Pop Philosophy

The Great Disruption

What the global economy, Blockbuster, going solo, hook-up culture, asynchronous intimacy, the Apple Maps app and ‘Homeland’ all have in common

We live in a world of broken models, columnist Robert Samuelson noted recently in The Washington Post. In his essay, Samuelson speculated that “to understand why world leaders can’t easily fix the sputtering global economy, you have to realize that the economic models on which the United States, Europe and China relied are collapsing.”

Samuelson confined his analysis to macroeconomics, but he's actually on to something. We find ourselves in a world turned upside down.  The Greatest Generation had to survive the Great Depression; our generation, I believe, is being asked to navigate (rather than survive) the Great Disruption.

Let me explain. It's now conventional wisdom that companies from Blockbuster (RIP) to Borders (RIP) have seen their traditional business models disrupted. In the case of the former, their video stores were challenged by the advent of DVDs by mail, courtesy of Netflix. In the case of the latter, the transition from retail to e-commerce (and, soon, e-books) pioneered by Amazon hastened Borders’ demise. Even 'new' companies like BlackBerry (RIP soon?) are seeing their once mighty technological advantages being leapfrogged in the space of months, not years. It’s often said that “a week is a lifetime in politics.” This is increasingly true about business. For almost every company, the world as they knew it no longer exists.

But what if that described the rest of “life”, as well? What if our 'living models' are being disrupted today as much as business models have been?  This is exactly what's happening, only it may not be as obvious.

From the way we live, date, mate and marry, traditional pillars of society are being transformed.

Taken together, it seems that we’re living through a revolution just slow enough to slip by almost unnoticed, but significant enough to upend our world.

Did you know that for the first time ever, a majority of Americans (51%) today are single? How about that 1 in 3 of Americans live alone? That number, by the way, rises to half the population in cities like Washington, DC and Manhattan. It’s not just that people are increasingly “going solo” or are putting off getting married; in some cases they are postponing that milestone - forever. Holy matrimony is not happening as often as it used to. When weddings do occur, they’re no longer necessarily between a man and a woman ( that's a good thing), and the unions are not lasting as long as they used to (that’s a bad thing).

Even the road to marriages and baby carriages has changed. These days, finding that partner - let alone a future husband or wife - is more complicated than ever before. Courtship, if it does exist, is far removed from the Ritchie Cunningham era of dates, dances, making out and going out.

Today, young people are txting instead of talking, sexting instead of playing spin the bottle, surfing internet porn instead of sneaking peeks at Playboy magazines.

This is all part of Hookup Culture. But when did it become A-OK for girls to announce that they were DTF? We live in a brave new world of what I call ‘asynchronous intimacy’. People used to get know each other, then have sex. Today, it’s not an exaggeration to say that they have sex, and then get to know each other (if at all). 

Time-honored social norms have been abandoned. Some of this is progress, to be sure; but even desirable advances represent a double-edged sword. For instance, there are more women than men attending college now, and women are increasingly getting ahead in the classroom, the boardroom and the living room. The flip side is that soon it will be difficult for a university degree-holding female to find a similarly-educated boyfriend, or a husband who earns as much as she does. 

There are what economists call externalities to all of these developments - broader social costs that we rarely factor in when contemplating the full impact of such changes.

More people living alone means greater self-fulfillment, but probably an increased risk of social isolation as well. The notion of what constitutes a couple is simultaneously being defined down (hook-ups and “friends with benefits”) as well as more expansively (same-sex unions, common law partnerships). Girls feel more free to hook up, but it’s eliminated the requirement for guys to court and emotionally connect with them first. Women are moving up in the world, but they’re going to be forced to “date down”.

More generally, people don't have the benefit of "social GPS" anymore. They don't know where they are, they don’t know where they stand, and they don’t have directions to where they’re going. It’s as if all of  us are iPhones 5s, and we just downloaded the terrible Apple Maps App: the Statue of Liberty simply isn’t where it’s supposed to be.

I'm a student of history. When it comes to change, I believe that much of what we say is du jamais vu has, in fact, been seen before. Globalization is one such ‘new’ development … that's been happening since Jean-Baptiste Colbert (no relation to Stephen) and the emergence of 17th century mercantilism. But what is new is the pace of change. Cars replaced horses over multiple decades; TV overtook radio in 15 years; Facebook went from a way for a nerd to meet girls to a 100 billion dollar company (at its IPO, at least) with one billion users in just 7.

How much have things changed in those last 7 years?

As Thomas Friedman remarked, in 2005 "when I wrote The World is Flat,  Skype was a typo, Twitter was a sound, 4G was a parking spot." Today’s ascendant generation - the Millennials - has never known a world without YouTube, PVRs or iPhones.  

Not only is every aspect of life getting fstr, the cycle times are getting shorter. We have less time to adjust to these deep and wide changes in society, and they're coming at us like a Twitter feed.

This is not a stable state, nor an end one necessarily. The old rules are out of date, but new ones haven’t been set yet. So what can we do in the face of this Great Disruption? First, grab tight and hold on.  Then, just as businesses had to reinvent themselves to adapt to new economic models, we need to rebuild our social models to adjust to the new realities. 

On one level, we have to become comfortable being uncomfortable.

We have to make peace with being a little lost. But we also have to make sense of this emerging landscape, and develop new (or old) ways to navigate it for the long term. This might mean moving forward, by redefining how society looks at single people and the state regards civil unions. It might also require, however, looking backward - and returning to a bygone era where people met, dated and mated in that order.

We can’t be trapped by the tyranny of “progress”, nor by the orthodoxy of the past. Perhaps most importantly, we can’t simply sit still. “Life” is being disrupted before our eyes, and all of us, individually and collectively, risk the fates of Blockbuster and Borders - of being left behind. 

I’m not arguing for a return to a “Happy Days” world, or an acceptance of a “Girls” one for that matter, either. But I do think that we need to snap back to a more thought-out and sustainable posture vis a vis this Great Disruption. My new favorite TV show is “Homeland”. It’s a taut psychological thriller that spins dark webs of deceit amid double-clutch plot twists and revelations. The two central characters - CIA agent Carrie Matheson and ex-POW and possible Manchurian Candidate Nicholas Brody - live in a lie-within-a-lie world. The show’s central appeal is the thoroughly disorienting sensation of not knowing what is real, who is the good character and the bad, and how both Carrie and Brody periodically lose and regain control of their lives.

In a sense, we all now live in a “Homeland” world - not one in which a Congressman may be a Muslim mole, or the CIA agent pursuing him may be mad - but one where good and bad, progress and regress, control and chaos all sit side by side.

Welcome to the Great Disruption.

The return of History

I was having lunch in a Persian restaurant in London with my Nigerian friend Obi the other day when I had an epiphany of sorts. It wasn't a realization about globalization, though by the opening line of my post it could very well have been. Rather, a lightning bolt struck when Obi described to me the qualities he looked for in potential recruits for the unusual investment firm in which he is a partner. His company is "the largest - and sometimes only - foreign portfolio investor in many of the markets of sub-Saharan Africa." Obi and his colleagues spend their time analyzing corporate, economic and political information in that area of the world, in the hopes that this will help them make money for their clients. 

I should point out at this juncture that Obi is not your normal investment analyst or fund manager. Far from being maniacally focused on making money, he is more of a Renaissance man of rare ability and kaleidoscopic interests. Obi is a medical doctor who can extemporize for hours about politics - from the sub-Saharan variety to Britain and America's arcane political systems - who discovered a zeal for corporate finance while doing an MBA at London Business School. We met there, and I've enjoyed his company tremendously - and been enlightened by his broad ranging insights - ever since. 

While he and I chatted over lunch that day, I asked him what types of people he sought out to join his firm. After all, few people had his rare combination of medical, business and geopolitical knowledge; surely, there weren't many other 'Obis' out there to snap up for the company. Given that, I expected him to say that they hired either people familiar with Africa and its' public companies to whom they could teach corporate finance skills, or clever manipulators of the Black-Scholes options pricing model (an abstruse corporate finance tool) who could be instructed in the ways of the Saharan continent. To my great surprise, Obi responded that while both financial analysis abilities and knowledge in African affairs were valued assets in a potential recruit, the most critical requirement for him was an appreciation for ... history. 

I was astounded, and it must have been apparent by my reaction since Obi went on to explain why. It all made perfect sense after he did, too. In a nutshell, the landscape of public companies in Africa today resemble, in an approximate sense, the state of corporate America at the beginning of the 20th century. The uber-corporations that stand astride the globe today began the last century as family-owned companies started in small towns (such as Sam Walton's Bentonville, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart). As they grew into the behemoths they have become, they passed through predictable - and well documented - stages of development and growth. As Obi pointed out, looking at Africa in 2007 is not unlike looking at America in 1907. Consequently, predicting the commercial 'future' in Africa - identifying the right companies and industries in which to invest - has a lot more to do with history and less to do with finance or, to a certain extent, local realities. Obi punctuated his point by adding matter-of-factly, "face it, Ion: there is very little today that is actually new." Cue the lightning bolt here ... 

Of course, he was right, and not just about history's applicability to business but to all aspects of life. Every generation tends to think - often through an intoxicating combination of naivete and self-absorption - that the challenges they face are completely unique and unparalleled. While most people concede the existence of historical antecedents, few actually accept the proposition that progress is more of a wheel than a line - that when we experience change it is more often than not as a repetition of history rather than a completely new story. 

Take globalization, for example. Authors have written reams about the impact of this 'new' phenemenon. One of my favorite authors, Thomas Friedman, wrote two excellent tomes on the subject, The Lexus and The Olive Tree and the more recent The World is Flat. Both books gained renown for performing the literary equivalent of capturing the lightning of globalization in a bottle. Friedman - and authors like him - have done much to help the lay person understand globalization, but they have also contributed to the common misperception that somehow this is a new development. Globalization - even as we know it - has been a rising tide of change at least since Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the architect of Mercantilism, imported Venetian glass and Flemish tapestries to France in the mid 17th century. Some more imaginative historians trace its' roots all the way back to the Mongol Empire and the cross-continental capital and culture flows that stemmed from the Silk Road trade. Regardless of its' actual starting point, globalization is neither new nor a particularly revolutionary phenemenon. However, the concept is often denuded from proper historical context and portrayed in the media today as both unfamiliar and unprecedented. 

The vast majority of 'analysis' about the Internet is another example of a-historical hyperbole. Don't get me wrong: I'm obviously not one of those deluded souls who believes that the Internet is a passing fad. However, I do submit that the changes wrought by the Internet are both more familiar and less fantastical than the conventional wisdom would have us believe. The Economist's recent survey on the Internet and new media (here) correctly put the Internet 'revolution' in perspective. Far from rejecting its' legitimacy as a revolutionary force, the survey made the point that we've experienced such a revolution before and that this one would follow a similar pattern. The magazine likened the Internet's arrival to the emergence of moveable type in the middle 15th century, an era where a new technology democratized knowledge (the Gutenberg Bible), "turbo-charged an information age" (The Renaissance) and set in motion forces that would reverberate centuries later (the modern ubiquity of mass media). 

What The Economist did was to root a contemporary event or phenomenon into proper historical context. In effect, it subjected the Long Tail to the Long View, and in so doing gave us a critical and much-needed perspective on the present. As both the examples of globalization and the Internet show, what society perceives - and anoints - as new and never-before-seen is often neither. What too frequently is lacking is the intellectual reflex and rigor to look at the 'new' through the prism of the 'old'. Society would benefit, it seems to me, if more futurists acted as archeologists and the past informed more of our knowledge of the present. 

Fortunately, History has been staging a bit of a comeback lately. With many of the complex conundrums that confound us today - from terrorism and the degradation of the environment to the war in Iraq - people appear to be turning to history to help make sense of it all. Little by little, historical perspectives weave their way into the public discourse on our modern maladies. Al-Qaeda is less and less seen as a terror cell that came to life on 9/11, but more properly put into context as a movement that arose from the 1980s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and catalyzed again by the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia at the end of the first Gulf War. The phenomenon of global warming was catapulted into the public consciousness by Al Gore's powerful documentary An Inconvenient Truth because it demonstrated that the Earth's temperatures were rising at a rate unseen in human history. The civil unrest in Iraq was once viewed as either the death throws of a recently-toppled totalitarian regime or the desperate final match strikes of a foreign-backed insurgency seeking to enflame the country. Today, it is seen through the prism of a millenia-old schism in Islam between Sunni and Shi'a - the contemporary boiling-over of a sectarian struggle that simmered for decades under Saddam's iron rule. 

Even self-avowed anti-historians and current affairs columnists are looking to the past for answers now. The famously anti-intellectual George W. Bush was recently reading, at Henry Kissinger's suggestion, Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace, about France's experiences in a guerrilla war against Muslims in Algeria in the mid 1950s, to help frame his foreign policy towards Iraq. In a stark illustration of how 'hip' historical analysis has become, New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof recently reached as far back as Virgil and the travails of Thucydides to offer the appropriate historical analogy to W's Iraq adventure. 

History, like the height of hem lines, comes in and out of fashion. After all, it wasn't that long ago (1989) that Francis Fukuyama famously wrote about the 'The End of History'. George Will more recently mused sardonically about the Fukuyaman viewpoint - and the atypical period of peace, progress and prosperity that spawned it - as our collective 'vacation from history.' That holiday ended abruptly, on or about September 11, 2001. Thereafter, the world faced sufficiently chilling and complex challenges that we have increasingly turned to history for context, comfort and courses of action. This is as it should be. George Santayana's famous dictum that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is as true today as it was a century ago when it was written. These days, however, his aphorism could be updated to say that those who do not listen to the past are condemned to misunderstand the present. Simply put, yesterday gives us perspective on today and a chance at properly explaining tomorrow. After all, as my friend Obi put it so well, there is very little that is truly new anymore ...