The Marlowsphere Blog (#133)

There we were in the second half of the 20^th century, having experienced the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan that ended WWII, and watched in the late 1970s a pivot towards the west by Communist China following the 1976 demise of dictator Mao Tse-tung (Zedong), and in 1989 even as we watched the horror of Tiananmen Square, we also watched the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. We saw the creation of the European Union, the death of South African Apartheid, the shrinkage of nuclear weapons on a worldwide scale, the expansion of democracies, the diminution of illiteracy to about 15% of the world’s population, and the increase of global trade, so-called globalism.

We also saw a further exploration of space and the rise of a few non-governmental organizations investing in the exploration of space. The Higgs Boson, the so-called “god particle” was confirmed and the “repaired” Hubble Telescope peered closer and closer into the origins of this universe. The future of generations to come appeared to be bright.

But here we are in 2016 and the reverse appears to be true. In 2001, on 9/11, Al Qaeda terrorists took over two commercial airplanes and destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City (this wasn’t their first attempt). There are now terrorist groups in Africa, e.g., Boko Haram, and in Russia, and in the Philippines, and in France, and in Belgium, among others. It has taken over eight years for the United States and other contingent countries to recover from the “mortgage crisis of 2008.” Britain has just voted to leave the European Union, the so-called “Brexit,” and in the United States the upcoming national election pits a politician, Hillary Clinton, with decades of regional, national and international experience, against an entertainer, real estate magnate Donald Trump, who has decades of experience on reality television. His vision of the future is to retreat from it by building walls between the United States and Mexico, to undo our trade agreements with other countries, and to (possibly) use nuclear weapons against our enemies (whomever they might be).

Elsewhere in the world, terrorists’ attacks have governments and peoples nervous about open borders and immigration issues resulting in the loss of jobs in one place only to turn up for less pay in other places. Local and regional wars have made millions of people homeless. The disparity between the so-called 1% (the haves) and the rest of the world (the have nots) grows deeper with every year. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is getting screwed.

Further, the Internet is not creating a level playing field. It is allowing those with the technical know-how and marketing imagination to create platforms wherein users create content for free and the owners of the servers housing the platform very rich.

It is a gross irony that while some countries, like the United States, parts of the European Union, Japan, and China are exploring space both within and without our solar system, several tribal cultures, such ISIS and the Taliban, are more concerned with what women should wear in public, women’s subservient role in their society, and a strict adherence to the word of Allah. Also, in the Middle East extremist Jews and extremist Palestinians are at war over who should own what territory. In Saudi Arabia, despite their ostensible acceptance of western trade, there is an adherence to an anachronistic extreme form of Islam, so-called Wahhabism. The so-called Kingdom funds this form of Islam with millions of dollars and proselytize their point of view wherever possible.

And in the United States, the chasm between predominantly white police forces and young mostly unarmed African-Americans appears to have exploded into the headlines and into television and radio news broadcasts in the last several years. The Civil Rights Acts were passed decades ago, but the blatant racism expressed by the shooting of unarmed black males by white police officers appears to have become a common occurrence, even in the historical context of an African-American president in the White House.

Q: Is America, is the world retreating from what seemed to be a        brighter future a generation ago?
A: Yes, it is. Or that’s the way it seems.

My view is that the world is experiencing a period of retreat from the future into a period of tribalism. And it is not recent. It has been building for some time, perhaps ever since the commercial introduction of the telegraph in 1844. This was the world’s first electronic communications medium that could transmit information from one point to another at the speed of light. In the mid-20^thcentury photonic technologies were introduced (these are technologies based on photons as opposed to electrons). These combined technologies have bumped up the speed of communication and transport of goods and services and with them cultural values on a global basis. Cultures around the world where the literacy rate is lower and much lower than it is in more developed nations are repulsed by this invasion of outside cultural values. It is anathema to their entrenched cultural values. And, in turn, we are repulsed by their reactions, such as when we hear about honor killings in remote parts of India, and the mutilation of female genitalia in parts of Africa.

Even in places that are so-called developed nations there is a retreat into tribalism. The Brexit vote is one example, the rise of neo-fascism in Germany, and the increasing rejection of Islamic leaning peoples in France are other examples. It is a retreat borne out of deep fear—a fear that one’s family and community values are being tested, challenged, upended, and revealed as untrue or unfounded.

People don’t want change even when it is beneficial in the long-run to the greater whole. The speed of light technologies that now are increasingly circling the planet have thrown opposing cultural values into the same economic pot and have created such fear among the members of opposing tribes that it is engendering violence.

And this phase of planetary cultural evolution will not go away quickly. It will be with us for a while, perhaps a generation of two. Until peoples of different cultural stripes begin to accept that the future is about the integration of cultural values, even the loss and rejection of some values—such as religious and political beliefs—there will be a retreat from the future. Accepting that change is the constant, that change is the way of the universe, a universe we are just beginning to learn about, is a deeply painful process.

This view parallels the structure of scientific revolutions. First, there is rejection of facts that contravene the prevailing view, then there is anger and battles over what is true and what is not true, then ultimate acceptance of the new factual context. We are looking at a generation or two of battles over what is true and what is not true. If world history is any arbiter, progress will prevail, but only after many more have died for their antiquated beliefs and many more have died defending the values of the future.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
September 5, 2016

© Eugene Marlow 2016

Back to Top

The Marlowsphere Blog (#130)

[Over time] Man’s communications technologies . . . have moved from the verbal, to the alphabetic, to the typographic, to the filmic, and to the electronic . . . , [I]t would be absurd to presume that “electronic” is the end of the. . .technology chain. . . .The next significant [and dominant] medium will be based in some form of light.

I wrote the above in 1990. They appear on page 155 of Shifting Time and Space: The Story of Videotape published by Praeger in 1991 (Eugene Secunda, Ph.D., was co-author).

Since the publication of this book, I have evolved a paradigm of the invisible affect of dominant media that posits, in part, that photonic technologies—first developed in the 1960s—have emerged as the dominant technology in the latter half of the 20^thcentury and the early part of the 21^st century and are slowly but surely combining with or supplanting electronic based technologies. In turn, I posit that in no small measure this emergence accelerated the advent of “globalism,” and this has resulted in the re-emergence of “tribalism,” this time on a planetary scale with several attendant challenges.

“Globalism” is defined as:

1. A national geopolitical policy in which the entire world is regarded as the appropriate sphere for a state’s influence.
2. The development of social, cultural, technological, or economic networks that transcend national boundaries.

A “Tribe” can be defined as:

1. A unit of sociopolitical organization consisting of a number of families, clans, or other groups who share a common ancestry and culture and among whom leadership is typically neither formalized nor permanent.

“Tribalism” is defined as:

1.  the organization, culture, or beliefs of a tribe.
2. a strong feeling of identity with and loyalty to one’s tribe or group

Clearly, globalism is in sharp contrast to tribalism. The former takes on the whole world contextually, whereas, the latter refers to a much smaller grouping.

In 1844 A.D. Samuel F.B. Morse commercially introduced the telegraph, launching the so-called “electronic age.” It is my contention that a little more than a 100 years after the birth of the electronic age and shortly after World War II we entered yet another “age” in Homo Sapiens’ technological evolution; this one based not on electrons, but on photons. To put it another way, we have already entered the age of “light” or what I am calling “the photonic age.”

Photonics is the science of light (photon) generation, detection, and manipulation through emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, and detection/sensing. The term photonics developed as an outgrowth of the first practical semiconductor light emitters invented in the early 1960s and optical fibers developed in the 1970s.

The use of “light” technology has spread “silently” into various aspects of society. And as Marshall McLuhan, author of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill 1964), has stated: “Once a new technology comes into a social milieu, it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated.” This is true of orality, early writing, typography, electronics, and now photonics.

The evidence that we are now living in an age of photonics is all around us. One can find photonic technologies in a broad spectrum of human activity: 

• Consumer equipment: barcode scanner, printer, CD/DVD/Blu-ray devices, remote control devices
• Telecommunications: optical fiber communications, optical down converter to microwave
• Medicine: correction of poor eyesight, laser surgery, surgical endoscopy, tattoo removal
• Industrial manufacturing: the use of lasers for welding, drilling, cutting, and various methods of surface modification
• Construction: laser leveling, laser range-finding, smart structures
• Aviation: photonic gyroscopes lacking mobile parts
• Military: IR sensors, command and control, navigation, search and rescue, mine laying and detection
• Entertainment: laser shows, beam effects, holographic art
• Metrology: time and frequency measurements, range-finding
• Photonic computing: clock distribution and communication between computers, printed circuit boards, or within optoelectronic integrated circuits; in the future: quantum computing

And many of these photonic technologies are not only becoming more present, they are also replacing older, more familiar technologies.

The National Academy of Engineering has pointed out:

“From surgical instruments and precision guides in construction to bar code scanners and compact disc readers, lasers are integral to many aspects of modern life and work. But perhaps the farthest-flung contribution of the 20th century’s combination of optics and electronics has been in telecommunications. With the advent of highly transparent fiber-optic cable in the 1970s, very high-frequency laser signals now carry phenomenal loads of telephone conversations and data across the country and around the world.”

George Basalla, professor of the history of technology at the University of Delaware, cogently points out in his book The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge History of Science Series, 1988), all technologies have antecedents. In other words, they do not just appear, like mice via spontaneous generation in straw as those in the Middle Ages surmised.

Similarly, photonic or laser technologies did not just appear in the mid-1950s. In 1917 Albert Einstein proposed the theory of stimulated emission—that is, if an atom in a high-energy state is stimulated by a photon of the right wavelength, another photon of the same wavelength and direction of travel will be created. Stimulated emission forms the basis for research into harnessing photons to amplify the energy of light.

Leaping forward over 90 years, in 1997 the Fiber Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) became the longest single-cable network in the world and provides infrastructure for the next generation of Internet applications. The 17,500-mile cable begins in England and runs through the Strait of Gibraltar to Palermo, Sicily, before crossing the Mediterranean to Egypt. It then goes overland to the FLAG operations center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, before crossing the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, and Andaman Sea; through Thailand; and across the South China Sea to Hong Kong and Japan. (Copyright © 2009 by National Academy of Engineering).

What are the effects?

To quote Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration (Huffpost, “The Blog,” 5/26/2014):

We are witnessing a reversion to tribalism around the world, away from nation states. The same pattern can be seen even in America–especially in American politics. . . .

Over the last several decades, though, technology has whittled away the underpinnings of the nation state. National economies have become so intertwined that economic security depends less on national armies than on financial transactions around the world. . . .

News and images move so easily across borders that attitudes and aspirations are no longer especially national. Cyber-weapons, no longer the exclusive province of national governments, can originate in a hacker’s garage.

The nation state, meanwhile, is coming apart. A single Europe–which seemed within reach a few years ago — is now succumbing to the centrifugal forces of its different languages and cultures. The Soviet Union is gone, replaced by nations split along tribal lines. Vladimir Putin can’t easily annex the whole of Ukraine, only the Russian-speaking part. The Balkans have been Balkanized.

Separatist movements have broken out all over—Czechs separating from Slovaks; Kurds wanting to separate from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; even the Scots seeking separation from England.

The turmoil now consuming much of the Middle East stems less from democratic movements trying to topple dictatorships than from ancient tribal conflicts between the two major denominations of Islam—Sunni and Shia.

To this list we can add: the Catalonians have long wanted to separate from Spain.

When early writing systems appeared in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East around 5,000 years ago the inhabitants there did not all of a sudden observe “Hmmm, we’re not just an oral-only society anymore. We’ve entered the age of early writing.” In the early 21^st century, however, with global literacy at an all-time high of around 85%, we have the benefit of much hindsight. We have also had the benefit of such media scholars as Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, et al. Their collective scholarship provides the intellectual foundation for looking at the world with a wide view.

It is from this perspective that I conclude we have entered a new “technological” age—the age of photonics. Photonics have accelerated the evolution of “globalism” and has resulted in an equal and opposite response: “tribalism.” As the speed of information has accelerated, and corporate entities have fostered homogeneity on a global scale, people have retreated into their tribal cultures to regain some semblance of unique identity.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
October 12, 2015

© Eugene Marlow 2015

Back to Top