May 10
16
Y2K – A Decade Later… And The Why It Is Relevant Now.
Every so often I visit the James Howard Kunstler blog to see what he has been thinking about…
I noticed some mail to James about his prognostications about Y2K way back in the last century.
Over the last ten years I have had conversation with a few people about my pre-Y2K book… A lot of people thought (and still think) that Y2K was a hype, that there were no problems and that anyone who thought there was going to be a problem was severely deluded.
I can't say what would have happened if the remedial work that was undertaken had not been done, but I do know that after the turn of the century I had several meetings with Grahame Inchley, who had been the Y2K commissioner in Australia leading up to the event.
Prior to Y2K Grahame talked to me several times telling me that I should tone down the rhetoric and that I was getting too much attention in the media….
At the time my primary message was not, “Hey, the sky is falling”. It was rather, “Look, we are seriously dependent on extraordinarily complex computer driven supply chains. If Y2K causes a disruption in those supply chains that is systemic then we are seriously screwed, and no one has any backup plans. Its time to have a backup.”
As we all know Y2K was pretty much a non-event.
Now some people say that it was a non-event because there was nothing to go wrong, and some people say that it was a non-event because the remediation work was undertaken – as is noted in some of the letters to James Howard Kunstler. I know that Graham Inchley (after the event) asked me why I had not been more vocal afterwards about the problems that had occurred that were kept out of the media. He knew more about them than me.
The point is that for most of the public nothing went wrong.
Which is great in one respect and tragic in another.
Its great that there was no significant disruption to society, no deaths and no injuries.
But its a shame too. Its a shame because people are far more reliant on very complex supply chains now than they were even ten years ago. As we talk more about the reliance we have on hydrocarbons and the need to find green energy solutions our reliance on oil increases day by day. We live in an incredibly complex ecosystem where the natural tendency for humanity is to try to exert order on that system.
The problem with exerting order is that it makes the ecosystem much more brittle and unyielding to the kind of flexibility that systems require in order to survive.
Case in point – which may be a long shot, but if you are a regular reader you will get it, I'm sure: The music industry.
Back in the 1970's when I seriously got into the music business, it was really a cottage industry. Sure there were a number of big corporate players, but it was still very much an industry in which people made a lot of it up as they went along. The “it” that they made up was the songs, the way that productions were created, the way that marketing was undertaken (if it was at all), they way that new sounds were created – everything was analogue. Not just technically speaking, but in terms of how the business processes were structured too.
That “analogue” capability meant that there was a lot of chaos, a lot of disorder, and a lot of anarchic ideas….
As time went by, ironically at the same time that digital emerged, companies merged and management structures and processes were introduced to create efficiencies. And that was actually a pretty positive thing…
But what also emerged was that as some of the great entrepreneurs of the early days of the music industry either died or retired, the managers who came in were less tolerant of the anarchy and the style and the madness. They wanted profits and they wanted order and they created manageable hierarchy everywhere they went. That structured hierarchy leads almost inevitably to brittleness.
And that is what we see in almost every field of endeavor nowadays.
It is that slavish adherence to process that takes companies down the road to perdition. I believe that this is totally counter to how nature works. Nature loves order, but it loves order that is natural and is flowing and is poetic – not order imposed in order to deliver profit at all costs and as much as is possible.
Nature loves evolution where the evolution is chaotic at times and surprising at times and is calm at other times. Nature doesn't look at a quarterly balance sheet to determine if it has been successful or not and if not fires a bunch of trees that have not been performing up to standard. Nature understands that things take place because of numerous outside considerations that are all ultimately in balance.
It is precisely because of this universal balance that nature is as it is. And it is because of the need for balance that some of the order that humans try to impose on it go so totally wrong on occasion.
The music industry is in difficulty because it actually needs to be less concerned with the artifacts and more concerned with the fact of art.
Y2K was about the brittleness of technology when it is designed to keep costs tight and margins big. All industry needs to understand that if you can actually deliver products and solutions that are really useful, the amount of margin will be enough regardless…
And life is about doing things that are really useful and worthwhile and fun….