by Mike Hoye
“… So everybody pretends they don’t know what the future holds, when the unfortunate fact is that – unless we start paying very serious attention – it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.”
– Joshua Ellis, The Grim Meathook Future free lookout the movie download
There are basically two ways to change the world right now. The easy one, the one that gets the most press, doesn’t take much more than a few drums of diesel fuel, some fertilizer and a U-Haul. There’s not much to it, and if you manage to change the world at all with that, it won’t be for the better.
So I’m not here to talk about that; I want to talk about the hard way to change the world, the one that needs you to be smart and driven, to be a salesman, a negotiator, a creator, a witness and a prophet. So if you came in here wondering what the hot new smartphone is or where everyone’s going after the Facebook/Twitter mash-ups fade away you’re about to be disappointed.
Eight thousand years ago someone figured out that if you dug a hole deep enough, there would be clean, potable water at the bottom of it. It’s not immediately obvious; the reward for digging the first nine-tenths of a well is being the eccentric madman who’s decided to dig himself into his own grave. But that last few feet makes sprawling communities possible in places you couldn’t even plant a crop before. But the important part was that someone else watched them do it, walked a mile down the road and tried it for themselves.
These days the community part is easy, or what passes for a community. New social-networking sites pop up every week, and you can join any number of communities within them with just a few clicks. The problem, I’m sure you’ve noticed, is that those communities are as easy to join and quit as they are ineffectual. And you can’t look around in our shiny modern world without feeling like there are things that need to change.
Now, I enjoy having my awareness raised as much as the next guy; it’s just like taking responsibility, except I don’t have to actually do anything. That last step, though, is important. And it turns out the formula is pretty simple, as old as water wells and fire pits – do something that benefits one person, that in some small way also benefits their friends. Show them how to do that thing, then show them how to show their friends. The modern term for that is “network effects”, the idea that the benefits to the individual grows as the number of people in the network grows. And seeing it work is like graduating from three wheels to two or dial-up to broadband: sure, you could go back if you had to, but why would anyone want that?
Once you’ve seen network effects in action, you start looking for opportunities to use them wherever you can. That’s not always going to play out, but just knowing they’re out there shapes the way you think of opportunities and costs. It shapes your choices too, about tools and technologies. Tools that restrict how you can talk to your friends? That limits what you can share, who you can talk to or when? Those tools might not be worth using, and if your goal is to change the world, then those tools won’t help.
So, if you give a man a fish, the saying goes, you can feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you can feed him for a lifetime. But if you can teach a man to teach other men to fish, you might just be able to feed the world. I’ll be talking about those people, the tools they’re using, the changes they want to see in the world and why. And the good news for you is, those tools are getting better, cheaper and more accessible every day; the quiet revolution of the twenty-first century is the fact that the barriers to entry changing the world are getting lower all the time. That if you’re smart, driven and convincing, if you have a compelling story to tell the world or a plan to make people’s lives better, that the tools you’ll need are getting closer to free every day. That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy; you’ve got to sell the product, and you’ve got to sell it to people so completely that they’ll want to sell it to everyone else. But the opportunities are out there.
And it’s a good time for it, ’cause diesel and fertilizer sure aren’t getting any cheaper.