Lesson of the 20th century unlearned in the 21st

The 20th century from our vantage point was all about technology.  It "looked like" war, pestilence, revolution, famine, plagues and death darkening the global background; and microwave ovens, velcro, computer graphics and viagra seeming to enable the individual in the foreground.

But the subtext was transportation technology enabling the spread of local diseases globally, communication technology enabling the manias of fanatics, information technology enabling the zeal of bigots and tyrants.  The century was framed with optimism: the Italian Futurists at one end and Steve Jobs at the other.  The Futurists contexted Mussolini.  Steve Jobs godfathered the "freedom" of a techno elite isolated from the reality of their environment by the self-medication of personal music appliances....and note that those appliances came with a built-in tether to a monolithic market presence.  If you want to know the future of local government in the next two decades, don't think the US Constitution.  Think iTunes.

The lesson of the 20th century was simple and easy to grasp: massive adoption of technology enabled a hyper-aggressive minority to dominate the will of masses of people for a while.

Lets look at this lesson and see if we can make any sense of the widespread failure to learn from it.

The key phrase in the lesson statement isn't "a hyper-aggressive minority to dominate the will of masses of people" although that has a lot of intrinsic interest.

"For a while" is the operating issue here.  There is a fast, "hyper" aspect to the growth of technology.  But it is self limiting.  The control a Comintern, Stasi or a TSA is able to leverage from technology has a built in freshness date, and once the masses under their control wake up to the trade-offs of surveillance and constraints on behavior involved, theirs is a precipitous fall of power.

"For a while" energetic and short-sighted people can leverage technology to gain unfair advantage over slower-moving masses of people.  But the slower moving masses will reach the same point as the early adopters and exploiters, eventually.  And at that point, the game changes.

We have seen where the game change occurs in the financial world with the growth and bursting of two major bubbles in succession: the high-tech IPO universe which collapsed irretrievably in the early oughts, and the leveraged mortgage based derivative market which collapsed in 2008.

But we haven't really learned the lesson.  In local governments, smaller corporations, and many other second-tier organizations, a new wave of aggressive, rootless technology exploiters will impose the same lesson on unsuspecting and unprepared members of their organizations -- selling technological sizzle that smells, finally, more like burning wires than steak.

The solution to this trickle down of failed expectations is not to try to resist technology in a luddite manner: banning or disabling the machines themselves.

The solution is to learn the lesson, talk up the lesson, remind ourselves of the lesson in various ways, and for leadership to embrace it, not deny it in their own self-interest.  Anyone trying to ride a wave of technology change to power is going to faceplant on a shallow sandbar sooner or later.  The cycle shortens as the wave moves down the food chain from national to regional to local purview.

So lets use our smarts to make the 21st Century safe for human relationships again.  When we forget that technology is only the see-saw, and without two people involved there is no real movement, we leave ourselves open for a very disappointing day at the playground.