I love this contraction! Book people prolly aren’t familiar with many of the popular time-saving contractions in use online, and this one is really oustanding. It’s actually a sort of double-(or triple?)-contraction: both “I’m” and “gonna” are contractions, and then the “-m-” is also a contraction of a bunch of apparently superfluous sounds and the end result requires just a tiny little bit more effort than “um”.
It is also perfectly fitting for this post. On the heels of last week’s speculative ponderings (see “Consumer Behavior and Belief“), I’ve experienced a wonderful “AHA!” sort of insight into human brain conditioning. And the most stupendous aspect of this discovery is the immense time scale over which it has played out (so far) — at least it seems completely stupedous to me. This process has (so far) lasted over half a millennium. I acknowledge that this is indeed minute on biological or geological time scales, but it is nonetheless vast compared to the expected payouts of most get-rich-quick schemes. [1]
Humans have already been printing paper for thousands of years, but it was “only just” a little over five centuries ago that what was ultimately to become the “publishing” industry was among the first (of the plethora of industries to follow) to become industrialized.
The output of publishing has been phenomenal. For most of the time (so far) it has lead to miles and miles and miles and miles of printed material. The volumes of tomes have become gargantuan. The paper-based industry has aged (if not even aged out), but the legacy remains intact. Century upon century, humans use books to show off their intellectual prowess much like churches employ altars to focus the attention of devout and would-be believers alike. To this very day, a wall of books is a favorite background used by many influencers, vloggers and similar virtual celebrities. And many (if not even most) of the most influential influencers sit down with their so-called guests to talk about some new and improved book that’s just now hitting the book market shelves “as we speak”.
As Esther Dyson pointed out several decades ago, the legacy publishing industry can very easily be technologically disintermediated (as data can now be freely copied). In contrast, the habitual conditioning of humans throughout society (including not only educational institutions, but also legal, regulatory and governmental technologies — to name just a few of the widespread array of industries to be affected by the Human Brain Conditioner complex) has led to a widespread lethargy to adopt new technologies.
Paper remains stupendously resistant to reform, change, progress etc.
Yet this, I feel, is merely one example, one instance, of a much broader phenomenon. The Human Brain Conditioner is now a vast array of technologies that form large parts of the entire infrastructure that has become (over the last few millennia) the habitat of humans worldwide — things like roads and houses, irrigation systems and much much more. What makes many of these technologies so resistant to change is the effort humans have put into cementing them into society. And a big part of the reason for this, I believe, is the way our brains are apparently naturally inclined to be oriented towards social cohesion. Deviations from social norms are generally dangerous.
Increasingly, however, it is becoming more and more obvious that this social baggage we need to carry day in and day out is not actually helping us — instead, it’s actually hindering us from moving on and progressing beyond the past technologies, which increasingly only bog us down like a ball and chain.
Socio Business blog 