Boys devoured car magazines the way a later generation compulsively toured porno websites. Girls judged their dates by how with-it the borrowed family car was.

Not long afterward, there was another America where it was not only cool but actually viscerally exciting to go to the record store and scour the bins for new (are you ready?) ROCK N ROLL releases. I mean, we’re not just talking getting the latest re-hash of global-fusion, Seattle-garage, techno-warehouse. It was a time when there was a fair chance of finding recorded sounds which could actually CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

Now, there’s yet another America where major stimulus comes not once a year or once a month or once a week but every day. The news pouring from the original Silicon Valley and its offspring from Silicon Hills (Austin) to Silicon Alley (New York City) to Silicon Delhi to Silicon Fuji is a constant nudge—SHOVE!—toward what we're sure must be a better, brighter future.

Pause for breath. Let’s look for a correlation. What do we see if we squint our eyes and blur the hard outlines and bright colors of the 50s, the 60s, and the 90s? Behind these parades of new-new-new, in each decade we see an economic boom. The numbers, bottom-line and market, were going up-up-up. Optimism saturated the very air.

"What’s good for General Motors is good for America," said a 1950s CEO. Bill Gates keeps writing whole, soporific books in which he says the same thing in a lot more words, except what he really means now is, "What is good for Microsoft is good for the WORLD." Whole generations of University of Chicago economists have won Nobel Prizes saying the same thing in words nobody except Swedish prize judges can understand.

Now let us step back for a moment. Way back. Say, a couple of billion years back. One of the great insights of all human history is the biological capsule:

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

Meaning that each individual organism as it grows from germ cell to maturity will, along the way, briefly take the form of each of the major evolutionary stages through which its ancestors passed. So human embryos at one point in their development have gills, and, a little later, a tail.

We're well aware of the form effects here, the changes from small, simple organisms to bigger and bigger, more and more complex ones. Maybe what we don't think enough about is the inner, subjective, experiential effects. What does it FEEL like to be part of this chain of shifting being?

Pasting this all together: Could it be that change, novelty, the desire, the quest for the NEW is so deeply in us, in our very DNA, that our large scale social behavior, macro-economics included, is a constant—if often fumbling and misdirected—movement toward that which has not been before? History, a not-so-blind beast staggering toward the always-new?

Thus, when things get stagnant, we get, well, DEPRESSED. As individuals, we experience small-d depression. As societies, we experience big-d Depression. But when things are churning along nicely, and we just can’t stop gleefully pouring out new stuff after new stuff (cars, music, chips, games, clothes, art, buildings), we feel great, successful, prosperous, and it’s boom times all over again. Because we're doing what a billion years of organismic evolution has taught us to do: think new.

Cassandras keep saying the current boom is a bubble. The stock market is irrationally over-valued, like the infamous Dutch Tulip Mania centuries ago. It’s gonna burst, they say.

Some day, sure. But for now, look at what we’ve got:

Every morning you log on to whatever sites are your news source and there’s no telling what you’re going to read: Deep Blue beats Kasparov, the immaculately conceived Dolly appears in Scotland, Communist China has 4 million Internet users, a pill to make your penis hard? no problem, a million computers around the world are linked in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Et cetera.

Seems like, this time in our search for new stuff, we’re doing it differently—and better. For the first time, we’re managing things on the biggest human scale possible: the whole world. Everybody’s in the game. The number of brains now involved in the Quest for Novelty is at least an order of magnitude greater than before. All those other, earlier boomlets were small-scale, parochial stuff compared to this one. It IS new territory, because we’ve never done it like this before. Who knows, who’s to say, who CAN say how long it may last.

The end of history, as Mr. Fukayama famously stated? I don’t think so. It’s more like the end of PRE-history, and the beginning of the real thing.

^{[Modest little footnote*]}Any theory worth its hypotheses has to be predictive, right? How can we use this little DNA-based theory of newness-driven behavior to anticipate future developments?

If we look at past periods of intense innovation, what do we see? Take post-war car design, for example. A slow start in the late 1940s, given a big boost by Raymond Loewy's mold-braking Studebaker in 1947. Nothing much more interesting than some pretty lavish two-tone paint in the 1950s until you get to fins and things in 1957. For five years it seemed there was nothing you could do with a piece of sheet metal that Detroit wasn't willing to try, culminating in magnificent baroque barges like the Chrysler Imperial (with the huge gunsight taillights) and the Cadillac Eldorado (with fins of a size we didn't see again until Jaws).

By 1962, the design explosion was played out.

So maybe what you look for is: When things reach the stage of "new just for the sake of new," you know the end is near.

Thus: A worrisome recent example, sad to say, is the iMac. In spite of the boost it gave to Apple, it's clear that its "beauty," its newness is only skin deep. I would see it more as a reason to sell, rather than buy or hold, Apple stock.

*Ed. Note: We included the footnote to try to give at least the appearance of academic rigor to Michelle Furr's completely hare-brained scheme.

END

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