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The title of this essay is a reference to the 1984 movie
of the same name, but the revenge I'm referring to is
more accurately characterized in terms of a future shift
in world power, as opposed to adolescent high jinks on
an idealized college campus.
We are entering into an interesting time in history. I apologize for not currently being able to remember the source, but I once read about how the way that the world functions will eventually become so complex, only engineers will understand how anything works. The basic premise of such a prediction is that the mechanical aspects of the world will eventually become too complex for the average human being to effectively fathom. Our inexorable migration toward a 'push button' world is the direction of the slippery, downhill path we're all collectively skating on. What does this mean in practical terms? You can observe an excellent example of this phenomenon in the television set. Pretty much everyone in the world knows what one is, and is exposed to one with some regularity. Of all these thinking, sentient individuals, very few understand what is happening mechanically inside the electronics of the object. There are some who grasp, in a general way, how electricity enters the unit via the wall outlet, and through a mystical combination of nondescript components and circuit boards, a picture somehow forms on either the cathode ray tube, liquid crystal display, plasma screen, etc. However, the amount of human beings who actually understand, and can explain, these technologies in familiar detail are extremely few. Now extrapolate this common situation against all other existing and emerging modern technologies, and you begin to get a clue about how much a practical knowledge of the world is becoming more and more rare. "So what?" you may ask. As long as there are people 'out there' who can continue to develop and fabricate these convenient technologies, then what difference does it make that the person on the street has no clue about how they work? I assume most people reading this have heard the old cliché‚ about knowledge being power. The way this currently plays out is by dividing the world into three distinct groups: 1) Those who possess the vital knowledge [the smallest group]. 2) Those who have enough money (power) to employ (or force) the people from group number #1 to provide these technological wonders [the slightly larger group]. 3) Those who consume and (and more significantly) depend on these technologies for their daily lives to function properly [the truly vast, largest group of all, literally comprising the rest of the world]. Within these groups, there is some crossover, such as the talented person from group #3 who becomes, through extraordinary application of effort and education, to become a person in group #1. There is also crossover of gifted people from group #1 to group #2, by virtue of their own attempts at entrepreneurial enterprise. The interesting thing is that while someone, through laziness and poor decision-making, can move from group #2 to group #3, the movement from group #2 to group #1 is so extremely rare that it wouldn't be too hard to imagine it has never happened in all of history. Why is that? The answer to this important question also provides the answer to why the future will not look exactly like the present, in terms of the balance of power in our global civilization. Simply stated, the power elite are intellectually lazy, as they consider their efforts at gathering wealth (and power) as the most valuable knowledge in the world. They imagine that because they can successfully buy the loyalty of those who possess true talent, they are therefore the smarter of the two, because they ultimately still retain control of both. Ayn Rand wrote a book called Atlas Shrugged that addressed this phenomenon in a fictional, yet still relevant fashion. The heroes of the story were engineers and inventors who eventually freed themselves from the dullards with power who tried to maintain control of their talent through money and politics. The story was a bit fantastical because the engineer heroes eventually created a secret, hidden place in the world where they could create without the greedy thumbs of the elite pressing down on them. While the creation of a mystical Xanadu for nerds is not likely to occur in the real world, there is an important message that Atlas Shrugged sends, and I'm hereby sending once again: If you want to live in a more humane, more just world, you must take power away from those who control others by their will alone. Instead of leading the masses by inspiration or honorable example, the power elite uses legislation and societal manipulation to maintain its position of authority. Their unrepentant mantra of "Greed is Good" is more and more falling on deaf ears, as those 'unwashed masses' they wish to instill with envy are instead growing more and more angry at the inevitable inequity of the philosophy. Because the people of earth can communicate in more effective ways than they ever have been able to before, the political and monetary elite are having more and more trouble manipulating the person on the street with propaganda. This is significant because the decentralization of information means that edifying facts are more and more difficult to keep away from those grubby little hands that hunger for knowledge and freedom from tyranny. The societal model of Have's and Have Not's, while becoming more pronounced than ever, is nevertheless unprepared to prevent a total reversal of the distribution of power. As the true destination of our technological progress becomes more evident to the elite, there will inevitably be measures taken to prevent the solidarity of the truly gifted. This will ultimately fail, and the reason for that failure was mentioned in the fifth paragraph of this essay. While there are smug persons out there who dismiss this kind of talk as wishful thinking, the real world is already showing powerful evidence of this way of thinking. The open source software movement is a very real and established entity whose efforts have given us superior (and free!) technologies that will eventually eclipse the current computer stagnation of Microsoft and Apple. These talented Linux (and other) hackers commit themselves to creating superior technologies with the expectation of nothing more than respect of their peers and the knowledge that they have contributed to the betterment of the world. These motivations not only fly in the face of the greedy, power elite ideal, but as it turns out, they more effectively address a far more deep-seated desire for relevant existence in the world than merely sitting on a wallet fat with Benjamins. Revolution is only possible when a certain leverage is available to those who would change things. Prior to the 21st century, this meant fists, rocks, clubs, spears, arrows, bullets, explosives, poison gas, degradation of biological cells via engineered pathogens, destabilization of atomic structures by nuclear fission. These objectionable and often atrocious entities are the progeny of those who wish to control the population through an aggressive will to power, instead of egalitarian reason and common sense. For centuries, the proletariat of the world have been under the sway of those who possessed nothing more than the charisma to lie effectively and wield loyal armies who ironically were made up of the very people they oppressed. This situation was intractable for one simple reason: knowledge is power, and the knowledge required to usurp tyrants was possessed only by the tyrants themselves, or obtained by brute force. The power base of the elite is built on a foundation of buying knowledge from those who actually possess it. To this, I pose a question: How much longer do you truly think those who actually possess the knowledge of how the world functions will continue to defer to those who have no other claim to power other than the silver spoon or grenade pin in their mouths? |