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Techvolution: A New Philosophy - Start
by Johnny
May 2020 (manuscript)
Back Page
Even before this pandemic, middle-class Americans and Canadians had serious problems: rising debt, stagnating wages, expensive healthcare. Not too long ago, we could relax and assume our political culture would solve our everyday headaches. Not anymore. Today, politics on both sides of the border is controlled by ideologically obsessed reporters, columnists, and pundits creating new ways to sell to their Left-wing or Right-wing choirs.
COVID-19 will only make middle-class problems worse, making traditional Left/Right politics even more dysfunctional.
What can ordinary people do?
In this book Techvolution, we'll see how everyone on Main Street today has a big choice to make. To improve our lives we can either pick a side in the increasingly nasty Left/Right war. Or, we can start funding, buying, and using new interoperable products, apps, and electronics that we custom-design to solve our everyday problems. But before the middle-class can choose the better option and reach for the incredible power of modern technology, we need to redefine what's good and bad in our politics.
To do that, we must adopt a new political philosophy for people in the moderate middle.
Here it is.
Dedication
This book is for the people in the open-source community. For the collaboration philosophy you handed down to me. For selflessly updating Wikipedia, writing free software, and building cool new tech for us all. For being the protagonists of the Internet Age. You gave the best education a political guy can get. I hope I've learned enough to write this book for you.
For the antagonists, the self-entitled gatekeepers keeping Blockbuster—and it's Industrial Age mentality of waiting in line, hoping to get a raise, and in general being middleman—alive, thanks for making history to repeat itself yet again. I hope you learn something.
This book is especially dedicated to the extras on Main Street. When it's time for you to act, I pray you decide to play the game of evolution.
"We are really the revolutionaries in the world today—not the kids with long hair and beards who were wrecking the schools a few years ago."
Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, 1973.
Contents
- Start
- Preface
- Introduction
- Prologue
- Act One - The Beginning
- Act Two - Blowing Up the Death Star
- Intermission - Taking a Break
- Mid Point - A Techvolution Battle
- Act Three - Climax
- Epilogue
- The Appendices
Note to the Reader
This book uses lots of videos. I use them to make it clear how widespread middle-class problems are. Keep in mind, you'll have to press play on the videos and turn the sound on/off. And of course, in all cases, all due credit goes to the media's creators and owners.
Inner Flap
You, me, and everyone else quarantined in their houses are anxiously waiting for the COVID-19 storm to pass.
On the bright side we have Netflix.
Thanks to our beloved online streaming, our pandemic worries are easily replaced with tales of passionate first loves, fantastic magic spells, and galaxies far far away.
We find Netflix so compelling because stories are so clear. Protagonists are good because they want to fix a problem. Antagonists are bad because they don't. Stories have no debate. We take the protagonists' side every time. This moral clarity tells us precisely who the heroes and villains are, and therefore, lets us commit our emotions.
We can cherish Romeo and Juliet because we know their love is beautiful and worth dying for! While their families' rivalry is ignorant and stupid. We get why Luke Skywalker's rebellion is righteous and worth fighting for! And know Darth Vader's empire is hellish and must be destroyed.
But our emotions don't change the story. Even the main character's feelings mean so very little to the final outcome.
That's why all characters, from Hogwarts students to Jedi Knights, Lord Voldemort to Sith Lords, don't battle using arguments or emotions. They fight using real objects like wands and lightsabers. Main characters never sit back and wait to see what happens.
Because nobody ever won a battle by watching it. The victors are the ones who control technology because tools are the levers of power in every story. Cinderella used a slipper to defeat her treacherous step-family. Harry Potter used a wand to defeat "He Who Must Not Be Named." And Luke Skywalker used a small torpedo to destroy the Death Star. When heroes control the tools, they control the levers of power to defeat antagonists, solve problems, and give regular people live better lives.
And this simple observation is the lesson Main Street must learn today.
Otherwise this pandemic was for nothing.
Talk to any political junkie, no matter when, and they'll say there's a big election coming up. They'll tell you, "if the Right-wing triumphs, infrastructure, healthcare, everything will go to shit!"
If you buy it—and most of us have at some point—you glue yourself to Left-wing blogs, radio, and TV. As you fill-up on Leftist philosophy, you'll filter human history as a never ending story of oppression, liberation, and change. With every minute you watch the news, you'll walk the path towards extremism and see any opposition to Leftist demands as fascist Conservatives responsible for every problem in the world, past and present.
Or, if the other side sucked you in first, you start spotting communist Progressives and their unholy socialist agenda instead.
But it's all bullshit.
Despite Left/Right yelling matches, neither ideology is your hero. The pundits, columnists, and reporters on newspapers, broadcast television, cable news only care to send you one-way messages to tune-in, protest or buy something and donate.
These extremists trick you. They say their ideological purity will solve your real-life problems by holding government accountable to their approved ideology. They say only if government writes ideologically approved laws, will your real-life problems ever be solved. But, the pundits on both sides are only out to solve their problem; being employed by aging broadcast and newspaper industries that is funded with expensive commercials and watched by a consumer obsessed society. The Left versus Right battle driving Americans to hate each other, is just a circus to attract eyeballs to a dying business model.
Does any pundit ever say give me authority, some funding, and I will fix traffic in Chicago, health-care wait-times in Cleveland, insurance fraud in Florida? Ideologues can't say they'll fix anything, because unlike true heroes Galileo, George Washington, and Luke Skywalker ideologues don't reach for the power of technology.
So why shouldn't you follow heroes? Even more important, why shouldn't the middle-class? Isn't our healthcare, infrastructure, and especially our pandemic preparation, worthy of upgrades?
Of course they are. And, that's the point. The feud between Left and Right ideologues is manufactured distraction created to keep the rest of us away from using new technology. The truth--that every employed person knows-- is that people need a paycheck, and thus are first loyal to whatever skills and tools secure their home, food, water, and futures.
Thus, like a dinosaur in an Ice Age, it's no surprise broadcast stars, corporate consultants, college administrators want to stay alive despite evolution passing them by. These businesses are often filled with staunch ideologues, because each is based around technologies from the Industrial Age, and thus the people inside want to keep the Industrial Age ideologies of Left and Right alive.
If this seems simplistic, and if you think your favored ideologues are modern and altruistic, what do you expect professionals to do after their industry is bested by a new technology? Never forget no ideologue, pundit, or movie star invented, promoted, or popularized the internet, podcasts, online streaming, and ebooks. Instead they fought each new technology because they threatened their cash cow of radio, DVDs, and bookstores.
When inventors did force through new technology, cable news hosts, broadcast anchors, movie stars etc. reached out into Twitter, Youtube, and other internet platforms and spread toxic narratives to get people's attention. In their quest to stay relevant, these stars used a superficial understanding of Conservative and Progressive political philosophy to label each other a facist or communist in a distracting race for eyeballs and clicks.
The truth is upgrading our society to the possibilities of modern Internet Age technology is the real political game of our time. Only new technology can improve your life on the frontline. And, it's by no means certain we'll upgrade our society and embrace the Internet Age.
We're already far behind. We got the tools of the Internet in 1970 when the internet and personal computers were both invented. That's when human civilization did what we've done many times before. We entered a new technological age. Like when we left the Stone Age by making bronze tools, or entered the Renaissance with the printing press, in 1970 we started to leave the Industrial Age of gas powered machines and human-powered factories and offices behind.
In 1970 we invented technology that completely changed life on Earth.
But the owners of Industrial Age technology such as television and newspapers, typewriters and blackboards weren't and still aren't jumping for joy. They don't want humanity to evolve anymore than Blockbuster, with its addiction to DVD rentals and late-fees, wanted online streaming.
Although we finally got online streaming, there are many other segments of our economy being held back by Internet Age antagonists. New technology kills some jobs and forces many to learn new skills; it's a universal fact. It's why life uses evolution to keep itself current. If we didn't evolve, we'd have summer with no A/C, use wood to heat our homes, and battle cancer with home remedies.
Evolution requires constant innovation, which makes regular life better but downgrades power brokers of old technology who often don't want to start over. These "Darth Blockbusters" want society's levers of power to remain with themselves.
Happily, many regular people have been fighting to establish the Internet Age. Internet geeks, hackers, and innovators are the heroes of the modern technology. They've been fighting Darth Blockbuster's gatekeeping and antagonism for years. The open-source community alone has made hundreds of thousands of tools that already empower the middle-class to live a better life with tools like Android, Linux, Ruby on Rails, Node.js; even Netflix uses open-source software. But, these protagonists can't keep fighting your battles for you. Main Street must jump into the fight.
There is no debate. The story is simple, and the morality is clear. We must upgrade our society to the Internet Age now.
If we don't, this pandemic only foreshadows a much more terrible storm to come. Every year, month, and day we delay our evolution only makes our politics, economics, and culture more outdated. Responding to and preventing horrible events like depressions, hurricanes, climate change, wars, and pandemics like COVID-19, will only get harder if we keep using Darth Blockbuster's Industrial Age technology.
This book will teach you how to upgrade our society to the very powerful Internet Age. Like conquering illiteracy, defeating slavery, and going to the Moon, upgrading our way of life will be a compelling story.
But for your grand-kids to ever watch it on Netflix one day, you have to make it happen first.
The first lesson is this; like any hero in any story, watching isn't winning. To be victorious in politics, you have to reach for, and learn to harness, the amazing power of technology.
About the Author
I graduated from university in political science, history, and geography. But I learned far more about the divide between Industrial Age and Internet Age on the frontline as a projectionist, contractor, adjuster, and especially when inventing a digital tool for an Industrial Age industry. I was once a Left/Right ideologue (both sides) but left them both behind long ago and have been thinking of a better way ever since. I wrote this book to inspire my fellow moderate minded people in the middle-class, so we can all live happier lives as soon as possible.