IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

30 Chapter 2
Questioning speed and acceleration raises interesting design and innova-
tion questions. Should we continue to design only to make things faster? Is
selective slowness consistent with growth and innovation? How might
faster information help us live more lightly on the planet?
A-Forces
Many of the problems that unnerve us have less to do with speed than with
acceleration. Graphs everywhere seem to be heading off the chart. In the
economy, for example, it took from the beginning of human history to
the year 1900 to develop a world economy that produced six hundred billion
dollars in output. Today, the world economy grows by that amount
every two years. 4 In my lifetime, energy production has more than tripled,
and economic output has risen by a factor of five.
Cultural evolution has also accelerated. In his book Consilience, the biologist
Edward O. Wilson plots the evolution of artifacts since the controlled
use of fire 450,000 years ago. According to Wilson, the brain of modern
Homo sapiens was anatomically fully formed by no later than 100,000 years
before the present. From that time forward, material culture at first evolved
slowly, later expanded, and then exploded. It passed from a handful of
stone and bone tools at the beginning of the interval, to agricultural fields
and villages at the 90 percent mark, and then—in a virtual eye blink—to
prodigiously elaborate technologies. Marvels Wilson: ‘‘Cultural evolution
has followed an exponential trajectory.’’ 5
It took centuries for information about the smelting of ore to cross a single
continent—and bring about the Iron Age. During the time of sailing
ships, it took years for knowledge and technologies to spread around the
world. Subsequently, as Dee W. Hoch, founder of Visa, points out, with
the telegraph and telephone it became possible to deliver information
point to point, simultaneously. 6 Radio, television, and satellite increased
the informational footprint—so that by the time man landed on the
moon, half the world’s population could witness the fact a second later.
The push toward simultaneity continues in today’s artifacts: Computer
processing speeds and storage have both increased over a millionfold in a
couple of decades, and the Internet has transformed the dynamics of information
distribution within a few years.
Travel speeds have plummeted at similar rates. It took the Pilgrim fathers
sixty-six days to sail from England to America in 1660, bringing news from