Our Surprisingly Napoleonic Twenty-first Century
Why are we so in love with top-down control?
Greetings,
The “Napoleonic” theme came up recently on Colligo so I want to follow up for everyone. Not too hard to grasp: we—our century—is Napoleonic. Our times. Much energy is spent trying to ignore, evade, or flat out deny this fact. So, it’s good to write about it, we sort of have to write about it, and I do hope you enjoy. One quick note: the piece was originally published (see below) in 2022, so the referent “this year” on Freeman Dyson is now no longer correct. The twenty-fifth anniversary of Imagined Worlds was last year.
Erik J. Larson
This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of famed scientist and author Freeman Dyson’s Imagined Worlds. The book, fashioned from a series of lectures Dyson gave in Jerusalem in 1995, is partly a historical discussion about why technologies—some familiar, like nuclear power, others not, like airships—succeed or fail in what he called a Darwinian process of selection. It’s also an enjoyable piece of futurism. He delighted in the possible, and in Imagined Worlds he speculated boldly about space colonization and an entirely new species evolved from future humans. Dyson was aware of the difficulties of prediction—Imagined Worlds fails to anticipate the rise of the Internet or World Wide Web—yet like H.G. Wells, whom Dyson admired, he leaves us with a sense of having encountered important ideas on a journey led by someone who knows the terrain.
Imagined Worlds was Dyson’s attempt to explore, as he put it, “the interaction of technology with human affairs.” Like the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, he thought science “moved ahead along old directions” until a conceptual revolution. Unlike Kuhn, he thought scientific revolutions could also be driven by tools, by technology. He explained that science and technology entered “Napoleonic” phases, when big institutions with deep pockets set research agendas, and “Tolstoyan” periods, when scientists engage more in tinkering and exploration. Napoleonic was “rigid organization and discipline”; Tolstoyan was “creative chaos and freedom.” Where are we now?
Science and technology today are Napoleonic. Silicon Valley is now Big Tech, the age of garage start-ups being long behind us. Neuroscience is pursued with “exascale” supercomputers and big data. Ditto physics, which also relies on billion-dollar particle accelerators like CERN’s seventeen kilometer long Large Hadron Collider. Consumers—you and me—now provide data to cloud servers, centralized repositories (“cloud” is a misnomer) of massive datasets owned by a relatively small number of governments and organizations. If anyone is “tinkering” with science and technology these days, they are not making the news. We live in Napoleonic times.
You can read the rest here, and thanks to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture for taking on diverse ideas. I love ya.
Garage startups were never the actual source of development. Inventors are always coming up with new ideas, but the ideas go nowhere until The Big Dog steals the idea. Synchromesh and fully automatic transmissions were both developed and produced in 1905, but neither succeeded until GM stole them in '29 and '40 respectively.
The idea of the transistor was around in the 1840s, and working semiconductor triodes were used in the late 1920s. It didn't go commercial until Bell Labs had the resources to develop the manufacturing methods in '47.