The Dawn of the Diamond Age

I've been reading a lot of gloom and doom lately. I even thought for a moment all the dire predictions might be right. But after looking at all the mile markers and drivers of change - I think we're on the eve of something wonderful. That may seem counter-intuitive if you've checked your brokerage account lately, or the value of your house, or the cost of a gallon of milk - but take a walk with me and see if I can't convince you that we're entering a renaissance that our children's children will look back on with awe and wonderment.

First, let's get the litany of problems out of the way - so you won't accuse me of sweeping anything under the rug. We're facing a global environmental crisis - there's no doubt. And it's driven by the burning of fossil fuels and a consumer driven economy. We've trained ourselves in little more than half a century to needlessly buy junk, have it manufactured far away, have it shipped to us and sold at low cost and then put it in a landfill so we can buy more. This is a terrible idea, wasteful and soul sucking. Replacing human beings and relationships and conversations with an empty need for consumer goods and consumption.

That's the bad news. The good news is - that's changing.

The emergence of digital goods shifts the consumer consumption economy to one where cottage digital entrepreneurs are making, and selling their ideas in the marketplace. The iTunes App store is a remarkable example of this - digital goods from the New York Times sit next to a .99 application created by a husband and wife who created the Bubble Level. (a great little app that is useful and elegant). Apple says it's now selling a million dollars a day in digital goods. Wow.

Big box stores like Wal Mart haven't been on the earth forever, and there's nothing saying that form of retail is going to last. You can feel the tipping point. Freecycle isn't just cheap, it's right. A used child's bicycle is shared, not discarded. People are hungry to share - it feels good - and it feels right. Using Craigslist to buy or sell a used dvd player or a car - either way, one man's junk is another man's treasure.

Of course, the economic impact of this 'slow down' isn't without a cost. When Walmart or Starbucks closes a store, people lose jobs, real estate goes empty, and keeping the consumer economy afloat becomes harder.

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But you can feel a change. People aren't driving less because gas prices went up .50 a gallon. Well, ok - they are. But as they do - drive less - buy less - consume less, they find other things to do that feel more communal and less consumptive. New businesses emerge. I paid .99 cents for "Bubble Level" software on my iPhone the same month I canceled my premium cable. I wanted to repurpose that $40.00 to be able to buy more media and digital goods 'on demand.' I wanted to shift my economic activity from big media to micro-media. I downloaded Pandora and put it on my iPhone. extraordinary. Pandora is a first generation media platform that can actually 'market' new music to me in a way that I can control (skip) or embrace (thumbs up). I want Pandora to expose me to new artists. I'm hungry for new sounds and new voices. Then, I downloaded Boxee. An open source, web savvy media tuner. A set top box that runs on my computer. Here too - digital media is routed to me, to watch, to share, to support. Tip Jars, Ad Supported, Subscription-based. I'm ready to support the media that I enjoy.

So, fuel prices drive up the cost of physical goods - and shift the economy to digital goods. Just in time.

At the same time - the factory farming system that feeds big box grocery (the supermarket) makes the cost of mass production of food at long distance unsustainable. But we knew that. And frankly, those tomatoes didn't taste that good. So food comes home, more local growers, more homemade and local produce. The 'economies' of transshipped foods are gone, making local food prices competitive - and it tastes better. Does it raise costs - yes. Is that part of the current economic conundrum - yes. But here again - there's nothing that says the trajectory we've been on is a good one, or the right one, or the only one. So this shift comes at a time when the planet demands it and when we can least afford it. But that's always the way.

And then there's the shift in knowledge itself. Who has it. Who needs it. Who shares it. In the past year, I've gone from reading the New York Times first every day, to reading Facebook status updates, to now, reading my Twitter feeds. Why? Because I want information filtered by my community - people I've chosen to 'follow' and whose digital footprint takes me places that I wouldn't have gone on my own. I read Howard Lindzon because I like his view of the market. I read Chris Brogan because he's the smartest guy I know on social media. I read Shelly Palmer because he sifts through a ton of info in the media, and pulls out headlines and links I need to know about quickly. There are 50 more. Twitter is my 'community' newspaper. Edited by friends and colleagues, and delivered in bite sized chunks.

Communities replace cars. Local replaces mass. Digital replaces physical. The desktop replaces the factory.

And then there's politics.

Why is it that the world seems so much more interested in Barack Obama than American media? For our TV Networks and Newspapers - he's a story. Maybe it's a big story, but a story nonetheless. But for the world, the US has been a bright shining light of promise for the past almost century. A country of immigrants who arrived with little and created a lot. This has fueled dreams and passion around the globe. Of course, that's an oversimplification - we all know that - but in recent years as we've moved to close borders, inflict democracy, and export ideas without invitation, the US has become somewhat less of the beacon of hope that it once was. Obama as a symbol at least - offers the hope to rekindle that. Will he do that? Will he win? Is he really a different kind of politician, or is he the same politician with a new color skin? It's far to early to say. But McCain at least is clearly not an agent of change. So Obama's campaign, his web-centric mom and pop fundraising, his soaring retoric, and his personal story of achievement can't help but make the global audience hold it's breath and hope he is what he claims to be. A global leader at a time we hunger for a global view of change.

Oil. Food. Politics. The trifecta of world shaking change. And here they are - demanding attention - insisting we change, or face a calamitous global crisis that seems too near to ignore for another moment.

Which brings me to why I'm so optimistic.

We've wired the world together. We've connected Beijing to Baltimore. Iraq to Italy. New York to New Deli. It's done already. Call centers in India. Computer programmers in Moscow. Twitter feeds from Israel. Facebook friends in Australia. This isn't a theory. It isn't a vision of the future. It's built - and growing - and creating a vibrant new movable feast of talent and partnerships. A digital world of "e" lancers and rent-a-coders. Certainly these massive shifts in work from physical to virtual, from geographic to economic will cause a massive disruption in the economic rules of engagement.

We're only missing one thing - the glue to put it all together. Something universal. Something human. Something that can be handed from parent to child, from neighbor to neighbor to neighbor, across borders and ideologies.

A new global language that connects us all.

The good news is - we have that too. it's video. The digital semaphores of the new world. From cave paintings to video - we need a new universal way to share experiences and allow knowledge to flow uninhibited to any and all.

A year ago - when we were talking about video, the world, finance, and such - my friend Fred Wilson sent me a song. I'd never been sent a song before. Not since high school anyway. So it caught me off guard. An artist I'd never heard, and lyrics I'd never heard. The title: 'We're all in this together' by Ben Lee. The artist wrote the song, Fred sent me the mp3 file. And I made a video. I found pictures on the web. I borrowed some pictures from my family photo album. I asked my son for a few pictures. And made a video. I put it up on YouTube, and left it there to share. But Fred had suggested we're all in this together, and reading the comments about my video - I was stunned at how the music, the sharing, and the video I'd mashed up had connected with people around the world.

It's been viewed 157,289 times. And 441 comments about the video, like this:

McFLYgirl12
This is probably one of hte most amazing videos on youtube this is an amazing song.
Keep on floating the boat

swizzlequeen101
i like this song because it talks about how we are all the same and we need to help
each other out!!

ZanshinKata
Every twelve seconds, someone remembers that we're all in this together.....

CJGlass
I love this song! And this video... the slideshow is perfect!

This wasn't work. This was done because the song made me want to add something, and I had some images - and an idea I wanted to express. 150,000 views later, I guess some folks enjoyed it. That feels pretty good. Not as a job, but as something worth making and sharing.

As I've turned my efforts away from making media - my lifelong career heretofore - and instead toward helping people use media to connect, Magnify.net is powered by the passion of individuals who want to organize and share media.

People are organizing frozen knowledge that is bits of video, and infusing communities with the ability to create and curate knowledge. This isn't a small task. The avalanche of digital data threatens to swamp us all with noise and nonsense. Finding knowledge in the noise, and sharing ideas and information with some confidence that people who want it can find it. It's a tall order. But It's meaningful work.

So - we're facing some daunting challenges in this newly connected world. And we've got the massive global resource of collective human experience and intellect to count on to make it through and out the other side.

Neal Stephanson wrote a piece of fiction that imagined a world in which humans are connected - and have a collective knowledge. He may have been imagining the internet and video, or maybe it's just a staggering coincidence.

But either way, it is truly - the dawn of the Diamond Age.

LINK: We're All In This Together

LINK: The Diamond Age, Wikipedia

Comments

[Sundialsvc4]

You present interesting and uplifting thoughts, Steve, and you do it very well.

Let's not gloss-over that ugly beast, "manufacturing." It's where all these neat digital toys actually come from, and right now it's not sustainable and it's not pretty. We have to make things in order to have things, but our process for getting those things is just as unsustainable, just as broken, as the process of getting our factory-food.

Bring it home. Bring it all home. If you sell it here, make it here. Henry Ford knew that he had to pay all of his workers well-enough that they could afford to buy Ford cars. He did, and they did. The cycles for everything ... food, goods, and yes, even money itself ... need to be "short" in both time and distance.

[KillTheMessenger]

Digital media and high speed internet do not bring order into a cacophony of useless "information". What this country needs is to give its children a library card and the intellectual equivalent of the product manual on how to use it. Instead we are creating a world of zombies against which the Gammas of "Brave New World" look like reincarnations of Albert Einstein, Mark Twain and Aristotle.

[anfractuous]

When they come up with digital food, I think you may be on to something; right now however, you're merely feeding your voracious sensibilities.

[Steve Rosenbaum - Huffpost Blogger]

Of course, digital doesn't solve everything -or frankly - anything on its own. But I'm hopeful that shared ideas about things like clean water, better farming, and also more quickly distributed information about problems (like Google.org's pandemic data notification project) will speed solutions. Of course, you're right - optimism doesn't feed hungry people. Point taken.

[Gabrielle]

YOU ROCK!!!!

[KillTheMessenger]

You are sssuming that people can process information they are given. That is not the case.

If, for example, someone wants to understand our energy problems, they would need to have a working knowledge of physics. I can show you how to find the key information for a solid overview of the world's energy supply and demand in a few hours using Google. But if I have to assume that you know nothing about physics it would take me the better part of a year to teach you about force, mechanical energy, power, electrical voltage and current, electrical energy and power, chemical reactions, their energetics, the consequences of the laws of thermodynamics for chemical/electrical/mechanical energy conversion etc..

And that just covers the theoretical physics aspects of energy. Now we would need to talk about engineering limits which require detailed understanding of the engineering of consumer devices (from cars to compact fluorescents). And then we would still have to cover the political and economic aspects, without which the discussion is fruitless.

Information without knowledge and experience is useless.