The current state of the economy is a scary thing. Banks are eating themselves alive and being taken over by Uncle Sam. Revenues are down. Unemployment is up. Inflation is up. People running out of gas. Where the hell do we go from here?
The Myth of Sisyphus tells of a man doomed to push a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down. That’s us, folks. We’re currently in the roll-back-down phase of the economy.
In about four months, though, we’ll be back at base camp. It probably won’t look like it yet, but there’s a bit of lag between the markets’ outlook and the reality (some might call it the shadow). We’ll get up, brush ourselves off, and find ourselves not quite as bad as we expected. And then we’ll start climbing and pushing again.
The main thing we need is something to push. It’s been said we’re in search of the next bubble. That is true to an extent. Mainly what we need is not a bubble, but industry. We need green, and probably more than green, to move forward.
Green means solar and wind farms. It means new transportation initiatives and it means factories building electric vehicles. But it also means changing the algorithms of business to allow more teleworking (telecommuting) and more fluidity of labor.
These are all great things and they will happen, but there is still something missing. There is a need for a new economy that’s not just service-based. It has to go farther than that.
To find the new ground, the new world, one must look deeper at what the future might entail for us. How we will live differently, work differently, and what we will be doing.
At the end of the day I’m a futurist. I look at the world for all its wastes and futilities and see a completely different world that can exist and call that the future. That future will never exist. But parts of it, or mutations of it, will.
For example, the future of what I tend to call casual computing [link pending] but might be called mobile computing or wearable computing isn’t anything like what it’s being marketed as today. Today you buy an integrated device. That’s the polar opposite of the cloud and true integration.
But that’s just a taste. I’ll post a piece about the future soon.
-Adam