Battle of the Offsprings
“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” Salvador Dali
A revolution is a very sharp change to something. The word comes from Latin, revolutio (which means a "turnaround"). Revolutions are predominantly political in their nature. Over time, the word developed a sharply different meaning, namely, "a sudden radical, or complete change," apparently from the idea of reversal of direction implicit in the Latin verb.
More than the numbers and size of the protests, what makes the 2020 revolutions unprecedented are the ways that they have pulled together multiple currents within the protest tradition into a mighty flood of demands for vital change in governments.
In political science, a revolution is a fundamental and relatively sudden change in political power and political organization, which occurs when populations revolt against government, typically due to perceived political, social, or economic oppression.
Modern revolution is the most recent threshold of increasing complexity, according to David Gilbert Christian, an Anglo-American historian, a scholar of Russian history from Oxford University, notable for creating and spearheading an interdisciplinary approach known as "Big History". He argues that "faster rates of innovation, new energy sources, and more complex networks of global exchange have made our world more complex and interesting, as well as more fragile if not dangerous."
Throughout history, people have always been dependent on innovation. Of course, the technology for each era might not have been of the same nature, shape and size as today, but for their time was certainly something for people to look at.
Industrial revolutions transformed economies that had been based largely on fishing, agriculture, mining, and handicrafts into economies based on large-scale industries, mechanized manufacturing, and factory systems. New machines, new power sources, and new ways of organizing work made industries more productive and efficient.
- The first industrial revolution of 1765, was followed the proto-industrialization period. The biggest changes came in the industries in the form of mechanization.
- The second industrial revolution of 1870, almost a century later, saw massive technological advancements in the field of industries that helped the emergence of new sources of energy (electricity, gas, and oil).
- The third industrial revolution of 1969, a century later, saw the emergence of yet another source of untapped, at the time energy; Nuclear energy! It brought forth the rise of electronics, telecommunications and of course semiconductors, mainframe computing, personal computing, and the Internet. Through the new technologies, the third industrial revolution opened the doors to space expeditions, renewable electricity research, and biotechnology.
- The fourth industrial revolution, is to reshape the world, representing a fundamental change in the way we live, work and relate to one another. It is a new chapter in human development, enabled by extraordinary technology advances commensurate with those of the first, second and third industrial revolutions.
The future for young people had often been presented in a negative light, with media headlines frequently describe a ‘lost generation’ facing a ‘bleak future’ with little hope of achieving the lifestyle that their parents and grandparents have enjoyed.
That may very well be, but today moving from analogue to digital thinking is a new paradigm. Three things are happening when you bring a digital mindset to traditional analogue societies:
- Bias towards relentless change
- Valuing of rapid iteration and minimally viable solutions
- Belief in the power of data
Which brings us to the following questions:
- Have digital thinkers started to move into positions of influence in our world?
- Are we starting to see people with a digital mindset moving into governmental leadership roles?
Most noticeable globally, is the markets economic revolution that accounted for more than 50% of e-commerce sales made through online marketplaces by 2019, contributing about $1.7 trillion per year to economies, and is forecasted to grow dramatically over the next 5 years, due to lockdowns, and as more companies adopt new solutions to solve issues in their supply chain to promote sales.
Notwithstanding, the emergence of leaderless and decentralized revolution activists using social media as a new mean of expression, to co-ordinate and/or mobilize anonymously the scale and quality of revolts. Making this new trend hard to suppress and negotiate with, although, different mass movements claiming to represent the “will of the people” do manifest at times contradictory demands, this does not necessarily imply a lack of organization.
The modern psychosocial dynamics of revolts seems to make a new era not only possible, but simply inevitable according to generation X and Y offspring's meta-analysis across studies, and stereotypical attributes...
“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Food for thought!