A New Year Gift For You.
Back to school week.
First things first, happy new year!
Here’s wishing you a well and happy 2022.
I have a gift for you.
But first, a (short) story.
I recently heard an interview with tech entrepreneur Jordan Hall.
Parts I knew. Parts I didn’t.
Let's start with the familiar.
Wind your clocks back. About 30 years. Some guys, tinkering with computers. A spirit of adventure and creativity. Trying things out, mainly in their garages. Before long, we bought books and cars and holidays and fridges and, well, just about everything, online. Shops closed. Entire industries creaked and groaned, sucked, one by one, into a Bezos black hole. Friends reunited by Mark. Sergey and the other one doing no evil whilst filtering wants and needs. A new establishment was born, calling political shots, echoing likes back to you.
And the less familiar (to me, at least)?
When people say things like ‘Web3.0’ I turn off, preferring a fluffier delusion of existence; hiding in the flowers of my mind, dreaming of mountains, fresh air and the slack water where in breath cedes to out, and return.
You, like me are a creative, pioneering, entrepreneurial soul. You carve your own path, pulled by your own wandering and wondering star. You, like me, are safe within the guard rails of your mind.
It changes everything.
From music to publishing to news to learning to shopping to playing to thinking, organising and doing; the tide of tech is a grim reaper or new broom (depending on your perspective) tapping at the door of, or sweeping away, entire industry norms, structures and behaviours.
Web 1.0 were the brave garage pioneers.
Web 2.0 the new establishment land grab.
Web 3.0, according to Jordan, is poised, ready for it’s boldest leap yet. It’s coming for the metaphorical water in which we, the fish, swim but cannot see: the institutions and institutional ideas on which the last 300 years have been built. Ideas like: Money, Banking, Government, Capitalism.
Jordan is an idealist.
In the right hands, with the right intent, distributed, self organising networks are better able to solve the huge and intractable problems of our time; problems of money and debt and climate and perspectives polarising to a bitter end. But in the wrong hands? Black Mirror meets China meets social credit and control, coming to a echo chamber near you, extremely soon.
He is absolutely clear: crumble too fast the social systems on which we depend and skipped toilet roll will be the least of your concerns; move too unconsciously and create a beast to which we’re blind and bonded for decades to came; alternatively, tenderly, delicately dance towards the better, self organising future our hearts know is possible.
Here we sit, teetering on an ‘topian’ knife edge. Whether ‘dys’ or ‘u’ is down to, well, you.
People like Jordan are busy imagining a future and working to make it real. This gave me pause for thought: a) what will the world look like if / when this vision comes to pass? b) If you fail to do the work imagining a future which inspires you, you’re outsourcing your future to those that do.
Conversations like this with Jordan serve to wake us up, to remind us what we don’t know. They point too to an age old truth: the ideas which will shape our collective tomorrow are hiding today on the margins, at the periphery.
Back to that gift...
I’m launching a new project for you.
It’s 49 years in the making, which makes it finer than the finest whisky and / or wine. It’s called Peripheral Thinking; a series of conversations (22, in fact) to inspire - and challenge - you with ideas, with thinking, from the margins, the periphery.
Ideas like:
- the end of money as you know it and what it means for you.
- an alternative healthcare.
- Buddhist economics.
- why and how to create a regenerative enterprise.
- indigenous wisdom and why the old trumps the new.
- eastern philosophy
- and your life and work organised on natural, ecological principles.
- and more.
It’s a series of conversations with academics and authors, pioneers and preachers, mighty misfits each - some well known, others less so, challenging you with ideas from the periphery.
Peripheral Thinking.
Your task? To bring the ideas back to the mainstream of your work and life.
It’s coming. Soon.
Sign up here to get the back story of who we’re speaking to and when, get a taste of what you’ll learn and be notified when they drop.
And if you know others who might benefit from shaking the guardrails of their mind, point them here too. Let’s make it a community of friends. It’s going to be good. And big. And fun.
Here’s to 22 conversations for ’22