My life has been defined by books, and now as I approach my senior years I find books no longer serving the main purpose or values (of print-literacy, knowledge storage and transmission) that they did sixty years ago. Well can I call myself a bibliophile ever since I was a young child. A trip to the local public library to browse the shelves and borrow some interesting titles was the major event of my week, far more fulfilling than an evening spent watching a black and white television set.

There will still always continue to be books printed and published for special purposes, fulfilling niche markets or even regular best-seller bandwagons, but the book as a primary agency of literacy and knowledge transmission has fallen by the wayside as a niche publishing industry, displaced and supplanted more and more by the lucrative, boundless market of the personal computing system connected to the Internet.

Volunteering a decade ago at the friends of the library, in the back sorting room bringing in all the donations, my main job was to haul out several times each evening in a couple of shopping carts all the books selected for culling out in the public dumpster at the rear of the county library.

Old encyclopedias now may become collector’s items, but few people if any are still using them consistently as a source of valid or reliable information on some esoteric topic, while any information they may need is but a click or two away on the worldwide web. My old dictionaries now serve the main purpose of being bookends on bookshelves rather than as a first reference at my writer’s desk.

Book publishing itself has undergone a critical transformation in which anyone can now print a book out or even have a computer-based “chat robot” create a book that can be printed “shake and bake” on demand, with next to no formal copy-editing or proofing, and readily put on a global book market within a matter of minutes or hours rather than an old-fashioned of days, months or years for snail mail based services to catch up with dynamic book markets.

I have been a cultural anthropologist who has focused on the esoteric field of the so-called “anthropology of knowledge,” and so in witnessing the tragedy of the books it seems appropriate that I should seek to more objectively understand the anthropological background to this global transformation of human systems.

Through all of human prehistory and throughout much of early human protohistory, the main mechanism of cultural transmission, upon which all human systems originally (and aboriginally) have depended for their successful survival, adaptation, reproduction, and integration, has been the oral-based vertical “folk” transmission that occurred inter-generationally from parent to child. In such a world, parents held absolute authority. Such a form of oral transmission is called vertical, being passed “down” from one parent to one child, or one to a few, through the generations.

Human history has largely been the written, recorded history of writing systems, from early pictographic and logo-graphic systems, through the invention of syllabaries, and then alphabets. Transmission and cultural transformation which depended primarily on vertical inter-generational transmission, could then become increasingly diagonalized from one to many, or a few to a great many.

This process increased in diagonalization of the exchange process with increasing rates of cultural transmission and change that became ten or a hundred times more rapid than was possible with oral based systems.

With the advent of computer-based literacy, with the rise of systems of information and knowledge communication and transmission that is increasingly horizontalized (one to all and all to one instantaneously), rates of transformational change have increased exponentially and is now rapidly approaching a global singularity of relatively infinite information instantaneous processed and transmitted and stored, within a single generation.

Oral vertical transmission systems still happen throughout the world, but they have become radically modified in their functional purposes and style within an historical era dominated by print literacy and printed records and literature, just as now print literacy remains embedded in all societies the world over, just only now encompassed and engulf within the “anthropo-cybersphere” of digital, wireless information communication and storage, albeit rapidly undergoing radical transformation from the former function of books to inform and record—functions now mainly served and taken over by interconnected computing systems the world over.

I remain wedded to my conventional, increasingly old-fashioned and anachronistic, if now quite obsolete, books. I love my books with interesting covers and titles without regret. As a digital migrant I remain a stranger in a strange new world. No one today refers on a regular basis to a hard-copy encyclopedia, even if some may still collect sets of encyclopedias. It has been a long time since I’ve looked a word up in a conventional bound hard-printed dictionary rather than on the worldwide web, and now my set of dictionaries primarily serve as oversized book-ends on my shelves.

My wife chides me that when I pass she will give Viking send-off on a raft with my body burning on top of all my piled up books. I have been a writer for most of my adult life—a fairly lonely life, but now I have accumulated a large number of mostly digitized manuscripts that I don’t know what to do with.

Since getting into new forms of “on-demand” self-publishing with a global marketplace, I’ve come to the realization that I am casting published texts and titles into a bottom-less digital black-hole. They will be most probably self-published, the majority of my lonely literary oeuvre, but will mostly remain unread and even unrecognized as such in a digitally transformed world. (And I would rather they be cast into such an all consuming digital blackhole than be burnt or thrown out as a part of my estate and my wake.)

Facing in a personal way of my own life-time bibliography and biography the global tragedy of the books, I will in my passing remain content and satisfied that I’ve been a lover of books that will sooner or later become burnt or recycled, knowing full well that I was part of a book-based world never to happen again.

We can afford some measure of chaos in our choices: we certainly do not need a global totalitarian dictatorship to set our priorities for life or death. But we can also afford some degree of guidance, especially if it is rational, sensible, and ultimately most humane.

It has been more than two decades that I have touted and developed the idea and theory of global meta-systems: in a nutshell, human systems of the anthropo-sphere must approach basic global design strategies for the sake of promoting sustainability, adaptability and long-term stability of human systems, and these design strategies come to rest upon five basic sets of problems the solution of all of which promotes such a long-term adaptive global meta-system.

Meta-system refers in this case primarily to a super-system composed of systems and their sub-systems, in which the higher meta-system or super-system level provides a common meta-systemic context within which its systems and sub-systems are logically comprehended and functionally integrated with their environments. Global meta-systems may or may not produce their own synergetic effects, depending upon how integrated they become at the super-system level, but many examples of meta-systems are primarily oriented to the providing of a meta-systemic context in which its systems and their subsystems may function in a stable and, in the case of the earth, an enduring and long-lasting manner.

The challenges of the global meta-system today is that it by and large lacks any deliberate effort at organization, beyond political-diplomatic and human development or aid organizations.

For any global meta-system on earth to become effective in realizing its promise, the following five sets of challenges must be met:

1. At the infrastructural level the development of a solar-hydrogen fuel based global infrastructure and economy becomes paramount to the consideration of the kind of long-term civilization we seek to build. This entails that the wealthy oil producing countries situated primarily in hot, arid desert zones, would do well to turn their sand into glass and produce solar energy that can be converted to other forms of energy and to the production of fresh water. Their glass can also go into production of industrial scale greenhouse operations.
2. At the structural level the development of areas and zones of protection and preservation of eco-bio diversity becomes important, that is free from human encroachment and habitat loss. Important as well would be the inter-connecting of these areas and zones by “human free” corridors that permit the migration of individuals of different species from one region or area to another. This entails that most human agriculture should go to large scale covered greenhouse production, semi-automated to replace large numbers of field workers, as well as the deliberate design and building of human habitation either skyward (upward or vertically,) or else, downward into the earth (or some interesting mix of both,) in order to reduce the overall infra-structural global footprint of human populations.
3. At the superstructural level, a global government is necessary to provide directional integration of the emerging anthropo-sphere, one that is democracy-based and primarily grass-roots (easily accomplished through the Internet,) and this includes human systems development focused upon education, recreation and knowledge systems-based structural and social development. This global government would seek to foster relative health and wealth of a growing human population as well as the provisioning of screens of opportunity for the majority of this growing global population to realize a better life for themselves and for their families.
4. Achievement of technological Artificial Intelligence singularity is critically necessary for human systems integration and entails that a lot of human labor displacing work can be accomplished more effective and more efficiently by machines than people, potentially free people up to pursue more intelligent objectives in their lives living hand-to-mouth especially with menial labor type jobs. The cybersphere that is a result of the increasing integration of computing systems into a collective synergetic system and meta-system, will increasingly interpenetrate and integrate with the human anthropo-sphere, and people will become critically dependent upon these artificial, increasingly autonomous systems.
5. Finally, the quest becomes necessary for travel, colonization, exploration and observation of outer space, deeper and deeper into the extant universe, becomes an important unifying and organizational priority. This pursuit must be made in many directions almost simultaneously or concurrently. It is important to pursue “biosphere” studies both on earth and in Outer space. It is important to develop both observational and communication/transportation hubs and grids in Outer space, presumably first targeting Earth-Lunar spaces and regions, and later branching into Earth-Martian and even Earth-Jovian regions of Space. It is also important to establish and develop semi-permanent human Space colonies as well also to promote the development of technological and production capabilities in Space not possible to develop on Earth due to its gravity, atmosphere, its geo physics, etc.

It is my main argument that these are the five main lines of effort necessary to be accomplished, if the social-environmental and primarily political-economic hurdles to achieving global developmental civilization are to be overcome. Without achieving any of these five problem-design sets, it is likely that human adaptation on earth will continue to fight an up-hill battle and risk global failure. Whatever our contemporary complex loyalties and identities, whatever the patterns of organization and stratification of current and near future human social systems, these considerations must find productive and human-based compromise with the global requirements and challenges that humankind now faces building its future in terms of global civilization.

The biggest risks humankind faces during the remainder of the 21st Century is its own antiquated ideas of political-economic stratification, self-serving ideologies and nativist chauvinisms. The greatest risk is that relatively minor sets of unpredictable events, regional or interregional environmental-social circumscription, triggered by large scale natural disasters or pandemic outbreaks of new strains of virus, cascading to the declaration of war between states and their people, and escalating to use of weapons of mass destruction in contexts no longer clearly governed by the dynamic balance of external powers or mutual detente. We run these risks as much in the next decade as we do in the next Century, because human development of civilization, becoming near completely horizontal away from its original vertical modality of transmission, no longer counts chronological, historical time as a critical constraint in the same manner that human systems did even half a Century ago, when information transmission still tended toward the diagonal.

Binary choices are not usually a good way of looking at the world, but general global trend-lines of climate change, urbanization and human population growth seem to be driving us to meeting the challenge of some tough either-or kinds of choices. In this case Buckminster Fuller summed it up succinctly: Utopia or Oblivion?

The challenge from a systems perspective is not only to understand what human systems are and how they work, but to understand workable design frameworks that would assure systems that are in essence “human-proofed” and reinforced by available back-up systems. A key trend, paradoxically, is the universal promotion of human development, and those primary lines of effort within human development that lead to greater realization of human health, happiness and realization of fundamental needs and requirements. But this key recipe of human development is not nor could it ever be unlimited development, and we are now within a couple of generations realizing the kinds of constraints to our own development put upon us by our requirements of long term adaptation to a global ecology.

Transitional energy forms, if done to economic scale and affordability, are a step in the right direction in moving humankind away from carbon compound producing fossil fuels. But this new grid of energy production must ultimately face to the requirements of hydrogen burning systems that have sufficient energy density to power large and heavy mechanical systems in an efficient manner: to operate heavy machinery, to fly supersonic aircraft, and to power large scale sea vessels, for instance. Hydrogen energy, cheaply produced, and with price falling with increasing production, reverses the trend the global economy has been facing towards the inflation of the petrol dollars and rising costs of fossil-fuel energies pumped from beneath the ground or mined from coal and shale extraction, that result not only in a carbon-compound based greenhouse effect leading to what is becoming drastic and rapid global climate change, but also which tends to drive the cost of manufacture, transportation, and maintenance that in turn drives ever-higher the average cost of living: of food, of water, and of the material goods and products that we have learned to depend upon in maintaining our everyday suburban “just in time delivery”-based lifestyle.

With a post peak oil global scenario, we cannot now think of any trend-line in human systems that would invert the formula of getting less by paying more into the reverse formula of paying less and getting more, except through the deliberate design development of sufficient alternative fuel infrastructure based ultimately upon hydrogen production and solar energy capture and conversion to ample and available storage facilities. In this regard, a purely electrical power-generating grid and infrastructure may work, but not if it primarily depends upon electrical energy production through fossil fuel stockpiling and burning.

Transformation of human systems begins from the bottom up—if you change the infrastructure then adaptive social structure must also change to follow suit. Political, military and religious forms are slowest and most resistant to such change, but the campaign to win hearts and minds always proceeds from the top-down though it must be driven from the ground up.

Systems are good to think, as I believe not only is our world organized upon the basis of systems, but our brains and minds, as part of our bodies and lives, and as part of general systems of the larger world, are also organized systemically, however complicated and complex it may really be. In other words, systems invite themselves to be representationally modeled in terms of symbolic knowledge constructs that pretend to embody and express the core design and components of any such system.

We really only consciously realize systems in nature, including our own human and often quite unnatural (artificial) systems (as well as myriad imaginary, fantasy or make-believe systems), through our awareness and interaction with them as such, as knowledge systems that have a relatively homologous structure with consistency with objectively real or subjectively constructed or imaginary systems. And all this speaks to the primary importance of the fundamental concept of the anthropological relativity of human reality through which all our perception, awareness and experience is filtered as the source of our intelligence. In other words, we cannot but help view and understand our world, including ourselves in that world, except through the conceptual and cognitive constructs of our symbolic representational knowledge of the world.

Granted, this knowledge is selectively filtered and shaped by many different processes. Hence human awareness, information, knowledge and understanding are constrained in basic and fundamental and therefore universal ways. All human knowledge is symbolically representational, even at the level of fundamental percepts as we construct our world through our basic senses. Symbolic knowledge in the human species is specially structured by human language—human language has a basic symbolic structure that we cannot undue or ever hope on a fundamental level to break out of. (Lord knows, many people try to escape their own knowledge constraints on a daily basis even, primarily through drugs, and if not by pharmacological means, then by fantasy, day dreams and wish fulfillment.)

So human intelligence is fundamentally symbolic linguistic, and there are scientific means of looking at, analyzing and sorting these things out. In a previous pre/post dissertation life, I was engaged more or less very directly with this kind of work. Our intelligence grants us great mental strengths to imagine new realities, to learn new things, to explore and discover, and to create entirely new worlds and even new working systems. We were creating new systems well before the development of writing systems. From then forward progress to civilizational systems involving and founded upon basic technologies and alternative human-made systems based on scientific understanding was only a matter of time and historical happenstance. In a very real sense, bronze beat out copper, and iron beat out bronze, and steel beat out iron (and now synthetic plastics and carbon fibers often beat out steel).

But the evolutionary purchase upon our great symbolic powers of human knowledge came at a very steep price. It has been a cost so great that often it has almost undone our world, if not ourselves completely in the world. For as powerful as it has proven historically to become, with the benefits and drawbacks of human civilization now on a global scale, our symbolic intelligence was never unlimited and always constrained by its own inherent, intrinsic structure. We can invent time, build clocks to accurately, precisely tell time, but we cannot control, stop or change time.

This has translated into a basic tendency—a weakness in both belief and behavior, and that is the fundamental anthropological fallacy of confusing the term for the thing that the term names. This leads systematically for mistaking the abstract idea of the name, symbolically invested with all kinds of meaning and memory associations, with the actual concrete reality of the thing being named or symbolically represented. If we can mistake the one thing for the idea or ideal of the thing thus designated, we can also mistake the idea for the thing it represents. This results in a kind of behavioral displacement that in large massive crowds, especially, can lead to very destructive consequences.

We are left then on the horns of a profound developmental-evolutionary and historical dilemma. The very human intelligence that empowers us creatively and constructively to build our civilization and make a better world, is the same intelligence that under constraints leads to equal powers of destructive aggression to tear down the world and human civilization back to total chaos. How this may occur is time and space for another blog. That it occurs and has happened and this design flaw, inevitable with symbolic intelligence, has characterized humankind as much or more than the more desirable and pollyanna qualities, and that it is fundamentally linked to the structural design of our own intelligence, must be the main punch-line to leave off with.

There are popular demagogues today who have figured some of this out on their own, and who are deliberately applying these lessons to their own aggrandizement even if at the expense of all of human civilization. In short, human beings, especially in large crowds, can become easily deluded into believing things to be true, and persuaded to act out upon these false beliefs, even when evidence is dubious and contradictory and the truth otherwise self-evident. This is perhaps the single greatest threat standing in the way of global human development in our contemporary world.

I came into General System Theory (or better perhaps System’s Theory in General) through advanced studies in Anthropology. That was now more than thirty years ago. Systems Theory has much to offer to us, even if many scientists tend to look at it all askance down their long noses. I don’t think I could have approached the complexities of anthropological or human-type systems theory in any other manner except through General System Models, of which there is a standard model proposed and developed by Ludwig von Bertalanffy (who was primarily a biologist), as well as many other basic, natural and applied models functioning at different levels, contexts and types of systems explanation. The real paradox today, in our “post-modern” and very global era, is that systems thinking and theory tends still to be eschewed by many informed professionals of the global knowledge community even when and if our contemporary civilization is and has always been constructed and operated by numerous and various kinds of systems. The paradox is even greater if we realize that just a semester or two of basic and advanced systems theory and method would be for most all that would be required to reconcile sciences and systems approaches and to form the foundation for building a healthy and respectable “science of general systems.”

In this regard I could not possibly underestimate the importance of a systems-based worldview, not in replacement of general scientific worldview, but complementary to and in support of scientific perspectives. The main reason I make this argument is the observation that the human pursuit of development has always been systems-based development, but mostly people have made discoveries and inventions and extended streamlining applications and innovations, not because of systems direct insight or intelligence, but often serendipitously in spite of systems awareness and understanding or not. It has been our myopic and short-sighted pursuit of systems largely on an ad hoc basis that now will lead us down a blind alley toward global climax and an unlimited plethora of possible post-climax global scenarios.

I began my blogging at a time when I thought what we needed most in the world was a system of systems, that if well organized and used in a scientifically informed manner, could provide much of the context and insight we need to generate long-term and sustainable solutions in an inherently super-complex world. I thought to myself what better system framework than the Internet to create a foundation for global integration and organization and mobilization of humankind above and beyond the ethno-linguistic and ethno-national horizons within which most people still dwell. Needless to comment, I never got past the first level of producing a few dozen manuscripts about general systems, and ultimately, in desperation of existential failure, abandoning and giving up almost everything I had been working on and for.

That was twenty years ago and both the world and I have moved on since then. Today, with global climate change and global circumscription of living systems and natural resource reservoirs, we perhaps need a bona fide systems framework more desperately than ever before, and I am still writing upon and even now on the verge of publishing on general systems thinking and theory. Our primary strategic national adversaries, the Chinese, appear to culturally take more to systems and systems type thinking than their American or perhaps European counterparts, who are more culturally oriented to causal models of direct linear actions and reactions. But in truth there is not an area of broader science today in the contemporary global era that does not adopt and depend upon many systems models and perspectives even in their analytical methodologies and applied procedures, even if discussion of the systems-based aspects of much of this work may seem implicitly somewhat verboten if not downright taboo as a professional career killer.

I have died many cowardly social deaths and have been resurrected from a professional death more than once, and I am still around and going strong even in my senior years. I can call myself an anthropologist with some serious intent behind that title, even if most others at best use it tongue in cheek when either addressing or ignoring me. My work is my own, I do not depend upon graduate students for my ego or for my professional development, and I have carried a human systems framework effectively into important applied areas. We all face a central challenge in the contemporary and future world. Earth remains our’s, humankind’s, to steward, protect and preserve (or, failing, not), and general systems theory and its consistent, broad-based, informed scientific application is the best way of accomplishing that through human civilization. Of all things possible between heaven and earth, this truth I do not doubt one dot or iota.