The N-1 and the Failure of the Chief Designer

Was the failure of the N-1 the Soviet Union's equivalent of the Challenger Disaster?

There's a lot to draw together here, so pay attention...

In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded soon after liftoff. It was later determined to be due to hot gases leaking from the solid-fuel boosters due to the failure of an O-ring. This failure was due to an unexpected sensitivity to cold that prevented a proper seal. Then-current administrative culture at NASA also made it difficult to recommend aborting the mission, even though there was evidence of the danger.

...Which made it similar to another disaster 64 years earlier, when the crew of the mighty Titanic ignored warnings and continued at high speed into an area where icebergs had already been seen. Walter Lord, writer of the seminal Titanic history A Night to Remember, specifically pointed out the similarities in the two disasters. Both were considered wake-up calls about the limits of technology and the risks of hubris.

Titanic and Challenger happened near the start of their respective Third Turnings, and might even be considered THE starting point of each. If it is common for this lesson of hubris to be learned at this time, we should expect to see it happening in other Third Turnings for other cultures - and the N-1 might be an example of that.

There are some definite problems with this interpretation.  The N-1 failed in 1969, which would have to be more near the end of the USSRs Third Turning. In addition, the news was not widespread until the fall of the Soviet Union over twenty years later - which would prevent it from having a cultural impact.

Except that such a large effort had to have had a large number of workers who all would have known or guessed what happened. And even if the fate of the N-1 was unknown, that the Soviet Union had fallen behind in the space race, despite having a massive lead at the start, must have had some impact on the people of the USSR.

Brunelleschi and the Duomo

"Brunelleschi". On the street next to the church he helped complete, literally looking up at the dome.
 Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

There's a NOVA episode about the Florence Cathedral, Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. It's also known as the Duomo, because of its massive dome,  designed by Filippo Brunelleschi in the early 1400s. The importance of the architect to the building is repeated (as he is named) successively, which suggest that it's a Third Turning event - that is, during period when people stand out compared to organizations.

Is it correct? Unfortunately, the dates of designing and building the dome cover such a wide period that it would depend entirely on which of them were chosen. Plus, the timing of the 15th Century Saeculum in Italy isn't easily found, so it could be gamed that way.  Although if 1492 is accepted as its end throughout Europe, it would make sense that the Fourth was roughly 1470-1492 and the Third 1448-1470.

Significant dates include:

• 1294: Cathedral design, including a requirement for a massive dome,  is approved by the Florence city fathers
• 1296: First stone is laid down.
• 1377: Brunelleschi is born.
• 1380: Nave is complete.
• 1401: Competition for new doors for the Baptistry. Ghiberti is victorious over the other competitors, including Brunelleschi.
• 1418: Cathedral is complete...except for the dome. Competition is held to find an architect to build it.Ghiberti and Brunelleschi are the main competitors: Brunelleschi wins.
• 1420: Work begins on the dome.
• 1436: The dome is completed.
• 1446: Brunelleschi dies.

By the earlier date range, the dome's building must be solidly in the Second Turning. If we wanted to infer the Saeculum based on the other events here, we could say that 1294 is clearly a First, with a major infrastructure build being approved and initiated. It seems likely that 1401 is also a First, being just more than a century later (one full Saeculum, that is), and with another government-sponsored infrastructure event. If that's the beginning of the First, furthermore, it lines up well with the earlier estimate of the Saeculum dates. (And implies that 1380-1400 was a Crisis period. If so, its start would line up with the Revolt of the Ciompi, short-lived though it was.)

It doesn't appear, that is, that he's known because it's a Third Turning.

1990

1990 - Third (Unraveling) - Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web

That the internet is used interchangeably with the World Wide Web is perhaps the most telling fact about Tim Berners-Lee's contribution.  It wasn't always that way.

The Internet is a collection of computer networks, each able to communicate with each other by using IP, the Internet Protocol. When you connect to the internet, you are really connecting your computer to a local network, then using the local network to connect to at least one other network, through which you will access another computer that has something you want to see. It might be a video, it could be a game server  - but chances are, it's a web page.

By the early 90s, these connected networks of computers enabled activities such as sending email, reading newsgroups and accessing files from File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites. Taking into account the comparatively slow connections, it was a useful and interesting place. For the most part, though, it required a technical mind to bring it all together.

Then, Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN,  formulated a more convenient method of sharing information. Specifically, what he was working with was “hypertext,” text that included links to other texts. Expanding on this, consider if Computer A could make a hypertext file available to other computers on a network.  The file might include a link to another file - select the link, and the other file would open. That other file could be on Computer B, and it wouldn't matter whether the file was  across the room, or across the globe. As long as a connection could be set up to Computer B, a reader of the text would not have to care what distance separated the two files.

Unlike some previous hypertext implementations that had required documents using proprietary formats, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) documents are all text documents. Any text editor could be used to create one, and so there was no barrier to entry for anyone who wanted to set up a page, another page, a link between them, or links to other computers. To view the files and easily navigate the links, a "web browser" was needed, such as the one Berners-Lee coded, or the more advanced versions from Marc Andreesen's team at the University of Illinois.

Perhaps the most useful attribute of web browsers was that they needed to show the text, so any page created could be easily read. Web browsers such as Mosaic (released in 1993) made accessing text files easy. Type in a URL and the text appeared in your browser; click on a link and a new page of text appeared. One could bring up one page, click on a link, and nearly instantaneously be shown a page from a different server, a different country, a different continent. Mosaic contained a spinning globe that made manifest the idea that information from around the world could be made available almost as easily as clicking on a descriptive phrase.

When looking at the impact the Internet has on lives in the 21st century, it is too common to identify connected computers as the primary innovation. Nonetheless, while email addresses were relatively common in 1990,  the Internet was still used primarily by the technically savvy.  It was the appearance of the Web starting in 1990 - an easily available, freely usable, cheaply used user interface for text files - that made those networked computers really valuable. In short order, the Dot Com era began, and the expectation that information could be made available to anyone, everywhere, was born.

1927

1927 - Third (Unraveling) - Lindbergh's Non-Stop Flight from New York to Paris

Prizes in support of technologically feasible but financially uncertain goals had previously been able to push advances.  The Orteig Prize intended to do so for intercontinental flight. This $25,000 prize was first made available in 1919 - less than 16 years after Wilbur and Orville's Wright's first flight - and would be paid for the first successful nonstop flight between New York and Paris.

(While crossings of the Atlantic had been completed by a number of aircraft, they had covered shorter distances or required intermediate stops.)

Originally, the prize had a five year time limit, but the limit was extended for another five years in 1925. Between then and May 1927, six were killed in attempts to win the prize - two when their overloaded plane caught fire, two more on a crash on takeoff during a test flight, while another plane attempting a Paris to New York flight disappeared somewhere past the coast of Ireland. 

This last flight had departed Paris less than two weeks before Charles Lindbergh's attempt began.  He had learned to fly starting in 1922, barnstorming over the next few years to gain flight time. In 1925, he completed a year of flight school with the Army Air Corps, becoming a reserve officer.  Over the next two years, he would be a U.S. Air Mail pilot until he started to consider the possibility of winning the Orteig Prize. 

While not as well financed as other prize contenders, Lindbergh had particular ideas about how he might be able to win. One of his initial design decisions was that the flight would be solo: One person (the pilot, himself) meant less weight, so more range for the same amount of fuel. The plane would be single-engined: Where others saw multiple engines as increasing survivability through redundancy, he saw increased chances of failure through complexity. (Three engines would mean "three times the chance of engine failure.") Additional fuel tanks were included to increase range. To reduce weight further, anything that could be was removed from the aircraft - extra maps, radio, parachutes - and the aircraft's seat was a wicker chair. 

He departed New York from field at 7:52 AM on May 20, 1927. The flight would take 33.5 hours, arriving 10:22 PM Paris time. This include time flying past the Paris airfield, which was so jammed with automobile lights from spectators that he had originally thought it was an industrial zone. When he landed, he was spontaneously pulled from his aircraft by the mob and carried aloft for half an hour.  Lindbergh became one of the most famous people in the world, which had become much smaller that day, as aviation would soon allow rapid transportation almost anywhere.

1852

1852 - Third (Unraveling) - Uncle Tom's Cabin is published by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Slavery had been an issue of concern to the United States of America since before it began. Discussions by delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had to navigate concerns between those who considered the use of slave labor a legitimate part of the economy, and those who thought a country based on liberty should not have human beings bought and sold. For most of the next 60 years, the process of determining the role of slavery in the country consisted of compromises between free states and those supporting slavery. 

And then, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a fictional story about the life of a slave. Initially a weekly serial, the complete story was published in book form in 1852.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed the discussion of slavery from an abstract view of economics and morality to one involving characters that people could care about. 

The following year Twelve Years a Slave would be published, the memoirs of a black man from the North who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. This described as fact not only the wretched lives of slaves - and acted as additional factual confirmation of Stowe's work - but the possibility that free men could also be trapped only because of the color of their skin. Over the rest of the decade the slavery question expanded until the entire country went to war over it.  According to Stowe's son, Abraham Lincoln said, upon meeting Stowe in 1862,  "So this is the little lady who started this great war."

1752

1752 -  Third (Unraveling) - Benjamin Franklin and the Kite Experiment

Make a small Cross of two light Strips of Cedar, the Arms so long as to reach to the four Corners of a large thin Silk Handkerchief when extended; tie the Corners of the Handkerchief to the Extremities of the Cross, so you have the Body of a Kite; which being properly accommodated with a Tail, Loop and String, will rise in the Air, like those made of Paper; but this being of Silk is fitter to bear the Wet and Wind of a Thunder Gust without tearing. To the Top of the upright Stick of the Cross is to be fixed a very sharp pointed Wire, rising a Foot or more above the Wood. To the End of the Twine, next the Hand, is to be tied a silk Ribbon, and where the Twine and the silk join, a Key may be fastened.

This is Benjamin Franklin's description of how to construct a kite that could be used to extract electricity from clouds. It comes from a letter written to Peter Collinson, with whom he corresponded on matters of electricity and other subjects. It was theorized that lightning was an electrical discharge.  Franklin and others had studied electricity using Leyden jars - early storage devices that were used like batteries, although technically  they are capacitors. Electricity was normally generated using electrostatic generators, which rubbed cloths against solid objects. This created static electricity in much the same way that walking on a carpet can.  Franklin was able to confirm that clouds carry an electrical charge that could be stored  and handled exactly as if it was the electricity extracted through their usual methods. 

Joseph Priestley, another friend of Franklin, set the actual date of the experiment as June 30, 1752. Franklin is said to have flown a kite from the steeple of Christ Church in Philadelphia, with the assistance of his 21-year-old son. The description indicates that a few small clouds could be used to pull a significant amount of electricity from the sky.

This Kite is to be raised when a Thunder Gust appears to be coming on, and the Person who holds the String must stand within a Door, or Window, or under some Cover, so that the Silk Ribbon may not be wet; and Care must be taken that the Twine does not touch the Frame of the Door or Window. As soon as any of the Thunder Clouds come over the Kite, the pointed Wire will draw the Electric Fire from them, and the Kite, with all the Twine, will be electrified, and the loose Filaments of the Twine will stand out every Way, and be attracted by an approaching Finger. And when the Rain has wet the Kite and Twine, so that it can conduct the Electric Fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the Key on the Approach of your Knuckle. At this Key the Phial may be charg’d; and from Electric Fire thus obtain’d, Spirits may be kindled, and all the other Electric Experiments be perform’d, which are usually done by the Help of a rubbed Glass Globe or Tube; and thereby the Sameness of the Electric Matter with that of Lightning compleatly demonstrated.

It has since been determined that Franklin was not the first to do an experiment such as this.  There are, indeed, those who doubt he ever did it at all, that he may have only proposed what was necessary for this experimental proof.  Still, this was one of the ways he made his name as a meticulous and noteworthy scientist and philosopher. Drawing lighting out of the clouds and into bottles made him famous enough, two decades later, to be a great help to the cause of the American Revolution.

1666

1666 - Unraveling - Newton's Miraculous Year

A few decades after Galileo risked his life and soul before the Inquisition, it was becoming clear that the Ptolemaic model was not an optimal way of looking at the universe. Using observations from Tycho Brahe's observatories, Kepler had determine not only the advantages of Copernicus' view,  but that the planets rotated around the sun along ellipses, not circles.

Questions remained, however, that twenty-three-year-old Isaac Newton wanted to answer - like what was making the planets move, and what kept them moving, and where they would be next.

Knowing how fast they were moving, and confirming the type of curves they were following, and knowing how long those curves were all necessary to answer this. The input to these questions had to be the the discrete points in space that could be observed on each available clear night. Any proposed would need to work with the years of independent observations that already existed. 

Except that general tools for doing this did not exist. There were formulae for answering some questions in specific instances - such as parts of circles - but Newton needed to be able to handle less regular and less studied curves. He would need someone to invent these tools in order to answer his questions. 

So he did. 

Although his results were published later, it was in 1666 that Newton invented calculus, as an intermediate step on the way to confirming not only that the planets moved, but that they moved in ellipses not circles, and determining the relationship between their movement, speed, and distance from the sun. He further determined that gravity followed an inverse-square law, stronger when objects were larger, weaker as they moved away. The calculus alone would have been an astonishing achievement, only enhanced by the practical use to which it had been put.  During that year Newton also also made important discoveries in optics and fluid mechanics, making his mark as one of the most important scientists of all time.

1543

1543 - Unraveling -  Nicolaus Copernicus publishes De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) 

Go outside, look overhead, and celestial objects will roll past. The sun will start its journey in the east and travel across the sky over the course of the day, disappearing to the west as the day ends.  The moon - whatever phase it is in - will do the same. At night the stars, if watched long enough, will seem to move as a unit, all traveling this same way.  Everything in the sky must be traveling in circles around the solid, unmoving earth. This had been so clear that it had been realized by the ancient thinkers like Ptolemy and incorporated in historical records, like the book of Joshua, where the sun stops overhead to allow the Israelites to overcome the Amorites. 

However, even those old records were from people who noted some discrepancies in what was perceived. The moon had phases, and did not move the same way as the sun. Sometimes one would be blocked out in an eclipse, but this did not occur every month or otherwise regularly. Even more significantly, a few of the stars moved on their own paths, not as part of the large group. These "wandering stars" - called planets from the Greek for "wanderer" -  would often even move backwards compared to the other stars and the sun - west to east, that is,  rather than east to west. Two of these planets were only visible early in the morning, as the sun rose, or in the early evening as the sun set, while the others moved through the night with the fixed stars. 

The solidness of the unmoving earth, though, meant those oddities must still be explainable by movement around it.  Astronomers proposed epicycles, circular movements of these traveling stars around points in space, which kept the perfection of circles and the solid earth in the explanation of what could be plainly seen. 

Nicolaus Copernicus was not the first to suggest that the problem was in the concept of an unmoving earth surrounded by celestial objects.  If the earth moved around the sun, the model became simpler overall, the epicycles unnecessary. Nonetheless, this proposed change was not immediately accepted. One problem was that the movement of the earth would cause the positions of the stars to change over the course of the year. This difference had never been noted, so how could it move? There were religious reasons to prefer the earth-centered view, often because the Bible, presumed infallible, described events that depended upon it. There would be additional refinements over the next century - requiring outright rejections of previously accepted concepts - before Copernicus' view would be recognized as the way our local universe really worked. 

  

Unravelings

Most of The Grid is filled now. We've looked at the recurring Crisis periods that are often the most obvious part of history classes, the Awakenings halfway between them, and the Highs as one becomes the next. Or, as they are referred to now, the Fourth, Second, and First Turnings, respectively.

This leaves the Third Turning, also known as the Unraveling, a period that is often conspicuously ignored when history is discussed.  This is in large part because it's the low point of organizational power. Governments aren't able to do as much. Individuals, on the other hand, can.

Wikipedia has a page for Annus Miribilus - Year of Miracles/Wonders, years where multiple significant events happened.  Most of them are directly associated with individuals, and most of those occur in Third Turnings.

Looking at the exceptional activities of individuals - activities that are often remembered for just this reason - can give a better feel for these Turnings than trying to comprehend what governments are up to.

Football

UCLA beat USC in football tonight, 38-20.  The cross-town rivals first played on September 28, 1929 - about a week after the first warnings in the stock market, in particular a sudden drop on September 18, and about a month ahead of Black Thursday. Which puts it right at the end of the exciting days of the Third Turning. A fair number of significant rivalries - though by no means all football rivalries - can be traced to that time:

• Notre Dame - USC (1926)
• The Old Oaken Bucket (1925)
• Maryland-Virginia (1919)
• TCU-Texas Tech (1926) 
•  Or if you prefer: Texas A&M-Texas Tech (1927) or Texas-Texas Tech (1928)

(Knute Rockne was the Notre Dame football coach from 1918 to 1930, which happens to be mostly the Third Turning and also when it started up most of its rivalries.)

Some from other periods:

• Michigan-Notre Dame (1887)
• Harvard-Yale (1875)
• Army-Navy (1890)
• Berkeley-Stanford (1892)

That Third Turning was a distinctive time for college nostalgia, from raccoon coats to the various references that can be seen in the Marx Brothers' film Horse Feathers. No small part of that nostalgia appears to be simply the excitement of the time - the stock market was up, education was a way to get involved in the money-making that was happening, life could only get better. It's one of the nostalgic periods that makes the generational model because it's so clear that the time then was very much like the dot-com era of the most recent Third Turning - that these very similar periods keep coming back.

B-52s

The National Broadcasting Company - soon to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Lorne Michaels Productions - has been showing "Vintage SNL" in the 10:00 slot on the last few Saturday nights. These have been significant, if not classic, episodes from past seasons. The first was Richard Pryor hosting in the first season. The second was Steve Martin hosting with The Blues Brothers performing. Last night was Alec Baldwin's first time hosting, on April 20, 1990 - Earth Day - with the B-52s performing.

The B-52s had recently been at the top of the charts with "Love Shack," a good-time party anthem. This episode had them performing less-known singles, including the title track, from the same album.  It was a surprising contrast with their previous appearance on SNL, only 10 years before, which had been as unnerving as any other new group that showed up in those first years of Saturday Night. 

• Discordant keyboards - in one case played literally on a toy piano. 
• Female vocalists with caterwauling vocals and bouffant hairdos that had been out of fashion for years.
• Half the band falling to the ground, as if struck dead, at the bridge of Rock Lobster
• Speaking of which: A song about a beach party and the dangerous ocean life nearby. Or something.
• And one about "All sixteen dances" - like the Hippogriff, the Escalator, and the Aqua-Velva.
• Surf music undertones, but definitely not the Beach Boys.
• Nor punk nor rock nor blues nor anything really that was heard before. 
• Plus cowbell. Seriously. Played front-and-center by Fred Schneider.

And all this in two songs comprising less than 8 minutes of performance time.

On this Earth Day show, however, they were more clearly a regular pop group. They were certainly more polished, less dangerous.  While some of the change in perception is due to looking back 24 years, a glance at Rock Lobster or Dance This Mess Around in 1980 shows how seriously unexpected they had made themselves. Compared to that, the 1990 version seems tamer, more a part of the world - normal, even.

Whereas, looking at that first performance, it really is, even now, seriously weird. 

Monitor

For what it's worth, this was triggered by a reference to an Oracle package called dbms_monitor.

The GE Monitor Top refrigerator was one of the first mass market refrigerators, sold from 1925 to 1936. In The Apartment, Jack Lemmon's kitchen has one of these - it would have been twenty or thirty years old. Its presence probably indicated a frugal but practical lifestyle. They are still renowned for their ability to keep running, nearly 90 years after they were first released.

It received its distinctive name from the round heat exchanger on its top, which resembled the turret on the USS Monitor. That was the first Union ironclad over 60 years before, when it kept the Merrimack CSS Virginia from a resounding Confederate victory at the 1862 Battle of Hampton Roads. (Their specific duel was a draw, neither warship able to harm the other.)  Successful as it was, the same basic shape - a low flat body with a round turret containing heavy guns - were used for a type of warship, called Monitors after that first one.

The effects of Crisis times run deep indeed, for so many people to associate a common household appliance with a warship based on its shape, distinctive though it is.

Research

This Fortune article about Google's research division (or one of them, anyway) isn't about how Google is replacing DARPA, or trying to act like it, or anything similar. It's more about the new leader at ATAP (Advanced Technology and Products), Regina Dugan,  who was previously the director of DARPA.

The idea that Google is doing research on that level brings to mind other research facilities, like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs. The latter was described as "the advanced planning department of the human race," with world-changing inventions like the transistor, Unix, and charge-coupled devices.  Even though AT&T was mostly unable to market the resulting products, and eventually spun it off as Lucent and associated successor companies.

Meanwhile, Google - which celebrated 10 years as a public company today - is using ATAP for their research at a modest level, rethinking cell phones and associated entertainment. There's another area for the projects that aren't quite in their core competencies, like wind energy using kites and self-driving cars. (The Google X Prize appears to be another, separate, entity.) It appears that a new "advanced planning department" has taken shape.

Bell Labs was founded in 1928, although predecessors were around as early as 1893 and formation of the division started around 1925. One coincidence - whether it's interesting is left as an exercise - is that is the same year that Fleming discovered what the penicillium mold could do. A starting date for Google's research facilities is difficult to pin down, but would appear to be soon after the IPO - as with Bell Labs, near the end of the Unraveling and the start of the Crisis.

Manic

The guy who invented the term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" would like to give it a rest.

Here are some thoughts on it, just in case his dream comes true.

First - because hey, this is all about history except for the part about math - let's note that his article was written in 2007. That places it on one edge or another of the Crisis, since everyone is sure this Turning started by 2008  -- even if some were convinced by 2005.  And since the author is concerned about reductive contextualizing, it could be said that the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is all about embracing a fantasy that can't possible actually happen - just like we are all doing before the Crisis when we expected to change the world or make a million when that dot-com went public. And that it therefore is an excellent marker of the start of the Crisis or end of the Unraveling, the point where everyone realized what was slipping away.

Taking a look at the list of sixteen Manic Pixie Dream Girls, and breaking their movies down by years and Turnings, we find that

• Three are between 2005 and 2008 
• Six are solidly in the Third Turning (1984 - 2004)
• Four are in the Second Turning (1964-1984)
• Two are in the First Turning (The Apartment in 1960, Breakfast at Tiffany's  in 1961)
• One (Bringing Up Baby, 1938) is in the previous Fourth Turning.

Which actually supports the above off-the-cuff assertion. Although it could also be recency bias, as the counts decrease logarithmically going back in time - maybe the authors naturally happened to remember recent movies.

Although one could instead note that the Manic Pixie Dream Girl isn't a fantasy. She's the embodiment of what almost every guy has gone through. She's too attractive, way out of your league. Every minute with her is like stepping into an animated forest with chirping birds and friendly rabbits. Her very existence cheers you up, makes you happy, reminds you why it's worthwhile to be alive. She's quirky and different and not at all what you expect, and that's one reason why you think she's so great.

In other words, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is what it means to be in love. Any guy falling in love with any girl is going to recognize the feeling of finding that too-pretty, too-fun, too-exciting girl that he can't believe he has a chance with. And maybe it doesn't always work out, but it's clear that there's a common enough feeling there to make it resonate.

Even if Elizabethtown wasn't that great.

Machine

A quick one today, a minor prediction success:

... All the accumulations of the last three minutes burst in on her. The room was filled with the noise of bells and speaking tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Had she any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? 

The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster

In this story, the titular Machine connects the members of civilized humanity, most of whom never leave their small, hexagonal rooms - and never want to. The Machine delivers food, handles hygienic matters (baths are particularly mentioned) and allows people to connect to all their friends, nearby or around the world. Not that any of these folks pay attention to something like distance, when the Machine keeps them together. In fact....

"You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say “Space is annihliated, but we annihilated not space, but the sense thereof.....‘Near’ is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet...‘Far’ is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet."

The focus is on a woman who gives lectures on music - evidently not on playing music, nor listening to it, but simply on ideas about music. This focus on ideas makes her much like the rest of the civilized world, which is connected through the Machine and talks one to another about what they know and what ideas they have. Her son  - who considers "space" as described above - decides to go beyond the boundaries that the Machine guards Supposedly to go onto the surface of the earth is deadly, but he pursues that goal because of his doubts about the Machine-led society. 

All of that is a lot to mention for a simple prediction, while not nearly enough to really describe the story. In any case, there is a focus on individualism that makes it seem very much a part of a Third Turning. The mother on her own, the son attempting to escape, the interactions that strive neither for conformity nor opposition nor destruction...And it turns out that it was published in 1909, after the Progressive Era, before the Great Depression. Which works.

Markets

On November 9, 1989, the people of Berlin joyously tore down the wall that for thirty years had divided their city. As the wall fell, so did communism and the planned economy. On April 30, 1995, the U.S. government ceased controlling the Internet. As entrepreneurs devised procedures for online buying and selling, electronic commerce burgeoned. These two dates denote the beginning of what has become, for good or ill, the age of the market.

John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar, 2002 (p. 4)

Both dates are well into the Third Turning, the time of individual freedom.  Not really a surprise.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets is a very good introduction on what markets are and what they require to operate properly. The "reinventing" part is an acknowledgement that markets are created in all sorts of ways for all sorts of reasons, even if all their forms have fundamental similarities to the bazaars where people buy food, trinkets, clothes.

For a deeper look, seek out Markets and Hierarchies by Oliver Williamson, which compares markets with another way for processing information: Instead of everyone getting information on actual value from prices, one person makes a decision based on the information available, then requires others to follow that decision - to allow that one person to be in charge. In the market, that is, every individual makes their decision on their own; the hierarchy, decisions are made by a leader. (Both options have their advantages in particular areas.)

Which, if it wasn't clear, was why it makes sense that "the age of the market" started in the Third Turning, the time of greatest individual freedom.

Andreesen

Marc Andreesen recorded an interview with the Hoover Institution a couple of weeks ago. A couple of items stuck out:

A) “By the end of the decade, everyone on the planet will have a smartphone.” The end of the decade happens to be the year 2020, which is when the peak of the Crisis is predicted to start. Not that there’s any reason to think that the Crisis will be about ubiquitous Internet access, but however it might come to pass, the ability of ANY person to easily answer ANY known question is likely to affect how it all plays out.

B) Marc discusses Bitcoin, and its status as a currently available cryptocurrency, a concept that has been around - and continuously improving under strong incentives - for about 20 years. (An interview with the Washington Post covers similar points.) 

The Great Simolean Caper was a 1995 Neal Stephenson story about a future where different cryptocurrencies are competing for acceptance. When the government attempts to subvert them, a group of “crypto-anarchists” help the protagonist fight back. All of which fits with a Third Turning perspective of strong individuals and weak institutions: crypto-currencies are a way to enforce freedoms and ensure that they will  be continued.  

As the Fourth continues, though, individual freedoms become less important in the face of more significant dangers.  As government and other institutions grow in strength, technologies like Bitcoin that are potentially useful  - and/or dangerous - could be taken over.  And likely will be.

Maytime

It's been 10 years since the end of the Maytime Band Review.

It used to be the biggest, baddest band review of them all - the year-ending one that mattered, that band directors spoke of as the culmination of an entire school year. The first Saturday of May (exception to be noted), bands up and down California could be found there, in uniforms as perfectly fitted as they could possibly be, shoes shined, ranks marked off precisely by staff and alumni who had done so many times before.  Teenage musicians who had awakened at 4AM to get on a bus at 5AM to arrive in National City at 7AM to be ready to warm up at 8AM, get in their spot in the line up so they could step off in front of the judges at 9AM. Followed by another band 10 minutes later. And another band 10 minutes after that - all morning long.

There were a number of reasons it stopped. The organizers - some of whom had been running the review since it started in 1947 - were unable to find sufficient workers to keep it going. And the city planned to beautify the area with a plan that included islands that made the main thoroughfare unusable for a review. There's certainly a possibility, though, that marching bands aren't quite what they were 120 years ago, when leading a marching band was what John Philips Sousa was famous for. There are other ways to make music, now, most of which don't require even a small fraction of seventy-six trombones.

Ten years ago, too, was still the waning of the Unraveling. The oldest Millennials were just graduating high school and college, and they still weren't quite as central to culture as they are today. That this review - and many others - fit snugly into the period between that last Crisis and this one could mean it wasn't meant for more turbulent times. Or that it was another creation of the High that made sense at that time, continued on through the Awakening, but required more societal support than the Unraveling could conjure. Which is confirmed, slightly, by the reason for that "exception" mentioned: If the first Saturday of May was the first of May, the band review would be on the following Saturday. Clearly, the traditionalists who had been running the review since the Hollywood Ten were in front of the HUAC were a little concerned about having something that looked like a parade that day.

Betas

Betas was not renewed.

To see all of it, of course, would require an Amazon Prime account, perhaps an interest in software development, wouldn't make much sense without at least enough technological savvy to own a smartphone. And being a streaming-only series, it took expected advantage of the lack of FCC regulation.  As much as you might want, at least, on a show about a collection of geeks in the greater Silicon Valley area, and with only one main female character.

If you have all of the above, though, it's worth the time. A company, an app, a mentor; a CEO, a wizard, a tester, a freak; a pitch, a pump, a push; an interest, an investment, an expansion, an exit strategy. Plus it really does work as Entourage for software engineers, and anyone who ever thought they were close to grabbing that big score.

Like the couple in a Rolling Stone article about the dot-com era, who were living in a place they could just barely afford, but only because they had no furniture. They were waiting for that great startup that would yield riches in the form of massive equity. Even though they had already missed it, in the form of a refused job offer from what would one day be called eBay.

Well, Ishmael's stock options didn't turn out to be worth much in the end, either.

Unshocked

Yesterday's post was about when and why "shocking" happens -- that outside of the Second and Third Turnings, it hardly happens at all. Examples were given. 

It's worth considering, though,  that the second and third turnings comprise 50% of all time. Is it that big a deal if most of the shocking events are in that half? From a straight statistical perspective, it actually is. This isn't "40% of sick days are on Mondays and Fridays" but "75% of shocking moments are in 50% of the time." The former is trivial to show as statistically meaningless, the latter very significant. 

Assuming you have rigorously defined "shocking" and looked at a large enough universe to justify that 75%, that is.

However, there is another option that fits the evidence: Reactives might just be past being shocked. Or not paying attention to what is shocking.

Perhaps. Almost all of the items from yesterday's post were from the last 50 years. Is there anything from previous Turnings to support this Second/Third assertion?

Well, from that linked to article are the following items:

 Un Chien Andalou - 1929 

 Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 - 1912
 Lady Chatterly's Lover - 1928

Stravinsky's The Riot, er, Rite of Spring - 1913

(Plus several more from 1963-2000 that weren't mentioned yesterday.)

In short, almost everything there is from either the Second or Third of the current or previous Saeculum. The only definite exception is "Un Chien Andalou": 1929 starts the Fourth Turning, so it's (barely) off. While there are mentions of recent  (i.e. in the current Fourth) offensive plays, part of the point of the article appears to be "But nobody seems shocked about them, really."

Before that - well, there's at least Fanny Hill, which fits the pattern a few saeculums back (it was published in 1748). Shakespeare was active from the end of the Armada Crisis and into the subsequent First, and his legacy is in his writing skills, not his shock value.

9/11 was shocking, which perhaps proves more that we were in a Third at that point. If MH370 was to come barreling out of the sky into the U.S. Capitol, it might cause outrage but not shock - people would believe such a thing could happen, as something similar has happened before.  JFK's assassination, on the other hand, was unbelievable, and knocked the nation back.  Maybe it was an important transition because it was shocking. Or vice versa.