OgEvolves - Charting the next revolution

A while ago, there was a rumor that Yahoo! had acquired JotSpot, a wide-ranging collaboration suite. Well, I’m glad to say that they didn’t. Instead, Google did. I can’t understate how revolutionary this is. Now, the entire world will have free — yes, free — collaboration tools, including project management, file sharing, personal to-dos, among others.

These are, for all intents and purpose, virtually enterprise-level software tools to which anyone with an internet connection can gain access. The “inprosumer” (investor-producer-consumer) revolution needs to happen, and it looks like Google is enabling it. This compels one to side entirely with Google in the Net Neutrality debate, as passing on ISP usage fees to users for a product as enabling as JotSpot would indeed be a travesty.

Telecoms — which have a history of overcharging for usage and lagging on innovation — vs. Google — which has empowered the entire networked economy to share and access all available information in real-time. Tough choice.

On a note of slight esoterica: I believe that all of this points to the need for an absolute relationship to the evolution of culture and consciousness (and by “evolution,” I am referring to increasing levels of ethics, transparency, care, and trust). When one considers the potentials Google is pushing as compared the equivalent of the telecoms, the choice is clear: the telecoms have limited access (through reneging on promised fiberoptic internet access, monopolizing industry, and thus limiting competition, and spending billions of dollars on lobbying that disempowers the consumer), whereas Google has brought, on balance, unambiguously good change to the world.

Once we start weighing the costs and benefits with undue consternation — in any of these areas of social urgency, like climate change, net neutrality, poverty — of “doing the right thing” versus “doing something that may be socially acceptable but ambiguous when considering actual externalities,” we’ve lost our true conscience, our ability to discern right from wrong. Democratizing power is unequivocally positive.

Transforming the value chain to include the entire cosmos in one’s calculation can only yield results that ameliorate global life conditions. And I’d say that’s a good thing. No, it’s a necessary thing. An absolutely necessary thing.