Today, I have been reading a lot of posts related to 9/11 and the terrible events of that day. The conversation lives. It is propagated in every direction and expressed in so many different ways once unimaginable from editorialized news.
My memory of 9/11 was quite personal; I was the customer engineering account manager at Boeing – my customer was United Airlines. I was fortunate to have worked with many UAL Pilots and Flight Attendants and their Unions; UAL lost 16 employees that day – I lost 16 friends.
I remember the anxiety in the aircraft business as the unspeakable was spoken, the impossible became possible, and the unreal became real. My own identity was defined by commercial air travel and the safety and comfort of people and families. The relationship between Boeing and UAL has always been profound; but the strain caused inside the industry was foreboding.
The fact that data could shift so rapidly called everything into question. Relationships diverged, people no longer knew how to process the information that was available. This gargantuan ‘outlier’ stained every single probability chart in existence – like a crater in a barren landscape. The only clarity could be found in shorter time segments, before 9/11, after 9/11… but not 9/11.
“Google News” was one of the first information aggregation devices and was developed in response to one news junky’s need to know, as soon as possible, what is happening in the world of such micro-timing. As the subsequent political and economic swings overshot every rational stabilizing mechanism such as ‘checks and balances’, or ‘market arbitrage’ forces, the rest of us sought quicker and better ways to stay in touch with the events of the world. This meant, quicker ways to stay in touch with each other.
Today, as 9 years of “new time” has been added to the risk equations, we can see the effects of radical cultural shifts; social priorities are gaining momentum over Wall Street priorities. While governments still wrestle with the old world order, a new one is forming in it’s place. This new world has the power to perform many of the functions of corporations and government. Can twitter catch terrorists? Can Facebook entries trigger community awareness? Can instant messaging deliver instant response? How many lives are saved by Social Media? I am not certain, but it is an important question to ask that age old question: Will good triumph over evil? or in economic terms; Is humanity self-correcting?
The convergence continues. The next paradigm of economic development will continue on the micro-time scale as FB communities hit neighborhoods, Linkedin communities hit local communities of practice, and Twitter news armies grow. Cooperation Capitalism will replace competitive Capitalism and social vetting will replace institutional surveillance. Finally, a productivity backed currency will replace debt backed currency. Bring it on.
