A writer friend of mine, whom
I'll call X, choked on a comparison I made in an earlier
posting. It took a Heimlich
maneuver to resuscitate the poor fellow.
I
had written about communal creativity, the kind that arises when creative
people frequently and randomly interact, stimulating each others' individual
creativity. In a book I referred
to, Jonah Lehrer says that communal creativity reaches a peak when an
assortment of supportive social, civic, economic and demographic conditions
align. What he calls "clots
of excess genius" then form.
(Better to call them "clots of excess creativity," since true
genius is too rare to come in clots.)
He gives as examples fifth century BCE Athens, fifteenth-century
Florence, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London and today's
Silicon Valley, and I used the same examples.
After
recovering sufficiently, X emailed me to ask how Silicon Valley's
"techies" and their creations could possibly be compared with the
cultural illuminati and creations of Athens, Florence or London. To put words into his mouth, it was as
if he were asking: Can one even begin to compare Steve Jobs with Sophocles or
Leonardo or Shakespeare? Can one
even begin to compare the iPad with Oedipus Rex, Mona Lisa, or Hamlet? Put this way, the juxtaposition is
staggering.
It
isn't that Silicon Valley doesn't have a clot of excess creativity. Annalee Saxenian, in
her now classic book Regional
Advantage, showed how the alignment
of the very same social, civic,
economic and demographic conditions cited by Lehrer led to an explosion of
communal and individual creativity there.
That alone at least invites comparison of Silicon Valley with earlier
eras, if not necessarily leading to its inclusion in the pantheon.
X
might accede thus far. He admits
that creators of technology have at least mental originality, but objects on
another ground, asserting that their work doesn't emotionally engage the whole
being of the creator or the beholder of the creation. This, he seems to say, excludes Silicon Valley from any
grouping with the other eras. I
wish I could imbue him with the sense of beauty and wonder that creators and
beholders of engineering masterworks can feel. It's sad that, more than a half century after C. P. Snow
wrote about the disjunction between the two cultures of
science/engineering and the humanities, mutual comprehension is still largely
lacking.
Yet
X has correctly identified a difference in kind. Many of the earlier eras' major creations were artistic or
literary masterpieces by single creators. Silicon Valley's major creations are
technological masterworks, usually agglomerations of efforts by many individuals. Since responses to these different
species of creations are so subjective, side-by-side comparisons of creators
and creations from Silicon Valley with those from the earlier eras might shed
more light on the comparer than the compared. I think the four eras should therefore be compared by using
a more objective yardstick: their overall impacts on civilization, which is
probably what Lehrer had in mind in the first place.
The
golden age of Athens set the course for western civilization for millennia. Fifteenth-century Florence set the tone
for the rest of the Renaissance and still enthralls us with the beauty it
created. Writers in late
sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London set a standard for English
literature for centuries. Yet even
as measured against these colossal accomplishments, X isn't justified in being
so dismissive of Silicon Valley.
It almost alone created the Information Age, enormously changing the
very structure of society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and
likely for centuries to come. In
terms of the magnitude of the consequences each creative era has had for the
world, Silicon Valley clearly belongs to the quartet.
I
will concede one point to X, though.
It is a big one, concerning the relative merits of the contributions of the four eras, not just
their magnitude. The creative
heritages we have received from Athens, Florence and London, seen through the
lens of time, are unalloyed boons. We are not yet sufficiently distant from the
heritage of Silicon Valley to comprehensively and dispassionately evaluate its
ultimate contribution to civilization.
On the plus side, the Information Age has made the cultural heritage of
the world easily and freely available to all of its population, not just its
elite. It has begun to redress the
imbalance between the powerful and the powerless by giving a stentorian voice
to those who had been ignored. It
illuminates the dark recesses of society that would never have been discovered
otherwise. On the negative side of
the ledger—as I have argued in the past two weeks—the Information Age has
greatly distorted the way we interrelate personally, the "alone
together" effect. And
there might be perils of the Information Age (sentient robots?) that are as yet
unknown—after all, it took almost two centuries for the global warming arising
from the still-ongoing activities of the Industrial Revolution to become
evident.
The
jury remains out on the net legacy of Silicon Valley, its balance of good and
bad. The verdict might not be
rendered for a century or two. I
wish I could be there to hear it.