they aren't new ideas, I know.
Mr Brown said: "I believe it will require no less than a fourth technological revolution. In the past the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, the microprocessor transformed not just technology but the way our society has been organised and the way people live.
The industrial revolution, the bright new future that changed so much and brought us everything from a shrinking world to soft-sliced, pre-packaged bread. The revolution of wheels, workers and winnings. Britain became great, poor had work.
History points to the revolution and says, there, there it began, the good, the bad. The ugly peals of smoke and the trains from which they puff, the travel and discovery of new cultures, countries, and the sadness that was so often brought to them. Here started the movement to the north, to the west. Here your great great grandfather died and here was the money that let his child live. On this revolution turns the next fate of the world, and here it turned, an ever spiralling movement, with its spinning centre turned by this first revolution. Or so it might seem. Uprooting, opportunity, education, everything. It was new, fresh and unclean, and it was smudged into the world so that it could not now be rubbed out.
Then there came the information revolution. In a day the world could be shrunk into your pocket, so small you needn’t even leave your home. You turned round and suddenly it was new. Another turn and even the newness had already been replaced. Communication and travel. Information and organisation. Trade quick, die slow. No need for the poor to migrate for work, the work will come to them if they’re poor enough.
Call your friend across the country while looking at the news across the world. History doesn’t point to this revolution, it just is. It is the history, ask wikipedia. History is turned by the information explosion that twists its way into the past until nothing can be imagined but this spinning change, which isn’t change it’s the same, it’s always been. Nothing’s new. Is it? Not since last week at least, and who needs to remember before that. This revolution turns the world’s spin, until it speeds and we all become a blur, the same shade and shape, melting and sinking until there’s nothing left.
And these two came as a surprise. The world turned and we hardly even realised as it turned faster. Time spun on and suddenly we were in a different place, but it was new and shiny, with opportunity for some, so why complain?
But what we will have to have next is the counter revolution. The one we know about ourselves, where we have to spin against the tide to slow this continuously accelerating turn. We need to distinguish ourselves again, become independent and clear. Expand our horizons until the whole world is as far away as we can dream, and excitement is a long journey away. The new revolution will not be an uprising but a relaxation, as each one can sink back into their own shape and stop being whipped about in the rush of the turn, the speed of the growth. We won’t know everything. We won’t move everywhere. The revolution won’t turn us but we will turn it, until it finally dispands and becomes a revolution that turns on us, each to their own.
When we can stop being turned by the mass movement, when we can stop it turning on us, but try to reach out and move others’. Then we won’t need the revolution any more, as we will have made each other’s.
