The Future Rewrites the Past
by
Ross M. Miller
Miller Risk Advisors
www.millerrisk.com
November 14, 2011
A major folly in the linear model of time is that the
past is a static entity, meaning that once something happens, it remains
frozen, as if in amber, for all future time. Classical natural science works
that way and, by direct analogy, so do the social sciences. Such
linearization of time relies on the assumption that we have the right
model of the world; but if our model changes, so must the past change with
it.
I think about the past a lot, probably because I think
about time a lot. My own personal past, however, is clearly not static.
Notwithstanding my forgetting or misremembering of certain past events,
the more I learn about the world as I move into the future, the more I
understand my own past. Small insights that happen as one moves into the
future can lead to drastic reinterpretations of the past events.
For most people none of this matters, because most
people are lost in the present or the past or some ill-defined combination
of the two. People usually develop an idea of where they are going in
their lives at a relatively early age, but as time passes they tend to
forget exactly what they were trying to accomplish. This is not entirely
bad because childish ambitions are usually not very well thought out. For
most people, ill-considered ambitions of being an astronaut or ballerina
are eventually replaced by something more practical and these original
ambitions are eventually forgotten (as is what replaced them).
Although he was still among the living when I conceived
this commentary a few months ago, Steve Jobs is a good example of how the
future rewrites the past. I did not know Steve personally, but I knew
plenty of guys who were like him to varying degrees. California in the
1970s, especially the South where I was as opposed to the North where
Steve was, was full of doped-up scammer-dreamers. (California was where
hyphenates were born.) Stuart
Margolin's Angel Martin character in The
Rockford Files (Rockford's "buddy" that he met in
prison) is a good example of a vintage 70s scammer. I have not read the
new Jobs biography, but from what I recall he and Woz had at least one
close brush with the law when they were running their massively illegal
"blue box"
business. Indeed, Jobs's unsavory activities were not anomalous; they are
measured in biographical chapters, not pages.
Steve's lucky fellow scammers have likely moved on to
more nominally legal scams in entertainment, technology, finance, you name
it, rather than prison. This cohort's clever subversions of the system
during the wild and wooly '70s are largely lost to posterity because their
futures unfolded differently from Steve's. His sordid past, however, is
something he can never escape and it lives on into eternity with or
without him. The blue box business with Woz is not viewed as merely an
innocent youthful error in judgment; instead, it is seen as a trial run
for what became Apple. Indeed, in light of the fact that Jobs would
eventually engineer the nearly miraculous resurrection of a major
corporation from near-certain death, every blemish of his life has come
under the microscope. While Jobs may have been thought of as "that
asshole" in his youth, in light of future events he is now remembered
as that and much, much more.
Incidentally, my concept of "the past" is
something different from what passes as "history." The victors
(and those with good publishing contacts) may get to write history, but I
see the past as a massive objective conglomeration of memories and
artifacts, few of which ever make it into the history books. Because the
past exists in the physical form of neurons, electrons, and yellowing high
school yearbooks, it is subject to the same decay that afflicts all
physical entities as well as their (selective) conscious preservation.
As Fox Mulder might say, the past is out there. With the
Internet (and Facebook in particular), the past is even more out there.
Indeed, many aspects of the past do only fail to decay; they can suddenly
be drudged up out of nowhere. Old local and school newspapers are out
there now to fill in curious little details of the past. Not surprisingly,
when faced with the source code of my past, it was not exactly the way
that I remembered it; not better, not worse, just different.
During a brief break from writing this, I happened
across the early seasons of The
Twilight Zone that have been transferred to HD and available
gratis on Amazon Prime Instant Video. Watching old Twilight Zones
in HD, even the limited HD available over the Internet, is an eerie
experience (on high-bandwidth Blu-Ray it is undoubtedly even more eerie).
Aside from the fact that the nature of the past, present, and future are a
frequently recurring themes on The Twilight Zone, seeing the show
in HD is viewing a past that never even existed. I saw the original shows
(as well as their numerous syndicated reruns a few years later) on the
questionable televisions of the day with even more questionable reception. The HD
transfers of the show from the original film masters when viewed on a good
HD monitor (even over the Internet) are closer to the film they were shot
on than they are to broadcast television of the 1960s. Watching Twilight
Zone episodes about the past and the future in a mode that turns that
past into an unforeseen future is simply mind-boggling. If Rod Serling
were still around, he would probably do an episode about how the current
version of the past could be truer than the past as it actually occurred
(and commercial-free to boot).
Unfortunately, in the realms of finance and economics,
the past cannot be so easily reconstructed. The economic past does not
flow into the future in an orderly manner. It does not even shift from one
regime to another in an orderly manner. The clichéd "point of inflection"
does not begin to explain the tangled paths taken by financial and
economic variables. The financial past is always changing because in
trying to understand the economic past we simply jump from one bad model
to another.
For the next two months I plan to cruise straight into
the future, contemplating the past as little as possible. When I return to
these commentaries in February, I will notch up another adventure in
retailing with a look at the first ShopRite to locate in Upstate New
York.
Copyright 2011 by Miller Risk Advisors. Permission granted to
forward by electronic means and to excerpt or broadcast 250 words or less
provided a citation is made to www.millerrisk.com.