Several weeks ago, as part of their IPO filing, Mark Zuckerberg released a letter to Facebook’s shareholders elucidating his vision for the company’s role in shaping the world. What follows is an excerpt:
By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date.
We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring. We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.
A more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services, because as people share their opinions, it makes it easier to improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.
By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.
Take a moment to let this sink in. When the digerati go to sleep at night, this is what they dream about, this is where their minds wander. The line between the virtual world and the real world is blurring. Now, they are inextricably linked in a reciprocal relationship of influence.
Initially, the physical shaped the virtual, but now, the converse is occuring. Technology is providing a viable alternative to how global society has been classically organized, and the gatekeepers of the traditional power structures are starting to recognize the threat to the status quo.
Peer-To-Peer, Openness, Transparency, Disruption
Know these words, for they will continually reappear in substantive debates to come. They belong to the lexicon of those that shape the future. They belong to the New World.
OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.
The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The movement, still in its first days, will have to expand in several strategic ways. Activists are needed among shareholders, consumers and students to hold corporations and politicians to account. Shareholders, for example, should pressure companies to get out of politics. Consumers should take their money and purchasing power away from companies that confuse business and political power. The whole range of other actions — shareholder and consumer activism, policy formulation, and running of candidates — will not happen in the park.
The new movement also needs to build a public policy platform. The American people have it absolutely right on the three main points of a new agenda. To put it simply: tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all.
Finally, the new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media. A new generation of politicians will prove that they can win on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blog sites, rather than with corporate-financed TV ads. By lowering the cost of political campaigning, the free social media can liberate Washington from the current state of endemic corruption. And the candidates that turn down large campaign checks, political action committees, Super PACs and bundlers will be well positioned to call out their opponents who are on the corporate take.
Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun.
Arundhati Roy on the culture of inequality and the response it has engendered. From the heart of empire, love and solidarity. We are aware and we do not forget.
In this plastic, anarchic stage of the Occupy movement, these almost painfully conscious protesters, who have nicknamed themselves POCcupiers, are determined to forge a new paradigm that eschews the divide-and-conquer pitfalls of the past. At the same time, the 33,000 square-foot plot that delineates the Occupation remains connected to the entrenched racial, ethnic and gender patterns of society as a whole. Issues that Occupy Wall Street has championed as a matter of principle manifest more concretely as day-to-day struggles for POCcupiers. For example, Occupiers have held aloft signs demanding the repeal of the PATRIOT Act, the effects of which Muslim and Arab POCcupiers have experienced first hand when profiled at airports. Indeed, people of color are over-represented in prisons, public housing, public education and crackdowns on undocumented immigrants.
Reverend Rosemary McNatt, a Unitarian Universalist minister, underscores the paradoxical centrality of the POCcupiers’ concerns. “It’s clear that the Occupy Wall Street folks really have excellent points…But they’re no different—they can’t be any different—from the society they come from.” According to McNatt, protesters who truly seek to create the broad reforms they’re demanding need to acquire “an understanding of the role that gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnic status, immigration status all play in keeping the system the way it is.” She is eager to avoid “the negative narrative” ascribing separatist motives to the POCcupiers. McNatt, who joined Martin Luther King’s demonstration against the Chicago school board at age ten, sees the Occupation as going a step further than the Civil Rights Movement. “All of us exist simultaneously in positions of marginalization and privilege…How do we help people move beyond positions of privilege and marginalization into this space of community and equality and justice? That’s what I love about this movement. Because at its core, that’s what they’re after.”
If you’ve been reading accounts of the financial crisis, or watching film treatments like the excellent “Inside Job,” you know that Iceland was supposed to be the ultimate economic disaster story: its runaway bankers saddled the country with huge debts and seemed to leave the nation in a hopeless position.
But a funny thing happened on the way to economic Armageddon: Iceland’s very desperation made conventional behavior impossible, freeing the nation to break the rules. Where everyone else bailed out the bankers and made the public pay the price, Iceland let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety net. Where everyone else was fixated on trying to placate international investors, Iceland imposed temporary controls on the movement of capital to give itself room to maneuver.
So how’s it going? Iceland hasn’t avoided major economic damage or a significant drop in living standards. But it has managed to limit both the rise in unemployment and the suffering of the most vulnerable; the social safety net has survived intact, as has the basic decency of its society. “Things could have been a lot worse” may not be the most stirring of slogans, but when everyone expected utter disaster, it amounts to a policy triumph.
And there’s a lesson here for the rest of us: The suffering that so many of our citizens are facing is unnecessary. If this is a time of incredible pain and a much harsher society, that was a choice. It didn’t and doesn’t have to be this way.
Suddenly, the United States looks like the rest of the furious, protesting, not-completely-free world. Indeed, most commentators have not fully grasped that a world war is occurring. But it is unlike any previous war in human history: for the first time, people around the world are not identifying and organizing themselves along national or religious lines, but rather in terms of a global consciousness and demands for a peaceful life, a sustainable future, economic justice and basic democracy. Their enemy is a global “corporatocracy” that has purchased governments and legislatures, created its own armed enforcers, engaged in systemic economic fraud, and plundered treasuries and ecosystems.
“For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.”
- John F. Kennedy
The wave of disruption will wash over us all. Buckle up and brace for the future.
We don’t trust institutions anymore. Name a bank or financial institution you can trust today. That industry was built entirely on trust — we entrusted our money to their cloud — and they failed us. Government? The other day, I heard a cabinet member from a prior administration call Washington “paralyzed and poisonous” — and he’s an insider. Media? Pew released a study last week saying that three-quarters of Americans don’t believe journalists get their facts straight (which is their only job). Education? Built for a prior, institutional era. Religion? Various of its outlets are abusing children or espousing bigotry or encouraging violence. The #OccupyWallStreet troops are demonizing practically all of corporate America and with it, capitalism. What institutions are left? I can’t name one.
