A global opportunity
It’s a crisis if you want it to be a crisis. I say it’s an opportunity.
The way things have gone over the past decade or two have really challenged my optimistic outlook. I was whining about the woes of the world to a good friend a few months back when he replied that “There’s a theory that everything is alright and it’s all the way it’s supposed to be.”
What an optimist. “How positive,” I thought.
As our indebted economies crumble around us and as capitalism takes blow after blow I got to thinking that these are things that probably should collapse and fail. They are things that got us to where we are today and we can’t change that. But now, today, in this golden age of the Internet, and smart phones and Facebook, we can do something about it. We can quite literally create a new world order where we can have a fairer system that serves all people on the planet.
Oh no, he just said “New World Order”! What a nut job! Well, let’s face it, we need one. National governments simply can’t handle global issues like population, pollution, banking, tax-avoidance, and Jedward. We have an opportunity to create systems that can control such things and preserve human rights for all people on the planet. It’s ideological sure, but that’s what we need now.
Lots of analysis is great – after all we must first understand how things worked and how things went wrong. We can go into great detail with this for those who care, and we can summarise for the rest. And then, can we start to move on? People need an alternative to latch onto. People need to see the foundations of a new system with new ideas to support.
Let’s start using our limited energies towards creating an alternative. There are literally billions of brains connected online, and if even a small percentage of these collaborated on producing an alternative it would most likely be robust and fair. As adoption of technology speeds up, it could be implemented and in place in a couple of years.
(Image originally published in the NY Times)
The above graphic shows how it took around 60 years for the telephone to be adopted, 50 years for electricity, and 30 for the radio. More recently the cellphone took about 15 years, and Facebook took around two.
The awesomeness of the Internet, the rate of technology adoption, and the huge need for change mean that as a species we can control and shape the future of how we manage ourselves. Let’s do it!
(Ross O'Mullane is founder of www.unitedminds.ie) {jathumbnailoff}
Image top: Adam Crowe.