We were twapping about Web 4.0. Right, yapping; as everything associated with twitter gets a “tw” makeover these days.
From the tweets and blogs I’ve been scanning of late — I actually feel like I’m catching up a tiny bit thanks to the magic called Feedly — the whole Obama thing seems to be sparking a kind of Mass Reverie. So why not join in? I probably should, as I could sorely use the practice at joining in. As a young child I was fascinated, even obsessed, with pioneers; those peculiar humans walking point for society and in some cases the entire human race; you know, like Lewis and Clark, Charles Lindburgh, Ameila Earhart, Madame Curie, people like that. Later, at around age 12, that fascination merged with what I perceived as a kind of ultimate productive pioneer philosophy, when I read Any Rand’s The Fountainhead. Little did I know at the time, my mother was probably experimenting on me to see if she could perform the nifty parlor trick of parading a 12 year old who had read the 645,000 words contained in Atlas Shrugged. She succeeded, and I lived the rest of my relatively maladaptive teen years magically thinking that if I only kept my eyes on my own paper and fully applied myself, I would one day meet the real John Galt and be spirited away to the Colorado Valley, where I could fulfill my destiny as a co-benevolent, co-equal capitalist empire board member. Peer to all mankind; neither superior nor inferior to any, because I’d successfully escaped the fallen world of socialist leeches and morons all around me. I was just a tweeny, so give me a little break, okay? However, it’s not too hard to imagine how this would lead to the experience of feeling like one was surrounded by an entire society that Doesn’t Get It. After all, when I tried to relate to my fellow sixth and seventh graders on the playground with, “Who’s hotter? Dagney Taggart or Dominique Francon?” or, “do you think they are really the same person in different books?” It didn’t exactly win friend and influence people. Well, it did influence them, but not so much in my favor. Toss in a few generations of genetic predisposition to substance abuse, and yeah, well, that’s pretty much a basic setup for an entire life of just not fitting in. What does all this have to do with Bruce Sterling, Frontiersman? I’ll try to connect the dots. After watching Kevin Kelly’s TED talk about the Next 5,000 Days of the web and the Internet of Things, I decided to dig a bit deeper — maybe still searching for John Galt at some vestigial emotional level — and consequently discovered Bruce Sterling. Sigh. He’s not John Galt. However, he did give this talk at Google two years ago and it prompted me reflect upon the most recent decade of life, during which time I indeed accomplished at least some version my Pioneering Dream by working for a decade in the 1990’s and ultimately building the first symmetric Gigabit Ethernet To The Home networks from 1999-2001; promptly after which I finally joined my True Peers, or in Jonathan Livingston Seagull terms, My True Flock, in that soaring mystical realm where pioneers actually most often end up: face down in the mud with arrows in our backs. After a few years of existential convalescence and cognitive behavioral therapy, I realized that pioneering was perhaps not all it was cracked up to be. I know: I’m a slow reader, even slower learner. Maybe I just needed to write a 650,000 word treatise, set on an Asmovian stage, fleshing out the hypocritical failings of objectivism. Nah, too reactionary. Or maybe I just need to find a bar stool next to Reverend Jesse, enlessly reminiscing about back in the day. Nah, too recitivist. Still, after investing forty-some years into a certain way of thinking and being, it’s a little difficult to take a completely new and different approach. Actually, it’s not so difficult personally, but difficult sociologically, because our culture of Industrial Era hyper specialization and interchangeable human parts seriously discourages such change. I mean really seriously discourages it; as in, “you shall now be rendered permanently unemployable and homeless” -type serious. So, the best that I could manage at the time was to backpedal from the pioneering mindset to the frontiersman perspective. A long time loyal friend and ally helped me to find a gig where I could contribute to work on planning for the California High Speed Rail (HSR), which finally recieved a thumbs up vote from California voters. With the encouragement of a great mentor, I helped the City of Fresno to flesh out plans to deploy Smart Cards for their mass transit system; which should eventually plug into the Bay Area TransLink system and HSR, for a truly regional transportation grid. These were great and rewarding projects, but still left me scrapping in the Wage Slave salt mines, far from that mythical Colorado Valley. Not that it would matter these days, I don’t even actually like the weather in Colorado all that much. The people and geology are awesome; but snow? Not so much. This is supposed to be about Frontiersmen, though. Those second-order sociologically innovative souls who follow the trail of blood, sweat, and tears left by the pioneers; who take advantage of the environmental signals left behind by the forgotten and disparaged heroes of yore. Those who seek out shadowy map etchings left on rocks and word of mouth folklore-accepted-as-fact; clues that, though gossamer, do cloak veiled hints about new threats and new opportunities in a new terrain just at the horizon. This is imporant: at the horizon, not over it. Frontiersmen are just too restless and relentlessly curious for the Settler lifestyle. They understand that they are not normal Settlers, yet they constantly seek approval in the form of the satisfaction gained when seeing new wagon trains of Settlers move into a new area and claim it as their own; even claiming that they discovered the place. Whatever. Frontiersmen often name places, things, or trends tentatively and the names don’t often stick. It’s not the names that matter, its more about the process, the progress, it’s about the constant migration toward a New, More Abundant and Sustainable Normal for Everyone. Then, having arrived safely at our Next Big Future, we immediately begin probing the fringes of possibility once again, scanning the skies for circling vultures — icons of ugliness to most, but daemons of progess to us — which point the way again toward those once brave souls, ever face down in the mud with arrows in their back. We hope for even a barely legible scrawled out message, scaps of a not-quite-accurate map, clenched in that now frozen, eternally noble, white-knuckled fist called ultimate persistence and determination. It may be true that constructing oneself as a Frontiersman is still a relatively unwinnable role in terms of widespread contemporary acceptance; after all, even a successful Frontiersman like Sterling was met with a surprising number of blank stares and slack jaws amongst many of the apparently best and brightest at Google. Yet, at least frontiering is a slightly more survivable calling, as there’s more hope for the Frontiersman that the hard work, creativity, and imagination that we bring to bear upon society’s common challenges and opportunities will somehow evolve into something that gets completely past our neologisms and simply becomes “the way we live now,” as Bruce puts it. Wagons, ho.