The Twentieth Century was Wrong

Last week, I attended the wonderful Lift Conference in Geneve which is especially great if you want to meet the swiss digital innovators all in one place. Many thanks to Laurent Haug who makes all this possible!

When I think about Lift09, the highlight in retrospective clearly was Lee Bryant and his short but thought-provoking talk about why the twentieth century was wrong.

Some people see new social technology and networked culture as dangerous and 'new', and they fall back on their experience of technology and organisational culture in the late Twentieth Century as the 'established' model. Yet, in fact the reverse is true. The Twentieth century took the ideas of the industrial revolution and applied them to people. Mass production. Mass marketing. Mass slaughter.

If you look at a longer timeframe, you will see that our new era of social technology and social business is in fact more traditional, and continues very old, resilient models of network-based trade, business and socialisation. The difference is, we now have the technology and infrastructure (and arguably the globalised world) that enables us to scale up these old ways of working to support our modern life.

I'm very glad Lee will be on the next09 stage soon. Maybe with an extended version of this, maybe with a different topic. Wait and see.