Status message for our world in 2015:
it’s complicated and that’s ok
Connecting the dots in the zeitgeist, from Umair’ Haque’s thought-provoking piece to The Atlantic’s Chrystia Freeland’s “The Disintegration of our world”, the mantra is that our world is at an all-time complexity level. This complexity of human construct, the result of millennia of evolution, is branded as responsible for all our ills, notably the inefficiencies of government and all large-scale institutions to activate and embrace change at a fast enough speed. Taking a step back, our world has indeed seen wide scope generational changes, from the fall of communism and the apparent “end of History”, to the rise of China and India from developing countries to adolescent economies. For all the billions of people lifted from poverty in emerging economies, which should create opportunities for all, our leaders are often incapable of initiating or delivering on change, mired in abject bought-off electoral politics. Freeland also writes: “The struggles of the middle class in rich nations are not attributable solely to globalization, but neither are they unrelated to it.“I think, in a 300-year time frame, this 20 or 30 years will be looked on as a pretty amazing period,” McKinsey’s Dominic Barton said, referring to the past five years and the coming decades. “People are asking, ‘How does the capitalist system work? Is it right? Is democracy right?’ There are a lot of people asking fundamental questions.”
Our democratic systems are in dire need of retooling and I’ve called attention to Lawrence Lessig’s Rootstrikers initiative, which, in my view, gets too little media attention but is one of those commendable efforts. As I’ve written and podcasted, our world is a highly complicated one, and that’s ok in my book. We need to accept that as fact and move on with how we can make it better, with new tools.
My friend Jon Husband’s Wirearchy concept is one of these tools, a -chy designed for the interconnected world we live in and have constructed. We all know and have seen that top down, pyramid-like organizations are no longer equipped to thrive in business, political and other social circles. French President Hollande just last week was seen in a newsmagazine segment (go to 6:48) deplore that the rhythm of change he’d like to apply to France was slowed down by countless layers of bureaucracy, commissions and dilution of responsibility. The thought that classic human organizations are no longer functioning is a scary one for many, given that the command and control construct is a very comforting one for many people, and has been successful for thousands of years.
We seem to be at the cusp of a fundamental reworking of human societies, where networked individuals are able to effect change in an asymmetrical fashion, guerrilla-style. When analyzing the last 4 or 5 decades for network-style evolutions/revolutions, 2 examples are of great interest: the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. These 2 world-changing events came as a complete shock to established analysts and intelligence services, primarily because they were not top-down revolutions (of which there are very few examples) but grassroots, wirearchy-style uprisings, powered by technology. In the case of Iran, the chiite mullahs, with Khomeiny at the forefront, used cassette tapes to disseminate and propagate their message from outside Iran’s borders. In East Germany, West German television served as a daily reminder that something was indeed rotten in communism and there are reports that faxes were used to spark the demonstrations which started with the cry “Wir sind das Volk — we are the people” and became “Wir sind EIN Volk — we are ONE people”.
There’s a resurgence, fueled by angst and the internet, of countless conspiracy theories eg the Bilderberg group, shadow governments pulling strings in the background. My personal view is that the scariest conspiracy theory is that there’s none at all — that is to say, our world is rudderless, without anyone at the helm guiding it, and everyone, political, business and social leaders, “faking it” like they are. While this can be scary, we should accept and embrace it as fact and recognize that there’s a bonus to interconnectedness. It forces us to think beyond ourselves and our daily, inward-looking first world issues, and find collective solutions to the very real challenges that we face as a species.
Let’s collectively roll up our sleeves, do good and effect change where we can, for the greater good of our networked and connected world !
