Crowdsourcing and the Collective Conscience: Tribes, Values and Wikis

The  biggest tech trend in 2011 was crowdsourcing, and the best examples of this were seen in the Arab Spring that led to several regime changes and the Occupy movement that is still developing, still formulating its direction as an impetus for a rebalancing of wealth and power globally.

These movements are huge. growing organically from ordinary citizens’ sense of frustration with the direction of established political and economic systems and accelerated by the use of new technologies, including smart phones and social media, to circumvent established systems of social control.

The result has been significant regime change with minimal loss of life and a global awareness of pressing political and economic issues.

There’s no question that these movements have had effect. Political strategists have been surprised, cheered and sometimes alarmed by their speed and strength.

Less obvious has been the shift in collective conscience afforded by these movements.

Where a decade ago the world was bent on highly competitive economic and technical achievement, the new decade is more concerned with security and equanimity. Where the outset of the Millenium was defined by geopolitical division across a variety of axis, we’ve since discovered that humanity itself values a balance of work, wealth, spirituality and comfort, and that the major barrier to this goal isn’t the tribes themselves, but a vastly uneven distribution of wealth and power that threatens each of them.

One reason for this change in the collective conscience has been a shift from the dogmatic tracts that define our political and religious history, to a greater reliance on crowdsourced references.

These new archives of our collective past – most notably, Wikipedia and other similar resources – allow us to see events from a variety of perspectives, and to develop our own opinions about them. This is a far cry from the communications paradigms of the 2oth century and before, where a handful of religious organizations, political parties and media outlets defined the world for us.

So where do we go from here?

I would like to think that we move toward a more balanced view of our world, and a more sensible and sensitive way of managing it, but in truth, not everybody is on the same page. There are still vast populations whose quality of life is far below average, and many of these populations reside right in the United States of America.  In fact, there really isn’t a country in the world that doesn’t have large imbalances in health, education and employment.

The world is changing, but it isn’t happening overnight.

Even as technology is expanding our collective awareness, it is enabling those with great power to develop ever more secretive, powerful and nefarious strategies for protecting their positions.

And, as the global economy recovers and our wealth rebalances, we can expect to see a rapid increase in population. This combination greatly increases the amplitude of epidemics, natural disasters and geopolitical conflict, which may yet bring a shift toward more protectionist policies that favor the rich and powerful, leaving the masses to wade through the damage like the survivors of the Japanese tsunami.

In the long run, our biggest challenge is not equality, but sustainability as a species.

If we cannot focus our technology to the goal of achieving harmony with our world, we will have missed the greatest opportunity of our lifetimes.

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