...who are:

• Claude Stanly Choules, Australia
• John Campbell Ross, Australia
• Fernand Goux, France
• Pierre Picault, France
• Henry William Allingham, United Kingdom
• Netherwood Hughes, United Kingdom
• Henry John Patch, United Kingdom
• William Frederick Stone, United States
• John Henry Foster Babcock, United States
• Frank Woodruff Buckles, United States

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surviving_veterans_of_World_War_I

The last surviving veteran of a Central Powers Nation, Franz Künstler of Austria (Austro-Hungary), died in May.

Of the greatest war that had — in its day — ever been fought; the war that unmade four empires, rewrote the maps of Europe, near Asia, and Africa; the war that destroyed the last great age of globalism; the war so total that it was called, for fifteen years, the Great War: almost no one remains who remembers that war first hand. In four years, the last vestiges of the medieval Europe of kings, fiefdoms and peasantry were unwritten. In only a few years, no one alive will remember that ancient world.

Before I was born, November 11 was Armistice Day. These men were elder statesmen, gentle retirees, and they were everywhere. Today we look over the boundary of oral history and history. A thing we lived through will become a thing we read about.

We can turn the wheel forward: sometime around my own retirement, no one alive will have fought through World War II.

And we can turn this wheel backward: when my father was born, the codgers playing checkers in front of the feed store were Civil War veterans.

When we measure history in lifespans, it becomes shorter. By this measure, Napoleon conquered Europe only three lifetimes ago. For almost a century, when people spoke of “The Wars,” they meant the ones Napoleon started. (When I was a kid, people said “the war“ and meant WWII. No one says “the war” anymore, unless they mean “this war,” that is, the one we fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

With that new span of measurement — lifespans, not years, or decades, or generations — the progress of the last five hundred years takes on a frightening dimension. For 17 lifespans, the people of Europe toiled in varying states of serfdom within a religious and political framework that transcended all memory: living and written. Think about living within a social order that was almost exactly like your parents’ social order; who in turn lived almost exactly as their own parents had lived ... for seventeen lifetimes.

On an archaeological timescale, agriculture — the foundation of almost all existing social order — is ten times longer: 170 generations. Only one tenth of that time — those 17 endless lifetimes — have passed since the fall of the Roman Empire. But agriculture is itself but a blink: human beings, in their present shape, have been making tools, singing songs, telling stories, hunting, fishing, building: for 900 lifetimes.

Of those 900 lifetimes, we have lived with “modernism” (capitalism, democracy, equality, science, and progress) for only seven lifetimes. The United States is only barely three lifetimes old.

I think the men whose names appear above fought for the victory of Modernism over Feudalism, although they almost certainly didn’t see it that way. In 1900, serious thought about history and politics contended with the fate of empires: British, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Chinese...by 1919, only one of those empires mattered. As the Great War slips over the Event Horizon of a Single Lifetime, we might start to think that the modern world order — the one with capitalism and science and so forth — is here to stay. When we consider the weight of all the lifetimes before, however, our modern world order may feel a little fragile.

You can use a Swiss Army knife to cut your fingernails in two different ways. Everyone knows the first way and has probably done it at some point in their lives (usually while camping) you open the little tiny scissors and make scissory motions across the ends of your fingernails. In other words: you exploit the technology of a scissors, which is good for cutting through a thin surface, but not much else. By the same token, the only way you can “scissor” something is using a scissors.

The other way requires a little more finesse. You can open one of the blades — the big one works better — and caaaarefully pare the ends of your fingernails. In other words: you apply the technique of “paring,” using whatever sharp edge is available, in this case the blade of a knife. Importantly, if you know how to pare your fingernails with a knife, you can use anything with a sharp edge to do so, including one half of an open scissors.

In studying material culture, the difference between technique and technology struck me pretty forcefully. In a seminar in ethnoarchaeology I watched several short films on Aboriginal life produced by the Australian government in the 1920s and ’30s. They had catchy titles like “Butchering a Kangaroo,” “Collecting Dew,” and “Building a Fire,” but were deeply fascinating nonetheless. Aboriginal people traditionally carried very little on their persons. In “Butchering a Kangaroo” the protagonists accomplished this feat using a small stone flake perhaps two inches across (which one of the men carried with him), and two straight sticks conveniently lying nearby. The men exploited their own voluminous knowledge of the local environment and kangaroo anatomy. In other words, they exploited technique almost exclusively. If you know the party trick of opening a beer bottle with another beer bottle (or a belt buckle, or the edge of a table), you have a sense what this must feel like.

On the other hand, I completed my thesis work with Eskimo people, who are famous for having had a highly advanced Stone Age material culture. Whereas an Australian hunter might carry on his person only a small handful of very generalized tools with which he could hunt a wide variety of animals in many circumstances, an Eskimo hunter would have very complex and specialized weapons optimized for hunting a particular animal in a particular circumstance. The harpoon you’d use to hunt seals surfacing for air during the winter is rather different from those you’d use to hunt seals from the open water, or on shore during the mating season; all of these are probably different from the harpoons you use to hunt walrus. Eskimo material culture places great emphasis on technology.

Of course, Australian Aborigines and Alaskan Eskimos live in very different environments, which explains almost entirely why they place different emphases on technique and technology. If you tried to carry a diverse toolkit of specialized tools across the outback, you’d never make it from one water source to another fast enough to avoid dying of thirst. And if you tried to pare your toolkit down to something that would fit into one hand, you’d never kill and process enough animals in the Arctic summer to make it through the winter without starving. Surviving in the Outback places a premium on flexibility, which favors technical solutions. (If you have the right technique, you can cut your fingernails with any sharp edge). Survival in the Arctic places a premium on efficiency, which favors technological solutions (given the right tool — a fingernail clipper — you can cut your fingernails much more quickly than paring them with a knife.)

I think the history of technology is about the inexorable replacement of technique with technology, improving efficiency at the expense of flexibility.

For example, many years ago, finding your way around required pretty detailed knowledge about celestial motion and the local landscape. You had to use sticks and shadows, or stars, to figure out where North is, and you had to know a lot about the immediate geography (and geographic processes) just to answer “where am I?”.

Maps and compasses turned orientation into a technological task. Reading a map requires a great deal of technique, of course (as does using a compass), but much less than having to orient yourself without either of those things. You have to learn how to read a map, and you have to learn how to calibrate a compass and compensate for the declination of magnetic north. But maps and compasses allow much more efficient orientation than astronomy and local knowledge. If you have a compass and the right maps, you can find your way anywhere in any conditions ... no need to wait for the right celestial conditions (a clear sky), or spend time learning the local terrain.

GPS renders maps and compasses slow and fussy. If you have a good GPS receiver you don’t need to know how to use maps or compasses, and (more importantly) you don’t have to acquire a map before you start out on your journey. The GPS is much more efficient for the unskilled orienteer than maps and compasses, which are in turn more efficient than astronomy and local knowledge.

My discussion of GPS kind of paints technology as the clear winner over technique, but I can think of at least two downsides to a reliance on technology at the expense of technique. From a practical perspective, technological solutions presuppose a certain number of systemic, social, or other technological prerequisites. For example, if the Hubble telescope exploded and took out half the GPS satellites with it, your GPS wayfinder might become a useless paperweight. It would take a a pretty big systemic failure to render a compass and map useless.

But more than that, inattentiveness to technique means putting a lot of knowledge into a conceptual black box. You don’t even have to know what “north” is to use a GPS.

When the topic is GPS and maps, technique vs. technology seems kind of abstract and quaint. But using low-technology techniques allows a craftperson — especially a novice — to peek into that black box. I would rather, for example, hire a designer who started out coding their HTML by hand, even if they use a WYSIWYG tool to do so now. Someone whose only knowlege of orienteering is “I turn where the little box tells me to turn” is not likely to be a creative thinker about how to get un-lost. Just before Orion was born, I got into a little discussion with David Carson(!) about just this subject on the 37signals blog.

The older I get, the less faith I have in technology. (This is surprisingly common among people who work with computers). My French press broke last week, the fourth such press that’s broken for me. I’ve therefore taken to making cowboy coffee, definitely a triumph of technique over technology. With less prompting, I’ve been using a reel mower instead of a power mower, vim in deference to a word processor, and a bicycle instead of a car. (And I’ve started paring my fingernails, which even I admit is pretty pointless.)

I don’t so much fear a technology’s failures (although, with energy prices rising I think it should be a concern), as I appreciate the unusual attention to detail the low-tech method affords me. With the reel mower I can physically feel the way grass grows. Cowboy coffee has literal texture. My commute by bike connects me to all the places between my home and office. Vim makes me slow down and consider my words.

I spent a portion of my weekend sorting and cleaning some of my old bike tools. Mixed in with which were the bare core of my archaeological field kit. Said discovery occasioned me to reflect on a life I used to have: I used to be an archaeologist.

I left that life behind nine years ago. After seven years of chasing work around the country, I wanted to put myself into a place first, and a job second. That’s when I took up the website-making stuff.

When people learn about this past life, they wonder either or both of two things:

1. Why I ever left it for web design
2. How my archaeological work prepared me conceptually for web design

The answer to the first question is easy: because it’s so much easier to find jobs designing websites. This is not, for me, a matter of income: I could (and did) happily live on my archaeologist salary. No, what makes website design a better career is that no one, ever, has said to me “you’re lucky even to have a job.” I think I heard this phrase, or variations thereof, from nearly all of my archaeology bosses, even the good ones whom I liked and who valued my abilities. The sad fact of having a job title like “archaeologist” is that the supply of people with that title far outstrips the demand.

The answer to the second question is also easy, but most people don’t like to hear it. So I don’t tell them. I think studying anthropology excellently prepared me for heavy-duty brain work, as I’ve written about previously. (Grad school also gave me another headstart on web design, but the reason was historical. I started grad school in 1995 when the web was young and unfettered high-speed Internet access kind of tricky to come by. By virtue of my status as a grad student at the University of Oregon, I had time-share access to Unix web servers, and fast ethernet.) But really, I’d have had (most of) this preparation if I’d have gone straight from my undergraduate degree, through grad school, and into the non-anthropology workforce. It has more to do with the great ability of a liberal education to prepare a person for nothing and everything all at once, provided that person is actually paying attention.

One perceptive person once deduced that archaeology — especially geoarchaeology, which I was pretty good at — conditioned the mind to think four-dimensionally, which was useful lateral training for work with computers. Everyone else sees some connection between the patience or care they imagine archaeologists use in excavation, and web design. I don’t buy that at all, because archaeology really doesn’t require that much patience or attention (just good note-taking), and web design doesn’t require it at all.

No, the real (and very prosaic) answer to “how did your archaeological work prepare you conceptually for web design” is “because it got me working with databases.” That’s really the only connection between what I used to do a decade ago and what I do now.

I often miss archaeology, because it’s a very satisfying job in its daily details. I particularly miss working and living outdoors. The career also provided a good mix of brainwork and hard physical labor, a combination lacking in most other (any other?) jobs. For the sake of reminiscence, I scanned a few old photos of my archaeology self, shaggy hair, beard, sunburn and all.

Apropos of nothing, I made a chart that shows, for any given year since I graduated from college, the number of W-2s I filed, and the number of addresses I called “home.” Of course, these are incomplete metrics of how often I hop jobs or shift house. The job metric omits freelance jobs that don’t provide W-2s, but over-represents temp agency jobs that no one would consider terribly permanent. And how I define “home” is notoriously vague. Do I count places at which I’ve received mail? This would include, for example, several “c/o General Delivery” addresses I had while doing fieldwork. For the purposes of this exercise, I decided to define “home” as any address at which I received a bank statement. So most of my abodes while performing fieldwork are not represented. On the other hand, this metric over-represents my parents’ addresses, where I had my bank statements forwarded during periods of high mobility (e.g. while living out of my backpack or moving to China).

Plotting a trend — even an exercise as simple as this — reveals patterns. Overall, I average about 2.4 jobs and 2.3 addresses per year. The inverse of the mean (1/µ) suggests a periodicity of about 0.4 for both metrics — in other words, I change jobs or addresses every 0.4 years (or 5 months). The logarithmic trend lines reveal a clear pattern to hold jobs longer as I age, and a less-clear pattern to shift addresses less frequently. In other words, my early job-hopping skews the job-hopping metric, but I can reliably be counted upon to shift addresses every five months.

The archaeologist in me sees three discontinuities. In particular, I notice two “stable years” (1996 and 2004) in which I had only one job and lived in only one address. I also have one “ultra-unstable” year (1999) where I top out both metrics. If this chart were a seriation of pottery shards from an archaeological site, I would expect that those three sample units are providing especially unusual information. So what happened in 1996, 1999, and 2004?

In 1996, I was in the second year of grad school. I had a fellowship that I carried for both years of school, and which grew out of and back into my job as a Collections Assistant at the Oregon State Museum of Anthropology. It was a great job and I was good at it. I also had an affordable, nice-enough apartment close to campus. So 1996 actually represents two years of stability: from the time I moved to Oregon (August, 1995) to start school, until I left school and moved to Montana for my first field directorship (August, 1997). The stability here was real: my life was mostly unchanged during the period beginning in 1995 and ending in 1997.

In 1999, I left my last archaeology job in Southern California and changed careers into web design. This was also the height of the DotCom boom. The job-hopping represents my gaining traction in my new career: two of my W-2 were for temp agencies that year. The address-shifting represents both the move from SoCal (back) to Oregon, as well as an abortive move to Seattle. There were also intra-city moves in Redlands and Portland.

2004 was the first year after I met Jenny (my favorite person). We were living in a rented house in Multnomah Village (my favorite home of my adult life), and I was working as an Art Director at Curiosity (my favorite job ever). We lived in that house for two years (July, 2003 to June, 2005). I had the Curiosity job for almost three (July, 2002 to April, 2005).

All this seems like a lot of change. But the apparent job-hopping, and to a lesser extent the house-shifting, are artifacts of my chosen careers. Both archaeology and web design are project-based work. Moreover archaeology is seasonal and site-dependent. When the project ends, everyone gets laid off, and you move (geographically) to the next available project. This happened to me with five archaeology jobs (one in 1993, three in 1994, and one in 1999). I kind of developed a nose for impending layoffs, and managed to duck out of some of my design jobs just before the company declared bankruptcy (which happened once in 1999, and three times in 2001).

After 1999, however, my profession doesn’t explain my address changes, because I pretty much lived entirely in Oregon. From 1999 to 2002, however, I was living through my unhappy first marriage, which produced a lot of moving-in and moving-out. I can attribute three address changes in that period to two separations and a divorce.

2007 looks to be an on-trend year. Jenny and I will be back in Oregon soon and I’ll be looking to add another job to my resumé. Frankly, though, I’m getting sorely tired of these shenanigans. My life has suffered from a surfeit of adventure, professional and personal. Despite which, as I’ve come to realize this past year, I am not a particularly adventurous person. If pressed, I’d say my favorite years (in the past fourteen) were, unsurprisingly, 1996 and 2004. (Although 1994 might rate as well, for very different reasons.) My least favorite would certainly be 2002, which was kind of the karmic hangover for 1999–2000.

I sometimes liken myself to a hobbit. I really long for the comforts of familiarity and the dignity of labor. I don’t care much for fancy trinkets or fast living. In another age I’d have made a pretty good farmer. But every so often I get an itch, and I tear my life apart scratching it. Today I’m hoping our adventure in China proves to be the last.

I resist talking too much on the blog about Big Ideas in regards to China vs. America (or anywhere else), in part because my thoughts aren’t well formed, but also because such ideas could easily be mistaken for racism. Several long email exchanges with friends Back Home have led me to reconsider my resistance. So I’m reworking my Big Thoughts on China and putting them into a miniseries of sorts. I don’t know how long this miniseries will be or what topics it will cover. For now, I’m just editing those email exchanges for public consumption.

But first, a disclaimer:

I don’t think the Chinese mind is hardwired differently (in a genetic sense) than the non-Chinese mind. I work with a lot of expats of Chinese heritage (i.e. Chinese-Canadians, Chinese-French, etc.) whose worldview pretty closely resembles mine. But the Chinese mind definitely runs a different OS. I’m bound to make sweeping generalizations about “the Chinese mind” or “Chinese Culture” or other such artificial stuff. Generalizations like that are impossible in a country of 1.3 billion people speaking two dozen languages with 3000 years of written history. They’re certainly bound to be shallow, given we’ve only been here seven months and spent almost all that time in one city (and not a very important city at that). When I say these things, you can assume I’m being intellectually lazy, but please don’t assume I think the people of China are somehow, in some substantive sense, different from myself. <ironic>Also: “Many of my best friends are Chinese.”</ironic>

So here’s where I’ll start:

Before we moved to China, I had lots of thoughts—stereotypes, really—of what China would be like. Those stereotypes were, almost universally, spectacularly wrong. The funny thing is, I was pretty well-read regarding China. In college I studied East Asian history and read Taoist literature in translation. We started studying Mandarin before we moved here. My wife grew up in Taiwan. In the past few years I’ve been keeping an eye on news about China. I was getting a lot of my information from neo-liberal free-market rah rah press like the Economist and Thomas Friedman. I thought I was well informed. If I was wrong, my sources are wronger.

I think everyone is a little misinformed about China, probably including the Chinese people. I think a lot of commentators get it wrong because a well-run Chinese city makes a good first impression. It looks clean and shiny and modern on the surface, but scratch the surface and you’ll see how slapdash everything underneath is. (I also mean this literally, BTW. Fancy new highrises in Xiamen are actually 30 story unretained concrete piles with interior walls of fired red brick. Everything is covered with stucco and bathroom tile to make it look “modern.”). The half-finished character makes it seem all go-go, but you need to spend a little time with a place to get past those impressions. When I read Friedman it’s apparent all he’s seeing of China is what his handlers let him see from inside a proverbial limo. “Handlers” in this sense might not necessarily be government officials, but more generally people with an interest in developing a certain view about China.

When you get out of the limo, you have to live in a different world. A world where you wash soot off your vegetables, where waiters stand obsequiously at your table while you look at your menu yet are nowhere to be found when you want more water, where farmers are driven off their land by rapacious real-estate developers, where the air is yellow for weeks on end, where people who make $1 a day rub the feet of people who make $1000 a day, where someone smiles when they deliver bad news, where remote officials in the Northern Capital issue sweeping statements about reducing carbon dioxide emissions while out here in the sticks they’re laying six-lane highways and building a coal-fired power plant every day, where most drivers have had their licenses for less than two years, where people eat pizza with chopsticks and spit chicken bones on the table. Outside the limo, we get the strong sense that everyone is making this up as they go along. China isn’t playing the same globalization game as everyone else. They’re making their own rules here about culture, intellectual property, trade barriers, and the free flow of capital and information. They might be worthy rules, but they are certainly unprecedented, and probably unpremeditated.

There are a couple other blogs I read that do this better than I could:

• James Fallows
• Benevolent Misanthropy