I recently watched English writer/scientist/businessman (where’s the neologism for this?) Matt Ridley’s Jul 2010 TED talk “When Ideas Have Sex”, which previously was this article published in Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology. His suggestion is that the exchange and trade of ideas, like the sex that spreads genetic variety, is the basis of cultural evolution and economic/technological progress.
In the talk, Ridley explains the need for exchange in creating ”cumulative, combinatorial things”, like a computer mouse and even the human body itself. The example I like asks us to think about how trade and technology have brought us what many consider a basic element of modern life.
“Ask yourself how long you would have to work to provide for yourself an hour of reading light this evening to read a book by.”
If you were to try to procure light from scratch (makes me think of another TED talk about how Thomas Thwaites built a toaster from scratch), you could, for example, go out and find and kill a sheep, remove the fat, and turn the fat into an oil lamp. Like building a toaster from scratch, you will eventually need a number of other tools (knife, pot, strainer, funnel, pan, bowl, jar) and raw materials (water, vegetable oil). Is there anything left that we can do by hand? Don’t answer that.
The next solution is to let someone else specialize in making an oil lamp or a candle or in getting electricity to your home, while you do something (hopefully meaningful and lucrative) to pay for that product or service. According to Ridley, however, the average wage earner in 1800 Britain could not afford a candle.
This demand for technology (yes, my fellow midnight owls, a candle is technology) requires a system of exchange and trade, division of labor, and cooperation and understanding among individuals. Ridley compares again the Acheuleun stone axe and the computer mouse. The former was developed by a single isolated, self-sufficient Homo erectus; the latter by a cooperating society of perhaps millions of people.
Among the millions who developed the computer mouse, Ridley adds,
“…you’ve got to include the man who grew the coffee, which was brewed for the man on the oil rig, who was drilling for oil, which was going to be made into plastic, etc. They are all working for me, to make a mouse for me.”
This idea that “they are all working for me” is curious. Here, the relatively luxurious lifestyle of Louis XIV of France (1638-1715, the longest reigning king in European history (72 years, 101 days), is the example used by both Ridley and science writer and The Skeptics Society founder Michael Shermer (in this recent interview with “Socrates” and his talk on “Social Singularity”). Apparently we, like Louis le Grand, have everyone working for us, and we depend on them to sustain our lifestyles.
So what about self-sufficiency? Isn’t DIY a trend? Don’t we like to be, or at least feel, self-sufficient, independent? Don’t we prefer holism to reductionism, the telescope to the microscope? Does anyone actually like pigeonholing or being pigeonholed?
Apple co-founder (do I really need to write that?) Steve Jobs famously told the 2005 graduating class of Stanford that “remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.” I wonder if the prospect of death, sobre todo, is enough to convince us that there are neither enough years in the life, nor life in the years to do it all alone.
But, slick networkers and aggressive outsourcers of the world, I don’t think you’re off the hook. Even though this cultural evolution seems to suggest to us all we need to do is “have a friend in the business”, or worse, just cooperate (think Japan), I believe that know-how should accompany, if not precede, know-who. In a brick and mortar model, specialized know-how (the practical, often hard-to-teach tacit knowledge; from the Latin tacitus, “silent”) is the brick, and cooperative know-who is the mortar.
