An Unsolicited Commencement Address to the Class of 2024

Dear Class of 2024,

As you have no doubt been told, Graduation means the end of something. Commencement on the other hand means the beginning, the commencement of something entirely new.

Congratulations on the former. And may all the good energy in the whole wide universe be with you as you are called upon to make everything new again.

Bob Dylan said it a generation ago, when many of your parents were at an event like this, Everything’s Broken. But few listened.

I was more optimistic than my fellow Minnesotan in the late 1980s. I had just written a book about the origins of Silicon Valley called “Charged Bodies” in which I expressed real hope then that by the beginning of the 21st Century the digital revolution would have advanced from Data, to Information, to Knowledge Processing, and was on its way to Wisdom Processing by the beginning of the new century.

It didn’t play out that way, did it? For a lot of reasons, but the reality is that, through no fault of your own, you are entering the bigger world facing possible civil war; blasphemy suffusing our religious institutions; and rank, corruption of our highest courts. And those are just a few of the challenges.

At the same time there is a coming age of such advanced technology that will allow a few multi-trillionaires to have surveilled you so well from birth that they can not only predict your thoughts and actions but shape them as well.

Nearly 200 years ago, English poet Matthew Arnold saw a time approaching very much like our own now, in his poem “Dover Beach”:

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

You did not make it that way. But it falls to you to remake the world whole, safe, just and civil. Where do you even begin?

I lived and moved and had my being for fifty years in the digital whirlwind. I helped evangelize it for many years. It’s hard to believe now that the stated goal of some of the first mainframe computer firms back then was to make travel safer, health care more affordable, and education more broadly available.

We have none of that now. And I think I may know why.

The Western understanding of knowledge has always been complicated. In our creation story, God gave the first man and woman a large brain for their body size. Dinosaurs had bodies that weighed tons and brains that weighed ounces. Adam and Eve had much better numbers and a better chance of surviving an asteroid hit.

And along with that big brain came curiosity. And when God give them a homestead right next to the Tree of Knowledge it was a perfect place to exercise their curiosity

And then, very oddly, the God of our Western tradition told Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge; not to satisfy their curiosity. They were about three days old at the time.

We all know the story, whether religiously affiliated or not. Adam and Eve ate from the tree, and they and we have been suffering for that ever since.

What kind of a parent would instruct his three-day old children thus, and when they disobeyed him, as they were apparently set up to do, cast them out of Eden and into endless suffering?

So think about this, what is supposed to the right relationship between God, knowledge and us? Or, between mystery, comprehension and us?

Allow me a suggestion, and then since I was not invited to this celebration, I will leave you and your friends to enjoy this well-earned day of celebration.

There is a dark side to knowledge. And this primitive story I think was meant to point to that, but it got lost over time.

When knowledge is sought, acquired and then used as a wedge, as a private tool, to divide us and to enrich a few at the cost to so many, it marks the abandonment of us, the tool-making animal, from nature, from each other, and from our own true selves. The balance increasingly seen to exist at nearly every level of existence, from quantum to cosmic, is shattered.

Too often, when secrets to better health, better education, better communications are discovered they get wrapped up in Intellectual Property (IP) protection for the benefit of the few and the loss to so many. It is like taking a hatchet to the Tree of Knowledge; like cutting down the ‘Giving Tree’ you may remember from a story told long ago.

Some, to their great credit, have given their secrets away: Jonas Salk gave his polio vaccine to the world asking how he could own such a thing when so many children were being sentenced to Iron Lungs.

Tim Berners-Lee gave the Intellectual Property (IP) protection of the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) when it might have made him the world’s first trillionaire.

The surest way for the dim prospects of the future to take hold is to maintain the idea that knowledge is meant only for a favored few to use against the many. And if we are to rethink the very meaning of knowledge, then the first step is to rethink technology, the tools we use to discover, implement and share the secrets in nature meant to benefit us all.

Most of our tools going back two million years to the time of homo habilis (handy man) have been wedge-shaped, from scrapers to arrow heads. There is no future for us continuing that direction anymore. Especially as modern scientific theories show us that nature is arranged more like a web than a wedge, with each node needed for the success of the whole.

So it comes down to you to rethink the idea of knowledge itself, and the tools by which we discover, use and propagate that knowledge to serve the benefit of all, and not to cause a crashing chord cluster that signals the end of all things, good and evil.

The Ancient One who condemned Adam and Eve, and the rest of us, to lives of toil and pain, seemed to gain wisdom himself as time went on. As at the end of the Torah, the Jewish Book of the Law, it is written: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.”

As no generation in human history before does so much human future depend on you. This is your charge, your charter. It falls to you to make all things new again.

The combined hopes of a million generations are behind you. We failed you, terribly. You owe little to us. You owe everything to the future. So, celebrate today. Tomorrow, commence…

© 2024, Thomas Mahon

“Charged Bodies,” my book referred to above, describes the transition of the agricultural Santa Clara Valley in northern California to the center of global technology. It is told through interviews with 25 people who envisioned, created and were affected by that transition. This is the 40th Anniversary edition of “Charged Bodies” which was reckoned a non-fiction book of the year at the time of its publication.