43 - Individual Freedom Is a Matter of National Survival

Summary

A New Era is upon us. This is no longer a controversial statement as far as I can gather. Indeed, it is a boring truism by now. A new page in our already speedy times has been turned and it is defined geoeconomically by the rise of China and of India and it is noted in how different societies are elbowing their way to get ahead in the queue.

More concretely put, it is the sum of the exponentially-driven consequences of electronic innovations that began not very long ago. And, as with all new eras, we were already mired in it before we noticed it. As has often been remarked upon, the smartphone as we know it today, which now controls our day, is only 11 years old. WhatsApp, with which you organise your contact network, is nine years old, as is Airbnb. And yes, the ride-hailing app Uber is eight years old and Malaysia's incredibly successful Grab app is only two years younger.

Your children's current favourite app, Instagram, may have taken a while to take off properly but it is, nevertheless, only seven or eight years old.

In this company, Facebook is really old, launched as it was in February 2004. Twitter isn't much younger. Its first proper prototype began working in the spring of 2006. You can see why teenagers consider Facebook and Twitter apps for the old. And Skype … I haven't heard that platform mentioned in quite a while but that could be because it is even older than Facebook – by a whole year.

What all this tells us is that the disorientation you currently feel in your daily life is totally rational. You should feel that way and you have every right to feel that way. In fact, you can take comfort in the fact that your younger peers, who boast of their prowess in handling communication devices and apps today, will soon feel the way you do right now. They will also be bypassed.

The pace of IT development today is exponentially increasing, while our human ability to sync to it individually is highly limited, often restricted by the socio-political culture, educational exposure and of course, the communicative habits of the society we live in.