That means that 93% of all information generated by humans has occurred 0.0000645% of the time we have been on this planet.

What does this mean? Let’s look at how the computer changed the world. Think of all the jobs that were replaced/are being replaced due to the increased speed of computing. Think about the way our wars are now being fought, about how commerce has shifted to primarily online, how any person with a connection to the internet can buy and trade stocks, can write a shitty book and publish it, can compliment or bully a stranger from the comfort of anonymity, or even take down an electrical grid. Every major breakthrough we have affects us from the jobs we have to wars our country is waging, which in turn has major effects on our safety and quality of life. 

And these breakthroughs are going to come quicker and quicker. A.I. and crypto-based technology are just starting to go mainstream. In energy, scientists are very close to capturing fission technology, creating for all intents and purposes an unlimited supply of clean energy that would certainly replace basically every other source we have. And we just sent the furthest telescope ever into space. Who knows what we will find there.

It was just barely over 50 years ago when we first put a human on the moon. Now we have rovers on Mars and are sending satellites into the sun. The first personal computer was released in the mid-1970s, and now every person from your 6-year-old nephew to your 80-year-old grandmother has more computing power in their pockets than NASA had combined in the 1980s. Just three years ago, video calling was an afterthought, maybe used to keep in contact with relatives overseas. Now it is the primary form of communication while we work from home.

I say this when it took us 50,000 years to invent the wheel. Another 12,000 years to realize we revolve around the sun and not the other way around. Yet in the last 500 years, we have invented electricity, telephones, TVs, microwaves, nuclear technology, computing technology, gone into space and back again and made it through 10 seasons of Friends. Things are starting to move pretty fast around here.

Let’s see if we can keep up.