The Digital Age is upon us

I want to showcase three writers whose work intersects with this content and helps us think   differently. The common theme within all their writing is the presumption that the economic framework, morality, and organizations of our world are not scaling well to a new digital age.

Eli Pariser is the chief executive of Upworthy. He was also on the board of MoveOn.Org.  In his book, the Filter Bubble,  he examines how the internet is filtering out what we want to see and what we don’t want to see.  That is concerning as allows many of us to filter out views that are counter to our own. This can be very dangerous in a democracy.

Then there is Don Tapscott, who wrote, “Grown up Digital” and “Macrowikinomics”

Tapscott suggests that we really need to develop new frameworks and paradigms.

Here is a quote from a Forbes interview that he gave, “In one sense, the Internet is like the discovery of the printing press, only it’s very different. The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge. The Internet gives us access not just to knowledge but to the intelligence contained in people’s crania, access to the intelligence of people on a global basis. This is not an information age. It’s an age of communication, of collective intelligence, of major collaboration, of major participation.”

And finally, Michael Sandel is a a writer for Atlantic and his book "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets," is an examination of how market based thinking so completely dominates that we assume we can “buy anything”. But we all know that you can’t buy love.  You can however, pay someone to stand in line for you and sell advertising space on your body if you live in Japan.  In the "Case Against Perfection," he continues this line of thought by pointing out that our morality is not evolving at the same pace as our technology.

 

Down the Up Escalator

In her book, "Down the Up Escalator," Barbara Garson chronicles real life stories from the recent "Great Recession" showing us the personal pain and loss that so many ordinary Americans experienced. She interviews a group that she called the "Pink Slip Club" where no one's life has returned to normal after being laid off from their modest but solid middle class jobs. She looks at workers in retail sales and highlights how this once secure service sector job has now become part time work without benefits. 

She tells the story of many faced with losing their homes from the mortgage crisis. In many cases, we see individuals who made bad choices to refinance at the wrong time or buy up in a speculative manner only to end up losing it all. One point she makes is that many solid citizens who once would have thought it unthinkable to walk away from debt did just that and walked away from their homes and mortgages. I can't say that this all has a distant ring for me. Some of my own friends at work were laid off during this time and I know that they often dug themselves into a deep hole by living on credit cards and dipping into retirement accounts. Even once they found a new job, their salaries never met what they once had. And my own next door neighbors, going through a divorce, found a short sale on their house to be the best solution when they found that they had refinanced one too many times and now owed more than the house was worth. 

While the book is full of individual stories, her real focus is on the cause and consequences of this long period of history where wages have not come even close to keeping pace with productivity. This has been a time where the wealth in America has gradually transferred to the hands of fewer and fewer. From the dot com bubble to the real estate bubble, it is always the average American that comes out on the losing end because they simply do not have the access or the means to weather these storms.

She ends her book with a few profound thoughts. First, she acknowledges that this is not like the Great Depression. These folks are not hungry and by in large not homeless. But they are not sure if they will ever work again and have lost any sense of security around home ownership and retirement. Planning for their own future has become day to day. We as human beings do not like uncertainty and yet we have allowed an economic system to dominate where safety nets are considered a sign of weakness.

Malcolm Gladwell

Just finished my second Malcolm Gladwell book. The "Tipping Point" triggered my thoughts around what the country would look like when marriage equality hit the "tipping point" and fortunately, we just saw that happen in 2013.
The one I just finished, "What the Dog Saw" is a collection of his writings in the New Yorker. The only one I did not enjoy was on Ron Popeil, the kitchen gadget guy. But the rest of the collection will really inspire you to look at things in a different way and that is really what this blog is all about. How can we face all the challenges we find in our world and cast them in a new light?

One of the most interesting pieces was on the Enron scandal. He points out that while we think things like that happen because of secret accounting practices that hid the problems. The truth is that they were not secret at all and it was all out there for anyone to see. But it was so completely complex and convoluted that no one was able to easily draw out what was going on. So while we definitely need oversight, it is also imperative that those overseeing the accounting need to have the skills and knowledge to understand what they are seeing.