EntEring thE Shift AgE:

The end of The InformaTIon age and The new era of TransformaTIon
DaviD Houle
Copyright © 2012 by David Houle
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Part 1 WElcomE to thE Shift AgE
introduction
A
re you unsettled? Do you feel anxious about the future? Why does everything that used to work no longer work and the way things used to be feels long gone? Are things getting better or getting worse? Are your children coming of age at a wonderful time or a horrible time?

Well, the reason you may be feeling uneasy and asking these questions is due to the time we live in and the fact that we are at a major inflection point in human history.

We have entered a new age, The Shift Age, and have left the Information Age. The Shift Age is and will be one of the most transformative times in all history. Almost everything in your life and every part of your life is in some relative rate of shift.

No wonder you are worried and anxious! Or you may be incredibly excited by the future rushing toward us. Either way, “Entering the Shift Age” is the book to better help you understand all the incredible change swirling around you. Consider this book your road map to the future

This book also has a unique lineage.
In early 2006 I launched my futurist blog http.evolutionshift.com with the tag line, “A Future Look at Today”. The reason I started the blog was simple: I had a strong sense that humanity was entering a new age—that manifestations of this new age were everywhere—and I felt the need to write about them.
The year before, when sensing that perhaps a new stage of humanity’s development was underway, I went back and reread the futurists who had shaped my thinking, who, writing in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s had been right about what was and would be happening in the decades ahead. These were the greats in my pantheon: Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan first and foremost, along with Buckminster Fuller. Later John Naisbitt and Nicholas Negroponte wrote books built upon these greats. I even revisited the science fiction writers Arthur C. Clarke and William Gibson as their fiction had become fact. What I found was that though these brilliant writers, particularly Toffler and McLuhan, had been incredibly insightful about the last quarter of the 20th century, their clarity into the 21st century became a bit diffuse.
What was this next age? It was clear to me that the end of the cold war, the globalization of the economy, the incredible force of the Internet, the astounding revolution in computing and the explosive growth of cellular communications was ushering all of us into a new time that didn’t yet have a name or conceptual shape.
As I researched, the word that kept coming up for me was “shift”. It seemed as though a profound shift was about to occur, that there were many shifts going on that were altering humanity’s reality in significant ways. How we live, how we think, how we perceive the world and even our consciousness was being altered. This shift was going to be so pronounced that it seemed nothing less than an evolutionary next step. Hence the name of the blog, Evolutionshift.
As I wrote 1-3 columns a week, two things happened. First, my constant study, observation and reporting from the front lines of the shift helped to shape a larger, more cohesive view of humanity’s next step. Second, my blog developed a following. This ever-increasing group of followers opened doors, brought invitations to events and conferences and then to speaking engagements. As I was developing a sense of clarity of the future, people were asking me if I was writing a book, or told me that I had to do so. So I did.
Armed with good contacts, a good agent and a book proposal I approached the traditional book publishing industry, though with a great sense of conflict. Here I was, a futurist, knocking at the door of an industry that clearly was about to be eviscerated due to disintermediation – and they didn’t see it. The responses to my manuscript ranged from cold to ludicrous. Publishers said I was too optimistic, that the future was about apocalypse, that I needed to have the word “trend” in the title, that they already had a futurist so another one was not needed. One editor, Peter Lynch at Sourcebooks, liked my proposal but could not get unanimous agreement from the editorial committee at that time.
So, I turned to one of my favorite companies, Amazon, and had them publish “The Shift Age” in late 2007. Since this was exactly when the Kindle, the concept of which I had forecast, was introduced, my book was available in print and ebook format by early 2008.
My life changed. Though “The Shift Age” never became a best seller in the traditional sense, it did become influential. The book made its way into the hands of CEOs, upper-level executives and business owners. My speaking career took off—within two years of the book’s first appearance on Amazon I had made some 150 speeches in several countries in North and South America. Heads of companies from around the world wrote me that the book had led them to alter the strategic vision of their enterprise. Audiences told me that my speeches changed how they looked at the world and gave them a context for understanding the scary upheaval all around them.
Simultaneously the crash of 2008 happened. Legacy thinking being what it is, most people I encountered before simply assumed we were still living in the Information Age. Now audiences were unsettled by the bursting of the housing bubble, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the unprecedented speed at which the world fell into the worst economic downturn in 70 years due to the ever increasing connectedness of the financial world. My view that we had entered what would be a five-year reorganizational recession between two ages, was the first context that provided understanding. This great global recession was coincidental with the transit from one age, the Information Age, to the next age, the Shift Age. In times of uncertainty, having a path to understanding at least provides perspective, if not a line of credit or a secure job.
During this time in the United States, in question and answer sessions after speeches, I was repeatedly asked if America would remain a great nation. I found myself answering this question by saying something along the lines of “If we don’t better educate our young, if we don’t become healthier and if we don’t rebuild our communications, energy and transportation infrastructures for the 21st century, it doesn’t matter what else we do”.
Well this led me to face America’s future on those first issues and write two books. The first, “Shift Ed: A Call to Action for Transforming K-12 Education”, written with friend and co-author Jeff Cobb and published by Corwin Press, was published in the spring of 2011 and was embraced by educators across the country. As a futurist my challenge to educators was to either follow the vision set forth in the book or create their own but that transformation was the only way forward. Many committed educators at all levels have risen to the occasion and that transformation has begun.
The second issue oriented book was “The New Health Age: The Future of Health Care in America” co-authored with health care attorney Jonathan Fleece and published by Sourcebooks in January of 2012. Simply put, the conversation about health care in America was and still is driven by fear, misinformation and manipulation by politicians. The goal was to write an intelligent book to bring both intelligence and vision to the country’s health care discussion. It seems to be starting to do so as of this writing.
“Entering the Shift Age” is now bringing me back to the more global, macro issues of this new Shift Age we have entered. (That third issue of infrastructure will be dealt with in Parts 3 and 4 of this book). “The Shift Age” was published quickly four years ago. The goal was to get the concept of this new age out to the world in a summary form. The first quarter of that book was a general discussion of the new age and the remaining three quarters of the book was reedited columns that I had written in my blog; the reporting from the front lines of the Shift Age. Since the publication of “The Shift Age” in early 2008 I have known that I would want to write a follow up book that was a fuller, deeper and more comprehensive explanation and guide to the Shift Age. This desire was driven further by the constant demand of “The Shift Age” readers for another book dealing with the larger aspects of this new age of ours.
“Entering the Shift Age” is that book.
What I had not yet figured out was how to publish this book in a way and format that was more in line with the future of publishing. This is where Dominique Raccah and Sourcebooks came in. Dominique heard me speak in mid-2011 and had a screamingly loud, full bells and whistles “aha moment” about publishing my work in an entirely new way. As someone who restlessly seeks new ideas and ways of doing things Dominique had been reflecting on what new publishing models might look like. One such model was a perfect match for my book.
I came into Sourcebooks to present to the company and to start the brainstorming of what this new publishing model would look like. Now, for the first time I got to meet Peter Lynch, who was the only person who had wanted to say yes to my book proposal years earlier. The symmetry, serendipity and karmic aspects of this new partnership were and are exhilarating. This book is being published using the Agile Publishing Model, which will be one of the new forms of bringing “books” to market. As a futurist, for the first time I feel the process and form matches the content. You are part of a new form of publishing. You are also now entering the Shift Age, one of the most transformative times to be alive in human history. This book, in all its electronic, print and video aspects will introduce the Shift Age to those of you who come to it conceptually for the first time. And for those of you who read and had your thinking changed by reading “The Shift Age” over these past few years, the book you hold in your hands now will give you a greater depth of understanding to these times. We have entered the Shift Age when almost everything is in a state of shift and change is accelerating and all around us. So, let’s take a look as this new age.
David Houle Sarasota, Florida, February 2012
CHaPter one

WElcomE to thE Shift AgE
W
e now live in the Shift Age, a time of transformation that will be regarded by future historians as one of the most significant periods in human history. The Shift Age is one of those inflection points or times when much of humanity will change how we live, how we think, how we interact with each other, and what we do. It will even be a time of an emerging new consciousness for many of us.

Shift is everywhere. Think about all of the shifts you’re seeing happen today. How we communicate with each other. The way the new global economy is reshaping national and even local economies. What we do for a living. The values we hold. The way we raise and educate our young. The way we view the world. The way we access information and knowledge. The way we influence and are influenced by social ideas and thought.

In the Shift Age the speed of change has accelerated to the point where change has become environmental. Change is no longer one of several dynamics that we must manage, it is the environment in which we live. We feel it. We are constantly confronted with change. The planned obsolescence of the Industrial Age has given way to the ever more rapid speed of technological and innovation obsolescence. We now suffer from what I have called innovation fatigue.

Wait you say, aren’t we in the Information Age? Well, to some degree we still are. If the Information Age was about information, knowledge work and computing then yes the Information Age is still with us. By that standard does it mean that because we grow more food that at any time in history we are still in the Agricultural Age? That since the global gross industrial output today is greater than ever before mean we are in the Industrial Age? Actually, the answer is yes. Ages don’t go away they just become layered sequential parts of our history of social and economic evolution. We still grow things, manufacture things, do knowledge work, and live in an information-overloaded world. Yet, as we will see, the Information Age has already ceded to the Shift Age.

Humans have a unique way of looking at the present through the concepts of the past. This is legacy thinking. It is hard to avoid it. We experience something, are taught something, learn something in the past and it then becomes the filter through which we look at and see the world. I will expand on this in Part Three of this book as we are now going through a major collapse of legacy thinking with a speed that is unparalleled in human history. We are about to go through major shifts that will render obsolete so much of the thought structures of the last two hundred years. Welcome to the Shift Age.

An appropriate metaphor for the Shift Age is an earthquake. If you have ever experienced an earthquake, you know the sense of powerlessness. You can remember it as though it was yesterday. That entire drama called your life is completely forgotten. The first feeling is disorientation: what is this? Recognition that it is an earthquake instills fear then prompts reaction. What to do? The ground is literally shifting underfoot. You survive but are shaken. You have experienced a force greater than yourself, a turbulence you can’t control. Yet you come out the other side, but with a different outlook on your life and of life in general.
Welcome to the Shift Age.
A Very Brief History of Humanity Leading to the Shift Age

How does one age change into another? For many of us, the most immediate example we can conceive of was the change from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. Let’s take a quick contextual look back to the beginnings of the Information Age. As the world entered the final quarter of the 20th century it became clear that one age was giving way to another. While the new age was not yet full formed, its early manifestations suggested a clear direction. First there was the massive increase in college graduates in the United States due first to the GI Bill post World War II (the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944). This created a higher percentage of the work force with college degrees – knowledge workers – than ever before. Then came the baby boom generation, the transformation of the workforce from blue to white collar, the advent of computers and their migration into everyday life, and the launch of communications satellites all presaged the onset of something new.

The great futurist and historian Alvin Toffler called it the Third Wave following the previous two waves of agriculture and industry. But from the view of the Industrial Age, it appeared that this new age was about information, so this new time or age was christened the Information Age by scholars, futurists, and historians alike. This name became part of the vernacular and has been used to define our time ever since. This term, the Information Age is now more than 35 years old, and during this time unexpected transformation has occurred.

Yet 35 years is actually quite a short time in the history of humanity’s ages. And it is only in recent times that ages have changed so quickly.

The current iteration of humanity is known as Modern Humans. It is generally accepted that the age of Modern Humans began some 150,000 years ago. For most of this time, humanity scarcely differed from other animals – simply trying to survive day to day by hunting and gathering.

Then, approximately 10,000 years ago, some groups of humans started to put down roots and the Agricultural Age began. This led to the placedbased development of society and culture. This 10,000 year period represents most of recorded human history and is when all the great civilizations we know of came into being. The basic foundation of human society was developed during the Agricultural Age.

The Agricultural Age continued until the 1700s when the invention of the steam engine ushered in the Industrial Age. This age brought about mechanization, urbanization, centralization and a dramatic increase in global wealth. The Industrial Age spanned roughly 250 years until, in the last quarter of the 20th century, the Information Age began in developed countries.

Now let’s think about the experience of change in these ages. Accept for the sake of easy math that a lifetime is 50 years. (We obviously live longer than that now, but centuries and certainly millennia ago we didn’t.) If a lifetime is 50 years, then 150,000 years, the time Modern Humans has been on this planet, is 3,000 lifetimes. The Agricultural Age, 10,000 years in length, represents 200 lifetimes. So for the first 2,800 of Modern Humanity’s lifetimes we were essentially nomadic and lived in portable housing or in caves. For 200 lifetimes we tilled the land and created civilization and for only 5 lifetimes we have lived in the Industrial Age with machines. Finally it is during the life of most adults alive today that Modern Humans have lived in the Information Age. Modern Humans therefore have spent 2,800 lifetimes living in caves, 200 lifetimes tilling the land and creating all the great civilizations of the world, 5 lifetimes creating all the wonders of the Industrial Age and only a single lifetime living in the Information Age. When we look at our species in the context of this timeline, it is clear that most of what we think of when we think of “humanity” and “society” is recent.

Not only are humanity’s ages fairly recent, but they are changing ever more rapidly. During the first 2,800 lifetimes, humanity had no sense of the speed of change. Survival was the only issue. Even during the Agricultural Age, the speed of change was hardly noticeable in a lifetime. People lived in the same place and held the same occupation as their parents. The average life expectancy was 45 years, or less. In the last few centuries of this age, exploration and discovery started to accelerate the social, cultural and economic evolution around the world. The Renaissance in Europe, the great Mayan and Aztec civilizations of Central America and the sophisticated dynasties in China and India all were toward the end of the Agricultural Age. Even during these great strides forward, humans had little or no concept of change in a lifetime.

It was not until the beginning of the Industrial Age that the speed of change was experienced by humanity on a large scale. In the United States, for example, if you were born in the year 1825, you grew up in an essentially agricultural society. The majority of the population lived in the country or in small towns, and land and products from it determined wealth. By your 60th birthday, if you lived that long, manufacturing began to supplant farming, cities were undergoing explosive growth, you could travel by train and you could have your photograph taken. The world you lived in was noticeably different than that of your grandparents and even parents. My grandparents grew up in a world of steam engines, candlelight and horse and buggy. I grew up in a world of television, jet planes, and communication satellites. My son grew up with video games, computers, cell phones, digital media and the Internet.

Therefore, it is only in the last five or six lifetimes of humanity’s time on earth that the speed of change could be clearly perceived to have occurred during one’s life. This is essential to remember, as the awareness and experience of the speed of change as a phenomenon is common to practically every human alive today.

The Four Ages of Humanity
While ages and stages of history often overlap and blend into each other, there are simple conceptual characteristics to every age.
» Tools defined the Agricultural Age » Machines defined the Industrial Age » Technology defined the Information Age » Consciousness will define the Shift Age

That does not mean that the advancements of the previous ages go away. Clearly, in 2012 and for the foreseeable future technology will continue to be a major influence in the world. In fact, there are tools still in use that were invented during the Agricultural Age. The same goes for Industrial Age machines. Each age adds to what has gone before, expanding and accelerating the human experience. The consciousness that will occur in the Shift Age will continue this expansion and acceleration.

In light of this, it is not often clear for people living during the time that an age is changing. A new age takes root before it becomes widely understood and accepted. Even though it is generally accepted that the invention of the steam engine in the 18th century initiated the Industrial Age (with the hindsight of history we can both ascertain what events became important and when new ages gained critical mass), a hundred years later there were still areas of the world and entire countries that lived and operated fully in Agricultural Age economics and rhythms.

The countries that were most developed in the early part of the 20th century were countries that had led the move from the Agricultural to the Industrial Age. In the last 100 years of the Industrial Age, the invention and rapid spreading of new forms of communications and then transport sped up the world wide transition to this new age. The telegraph led to the telephone. Railroads increased the speed of transportation as did the airplanes that followed. World War I was the first industrialized war, which was why it was so horrific compared to any prior war. In fact, it wasn’t until during and after that war that humanity accepted it was living in this new Industrial Age.

It is also clear that the beginnings of the Information Age began before humanity became aware of and then generally accepted that it was living in a new age. In the 1960s the United States was clearly an Industrial Age country. In the 1980s it was clearly in the Information Age. The decade of the 1970s was the transition between these two ages. It was the decade of communication satellites, the personal computer, cable television, unprecedented numbers of college graduates. In other words one could say that the Information Age began sometime around 1975. (It is generally accepted that the Industrial Age began in the 1700s and that the Information Age began sometime between 1950 and 1980. Clearly there is no one specific date or year that an age begins, but rather a period of transition between any two historical epochs or ages. For consistency and clarity and because I believe the demarcation between these two ages became clear in the middle of the 1970s, I arbitrarily use the date of 1975 to mark the beginning of the Information Age.) But other than futurists, visionaries and inventors, the larger population didn’t see in 1975 that it was living in a new Information Age, until the 1980s when computers started to show up on desktops, the number of television channels multiplied, the majority of workers had become white collar and the office had replaced the factory floor.

So new ages begin and develop for a time before the majority of the population perceives that it is living in a new age. I submit that the Shift Age began around 2006 or the middle of the last decade. It has been interesting to me that when I first started to speak about this new age in 2007 people had a hard time perceiving that they were in a new age. By 2011, after a four year reorganizational recession audiences have largely accepted that a new age might well be upon us as everything had changed or shifted so much in such a short period of time. Welcome to the Shift Age.

This does not mean that when people realize a new age has begun that they easily accept it. When a new age is born, it seems radical, transformative and is often resisted as unnatural, nonhuman, immoral, or threatening. This is due to the very nature of human thought. We know what we know, we live in a time when things are the way they are. To think differently is difficult. Truth as we have known it is shown to not be true. We find out that facts that we’ve accepted are not really facts, but beliefs.

10,000 years ago, the idea of humans staying in one place, growing food and creating the tools to do so, was a radical idea that slowly emerged. Staying in one place and not following the animals and the weather must have seemed almost unnatural. The introduction of the Agricultural Age took many millennia to become dominant. Once it was, then towns and cities superseded migrant tribes. These led to the development of the Concept of Place. People spent entire lives living in a single place for the first time in humankind’s time on Earth.

Once lives started to revolve around place then civilization began. Social rules, culture and mores were established to organize these placebased, agriculturally driven civilizations. Place became defining. People were from a place. This led to the orientation of land as the dominant form of wealth. Wealth came from the land.

The Industrial Age triggered massive change. People left the land for the rapidly growing cities. Machines became dominant. Factories created a centralized work force. The concepts of jobs and management began. The factory was the model and production superseded the land as a form and measurement of wealth creation. Those that controlled production created unprecedented wealth. Robber Barons in every country created vast wealth and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Land was no longer solely the place on which crops were grown but the place from which minerals and fossil fuels were extracted. Cities grew explosively as the poor who worked the land before could now earn more money in cities and factories.

The Industrial Age gave us all the machines and inventions we now take for granted: automobiles, electricity, elevators, airplanes, and untold numbers of production related types of machinery. This economic reorganization initiated new social organizations, such as public school systems, transportation systems, private clubs, civic and charity organizations, organized sports and of course everything related to the automobile. Simply put, the Industrial Age organized the developed countries of the world into an order that, in large part, defined the 19th and 20th centuries (and is still largely in place today).

The Industrial Age moved the Concept of Place from small towns and the land to the City. Along with this move of course was the introduction of communication inventions that became systems that made the world “smaller”. The Telegraph was replaced by the Telephone. Radio was followed by Television. The world became more connected. World War II was the first radio war. Viet Nam was the first television war.

Then, in the 1970s technology started to replace machines. Computers moved from big air-conditioned basements to the desktop. Communication satellites increased global communication and created such businesses as cable television. Computers dramatically increased everything in science, business and education. The fax machine, the electronic calculator and the copier changed the office. This was when we realized that this newly named Information Age was upon us.

Since the Information Age began approximately 40 years ago in developed countries, the perception of change and the speed of change have become pronounced. The future has seemed to show up at an accelerating rate. Alvin Toffler’s book “Future Shock” was published in 1970. The simple premise of the book was that humanity was entering a period when time is accelerating and new inventions will show up and “shock” us into the future. One personal example was when, in the mid 1980s I saw a man walking down the street talking on one of those early 5 pound cell phones. Wow, a phone without a cord being used on the street! That is the future! In the decades since 1970 humanity has come to accept this future shock as an almost constant experience. We settle into learning and adapting to a new technology and its enabling power in our lives, and then almost immediately a new technological breakthrough or gadget renders what we just mastered dated or even obsolete. We say we embrace innovation, and yet at times it overwhelms us. We want to keep up, and in most areas of our lives we do, but there always seems to be a part of our lives where we can’t quite catch up. Things move at us too fast and with great force, as though we are drinking from the proverbial fire hose. This sense of the rapidity of change really began in the past 25 years, a transitional time when humanity moved from what was to what will be.

Change can be quite unsettling. What we “know” and the technologies we use are our current reality. We all tend to develop a sense of comfort in what is, what is known, how we live, what the current parameters and ways of living are. So when some change or sense of disruption is felt we often get anxious. In reality the only constant in the universe is change. In Modern Humans most recent history, the speed of change and the depth of the sense of disruption has been increasing.
So, let us take a look at the 20-year period that will be looked upon as the demarcation line between the past and the present/future.
CHaPter two

thE thrEShold dEcAdES

threshold
1: the plank, stone, or piece of timber that lies under a door: sill
2 a: gate, door b (1): end, boundary; specifically: the end of a runway (2): the place or point of entering or beginning: outset “on the threshold of a new age”
3 a: the point at which a physiological or psychological effect begins to be produced “has a high threshold for pain” b: a level, point, or value above which something is true or will take place and below which it is not or will not
—MerriamWebster Online Dictionary
A
s the dictionary states, a threshold is a place of entering or beginning. It is a place between two rooms, a doorway. Threshold is also used regarding pain, as in one’s “pain threshold”. All three meanings pertain to the Threshold Decades, the 20-year period from 1985 to 2005. The years from 1985 to 2005 were a time of incredible change. In fact it

is hard to find another twenty-year period in the history of humanity when our world changed as much in such a short period of time. Fifty years from now, I believe these two decades will be seen as a true demarcation in the history of humanity, an obvious time bridge between two eras.

Practically every aspect of life changed. Since there has been so much transformation, change, and innovation it is easy to forget what actually happened during these 20 years. Here is a quick look at 1985:

» The political and economic world was divided in two: the Eastern Bloc, controlled by the Soviet Union, and the Western Bloc, led by the United States.

» China was the world’s largest communist nation, with closed and protected borders.
» The precursor to the Internet was used by only a few thousand people, mostly in scientific, academic and governmental settings.
» The first cell phones were appearing, but they weighed several pounds and there were just a few hundred thousand users.
» The personal computer was in the very early stages of distribution and existed mostly in business settings.
» The fax machine was just gaining distribution.
» There were three broadcast networks in the United States
» The penetration of cable television in the United States was under 40 percent, and there were fewer than 20 cable networks.

Those of you that went through this twenty-year period as adults look back on this and are amazed how much has changed. You have adapted and accepted so much newness into your lives that this snap shot of reality above makes you realize how much change we have experienced. Those of you who were young children or were born during the Threshold Decades now can see how different your lives as adults are today than those of your parents.

Major Transformations in the Threshold Decades

Much has been written about the movement from analog to digital, from hierarchies to networks, from few to many, from fast to faster and from national to global. I do not intend to rehash or deeply investigate these subjects. This book after all is about macro trends, the largest forces reorganizing our world. That said, a brief recap is constructive to not only provide a refresher on all that happened during this twenty year period, but to also set the stage for the Shift Age, which follows the Threshold Decades.

AnAlog to DigitAl
Between 1985 and 2005 developed countries moved from analog to digital. This shift underpins the technological communications growth and computing explosion cited earlier. It is also evidenced in music moving from analog LPs and tapes to CDs to digital downloading. The same parallel occurred in film with the move from VHS to DVD to digital downloading. Digital downloading greatly increased Internet use, caused upheaval in the affected industries, and disintermediated professions.

The conversion to digital also accelerated access and usage. A consumer can go right to her favorite song on the CD or scene on the DVD, without waiting for fast-forwarding. This has created an expectation among consumers of immediacy and “on demand” fulfillment which now drives consumer and individual empowerment. Music can instantly be downloaded

1985
If you were a middle-aged American in 1985, you most likely:
» Had a repressed fear of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union that would destroy both nations and most of the world.

» Had a phone at home and one at the office, both attached to the wall
» Had in your entire office complex one or two personal computers that somebody had been specially trained to operate.
» Had maybe a single, slow fax machine in your workplace.
» Might have been in the 40 percent of the population that had a VCR, and most of what you viewed you recorded (with difficulty) as there were few video rental stores.
» Listened to music on vinyl records or cassettes
» Rarely experienced what is now called Òairport securityÓ
» Most likely had never heard of AIDS or HIV and you had certainly never heard of Al-Qaeda, outsourcing, downsizing, cheap airfares, DNA mapping or the Internet

to wherever you are. Movies are increasingly streamed, videos instantly served up for viewing. All forms of content are available right here, right now. We determine what and when, and often how much—always on, always available.

HierArcHies to networks
In 1985 the world was still largely structured around hierarchies. The drive toward centralization that occurred during the Industrial Age created large hierarchies in business, government and practically any large organization. In fact, half of the world, the Eastern Bloc, operated with central planning committees. Even in the social realm, there were pecking orders, remnants of the aristocracies of the Agricultural Age, and economic social structures held over from the robber barons of the Industrial Age.

These hierarchies were challenged and, in many cases, converted or obliterated during the Threshold Decades, when most of society started to reorganize around the network structure. Vertical hierarchies flattened into horizontal networks. Decision-making was pushed down in organizations, rendering hierarchy less important. The new connectedness allowed people to circumvent traditional social structures and connect around common interests, regardless of location. In 1985 people worked up the corporate ladder and socialized at private clubs. In 2005 people worked as independent contractors or entrepreneurs, connecting on online social networks.

Our world is now one of networks. Hierarchies still exist, particularly in government, but they are no longer as respected and are often scorned for being slow-moving. In fact, all the areas of society that still had a great amount of bureaucracy in 2005 and have not yet radically changed are suffering ever lowering respect and ever slowing ability to keep up.

Few to MAny: tHe triuMpH oF cHoice
Along with the transition from hierarchies to networks came the shift from few to many. Even on the political front, numbers increased. In 1985 there were 159 member nations of the United Nations. In 2005 there were 191, largely due to the fragmenting of the Soviet Union into 15 countries and Yugoslavia into 5. In existing democracies new political parties were created, often issue oriented ones such as the various environmentally focused Green parties that have sprung up in several developed countries. Democratic choices increased.

Media is perhaps the clearest example of the explosion of choice. In 1985 the United States had 3 broadcast networks and approximately 20 cable networks. In 2005 there were 6 broadcast networks and more than 100 cable networks. The number of web sites went from a handful to millions.
Number (in 1950 1975 1985 1995 2005the U.S.)
Radio 2,232 4,463 8,593 11,987 13,499Stations
Web Sites 0 23,500 75,251,156
Published 11,022 39,372 75,452 113,589 251,903Books
TV Channels
(Average 2 3 18 41 102 Household)
Figure 1: The Explosion of Choice in the United States: 1950–2005, from The
ShifT Age^1.
While this movement from few to many occurred, new technologies came to market that helped the consumer make selections. During the growth of television viewing options, the remote control came to market: the viewer could change channels without getting up from the couch. The remote control helped the consumer make fast and immediate decisions. This was the beginning of the end of network programmers’ command over viewers. This also happened with digital purchase of music, allowing the buyer to select single tracks and therefore unbundle the album concept.

The key development that came from the transition of few to many was the explosion of the choice for everyone. With hundreds of channels, tens of thousands of books, millions of web sites, and even dozens of different toothpastes, the consumer had an ever-increasing amount of choice and therefore control. Today more than any time in history, the consumer has the power of choice and uses that power every day.

Today, in the Shift Age, the power of the individual is growing every day. As we will see in Part Two of this book, we as individuals have more power today than individuals have ever had. It was during the Threshold Decades that the explosion of choice began. This means that the power has moved from the producer to the consumer, from the institution to the individual.

ever FAster
During the Threshold Decades everything seemed to move faster and faster. Cell phones, the Internet, and personal computers drove this acceleration. The speed of computers doubled every 18 to 24 months. The back-andforth nature of most human communication collapsed. The turnaround time for mailing a letter and receiving a response was approximately a week; the turnaround time for sending and receiving an e-mail was minutes, and instant messaging only took seconds. Waiting for someone to get home or get to the office to return a phone call was no longer necessary’ you called the person wherever she was. This time shortening increased the velocity of transactions, business decisions, and plans (teenagers now make plans moment to moment via text messaging). Decisions happened much faster in a networked, decentralized environment than in a hierarchical, centralized one. Work could be done much more quickly on faster computers.

When Internet usage took off during the second half of the Threshold Decades, people could work around the clock. Suffer from insomnia in the middle of the night? Send emails. Financial projections need to be reworked? Have them back on the boss’s electronic desk before she logs on in the morning. Work became something one could do 24/7.

Communications became closer to immediate than ever before. All this connectedness accelerated human interaction. Factor in the constant and rapid rate of innovation across numerous fields: medicine, science, nonhuman space exploration, artistic creation, most forms of content publishing and any number of other fields underwent significant advancement, accelerating the general speed of change to a rate never before experienced.

By the end of the Threshold Decades, the speed of change had accelerated so much that it was no longer sequential (as in the Industrial Age) but had become simultaneous across multiple social areas. This set the state for the Shift Age, where change becomes part of our environment. We now live in an environment of change.

west Meets eAst
The social, economic, and political ramifications of the unification of the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc cannot be overstated. In 1985 communism was perceived as a possible economic and political order. By 2005 it was essentially dead as a viable way of governance. The largest communist country in the world in terms of population, China, became the fastest growing capitalistic economy in the world. In 1985 there was no real global economy. In 2005 there was a vibrant global economy. In 1985 there was minimal and highly controlled economic activity between the Eastern and Western Blocs. In 2005 Europe used millions of barrels of Russian oil, and the United States was awash in products made in China. The collapse of communism, most symbolically represented by the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, created a vacuum, and global forces rushed in. For the first time since before World War I, the economic movement toward a global economy resumed and then took off.

So it was during this post–Cold War time that the West began to aggressively export its’ capitalistic way of life. Western companies set up international supply chains utilizing newly opened countries and markets for low cost production. Western consumer culture was widely embraced by former Eastern communist countries. This started the creation of rapidly growing numbers of people in the middle class around the world.

There was another merger of East and West that was equally profound, although perhaps less noticeable. This was the merger of underlying beliefs and philosophies. During the second half of the 20th century, culminating in the Threshold Decades, Western science, particularly in the fields of particle and quantum physics, reached several core conclusions. Drilling down into ever-smaller subatomic particles, physicists realized that everything, at its core, is energy. For centuries, Eastern philosophy, medicine and religion were based on the belief that everything was energy. Finally, as predicted by several thinkers who had bridged Eastern and Western thinking, the two schools of thought ended up at the same place: All is One.

Thus, not only had the economic, political, and social barriers to the movement to global order come to an end during the Threshold Decades, a partial unification of the underlying tenets of Western scientific thought and Eastern philosophical thought had come together. The obvious cultural manifestation of this in the United States and Europe was the explosive growth of such practices as yoga and meditation and the Dalai Lama and Deepak Chopra scaling the best seller lists. Humanity was on the path to becoming one.

In the Threshold Decades, while the West was busy exporting its capitalistic and economic way of life to the East, the East was exporting its more integrated, holistic and contextual way of thinking. So globalism was more than just an economic reorganization and integration, it was the emerging new reality of thought and behavior.

We now look at what was unquestionably the single greatest development of the Threshold Decades, the one that has created an entire new environment and changed humanity forever. Literally, the accepted time, space, and place underpinnings of humanity were being altered. These new technologies – that are now as of this writing commonly accepted – were disruptive and almost unfathomable when first introduced. In addition the rapidity of growth of these new technologies was historically unprecedented.

explosive growtH in tecHnologicAl
connecteDness
The Threshold Decades were not only a period of fundamental change, but also a time when technologies developed and brought to market in the previous decades experienced explosive growth.
Number 1950 1975 1985 1995 2005 (Worldwide)
Computers 60 500,000 30,373,576 207,365,651 1,425,000,000 Cell Phone 750,629 89,978,977 2,109,960,723 Subscribers
Internet 210,000 45,100,000 1,094,000,000 Users
Number (in 1950 1975 1985 1995 2005 the U.S.)
Computers 9 400,000 25,270,000 86,300,000 203,700,000
Cell Phone 340,213 33,785,660 201,650,00 Subscribers
Internet 190,000 28,100,000 205,327,000 Users
Figure 2. Global Technology Growth: 1950 to 2005^2 and Figure 3. Technology Growth in the United States: 1950 to 2005^3
The exponential growth in number of computers between 1975 and 1985 was largely due to the introduction of the first personal computers. Before this time, most computers were mainframes or mini-computers used exclusively by institutions. As these numbers indicate, the Threshold Decades were clearly a time when computers went from being something special for business to being commonplace and for everyone.

The truly remarkable numbers in figures 1 and 2 are those regarding cell phones and Internet use. Both technologies went from early stage to full market penetration and acceptance, providing electronic connectedness to the world.

At the beginning of the Threshold Decades, in 1985, humanity was not connected except via landline phones, and it was only in developed countries where these landlines were used by a majority of households. In 2005, more than two billion people had cell phones; not only were there more phones in use around the world, but they were portable. Communication ceased to be tied to place as it had been in 1985.

This is an extremely important transition as it made human communication completely mobile for the first time in history. People could be anywhere and be connected. And this is occurring globally. While the United States represented close to 50 percent of all cell phones in 1985, that percentage was down to 10 percent in 2005. The cell phone had become a global technology.

The growth in Internet usage was even greater. In 1985 the Internet was not available to the public; so all traffic was institutional. By 2005 the increasing connectedness of the world collapsed time and distance in the realm of human communication. This connectedness was simultaneous and parallel to the massive social, political, and economic forces that were unleashing globalism around the world. It is interesting to note that, as with cell phones, the United States was dominant in Internet usage in 1985, with 90 percent of all users, but by 2005 that percentage had dropped to 20 percent. The world was quickly adapting to this new 24/7 electronic medium. The transformation was creating a “global village” vaster and more interactive than anything Marshall McLuhan, the man who coined the phrase in the 1960s could have foreseen.

The electronic communications global village created during the Threshold Decades was not due just to the exponential growth in the number of users of cell phones, the Internet, and computers. The constant innovation in all these technologies was an ongoing phenomenon. Moore’s Law – the theory developed by Gordon Moore, founder of Intel in 1965, that states that computing power and speed doubles every 18 months while at the same time drops in price by half – became a living reality. Every year or two there was a new generation of computers that were smaller, faster, more powerful, and cheaper. This not only fed the rapid growth of the PC market, it also dramatically increased speed and productivity in business. As computer capability dramatically increased, it affected the explosive growth of Internet usage as the download speeds for modem dial-up increased every year. Paralleling this was the miniaturization of cell phones that were increasingly feature-rich. By 2005 PCs, cell phones, cell phone contracts, and access to the Internet had dropped in price so much compared to even a few years earlier that all these technologies became commodities. The cell phone went from being a cutting-edge, transformative, expensive piece of technology to being a disposable consumer product. All of this greatly affected usage patterns.

2,100,000,000

U.S. World
1,800,000,000
1,500,000,000
1,200,000,000
900,000,000
600,000,000
300,000,000
0 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
Figure 5. Cellphone Subscribers in U.S. and World Figure 4. Cellphone Subscribers in U.S. and World
1,400,000,000

U.S. World
1,200,000,000
1,000,000,000
800,000,000
600,000,000
400,000,000
200,000,000
0 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 Figure 4. Number of Computers in U.S. and World Figure 5. Number of Computers in U.S. and World
7,000
MIPS
6,000
5,000
4,000
3,000
2,000
1,000
0 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
Figure 9. Microprocessor Power in MIPS, 1975-2005
Figure 6. Microprocessor Power in MIPS, 1975-2005^4
1,200,000,000

U.S. World
1,100,000,000
1,000,000,000
900,000,000
800,000,000
700,000,000
600,000,000
500,000,000
400,000,000
200,000,000
100,000,000
0 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
Figure 6. Number of Internet Users in U.S. and World Figure 7. Number of Internet Users in U.S. and World
US
140,000World
120,000
100,000
80,000
60,000
40,000
20,000
0
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2005
Figure 9 (alt). <caption>
Figure 9. U.S. and World Internet Traffic, in Terabytes, 1995–2005
There are several key points conveyed in these graphs. All three technologies – cell phones, Internet, and PCs – display accelerating growth curves during the Threshold Decades. The rate of growth was greatest during the last five years of the Threshold Decades. The growth of cell phones, computers, and Internet usage occurred simultaneously. The growth of these technologies was global, and while the United States initially had an advantage, the rest of the world started to both catch up and then exceed the United States in rates of growth.

Not only did connectedness dramatically increase as more people joined, the speed and amount of information being communicated also dramatically increased. So, more people became connected and as they did so they also created more information and content, at ever increasing rates.

There has never been another 20-year period in human history when this amount of transformation in the way human beings communicate with each other occurred. In this regard, the Threshold Decades represent a singular time in history. A level of human connectedness existed at the end of this 20-year period that was not only new but that was practically unthinkable decades ago, except perhaps in the pages of science fiction.

Summary of the Threshold Decades

The 20-year period of 1985-2005 was a time of significant transition from the accepted “reality” of the past to the new “reality” of the present. It was a time when the triumphs and constructs of the 20th century came up against the new global realities of the 21st century.

This two-decade time was when widely accepted ways of doing business, of well entrenched distribution systems and models and economic constructs were challenged, altered and in some cases eviscerated. Many industries that were perceived as dynamic, powerful and well situated in 1985 were on life support by 2005. Entire businesses were rendered obsolete in record time.

The Threshold Decades will truly be seen by future historians as the demarcation between the room of the past and the room of the present. Between the room of what was to the room of what is and what will be.

This twenty year period was the transition not only to this new century and to this new millennium but to this new age we now find ourselves in: The Shift Age.

Part 2 The Three Forces oF The shiFT Age
E
very new age is ushered in by a confluence of forces that disrupt and alter society.
The primary force of the Agricultural age – agriculture – changed how humans lived in terms of diet and created the concept of place and the beginnings of society and civilization. The initial forces of mechanization and centralization of the Industrial Age drove urbanization and the creation of rapidly growing cities around the world. These forces also created hierarchical management structures in business that had only existed in the military. This led to the establishment of not only management theory, but the concept of the job. The forces of subsidized higher education on a massive scale, satellites and the development of computers and the rapid spread of them throughout the world initiated the Information Age.

It is no different with the Shift Age—you can feel the force of change in every part of our life and world today. In fact, the Shift Age is being created and shaped by three major forces:

» The Flow to Global
» The Flow to the Individual
» Accelerating Electronic Connectedness

Now, that isn’t to say there aren’t many other dynamics and influences defining our world today: religious fundamentalism, climate change, energy, poverty, migration, and over population to name just a few. But the above three forces are the dominant ones that are reshaping humanity in the Shift Age. Most of the disruptive changes and disorienting speed of change we all experience can to a great degree, be traced back to these three forces.

It is hard to think of a business or human endeavor that has not been and is not being affected by these forces. Whether it is the real estate industry, the communications industry, print and electronic media companies, retailing, energy, cultural institutions or the medical and education sectors, all see the clear effects and dramatic changes these three forces have brought to their respective fields.

And they are affecting our personal lives too. Think about how the global economy and globalism has impacted what you do. Think about how much power you have today as an individual and how you use it. Think about how differently you communicate and connected you are to people all around the world.

In this part we will take a close look at each of these three forces—The Flow to Global, the Flow to the Individual, and Accelerating Electronic Connectedness—to see how they are shaping our lives and our business, and how we can grasp their power as we enter the Shift Age.

ChaPter three

The Flow To globAl
A
s it was for all three forces, the seeds of the Flow to Global were launched in the Threshold Decades. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc created an opening for globalism to take root, launching a rapid growth of the global economy. The coming together of Eastern and Western thought created a more unified and integrated way for humanity to think and live. The move from hierarchies to networks flattened corporations and allowed them to move outward horizontally. Global supply chains were developed. All of this new globalism swelled into the force known as the Flow to Global.

Today in the Shift Age, humanity is heading toward a new global integration. In our history we moved through geographical stages in how we identified our place in regards to others: first family, then tribe, village, city, state, and country. Now, due to our sheer numbers and our increasing electronic connectedness, we have arrived at a when we will all consider ourselves part of one global community.

This is a new phenomenon. Even in the later part of the 20th century, we often used the word “international” rather than “global”. We traveled internationally or had international business relationships. But today, the words foreign and international have given way to the word “global”, and we find ourselves integrating this new emerging sense of global citizenship with our past identities.

How did this happen? First, there are simply so many more of us today. The population explosion means we no longer feel like we live far apart from other groups of people, but together in a dense population. Next, economics historically leads the way in the change of an era, followed by politics and culture. And today we are ever more rapidly becoming a global economy. Finally, along with the economic changes, historically unprecedented growth in electronic connectivity helped to accelerate this new Flow to Global in politics and culture. When the speed of communications accelerated, the world became smaller. Borders opened; boundaries collapsed and culture and world politics rushed in. Hundreds of millions of people and then billions of people for the first time were exposed to information and opportunity that was global in scope. There was a massive increase in migration, as workers from poorer countries went to richer countries to work for significantly higher wages that could be sent home or used to move the entire family to a new land of opportunity. Distinct national identities started to blur as most nations experienced ever more multicultural integration.
Let’s take a close look at each of these factors, to better understand how we became global citizens and what it means for our future.
Population

It took modern humans approximately 150,000 years to reach a global population of one billion. This roughly coincided with the end of the Agricultural Age. But during the Industrial Age, another three billion people were added, so that by the beginning of the Information Age in 1974, there were four billion of us. There were roughly five billion at the start of the Threshold Decades and approximately six and a half billion at the dawn of the Shift Age.
What we see in Figure 11 is the exact year humanity reached each billion milestone and the number of years between each one. What becomes obvious is the ever more rapid rate at which milestone is reached. Only now in 2012, when this book is being written, are we beginning to see a lengthening of time between each billion interval.
Year World Population Years in Between
1804 1,000,000,000
1927 2,000,000,000 123
1960 3,000,000,000 33
1974 4,000,000,000 14
1987 5,000,000,000 13
1999 6,000,000,000 12
2011 7,000,000,000 14
2025 8,000,000,000 15
2045 9,000,000,000 26
2083 10,000,000,000 38
Figure 11. Milestones in World Population: When Did/Will We Reach the Next Billion.
No wonder we have entered the global stage of human evolution, there are simply so many of us! Two hundred years ago, when the Industrial Age was impacting the world there were only a few cities with a million or more inhabitants. Most of the rest of the world were small towns and wide open spaces. We felt there was open space if we wanted it. As we entered the Information Age humanity the combination of explosive population growth and early understandings of the finiteness of the planet made us sense that impending limits lay ahead. As we now enter the Shift Age the 7 billion of us are experiencing both all of our physical presence
–gridlock, congestion, pollution – and our ever accelerating connectedness to each other.

The growth in our population though, while still rapid, is beginning to change As nations became developed and became more urban, birth rates are going down. The population replacement rate is 2.1 children per childbearing woman. This number was reached in most developed countries of the world by the latter part of the 20th century. The less developed countries had much higher birth rates for many reasons. Now that the global economy is moving many countries from the category of less developed and rural to developed and urban the global birth rate is declining. As Figure XZ shows, the population explosion that began in the middle of the 20th century will level off by the middle of the 21st century. Still, in this 100 year period our species will have more than tripled in number—imagine the density and connectedness we’ll all feel in the next three decades!
6
5
4
3
2
Population Replacement Rate
1
0 1950−1955 1965−1970 1980−1985 1995−2000 2010−2015 2025−2030 2045−2050
Figure 12. Declining Fertility Rates
Figure 12. Declining Fertility Rates
We experience, often negatively, our collective physical presence. We experience limits to growth and a growing understanding of the finiteness of earth. We experience our ever increasing connectivity to each other.

So, the Flow to Global is propelled in part by the simple fact that there are so many of us living on planet earth at the highest gross global population density in history.

Economics First

In any major change in human history, you will almost always see an economic factor leading the way before the change reaches politics and culture. For example, the ancient conquerors expanded empires to gain control of more land, more people and the riches that could be created from the land. Economics was often the initial driver.

The Flow to Global we are experiencing today was first manifested with the beginnings and rapid growth of the now global economy. When the Eastern Bloc collapsed, first with the symbolic destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and later with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the new global economy began to really take off. For the first time since before World War I there was a global economic playing field. In fact, most of us first encountered the term “globalization” in a business context.

This global economic playing field presents both opportunity and pain. The pain has been felt quite strongly in recent years, from recession to the disintermediation of industries. When industries go away, there is the pain of both loss and loss of comfort that the way things used to be, no longer is. In the countries such as the United States, what used to be great no longer is and there is a reactive urge to want to go back to recapture. This of course is a losing proposition. As Marshall McLuhan famously said “Most of humanity drive on the freeway of life looking in the rear view mirror”

The opportunities, though, are both readily apparent and in rapid creation. Where old models of an industry go away, the compensating growth of the new business formations create optimism and a new sense of empowerment. We are all given a new opportunity to grow economically in ways we couldn’t imagine just a few years ago.

The economic status of the world is changing as well. The world is rapidly moving from the Industrial and even Information Age model of “have” and “have not” nations to a new reality of all countries moving to “haves”. The language has even changed—we now are replacing the term “third world” with “developing”. In the newly developed and developing countries there is an incredible upswing in affluence and increased standard of living. Tens of millions of people are entering the middle class for the first time every year globally. This huge expansion of the middle class creates market demand, which of course fuels the increasing rate of global economic activities in new trans-border ways.
We are economically becoming organized around all of us, the “macromacro”. Today there is no bigger economic entity than all of us.
Culture and Politics

Just as changes in politics and culture always follow in the wake of economic change, we will see a new global culture and politics follow global economics. Both in fact are already becoming globalized, and will continue to do so at an ever-increasing rate. This will complete the Flow to Global: a complete reorganization of humanity around the global concept.

The roots of our move from a country to global orientation in our culture and politics can be found in the exploration and resultant colonialism of the recent centuries. In fact, you can still see the remnants of these past empires today: the countries of the British Commonwealth around in many cases drive on the left side of the road, and Brazil speaks Portuguese as a legacy of the Portuguese empire while the rest of South America speaks Spanish as a result of the Spanish Empire.

The 20th century inventions of radio and then television, more than any prior technologies or inventions, connected nation populations and helped make the world smaller. Hearing Edward R. Murrow’s voice live from London during the Battle of Britain brought WWII into the living rooms of America. The launches of manned space missions at Cape Canaveral were televised live around the world. The concept of time in relation to distance was profoundly altered. The electric global village envisioned by Marshall McLuhan became the new environment in which humanity began to live.

The sharing of culture rapidly increased as we moved from the 60s to the 21st century. The Beatles, American youth culture, and animation from Japan are all examples of culture that developed massive followers around the world. It has gotten to the point where today, much of unique national cultures are increasingly being usurped by the global culture. The indigenous and folk cultures that used to define a country are becoming legacy cultures preserved through rituals and holidays, while the global culture becomes ever more pervasive and prevalent on a day to day basis.

The changes in politics and government are a bit harder to see as government is now the slowest moving part of society. Today, the government of almost any country moves more slowly than the entrepreneurs, corporations and general public. It is the most bureaucratic and institutionalized part of society, influenced by existing special interests and largely filled with long-term workers. There is not a developed country of the world whose government is not largely of the Industrial Age in construct and function.

The accelerating connectivity will eventually force governments to pick up the pace, because government is increasingly more on display and can be petitioned more quickly. Still, it often feels as though government leaders have become followers. The phrase “national leaders” is becoming oxymoronic in this new global age.

The Flow to Global is creating a world where the nation state, that great invention of the Industrial Age, is becoming an anachronism. A powerful nation state with centralized power was necessary to aggregate smaller units of people into countries that provided identity, services, safety, education and economic force. In the global age, nation states are out of step, stuck in times past.

What will the next stage of government be? The United Nations has performed its duty as best as possible throughout the Cold War and into the new millennium. It, however, is an organization comprised of nation states, nation states with their own agendas, political and economic. Issues and crises tend to get addressed from the self-serving viewpoints of the nation states.

Increasingly the major issues facing the citizens of the world are global in scope. Global issues need global answers. Global warming and climate change is a primary example. There is absolutely no way any nation state can solve this problem alone. The entire world needs to be involved in solving this problem.

Eventually, issues such as global warming, ocean restoration, allocation of natural resources such as water, space exploration, the energy crisis, the growing extinction of plant and animal species and overall geographic and environmental degradation will. result in the creation of global agencies, empowered to coordinate efforts to address and solve these problems. And this will accelerate the movement toward the development of a global government

Sometime in the next 10 years there will be the creation of a new global governing body that will be both an outgrowth of these global-issue oriented organizations and something that will succeed the increasingly less relevant and gridlocked United Nations. This entity, which I will call the Global Council, could be charged with oversight of planetary issues, leaving the United Nations to manage and adjudicate political and economic disputes between nations. National governments will increasingly be left with the responsibilities for services, infrastructure, the safety of their citizens and the maintenance of historical national heritage.

This Global Council will be created during the Shift Age. As all past economic and social entities such as towns, cities, countries, states and nations created governmental structures in their own time, so the Flow to Global will necessitate the creation of this Global Council.

This will be hard for many to see or accept as all reading these words have some mild to strong sense of nationality. One’s sense of one’s nationality may well continue but it will be less restrictive and in opposition and more something that defines where one is from and has grown up. Prior to the Industrial Age, Europe was a collection of aristocratic fiefdoms where marriage served as the bonds of unity. When this new age birthed large cities the view of one’s identity moved from monarchy to democracy and from region to nation, introducing the three hundred year apotheosis of the nation state. This will now move to a larger more integrated global construct as the politics of the world are pulled by the global economy into this new age.

We already have a global culture in rapid development. Prior to the Shift Age, media was national, communications were national and distance and place to some degree corralled culture within national boundaries. Now, the Internet provides global cultural connectivity so that cultures and people become ever more connected and integrated. The silos of national distribution that existed are largely gone and all forms of culture now flow around the world at the speed of light. The direction is clear that increasingly we are developing global cultural integration.

The Global Stage of Human Evolution

With the global economic changes underway and the resultant social changes taking root, we are developing the identity of global citizens. Whether one has come to this through their business or line of work or has come to this new identity through political or cultural issues, we all, to varying degrees, see ourselves as global citizens. Globalization is no longer simply an economic term, it is the term of what is and will course through all aspects of human society for the 10-20 years of the Shift Age.

The population growth of the last 50 years, the rapidly growing integrated global economy, the issue led globalization of politics and the flow of culture around the world via the Internet points us to the next step.
We have entered the global stage of human evolution.
ChaPter Four

The Flow To The individuAl
T
he changes that occurred during the Threshold Decades also triggered a transfer of power in our society from large groups to each person—what we refer to as The Flow to the Individual.
Power have migrated from institutions to individuals due to the explosion of choice, the growth of free agency, the technologies and dynamics moving us from hierarchies to networks, and the ever-increasing electronic connectedness. Gatekeepers are disappearing; disintermediation—and its primary agent, the Internet—are reorganizing the economic landscape. The individual is becoming the primary economic unit, the micro-micro that is combining with the macro-macro of the Flow to Global. We are distinct individuals who are also global citizens.

Free Agents

The Flow to the Individual can, in part, be traced to the movement from a production economy that was hierarchical to a knowledge and information based economy that is flat and networked. In today’s global marketplace tens of millions of people have moved from being employees to being independent contractors.

We have increasingly become a culture of free agents. We come together around projects or initiatives, do our work, and then move on to something else. Access to high-speed connectivity and to wireless technologies allows us to work anywhere. We can go to an office if we want to, but it is only necessary for in-person meetings, interactions and collaboration. And we as a society have finally embraced this. While even during the last part of the Threshold Decades people often felt they had to hide the fact that they worked from home, now in the Shift Age we are proud that we work from home. I myself work from home (or in a hotel room, or on an airplane)—and I like to say I have a ten second commute.

This new work reality often also means that the work we do and the people with whom we do it are global in scope. Expertise, knowledge and talent are in demand globally. As free agents with desired competencies, we can offer our services to anyone in the world who might want them, thanks to the accelerated connectedness of the planet. Project teams of independent contractors are now routinely formed using multi-national and multi-time zone members.

One of the consequences of this new globally distributed work place is that people are ever less restricted by place when it comes to earning a living. If one does not have to regularly go into a factory or office on a daily basis but can work from home, the opportunity for that home to be in a desired place to live increases. If home is where the work is then the opportunity to choose where to live based upon personal choice increases.

At the same time, this globally distributed workplace of individuals is that when place is no longer the significant conceptual reality, then those economies that were protected by a nationalistic place-basedness experience loss. This has clearly been apparent in the United States where the wage structures and costs of manufacturing ceased to be globally competitive so those jobs and industries moved to places that were more economically efficient in the new global economy. This is painfully transitional stuff for the countries that lose. We will see the development of regions where place dictates production work and regions where the desirable places will attract those that can both work from home and leave to fly anywhere in the world their services are required. In Part Three and Part Four I will suggest what the global outcomes could well look like as the global reorganization and integration completes this first historic cycle.

As will be discussed in subsequent chapters, this ability for individuals to work independently, to, in a true sense become their own jobs is part of a redefinition of what employment and the job is in the Shift Age. The concept of employment has moved from the lifelong employment of the mid-twentieth century to the serial employment of the late-twentieth century to the project-by-project work of the independent contractor or free agent. Of course there will always be jobs at institutions, corporations and governments but people increasingly define themselves by what they do than for whom they work.

Choice and Control

We also have incredibly more individual choice in our personal lives as well. Many of the developments in the Threshold Decades have given each of us relatively unlimited choice compared to times past.

In the mid-20th century, it was broadcast networks that defined television. In the late 20th century, cable started to reshape television. Now the word television has ceded to video and the new model is one of You Tube and other video based sites.

This explosion of choice has firmly placed control and therefore power in our hands. We have come a long way from a century ago when Henry Ford, describing the Model T said “People can have any color they want, as long as it is black”. We have come a long way from the 1970s when, in the United States, the three broadcast networks were programmed by three people sitting in offices in Manhattan, just blocks apart from each other.

The advent of 24/7, “always on” culture means that we can shop, work and play whenever we want to, on our own schedules. Programmable DVRs, low cost terabyte plus external hard drives and instantaneous connectivity to the cloud give us access to information and entertainment anytime, any place on almost every digital, electronic device we own. We have completely customized media experiences. Hundreds of millions of people walk around with iPods and other digital players, listening to their own personal sound tracks. Compare this with the limited choice of radio stations in the last century. We have our favorite Web sites bookmarked on our computers, blogs and newsletters inbound via email or RSS feeders. We see the world through the apps we select for our smart phones and tablets. We sit on the couch and use our remote controls to make secondto-second decisions about what to watch on television. We program our own media experiences rather than having someone program them for us. We are in control.

The End of Alienation

Unlimited choice has also dealt a blow to alienation. In the decades immediately after World War II, alienation was clearly present in the developed nations. Those nations were dominated by big business and big government, mass media and mass culture, as well as tightly defined social structures and ways to dress. If you were not in step with these big entities and rigid structures, you felt alienated. Now, in the Shift Age, alienation has largely disappeared due to unlimited choice.

Accelerating connectivity allows us to find others like us anywhere around; we create and identify with “tribes” of like-minded people. We can find places and groups that we can develop affinity with rather than being in alienation from. Our identities are aggregations of our choices. We determine what we like to listen to, watch, wear or do for recreation. Ever increasingly what we do for work and how and where we live is up to us. We no longer measure ourselves against the mass models, instead we group ourselves around our interests and activities. The concept of conformity has lost its grip on us. We are all individuals who may choose to be like others, but it is no longer as socially imperative as it was just a few decades ago.

The MicroMicro

How will the Flow to Individual change the world? There will be a decrease in the power of institutions and organizations. Society is being reorganized around the macro-macro (the Flow to Global) and the micromicro (the Flow to the Individual). The smallest and largest economic units have increasing gravitational pull.

The institutions that came into existence over the last 300 years are declining in power, membership and influence. Residual social institutions from the days of landed aristocracy or from the gilded age of robber barons have greatly declined in importance. Unions, service organizations and the corporation itself, while all still important, are no longer as much a part of one’s identity as in generations past. What one does is more important than who one works for or what one belongs to.

Media is a large institution that is experiencing the Flow to the Individual in a significant way. Mass media created in the 20th century: newspapers, magazines, radio stations and television stations created by media companies and sent out to the masses. Then, in the early part of the 21st century, non-media companies started to generate content and therefore became media companies as well. Now in the early years of the Shift Age content creation has moved to individuals, so now individual humans have each become media companies. Ever more content, be it written words, photographs or videos, are being created by individuals. We have moved from few to many, to many to many, to one to all or one to one to one to one. The individual tweeting from her phone has replaced the beat reporter of newspaper days gone by.

In fact, starting with the Threshold Decades, the mass market as a whole has been in steep decline as a influence. We deal now with an aggregation of small, targeted, micro markets. The “Long Tail” concept Chris Anderson so excellently described in his book of the same name is the new shape of the market in the digital world. Now that products are as much digital as physical, markets will and can be smaller and evermore customized. The word “fragmentation” has been used a lot in the last 20 years, but it is an old reference point as it speaks to the fragmentation of the marketplace, which assumes a mass market. Think instead of this phenomenon of mass to micro as a historical process that will continue and accelerate.

The Global Individual

Ever increasing choice, ever increasing connectivity, ever increasing mobility, ever increasing independence from institutional jobs or traditional distribution models are all part of the Flow to the Individual.

The Flow to the Individual, combined with the Flow to the Global combine to reshape how we think of ourselves. Increasingly we are selfarticulating individuals who identify ourselves as global citizens.
Both of these flows have, are and will be amplified by the third force of the Shift Age, Accelerating Electronic Connectedness.
ChaPter Five

AccelerATing elecTronic connecTedness
T
he third major force of the Shift Age is the Accelerating Electronic Connectedness of the planet. It is also one of the most significant forces in the history of humanity.
The force of Accelerating Electronic Connectedness, particularly in its Internet manifestation, has been much written about and certainly widely experienced. So it can be easy to forget that it wasn’t always this way.

Until the latter part of the Industrial Age, entire civilizations, societies and countries developed largely confined to their geographic space. During the course of human history there were often civilizations in the world that existed simultaneously but were not aware of each other. They could not interact but instead experienced their entire trajectory in isolation, only later connected by historians.

This only recently began to change. Samuel Morse introduced a superior telegraph in 1837 and this new communications technology reached across the Atlantic in 1866, less than 150 years ago. The Bell Telephone Company introduced telephone service in the United States in the last twenty-five years of the 19th century but it wasn’t until 1956 that the transoceanic cable brought two-way telephone calls between North America and Europe. So it has been less than 60 years that we have had the experience of Trans-Atlantic two way telephone calls. Global human communications connectivity is that recent.

Today, though, there is a simultaneity in global communications that is unprecedented. The accelerating connectedness eliminates time and distance from human communication, greatly contributing to the pervasive sense of speed in today’s world, creating a transformational immediacy of human connectedness. This connectivity in our society is approaching a singularity—the moment when an idea moves almost simultaneously through a population.

The Occupy Wall Street phenomenon of 2011 is a recent and probably early example of what will increasingly happen. On September 17 some 75 people collected in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. One month later on October 15 there were tens if not hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating in more than 1,500 cities in 83 countries under the “Occupy” banner. A global movement in just one month!

This is something that was unimaginable until this century. And it is the force of Accelerated Electronic Connectedness that enables this to occur. Before, distance meant time for information to move, which up until the 1800s was the speed of a horse day, how far a horse could travel in a day. Compare that to today, just 200 years later, when communication is almost instantaneous. And as our electronic connectedness continues to accelerate, we will see even more change shape how we live in the Shift Age.

Accelerating

The Accelerating Electronic Connectedness is occurring at rates that twenty, fifteen, ten or even five years ago could not be predicted, except perhaps by science fiction writers. I have personally lived with a clear example of this over the past five years, as I’ve studied the growth in cell phone usage.

To give us a full perspective, let’s step back in time a bit. Electricity was first offered as a commercial and consumer product by the California Electric Light Co. in 1879, 133 years prior to the writing of this book in 2012. The first cellular phone was commercially introduced in 1983 by Motorola, or 29 years ago. There will be 6 billion cell phone subscriptions in 2013, roughly 85% of the total global population. Yet it is estimated that there will be approximately 1.1 billion people without electricity in their home in 2013. In other words, in 2013 the number of people who have in-home electricity, a 133 year old consumer product, will be the same as the number of people who have cellular phones, a 29 year old consumer product.

This of course is due to the huge differences between the capital intensive supply infrastructure of electric energy and the much less expensive cellular infrastructure.

In 2007, as I was developing the concept of the Shift Age, and writing the book with that name, I was fascinated by the seemingly incredible rapid rates of connectivity that were occurring. I had already identified Accelerating Electronic Connectedness as one of the three forces of the Shift Age and I wanted to see and shape what it would look like going forward. A focus of this research was to try and determine what the actual trajectory of cellphone connectivity and number of users might be in the years ahead. So of course this led to research on what experts around the world saw coming.

Be they telephony experts, international organizations, communications companies or technology think tanks, they all had approximately the same forecasts. In answer to the question, “When will humanity reach three billion cell phone users or subscribers?” the general response was sometime in 2010.

Why did they all say this? Well, it took about twenty years for humanity to go from the first commercial cell phone to the billionth. It then took only four years to get to two billion, in 2006. So what was the general prognostication then? It went something like this: “Wow! A five hundred percent increase in the rate of growth! That is so fast we can’t imagine it growing any faster than this seemingly overwhelming rate of growth so we will just project that linearly into the future. Let’s see, it is now 2006, so we will reach three billion cell phone subscribers sometime during the year 2010.”

Using this approach, the aggressive forecasts were that we would reach 3 billion cell phone users in early 2010 (the less aggressive suggested by the end of 2010). In addition, even the more aggressive forecasts showed it taking until 2025 to reach 5 billion cell phone users.

But as Figure 13 shows, humanity actually crossed three billion cell phone subscribers by the end of the first quarter of 2008. This means that every day, from mid-2006 until spring 2008, there were 1.5 million new cell phone subscribers a day. If you recall from an earlier chart in Part One, there were 700,000 subscribers in the world in 1985, so every day in 2007 there were twice as many people using a cell phone for the first time as existed on the planet in 1985.
8,000,000,000
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Figure 13. Global Cell Phone Users
Figure 13. Global Cell Phone Users
Humanity then crossed 4 billion cell phone users in the first part of 2009, 5 billion users by the end of 2010 and 5.3 billion by the end of 2011. We are currently close to 5.6 billion. Sometime in 2013 we will reach 6 billion users.

So the reason that all projections of cellular phone users have been so off until the last three years is that the rapidity of growth is unprecedented in human history. There are several reasons for this. First, the cellular infrastructure can be developed more rapidly than any previous communications infrastructure. Second, the costs of cell phones and the use of them plummeted more quickly than expected, making purchasing and using of cell phones incredibly cheap very quickly. Third, the acceleration of the speed of technological innovation in the Shift Age is unprecedented which thus renders prior rates of change obsolete.

The Transformation of Communication
So what does the current reality of 5.6 cell phone users mean? How is it changing the world we live in?
Well, if I was standing ten feet from you and used my cell phone to call your cell phone, it would probably take about five seconds for your phone to ring. If I were to call a cell phone in China, some 12,000 miles away, it might take an extra two to three seconds because of the additional satellite relay. Which means that today, the difference between calling someone ten feet away and 12,000 miles away is two seconds.

So for the first time in human history there is no longer any time or distance limiting human communication! That could not be said even ten years ago let alone twenty-five or fifty years ago. This is a completely new human reality.

When you call someone from cell phone to cell phone, after asking “How are you doing?” and “Can you hear me okay” one of the first things you often ask or are asked is “Where are you?” This of course is due to the fact that we move around the world and take our cell phone with us. Place has therefore also become irrelevant to human communications (except of course for the still on-going frustration of finding good cell phone reception!)

So for the first time in human history it can be said that there is no time, distance or place any longer limiting human communication.

Think about that! In the some 150,000 years that Modern Humans have lived on earth, only in the last five years has human communication been freed from the limitations of time, distance and place. Imagine living three, two or even one hundred years ago and trying to comprehend communication with another human being not constrained by time, distance or place. This was not true even at the beginning of the Information Age. It would be an incomprehensible concept. Yet it is now our reality.

This is the new reality of the Shift Age. It is a profound difference from the Information, Industrial or Agricultural Ages, and will be one of the major factors shaping our future.

The Internet

In Chapter Two we saw that it was in the second half of the Threshold Decades that the Internet and usage of it took off. We have lived in an Internet world for some 17 years. We have lived in a high speed Internet world for less than 10 years. We have lived in a high-speed wireless world for less than 5 years. Now the “we” I am referring to is the developed countries of the world, with the United States initially leading the way. As the developing countries of the world “come on-line” the growth in the number of Internet users is explosive. As Figure 14 shows, we are at the early stage of Internet usage.
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Figure 6. Number of Internet Users in U.S. and World
Figure 14. Number of Internet Users in U.S. and World
To use the United States as an example of a developed country, Figure 15 shows both how recent high speed internet is an how pervasive it has now become.

As more users come on-line and bandwidth and high speed access grows we also face an explosion in the amount of data that will course through the Internet backbones of the planet.

So, we have ever more people using high-speed Internet connections, creating ever more data. This has created an entire new reality that did not exist 20 years ago or even 10 years ago.
We now have two realities we live in, the real or physical reality and the new screen reality.
The Two Realities

Prior to the development of communication technologies of the last 200 years, the concept of place was an overriding reality of human life. Where one lived largely determined one’s life—other places could not be experienced without often lengthy and usually arduous travel. This meant that the concept of place was a dominant reality and one’s life was largely defined by what one did and experienced in that place. Reality meant physical reality.

Even during the explosive growth of communications technologies such as the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television from the 1830s through the 1970s, one had to be in a specific place to communicate with another place. The telegraph office gave way to the telephone at home [even in many developed countries outside the United States, having a telephone in the home was a luxury and not universal until years after WWII] and at the office, both connected to the wall. The radio was big and in the home. The television set was big and in the living room. The experienced reality was still about place with these electric devices anchored in them. So one lived in a place, was largely defined by that place and had connectivity to the world through these placed based appliances.

No longer.
As Figure 15 shows, we now live in a broadband world. We live in the world of connectivity. This new broadband world shows up on screens, be they large flat screens, computer screens, laptop screens, tablet screens or smart phone screens.
This screen reality can be every bit as compelling as the physical reality that we physically inhabit. Do we not all “check our screens” with close to addictive regularity? Isn’t how a teenager is seen at night on Facebook every bit as important to her as how she is seen in school the next day?
This connectedness, happening at the speed of light via fiber optics, is creating an entire new place: the neurosphere. Our physical reality exists in the biosphere—the thin surface of the planet where life exists. But this new, rapidly growing neurosphere is the electronic extension of our collective neurological activity. It is a pulsing cyber repository of humanity’s creative brainpower, its knowledge, history, culture, social interactions, and entertainment and commerce. This is a global village vastly more comprehensive and interconnected than Marshall McLuhan could ever have envisioned when he coined the phrase “electric village” more than 40 years ago. We now live in a two-reality world. The physical reality in which we live and the neurosphere reality of the screen that connects us to everything and everyone else on the planet.
The Shift Age is the first time that humanity has experienced these two realities. As we will see in Parts Three and Four, the unfolding reality is that these two realities will develop as significantly different evolutionary rates. This will cause incredible transformation of the physical reality and of human consciousness.

The Evisceration of Ignorance

This accelerated connectedness and dual reality will have profound effects on our culture and politics. This will be most evident through an evisceration of ignorance.

Throughout history, kings, dictators, leaders of religions and leaders of sects ruled, to some degree, by keeping people ignorant. Populations had to accept what they were told by those that ruled them, as there was no other option. Before Gutenberg there wasn’t even a strong way to transmit information among people across distances. Even after Gutenberg invented the moveable type press, the resulting communication were limited. Even up into the 20th century when the world noticeably sped up, closed societies such as the Soviet Union, China and South Korea could simply block or jam incoming printed or electric communications from outside the country. The phrase “ignorance is bliss” was a lived reality.

But now, due to the Accelerating Electronic Connectedness of the planet, such ignorance is practically impossible. A compelling example of this change has been occurring in the Middle East.

Now, I am generally optimistic and excited about the coming transformations of the Shift Age. This also comes through when I speak to audiences. And so often, in the time period of 2007-2009, I was questioned about this optimism by people. They would often point to the dictatorships and radical Islam and dictatorial Islamic states. My response was always the same. I said that within 3-5 years there would be upheavals in most dictatorships and many Islamic states because of this Accelerating Electronic Connectedness. That the fundamental force of the Shift Age would force those closed societies to open up. I didn’t know to call it “Arab Spring” as of course I had no idea it would happen in the spring, but I was clear that it would happen.
The two common denominators of all of the countries that experienced upheaval and revolution during the Arab Spring were these:
» Electronic Connectedness—Facebook and Twitter were the weapons of revolution and
» 45-55% of the populations of these countries were under the age of 25

The second factor is important to note as well. The Millennials and Digital Natives generations are more tech savvy and more connected that any prior generation in history. They are using the inventions created in the last two decades to actually change history and transform the world. I will write of them in future chapters here.

The Arab Spring is just one of many events to come where the Accelerating Electronic Connectedness of humanity will change the world. Simply put, this third fundamental force of the Shift Age is one of the most significant forces and occurrence in recorded history. It is a force that is changing our reality and our consciousness faster than any before it. It is not only a force in and of itself, it also amplifies and accelerates the Flow to Global and the Flow to the Individual.

When 80% of humanity has the capability to connect with each other any time from almost anywhere it amplifies the Flow to Global as we are now connected for the first time in history. The Accelerating Connectedness of the planet has provided the technological connectivity for humanity to be as one, all connected to each other.

When any one of us can put out a message or develop content that can be shared – often at the speed of light –with up to 80% of humanity, we each have potential new powers of influence no longer limited by place, class, wealth or institutional power. So this Accelerating Electronic Connectedness places power in the hands of individuals, thus amplifying the Flow to the Individual.
It is this force that is and will provide the technological underpinnings of all the change we are now experiencing as we enter the Shift Age.
noTes

1. The Shift Age by David Houle, 2007. [Radio Stations; Published Books 1950-1995; TV Channels].
“Tim Berners-Lee, Invent or of the World Wide Web, Knighted by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II” http://www.w3.org/2004/07/timbl_ knighted [Websites 1985].
“Measuring the Growth of the Web” by Matthew Gray http://www.mit. edu/people/mkgray/growth/ [Websites 1995].
“Internet ends 2008 with 186.7 million websites” by Wolfgang Gruener http://www.tgdaily.com/business-and-law-features/40811-internetends-2008-with-1867-million-websites [Websites 2005].
2. eTForecasts, “Cellular Subscriber Forecast by Country,” eTForecasts, http://www.etforecasts.com/products/ES_cellular.html; eTForecasts, “Internet User Forecast by Country,” eTForecasts, http://www .etforecasts.com/products/ES_intusersv2.htm; Donald D. Spencer, The Timetable of Computers: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in the History of Computers (Ormond Beach, FL: Camelot Publishing, 1997).
3. See note 1.
4. eTForecasts, “Worldwide PC Market,” eTForecasts, http://www .etforecasts.com/products?ES_pcww1203.htm; Marshall Brain, “How Microprocessors Work,” HowStufWorks, http://computer.howstuff works.com/microprocessor.htm.
5. “The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History” by Gregory R. Gromov www.netvalley.com/intvalstat.html [U.S. internet traffic 1985–1989].
“Measurements and Mismeasurements and the Dynamics of Data Traffic Growth” by Andrew Odlyzko [U.S. internet traffic 1990–1994; 1996–2002].
“Growth of Traffic on the Internet” http://www.worldhistorysite.com/ internettraffic.html [U.S. internet traffic 1995; 2003–2005].
“The National Weather Service Gateway: A History of Communications Technology Evolution” by James L.R. Fenix http://www.nws.noaa .gov/tg/histgate.html [World internet traffic 1985–1989].
“Global Crossing (Condensed)” copyright 2006 by Richard P. Rumelt [World internet traffic 1990–1998].
Next Generation Newtork: Will the BROCs be Googled Up? [World Internet traffic 1999].
“Overview of Recent Changes in the IP Interconnection Ecosystem” by Michael Kende, January 2011. [World internet traffic 2000–2005].