The new modernity (E)

0:00John F. Kennedy was born more than 100 years ago, which means he lived closer to Abraham Lincoln than to now. That's sort of stunning to think about, because when I think about Abraham Lincoln, I'm thinking about somebody who lived a really long time ago. But when I think about JFK, I think about him in color as part of the modern age. It turns out that modernity is not just fun to say, it's important to understand. Hey, it's Arav, And this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

1:09same shoes and the same suit as the president would be wearing. You could use language that would probably fit right in. If you knew how to drive a standard car, you'd have no trouble driving there down Pennsylvania Avenue. And if you took the bus, it wouldn't be difficult at all to figure out. But if you headed back in time to Abraham Lincoln, you wouldn't know what to wear. You wouldn't know how to speak. You wouldn't figure out how to get there. The world was dark and dank and sort of weird. Certainly it was in black and white. What happened? How is it that more than 50, 60 years ago, we had the modern age?

1:57But just 100 years before that, the world was totally different. It turns out that modernity is fueled by several factors. Let's think about art. If we think about art on the wall, paintings, conceptual art, things like that, it's really easy for someone who isn't even an art major to tell the difference between a painting from before 1860 and one after 1860. The stuff after, starting with Manet and working its way through the Picassos and the Duchamps and the Helen Frankenthalers of the world, the Susan Rothenbergs with her horses, all of it looks like now. Whereas the stuff from before looks like before.

2:48We can point to several factors. One of them, a huge one, is the electrification of the world. Turning on lights, giving people machines, creating comfort. More than that, creating productivity so that there was a surplus, so that people weren't living quite so much on the edge. Next, the invention of the telephone, the great connecting device, the one that put us into sync with one another. It made the world smaller. And then the car and, of course, the airplane, because the car paved the world and allowed massive movements of people in every single direction, not constrained by where the train stopped.

3:36Those three things, and then the computer and the camera, I would add, below them, we'll get to that in a second, really shifted how we see the world and how we see ourselves in the world. And for the people who grew up with the science fiction stories of the 20s and the 30s, where it was promised that this cycle of complete rebuilding of all of our expectations of how the world works can't help but be a little disappointed. Because it seems like since Kennedy's time, we've been sort of coasting. that John F. Kennedy coming forward in a time machine wouldn't have a heart attack the way Abraham Lincoln would if he had come forward to Kennedy's time.

4:25That the world sort of looks like the world. That we can watch a well-produced movie from 1970 or 1980 and not feel like we're involved in a time machine. Which leads to the first big idea, the difference between modern and contemporary. Modern art, a term Clement Greenberg explained, was a reaction to centuries and centuries of classical art. That modern art is a response that happens because the camera was invented. Once you have a camera, there's really no economic need to paint things that you see. because we can take a picture of what you see cheaper and faster and more effectively than we can hire you to paint what you see.

5:18And so if the artist is going to add any value at all, the artist needs to bring emotion to the table. They need to portray things in ways that don't look like they would look if we had taken a picture with a camera. So it began with Edward Manet and his impressionistic, modernistic view of how the world looked to him and to him alone. And it proceeded all the way to Marcel Duchamp, who stole the Baroness Elsa von Freytag's work called Fountain and created what was probably the last piece of modern art, a urinal hung upside down in an art museum. I've mentioned it before, but it's important because it's the mic drop.

6:10It says, all right, we're done here. We have nothing left to say. and after that we shifted from modern art to contemporary art. Contemporary art is not seeking a revolution. It is not in response to the camera. Contemporary art is the art of the moment, the art of now. It is what we are talking about today. So contemporary art doesn't have to push way the work of Rembrandt or Michelangelo. Contemporary art instead is one artist's statement about what they want to say. This is useful even if you're not interested in the art world, because the same thing is happening in technology. That it's not very often that we completely overthrow the cultural precepts the way electricity did, the way the scientific method before that did the way the assembly line did.

7:09But it's happening. It's happening right now. The revolution, the next one, is happening right now. And we are about to enter an era where, in fact, all the media and all the history from 1960 through 2000 is going to seem like it's old-fashioned. So what is going to define this new era? Well, in the short run, it's the smartphone. It's the ubiquity of connection. Take just about any movie, just about any play since Shakespeare's time, and add cell phones to it, and it all falls apart. As soon as you have cell phones, Romeo and Juliet makes no sense. Neither does any Seinfeld episode. As soon as we are able to connect with the others, the others at large, the others individually, individually, lots of plot twists go away.

8:03It was a big deal when they installed that red phone in the White House that would let the president pick up the phone and call Khrushchev or whoever was running the Soviet Union at the time. Now, it's accepted. It's accepted that things are more in sync than ever before. The internet is a game changer, not because of cat videos, not because of one-click shopping, but because of what those things bring behind them, which is this massive peer-to-peer instant sync of culture and information. It means that for the first time in the history of the world, anyone who wants to learn something can learn it.

8:48That is a game changer because the idea that we can learn ideas and get better at them faster and faster than ever will change the pace that our culture advances. The next part of it, once we are digitizing all of these interactions, is machine learning and artificial intelligence. AI, which has been defined as whatever a computer can't do yet, is rapidly getting really close to what computers can do now. And so one job after another, whether you're a radiologist or a customer service rep, is getting replaced. Replaced by an infinitely trainable, infinitely patient, infinitely cheap system that will do the thing we used to think of as work.

9:39And the third factor is we are replacing mankind's desire to kill everybody else, whether it's with muskets in the Civil War or nuclear weapons as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, is going to be replaced by a different threat. And the new threat is the warming of the climate, the rising of sea levels, the melting of the glaciers. Because one out of every five people on Earth lives in a coastal region, a coastal region that even if you've got air conditioning and a place to hide from the change in temperature, you don't have a place to hide from the sea level. This is going to dominate the conversation going forward the same way ducking under your desk to avoid a nuclear war dominated the 1960s.

10:32Now we must be ready for a new danger, the atomic bomb. If you duck and cover like Bert, you will be much safer. First, you duck, and then you cover. And very tightly, you cover the back of your neck and your face. Contemporary then starts to add up until it becomes the new modern. That the contemporary conversation about how are we engaging with this phone? What does it mean to be a micro music star who never would have been on the radio in the days of top 40? What does it mean to be in sync, to be a 15 minutes of fame person? What does it mean to see the others and to be seen by them? All of these are contemporary concerns.

11:21They're not the giant leap forward that modernity was, but they all add up. And when they add up and you weave them together, what we end up with as the next cycle shows up, as we have 30-year-old, 40-year-old, 50-year-old leaders instead of 70, 80-year-old leaders, as we have people who are running our organizations who not only never met John F. Kennedy, but don't even remember him, we're going to see a new cycle show up. You're not going to be able to go buy the clothes that Kennedy wore in the White House unless you're going to a costume party that just as Lincoln's Day, which was filled with magical technologies like the steam engine and the camera, has retreated into ancient times, so will the world I grew up in.

12:14That the revolution, this revolution of connection where culture changes faster than ever, where we share ideas, we treat ideas, we trust ideas totally differently than we did just 25 years ago, It is creating a new standard of what it's like around here. And around here is no longer just within 100 miles of my house. Around here is all of us. Because for the first time, the culture that we are talking about is all of us. That there are people listening to this podcast in a little village in Pakistan. that there are people who are creating the next important piece of software in Marrakesh. Everyone connected, cycling up with computers, doing the jobs that we can write down, leaving nothing for the rest of us to do except for the jobs we can't write down, the jobs of disruption, of leadership, of solving interesting problems.

13:19And so, yes, it is going to be a bumpy ride, the same way the 1910s and 20s must have been quite a whipsawed time to be alive. That the world is changing fast. We're just not noticing it because we're the ones who are doing the change. Thanks for listening. And when I say, go make a ruckus, this is what I'm talking about. It's up to us to decide what the new normal is. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi, Seth. Alicia from Charleston here. Hi, Seth. This is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi, Seth. Warm greetings from Curacao.

14:02Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, Seth. This is Rex. Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. Thank you to everyone who has chimed in with questions. They're coming in fast and furious, and each one is better than the one before. If you've got a question about today's episode or any previous episode, please visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and press the appropriate button. There's show notes there for each of the previous 70 episodes as well. Hi, Seth. This is Dennis from Hayward, Wisconsin.

14:43because I find your illustration of the fire hall and the need for slack from your systems podcast so helpful. I have a team of highly efficient and loyal workers, so efficient and loyal that if they don't have orders to fill, they just feel the need to go home and save the company money. I've always struggled to communicate just what you so well illustrated, that we use the slack time when there is no pressing need to do custom work or deal with a crisis to make things better. I'd like to hear more from you on how I could better communicate this to my coworkers. I know firsthand the resistance that appears when a producer is tasked with being an innovator.

15:24It's not easy. Yeah, this is a great place to start. So here's the deal. There are issues of leadership and there are issues of management, and both of them occur on the factory floor and in all organizations. It's one thing to lead, to say to the team, we need to head in this direction. But if it's falling down, it might be because you are failing to manage. That many people who go to work in an organization seek to do a great job. And to do that, they need to be managed, to have boundaries, to be really specific about what success looks like. So in the case of a factory floor, here's a leadership decision.

16:06Everything has been based on inventory, lots of parts, giant bins. The CEO realizes that buying a million-dollar laser cutter and a CNC lathe that can run all night means that he or she can eliminate tons and tons of spare parts and create a system that is much more resilient. You're not going to get someone on the factory floor to make that capital decision. On the other hand, what you can say to the team is part of what we do here is bring our own stopwatches and our own clipboards to work and see if we can beat the record from a minute and a half to put together this kind of item to 45 seconds.

16:52How could we work as a team to create better communication so that this particular task goes better? By breaking down a strategic decision into a series of tactical ones, you can use your spare time, which isn't spare at all, to create a more resilient, connected organization that ends up giving you more slack. Hey, Mr. Seth. How you doing, man? Enough respect to everything you do. Love your books and definitely love akimbo. You know, in Jamaica, when we use that word, we don't say akimbo. We say kimbo, which kind of means a posture, which is the same thing. Love what you do. It's a posture. It's a position, a stance.

17:42Love it. Anyway, my question is in regards to your latest episode on akimbo. It's about enrollment and possibilities. I want to know in today's world where everything, you know, is like designed and geared towards enrollment and catching attention with things like yo, which really are, you know, once you play with it once you're disappointed. How on earth does a person with a good idea, you know, get through all the noise and really get the attention of an audience? Thank you for the kind words. And what I'm getting at with all of these ideas about how culture changes is simple. Find the others.

18:28Your idea isn't going to succeed because you get some hype. The folks at Yo figured that out. Your idea succeeds because the diehard users, the early adopters, the first ones, tell the others. They tell the others because it's good for them to tell the others, not because it's good for you. The goal is not to do a stunt. The goal is to build a ratchet, a system that gets better as people use it because it helps them achieve their goals, to raise them in the hierarchy by bringing along the others. This didn't used to be true. In 1970, you just needed enough money to buy enough ads to sell more ketchup.

19:14You didn't need ketchup that worked better in a team setting. It was just ketchup. And if it was well-advertised ketchup, you could sell more ketchup, which would make you more money to buy more ads for more ketchup. But that's not the way it works anymore. Now it's peer-to-peer, which means it's on us to build the systems, to build the content that works better when people spread it. What Bob Marley taught Chris Blackwell, since we're talking about Jamaica, is that reggae works better when you're doing it with other people. So you didn't need a lot of radio airplay to have reggae catch on. What you needed was a reggae fan who realized that she or he would be happier if their friends were reggae fans too.

20:02Tell the others. That's what we do. Tell the others. Thanks. Hi, Seth. It's John from Boston. Thanks so much for your insight about bringing consequences forward when it comes to systems thinking. I think this is spot on, but it leaves me and other aspiring systems thinkers in a bit of a pickle, one related to your possibility in enrollment episode. When it comes to selling a systemic approach in a given domain, we can surely bring the long-term impacts forward. Public policy is my passion area, so I'm so happy to use cigarette taxes as the perfect example. However, when selling myself as a systems thinker or systems thinking as a service, how can I move the long-term benefits up front?

20:43In other words, how should I illustrate the possibility and get followers or clients fully enrolled in my prior systems thinking enterprise, given our natural predilection for short-term cause and effect endeavors? Okay, so you've seen the flaw in the system of selling systems thinking, which is that if you need your clients to embrace systems thinking long-term, to hire you, to help them do systems thinking, you're not going to get the clients you deserve. So what's the alternative? The alternative is to sell them on the short-term benefit of having a systems thinker on hand. Well, they're probably in pain.

21:22They're in pain from the repercussions of their short-term thinking. so you can help relieve that pain by giving them a story, a story they can tell the board, a story they can tell investors, a story they can tell their employees. And the story is help is on the way. The story is we have taken action. The story is, okay, everyone take a deep breath because now we're going to find a way forward. That's worth everything they're paying you. and then later when you bring them the system that's going to change the game. That's a new thing. You've got two things now. First, help is on the way. Second, here's a system worth investing in.

22:10Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.