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    Crowd/Control
    Crowd/Control
    Crowd/Control
    Ebook127 pages2 hours

    Crowd/Control

    By Tim Gray

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    About this ebook

    Where is the world going? And why is it doing that?

    A lot of books looking at the incoming waves of the future get starry-eyed about technology. This one takes a broader view of social change, framing the world we see taking shape in terms of two mindsets that are pulling in different directions.

    The internet has given us communication beyond borders. That has acted as an accelerator, bringing people together to grow ideas, movements and projects.

    The crowd mindset sees opportunities for combining the best of our skills, energy and resources to make things happen.

    The control mindset sees the familiar patterns of society crumbling, and its own place at the top of the heap threatened, and responds by trying to enforce more structure.

    The book is a collection of short articles blending perspective, compassion, humour, and fierce frustration at why things aren't better yet. Tim Gray introduces the cultural forces of crowd and control then looks at different facets of the fluid world taking shape around us, including technology, climate and resources, work, business, political power, media and health.

    'Crowd/Control' is not just about playing with ideas. It's about informing social change and personal development. We are in a time when our self-created problems are building up to bring us low, and the root cause is thinking and habits that no longer serve us.

    We are in the process of choosing between the upward path and the downward path, consciously or not. This book is about helping you see more clearly where to put your allegiance and your energy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXinXii
    Release dateMar 29, 2015
    ISBN9780957457218
    Crowd/Control

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      Book preview

      Crowd/Control - Tim Gray

      Contents

      Introduction

      PART ONE Cultural forces

      Why is the world like this? Where are we going?

      Communication beyond borders

      Cultural mutation

      The control reaction

      The crowd movement

      Where do these tendencies come from?

      Equal culture

      The age of illumination

      Neofeudalism

      On toil

      Growing pains

      PART TWO Surfing the fluid world

      Welcome to the fluid world

      Technology on tap

      Backstabbing the internet

      Resource realism

      Wild weather

      The dance of the gaps

      Caution, humans at work

      Crowd business

      The technology of ourselves

      Expert accelerators

      Crowd power

      The media split

      Health hostilities

      An older society

      The privacy problem

      Conclusion

      Wrapping up

      A call to action

      End notes

      Stay in touch

      The author talks about himself in the third person

      Acknowledgments

      Admonitions

      Introduction

      This book started in autumn 2012, I think, at a seminar for entrepreneurs run by Roger Hamilton. Roger’s an Australian entrepreneur, creator of the Wealth Dynamics personality profiling system, doer of various other interesting stuff, and an excellent speaker.

      One of the main parts of the programme was ten waves of change Roger saw that would alter life and business over the next few years. Stuff like 3D printing and ways of taking payments with portable devices.

      It was all great food for thought and important to know about, but I started to get an itch. Roger’s waves were all very technology-based and, like many futurist predictions, a bit utopian. I love it when technology does cool stuff, but I think you need to include more human factors, and be a bit grounded as well. I was involved in the environmental movement for years, so I always think about the resource implications. You can’t treat technology as magic on a planet with finite material and energy resources.

      So obviously I started thinking about what my own waves of change might be. It included some of the same elements, but also a lot of big-picture social and environmental issues. I got part-way with a text and then left it while other things went on.

      I was exploring and thinking about using writing to communicate, online and offline; how it connects with how people think; and the role of design and presentation. I was poking around to learn about online marketing. I was having great networking and personal growth conversations in Nick Williams’ Inspired Entrepreneur community (now evolved into Born to Lead). Last but not least I was railing against the anti-humane actions of the UK government and outrageous crap elsewhere in the world, and pondering where that might be coming from.

      I’m a big one for theories. My pattern-seeking is turned up pretty high – it’s where my editing skills come from. And I did, after all, do a philosophy degree, although thank goodness I pretty much forgot it all years ago. Eventually I saw a model of crowd/inspiration vs control/structure, which is pretty useful in explaining what’s going on in the world right now.

      That’s what I want to set out for you here. I’ve folded in some of the earlier big picture/waves of change material about what’s happening in the world and what might happen next, trying to set it in a crowd/control context.

      Why? You mean apart from setting it down before I forget, and seeking the adulation of my fans?

      Well, I think we live in a time of great significance. Our options are huge, and our self-generated threats are also huge. We have to make choices. We can take an upward path in pursuit of our great potential and our higher selves. Or we can take a downward path in capitulation to our lower selves that will leave us broken and overwhelmed by the follies of our own thinking habits.

      If you are a good and thoughtful person you may wonder why that is even a question; and why, day after day, people choose the wrong answer; and, perhaps, whether anything can be done about it.

      In response, here is a perspective that may help to illuminate the quagmire. I think I am on the right track; and if not, at least I’m posing some of the right questions.

      The world we want is waiting to be made. But there are limited time windows for parts of that process. There are elections to be decided, carbon emissions to be reduced, petitions to be signed to head heinous nonsense off at the pass. I hope you will choose to be an agent of the upward path. I will be honoured if I have supplied part of your armament.

      – Tim Gray, November 2014

      PART ONE

      Cultural forces

      Why is the world like this? Where are we going?

      You’ve probably looked at stories coming through the news and your social media feeds, and wondered: why do people do things like this?

      Or maybe you’ve looked at the way the world has changed, and is changing, and wondered where on earth we’re taking ourselves over the next while.

      My aim in this book is to give you a perspective that’ll help make sense of the big picture. And also to encourage you to play a part, small or large, in nudging things in a righter direction.

      WHERE I’M COMING FROM

      I got involved in local environmental action in the late 1980s. I helped with local work relating to the 1992 Earth Summit, and have followed sustainability and ethical issues since.

      And, you know, I look around at where we are two and a half decades later and I get angry and frustrated. Why haven’t we fixed this stuff yet so we can move on to whatever’s next?

      Seriously, we’ve known about the problems and a lot of the solutions for that long, and we’re supposedly smart monkeys. What’s been getting in the way?

      We now understand, in a way we didn’t twenty-odd years ago, that creating social change is not a straightforward matter of presenting persuasive information. It’s about all sorts of things that go on in people’s heads.

      Recently I realised that if you look at the path of our society in a zoomed-out way, there are cultural forces of control at work.

      Deliberately or coincidentally, they try to stop change and nail everything down into familiar patterns. Psychologically and materially vested interests are acting to keep you in your place.

      They have always been there, I expect, but today they are accelerated and magnified by the rise of the internet, and the extent to which that is creating change – especially change that brings groups of people together to make things and exert influence in mould-breaking ways.

      This is what I’m going to draw out in the first part of the book. I believe it’s an important model to think about if we want humanity to take what I call ‘the upward path’, and if we want to play some part in making that happen.

      The upward path is about bringing our best talents and values to bear in the pursuit of human well-being, with responsibility to each other and the world that supports us. You can say this is idealistic, but it’s an increasingly concrete, pragmatic option as the landmarks along the downward path come into ever-sharper focus, and more of us wonder how we got here.

      We have been standing in a place of options. Some of those options are windows slowly closing. The ground we’re standing on will shift. The consequences of our action or inaction have not been waiting patiently for us to decide, but have crept out into the world.

      So let’s speed up the good stuff. Let’s be bold and honest with ourselves about the world we really want to see. Let’s use books like this to jump our thinking forward so we can climb faster.

      Let’s get off the slow train to Mordor. And let’s start by unmasking the goblins

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