The Rise of the Digital Native

Why are so many people frightened by what is happening with blockchain? What is going on here, with all this techno-mumbo-jumbo, words whose meaning we can’t understand? Plenty of energy and billions of dollars are being thrown at new ideas and new technology that apparently only a relatively small number of people can fathom. A tremendous amount of noise and truly troubling destructive power is also associated with this creative output.

Most of us feel unsettled when the boundaries of our comfort zone are challenged. Who thinks about what our comfort zone means, how it is defined? Entrepreneurs do, as do philosophers and artists, who are dedicated to pushing themselves beyond conventional limits. They are driven to think differently, to try new ways of being and of creating. Every new generation of our society cannot avoid this challenge, as young people struggle to define what their lives might evolve to become.

It appears that we are all engaged in a grand and very challenging social experiment. Perhaps this is a discontinuity in the history of human society, initiated by a remarkable mathematical invention, the blockchain, enabled by computing power. Traditional industries and institutional structures are being redefined in fundamental ways, from finance to art to government. Our brains and our consciousness are being stretched in dimensions previously restricted to fertile imaginations. Change is literally happening at the speed of photons of light. Now, our world is being defined at the level of atoms and molecules, in genetics and medicine, and quantum computing, where we are discovering that the familiar rules of Newtonian physics don’t apply. When we are thrust into games where we don’t know the rules, isn’t that scary?

How do we understand the world around us? Ever since we invented counting, a technology that was not universal among the earliest human societies, we have used numbers to define physical objects and structure. It was not enough to say that my chicken is fatter than yours, I wanted to be more precise so that I could bargain for a better price in a barter transaction where I could obtain more produce in exchange for my chicken. The ability and drive to measure physical things led to our contemporary (actually now outdated) industrial and economic structures and institutions, including government. The foundational concept of democracy is “government by the people,” where decisions taken by the government reflect a majority consensus. It’s supposed to be all about the numbers.

As we keep re-learning over the centuries, there will always be people who will create new levels of games out of our social customs. Among them are a small number who are obsessed with winning, with accumulating power and wealth that is at the limit of an ordinary person’s comprehension. Would the Catholic church call this a manifestation of original sin? Perhaps it is just an example of the natural human tendency toward perverse gamification. What motivates the creation of games? We love to be entertained, to be challenged, to compete with one another. Games are also a way to define roles and organizational structures where we explore how we can interact with each other, for better or worse.

The discontinuity I mentioned earlier is the rise of the digital native, the millennial generation that has grown up spending more time and energy with electronic devices than with other human beings. Perhaps even before birth, they were introduced to electrical stimulation in ways that previous generations had never experienced. At home, they have been monitored 24/7, and entertained for hours on end by music and images, with or without the presence of parents or siblings. Do we have any idea what they, as infants, had been learning about their future role in society?

As their intellectual and physical capabilities developed, they discovered new worlds and their brains formed neural connections that had never been explored before. This was happening decades before older generations realized that young people were thinking and behaving in ways that seemed fundamentally quite foreign and incomprehensible. Of course, these brains, now enhanced with unprecedented functionality, set out to test the limits of their power and discovered a truly revolutionary possibility about human creativity. Our imagination has no limits and every aspect of who we are to ourselves and to each other can be explored and measured, but now, we have new objectives and new tools. Every new generation rediscovers the first part of this truth, but the digital native is fundamentally different because their creativity, powered by essentially unlimited computing resources, can transcend conventional definitions.

A fundamental factor in the discontinuity is the invention of various computing technologies, especially blockchain, which seemed to appear out of thin air, and from an anonymous source. This meant that older academics and professionals were actually at a disadvantage, compared to young enthusiasts who embraced blockchain’s philosophy and technical potential far more quickly and whole-heartedly. Corporate managers these days are perplexed and struggle to find ways to manage this new workforce that uses unfamiliar tools and doesn’t accept the conventional corporate ethos. Where is the common vocabulary, the shared meaning, that makes effective communication possible?

Are we at a real fork in societal evolution? If digital natives are creating and choosing to live much of their lives in virtual—i.e., digital—worlds that they are inventing, how will they interact with the rest of us in the familiar physical world? How will our social customs and institutions continue and survive? Older generations have always looked to the young to support them when the infirmities of age set in. In the future, who will take care of us when we are senior citizens?