Modernism, Postmodernism, and Digitality
Communication as Digital and Subliminal
Communication as Digital and Subliminal
We live in a world where a form of communication once dedicated to academics and defense contractors has become the way that we communicate with each other. But it is wrong to think of the Internet as the key part of the equation. After all the Internet began decades before the present moment. Many of the key attributes of the Internet are hidden from view, things like TCP/IP, Linux, the proliferation of programming languages, and the welter of ways that we stack on top of the Internet different forms of communication. In fact, two of the most important factors in Digitality are not related to the Internet at all: one is the globalization of supply chains, and the other is the aging of a population that desires to make more money than economics allows. Neither of these things relies on the Internet.
Let us take the first one: in the 1990s the idea that internal supply chains could be extended across country boundaries. What this meant was that the suppliers could be anywhere because it was extremely cheap to ship things rather than pay for local workers. It began a race to the bottom, which worked until it did not. This is why the increase in fast food wages is going to fail in that “fast food” was originally conceived of as a cheap version of food and now it is an expensive version of cheap food. At what point does the cost of a hamburger become out of reach for the person who flips hamburgers? This is not something which is unusual at this time but instead comes up every time the means of consumption becomes the way to reach the middle class.
The problem with “free trade” is that on one hand, it reduces the cost of producing the lowest unit by volume of almost anything that relies on lower order wholesale cost. For example, beef. There is no advantage to creating beef at the margins of production, the only way to increase the margins of production is to differentiate by creating a higher grade of beef and selling it for a sufficiently marked-up price, which is exactly what Koba beef does. This means however that washing one’s hands and other necessities of cleanliness go by the wayside because if not produced locally there is no guarantee that such rigors will be applied to the production of foodstuffs. This means that there is a perpetual threat of infection at the bounds of marginal cost. In fact, that is why the regimen of cleanliness was put in place over the decades in higher-end economies. But if free trade is made gospel, then the “free” moniker is made quite literally and the lowest order economy that can ship foodstuffs to the developed world plate will not bother with cleanliness.
In fact, the threat occurred years before with the same type of virus. Because if the parts can be shipped for assembly elsewhere that means that other things can be shipped as well, in this case, a virus. But this is not a new lesson, rabbits, starlings, and other forms of fauna have been shipped to places where they have little to no competing carnivores. The word we use for them is “invasive species.” We have also shipped viruses and bacteria faster than immunity could be developed.
In fact, one of the great factors in creating the Modern age is Yersinia pestis which is more commonly known as the Black Death. Twice before Christopher Columbus discovered America and allowed ships from Spain and Portugal the New World was discovered by two groups of people, one from Polynesia and one from the Scandinavian Peninsula. Neither of these two brought infection to the New World. On the other hand, Christopher Columbus and the people who came after him brought a series of infections that killed 50% to 90% of the population. In other words, this is not a lesson that we need to learn if we have been looking at the past. However, economic motivation does not conceive of invasive species because that does not have a line in the ledger.
To base a mathematical model of COVID, we must first realize that even a cursory application of epidemiological spread said that it was extremely likely that the disease which occurred first in Wuhan, China was going to spread quickly. Even people who were members of the Communist party were concerned about going into Wuhan and spreading the virus.i This had an effect where supply chains that ignored boundaries made infection as easy to spread as component parts. Suddenly it became quite rational for countries to seek supplies of materials that were close to home. This was in addition to the reality that some components were a key necessity: lithium being a key example, which was already worried about even before Covid became a word.
But this then created a conundrum: the reason for outsourcing supply chains is because of the cost where the additional cost of domestic labor was far higher than the oil used for shipping components. This led to a pandemic that has killed several million people, we are not sure how many because the way of counting is in dispute. However, at least 7 million dead from Covid is the estimate which is currently given.ii Of this, 1.87 were in the United States according to WHO.iii This shows that in America the methods used to combat the spread of the pandemic were utterly miserable because nations such as Japan, South Korea, France, and Germany all had fewer deaths.iv In addition, there was a movement to discount vaccines and other steps to reduce fatality, and there was a push for counter-programming. This counterprogramming had points in its favor, but it was completely overwhelmed by the epidemiological statistics.
So, the pandemic showed the weakness in globalizing the supply chain and it is obvious given the long track record of invasive species and epidemics. Yet it was done. This is the power of a logical system. We live a masquerade. This is because when an older generation shifts to a new generation it occurs rapidly because most times it is by the majority. This means that the tipping point is when the new generation outvotes, out-consumes, and raises children faster than the old generation. In this particular case, the leaders of the political parties in the United States are going to shift in less than eight years: in 2020 all of the leaders were of the baby boom generation, in 2030 it will be completely different. This means that we can look for SVDs that will show when the new generation has leverage. Right now, this is not the case in the US, and similar attitudes are or have been shifted in Western Europe. For example, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel spent 16 years in office, and she was born in 1954, while her predecessor was also in the baby boom generation, Olaf Scholz. But there was a challenge from the Green party and there will eventually be a shift in generations in Germany. This is one of the primary causes of a logical shift: the baby boom generation responds to older threats and opportunities some of which will be obsolete or at least obsolescent.
However, the Covid pandemic was merely the point at which the Postmodern reached a crisis. In the election of 2024, two members of the baby boom, as defined by the wartime increase in births, were matched again in a contest. Each one promised a significant segment of the population a set of programs that would benefit the members of the population. Each had their proxies say that the end of the world would happen if the opposite party won the election, and the Republican president claimed that he had actually won the election of 2020, even though there was no evidence to support it. Clearly even if Covid had not happened, there would still be a crisis point. This means that there was a crisis point and something managed to fill the void.
The world is increasing in the hands of old men and some women. The Wall Street Journal reports that all of China, India, Brazil, United States of America, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Mexico have leaders over 70 and Indonesia is set to join them, we could add Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey.v Moreover, several parties are elected by the old including the United Kingdom. These are states that run the gamut from Democratically elected to totalitarian dictatorship, so it is not the prerogative of just one type of country or one type of leader. This suggests that the SVD has some relationship to an older generation that remains in power for a set of logical systemic reasons that do not care what policies they pursue but who they benefit from.
What this means therefore is that the accumulation of power at the top is not a general trend but is in fact a specific trend at this particular time. There have been other times when the leadership is composed of younger individuals and times when there is no correlation between who is in power. This means that the SVD is specific to this particular moment and therefore since we have set that the Cultural System is at the end stage, by definition, we are looking for the end stage of a particular Cultural System that has as one of its components the aging of the leadership or of the main bulk of the followership. This, in turn, leads us to look for markers which have economic motivation, that the easiest response to is to move wealth up. For example, the dearth of housing stock in the United States is such an economic motivation and the increase is in the fact that there is less housing and the housing which is the most sought after and built by homebuilders is in the higher ends of the product.
The fact that the range of systems is so diverse is similar to the 1930s when different leaders sought to find a way to employ people in a world that coined the term “depression.” While the age range is unusual the grasping for answers to an economic question is far from unusual. Because there is no general depression or recession it means that we must deal with economic troubles which do not always engender recession or depression in the more usual terms.
The End of One System is Not Quite the Beginnings of Another
It should be noted to points which will occur again and again:
The sign of the end of a Cultural System is not the beginning of another.
Long before a Cultural System is capable of running the majority of the world it has been explored for some time.
Let us take the first example: COVID signals the end of the Postmodern system because it takes full advantage of economic signals that were in place from the beginning of the Postmodern era: that is if goods and services may be shipped then so too will pathogens. However, the beginnings of Digitality are not yet in place and the reorganization of the Cultural System has not happened.
This can be shown by the fact that in 2024 of the candidates are from the boomer generation, though the boomer generation is slightly reorganized. In specific, the boomer generation began during the Second World War in the United States and Canada. These early members of the boomer generation had certain advantages and certain disadvantages, in that no one understood how the generation that was then beginning would dominate almost all of the social hierarchy for the next 35 years. But they were also short on things such as meat, milk, and clothing because the focus of the world at the time was the present World War II. The advantage that the early boomers had was that they were inoculated with the Boomer mindset even though some of the elements were not yet in place. An example would be the mass building of suburban lots which occurred only when the military mindset was applied to civilian use. This meant that the beginnings of things such as “Levittown” were present in the construction of military bases.
The second point is that long before a Cultural System can run the entire world or at least some fraction of it, it needs to be explored. This is because the older Cultural System sees the new extensions as simply part of the older Cultural System solving problems that arise. For example, the card catalog system for retrieving information was originally an analog system which was then converted to a digital system. This digital system was originally just a scaling up of the old analog system using “|” or “pipes” to assemble a new way of doing things out of individual programs.
For example, at a UNIX prompt one could type out:
This is part of the UNIX philosophy set forward in 1974’s “The UNIX time-sharing system.” By Ken Thompson(1943- ) and Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011):i
Make it easy to write, test, and run programs.
Interactive use instead of batch processing.
Economy and elegance of design due to size constraints ("salvation through suffering").
Self-supporting system: all UNIX software is maintained under UNIX.
Notice that the limitations of the UNIX software are turned into an advantage but also this starts out as one aspect of the Postmodern system at first. Later it came to the forefront with the invention of the Internet, which was also being developed at the same time, as a new way of retrieving information rather than the card catalog.
This was codified by Douglas McIlroy(1932 - ) in 1978 as:
Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features".
Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter the output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.
Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.
Using tools in preference to unskilled helps to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you've finished using them.
And leader by Peter H. Salus(1938 - ) in 1994:
Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Write programs to work together.
Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
So before Digitality, or any Cultural System, can take over it needs to have been tested and developed and therefore have a large enough base of users to understand the intricacies of its functioning.
This means that the COVID pandemic is near the end of the Postmodern system, but not yet the beginning of the age of Digitality. This pattern is repeated in each Cultural System where the old system makes true blunders in that it wants to reach a new equilibrium but is unable on its own basis to do so. “The mouth is larger than the stomach.” This is because the limitations of the older system were known even at its beginning, but at the end, the leadership of the Cultural System does not realize that they are inherent in the Cultural System.
How do we do this?
The method is rather simple: and the old Cultural System we are looking for the failure in the late stage as a marker while in the new Cultural System, we are looking for the success of a revolutionary change. Because these two things are different, it is very likely that they will turn up different events as being differentiators. For example, the failure of the Neoclassical system centers around the beginning points of the First World War and how various groups responded to those events, whereas the revolutionary event quite clearly focuses on the events of overthrowing governments, and thus focuses on the revolution of 1917 in Russia and in the disbanding of the Empire Germany, the Empire of Austria-Hungary, and the Sultanate of Turkey.
With the question before us, we can see that while the failure of the late stage of the Postmodern has happened it is increasingly unclear that the moment of Digitality is probably not referenced by a marker.
i Dennis Ritchie; Ken Thompson. 1974. "The UNIX time-sharing system" (PDF), Communications of the ACM, 17 (7): 365–375, doi:10.1145/361011.361061, S2CID 53235982
i The author spoke with two separate individuals in December 2019. At the time there was little information about how infectious and the level of fatality the virus would reach. It turns out that it was bad but not truly horrific however that was enough to spread around the world.
ii One such source is https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ and this lines up with the WHO estimate which is https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths?n=o.
iii https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths?n=o
iv As of this writing:
Japan 74696
S. Korea 35934
China 122170
France 168091
Germany 174979
v Wall Street Journal. 2024. “It’s Not Just the U.S. Why Are World Leaders So Old Now?” Youtube. May 21.