Can't Get You of My Head

My thesis is a simple one.  We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world that has not yet been born.  Given the character of the forces of change, we may be stuck for decades in this ungainly posture.  You who are young today may not live to see its resolution.Famous landmarks of the old regime, like the daily newspaper and the political party, have begun to disintegrate under the pressure of this slow-motion collision.  Many features we prized about the old world are also threatened:  for example, liberal democracy and economic stability.  Some of them will emerge permanently distorted by the stress.  Others will just disappear.   Many attributes of the new dispensation, like a vastly larger sphere for public discussion, may also warp or break from the immoveable resistance of the established order.
Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer:  authority for the old industrial scheme that has dominated globally for a century and a half, the public for the uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest.  The two protagonists share little in common, other than humanity – and each probably doubts the humanity of the other.  They have arrayed themselves in contrary modes of organization which require mutually hostile ideals of right behavior.  The conflict is so asymmetrical that it seems impossible for the two sides actually to engage.  But they do engage, and the battlefield is everywhere. Irreconcilable differences between old and new can be found in something as seemingly trivial as naming conventions.  The industrial age insisted on portentous-sounding names of great seriousness and formality, to validate the organizations which spoke with the voice of authority:  “Bank of America,” “National Broadcasting Corporation,” “New York Times.”  Each of these three names stood for a professional hierarchy which claimed a monopoly of specialized knowledge.  They symbolized a starched-collar kind of mastery, and they meant to impress.  Even the lowest-ranking person in these organizations, the names implied, had risen far above the masses.
The digital age loves self-mocking names, which are a way to puncture the formal stiffness of the established order:  “Yahoo,” “Google,” “Twitter,” “reddit,” “Flickr,” “Photobucket,” “Bitcoin.”  Without having asked the people in question, I feel reasonably sure that the founders of Google never contemplated naming their company “National Search Engine Corporation” and Mark Zuckerman of Facebook never felt tempted by “Social Connections Center of America.”  It wasn’t the style.