Thomas Jefferson and Banks

Thomas Jefferson was one of the greatest Presidents of the United States. He helped shape the ideal of a citizen’s democracy for America.  He was a visionary and evidently a futurist.  Here is what he said in 1802 about banking institutions:

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.  If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered”

What  would he  think and say about the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon?

Last November, I wrote a column here about the future of cable television.  In that column from last November I forecast:

“Cable television subscriptions will experience noticeable percentage declines in the next three to five years.”

Last week it was announced that for the first time in history paid television subscriptions dropped 216,000 with cable taking the greatest hit.

The conventional wisdom of course is that this is due to the bad economic conditions of today.  Of course that is a factor, but the times have been bad for the past two years.  The new dynamic is what I touched upon in last year’s column; that the video viewing marketplace is fundamentally changing, that disintermediation is entering the living room with televisions with internet connectivity and that people have become increasingly comfortable with alternative screens.  In addition, people have come to accept paying for what they watch.  The cable television model is based upon having people pay for all the channels they don’t watch.  Why would people who willingly pay for what they watch any longer except paying for channels they don’t watch?

Of course, a decline of 216,000 subscribers is nowhere near a “noticeable percentage decline”, but I believe that this first ever downturn will be looked back upon as the early indicator of the trend I forecast last year.  As for the rest of that forecast from last years’ column:

“This decline will only be slowed if they [cable operators] accept unbundling and price per channel. This will cause a variety …

As a futurist I often feel as though I live in a déjà- vu world. I write about something and then months or years later it occurs or becomes something that is on the minds of a lot of people.

This is the first of what may be occasional columns from years past written here that, for one reason or another, are relevant to what is currently going on in the world.  As a futurist I try to write “ahead of the curve” or to take a “future look at today”. Sometimes old columns resonate today.  This is one of them.

The recent – and ongoing – flap about privacy settings on Facebook is just the latest incident that makes us think about our privacy in this age of connectivity and social media.  When we are confronted with this issue, predictably we seem to recoil and speak about invasion of privacy.  We get upset that our personal data is or could be shared with people we don’t know.

Facebook, with  almost too numerous to count privacy settings, is clearly a conflicted company when it comes to privacy.  It has a culture, purpose and business model that is completely about sharing, or sharing completely.  A complete surrender of privacy is the ideal.

To focus on Facebook and other social media as a place of concern for privacy is myopic.  We all long ago gave up privacy for the sake of convenience.  In the larger scheme of things we have willingly, if not fully consciously, …

[Note:  This is a column reprinted from the current "Shift Age Newsletter" as it is very timely and has already received a lot of positive comment.  If you are not yet a subscriber of the newsletter, please go here and click on FREE subscription]

Those of you who have either read “The Shift Age” or have heard me speak about the Shift Age, know that the accelerating global electronic connectedness is one of the three forces that has, is and will continue to reshape our world.  There are now 4 billion cell phone subscribers in the world.  Facebook has more that 200 million users.  Twitter is approaching 20 million users and all these numbers are increasing every day.

There is no longer any time, distance or place in human communication. That both transforms reality and creates new realities and opportunities.  It is as though human communication is completely fluid and like water, can flow anywhere without boundaries, channels or hierarchies.  Humans can interact with other humans in ways never before experienced in history.  Our connectedness is a force in and of itself.

What has occurred these past few weeks in Iran will be regarded as one of the events in the geopolitical world that is both a confirmation of this new force and a signpost to our future global orientation.

Even a month ago, it would have seemed hard for most people to imagine that Twitter tweets would be used as news sources about a major event in the New York Times, …

It was 20 years ago this week that the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square turned violent.  After days of open demonstrations, the Chinese government had had enough and sent in the army.  This led to one of the most iconic visual images of protest in recent decades: a single man standing right in front of four tanks, daring them to run him over.

The image is one that anyone over the age of 35 can remember as it flashed around the world and represented the individual facing down superior force in a literal stand for freedom.  It was this image that gave the communist Chinese government its first taste of international outrage as it was slowly moving toward a more open, capitalistic society. It was a government and a country unused to global scrutiny. While the crack down on protestors continued, it was done quietly and out of camera range of foreigners and journalists.  A single image had flashed around the world and had left an indelible mark on human consciousness.

One of the dynamics that led this single man to stand in front of the tanks was the impact of technology.  When the government moved to end the demonstrations, it blocked all know communications channels, isolating the demonstrators. International TV and radio was jammed so the demonstrators had no idea whether there was support for them around the world. One thing the government missed was the new communications technology called the fax machine.  Evidently in offices near Tiananmen Square and in universities …