Two stories in the news today remind us about how little we can predict. In Ormsby, Minnesota, the Strib tells us, a farmer is developing custom soy beans, selected for tofu-taste, selling to an international market. Nobody before had thought of making tofu taste better by growing better tasting soy beans. Ormsby has 153 inhabitants.
A piece in the New York Times discusses detractor ads, like a famous campaign against Ipod batteries (they lasted 18 months, cost $250 to replace). One detractor is sometimes equivalent to 100,000 endorsements, in ad-think. Apple addressed the Ipod problem, responding to one $40 commercial.
The economy and the changing social, moral, political environment put natural selection pressures on many small, isolated operations: technology users, farmers, peace groups. In the current environment, they cannot stay the way they were and survive. But oddly, for the first time in history, the groups -- and individuals -- under pressure have access to global information and global communication. It's as if a frog whose pond was drying up had access to all the frog genes in the world, to improve himself, and all the travel agencies in the world, to find another pond.
We are getting set up for an increase in the speed of change, and for a new sort of bewilderment: change can come from directions we didn't expect. (Meat and cheese marketing depend on tofu tasting a certain level of bad -- at least in America. Improve tofu, and the chessboard looks way different.) Also, the potential resilience of individuals and communities under pressure has recently gone way up. That's good news, if their goals are humane, and bad news, if their goals are destructive. The first rule of homeland security has to be: "Don't force terrorists to evolve."
Posted by shea0017 at December 27, 2004 9:59 AM