Faux Fu

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Exercising the Brain Matter

John Robb at Global Guerillas is always forward-looking.  Trying to see beyond the next bend in the road.  If I understand him right, he believes that the global system of trade and intelligence that has settled over our planet, is actually too large, too complex and too unwieldy for us to control and make work for us.  Instead it's an overly large complex system with no master - well beyond nature - and it will foster major disruptions to our ways of life.  Changes will continue to come fast and furious.   Speed will feed speed.  Is that the endgame for the whole she-bang?

Maybe thinking and acting "globally" and can be a positive new paradigm, but maybe not.  In the short term maybe our brains and worlds will just go "haywire" - too much information, too much acceleration, too many choices, a large planet reduced to a small playground.  

Robb is sort of predicting some kind of "black swan" event (a meteor?  an Alien Invasion? maybe the avian flu?) that blows a hole in the fabric of the new thing, upsets the apple cart and brings us back down to some more sustainable (reasonable) existence. 

And then there will be some kind of retrenchment.  In the pain, the tumult, the chaos a smaller scale, sustainable mode of existence will emerge - whether we want it or not.  Then again maybe all of this is poor crystal gazing.  Thinking about the future, trying to read the day and making guesses about what's gonna happen is sort of a "mug's game."  Still it does exercise the brain matter.

Blog Archive