Fate only provokes the incident; it’s up to us to determine the quality of its effects – Montaigne – from my phrase collection in Portuguese.
We are cultural beings.
What makes us different from animals is our capacity to transform the world to make it habitable, taking into account our limitations.
Unlike animals that live in ecological niches, we need to create knowledge ecologies.
Thus, behind our civilization, there is an informational environment (or operating system) that supports it and enables our existence.
The more numerous we are on the planet, the faster the operating system has to run to meet increasing demands of quality and quantity, as well as complexity – the combination of the former two.
However, this demand is invisible, slow, and almost imperceptible. It takes a long time to appear, but it’s inescapable. Just look at São Paulo and its traffic jams.
Decades went by, with no planning, before we reached this chaos.
Thus, the Internet is born to enable a new knowledge environment for a planet with 7 billion living souls.
It’s interesting to note that the upgrade of this informational environment (or operating system) is done spontaneously. Or better, through trial and error, without a “God” above planning our future.
No, in humankind’s history there was never a bad or good genie, able to perceive the impasses and latencies in informational environments, who designed the new knowledge operating system.
Things just happen. It was like this with all other technologies that made a difference – from the book to the Internet, from the telegraph to the telephone.
Nobody thought the world would be reduced in terms of time and space. Things are put forward and we collectively migrate, incorporating intelligence and interests, while civilization advances and becomes consolidated.
In fact, inventors of these technologies of rupture just wanted to make money by coming up with something that could make life in some way easier for some people.
Thus, entrepreneurs launch their products and depending on their capacity to meet latencies, people will adhere to them.
The new operating system is built by trial and error, especially because adherence is always unpredictable. The system will have to meet people’s demand to facilitate their informational life.
(The printed book resulted from Chinese experiences Gutenberg had heard about and decided to experiment with. He wanted to sell pictures of Saints at the Church door, and unknowingly changed the world.)
Thus, people realize it’s faster to communicate via cell phones, through computers connected to a worldwide network. And presto, they are in.
If the operating environment is the background, society and its institutions are the applications which run in the new environment.
In the past, “social applications” were slower, based on a suitable operating system, which met the printing and processing demands of a population with a specific size.
Today, there is incompatibility between the speed of demand, of the network that started to accelerate the planet, and institutions born under concepts and pace of the past environment.
We are sons and daughters of the printed book, which generated an environment for sharing ideas, which enabled the industrial revolution civilization. This civilization can’t cope any longer with the current world, on a globalized and overcrowded planet.
Actually, all 2.0 projects are cultural initiatives, trying to accomplish this mental upgrade, adjusting institutions to the new level of speed, quantity, and quality of exchanges occurring on the web, which results from the demands of more people on the planet.
We have now a more robust and faster operating system, which arrived first to create an environment for sharing ideas to reshape institutions. These institutions will be based on new philosophical, political, economic, and social concepts that will become hegemonic in the still embryonic and emerging ruling class.
This is the challenge faced by all people who wish to implement “Internet projects” or whatever we call them.
Revamp institutions to make them suitable to a more populous and, therefore, more complex planet.
Schools, hospitals, companies, Justice, and Legislative are no longer compatible with the current world and its operating system.
They all need to become internetized to be faster and cope better with new complexities – and this has nothing to do with building homepages.
Thus, in order of development:
- 1– The population grows increasing demand.
- 2 – A new informational environment is created for information sharing and communication, or knowledge, which spreads like fire in dry grass.
- 3 – Institutions become incompatible with the new environment and need to migrate to the new system, revising their actions.
That’s what the 2.0 world is all about: a civilizational revision!
What we call the 2.0 world is the revision of the Media Age, of the control exercised by large monopolies, which will have to become compatible with the new operating system, invented by new masses of people to protect themselves, prosper and go forward.
It’s the Hidden Collective Intelligence in action.
(Do you believe in goblins? Neither do I, but I believe in the Hidden Collective Intelligence. I’m going to put a sticker on my car: “I believe in the Hidden…”)
That’s it. What do you say?
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Translated by Jones de Freitas. Edited by Phil Stuart Cournoyer.
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