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NOTE 4. Scavengers of the Physical Universe

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Scavengers of the Physical Universe

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It has been ten years since my office was last cleaned.

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It was like opening a time capsule and not just because what I found was old.

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What I found represented a different epoch, a time when all things that mattered were

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subject to the laws of scarcity.

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What one had, no one else could have, and therefore it was treasured and hoarded for

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for All Eternity.

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And then, something changed dramatically.

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Most of what was once hoarded became digitized and reproducible unto infinity by pushing

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buttons, and therefore all things were accessible instantly from everywhere.

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And so within the last ten years, not all at once, but bit by bit, what I owned became

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something that I no longer had to own.

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I could keep it or not, but it wasn't going away.

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Here's some of what I found.

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Video tapes of short clips of ideas and events that are now all on YouTube.

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A printout of contacts generated by my own Palm Pilot, all of which are now back on a

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handheld device that syncs through cyberspace with any online device.

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My ancient Palm Pilot itself, which is about as useful as a pet rock.

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First print runs of legislation before Congress, now all on the internet and searchable. Two

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big plastic trays, one labelled Inbox and one labelled Outbox, now replaced by a gargantuan

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archive of emails that I can access in seconds. Photographs of this and that, easily scanned

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and posted and shared with the world. Scholarly journals, pile after pile of weekly magazines

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Clips and newspaper clippings all, long ago digitized, cassette recorders for doing interviews,

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once treasured software packages that now seem as sophisticated as cave drawings, a

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world clock, a thermometer with a wire, you stick outside the window.

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I put all 200 pounds of it into contractor bags and put it in the dumpster.

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In the scheme of things, this is a lightning fast change in the way we value things.

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By the pace of life itself, it has been too slow for most of us to be entirely conscious

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of it.

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We encounter the newest new thing several times per week.

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We get a kick out of it, but that kick evaporates in a day or two as the new technology is rolled

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into our daily lives.

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But then, one day, you clean out your office to discover that the technology has reshaped

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what we value and why, and that our lives are completely different than they used to

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be.

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Somehow, the change from physical to digital strikes me as more significant than the move

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from iron to steel, from horses to internal combustion, or from land travel to air travel.

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In all other cases, the technological shift went from less to more efficient ways of accomplishing

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tasks by the use of things.

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But these things were still scarce.

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To make another book required felling another tree.

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To get from here to there still required fuel and everything that is associated with making

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it.

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My pile of paper could not simultaneously be your pile of paper.

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The space on the land on which I was driving could not be shared without causing a wreck

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and endangering life itself.

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These limitations informed our valuations.

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This is allocated distribution.

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Property rights in all things were essential else we would fight with each other.

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What we acquired, we kept.

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We only gave things up if we got something in return of higher value.

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Many things we knew were valued by no one but ourselves, so we packed them away, hoarded

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them so they couldn't get lost.

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Accumulation was the goal.

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We weren't aware of it because we hadn't been shown any other way.

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Our behaviour was being dictated by our sense of what was possible, which thereby informed

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our sense of what should be done.

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I had a friend once who moved from Russia to the United States in 1987.

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He moved from a place where offices chained typewriters to desks because they would otherwise

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be stolen.

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Citizens would brag about their private collection of paper clips.

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Spare parts for washing machines and cars were gold.

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So when he first arrived, he got an apartment and began to fill it up.

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I visited.

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He had typewriters and stereos.

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He had washing machines and car parts.

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He had tables and chairs and desks piled high.

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He had vases and bowls and plates and cups.

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He had moose antlers mounted on a big piece of wood.

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He had golf bags with clubs, wooden and plastic bats, stuffed animals, music boxes, toys of

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all sorts, and piles and piles of shoes that didn't even fit him.

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His apartment looked like a thrift store or the refuse of two dozen yard sales.

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I was aghast and I asked him why he was accumulating all this ridiculous junk.

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He explained that, in Russia, everything was treasure.

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He was vaguely aware that it was not valuable here, but he had to have his fling, for he

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was in a constant state of shock that he could just buy all this stuff so cheaply.

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He begged for indulgence, he just wanted to get through this stage in life, this period

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of adjustment.

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Fine, I said.

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Then he took me with him car shopping.

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At the end of the day, he was the proud owner of three used cars that barely ran.

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In Russia, he had learned to grab anything he found because there was a shortage in everything.

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He was hardly alone in this, the whole society was informed by this sense of valuation.

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There was no free market at work, so one could be sure of nothing.

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Socialism led to shortages and poverty, a perfect recipe for rampant materialism.

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I'm realizing now that we had more in common than I thought at the time.

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The only difference between us was in what we accumulated.

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His passion was what I regarded as junk.

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My passion was for documents, papers, journals, magazines and books.

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He thought of all these as luxury goods that could be foregone until life's essentials

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were provided for.

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What we had in common was the assumption that we had to physically possess what we valued.

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We were both desperate scavengers of the physical world.

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This is what has changed – and all in a mere ten years or so.

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Digits take us away from the constraints.

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They have folded vast swaths of regular life into that magical realm that makes scarcity

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evaporate.

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If I have a document now, I can continue to possess it even as I unleash it on a globe

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that has the opportunity to consume it in exactly the same way I have – making hundreds,

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Thousands and millions of duplicates of the same thing in a matter of seconds.

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The same is true with any sort of information, databases, video, audio and images.

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No reflection on this topic can fail to credit the market economy for what has happened to

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us.

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Despite every attempt by governments to hobble it, the digital universe as we know it was

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made by the market economy.

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It is a market-built world, which is to say, a world built by human choices, entrepreneurship

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and service, one to another.

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Socialism tried to make scarcity disappear through government fiat, and only ended up

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creating huge shortages that spread misery and death.

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Capitalism sought to unleash the cooperative and competitive spirits of the human person,

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and ended up abolishing scarcity in life's most valuable things.