Just got back from a ski-holiday in France. As you are skiing in those steady rocks, you don’t really feel that you are actually within an area of – geological spoken – young mountains: round and about 60 million years young. In our timescale there is nothing as solid as a rock. However, for archeologists rock is all but steady. It is hard for us to really understand the timescale of geologists. I remember a ‘geographers talk’ in the Grand Canyon. He disclosed that the Grand Canyon emerged in an extremely short time period: only 17 milioen years. It is quite certain that it wil erode away in a short timescale as well: it is eroding at a pace of 16 centimetres every 1000 years, so it will have been half the depth it has now within 5 million years. In the earth timetable this is peanuts. A geologic whim.
You could argue that within the time frameof human civilisation it is as close as you can get to stability. One million years ago there might have been manlike creatures, but not the home sapiens (or homo ludens as Huizinga calls us or home narrens as Snowden does).
Yet it is a good example of how we underestimate change. It appears as if our mind is inclined to see stability in a world that is all but stable. We have the inclination to forecast the future as a straightforward function of the present. Not so long ago all science fiction literature was all about ‘the cold war in 3000 and something’. The future was – as it always is – an exaggeration of the current state. In the beginning of the 2oth century the big fear in London was that in the further future horses manure would become a major problem. Again, a forecast based upon (at that time) current reality taken to the extreme in the future (think about the mess in a city of 16 million people, half of them riding a horse!).
The funny thing is that we appear to have an extremely short memory. Once we have passed through a phase change, we forget all about the previous states we were in. Take for instance the internet and the on line possibilities. I remember quite vivid the year of 2000 when the internet bubble collapsed. There was a clear concensus in society that internet would not deliver the bright future that it had seemed to do only a short time before. The new business models were not solid enough, there was not enough added value in the internet. Funny how only a few years later Google apparently is thé example of new business models. And presented by the same media that not so long ago were absolutely certain about the internet economy as a failed concept. Funny how, hardly without noticing, our lives changed dramatically in a practical sense. I am writing this with my laptop where it should be according to its name, sitting on the bank (after watching Ajax winning from Utrecht). Checking some English words on my i-phone with the famous Van Dale (a Dutch dictionnary) installed as an applet. Before choosing to watch a movie on the TV I check the rating at www.imdb.com (above 7 you will never be disappointend). If I choose to work, I log in to my office network, finding all reports, agenda, emails that I need to look at.
The interesting thing is not that I can do all this. The interesting thing is that I hardly notice how different this is from only 4 years ago, let alone from the practice when I started to work (in 1989, at Ferro there was one stand alone computer. The idea of a network existed already, but not for small companies like Ferreo). We wrote reports by hand, these were typed out on the single computer we had). I am not living in a constant ‘wow’. It is just that I forgot about how things were a few years ago. Only if I deliberately imagine the before-internet habits I do feel: ‘wow. That is different’. You could blame our memory for this. That would be false. It is not exaclty that our memory is fault, for we do remember the past. It is just that we have accepted the new order as ‘normal’. This blog is not about bad memory, it is about superiour adaptation.
It is exactly this adaptation that creates the second important illusion: the illusion of stability.