Appearance
Techvolution: A New Philosophy - Preface
Foreword
My oldest child enrolled in a beginner Spanish class. It wasn't long before the teacher suspected (correctly) that Spanish was his mother tongue. To test him, Ms. Milgram showed words of colors typed in a different color, so "red" was shown in blue ink for example. With only a half second to see each slide, my son had to say the color each word was written in.
It's nearly impossible to cheat the test. Even if you're pretending ignorance, your mind reads the word "red" before seeing it's typed in blue. My kid was soon found out and took the advanced Spanish class. I laughed when he told me the story. I advised him to take a lesson from it.
No lifeform can ever stop evolving; it's a mindset only for the doomed.
That's the reason I still read this book today in 2083. I never want to go back.
I sometimes forget Techvolution was as transformative as it was.
Was humanity ever so hamstrung?
Did ideology control economics the same way religion once did politics? Were people loyal to their personalities instead of their achievements? Why were there so many currencies instead of using Nature's currency? Would teachers demand that their students not use the latest technology because they wanted safe jobs for life teaching ancient technology?
It's even more confusing trying to understand how regular people responded to their evolution being held back. They would watch ideological stories on a screen and call that politics. They would march in circles, expecting their lives to improve. Did parents really raise their kids in suburban isolation while showering them with generic mass-produced items instead of instilling a God-given requirement to use their gifts, physique, passions, to solve their own problems?
The hard truth is yes, we used to live this way. I must remember that. It's easy to forget that humanity once fought our evolution instead of our natural enemy.
Our true enemy is Entropy, the catchall term for the continuous change of our environment through ice storms, hurricanes, solar radiation, and everything else making Life on Earth a constant work in progress. For billions of years, every organism has rushed to stay ahead of the nasty, brutish, and short-life Entropy can cause. Did humanity think we must not also be vigilant?
Of course we must! Like any animal, Entropy is always on our tail. We feel the agony of pain as a blessed warning to avoid chutes and cherish ladders while living on the gameboard of evolution; only by reducing pain can we stay ahead of Entropy's wrath.
Yet, we are not solely biological creatures. Did the caveman start a fire with lasers from his eyes? Did explorers map the world by flying across oceans? No, we are not superheroes. Our race, sex, and genetics do not keep us warm or grow our food.
We are all biological vessels for technological evolution. We are not a species, but the operators of technological ecosystems.
We outrace Entropy by learning the language of our fate: the free and widespread creation, adoption, and replacement of technologies on the technological tree of Life. Technological evolution has the exact requirements as the normal evolution that powers everything from slime molds to blue whales. We need unfettered innovation to create a variety of new technological adaptions. Whichever adaptions most efficiently harness resources captures a niche and is rewarded with a job in Life's holy war against Entropy.
That's why our most important identity is the tools we use. Our tools, not our biology, enable us to find a niche and earn a living. Importantly, unlike biological animals, we can replace our tools and become new and improved technological species throughout our lifetime. Inventors are thus our heroes, the people who help our technological evolution are our allies, and those who oppose our technological self-improvement are our, and evolution's, antagonists.
Seeing ourselves as biological beings had us chasing shadows.
When we primarily identified with race, gender, or genetics, it allowed those with control over an important technology, from princes to supervisors, to become gatekeepers and stop mankind's evolution. Our false biological identities gave antagonists the falsehoods they needed to spin-up ideological stories about their racial, gender, education, or noble superiority that supposedly put them above the evolutionary race everything must run.
Humanity would fight against these fictions, only to see another version pop up. Like a hydra, racism, sexism, and elitism are re-told by antagonists over and over because running race of technological evolution is scary. By chasing ideological shadows, we'd let people tell their ideological falsehoods and become antagonists.
We were born free, but everywhere, our technological evolution was chained.
Yet, even with all their talented storytelling, antagonists always failed. They proved that human survival on this lifeboat called Earth is not based on our biology. Anyone who ever preached biological superiority inevitably fell in the face of technological progress.
That progress wasn't perfect. Filled with antagonism, our evolution was so sporadic and uncertain that Entropy often caught-up on the game board of evolution. The pain of its attacks was called layoffs, unemployment, homelessness, recessions, civil wars, depressions, and revolutions. The primary cause in these human affairs was not failed government policy or unfair history; it was thwarted evolution, i.e., the stream of adaptions needed to outrun Entropy was stalled because people wouldn't or couldn't adopt innovation fast enough.
Life's history shows us that evolution's selection of the best adaptions requires a daily and hour scrutinizing, throughout the world, of every adaption, even the slightest. That's why today, we protect every individual's technological evolution as a sacred right and teach it as an absolute obligation.
Harnessing technological evolution seems simple to us now, but it took a big change to get here. Galileo taught us science over mythology, Jefferson freedom over servitude, Darwin evolution over creationism; this book teaches us techvolution over ideology. The pathway to healthy economics is democratized, interoperable, and open-source technological products that let everyone find their niche. We judge our economic success by measuring the health of our technological ecosystem's checks and balances as biologists do with the natural world. Healthy politics is ensuring everyone has easy access to the tools that solve their pains.
Because of Techvolution, we no longer have ideologues telling extremist stories to keep their followers loyal. Instead, we practice Techvolution that promotes moderation and problem-solving with its mixed-ideological politics and bumblebee economics.
This change brought tremendous progress, yet human Nature is not perfect. We still have many problems today. But at least we know antagonism byway of bullying, threats, and attacks comes too naturally when we have authority over others, from teachers to coaches, executives to princes. And so antagonism must be purged in ourselves and our community via the universal experience of real-life pain and the reliance on others to solve our pains.
Knowing Techvolution is like learning a language because once you understand a way of thinking, you automatically realize better tools are the best levers of power against Entropy, but gatekeeping a technology is a false god that, instead of securing one's future, destroys the checks and balances required inside ecosystems and thus leads to everyone's inevitable destruction.
Now, I must thank those who took the first leap. It was many brave parents decades ago who unplugged from ideology and ventured into the frontier to start a new society. Because of them, we study, understand, and promote our technological evolution's new modes and orders. As a result, today's parents know every kid has an important goal to achieve and a fun story to live because, like in the natural world, there's always a niche to fill inside our ever-evolving ecosystem that's using Nature's currency to harness energy more efficiently every day.
Now, our kids don't die in ideological wars, suffer economic depressions, and only rarely struggle with psychological torments.
Instead, they are busy rolling their dice with other frontline workers under minimal, open, and accountable leadership, using any tool they need. Nature's currency interconnects them inside a technological ecosystem filled with open-source and interoperable tools that is selecting new adaptations so quickly it's edging us closer to perpetual profit while evolving Life closer to our glorious future among the stars.
Along with their teachers and leaders, I helped my kids find their technological niche. And now I get to watch them achieve their very best. I advise them to re-read this book often to be sure their kids will continue evolving mankind to our highest potential.
A happy and loving mother circa 2083
P.S. I shudder to think of our fate had we continued to interpret our reality using ideologies that blamed each other for their shared inability to drop old ways of living and work hard to that give our kids a happy life.
Preface
The 2020 Pandemic
"People are angry, man! Most people's lives suck...Even if like the economy is doing better, the vast majority of people aren't doing what they want to do with their lives." Joe Rogan, November 2019.
This book was going to deal with your levels of anger and happiness in life. It was going to begin with analyzing your take on the economy, nation, and life at large. Because before we talk about a new common sense of political morals, ethics, and in general what our society's shared mission should be, we must dislodge any loyalty you have to our old ones in the Left and Right.
Now we've hit the Great 2020 Pandemic. So this job of replacing our political philosophy should be easier. People are more open to the idea that our society is in need of change. I don't need to inquire about your happiness anymore. If you're like most Americans and Canadians, you're likely downright terrified about getting sick, and perhaps more frightening, wondering what's going to happen next.
For years, North Americans suffered under troubling trends: micro-management at work, antisocial behavior at home, political hatred in government. We got by because superficially we were "doing great": we had full employment, luxurious homes, and stable politics. Whenever things got too bad, and we got too unhappy, we visited the shopping mall for therapy. If we were still angry, we'd install a new political party. Over the years, Canadians and Americans gave Left and Right control of our government again and again.
Yet, no matter which we choose, Main Street wasn't happy with the results. It's why we kept rotating Left and Right over and over.
Turning Right and Left got us no where. We kept going in circles because there is something fundamentally wrong with our politics. Both Left and Right are Industrial Age ideologues, and thus have been doing what they're created for, building and maintaining an Industrial Age alive.
But we're in a new age, and it's finally time we step up, as our ancestors did so many times before, and rethink our way of life. The hardest part isn't explaining our problems or coming up with solutions. It involves the realization that you, me, and every ordinary Canadian and American should be happy with our jobs, government, and life.
It's our right to enjoy happy lives.
Because individual happiness is the ultimate sign of a healthy society. Interesting to note, our ancestors, despite often being very hard-up in comparison, were often happier then we modern people are today. Our grandparents and great-grandparents weren't "simpler." Nor did they have lower standards. They saw their society improve every year. They went from mud roads to paved ones. Fireplaces to furnaces. Outhouses to indoor plumbing. Letters to telephones. So, like with any hero, the blood, sweat, and tears our ancestors suffered through was easier to bear because they we're making progress everyday.
In contrast, North American culture is going backward. The trends that make us unhappy like horrible commutes, expensive education, and mindless bureaucracies keep getting worse. A significant reason is that as employees and consumers of big bureaucracies and corporations, we're powerless to demand better.
But the more significant cause for our society's decline is our belief in Left and Right political ideologies.
We keep alternating which "side" controls our governments and our political loyalty. But nothing changes with either because the truth is the middle-class gives Conservative and Progressive doctrines far too much credit. Regular people on Main Street following one (or hating another) is never going to solve our problems.
When I started writing this book around 2015 I quickly stopped. I soon realized how foolhardy it was to write a book to get Main Street off their ideological obsessions, and more often, hatreds. So I wanted to first showcase the value of a modern technology to solve everyday problem by bringing a new product to market. A simple app that costs thousands, but would save the middle class hundreds of millions.
The dream was to show how technology is always humanity's salvation and that all ideologies are created to help us make the most of modern technology. Like in any story the hero's philosophy and beliefs are only good if she uses it to use technology to defeat the bad guys. If Luke Skywalker failed to stop the Death Star we wouldn't be teaching our kids how great the Force is.
But today, we sadly follow our favorite political ideologies regardless of real-world improvements.
After my app failed (or better said, got steamrolled) I started writing this book in September 2019. I still dreamed of (somehow) convincing the North American middle-class to stop putting so much faith in Left and Right writers, commentators, and pollsters. I didn't know how but I still dreamed.
Because the simple truth is, Left and Right are old. Very old. When Left and Right were created, indoor plumbing wasn't even science fiction, because science fiction didn't even exist. Evolution and electricity didn't exit. Rubber shoes and a simple ball-point pen weren't around. Heck, people didn't even know what bacteria or viruses were.
The creators of the Left/Right politics didn't even know enough about the world to wash their hands before undergoing surgery. Since Left and Right were born, we've updated our medicine, geology, astronomy, biology and other sciences because new scientific instruments revealed new truths about the world.
Why haven't we also updated our political ideologies too?
Now realize it's okay to change our ideologies. It's totally okay! We're free to pick and choose whichever philosophy we want. There's nothing special about any belief system, be it democratic socialism, hereditary monarchy, or Left/Right. Every political doctrine was created by a human being to help society prosper.
So, if ordinary people are not happy with their lives, we're supposed to change the philosophy that rules our nation.
And now we should. Because this one virus is highlighting just how shaky our foundations really are.
There have been hundreds of pandemics throughout history—and yet today, we were caught with our pants down. Why? Why was President Trump impeached (the first time)? What was the reason? Even if you agreed with the trial in November 2019, was that really what our government and political energy should have been obsessed with only a few months before COVID-19 hit?
Both partisan "sides" are the faces of the exact same coin. When President Obama tried a much needed overhaul of the US healthcare system, was any pundit or strategist talking about pandemic plans? We have fire drills throughout our society; why don't we have pandemic plans?
Here's why. Instead of governing our society, our political system is hogtied by extremist Left/Right reporters, commentators, and pundits hell bent on keeping their old technology and businesses relevant by using the embers of Left/Right ideology for entertainment, spectacle, and distraction.
Modern political discourse is no different than a blockbuster movie franchise on its 10th sequel. Mindless movies reuse the same plot, the same faces, saying the same lines of dialogue while the producer ramps up the special effects and sex to distract the audience one more time from a terrible plot.
The truth is, every Left/Right commentator fears being you, the one with a regular job trying to live a regular life in today's aging economy.
I used to be one of their followers. I understand their appeal. By signing up to a side, any person has a pre-made set of policies to rally around. Or more likely, a ready-made group of people to blame for any and all problems. Happily, I think most on Main Street has learned what I eventually did, professional political partisans aren't heroes fighting for the average person. Each radical only cares about advancing their personal careers by preaching ideological purity.
Yet because too many of us still listen to Left/Right idealogues on blogs, books, and TV, our elected leaders are forced to satisfy the extremes. Campaign fundraising alone requires politicians to talk with echo chambers nearly every single day. Speaking to choirs in media junkets, talk-show interviews, and dinner fundraisers is why our elected representatives can sound like foreigners to "non-believers" on Main Street.
After many conversations with politicians, I honestly feel for them; it's almost always the extremists who show up, donate, and otherwise get involved in today's politics. Any moderate politician who doesn't accommodate the radicalization of politics goes unnnoticed.
The funny thing is, despite blaming the other side for today's frontline problems, neither Left or Right ideologues have any idea how Internet Age technology even works. After all, since Left/Right extremists are not heroes reaching for the power of new tools to solve a problem, they don't work hard and figure out how to invent something new like Netflix or Wikipedia.
That's why if (or when) you ignore an election, it's hard to notice who won.
I mean, in either Canada or America, does road traffic disappear and reappear every four years? Do carbon dioxide levels stop or start rising on election nights? Do our workdays become more or less productive after the first Tuesday in November?
Of course not.
The next time you watch a ideological newcast look for Hermione's magic wand, Luke's lightsaber, Galileo's telescope. You won't find it because Left and Right were created in the Industrial Age to industrialize humanity. The Right would collect and protect capital so it could be invested into new factories, buildings, products, and services. The Left would distribute this new wealth to be sure everyone in society participated and stayed loyal. Together, both Left/Right gave humanity great things like paved roads, indoor plumbing, and libraries filled with books and DVDs. Both sides did a wondrous job. To a person from 1850 we're extremely developed.
But now we're fully industrialized. The industrialization step in our technological evolution is complete. If we want a better future in the Internet Age, we need a new Internet Age philosophy to guide us there.
I happened to be writing this book long before the coronavirus. Suddenly history has given us all a sad reality check. Our society, and our political ideologies, are very outdated. We weren't, and still won't be prepared for whatever comes next in the story of life if we keep using old ideologies.
Hopefully this chapter created a little wedge in your mind. Left and Right were born in the Industrial Age. Conservatism, Progressivism, Marxism, Socialism, and all the rest you may love and hate, are simply old. I won't get technical into their details because there's no need; if you really care about them you can stop watching cable news and read them on Project Gutenberg and listen to expert analysis on YouTube.
Instead of talking about old philosophies, I want to upgrade our civilization so regular people start living happy lives again soon. This new philosophy called Techvolution helps the middle-class not with entertainment and false promises, but with modern custom-made tools that solve our everyday problems to make middle-class life more affordable.
Our Levers of Power
Do me a favor. Open up Skype or FaceTime. Now check your Instagram feed. Then get Google Maps up and running.
I'm serious, open these apps up. Come back when you're done.
Isn't it cool that within a few seconds, you can chat with friends, get live video, and receive pin-point directions? Even as society is under quarantine, you have these very formidable levers of power at your disposal. I mean, can you even imagine writing driving directions on a napkin? What about going back and forth to Blockbuster (twice) every time your family watches a single movie?
Of course not, because it's not 1990.
Okay, so now get your medical records ready. Next up, get your health metrics like fitness levels, antibodies, and blood type. Excellent, now let's evaluate your risk factor to COVID-19 by comparing your statistics to the records of those unlucky people who got sick, especially the ones who are seriously ill. What characteristics is this new disease targeting?
I pray your risk factor is small. But, if you're in trouble, what does your nurse or doctor say to do? Don't tell me, but I hope it was at least calming to hear specialized medical advice.
Hey, don't forget, there's a possible drug shortage. So, what is your pharmacist recommending? Do you have enough prescriptions? What should you start doing now to plan for the worse?
After you've collaborated with these health professionals, quickly find out what your health insurance company will, and more importantly, won't pay for. Just in case the worse happens, it's good to know before disaster strikes.
Phew, that was educational. Isn't it good to know all this stuff! Apps and gadgets are cool, but I personally think knowledge is what turns tools into levers of power.
Problems
Wait, wait, wait. FaceTime worked, so did Google Maps and Netflix (thank God). But is the medical records "lever" stuck? What will the ER doctor assess you by when there's a flood of patients?
Did I hear that right, you're not in contact with your doctor? What about your pharmacist? You're waiting on hold with your insurance company! Insurance is basically a bank-account for disasters, and now during a pandemic, you have no idea how much money you have?
This all sounds like I'm talking to someone living through the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic. It's like science-fiction in reverse. Because, if someone in 1918 was teleported to 2020, they'd fit in just fine.
Well, at least many of our students, teachers, and workers can keep on learning, working, and collaborating from home in these tough times.
WHAT! You're still driving to work! Or worse, your work or school is closed!
What the heck is wrong with your laptop and the internet at home? Wasn't there a plan to keep things moving in case of earthquakes (San Francisco 1989), riots (Vancouver 2011), hurricanes (New Orleans 2005), city fires (Fort McMurray 2016), floods (New Jersey 2012), pandemics (H1N1 2009) and blizzards/seasonal flu (every winter in North America)?
Responding to this pandemic should have been a small modification of dealing with a severe rainstorm or blizzard. But it wasn't. I wonder what we were all doing before March 2020.
People in High Places
Left and Right ideologies think they can help improve your life, but they can't. They're like medical soothesayers because they have their solution ready before they hear about your problems. But although Right and Left ideologues are damaging they don't actually operate our businesses, bureaucracies, and daily lives.
Someone else does, and upon reflection, it's no surprise our businesses and bureaucracies didn't have a plan for this COVID-19 outbreak. Because we don't have procedures for any disaster. Because like our politics is steerd by people devoted to keeping Industrial Age technology like television and newspapers alive, our economics is controlled by a select group of people looking to protect their high-paying Industrial Age jobs; or better to say positions.
I was an insurance claims adjuster for eight years. The person with the checkbook you talk to after horrible events like car crashes and house fires. Despite promoting a low-risk lifestyle, the insurance industry still didn't prepare for disasters. One example, we adjusters were forced to drive into an office during heat-waves, blizzards, and ice-storms.
It's quite surreal to speak with people who had a tragic car crash on the exact same roads your boss is demanding you drive. You can have a debate about telecommuting versus offices. But not when the streets have three feet of snow.
This speaks to our society's fundamental problem. Regular people aren't ready for bad times because we aren't free to decide what's best for ourselves in good times.
It's our own fault.
We gave the levers of power in our schools, hospitals, companies, and bureaucracies to the same managerial positions that were giving us unhappy lives as customers and workers. The people making today's economic decisions aren't the ones with skin in the game of real-life. Evolution gives every life-form on Earth the freedom and the responsibility to find the most efficient way to life. Yet we don't have that today. Now our society has to make impromptu plans to deal with this coronavirus pandemic and whatever comes next.
Should we really have expected better?
Your Unhappiness Means We Have an Unhealthy Society
Our workplaces are riddled with too many bureaucrats, managers, and consultants. This way of life made us very unhappy. I wrote a book to try to convince you it also made us dangerously complacent too. And now, sadly, it's obvious for everyone to see and feel every time we hear "the virus is getting closer."
Our society is fragile because while try to solve our frustration by participating in Left vs. Right politics, our "eight different bosses" have antagonized upgrading our economy for generations.
As a result, when using our education system, making a claim, signing a mortgage, it's like we're still renting DVDs from Blockbuster. As in, we're stuck with the hours of operation, DVD selection, and corporate policies of the rich and powerful with no ability to have our say.
Having our say makes all the difference in the world. It's the difference between being lost at sea with nothing but a radio to listen to the search party, and holding a two-way radio so you can tell the rescuers where you are and save your own life. Having your say is what life demands of every living being on this Earth.
But, the eight different bosses of the Industrial Age will never empower you with a Internet Age "two-way radio". Blockbuster didn't want internet streaming. Newspapers didn't adopt online classified ads. Universities didn't institute web-based education.
Did Kings or Queens ever ease humanity into democracy and constitutions? Of course not. So, why would Industrial Age institutions and businesses upgrade your way of life if it means they'd downgrade themselves.
This is why regular people have super-advanced apps like Skype, Instagram, and Google Maps in our private lives. But, we're rushing to figure out how to educate our kids online, checking mailboxes for insurance checks, using sticky-notes to track store inventories, and wondering how we'll earn a living while a killer disease searches the globe for human hosts.
Being so powerless is needless bullshit, to say the least. It's contrary to evolution at its very core.
When nagging about TPS reports made us unhappy, we bought bigger TVs, cars, and houses. When the middle-class got too angry, we'd turn to Left and Right politics. We thought marching in a Tea Party parade, or watching a Bernie Sanders political speech, was doing our part to solve our society's problems.
It wasn't. The truth is Big Government (Left), and Big Business (Right) came together to make a philosophy of Left/Right anti-evolution for Main Street.
And, we're feeling the consequences of our technological stagnation right now. Because everyone in the middle-class is depending on our weakened manufacturing base, overburdened healthcare system, and in general, our dated economy to provide for us during and after this great pandemic.
Since entering the Internet Age in 1970, debt levels skyrocketed because our society is being forced to use Industrial Age tools. Governments try to solve the mix-match by printing money. Workers aren't allowed to be productive enough to pay for ourselves. The result is more evermore debt. And we're justifiably frightened, wondering what's going to happen next in the economy, international relations, and in general, what the future holds for a species that resists life's demand to evolve.
Our Aged Health Care System
Doctors study really hard. It takes years to learn how to keep the human body and mind healthy. That's why a medical degree is respected in every society on Earth.
Despite all the hard work and worldwide esteem, in this TED talk from 2015 Dr. Alieta Eck discusses how much of a let-down her job is. You see, when she started medical school in the early '80s, she thought practicing medicine would mean making deep connections with patients. She pictured detailed examinations, home visits, and being there when needed most.
Instead, Dr. Eck got something far different. To her sadness, the Main Street economy, where customers directly dealt with specialists like carpenters, tailors, and doctors, was long gone.
True to the trend ravaging our economy, what Dr. Eck got was ever-more Industrial Age gatekeepers like civil bureaucrats and hospital administrators. Since 1970, the valuable administration of clinics and hospitals, once done by a few trusted individuals, was taken over by a culture of government and corporate middlemen. These real world Michael Scott's created ever-more paperwork to put themselves in between doctors and their patients.
Notice I said paperwork, because actual paper forms, regulations, and fax machines help delay processing and justify more bureaucratic positions. Note, although sometimes these are digitally entered in things like PDF's, they're still based on paper. That's why our society doesn't have wide-spread use of "Medical FaceTime" or "InstaInsuranceHealth" apps connecting patients directly with their therapists, nurses, pharmacists, nutritionists, and doctors.
And if you think the recent use of Health Apps is a Internet Age upgrade, you don't know the power of modern levers of power. If we did use modern digital tools to their full potential, you'd see it. It would put many micro-managing middlemen out of a job.
Is it a surprise the Internet Age started in 1970? As computers got better, it made typing and printing increasingly easy. A small group of administrators turned into almost countless regulators, managers, executives, and lawyers who used computers to keep making more memos, rules, and regulations.
Using new technology for themselves, and keeping it away from customers, is how the Industrial Age middlemen kept growing. You can see the same trend in trend whenever a civilization enters a new age. The political power of the old age is used to grasp levers of power to enrich itself (Turkish Janissaires and British landed aristocracy are two examples). Today's middlemen turned themselves into gatekeepers of potent Internet Age levers of power while customers wait on hold with a call-center or spend 30 minutes filling out paper forms.
Some middlemen are, in fact, needed. Many, however, are not. All of them have been sucking our healthcare system dry for generations while holding back new technologies from reaching the hands of the middle-class.
Unfortunately, Main Street is too distracted by the Left/Right circus to notice how screwed we're getting in the medical system, and many other areas of our economy.
Controlling Modern Tools Will Upgrade the Middle-Class
A lab inspector from the state came and wanted to know who was running this (lab) machine. And she wanted to be sure they all have high-school diplomas. Well, we had RN degrees, MD degrees. That didn't suffice. She wanted to see high-school diplomas. That's an example of mindless bureaucracy. Dr. Alieta Eck.
Talk to anyone on the frontline of today's pandemic and ask them if they feel ready. Face masks and disinfectants are running low. More ventilators are needed, but no one knows where to get them. Patients show up, and no one knows where their medical records are. Even with so many government and corporate middlemen, and historical examples, no one was planning for a disaster.
I can sympathize. Whenever there is a bad storm, our car and property insurance claim departments scramble and make a impromptu "cat(astrophe)" team. This happens every time, even though there's a big storm every few months.
As a result, long-time and loyal insurance customers can wait hours to speak with somebody and months to get their claim checks. During my time, I had to (somehow) explain to people fleeing the burned-out city of Fort McMurray, why the insurance company takes customer's money digitally but insists on paying claims with paper checks sent via snail mail.
It sucked trying to explain the nonsense. These customers paid their bills, and their claim was approved. Yet, after being forced to flee their city, and living in a random motel room, staying with strangers, or living in their car, they had no money.
Their experience is a symbol for the modern middle-class. They paid for a service but we're still like a ship-wrecked man on a beach, desperately waving at passing boats because he doesn't have a two-way radio.
There was no technical reason why my customers couldn't be sent their money instantly. But like I said above, powerful managers and executives stand in the way of evolution by not giving regular people a fair deal.
To get a better deal, ordinary people must stop believing Right or Left is our savior. Neither Big Government or Big Business has any reason to make you more self-sufficient. The fact is, to live a happier, more stable life, the middle-class needs to control our own "two-way" radios, our own levers of power, and become a new and empowered person with a strong voice in their community.
You should expect to be like every single life-form, living a life based on finding the most efficient way to harvest resources.
We need to do things like install solar panels on our roofs, keep stores of food in our cellars, and insist on a robust local supply chain. Even better would be wide-spread recognition of online education, having seamless communication with medical professionals, and the ability to still make a living during a disaster.
Regular people can have all of this with modern technology.
That's the hidden truth in society today. We aren't waiting for any technical development. There's no scientific research that needs to be unlocked. Thousands and thousands of creators, makers, inventors, and billions of dollars worth of free and open-source software are waiting to give the middle-class the levers of power right now.
Two-way radio's for everyone!
If someone from 1918 were to see us today, they'd marvel at FaceTime and Youtube, but then say we have the tools of science fiction, but not the way of life.
By promoting technological evolution, this new philosophy called Techvolution teaches us to be our own heroes, reaching for our own apps, electronics, and other levers of power. Main Street can give ourselves the society of the future. It's a beautiful place worth fighting for.
Because it's a place built to make you and your kids smile.
Segway
A crisis should teach us to evolve. But, the many in recent memory, from the loss of American manufacturing, the Savings and Loan Crisis, the Dot Com Crash, rising cost of formal education, and the Great Recession our society borrowed more money instead. We subsidized and bailed out the "too big to fail" manufacturers, insurance companies, colleges, and banks who caused the problem in the first place.
Many of these big institutions are holdovers from the Industrial Age. They're products are libraries, banks, and confusing contracts; all things based on limited supply to force you to pay a premium for limited access. The people inside these behemoth institutions have a good reason to antagonize our society's technological evolution. They don't want to democratize limited access to things such as education and healthcare. But antagonising evolution is a losing battle because all the money in the world won't make the Internet Age disappear.
As the saying goes, we evolve or perish.
Sadly until now, we've chosen to perish. We kicked the can until it hit the road block called covid. Living on borrowed time because we refused to admit we needed to fundamentally rework our society with modern technology. Credit cards and budget deficits weren't evolution but brooms to sweep our problems under the rug.
We the people decided to believe either Big Business (Right) or Big Government (Left) we're looking out for our best interest. We burdened both with an impossible task of keeping an Industrial Age society happy and healthy in the Internet Age. All we managed to do was fund bailouts and work BS jobs to avoid the working hard to evolve a new and more efficient way of life.
But now we can't sweep anything, anywhere. This pandemic is something different.
Printing more money can't kill a virus. Regular people literally can't go shopping or watch professional sports to distract themselves from the bad news. After so many crises were ignored, this one is actually shutting our society down.
The public scare, economic fall, and makeshift plans caused by this pandemic is not a surprise. Our society has been getting more in debt, surrounded by red-tape, dependent on foreign manufacturing, and micro-managed, for many years. The coronavirus is only exposing problems we've ignored for far too long.
But, and this is a huge but, there is no reason to despair.
I'm happily very serious.
Internet Age technology is awesome. Not the overused awesome people say about a good hamburger or whatever. I mean actual awesome; like the Pyramids.
Once we climb the ladder to the Internet Age, there is a golden meadow waiting for us. Once the middle-class embraces new tools, we can can create start to solve our everyday problems with a custom tool.
Renting DVDsWatching broadcast televisionCalling a taxi-cabWriting directions on napkins- Rising insurance rates
- Expensive education
- Shaky global supply chain
- Car crashes
But, to get to this amazingly awesome new world, Main Street needs to believe in a new philosophy.
You're already reading it. It's called Techvolution, and it's big lesson is this. The middle-class must solve our problems with digital technology now. If we don't, we'll soon be suffering something much worse than unhappiness and scary pandemics. There's only so much longer we can keep running our civilization on the fumes of Left and Right ideology. Soon our debts will explode, or bureaucracies will implode, our bullshit jobs won't be worth working anymore, and Left and Right will stop yelling and start fighting.
We can save ourselves from all this grief and enter the amazing Internet Age now.
All we have to do is change what you think is politics.