In western societies we are accustomed to regarding our own time as one of unprecedented change. In a sense it is, but, in another, the generation born early in the twentieth century, my parents’ generation, experienced far greater change in the pattern of their personal lives and society. Theirs were the lives that saw the full transformation from a rural to an urban society (in the sense that agriculture, following the Second World War, ceased to be a significant employer); that saw the flowering of mass communications and of instant personal communication; that saw the achievement of almost universal personal physical mobility; that saw a major increase in leisure and disposable income.
Current times have seen a proliferation of technological devices. Now we have bread makers, espresso machines, electric tin openers, but nothing new that has so radically altered our lives as theirs were by the washing machine, the refrigerator, the vacuum cleaner, the motor car, the telephone and the radio, all of which became widespread in the decade after the end of the Second World War.
Today our cars can automatically adjust their seats to our body shape and sense when it is raining, features that we scarcely need, and we passively anticipate the moment when they break down and are too expensive for us to bother to have them repaired.
We live in a time of superfluous technological sophistication. On a more serious level, technological advance delivers, for example, in medicine, benefits that are applicable to, or affordable by, only a very small minority in usually western society – whilst malaria kills in Africa for the lack of mosquito nets. Or we marvel at space exploration that extends our understanding of the universe, and delivers marginal technological benefits to our consumer society.
Similarly ours is a time of superfluous, signs and information that paradoxically drive meaning out of our experience through cross referencing overload. The conflict of social and political ideals has vanished, not because one set of ideals has convinced us over another, but because all ideals have lost meaning for us. Everything now is ‘post’ – post-modern, post-structuralist, post-industrial – defined by reference to something we have not fully left behind yet cannot energise. Only cataclysmic events might restore our sense of meaning. In the US 9/11 produced such a reaction on a minor level but it quickly slipped back into the old moral, cultural and political confusion.
Meanwhile change in our time is driven by the acceleration of population growth rather than socially significant technical advance. That growth leads to the depletion of the earth’s natural resources, a process that simultaneously stimulates technological development and prevents it from transforming – or preserving – our social organisation.
Surely, one might think, computers and mobile phones contradict my view. With them, technological invention has produced something new and made it available to the mass of us at steadily decreasing price. They have certainly transformed the pattern of our lives and enabled new manners of social interaction, and social isolation, but the change has been more cultural than social or economic in broad terms. Famously, although computers made all sorts of business methods and practices newly possible, economists have been unable to trace an increase in productivity commensurate with the amount of investment in information technology except in individual cases. It has not been a new industrial revolution.
Computers give us the illusion of control. As we strike keys or click the mouse, information is instantly displayed. A further twitch of our fingers shows us in a flash the effect of changing this or that variable, but seldom is this degree of control or choice able to be transferred straightforwardly to the real world. The effects of this are seen most dramatically in the growth and near collapse of our international financial system, where computerised functioning has created a complex accelerating web of virtual activity that is entirely dysfunctional. As the survival of some of our largest and most sophisticated banks teetered on the edge the only direction in which they could turn for immediate funds was in many cases laundering the profits of organised criminal drug supply, where grubby cash changes hands for the supply of small packets of physical substances, and produces one of the largest by value and most thriving of international trades.
