themovingpause

Just as language freed us to operate with unprecedented efficacy, the wireless-and-everywhere network brings us new powers, both as individuals and as a race.  We are unprepared for this transition, even though everything in human history has led us directly to this moment.  Everything seems chaotic and random.  The specifics will always elude prediction, but the general outline of events-to-come has already revealed itself:  We are connecting.  We are sharing.  We are learning.  We are doing.  In articulating the details of this outline, this book serves as a ‘field guide to the future’, providing the tools needed to make the most of the tumultuous, explosive and epochal next billion seconds.  Whether you run a business, teach or learn, heal or require care, move the levers of power or seek to, this book will speak directly to you.

The next billion seconds will see more change than the previous sixty thousand years.  We are the lucky few, witnessing the birth of that which follows language.  Our ability to speak created the world as we know it today.  This world is being remade as we utter new words, in a different, connected tongue.  The world around us is hardly changing at all, but the universe beneath our skin has acquired a connected depth we never expected, nor even dreamed of.  There is a space, within each of us, that encompasses all of us.  This new universe of the connected self contains within it all of our knowledge, all of our strengths – and all of our ignorance and weaknesses.  We are becoming more: not better, nor worse, but larger-than-life-as-we-have-known-it.

Over the last half billion seconds we have witnessed a momentous transfer of knowledge: The insides of each of our heads vacuumed out, contents replicated and transferred to vast libraries, broad and deep, reflecting everything known to any one of us, on every conceivable subject. The topic could be quotidian or impossibly obscure – it makes no difference. As soon as someone shares what they know, it is available to every one of us. We all know what they know.

In those moments when we remember that we have nearly perfect knowledge to fall back upon, we become smarter. As that moment, continuously repeated, becomes automatic and instinctive, we acquire a second mind, outside our own, vast beyond comprehension, containing everything, sitting alongside our own, smarter and wiser and faster, continuously informing us of how to maximize every moment.

Now that everything known is shared broadly and freely, now that everyone who cares about any given body of knowledge maintains a constant relation to it and to everyone else who cares about that knowledge, the entire world is composed of a continuously multiplying set of knowledge amplifiers. Any of us can place ourselves within one – or fall in, almost accidentally – simply by engaging. By being present, connecting and sharing, we shed our ignorance and quickly acquire a degree of mastery. We can know nothing and crash headlong into one of these knowledge amplifiers, emerging on the other side changed and potent.

Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a rapid descent into the Bellum omnia contra omnes, Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all.” A hyperconnected polity – whether composed of a hundred individuals or a hundred thousand – has resources at its disposal which exponentially amplify its capabilities. Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment. After the arms race comes the war.

Naturally, governments will seek to control and mediate these emerging conflicts. This will only result in the guns being trained upon them. The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and ‘rebooting’ them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead famously pronounced that we should “Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world.” Mead spoke truthfully, and prophetically. We are all committed, we are all passionate. We merely lacked the lever to effectively translate the force of our commitment and passion into power. That lever has arrived, in my hand and yours.

And now, the world’s going to move – for all of us.

Just as we now see being verbal and being human as synonymous, hyperconnectivity is adding another layer of richness and depth to our experience.  Where we can observe the sudden explosion of depth in the human record, eighty thousand years ago, so our children’s children’s children’s children will look upon this billion seconds as a second explosion, another sudden quickening, before which the ‘dumb’ and disconnected generations of humanity will seem incomprehensible and inhuman.

We are at a threshold.  In fact, we are already more than half-way across it.  We can look in either direction; behind us we can see the familiar shape of a species as we’ve known ourselves for eighty millennia; before us we see something quite different, a form not wholly realized, yet quite real.  We still don’t have all of the language of hyperconnectivity.  The chaos of the present moment is very much like the hollering of seven billion toddlers learning to stretch their voices across an entire planet.  It’s growing quite loud, as everyone clamors to be heard.  There’s a lot of sound, but not much sense.

That sense will come over the next billion seconds.  When it does, the door to our recent past will be closed.  We will have been these disconnected people, but we will not understand them, any more than we can understand our earliest ancestors.  We will have lived two lives, before and after we all connected.