The three forces of the Shift Age are the Flow to Global, the Flow to the Individual and the Accelerated Electronic Connectedness of the planet.  There are 7 billion humans alive today and 5.3 billion of them have cell phones.  3 billion people connect to the Internet every day.  These are the forces and the numbers that are shaping most of the change and many of the headlines in media today.

The Accelerated Electronic Connectedness of humanity is perhaps the most significant dynamic in the world today.  It amplifies the first two flows.  It is one of the two reasons that, 4 years ago I forecast that there would be, in 3-5 years, great upheavals in dictatorships and Islamic states ( I didn’t know to call it Arab Spring because I didn’t know it would be in a season).  The second common denominator of the Arab Spring is that 45 to 55% of the population of every country is under the age of 25.  Combine Millennials and Digital Natives with the ability to connect electronically and you have the commonality of the Arab Spring.

In the Shift Age, there is a new, rapid reality of Memes to Movements.  In a recently uploaded video I speak briefly about this.  Think about Occupy Wall Street.  As I wrote in a recent column, the Occupy movement went from some 75 people demonstrating in a small park in Manhattan to tens of thousands of people demonstrating in hundreds of cities in 80 …

Well, here we are in 2012.  There is much about change and expectation in the air.  This is the year of the quadrennial presidential election in America, the ongoing drama about the future of the Euro and the next stage of the Occupy movement.  We continue to suffer the on-going debt overhang and hangover from drinking too deeply from 20^th century business models and ways of thinking.  The rate of change is ever accelerating and is now environmental.  Change and the anticipation of change is in the air and coursing through the global consciousness.  And yes, 2012 is the year of the Mayan Prophesy.

I will address all of these topics and more this year. It really will be a year to face and accept that we are truly in a new decade, century and age.  Looking back, wanting to go back, and wishing for the time when it all seemed to make sense must be jettisoned.  2011 has been summed up as a year of incredible change.  From the vantage point of 2014 it will seem like the ancient history of early beginnings.  Get ready and develop more fully the quality of adaptability.  Any strongly held resistance to change may well bring obsolescence, failure, depression and ultimately irrelevance.

This futurist will provide what I see ahead and will, as the tag line of this now six year old blog says, provide “a future look at today”.  In addition to this blog and my Shift Age Newsletter, I am writing two new …

The Occupy Wall Street movement must be looked at from both a historical and future perspective.  If you have just received your information through the main stream media of this movement you do not have a clear picture of its significance.

Occupy is a historically unprecedented movement.  In one month it went from several dozen people in one small park in lower Manhattan to tens if not hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating in several hundred cities in 80 countries.  That speed of growth and dissemination has never occurred before.  One of the three fundamental forces of the Shift Age is at play here: the accelerating electronic connectedness of the planet. Since 2007 I have been saying that this is the most profound and powerful force at play with humanity right now and that it would initiate new forms of communications, movements and individual empowerment.  Never in human history has a movement moved from one city to hundreds around the world in one month. Ever!

The second reason it spread so fast is that its ethos – no vertical structures, only horizontal structures – is perfectly aligned with this connected global electronic reality that is web-like and flat.  It is a movement whose message is fully aligned with its structure and connectivity.  To get a sense of this breadth and flatness, take a look at this site just constructed by a friend and you will see the global connectivity.

The third reason that it is a very contemporary phenomenon worth watching …

[Note:  This column was published in the most recent Shift Age Newsletter.  You can sign up for a free subscription here.]

It was one hundred and six years ago that Albert Einstein stated that the speed limit of the cosmos was the speed of light – 186,000 miles per second.  The speed of light, the “c” in the equation E=mc2, has, since Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, been accepted as a fundamental axiom of science.  It is one of the foundations of quantum physics and much of scientific endeavor ever since.

This is why there has been such an uproar over the findings of a recent research project on neutrinos recently conducted at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research.. Neutrinos, sub-atomic particles were measured as traveling a distance of 450 miles (720 kilometers) 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam. Even this miniscule difference raises the possibility that the speed of light is no longer the upper speed limit of the universe.  Einstein himself once said that, if you could send a message faster than the speed of light “You could send a telegram to the past” [It is a commentary on the speed of the last century’s pace of invention that Einstein used the word telegram, but that is something for another column, newsletter or even book]

So the science fiction possibility of actual time travel and longstanding ideas of cause and effect might now have to be reconsidered.  The most published quote in reaction to these …

The Eurozone is a mess.  Mathematics, common sense, recognition of a changed reality, and, yes, democracy have all taken a back seat to a deep-seated, ego-related loyalty to a broken idea from the 20^th century.  This is one of a number of situations today where legacy thinking from the last century is propping up institutions and ways of looking at the world that will soon dissolve in the face of new forces and ways of thought of the 21^st century.

In January, I started to say that we should stop calling it the “Greek Debt Crisis” and start talking about it being the potential death rattle of the Euro.  In August, I suggested a 30%-60% chance the Euro would collapse.  A couple of weeks ago, when the “Euro solution” was widely trumpeted in the media, people who knew of my view of the situation sent me links about it.  Not so fast, I said.  This is not the final answer; it is a temporary delay of inevitable further mass meetings of politicians to try to save face.  There was no solution there, just an agreement to move forward and hope to arrive at one.

I have long suggested that the Eurozone should allow Greece to become the third-world country it seems to want to become.  When was the last time the terms “innovation,” “strong work ethic,” or “growth economy” were accurately used in the same sentence as “Greece”?  In a country where 10% of the work force is employed by the government, …