We all have a secret fear:
That we will one day reach a day of reckoning, when we realize that instead of writing that novel or hanging out with our kids or building that startup, we chose instead to spend our time staring into our evil, little screen.
People worry about this kinda stuff, sure, but I think long-term we will adjust. We’ve moved from an industrial society to a digital society, so of course there are going to be massive adjustments to make.
The great thinker, NYU’s Clay Shirky wrote about this a decade ago. Apparently the Industrial Revolution was so traumatic on society, that in order to cope, the English basically got drunk on gin for a generation. And it was only after they got over “their collective bender” was society able to build the cultural institutions it needed for this new, post-feudal, industrial reality.
And so be it with us. We will adapt. All that recent backlash in the news aboutFacebook and Cambridge Analytica is just the beginning.
Today’s $120BN decline makes it all the more interesting.
Nothing is forever. And nothing is really what it appears to be at first. So as worried as we are about the new digital thrall we all seem to be under, there’s plenty of stuff to be excited about. Again, this is just the beginning.
