What do we know at the blocking and tackling level in regards to the Brown victory?

First, the political “pundits” – and that word is always best in quotes – are back.  What did they have to say about Tiger Woods except to speak of a fallen idol?  What could they say about Haiti except to express what an unspeakably horrible tragedy it is?  Ah, but now there is blood in the water!  Political drama of the highest order!  It is so predictable what is going to be said on Fox News, on MSNBC and even CNN in the days, weeks and unfortunately months ahead.  Raised voices!  Pompous posturing and prognostications about the status of health care, the Democratic majority and the Obama Presidency.  How will the Republicans relate to the Tea Party folks?

It is clear that Brown ran a perfect pitch campaign.  Timing, image, message and package were all right on target.  Coakley ran perhaps the most lackluster campaign in recent memory.  What killed her, and is the point of this column is that her campaign, her demeanor reeked of entitlement.  This was a Democratic seat in a Democratic state ...]]> As a futurist, it is imperative to be a student of history.  The macro trends, rhythms, and forces of the past can be of great assistance when trying to see ahead clearly.  In the case of the Massachusetts Senate Election I found myself understanding it within the context of American history.  So, Thomas Jefferson a little bit later in the column

What do we know at the blocking and tackling level in regards to the Brown victory?

First, the political “pundits” – and that word is always best in quotes – are back.  What did they have to say about Tiger Woods except to speak of a fallen idol?  What could they say about Haiti except to express what an unspeakably horrible tragedy it is?  Ah, but now there is blood in the water!  Political drama of the highest order!  It is so predictable what is going to be said on Fox News, on MSNBC and even CNN in the days, weeks and unfortunately months ahead.  Raised voices!  Pompous posturing and prognostications about the status of health care, the Democratic majority and the Obama Presidency.  How will the Republicans relate to the Tea Party folks?

It is clear that Brown ran a perfect pitch campaign.  Timing, image, message and package were all right on target.  Coakley ran perhaps the most lackluster campaign in recent memory.  What killed her, and is the point of this column is that her campaign, her demeanor reeked of entitlement.  This was a Democratic seat in a Democratic state and hey she won the Democratic primary.  Why do I have to shake hands with voters?

This is why the electorate is in revolt.  We voted for change in 2006, change in 2008 and change in 2010.  It isn’t that citizens are voting against health care, though I am sure many did.  It is not that citizens were voting against the Democratic Congress, though I am sure some thought they were.  What the voters were voting against was this entitlement stink of a professional, careerist political class.  Every election from now on out will be about this to some degree.  They got us into two wars, two recessions, historic collapse of housing values, record unemployment and have added 20 trillion dollars  debt and unsecured liabilities and that is just in the last nine years.

In the last four months as I speak to audiences about the trends, changes and transformation that is about to occur in the coming ten years, there has been an emerging consistent point of view and question.  It goes something like this:  we understand that this is coming but will the politicians ever get it?  In Canada they speak about the insular, dull, bureaucrats in Ottawa.  In the U.S. it is about the life-long politicians beholden to special interests for self perpetuation.  If your party is in power you get a job.  If your party is out of power, you become a lobbyist until the revolving door brings you back into the corridors of power.  For two years I have been saying that, increasingly, the phrase “national leaders” is oxymoronic.  It is the people that seem to lead the politicians.

When the founding fathers crafted those exquisite documents and initiated the greatest experiment of democracy in history they never, ever, envisioned an entrenched political class whose sole interest was  perpetuation of their power and their party’s power. Thomas Jefferson was a farmer.  He became a great statesman, a magnificent president and left a towering legacy of compassionate love of country.  Then he went back to being a farmer.  The founding fathers imaged a citizen’s democracy, where service was given and then, private life was resumed.  That was the assumed practice.  Where were political parties mentioned in those documents we revere?

In my current Trend Report and in Q&A with audiences I suggest that by 2016 there could well be a new, third party in ascendency, winning across the map. Both the Democratic and Republican parties feel so 20^th century, burdened by legacies no longer pertinent to the 21^st century and the Shift Age.

The historians of 2020 or 2030 may well point to this period as  a new beginning when Democrats and Republicans were marginalized, giving way to a party tuned to the realities of this new century, this new age, this new decade.  We shall see.

Don’t those definitions feel like what has been already going on in your life and the world?  Many of us have already been living in this state.  Many of us have only recently felt the impending alterations, disruptions and reorganizations that have begun.  Everything seems to be in a transforming state of shift.

We are entering the first full decade of the Shift Age, even though it has already taken root in the last 4 years.  This new age has launched incredible shift and upheaval already. This current Great Recession can only be fully understood when seen as the reorganizational recession between two ages, the Information Age and the Shift Age. It is not unlike the recessions of the 1970s, which was the decade of transition between the Industrial and Information Ages. Almost everything is in a state of shift, in a state of being transformed.

Think about all that is going on in your life and in the world.  The way we communicate has and will continue to change in form, appearance (our gadgets are vastly different than even five years ago) and character (how many of you text or tweet regularly versus even three years ago).  The shape of our relationships is changing.  The shape of how we work,  how we live and how  and in ...]]> This new decade, 2010-2020, will be known as the Transformation Decade. The definitions of transformation are several: the act or process of transforming, the state of being transformed, change in form, appearance, nature, or character.

Don’t those definitions feel like what has been already going on in your life and the world?  Many of us have already been living in this state.  Many of us have only recently felt the impending alterations, disruptions and reorganizations that have begun.  Everything seems to be in a transforming state of shift.

We are entering the first full decade of the Shift Age, even though it has already taken root in the last 4 years.  This new age has launched incredible shift and upheaval already. This current Great Recession can only be fully understood when seen as the reorganizational recession between two ages, the Information Age and the Shift Age. It is not unlike the recessions of the 1970s, which was the decade of transition between the Industrial and Information Ages. Almost everything is in a state of shift, in a state of being transformed.

Think about all that is going on in your life and in the world.  The way we communicate has and will continue to change in form, appearance (our gadgets are vastly different than even five years ago) and character (how many of you text or tweet regularly versus even three years ago).  The shape of our relationships is changing.  The shape of how we work,  how we live and how  and in what we travel are all changing.  The economy and the workplace are changing and being reshaped.

In the next ten years there will be a level of transformation probably unmatched in human history:

- Humanity’s relationship to communication technology is rapidly changing and will bring on-going transformation socially, culturally and economically.

- Media will be completely different that it is today.  We are only at the initial creative destruction phase of it now.

- Economic metrics will need to be transformed, both on national and global levels

-  How countries define defense will be transformed given the shape changing nature of our enemies and the threats that face us.

-Energy and energy use will be transformed from the 20^th century ways we look at it and use it still today.  Alternative and renewable energy development and use will create great new wealth and will transform landscapes and how we live

-Education is no longer serving the needs of people and society; it will be transformed. K-12 education will be dramatically transformed in the next ten years.  For a large part of the population it will become K-14.

- The medical breakthroughs around the corner will make 2010-2020 the most transformative decade in medical history.  This is not just due to the actual discoveries, but to what they will make us face and the moral decisions we will confront for the first time.  We will all have the affordable ability to know our unique complete genetic map.   We will move into the age of personalized medicine as a result.  We will have fore knowledge of probable personal health conditions in the future. That will transform how we live.  The concept of pre-existing conditions will largely go away as we were born with them genetically.  Do you get married if you and your intended partner’s respective genetic maps are not a good match?  Does knowledge trump love?  Who gets to make the decision as to who gets to live forever in an over crowded world? We will have the capability to make such decisions.  How do we develop the ability to do so? There will be transformation across the board in health care and medicine.

-We will undergo personal transformation as well.  Our consciousness will change in dynamic ways.  Our relationships, our work place, our view of life and even the definition of life itself will be transformed

-The workplace will be transformed as the place part becomes less and less relevant.  Human beings will only need to be in the same place to collaborate, as work is increasingly defined as collaborative.

- The Internet and our rapid fire use of mobile digital devices to access it has created a pulsing, synaptic place of unprecedented interactivity that on a global scale is starting to feel like a global brain.  It is a live, morphing place called the Neurosphere that is not only transforming us now, but could well be the technological model for a new level of human consciousness in 10-20 years.  That is an evolutionary level of transformation.  An Evolutionshift. It may be hard for you to envision, but we are rapidly moving in that direction.

The list could go on and on as to what will be transformed. Take a snapshot look at your life now with all your relationships, ways of thinking, ways of living and ways of looking at the world   I promise you that when you take the same snapshot in ten years you will astounded as to the transformation that will have occurred.  The speed of change is now both constantly accelerating and environmental.  It may feel uncomfortable as familiar things and ways of living are disintegrating. Transformation, to varying degrees, is always uncomfortable.  We are and will be transformed in the next ten years.

We have entered the Transformation Decade.

There is so much noise about it.  The media knows it is an important topic to many and they know that controversy prompts viewership so they create controversy.  The U.N. Copenhagen Climate summit is the current case in point.  TV in particular provides superficial, breathless coverage of registration problems, conflicts,  walk-outs and somewhat angry talking heads arguing points of view.  So what to think?

The most cogent description of the four general points of view concerning climate change and humanity’s causality of it was in a column in the New York Times.  It was written by Stewart Brand.  Stewart Brand is best known for creating the “Whole Earth Catalog” and also for being one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters.  It can – and has- been argued that Brand and the “Whole Earth Catalog” created the beginning of the environmental movement and the cultural underpinnings of Silicon Valley.  He is that significant of a cultural figure.  After all it was Brand who, in 1968, asked the straightforward question:  “Why haven’t we seen a picture of the whole earth?”

Stewart Brand has been a hero of mine for the last 40 years.  It therefore gave me great comfort to read his column and find that of the four positions he describes around climate change that he and I are in the same one: “Warners”.

Brand describes ...]]> As someone who writes and speaks about alternative and renewable energy, I often get asked about climate change.  What do I think about it?  What is true?  Who to believe?

There is so much noise about it.  The media knows it is an important topic to many and they know that controversy prompts viewership so they create controversy.  The U.N. Copenhagen Climate summit is the current case in point.  TV in particular provides superficial, breathless coverage of registration problems, conflicts,  walk-outs and somewhat angry talking heads arguing points of view.  So what to think?

The most cogent description of the four general points of view concerning climate change and humanity’s causality of it was in a column in the New York Times.  It was written by Stewart Brand.  Stewart Brand is best known for creating the “Whole Earth Catalog” and also for being one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters.  It can – and has- been argued that Brand and the “Whole Earth Catalog” created the beginning of the environmental movement and the cultural underpinnings of Silicon Valley.  He is that significant of a cultural figure.  After all it was Brand who, in 1968, asked the straightforward question:  “Why haven’t we seen a picture of the whole earth?”

Stewart Brand has been a hero of mine for the last 40 years.  It therefore gave me great comfort to read his column and find that of the four positions he describes around climate change that he and I are in the same one: “Warners”.

Brand describes all four groups; the Denialists, the Skeptics, the Warners and the Calamatists.  He then speculates on what each of these groups would do if climate change were to suddenly reverse and the opposite, that it keeps getting worse.

Which category are you in?  Here is the column:

Four Sides to Every Story

By STEWART BRAND

Published: December 14, 2009

San Francisco

CLIMATE talks have been going on in Copenhagen for a week now, and it appears to be a two-sided debate between alarmists and skeptics. But there are actually four different views of global warming. A taxonomy of the four:

DENIALISTS They are loud, sure and political. Their view is that climatologists and their fellow travelers are engaged in a vast conspiracy to panic the public into following an agenda that is political and pernicious. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma and the columnist George Will wave the banner for the hoax-callers.

“The claim that global warming is caused by manmade emissions is simply untrue and not based on sound science,” Mr. Inhofe declared in a 2003 speech to the Senate about the Kyoto accord that remains emblematic of his position. “CO2 does not cause catastrophic disasters — actually it would be beneficial to our environment and our economy …. The motives for Kyoto are economic, not environmental — that is, proponents favor handicapping the American economy through carbon taxes and more regulations.”

SKEPTICS This group is most interested in the limitations of climate science so far: they like to examine in detail the contradictions and shortcomings in climate data and models, and they are wary about any “consensus” in science. To the skeptics’ discomfort, their arguments are frequently quoted by the denialists.

In this mode, Roger Pielke, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado, argues that the scenarios presented by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are overstated and underpredictive. Another prominent skeptic is the physicist Freeman Dyson, who wrote in 2007: “I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models …. I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests.”

WARNERS These are the climatologists who see the trends in climate headed toward planetary disaster, and they blame human production of greenhouse gases as the primary culprit. Leaders in this category are the scientists James Hansen, Stephen Schneider and James Lovelock. (This is the group that most persuades me and whose views I promote.)

“If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted,” Mr. Hansen wrote as the lead author of an influential 2008 paper, then the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would have to be reduced from 395 parts per million to “at most 350 p.p.m.”

CALAMATISTS There are many environmentalists who believe that industrial civilization has committed crimes against nature, and retribution is coming. They quote the warners in apocalyptic terms, and they view denialists as deeply evil. The technology critic Jeremy Rifkin speaks in this manner, and the writer-turned-activist Bill McKibben is a (fairly gentle) leader in this category.

In his 2006 introduction for “The End of Nature,” his famed 1989 book, Mr. McKibben wrote of climate change in religious terms: “We are no longer able to think of ourselves as a species tossed about by larger forces — now we are those larger forces. Hurricanes and thunderstorms and tornadoes become not acts of God but acts of man. That was what I meant by the ‘end of nature.’”

The calamatists and denialists are primarily political figures, with firm ideological loyalties, whereas the warners and skeptics are primarily scientists, guided by ever-changing evidence. That distinction between ideology and science not only helps clarify the strengths and weaknesses of the four stances, it can also be used to predict how they might respond to future climate developments.

If climate change were to suddenly reverse itself (because of some yet undiscovered mechanism of balance in our climate system), my guess is that the denialists would be triumphant, the skeptics would be skeptical this time of the apparent good news, the warners would be relieved, and the calamatists would seek out some other doom to proclaim.

If climate change keeps getting worse then I would expect denialists to grasp at stranger straws, many skeptics to become warners, the warners to start pushing geoengineering schemes like sulfur dust in the stratosphere, and the calamatists to push liberal political agendas — just as the denialists said they would.

Stewart Brand is the author of “Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.”

{This ran on the OpEd page of the New York Times Tuesday December 15,2009]

The history of broadcast television in the U.S. can and will be distilled down to the same:  Ed Sullivan Oprah Winfrey.

The Ed Sullivan show was on from 1948 – 1971, was almost always live, created the concept of the Sunday night viewing experience, was and still is the definitive variety show in the history of television and basically stood astride  the first 23 years of broadcast television in the U.S.  The Oprah Winfrey show has now been on a little more than 23 years, (interesting irony don’t you think)  has been the definition of ultimate success of a talk show and a syndication show and has shaped, more than any other show, the culture of the U.S.

[Please understand that as a student of the medium I know of all the titans of the television medium, from Berle, Gleason, Lucy, the Cartwright family, Rod Serling, Star Trek to Norman Lear, Cosby, the Simpsons and Law and Order.  This is not unlike all those wonderful jazz trumpeters.]

Sullivan and Winfrey bracket the history of broadcast television in the U.S.  Sullivan was the longest running, dominant ...]]> In the early 1970s, when I was first really getting into jazz, I heard one of those glib statements that stuck with me.  “The history of the jazz trumpet can be written in four words:  Louis Armstrong Miles Davis”  Now this obviously is not true as there have been dozens of great jazz trumpeters, but in a way it distilled the history of something down to two iconic figures.

The history of broadcast television in the U.S. can and will be distilled down to the same:  Ed Sullivan Oprah Winfrey.

The Ed Sullivan show was on from 1948 – 1971, was almost always live, created the concept of the Sunday night viewing experience, was and still is the definitive variety show in the history of television and basically stood astride  the first 23 years of broadcast television in the U.S.  The Oprah Winfrey show has now been on a little more than 23 years, (interesting irony don’t you think)  has been the definition of ultimate success of a talk show and a syndication show and has shaped, more than any other show, the culture of the U.S.

[Please understand that as a student of the medium I know of all the titans of the television medium, from Berle, Gleason, Lucy, the Cartwright family, Rod Serling, Star Trek to Norman Lear, Cosby, the Simpsons and Law and Order.  This is not unlike all those wonderful jazz trumpeters.]

Sullivan and Winfrey bracket the history of broadcast television in the U.S.  Sullivan was the longest running, dominant figure at the beginning and Winfrey the same at the end.  Yes, the end.  When, in 2025, media historians write about the broadcast television business, they will point to Oprah’s exit as the real end of the business.  Yes there will be a business of broadcast after her exit in 11/2011, but it will be its’ twilight.

Oprah said that 25 years feels right to her, and who can challenge her instincts and feelings as they have proven unswervingly correct.  This observer thinks that she is astute enough to realize that the business over which she has ruled these past 23 years is, indeed, in a rapid dénouement.

[Some of you reading this column know that 16 years ago, along with my good friend Jack Myers, we created a company, TPP, that suggested to advertisers, networks and agencies that the broadcast networks would soon decline to a less than %50 share of primetime viewing and would then rapidly decline to less than %40, which is where it is today.  We strongly recommended to them that they therefore needed to create a new model of doing business.  Except for a couple of visionaries, most executives of the day told us we were wrong. Jack and I are futurists and try to see clearly what lies ahead; that is what we do.  Broadcast executives historically don’t see beyond the next season.  This is just to state for the record that as futurists it was pretty clear 15 years ago that the broadcast business would be where it is today.]

Ed Sullivan and Oprah Winfrey respectfully influenced American culture.  Sullivan introduced the larger culture to Elvis, the Beatles, Marcel Marceau and to numerous comedians who became big stars.  He was the successful launch platform of culture.  Winfrey launched the Book Club, successful talk shows, innumerable products and to a large degree Barack Obama.  More than any other two television stars they influenced our cultural zeitgeist.  They defined the powerful platform of broadcast television to expand and alter our country’s culture.

See Oprah’s coming exit for what it is, the end of the cultural impact of broadcast television.  It will exist but with a bunch of qualifiers.  If Ed Sullivan was alive today he would look at it and find it wholly unrecognizable.

Oprah Winfrey is moving to cable in some new program iteration.  It won’t be “The Oprah Winfrey Show” as that is a broadcast product.  She will find the right program(s) for the cable medium.  She clearly understands that as a 50% owner of a cable network, she can create wealth and success in that medium and once again be seen as a cultural iconic figure redefining a medium.

All the media coverage of Oprah’s exit from broadcast is about cable’s dual revenue streams and its profitability and superiority to broadcast as a business model. As a comparative conversation that is valid.  That said, cable television is mature and is about to enter a long slow period of decline.

This futurist has a forecast that you can file away for 15 years.  When the above mentioned media historians of 2025 write about cable television, they will write that Oprah Winfrey’s exit from that medium sometime in the time frame of  2015-2020, signaled the end of the significance of the medium.  She will be the overarching television personality to end not one but two television mediums.

My entire life up to that historic day of 11/9/89 was one lived with the world divided between the Western and Eastern Blocs.  It was an us versus them world and most geopolitical events were defined within this context.  As a young teenager, I had crossed through Checkpoint Charlie and always remembered the stark contrast between bustling West Berlin and the drab, empty East Berlin.  I chipped away two small pieces of the Wall on that trip and still have them encased in Lucite on a living room table.  To watch Checkpoint Charlie open up with hundreds of Berliners dancing on top of the wall brought tears to my eyes.

In “The Shift Age” book and in a presentation of the same name, I speak of the Threshold Decades, the 20 year period 1985-2005.  It is this 20 year period that will be seen by future historians as the threshold between the room of the past and the room of the future, between what was and what came to be.  There is no greater single geopolitical event of greater transformation that occurred during the Threshold Decades than the fall of the Berlin wall.

The fall of the wall was the start of the ...]]> It was twenty years ago last week that the Berlin wall ceased to be a barrier.  The wall of Berlin came down, starting several years of collapse and turmoil in what used to be called Eastern Europe.  This was one of the most remarkable, deeply moving events in my lifetime

My entire life up to that historic day of 11/9/89 was one lived with the world divided between the Western and Eastern Blocs.  It was an us versus them world and most geopolitical events were defined within this context.  As a young teenager, I had crossed through Checkpoint Charlie and always remembered the stark contrast between bustling West Berlin and the drab, empty East Berlin.  I chipped away two small pieces of the Wall on that trip and still have them encased in Lucite on a living room table.  To watch Checkpoint Charlie open up with hundreds of Berliners dancing on top of the wall brought tears to my eyes.

In “The Shift Age” book and in a presentation of the same name, I speak of the Threshold Decades, the 20 year period 1985-2005.  It is this 20 year period that will be seen by future historians as the threshold between the room of the past and the room of the future, between what was and what came to be.  There is no greater single geopolitical event of greater transformation that occurred during the Threshold Decades than the fall of the Berlin wall.

The fall of the wall was the start of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the resumption of globalism for the first time since before WWI, and the true beginning of the current global economy.  The landscape of Europe and the EU was completely altered.  The global stage of capitalism began and the world moved into the second stage of the Information Age.

I wrote a column three years ago that basically said two things.  First, the city was the through point of history of the 20^th century, that most of the significant events of the century involved Berlin.  Second, the city now stands for freedom and openness.  For 66 years it lived under two of the most repressive and violent regimes of the 21^st century and now it highlights that past so that we all know how precious freedom and openness are to all of us.

As we enter the Shift Age much of what we experience was unleashed by the collapse of the wall.  The capitalist ascendency of Asia, the creation of Skype in Eastern Europe, the creation of multi-national corporate supply chains all flowed from the collapse of the Berlin Wall.  The world we live in today has been shaped to a large degree by the forces that were unleashed 20 years ago last week and the wall they toppled.