365

In 1964, in response to the New York World's Fair, Isaac Asimov made some predictions about 2014.

• Your kitchen will automatically make breakfast.
• Underground houses will be commonplace.
• No electric cords on appliances, since radioisotope batteries will take care of power needs.
• Short-range travel will include moving sidewalks and compressed air tubes
• High school students will all be experts in computer languages and binary arithmetic.

He does better in some areas, such as where he predicts "wall screen" TVs, phones that make video calls, and using those same screens to read books and view photographs.

As someone who is trying to make predictions as well - and not nearly as far ahead as Asimov-  it is humbling to see how far off some of them could be. We haven't colonized the continental shelf, we don't have moon colonies - there wasn't even a World's Fair this year.

Still, I thought it a good one to round out the year, sort of a bookend to the earlier post.

A year ago, I made a new year’s resolution, to write a blog post a day. My intention was to get this blog going, as there’s no point in having a blog that isn’t updated regularly. There are a couple of problems with this idea, though, as noted at the 30, 100, and 300 day marks: A post requires research, identifying a topic, drafting the post, editing the post, and deciding that it is good enough to post. The only real adjustment that can be made is the length of the post, which can reduce some of the time on parts of the process.

Adding to the difficulty in this case was the subject of the blog, This Current Crisis. In effect, this was a daily history essay, requiring a relevant daily topic, a draft that had some connection to the goal of the blog, and references to other texts that supported any allusions noted and predictions made. Plus some occasional explanation of the terms behind the analysis and predictions.

Or, to summarize: It was not easily done.

But I did it, with a post every day, almost always before midnight, and generally relevant to the blog, as described.

What else was learned:

• There aren’t that many big stories. Probably the only topics that are returned to - mentioned, that is, more than once - are the Russia / Ukraine conflict and the Sony hack. Most items of interest stay interesting for only a couple of days. 
• It’s not easy to go viral - or to be more general, it’s not easy to get a critical mass of people interested in a creative product. A blog, a song, a video, an app - in any case, you need something appealing to a  large enough group, a way to get it in front of them, and a value proposition when trading their time or money for your product. As of the last day of 2014, this blog has had 3250 views - less than 10 a day, The page with the most views has 48.
• Having an achievable daily goal can help to get a process or project started.
• Achievable, however, has to incorporate “what you have time to do.” Two hours a day - minimum - for this has taken up most of my free time - indeed, it has been fully ten percent of all my time over the last year. 
• Having a backlog of "articles" is only temporarily helpful: If you don't set aside enough time to do what you plan to do, you will eventually work through that backlog.
• I was able to complete the Grid project I had initially thought of five or six years back. Having a goal to do writing every day - no matter what - helped

I plan to continue with this blog. It won’t get guaranteed daily updates any more, although I’ll keep them going for at least a couple more days. It turned out that searching for Crisis in the news - along with Collapse, catastrophe, apocalypse,  or Cloverfield - can lead to interesting results that support the letter and spirit of its title, so this will move in that direction. As many posts analyzed entertainment - movies, literature, music - from a generational perspective, that will get spun off into its own separate site.

It's been worthwhile, though, and it has helped me be aware of what sort of activities I enjoy. Which is a worthwhile result on its own. Happy New Year.

Favorites

Yes, there are favorites I have from over this last year, whether for content or style or just interesting-ness.

Unionization: (January) Wherein I am completely wrong about Union Station.

Synthococcus Novae: (February) The Space Hippies episode of Star Trek was more insightful than I realized.

Camelot: (March) It wasn't about JFK until Jackie made it so.

Astronaut Corvettes: (April) I hadn't known that most Apollo astronauts had Corvettes.

The Data Wars: (April) There's a tag, too, but this was where I first started thinking there might be a real correspondence between data and what happened in the early 1940s.

Carry On: (May) Not surprisingly, those "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters have a history going back to the last Crisis.

Runaway: (June) Explaining why a Seth McFarland joke isn't funny and, literally,  probably wasn't ever funny.

The Ramones: (July) Why they also indicated the peak of the Awakening.

Antibiotics: (August) Did you know penicillin works by allowing bacteria to divide in half (as they do to reproduce) but then prevents the resulting new bacteria from sealing their shells afterwards? Oh, and it was a long time until it was commercially ready, but a relatively short time from then until it was mass-produced.

Annie:  (August) From finding out that the cartoonist was NOT an FDR fan, quite contrary to the musical.

Research: (August) Is Google the new planning department for the human race?

Trinity: (September) Some times just fly.

Deadline : (September) Something about the last minute rush for such an important thing - of so much happening that people at these high levels still sound human.

1968: (October) This came out well, even though it was a one-night special even for a Grid entry.

The Force Awakens: (November) A fun analysis where some prediction turned out as expected.

1990: (December)  Because it finishes up The Grid (I've been working on that for a long time) and also because of an insight about the Web being successful because it was text.

Start doing this and you'll find others to like. There are a few others near the start of April, for example...but enough. Bad enough having a clip show post, anyway.

300

October 27 is the 300th day of the year in non-leap years like this one. 

On the first day of this year, I made a resolution to build up this blog by making one post every day. 

I had a 100-day post, and had planned for a six-month retrospective, but it got lost. So here's the status, 300 days in.

And what have I learned?

It would be difficult to do this without the daily plan, because sometimes that's the only reason to find something relevant to the blog's goals. It always starts with a blank page, and I expect that if I missed one day, I'd soon miss two, then three...

Having a daily deadline is a great way to ensure that something is going in. You learn how much you like writing on a daily basis. Decisions have to be made about what is good enough, and when to let it go. It can be easy to let mistakes slide, to give up that last re-read since it must already be correct.  That also makes it easier to see why newspapers need editors - if you are writing without any backup, it's too easy to let mistakes slide.

It takes some time to do this daily.  It's a good day when it only takes a couple of hours to identify, compose, link, and post an entry here.  Some days have been longer, some posts (like this one, even) take a few days to set up.  Which is isn't exactly a problem, but isn't sustainable long-term unless it starts paying, one way or another.

Looking at what other sites do (history focused or not), there's usually a trade off between depth of reporting and frequency. There are click bait sites which figure out groups of related pages ("Ten facts you didn't know about Pulp Fiction" - I did, they were mostly on IMDB), which might not work with "How to tell 16th Century Popes apart."  Epictimes has many updates each day, posting links of interest with short, twitter friendly descriptions.  History Unfolding promises only a post a week but the one post is extensive, well thought out and ready for publication. (Blog author David Kaiser has recently started writing for Time.com.)  Nuclear Secrecy posts irregularly but with well written and impressively researched pieces. 

This blog will need to go in one of those directions, soon. A daily post for the sake of posting is good to encourage forward movement but can be bad for quality. The original idea was to point out items indicating the crisis and those don't happen every day. They do require some explanation, and not every tragic incident marks the Crisis. There is still some need to go over the specifics of how Strauss and Howe works. It will all have to come together.  

Finally, some interesting historical realizations that I've had over these last 200 days:

• The time between Trinity and the end of World War II was amazingly short, 
• The original Annie cartoonist was not a fan of FDR (even though the musical producers clearly were.)
• England's late start in New World colonization probably was related to being a minor enough power that it couldn't reasonably protect folks that far away. (Although England's domestic situation surely had an impact as well). 
•  Television shows also seem to be doing different Crisis possibilities. 
• The Roman Empire was once divided into three parts.
• And of course, today is the 50th anniversary of Reagan's A Time for Choosing speech, an important milestone in his career and American conservatism.  In case you missed that earlier.

Perspectives

While looking up info on Athens in 413 BC, I found myself on a number of different sites I'd seen before.  Which made it seem the right time to point to some of those sites, for anyone who is looking for additional information or alternative perspectives.

Lifecourse Associates - The consulting firm founded by Strauss & Howe. Includes links describing the theory and the current status of different generations and turnings. Reading the books is better, but it's still a perfectly good starting point.

The Fourth Turning - Site set up to promote the 1997 book. Includes Fourth Turning forums, with ongoing discussions on the theory, current events, and historical applications.

The Burning Platform (blog) - Updates a few times a month or more with reminders about how we are all doomed. The title refers to our current status, supported by a system that will collapse beneath us soon enough. Our foot will slide in due time...

Generational Dynamics - A continued and in-depth analysis and expansion of the theory, with some items that aren't necessarily as originally described by Strauss & Howe.

The TimePage - Silent Generation guy looking at history and Strauss & Howe. Blogs as well, with a frequent "Notable Historical Event."

James Goulding - Sections of his site delve deeply into American History, using the Strauss & Howe model.

The Art of Manliness - While not really about Strauss & Howe, the author of the blog is a fan and sometimes has posts about the theory.

Nameless - Site set up to promote the 2014 movie about Millennials. Includes an ongoing blog.

The Millennial Legacy  - A Millennial talking about being at this point in history et cetera.

It was The Burning Platform, incidentally, that had a comment about the doomed attack on Sicily in 413 BC - which is to say, about 80 years after the Battle of Marathon. Which suggests that it was the start of a new Crisis for the Athenians - and sure enough, despite some victories along the way, Athens had a rough time of it soon after.  Which I'll come back to soon.

Bad

I will occasionally toss out the word Bad when referring to Nomads - Reactives, that is, those who were children during an Awakening, folks like Generation X. Usually I will let the word speak for itself, capitalized to indicate I Mean Something In Particular. Which I do.

 Both Generations and the follow-up The Fourth Turning have charts that aim to describe attributes of the different generational archetypes. (In the former, it's called "Peer Personalities by Generational Type" on page 365 while the latter is "Archetypes in History" on page 98.) One of the strengths of the model is the recognition that people change over time, as does how they are perceived. Some of the change is the move from one stage in life to another: Actions that are acceptable while learning life in youth cannot often be carried along when raising new life in adulthood. Other changes reflect the attitude of the current Turning, like mid-life Heroes basking in the afterglow of the High contrasted with mid-life Nomads trying to survive the Crisis.

In any case, the charts give one-word descriptions of the archetypes at different stages. To describe the Hero "reputation as child," the word given is "good," while Artists are described as "placid" and Prophets as "spirited."*

The corresponding word used for us Nomads?  "Bad."

While it may not be exactly as intended, it also works out that "bad people" in stories - whether it's books, movies, or television - are often Nomads. The elder daughters in King Lear, Beavis & Butthead, Lt.Col Cage (who tries blackmailing a general to avoid combat) in Edge of Tomorrow - the best that can be said at the start is that they may strive for redemption. And could even succeed. 

If you see a bad person, there's some better-than-usual chance you are looking at a Nomad. Which is why I'll often use Bad as shorthand for - well, for everything here in this post, and on those charts, and really in most of what Strauss&Howe have to say about these cohorts.

The U2 song doesn't really have much to do with this. It's not about Gen Xers in particular, although it seems likely that many of the heroin addicts from whom it drew inspiration were of that cohort. Although it could be a theme song for our generation.

* In Generations, the Prophet archetype is called the "Idealist" and instead of "spirited" they were "stormy." The (Boomer) authors presumably considered this change an improvement.

Pseudoscience

“...Is it crackpot?”

John Holland, remembering questions about his early research into genetic algorithms and adaptive systems.

I’ve been a little nervous since posting links to rationality sites from a blog that is not nearly as hard-science. Or even very soft science. Indeed, it can sometimes seem like nothing more than horoscopes and apophenia. So let it be noted that I’m aware of this, and doing what I can to toughen it up a bit.

One of the biggest dangers in a model such as this is confirmation bias: You look for situations that match, and ignore ones that don’t.  Soon you start seeing the theory working for EVERYthing, because you aren’t paying attention to the times it doesn’t.

 I am trying to avoid that by

1) Being aware of the possibility 

2) Bringing up alternatives where possible and 

3) Calling back to failures in predictions.

Bias can lead you down dark paths. With the Ahab post from the other day, I was so certain that Melville was a Nomad that I started setting up the post with a comparison between him and Mark Twain.  I pivoted quickly to him as a Prophet instead, and could have gone on for a bit how of COURSE Ahab is a Prophet, just like Melville...and that after having to justify Ahab as a Prophet when one of my first calculations ended up with him as an Artist. Which at least is a reminder to be cautious about finding where things match, instead of where they don’t.

Generally, in fact, I’m less convinced of the personality aspects of this model, at least as applied to individuals. While the Assertions in my recent post on how the model works allude to common traits, I prefer not to get too bogged down in what those might be. The historical aspects don’t have quite the same tendency to get caught in parsing out differences between “ruthless” and “amoral” or “rational” versus “practical.”

Nonetheless, some folks seem to be doing well identifying current and ongoing trends based on generational personality profiles.  And to the extent that is tied closely to the rest of the model, some acknowledgement must be given. It’s still possible this is the perfectly natural tendency to find order in chaos. That the model is explained as tied to basic human aspects makes me think that it will ultimately be shown correct.

100

If I've counted correctly, this is 100 straight posts in 100 days.

It's more difficult than I expected to get this far.

Takes about 2 hours a day to put one of these posts together, mostly at night. When I realized how long it was taking, I started using time earlier in the day to get started. Figured it would get me finished earlier. Now it takes...about 2 hours a day, mostly at night. At least now the whole two hours isn't spent trying to find something to post about.

Two hours is a chunk of a day's time - almost 10%, in fact. (Which further means I've spent 10% of 2014 posting here. Woah.) Last year I had been working my way through a number of television shows I missed when they were broadcast. No time for that, now. It has been a good reminder of how little time any of us really have - and how it takes real concentration to actually make use of it.

There's a fair bit here that is inspired by, if not about, popular culture. It's more difficult to place actual events in the Crisis since we don't see where they end up. Culture has a shorter cycle, and we can see where it is ending up in the nearer term. And the model is really a sociological one, and culture - what people watch, read, hear, do - naturally reveals something about what groups of people think/feel/believe.

I'm becoming more insistent on finding comparable examples in previous Crises. It's too easy to say "Doesn't this look like the Crisis?"  Finding an earlier counterpart at least gets closer to being proof. Even if only one can be found in an hour or two.

Which is why a lot of posts end up with "may" or "probably" or "it suggests" - it's difficult to be certain about an unproven model when there are only a couple of hours set aside to compose, research, contrast, link, and post. I tell myself that I'm going to go back and investigate some of them more. But as long as I'm doing a post a day, I don't expect to have time for that. I'm still glad to have the raw material around.

Sometimes all you need to convince yourself to write regularly is some trick to make yourself write regularly. I'm sure that would work for other goals, too.

Next how-long-have-I done checkpoint will probably be the six-month point - end of June, about when summer starts. Which will be here soon enough.

Daily

Yesterday was one full month of daily posts. All were written as described in the post on January 1, and it appears to be working well enough. Two days come to mind that weren’t as well done as preferred. The rest are adequate at least, and a few manage to still be interesting all these weeks later.

(Although I have a couple of pre-written posts in case I really needed a day off, I wanted to avoid doing that until at least a month had passed - if you can’t get through 31 days, after all, what hope is there for 365. )

Looking back over this long eventful month, it has involved

• A look at Benghazi - although more about how reactions to it are indicative of the shrillness of national discourse
• A couple of days talking about Captain America - as a movie, as a character in a movie, as a story, and all of them together.
• A few more days on other movies  - including Point Break - from a generational standpoint
• One day of trying to explain how this theory works, and another that looks just at the Crisis itself to see what it proposes, followed by an exercise showing how useful it was to know what to actually look for.
• Musings on what it means to be a Reactive, and an Xer in particular.

Lessons to date include

• It actually is difficult to write like this every day - sometimes inspiration takes a while to strike, others it simply isn’t there.
• It is also not simple to have a relevant Crisis-related post every day related to current events, even if current events are defined as “Since World War II, and even that’s okay if there’s a chance for an enlightening contrast.” Some days, the Crisis doesn't show in the news.
• Without a limit on how much time to spend on finding an appropriate topic, this could take all night. (2 hours is a fine one, going forward, although I’d prefer to start writing when I sit down and be done 30 minutes later, leaving a few minutes for finding Wikipedia links.)
• Having a definite list of items to relate to The Crisis is very helpful in deciding whether a given event has any relation. It’s otherwise easy to say “blah blah blah Millennials therefore Crisis blah.” (Which is not only weak but unlikely to be true.)

As long as I can find some time to write on the subject, though, having a post a day is doable. And I'm enjoying it.

Redirect

I have been adding entries to this blog sporadically for a while. Often, they have been what I can pull together in 20 minutes or less - the period of time between entering the subway and leaving it on my daily commute - as that was often all of the writing time I had in the day. And it was an interesting challenge, to see if one could populate a blog in such a way. As seen, the answer is “Sorta.” It was a good way to use that time, when I managed it.  It’s not a lot of time, though,  to pull a thought together, hash out the implications, write it down and fix misspellings and be left with something worth the posting.

Another issue is that there is too much pressure to reconsider, rewrite, redo. “Do I really want to post this? Is it Important Enough for what I Should Be Saying? Have I Properly Attributed Everything I Say?” That, too, keeps one from posting as often as one could. Which is my real reason for heading in a new direction, here: I’m going to post once a day. If I don’t have much to say, I won’t say much. If it turns out to be a stupid prediction/observation/intuition, it’s stupid. If I can do it every day, though, at least one or two items should be good enough for, well, a part-timer’s blog.

With that in mind, I’m also going to expand my vision a bit, to other topics related to Strauss & Howe that I find of interest. This might include

• News, predictions, and intuitions related to The Crisis as it unfolds, as before
• Ways of describing how this theory of history works (without churning up opaque jargon) and ways of making it useful
• Applying the theory to the arts - primarily literature and movies, although I made an accurate architectural prediction once - to see what insights it can give
• And anything related to Strauss & Howe’s books and predictions

Because you don’t jump into this sort of thing without a good running start, I’ve been practicing this daily writing thing for a little while now. Some of those previously written items are likely to end up here at some point, in which case I will copy and paste and leave them without any guilt.  Today, though, everything recent is too apocalyptic and negative to be appropriate at the start of the year. I’m making a new start, I want it to flow organically - and I don’t want to drag us down into the muck already....so here’s what I have.

There is a lot to be said about the recently released “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” - enough that I expect I will come back to it a few times. One is that it doesn't seem to quite fit in our time, right now, this Crisis.  This Slate story mentions that it was in development for about 20 years, and that the initiating event of the film - the closing of Life magazine - happened “over a decade ago.” (That depends how you count it: Wikipedia says it lived on until 2007 as a supplement, although its last proper issue was May 2000.) In any case, there was certainly the feeling that it was a pre-Crisis movie: The worst-case scenario is that your company gets taken over and you are unemployed as a result? Not a terrorist attack or a complete meltdown of the financial system or a hurricane smashing into the city? 

It seriously reminded me of a Saturday Night Live parody of Rankin Bass animations from a  few months after 9/11. The old Burl Ives-voiced snowman tries to convince the audience about the danger from the villains, including an abominable snow monster, before giving up in the face of recent real-life dangers of terrorism. “Oh, we’re so scared of some crappy abominable snow monster” is about what I wanted to say to Ben Stiller at various points.