I’m not sure if I’ve ever told anyone this before, but there are a couple Shane-invented holidays that I celebrate, or used to celebrate. Christmas and Thanksgiving are well and good, but I think it’s important to put your mark on time, and divide it up in some way particular to your own world and experience.
The first holiday is December 22nd, the Day of Remembrance. I’m not going to explain that one to you. The second holiday is June 20th, the Feast of the Rising Gods. The DoR is about sober reflection, and even melancholy. The FotRG is about optimism, and hope. The day is significant: it’s the day before the longest day of the year. It’s the last day when things are still getting better, defined when I rode my motorcycle a lot and “better” meant more sunlight to ride in.
This sense of looking forward to better things has always been vital to my sanity, and from time to time I think, and shudder, about the day when I don’t look forward to something better. If I’m lucky, the definition of “better” will continue to drift – I’m not concerned anymore about my vertical leap or my ability to initiate an offense without turning the ball over; the “better” that concerns me at the moment involves not bubbling over with hate and rage when someone won’t let me merge. Maybe when I’m seventy I’ll be tracking my progress using some other coordinates.
Anyway, I had never thought about how our technological society might feed into this aspect of my own mental life, but now that the brilliant Kevin Kelly points it out, I can see it:
But while the slow demise of the transistor trend is inevitable, if the larger meta version of all the related Moore’s Laws — increasing, cheaper computer/internet power — were to suddenly cease on Earth in the next few years, it would be disastrous. These performance ratios roughly double (or half) 50% annually. That means things we care about get better by half as much every year. Imagine if you got half-again smarter every year, or remember half as much more this year as last. Embedded deep in the technium (as we no know it) is the remarkable capacity of half-again annual improvement. The optimism of our age rests on the reliable advance of Moore’s promise: that stuff will get significantly, seriously, desirably better and cheaper tomorrow. If the things we make will get better the next time, that means that the Golden Age is ahead of us, and not in the past. With the meta Moore’s Law out of action, half or more of the optimism of our time would vanish.
It’s funny how the vision of a better future drives so much of the present, despite everybody knowing that the future is for the most part an illusion, and pinning your hopes on what happens there is chasing an ever-receeding carrot. I suppose it shouldn’t be so surprising, since everybody’s got a bucket full of illusions to get him through the day. The only difference is which particular ones are in the bucket.
I’ve fallen out of the habit of observing the Day of Remembrance and the Feast of the Rising Gods. The former I think I can continue to do without – there’s been too much remembrance in recent years, too many backward glances. A Feast, on the other hand, and a view toward a clear horizon – well, that would be mighty fine indeed.