the great turning and the cognitive surplus

 

Two very interesting articles:

 

Navigating The Great Turning From Empire To Earth Community

 

by David Korten, YES Magazine

 

" ... The second piece of the big picture is an unraveling of the social fabric of civilization that is a consequence of extreme and growing inequality. A world divided between the profligate and the desperate cannot long endure. It intensifies competition for Earth’s resources and drives an unraveling of the social fabric of mutual trust and caring essential to healthy social function.

... We cannot grow our way out of poverty. The only way to end poverty and heal our social divisions on an already over stressed planet is through a redistribution of resources from rich to poor and from nonessential to essential uses. Ooops. Can’t you just hear the right wing wind bags? Hey, that Korten guy, he’s talking about equity. He must be a communist."

 

and

 

Looking for the Mouse in Media:
Clay Shirky on Deploying the Cognitive Surplus for Public Good

 

by Jay Rosen, PressThink

 

"… This is a huge deposit of waking hours lived in front of the tube, a vast expanse of free time occupied for 40 years by commercial television. We’re at least starting to find the architecture of participation (Tim O’Reilly’s phrase) that would turn some of those couch-born hours into sentient activity, followed naturally by inter-activity, as in massively multiplayer games, which can lead (for some) to public works and social goods, as with “the online encyclopedia anyone can edit.”