www. the great leveler
At the age of 22, I took my first introductory class to the desktop computer. It was 1985; the screen was black with a flashing green cursor that gave me a headache and the OS was DOS. Ever heard of it? It stands for Disk Operating System and the machine was nothing more than a glorified typewriter, aka, a word processor. Basic command language was required in order to tell the machine what to do. It couldn’t do much. The Windows-style user interface hadn't been developed yet. I remember when email became a thing and we freaked out about the lost art of letter writing.
When the internet was first accessible, the information superhighway was so slow…but still, we worried that people would stop interacting face to face and suffer from isolation and mental illness due to long hours spent staring at a computer. This was initially, a first-world problem. Affluent nations could watch the famine in Ethiopia or the genocide in Rwanda like we watched the Vietnam War on Tv. The personal computer was just another screen, at first. By the 1990s the internet became a powerful tool for grassroots organizing, connecting people across vast geographical distances allowing information sharing at speeds never accomplished before. The rise of e-commerce involved the entire globe by the first decade of the 21st century.
Every time a new level of technology is introduced; smartphones, for example; we freak out about losing ourselves inside a digital reality. Clever minds capitalize on projected trends and multi-billionaire culture is born. Behemoths like Google and Amazon take over the world and suddenly everything has speeded up to an unbelievable pace with technology advancing by days and hours instead of decades.
And we have the same fear; fear of change.
Fast forward to today; the Pandemic has made the internet a hero, allowing the wheels to keep turning as people work from home, children learn from home and we connect with others outside our homes, in virtual space. Www. has brought the people of the world together during a global catastrophe in a way like no other in recorded history. Because no one is exempt, the Pandemic is acting in the role of a leveler on more than just a physical plane. This is a shared immersive experience and anyone can air their point of view.
With the rise of the Social Media Influencer, ordinary people are determining which ideas, people, and things get attention, how much, and for how long. Corporate platform algorithms aside, people have more choice and arguably more power of choice than ever.
It was interesting to observe ‘influencer nations’ such as the USA, Russia, China, Britain and France, struggle in the early days of the pandemic, while nations with a smaller profile on the world stage such as Iceland, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Denmark managed the Pandemic with quiet efficiency. Millions have died regrettably, but nothing essential is broken but some illusions of grandeur. Most governments, banks, farms, supply chains, military organizations as well as all those ‘Elon Musketeers’ have just adapted and kept going. Wars, cybercrime, and domestic violence have carried on as well. The shit hit the fan and we coped; many of us thrived.
In fact, as a Canadian, I watched with intense fascination as the large, populous, lopsided, and arrogant nation on our southern border lost its’ shit for a while. I watched with admiration as the American people got angry, rose up, and did something about it. It’s as if the Pandemic, with its’ survival imperative, motivated the American group mind to remember its roots as a republic. As fraught as those terms have come to be, I admire the spirit of we the people and the belief in their ability to manifest real social change. It takes tremendous faith and courage to continue to weather the backlash, the violence, and the hate.
North America is not the only stage upon which the Pandemic has been a catalyst for a drama of change. I watch more world news than I have ever before because I seek to witness the patterns that portend a paradigm shift. I love that I can observe, collect data and interact. The scale is massive and very complex because everything is interconnected. Everything has always been interconnected but for the first century in human history, we are watching it happen live, in real-time, because of the internet.
