America: Revolutionary Nation

Great revolutions accompany the uncovering of great frontiers. The USA was founded on the Eastern frontier of a large continent, and has been moving to expand its frontiers outward over most of the 232 years since. That expansionary revolution continues, but it is taking some interesting forms:

The great new American frontiers proved to be those of business, science and technology. In the course of the 20th century, Americans invented more milestone technologies and inventions, created more wealth and leisure time, and reorganized their institutions more times than any country had ever done before – despite a massive economic depression and two world wars. It all reached a crescendo in the magical year of 1969, with the creation of the Internet, the invention of the microprocessor and, most of all, a man walking on the moon.

Along with genetic engineering, we are still busily spinning out the implications of these marvels. Yet it is becoming increasingly apparent that the cultural underpinnings of these activities have changed in some fundamental way.

We still have schools, but a growing number of our children are studying at home or attending private schools – and those in public schools are doing ever more amounts of their class work on the Internet [ed: virtual charter schools].

We still have companies and corporations, but now they are virtualized, with online work teams handing off assignments to each other 24/7 around the world. Men and women go to work, but the office is increasingly likely to be in the den. In 2005, an Intel survey of its employees found that nearly 20% of its professionals had never met their boss face-to-face. Half of them never expected to. Last summer, when the Media X institute at Stanford extended that survey to IBM, Sun, HP, Microsoft and Cisco, the percentages turned out to be even greater.

Newspapers are dying, networks are dying, and if teenage boys playing GTA 4 and World of Warcraft have any say about it, so is television...The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. __WSJ

So where is it all heading? Into a very wild and Future Shock sort of a world.

The economy will be much more volatile and much more competitive. In the continuous fervor to create new institutions, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain old ones. New political parties, new social groupings, thousands of new manias and movements and millions of new companies will pop up over the next few decades. Large corporations that don't figure out how to combine permanence with perpetual change will be swept away.

This higher level of anarchy will be exciting, but it will also sometimes be very painful. Entire industries will die almost overnight, laying off thousands, while others will just as suddenly appear, hungry for employees. Continuity and predictability will become the rarest of commodities. And if the entrepreneurial personality honors smart failures, by the same token it has little pity for weakness. That fraction of Americans – 10%, 20% – who still dream of the gold watch or the 30-year pin will suffer the most . . . and unless their needs are somehow met as well, they will remain a perpetually open wound in our society.

The "gold watch and 30-year pin" segment of Americans may be only 10%, but in Europe that fraction is closer to 50% or larger. How will Europe adapt to this brave new frontier revolution that is unfolding in America, only to spread globally in the next few decades?

Given the enormous influx of new uneducated welfare recipients from the third world, Europe will be severely challenged to find the type of economic growth at home in which its capital savings can invest. It will have to look overseas to areas that are still growing. In the mid 2000s, that would be Brazil, India, and parts of the Anglosphere including the US.