This is a guest post by Lynne Desilva-Johnson, cross-posted from her blog, The Trouble with Bartleby

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I came across this post from Dave Pollard via Twitter the other day, and found it so provocative that I am compelled to crosspost. (I emailed Dave and he gave me his permission.) After I retweeted it, a few people wrote back saying it was overly pessimistic and doom-and-gloomy, but after looking through some of Dave’s other posts, he seems to actually be quite optimistic that the power of local community and resilience can “save the world.” Some other posts of his work checking out – A Framework for Personal Action, How to Save the World Reading List, and a really neat list of 65 Essential Abilities for a Relocalized World. Anyway, the below piece just made me go “hmmm,” so I wanted to share. The original can be found here.

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In a recent article in The Economist, futurist Paul Saffo claims humanity’s overdue for a new god. He points out that throughout history, great new religions took shape during times characterized by uncertainty and social unrest, combined with an ability to spread compelling new ideas and world views virally.

And here we are today, he says, equipped with the Web as our communication channel, and a cultural climate bubbling with that same potential for something new to emerge. The article ends there, with only an image of worshippers gathered around an iPad to suggest where we might be placing our faith next.

It was just a prompt, but it’s made me wonder.. is this where we’re headed? Will the next “great” mythology be a story about how technology is going to save us? And can we do better?

If a new zeitgeist were to capture the minds of billions, what might it look like?

Externalizing our saviors, whether in personified gods or computerized devices, is a convenient way to bring us hope when we feel powerless or misdirected, but it can also relieve us of the burden of taking responsibility for our actions or inactions.

Perhaps it’s time to advance our collective story.

We continue to grow more connected, more informed, more intelligent, and more dangerous. Many are aware that the fictions being thrown around about how the world works are just that – fictions. Things are not working all that optimally, and that reality is only thinly veiled. We see the shift underway – with some trying to reveal “truth” by making information free, allowing open communication across borders, and giving people the tools to decide for themselves what’s what and how they want to live and participate. Opposing that effort, as has always been the case, are the ones terrified to lose control.

But how much longer can we continue this charade? It’s clear that our environments and economies are interwoven. We impact each other more and more every day, and our commonalities become apparent just as quickly as our differences. We must be nearing a tipping point.

Can we find a common ground? Can we put the games aside and be honest about things, perhaps agree upon some baseline for sustainability and thrivability on the planet? Can we wake up to our own potential to change the way things are and shape the way they can become?

Or or ideologies too entrenched? Are those in power too enchanted by their own stories to even attempt a reality that could be better for us all?

And while we watch those bigger forces biding time and maintaining illusions, we are given the option to become the change agents – to influence, inspire, and lead ourselves into a brighter future.

Will we act?

Or just pray?

Yesterday I sent out a tweet: “how do you see the world? as a battlefield, or as a playground? something else?” and I received the largest response to any tweet I’ve made ever.

I’ve noticed over the past few weeks that there are a lot of manifestos circulating. I made one myself the other day (a Life Manifesto), saw Leo Babauta of Zen Habits has a beta of his new book posted, focus: a simplicity manifesto in the age of distraction, Umair Haque of the Harvard Business Review just wrote up The Betterness Manifesto, and even a we are human manifesto. (p.s. these are all worth a read!)

What this means to me is that people are growing restless with what’s being presented to us from “out there,” and inside we are taking ownership of our lives and our minds and saying “No.” We are looking inside of ourselves and asking what we really think we are, who we are, what our fundamental values are, and how we can start living honestly and authentically. I personally feel that every action or behavior we take that is out of alignment with what we really believe in crushes our soul a bit. And if you look around, there are a lot of downtrodden people. And people are getting fed up and ready to wake up. Continue reading →

So, this is what I have been talking about. This is what I’ve been exploring for all these months, and trying to figure out for myself. This is the big picture for me. When I’ve been talking about Junto, it’s not the platform I’m really talking about – it’s the conversation. Having the conversation is what matters. Below is what the conversation looks like.

Part I

Here is where we started. Unfortunately my video camera decided to just stop functioning at the outset, so all you hear is my voice. Which maybe is kind of cool in itself, metaphorically. The person with whom I’m speaking, @jazzmann91, is someone who has been reading this blog for a while, and we interact on Twitter as well. He said something to me last night in a tweet, and I suggested we take it to the next level and have a conversation. Unfortunately junto.cc was being buggy with the audio, so we took it to Skype and I recorded it with Jing, and then uploaded it to YouTube.

So this is the Twitter conversation that led to this live conversation: Continue reading →

It’s been an interesting week, to say the least.

In a lot of ways, we all just pulled each other up to a new frequency, I think. We’ve been sharing our ideas and perspectives of our personal discoveries for a while now, and all of a sudden all these perspectives assembled into an insight that helped me understand why the human network is so important, and why building a personal ‘trust network’ is critical for moving forward in society. (For anyone new here, check out An Idea Worth Spreading post and comment thread as an orientation to this site and the thinking going on here.)

So the past few days have been spent thinking about what just happened, and how we can keep doing it.

I have realized what’s happening here is that this blog has become a public learning community, where we are all literally learning how to learn. We are learning how to think in this new way. This new way of thinking, this ‘network thinking,’ by default requires a network. We can’t learn how to think in the new way alone. We can only figure it out through experimentation and collaboration. This is the “shift” everyone is talking about, the big thing that individuals and organizations “need” to operate in the 21st Century. We’re revealing it, unfolding it, right now, together.

My takeaway of what this means and how to do it: Continue reading →

This weekend I experienced a snowcrash; a moment where the seemingly disparate pieces of information floating in my head came together. A synapse fired, a new connection was made, and I was brought to a new level of consciousness, a new way of seeing the world. In reading this over, it almost sounds obvious, but it took me a while to get here. I hope that by sharing with you, it’ll help you “get it” too. So let me take you on my thinking trail.

Insight #1: The Overview

The Future is Networks.

This idea has been buzzing in my head for a long time. The first time I wrote it down was over a year ago, not really understanding what that meant, but it was an “intuition.” As time has gone by, this has seemed more and more probable, but I wasn’t sure how it fit together.

The buzzing has been growing louder, and my mind was saying, ‘The future of Social Business is networks,’ ‘The future of education is networks,’ ‘The future of society is networks.’

What did this mean?

I know everyone is busy. Everyone is looking for some solution to how to make their situation better. If you will just bear with me, I’m going to expose you to what I found to be an incredibly powerful idea. Continue reading →

Can we better equip ourselves to deal with constant change by seeing things through a new lens?

I started exploring this question with the Metathinking Manifesto, and I’m going to try and flesh out those ideas a bit further. Continue reading →

The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. – Einstein

For several years now, I’ve been studying the intersection of technology, culture and communication, the impacts of social media, the relationship between creativity, innovation and design, and the potential of various futures.

I’ve had this gnawing sensation at the edges of my mind that all these areas were held together by a common thread, but I couldn’t put my finger on the connection. My intention is that by taking this out of the incubation stage in my head and putting it into words, it will become clarified and provide some value.

First off, let me lay out a framework . My ideas are based on 3 main concepts:

* Social media is fundamentally changing the human experience.
* The world is increasing in complexity.
* We are experiencing accelerating change.

And a brief explanation of each: Continue reading →