I don't want to go into the history but there's actually a really neat history of exactly
why and how a particular set of ideas became so important in the latter half of the 20th
century.
I'll give you just one example, but the idea of operational management, which was innovated
during the heat of World War II and largely to do things like make strategic decisions
about how we were going to go about moving ships across the Atlantic or run bombing raids
on Germany using statistics, actually applying statistics to analyze the effectiveness of
different approaches and then therefore making decisions based on statistics.
And so operational management was very effective in the military theater and the people who
had learned those techniques after the war percolated out into the broader economy and
started applying those techniques in things like deciding how to run their businesses.
So that's the basic framework of the order that we built up until now.
Now, the idea of the Blue Church is trying to get a sense of what it is that is the essence
of the control structure.
By control I don't mean necessarily anything bad I just mean the mechanism by which we're
able to make collective decisions and engage in effective collective actions, the thing
that holds our decision and action structure together.
The control structure that still is the one that we're operating under that came out of
that timeframe and the proposition is that, in addition to—and this is one piece but
it's a very important piece—that there's a dominant role played by the structure of
media.
We're actually in the process of breaking that apart right here so this is good.
We know that there's a particular dynamic associated with the kinds of media that are
broadcast where one individual or group, because of the nature of the medium, so for example
broadcast television in the day of three networks there was only three people who got to be
the anchors who communicated out to the entire population.
It was a massive asymmetry between the speaker and the listener and there's no interaction.
So I am in a position of listening, you're in a position of speaking and there's 30 million
of me and one of you.
Now, that's actually a very important dynamic.
If you don't understand the fact of that and its importance you're going to have a very
hard time understanding what actually happened during the latter half of the 20th century
as, in particular, television emerged as the dominant medium displacing radio and newspapers.
And by the way, you also have a hard time understanding what's happening now has the
Internet is now emerging as the dominant medium replacing television.
Just understanding that transition and what it implies and means at a deep level is sort
of fundamental for predicting future states.
So using sort of television as the metaphor I then looked back and said: all right are
there other things that we see that look like that?
And it's actually quite interesting that, for example, school has a very similar shape
to it in the sense that you've got one speaker, a large audience and a very little interactivity,
particularly like the university setting where there's a lecture and there's 500 people in
the lecture hall.
That is effectively the same thing as television in the sense that the relationship of information
flow is effectively the same.
This is important both from sort of the social dynamics as well as the psychological dynamics
because if as a child your primary relationship to how you engage in culture is one of almost
certainly being a pure receiver then your psychological development, your set of assumptions
and habituations and how you adapt to the world, will be associated with that environment.
You're adapting to your local environment and this implies a certain set of deep psychological
structures.
So we get a relationship between the mechanisms and techniques and potentialities of broadcast
as a concept—so school, television, fill in the blank—and the behavior strategies,
the habits, and even the capacities of the individuals in the social layer.
So when you get to the mid and late '90s you're actually dealing with a society that could
be understood as the society of broadcast and that has implications for how decisions
are made.
So the society of broadcasts is characterized by what you might call the Encyclopedia Britannica
model or the Walter Cronkite model where you have a set of hierarchical structures where
the individuals who have permission, authority, and responsibility for speaking, for having
authority are selected in some fashion to be positioned at the top of the broadcast
hierarchy and then the rest of us defer to them.
And so somebody has written an article in the Encyclopedia Britannica or some group
of people, some group of experts who have been nominated in some fashion to be positioned
as experts and at best take that responsibility very seriously, they pull the total set of
questions back into their centers of excellence so they're having conversations in academic
environments and groups that get together in think tanks, they produce an authoritative
statement of what is in fact our collective opinion around this particular object.
They then disseminate it through a broadcast medium and the rest of us listen to it, cohere
around it and say okay that's what we do and then move forward.
And this is actually a very powerful mechanism because it allows us to simultaneously have
hundreds of millions of people broadly share the basic set of assumptions about the nature
of the world, the nature of what effective action looks like, even values: what is important
and what's not important.
So a major piece, not the only piece, but a major piece of the transition that we're
going through is precisely the fact that the decentralized communication infrastructure,
sometimes known as the Internet and all of its manifestations and mobile and everything
else, radically changes that dynamic.
So the Internet is characteristically symmetrical, meaning that the number of people who can
speak is effectively everyone.
Obviously there's not an even distribution of audience among everyone, but it's not structurally
locked in.
And the relationship between speaking and receiving has become intrinsically or at least
intuitively bi-directional.
Now this shift implies a very large number of differential consequences so we can graph
the notion of the impact that it has on power and the relationship between decision making
and action taking.
But there's also the impact that it has on psychology.
The intuitive sense or the way that your brain, in fact even just your sort of way that you
go about making decisions in the world, actually has to adaptively change.
So the people who grew up in the post-Internet environment have a fundamentally different
psychological set of structures like deep habitual architectures and expectations of
how to most effectively present themselves in the world than people who grew up before
them.
So what that will mean is two things: one is the set of techniques and approaches that
socially evolved in the television or in the broadcast era are suddenly maladaptive in
this new psychological ecosystem.
So think like the Pepsi commercial that so famously was a disaster.
That's very much the kind of thing that is produced by a broadcast intuition.
"We get to send messages and those messages are things that you receive."
But the psychology and the technology of the Internet or of the decentralized or the symmetrical
medium is one of: "No, no we get to critique.
We get to directly respond to."
And things that feel like they are broadcast or feel like they are quite obviously intending
to influence us emotionally, we know what that feels like and it doesn't work anymore
so we're going to respond to that and our ability to respond swarms around it and breaks
it up.
And so this, for example, is I think at least a reasonably good explanation for what's been
happening in the political domain over the past 30 or 40 years and certainly over the
past two.