Sticky Ink

Picture if you will the year 2050. Yes China will be the largest economy on earth, having held that record for almost 2 decades. But what I’m envisioning is lots of people, older folks actually, walking around with indecipherable bluish blobs on various parts of their bodies. Here in the United States, tribal markings are big business, creating new jobs that used to linger only near dark alleys near dangerous port terminal: piercing and tattoo parlors.

My friend, business consultant Dennis Duitch, publishes an RSS feed DGC Client/Contact Bulletin. A couple of excerpts from his February 2^nd release provides a pretty interesting statistical look at cultural oddities that just aren’t that odd anymore: “… OVER A QUARTER OF 18 TO 30 YEAR OLD ‘MILLENNIALS’ ‘HAVE A BODY PART PIERCED OTHER THAN EARLOBES…and name ‘body metal’ as their ‘art’ of choice.’ Tattoos are also now becoming common place for Millennials: 26% have more than one (although 33% of Gen Xers and 15% of Baby Boomers do also). The public-at-large still regard these trends as generally lower class and a form of rebellion (‘coming out of the prisons and from the gang world’), but ‘body art’ is becoming considered more a matter of self-expression. S o, since Millennials will comprise some one-third of the workforce in three years, and beyond the legal hassles which companies who attempt to restrict such freedom-of-expression are beginning to face, reality is that from a simple perspective of workforce supply and demand, employers have little choice but to accept Body Art in the workplace. [ACCOUNTING WEB – Dec 29, 10]”

But his closing observation is simply delicious, and makes you wonder what the tattoos on these future teens will be like, or whether they may prefer their markings in the form of imbedded microchips enabling mind-controlled mobile applications: “Nearly one in five children age 2 to 5 can operate a smartphone application, according to an AVG security-software survey. But only 9% of children that age can tie their own shoelaces…” Come on, a clever app is simply compelling, particularly as I watch my two and half year old nephew pull up pictures on an iPhone, manipulate the images with flying and expert fingers, flip through apps and look up at you with that grin… you know the one.

What this is really about is change, inter-generational disconnects and the harsh reality that a “generation” (demographically having been defined as a twenty-year cohort throughout most sociology texts) is of necessity becoming a vastly smaller age-range grouping. For those adherents of “Singularity Theory” – embraced by futurists and inventors like Ray Kurzweil – the hyper-acceleration of change is disconnecting ages more rapidly. In world where available information doubled every two hundred years – as was the case half a millennium ago – a generation could easily be that 20-year cohort, but if as Singularity Theory suggests, change is so rapid today that if one were to take the year 2000 as one-year-unit of change, assuming the same rate of accelerating change we have witnessed over the past few years, by the end of the century, humanity will have experienced 20,000 year-units of change!

So someone 26 probably will have nothing in common with someone 18 years of age. Oh, they already don’t? Don’t believe me? Ask a 26-year-old what he or she thinks is going on in the world of an 18-year-old. Then ask an 18-year-old if that perception is remotely accurate. Prepare for a laugh. A generation could be a three-year cohort?! Ah… yup, it could!

Maybe if you live as a subsistence farmer in Central Africa, this hyper-accelerating change theory is meaningless, but where electronic media govern, change is accelerating even still. People just a few years apart don’t even use the same language. Slang and text codes are morphing at warp speed (a 70s allusion to Star Trek, which instantly dates me!); look at linguistic changes in the slang of the young. Texting codes are constantly being changed to manage generational mystique (read: kids don’t want you to know what they are saying to each other). People living side-by-side are increasingly having less and less in common? How strange is that? How real it has become!

I’m Peter Dekom, and the impact of change isn’t just about the technology; it is also how human beings rewire as a result.