The Genius that is Alan Kay
21 January 2009
I don’t spend time complaining about this stuff, because what happened in the last 20 years is quite normal, even though it was unfortunate. Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you’re always going to get a pop culture. — A Conversation with Alan Kay - ACM Queue
Alan Kay has this knack for making simple statements that outline concepts that explain whole swathes of history and society in a single instance.
His above statement that pop culture is what you get when growth outpaces education.
In essence this explains the endemic infantilisation of our culture and the transformation of every craft, art form and media into pop culture obsessed by simple pleasures and the nostalgic memory of earlier works of pop cruft.
I can’t think of a single facet of our society that hasn’t given into this trend.
The solution is, fortunately, simple: Education.
I am reminded of some of the observations from the human resources community in IT (originating from some book or the other*) that the production of usable talent by the education establishment has been relatively unchanged for over twenty years. The rest are just cheap labour with a bit of vocational training as Alan Kay put it.
All the growth in the IT industry has just turned it into a pop culture while the size of the productive community has remained relatively fixed and increasingly fragmented.
It’s a long road ahead, but education is the only way out of this pit we’re in.
* Update: Actually, I found the place where I first encountered this idea, although I later heard/noticed anecdotal mutterings to the same effect from my friends in HR. From Bruce Webster’s excellent writings:
My argument, supported by various studies, is that certain people have inherent talents that help them in IT, just as others are gifted in math, music, language, and so on. My follow-up observation is that the percentage of really talented IT engineers in a given human population is (a) small and (b) fixed. (It’s hard to argue for natural selection causing that percentage to increase when we’re talking about geeks breeding.) — The Wetware Crisis: TEPES
