|
Y2K - From the Past
to the Information Age
by Ray Strackbein
"Across the country, there will be system failures. People will not understand it. There will be a lot of confusion. …Communities need help and we need some direction. We're not just thousands of
different communities -- we're an American community." -- Congressman Dennis Kucinich
Sally and I heard Congressman Kucinich say that at the George Washington University's Conference on Y2K, July 26 - 30, 1999.
Many of us hoped the direction and leadership we need to prepare for and get through Y2K would come from national, regional, or local governments. It hasn't. Some local governments have supported Y2K
citizens' groups, but precious few. Expectations and realities are at wide variance.
Where will we turn?
We cannot expect a centralized response to the effects of Y2K. We will see a diversified response. We will not be able to depend on the government. We will have to depend on ourselves.
Some people are worried about rioting, panic, and martial law. Others are worried about people becoming disenchanted with government and our government falling. We have other models to look at.
The best of the past
A solid part of American heritage is helping our families and neighbors build barns and bring in the crops. Families and neighbors shared tools, knowledge, and supplies. They also shared food.
By doing so, these families and neighbors also built community. They worked together to build their future and overcome adversity. They ate together. They celebrated victory and consoled each
others' losses. They took each other in when there was a need.
It still happens. When there is a disaster, friends, neighbors, and family all help each other. Whenever there is a disaster people help each other. People will help each other cope with Y2K.
Y2K can help us build better families and communities by pulling together.
When I was in my late teens, I worked as an ambulance attendant, and later, as an ambulance driver.
I have seen how people behave in times of crisis. Strangers help each other. I see people helping the same way when television reports on the latest flood, earthquake, or fire. People use their hands to dig a stranger out of debris. More than that, even rivals help each other. In a recent earthquake in Turkey, even Greece, a long-time rival, sent rescuers and supplies.
Helping other in times of crisis is not just an American tradition, it is engrained in humanity. Just as war destroys communities, cooperation builds communities. Cooperation builds civilization.
Decentralized response works
Because of our global communication systems, we learn of disasters in minutes instead of years. A crisis in another country takes on the immediacy of a local problem.
When Turkey had its devastating earthquake; the local Fairfax County Search and Rescue responded as if it were a local disaster and flew to Turkey to locate and save as many people as they and other
emergency response teams from throughout the world could. Instead of a centralized response to the earthquake, there is a decentralized response -- cities, counties, states, and countries all
contributed to the rescue effort. These actions help to build a world-wide community.
Y2K is similar. Instead of a national, centralized effort, individual people, loose-knit groups, companies and activists all work to educate others about Y2K. There is no effective centralized process.
News about Y2K flashes through the Internet in minutes, scooping broadcasters and the press.
The difference between the response of rescuers to Turkey and activists to Y2K is that the rescuers are professional and organized while the Y2K activists are not. We have never had a Y2K before.
Most people do not know what to expect. They do not believe Y2K is a threat. They depend on technology without understanding it. They do not know how fragile our technology-based infrastructure is.
How Y2K differs from "normal" disasters.
There are four main differences between Y2K and ordinary disasters.
The first difference is that we have never had a Y2K before.
We really don't know what to expect, although we have a pretty good idea. We know the potential -- anything that depends on computers can fail. What we don't know is how effectively organizations are locating and fixing Y2K problems. Normal response to disasters is based on the fact that the disaster has already happened and we know what to expect in that particular type of disaster. Y2K hasn't happened yet and it has never happened before.
The second difference is that Y2K was predicted years ahead of time.
We knew its potential and its time of arrival. We know earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and droughts are going to happen in certain areas -- we just don't know exactly when. We do know exactly when Y2K will happen.
The third difference between Y2K and ordinary disasters is that in Y2K there will be little physical damage. In earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, there is a lot of physical damage.
Houses are damaged. Roads are damaged. The destruction is obvious. In Y2K, the infrastructure might fail, but the houses and roads will be undamaged. In an ordinary disaster, it is obvious what people have to do to move forward with their lives. In Y2K, people will just have to wait for "them" to fix it.
The fourth difference is that normal disasters rely on mutual aid for recovery. Normally a local area is affected and everything outside that local area is OK. The unaffected areas send help
to the affected areas. This will not be possible in Y2K because there will probably not be any unaffected areas.
Since Y2K problems will occur over a protracted time, even those who are relatively unaffected may not be willing to leave the local area help another affected area out of fear that something else may go wrong while the helpers are away.
This fourth difference is crucial.
It means that during normal disasters, the local area is the worst place to look for help. In Y2K, the local area will be the best place to seek support and help because there may not be any transportation, electricity, or gasoline anywhere. We may have to stay put until the infrastructure is repaired instead of evacuating the way we would in a "normal" disaster.
The hierarchy abandoned us.
Most people think that if Y2K will really be so serious and if we really need to prepare, the government and the media will send us a clear warning. They haven't.
Neither the government nor the media are committed to a timely discussion, explanation, and warning about Y2K. Our hierarchy has failed and a decentralized replacement is struggling to emerge. The current, established way is failing us and the new way is yet to establish itself. These are confusing times.
As Congressman Kucinich says, "…People will not understand it. There will be a lot of confusion … and we need some direction…."
A new way of thinking is required.
Albert Einstein said it well: "Significant problems that we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."
When Y2K hits, some people will propose that we should "go back to basics." That sounds good but it will simply magnify our problem. Others will cry that we should do things differently. They
won't be able to describe in detail what "differently" means. Any cliché will be accepted when enough people cry, "Somebody do something!"
We certainly don't need to "do something."
We will instead need to solve the problems that created the crisis. We have a choice: we can wait to solve those problems or we can work on them now while people are more-or-less rational.
Short-term thinking is one cause of Y2K.
Two of the primary causes of our problems are short-term and specialized thinking. When programmers warned about Y2K, they were told, "the year 2000 is a long time away," or "we will cross
that bridge when we get to it," or "we can't afford to worry about that now." It became a cancer that grew to consume our infrastructure. But our managers and leaders didn't have the
foresight to see that. Blinded by the specialization of management, but ignorant of how technology works, they predicted, "It is just a little bump in the road."
They hoped they could ignore the cancerous little bump and it would go away.
Specialization is another cause of Y2K.
Most people are specialists.
They may know about law, but not finance. They may know about mechanics but not electronics. The fact that we have not solved the Y2K problem is the result of people not understanding systems and how parts of the system are interconnected. They cannot understand someone who explains a problem outside of their specialty.
We are besieged by warnings.
People who want us to take a certain action try to motivate us by telling us how urgent it is to take action and how dangerous it is not to take the action they propose. We are surrounded by a society that continually cries "Wolf!" Without understanding the world outside their specialty, people have no way to differentiate wolf cries from real problems.
It is not just a Y2K jam -- it is an Industrial Age jam.
This is a time of transition from an old, established way of doing things to a new way.
The old ways are failing and the new ways are not widely understood. We are in the transition between the Industrial Age and the Information Age.
The Industrial Age was marked by centralization. Before the Industrial Age, automobiles were made by hand by specialized craftspeople. Each part was tailored to fit another hand-made part. When a part on
a car broke, a new part had to be hand-made because there were no interchangeable car parts. Henry Ford dreamed of every family having a car. To do that, he centralized the automobile industry, bringing
it to a factory he built in Michigan, introducing interchangeable parts, and put large numbers of individual automobile builders out of business. He could do that because steel and transportation was
already centralized into a small number of steel mills and railroads.
A few years later, in response to the Great Depression, government was centralized.
Before that centralized federal response, Washington DC was a sleepy little town. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created an assembly line to get us out of the Depression. He centralized government.
Now we have a hierarchy of centralized governments: local governments under state governments under one Federal Government.
But this is the Information Age. The pendulum is swinging back towards decentralization. We have seen this same cycle with our computer systems. In the Industrial Age, computer systems were
centralized with each company centralized by a mainframe computer in national headquarters in New York, Chicago, or Detroit.
Now, centralized corporate centers have diversified. For the past few decades, companies have been abandoning the old Industrial Age centers, relocating to wherever their fancy sent them.
This is similar to what is happening to computers. Disappearing fast are the centralized Mainframe computers, giving way to diversified client-server networks.
The Information Age is about decentralization.
The Information Age is decentralizing our technology, our commerce, our society, our government, and our politics. There has been no centralized, national War on Y2K. Industrial Age methods are
failing us in the Information Age. We have to invent new methods.
The Information Age brings change.
Many people do not understand or do not like change. Yet the Information Age brings us increasing rates of change. We humans used to have a lifetime jobs or careers. Our Information Age society is
changing so fast that we now have "lifelong learning" so we can adapt to life's changes and have many jobs or careers. School isn't just for kids any more. People who are troubled by change
must be terrified that they might not have a job for life.
Learn and change or stagnate.
Ralph was a technician in his 30's or 40's who drove a service truck, travelling to farms and businesses fixing their radio communications equipment. I knew him when I worked at a mobile telephone,
two-way radio and radio pager repair shop in the late '60's. I was a bench technician who stayed in the shop fixing radios. When the technicians driving the service trucks couldn't fix a radio or mobile
telephone because they didn't have the parts or knowledge, they brought it into the shop for me to fix -- the part time college kid.
One day, Ralph, who worked only on vacuum tube radios, brought me a transistorized two-way radio. I told him that working on transistorized radios was very similar to working on vacuum tube radios.
I offered to show him how to repair transistorized equipment. He declined, saying, "These transistors won't last long. There will always be tubes for me to work on." Yet at that time, transistors were not the newest technology. Integrated circuits were available and within five years, Intel would sell their first microprocessor.
Ralph couldn't deal with technical change, yet technical change is far more predictable than social change. If he didn't learn about newer technologies, he would soon be out of a job. Today we have to
anticipate and adjust not only to rapid technical change, but unprecedented social change. The change that took many generations in the past occurs within a single lifetime today.
Industrial Age methods threaten our infrastructure.
These changes accelerated to become Y2K.
Y2K threatens our infrastructure. Some of us saw it coming for decades. Computer programmers proposed solutions to business and government in the 1980's. We were Chicken Littles -- the same as those who warned of global warming, pollution, the ozone hole, greenhouse gasses, and our reliance on foreign petroleum. Y2K is only one of many things that threaten our infrastructure.
This threat can bring progress. Human civilization lost its infrastructure before. The disruption of shifting from the Industrial Age to the Information Age will be similar to the disruptions of
shifting from being hunters and gatherers to the Agricultural Age. New, better ways will come out the Y2K experience.
We survived transition in the past.
At one time, we were hunters and gatherers. We prospered and flourished. We over-hunted and over-gathered. Our food supply diminished. Too many people, too few resources: too few animals, too few plants.
As we continued to hunt and gather, we further diminished our infrastructure.
Life was a zero-sum game: if one person wins, another person loses: if you eat, I don't. The answer, of course, was to raise plants and animals for food. Raising our own food postponed the zero-sum game.
Everyone could eat. The Agricultural Age brought an abundance of food.
We can learn from the past.
During the change from being hunters and gatherers to farmers, what was once forbidden became required.
For the Agricultural Age to succeed, they had to invent and promote the unthinkable: ownership of land.
Hunters and gathers are nomadic; farmers are not. Farmers had to claim plots to sow, tend, and harvest. Farmers work the same plot of land year after year.
They reap the fruits of their labors. For the Agriculture Age to succeed, people had to own land, either individually or as a group.
Yet to the hunters and gatherers, this was unthinkable. Land belonged to nature -- to the gods. Humans could not own land. Owning land was once forbidden, yet later, essential.
The Information Age requires new rules.
In the same way, beliefs and practices that were essential in the Industrial Age will have to be cast off and new ways learned.
We have to invent the Information Age. We will discover new essential practices and beliefs to make the Information Age work. We have to be willing to question everything about our Industrial Age values and practices. We have to cast off what does not work any more. We have to discontinue actions and beliefs that caused problems. We have to stop doing things that now threaten our existence.
One of the things we will have to cast off, or at least reduce, is control. People entrenched in the Industrial Age are terrified of a loss of control.
Control was necessary for the success of the Industrial Age. We had to control the raw materials, the assembly line processes, and the workers. The better the controls, the better the product. But control can be carried too far, and it has been.
People who still cling to the Industrial Age are terrified of loss of control. They ridicule and criticize those who want to relax control. They label relaxed control as "anarchy."
The Information Age requires freedom, not anarchy.
Freedom is to the Information Age as land ownership was to the Agricultural Age. Freedom and relaxed control will move us into the Information Age.
The Internet is the metaphor for the Information Age. The Internet is freedom. There is no control on the Internet.
No one owns it. No one controls it. It is an Information Age free-for-all. The freedom of the Internet ushers in the Information Age.
Y2K is the direct result of excess control. The experts in government, politics, and management tried to control the system. They tried to control the inevitable.
The opinions of the technical experts did not matter; controlling the system did. Excessive political control results in technical and social systems that are out of control.
To solve Y2K, we can continue to look for someone to impose control, or we can have the freedom to restore our families and communities.
"We're not just thousands of different communities -- we're an American community." -- Congressman Kucinich
www.y2kkitchen.com Copyright © Ray Strackbein ray@y2kkitchen.com
Get more! Buy Y2K Kitchen - The Book (703)262-0300 voice/fax
Y2K Kitchen, 12030 Sunrise Valley Dr., #300, Reston, VA 20191
|
