Sitting on the bus this morning, I was listening to music, sipping my coffee, and watching other people. There were a handful of people on the bus who were doing a bunch of things at once - reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, checking their Blackberry's, talking on the phone, playing with their hair (girls play with their hair a lot I've noticed). There was a sense that they just couldn't take in enough information, but not information in the observation sense - take my co-worker who was surprised to see a dead deer on the road. In the six months that she's been taking the bus down the 280 she's never noticed a) other dead deer b) the signs that say watch for deer and c) the DEER that are eating grass on the side of the highway. She doesn't miss a day reading the paper but isn't even taking in the information around her.
So I start thinking about how bizarre it is that humans are so interested in what other humans are doing, and how I observe humans but not any more than I observe anything - plants, animals, weather, stars. There's not much in the news about what animals are doing unless it relates somehow to what humans are doing with animals. Same with plants and space and weather. It reminds me of the hilarious comment from a lecture on environmental sustainability that a natural disaster is only considered a disaster if it kills humans. A million cows killed by Mad Cow (a disease we potentially caused) isn't a tragedy but 10,000 people killed in a mudslide is.
I was feeling like someone from Heroes who has seen the future and knows that what everyone is madly doing at this moment is so inconsequential to the big picture and so soon to be obsolete. I haven't seen the future and I don't know what it is but I'm pretty sure that the industrial age is about to come to an end. The age in which we set up factories and machines to exploit natural resources and human labor to create goods. The age in which we work in these factories to make money to buy the stuff that's made in them. It's mostly coming to an end because we're going to run out of resources to exploit but also, I think, because the kind of change that we need to make in the coming years for our species and civilization to survive will need to happen quickly and be motivated by much more than profit.
The age that's going to replace it is the age of the individual - but not everyone will be an individual. In this age, individuals, not corporations, are in charge. Companies still exist but they work for us instead of the other way around. A people-powered world where we don't have to demand change and yet suffer the constraints of an old system, we'll just collective make the change. Individuals are much quicker to adapt than companies. Think about it. How long did it take people to buy into the iPhone? Something that was literally revolutionary six months ago is now commonplace. Did people have to be cajoled into using it? No. Now think about wi-fi and the fact that if it were up to PEOPLE, all cities would be wi-fi enabled. I'd be happy to pay a monthly fee to access public wi-fi, or pay it in taxes, or not at all. But we don't have it because the communication companies spent a billion dollars laying fiber optic cable so they keep us in the dark ages (while people in developing nations access wi-fi on tiny handheld computers run that on solar power!) because they need to make money off of their investment.
Individuals are more innovative than think tanks, better benefactors than governments, better employers than corporations, better organizers than unions, and better reporters than newspapers. One could make an argument that certain things need infrastructure, like communication, but in the wi-fi scenario, that just isn't the case. Transportation, maybe, but again if individuals were in control, we'd be putting our money into railroads instead of airplanes. Big business runs the world but they're losing their grip. More people are using sites like Craigslist, eBay and Amazon to buy and sell from each other instead of companies. Etsy lets individuals sell things they've made to other people, things that are more interesting and cheaper than a lot of "made in China" crap from Target. Celebrities and philanthropists like Bill Gates and Richard Branson are doing more to change the world than our president.
In the age of the individual, reputation is everything, and these people who aren't working for the common good can no longer hide in a corporation or the White House. Microfinance is taking banks out of the equation by letting people lend money to each other. And people are starting to see that health care as something employers need to provide just isn't viable. Too many people now don't have an employer. More and more people are working from home, creating their own jobs, their own businesses and deciding how and when they want to work. We're deconstructing the power structure that was royalty, religion, government and business and increasingly breaking the world down in smaller bits that connect in new, random and spontaneous ways. We're starting to look like the internet - a place where literally anything can happen. This change adds more checks and balances to every interaction and ultimately makes us all much more accountable to each other.
There were three articles in Rolling Stone this month about big recording acts not renewing their record contracts and either going straight to the people with their music (Radiohead), working directly with a promoter and cutting out the middle-man (Madonna) or just simply letting their contract expire (Nine Inch Nails). It's an exciting time, and this trend is something that gives me hope. If corporations are in charge of turning this planet around, it will never happen in time, but if the right individuals take charge, it just might.
Showing posts with label individual. Show all posts
Showing posts with label individual. Show all posts
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Do-it yourself is a bad idea
Ever have a boyfriend write you a poem in high school? Watch American Idol? Read an amateur script? I don't have to tell you that some people are more talented than others. There are people who can do things that literally no other person on earth can do. Where did we get the idea that the world would be a better place if instead of celebrating the talented, we elevated the common person to doing whatever they want?
President Bush has said, in defense of going to war in Iraq, that he doesn't believe that the general population is qualified to decide what government should do. Frankly, I have to agree with him on this point. I mean, despite our country being "the land of opportunity", the idea is not that anyone can be president.
A candidate should have to be extraordinarily intelligent, decisive, rational, educated, informed and compassionate because that person is making decisions on a daily basis that far eclipse the weight of any decision the average person will make in his/her lifetime.
Certainly radical transparency and information sharing are very, very good things. We are no longer living in a world that can afford proprietary rights on anything that can save or improve the lives of others. But I ask you, should we really be allowed to collectively create our world? Look what happened to the Romans!
Today, the idea of gladiators fighting to the death, and of an amphitheatre where this could take place watched by an enthusiastic audience, epitomises the depths to which the Roman Empire was capable of sinking. Yet, to the Romans themselves, the institution of the arena was one of the defining features of their civilisation.
Sound familiar? We're getting giddy over Web 2.0, writing our blogs and then Time magazine declares us all the "Person of the Year." Meanwhile every show on television (including the news) is about tragedy and humiliation, the top story clicked on in The Seattle Times was about horse sex and YouTube and MySpace, while legitimately doing what they were created to do, are also cesspools of the obscene and violent. I'm surprised this didn't make it online.
Don Imus, in his apology, acknowledged that as a society, we need to consider the direction we're going:
Here's what I've learned: that you can't make fun of everybody, because some people don't deserve it. And because the climate on this program has been what it's been for 30 years doesn't mean that it has to be that way for the next five years or whatever because that has to change, and I understand that.
Marketing now is all about interactivity, personalization and relevancy. Some of it is just common sense: in a world where thousands of companies are marketing to me at once, I only want to hear about things I might actually want to buy. But a lot of it is just time-consuming crap that taps into our limitless egos. "Put your face on something and send it to all your friends - they'll love it!"
Are we really living in a more personalized world or are we just being duped into doing more ourselves? Self check-out at the grocery store, do-it yourself plumbing, "customer service" that requires you to be on hold for a half hour and then an hour troubleshooting some piece of electronic equipment are things we don't even blink at anymore. Now marketers want us to make their commercials, write their ads and even design their products!
Lynne Truss wrote a fantastically hilarious book that touches on it - Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door. This is one of those those books that you shake your head, laugh out loud and say "so true" to yourself while reading it. Here's an excerpt.
The bottom line is, we're facing extremely tough and complex issues in the 21st century that the average person will not be able to solve, even if they desire to do so.
Here's an example from The New York Times:
- A Northwest power company owns four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River, a crucial source of so-called clean energy at a time when carbon emissions have become one of the world’s foremost environmental concerns. Without them, they'd have to rely more heavily on coal or natural gas. The Klamath dams only provide enough power to serve about 70,000 homes, a small fraction of PacifiCorp’s 1.6 million customers, which span six Western states.
- The American Indians, fishermen and environmentalists want the dams removed. They say for the last 90 years since the dams were built, endangered salmon have been blocked from migrating, Indian livelihoods have been threatened and the commercial fishing industry off the Oregon and California coasts has been devastated. In addition the water in the river is filthy.
- Residents in Portland and Seattle are the most sympathetic to taking down the dams but they're the ones getting the cheap power hydroelectric provides.
- Farmers in the area rely on the river and its dams which support an elaborate irrigation system started by the federal government more than a century ago. It provides water for about 240,000 acres of cattle pastures, alfalfa fields and other farming and also flows through a wildlife preserve.
So what do you think? Leave the dams? Take them down? What kind of clean-fuel alternatives do you think we should be promoting in Oregon to take their place?
What we should be doing is recognizing, supporting, promoting and celebrating those talented and rare individuals who can actually solve our problems (and for that matter, write TV shows, make movies and run the country)!
President Bush has said, in defense of going to war in Iraq, that he doesn't believe that the general population is qualified to decide what government should do. Frankly, I have to agree with him on this point. I mean, despite our country being "the land of opportunity", the idea is not that anyone can be president.
A candidate should have to be extraordinarily intelligent, decisive, rational, educated, informed and compassionate because that person is making decisions on a daily basis that far eclipse the weight of any decision the average person will make in his/her lifetime.
Certainly radical transparency and information sharing are very, very good things. We are no longer living in a world that can afford proprietary rights on anything that can save or improve the lives of others. But I ask you, should we really be allowed to collectively create our world? Look what happened to the Romans!
Today, the idea of gladiators fighting to the death, and of an amphitheatre where this could take place watched by an enthusiastic audience, epitomises the depths to which the Roman Empire was capable of sinking. Yet, to the Romans themselves, the institution of the arena was one of the defining features of their civilisation.
Sound familiar? We're getting giddy over Web 2.0, writing our blogs and then Time magazine declares us all the "Person of the Year." Meanwhile every show on television (including the news) is about tragedy and humiliation, the top story clicked on in The Seattle Times was about horse sex and YouTube and MySpace, while legitimately doing what they were created to do, are also cesspools of the obscene and violent. I'm surprised this didn't make it online.
Don Imus, in his apology, acknowledged that as a society, we need to consider the direction we're going:
Here's what I've learned: that you can't make fun of everybody, because some people don't deserve it. And because the climate on this program has been what it's been for 30 years doesn't mean that it has to be that way for the next five years or whatever because that has to change, and I understand that.
Marketing now is all about interactivity, personalization and relevancy. Some of it is just common sense: in a world where thousands of companies are marketing to me at once, I only want to hear about things I might actually want to buy. But a lot of it is just time-consuming crap that taps into our limitless egos. "Put your face on something and send it to all your friends - they'll love it!"
Are we really living in a more personalized world or are we just being duped into doing more ourselves? Self check-out at the grocery store, do-it yourself plumbing, "customer service" that requires you to be on hold for a half hour and then an hour troubleshooting some piece of electronic equipment are things we don't even blink at anymore. Now marketers want us to make their commercials, write their ads and even design their products!
Lynne Truss wrote a fantastically hilarious book that touches on it - Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door. This is one of those those books that you shake your head, laugh out loud and say "so true" to yourself while reading it. Here's an excerpt.
The bottom line is, we're facing extremely tough and complex issues in the 21st century that the average person will not be able to solve, even if they desire to do so.
Here's an example from The New York Times:
- A Northwest power company owns four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River, a crucial source of so-called clean energy at a time when carbon emissions have become one of the world’s foremost environmental concerns. Without them, they'd have to rely more heavily on coal or natural gas. The Klamath dams only provide enough power to serve about 70,000 homes, a small fraction of PacifiCorp’s 1.6 million customers, which span six Western states.
- The American Indians, fishermen and environmentalists want the dams removed. They say for the last 90 years since the dams were built, endangered salmon have been blocked from migrating, Indian livelihoods have been threatened and the commercial fishing industry off the Oregon and California coasts has been devastated. In addition the water in the river is filthy.
- Residents in Portland and Seattle are the most sympathetic to taking down the dams but they're the ones getting the cheap power hydroelectric provides.
- Farmers in the area rely on the river and its dams which support an elaborate irrigation system started by the federal government more than a century ago. It provides water for about 240,000 acres of cattle pastures, alfalfa fields and other farming and also flows through a wildlife preserve.
So what do you think? Leave the dams? Take them down? What kind of clean-fuel alternatives do you think we should be promoting in Oregon to take their place?
What we should be doing is recognizing, supporting, promoting and celebrating those talented and rare individuals who can actually solve our problems (and for that matter, write TV shows, make movies and run the country)!
Saturday, April 7, 2007
The epoch of the individual
A psychologist that I met (one of two brief relationships from my foray into online dating) explained to me that the reason we, "Generation X", were so much more self-aware (or self-absorbed, depending on the person) than our parents is because we're living in "The Epoch of The Individual."
Words of analysis have become part of our culture's vernacular. People commonly diagnose themselves as a neat-freak, controlling, passive aggressive, insecure, commitment-phobic, etc. I thought it was genius and asked him to explain further.
The explanation was brief and I have not been able to find any documentation on this theory but this is how I understood it:
When humans first lived on this earth, we had very little understanding of our world. Natural disasters, disease and death were terrifying and unexplainable. They were attributed to "gods" that for whatever reason were angry at us. As a tribe, we did what we could to appease these gods through sacrifices and rituals. This was the epoch of the tribe. Whatever the tribe demanded of a person, was to be obeyed, there was no individual will. Everything was for the collective survival.
As we gained more control over our survival, by building houses and growing crops, we were liberated from the stranglehold of the tribe. When the Jews wrote the bible and proclaimed that man could speak directly to God, we entered a new level of awareness. We entered the epoch of family. We formed societies of artists and thinkers. We amassed wealth and protected our own. Our actions, worth and sense of self were now determined by our place in a family and that family's place within a society.
With the industrial revolution, masses of people now worked for someone else and bought food instead of growing it themselves. Young people moved to cities, alone, to work and live. We were no longer defined by our family. We questioned our purpose in life, went to universities to engage in higher thinking and embarked on an individual quest. Thus began the the epoch of the individual. (During the 1950's when rock and roll was introduced, the teenager was invented and further prolonged this period of self-exploration.)
We live longer than we used to, so perhaps a longer life delivers that luxury. We don't have the biological need to reproduce as soon as humanly possible. Countries with a higher death toll (from war, disease, or poverty) are not ushering in the epoch of the individual with the same voracity. By necessity, many are still deeply entrenched in their tribal and familial roles.
So what's next in this "evolution" of epochs? For one thing, we're dividing the group into smaller and smaller units. Is there anything smaller than the individual? After all, scientists keep finding smaller units of matter that increasingly defy our known reality.
I'd like to posit some wild guesses as to what epoch is next:
The epoch of the virtual self - Like "Second Life" only better. Really LIVE a virtual life. Question: Would there be an "actual" life?
The epoch of the "ideal" self - We could pinpoint the places in our life where we think we went wrong, and change them. I put ideal in quotes because who knows if life would be better or just different.
The epoch of the present self - Higher reflection would afford us the ability to come to terms with everything in our past and live only in the present.
The epoch of the soul - We become "liberated" from our animal instincts and the primitive parts of our brain and instead live entirely in an enlightened state. We may not even need food or sleep!
The epoch of the collective - With the spread of democracy, more and more people get involved in government and governing policy. In the future, we'll be defined by our contribution to the collective.
The epoch of the other - Those who have had the luxury of choosing who to love, how to live and what to do with life, will have the responsibility to help others achieve the same freedom.
The epoch of earth - The focus is completely off of humans as we become caretakers of the earth as a whole. We are only one organism living on the ball of life, it is our duty to maintain it.
The epoch of life - The sanctity of life becomes more important than anything. Eating an animal is considered as barbaric as eating a person. Wars and executions are a thing of our horrifying past.
Words of analysis have become part of our culture's vernacular. People commonly diagnose themselves as a neat-freak, controlling, passive aggressive, insecure, commitment-phobic, etc. I thought it was genius and asked him to explain further.
The explanation was brief and I have not been able to find any documentation on this theory but this is how I understood it:
When humans first lived on this earth, we had very little understanding of our world. Natural disasters, disease and death were terrifying and unexplainable. They were attributed to "gods" that for whatever reason were angry at us. As a tribe, we did what we could to appease these gods through sacrifices and rituals. This was the epoch of the tribe. Whatever the tribe demanded of a person, was to be obeyed, there was no individual will. Everything was for the collective survival.
As we gained more control over our survival, by building houses and growing crops, we were liberated from the stranglehold of the tribe. When the Jews wrote the bible and proclaimed that man could speak directly to God, we entered a new level of awareness. We entered the epoch of family. We formed societies of artists and thinkers. We amassed wealth and protected our own. Our actions, worth and sense of self were now determined by our place in a family and that family's place within a society.
With the industrial revolution, masses of people now worked for someone else and bought food instead of growing it themselves. Young people moved to cities, alone, to work and live. We were no longer defined by our family. We questioned our purpose in life, went to universities to engage in higher thinking and embarked on an individual quest. Thus began the the epoch of the individual. (During the 1950's when rock and roll was introduced, the teenager was invented and further prolonged this period of self-exploration.)
We live longer than we used to, so perhaps a longer life delivers that luxury. We don't have the biological need to reproduce as soon as humanly possible. Countries with a higher death toll (from war, disease, or poverty) are not ushering in the epoch of the individual with the same voracity. By necessity, many are still deeply entrenched in their tribal and familial roles.
So what's next in this "evolution" of epochs? For one thing, we're dividing the group into smaller and smaller units. Is there anything smaller than the individual? After all, scientists keep finding smaller units of matter that increasingly defy our known reality.
I'd like to posit some wild guesses as to what epoch is next:
The epoch of the virtual self - Like "Second Life" only better. Really LIVE a virtual life. Question: Would there be an "actual" life?
The epoch of the "ideal" self - We could pinpoint the places in our life where we think we went wrong, and change them. I put ideal in quotes because who knows if life would be better or just different.
The epoch of the present self - Higher reflection would afford us the ability to come to terms with everything in our past and live only in the present.
The epoch of the soul - We become "liberated" from our animal instincts and the primitive parts of our brain and instead live entirely in an enlightened state. We may not even need food or sleep!
The epoch of the collective - With the spread of democracy, more and more people get involved in government and governing policy. In the future, we'll be defined by our contribution to the collective.
The epoch of the other - Those who have had the luxury of choosing who to love, how to live and what to do with life, will have the responsibility to help others achieve the same freedom.
The epoch of earth - The focus is completely off of humans as we become caretakers of the earth as a whole. We are only one organism living on the ball of life, it is our duty to maintain it.
The epoch of life - The sanctity of life becomes more important than anything. Eating an animal is considered as barbaric as eating a person. Wars and executions are a thing of our horrifying past.
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