Yawwwwn. So it’s ground hog day all over again with tired debate over Accountable Anonymity and Online Identity Management in general. Really? This is a valid topic of conversation among educated, intelligent interwebs inhabitants in 2011?
If I had an decent CPC for every time I’ve had to defend Bruce Schneier’s 2006 infinitely logical position on accountable anonymity – a position I independently began fighting for as early as 2001, if you must know – I probably wouldn’t bother posting another blathering blog entry on such a long-expired and utterly resolved basic topic.
Please, our collective intelligence and attention are far too valuable to squander on this again. Let’s not continue wasting valuable extended cognition resources on yet another naval-gazing rehash of this long resolved, non-problem.
We desperately need some fresh, new global conversation conductors for this online orchestra. Conductors who will whisk us past superfluous accidentals and distractions and get on with the opus of fixing What’s Most Broken on the planet:
The future that is already here — and nowhere near sufficiently evenly distributed.
This challenge, along with climate change, is arguably the urgent matter of our era. We need entirely new ways of circulating value throughout a global economic circulatory system that is rapidly transitioning to a social capital substrate. As tweeted earlier:
“… as quantum physics differs from newtonian, so does social capital growth differ from industrial capital decline …”
People and communities are suffocating at the economic capillary level. This debt ceiling theater — focusing all too scarce and shallow public attention on histrionic, superfluous cardiac bypass procedures — won’t do a thing to support or supply nutrient-starved capillaries.
Please, let’s have the courage to finally move forward to solving the big problems, building upon the best of what’s worked and discarding all that has not worked well; setting forth upon a global course correction, an #EarthOS reboot worthy of the best of our collective intelligence; accelerating change to cultural escape velocity sufficient to finally begin apprehending postscarcity. At the very least, there is no further excuse to postpone ending poverty, beyond our lifetimes.
Avoidance of our fundamental, inter-generational responsibilities will not make them go away. The world has dramatically changed because our understanding has so dramatically changed. What we once thought was a cold, barren universe is in fact full of water, oxygen, and we ourselves are made of the stuff of stars. Amidst all these no longer shocking realizations, isn’t it time to grow up and be responsible, Earthlings?
“All this is about stewardship.” – Harry Hellenbrand, Cal State University Provost.
