perhaps the next big thing is us.
perhaps it's been us all along..
and tech wants to get us back to us.
Our institutions are failing not merely because they're bankrupting us financially, but because they're bankrupting us in human terms — that, having become something like Alcatrazes for the human soul, they fail to ignite within us the searing potential for the towering accomplishments necessary to answer today's titanic challenges.
Perhaps we've gotten a little too seduced by the quest for the Next Big Thing. While it's certain there will be a (smallcaps) next big thing — 3D printing, personal genomics, etc, that will redraw the boundaries of productivity, efficiency, effectiveness — perhaps, the biggest thing we need to face next is us.
Not "us" in the vague, internetzy sense of "the collective." But "us" as in the even more imprecise, yet razor-sharp sense of what pulses through you and I when we feel most alive; what ripples gently through us, when we feel alone, hurt, small, afraid, taut with grief. The stuff that makes us us: not just well-behaved, obedient, productive atoms in the economic world, but feeling, thinking, doing, living beings in the human world.