Bleeding Edge

Change is Constant.

In fact it’s the only “constant” we have in physics.

The Corporate history of the world made up of some of the greatest companies on record, as they were then and now, is a vast battle field littered with corpses and ghosts of the once mighty empires. And it is this field of battle between Innovation and Complacency that actually provides the best way to understand the acceleration of innovation and the failure of incumbents, that has occurred over the last couple of centuries and is accelerating today as we move forward to the Shared Economy of Ideas.

The original age of innovation has ushered in an era of unforeseen productivity, life improvements, population control, educational achievements, and social justice progress, as well as more Liberty, Democracy, and Longevity for all.

Still it was also an absolutely terrifying roller-coaster ride for some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people at the top…

Over a number of generations however, our society responded to the ever changing landscape and the uncertainty of what tomorrow might bring, by developing a new set of institutions to lessen the pain of this new volatility, including unions, Social Security and the single greatest risk-mitigating institution ever: the corporation.

During the late 19th century, a series of experiments in organizational structure culminated, in the 1920s, with the birth of General Motors, the first modern corporation.

Its basic characteristics soon became ubiquitous. A great deal of crowdsourcing ensued. Distributed production, distributed ownership, and distributed workforce soon followed.

For example: Ownership, which was once a job passed from father to son, was now divided among countless shareholders. Management, too, was divided, amongst a large group of professionals who directed units, or “subdivisions,” within it. Process and resource as well as parts procurement was spread over a vast number of sources and the workers came from everywhere and were located everywhere the corporation functioned and sold it’s products. The idea being that the corporation should sell it’s products everywhere around the world… and thus an every man, woman, and child became likely customers and purchasers of goods, services, and equities of said corporations.

Equalizing and spreading globally, employment, product benefits, as well as risks and rewards, soon the corporation became the way forward.

The corporation, in essence, acted as a giant risk-sharing machine, amassing millions of investors’ capital and spreading it among a large number of projects, then sharing the returns broadly too. The corporation managed the risk so well, in fact, that it created an innovation known as the steady job. For the first time in history, the risks of innovation were not borne by the poorest. This resulted in what economists call the Great Compression, when the gap between the income of the rich and poor rapidly fell to its lowest margin.

That’s capitalism at work for you…

The secret of the corporation’s success, however, was that it generally did not focus on truly transformative innovations, but in steady same iteration of products that worked well with their many clients and shareholders who often times were the same people since the shares of the companies were the best product a successful company could sell…

Most corporate firms found that the surest way to grow was to perfect the manufacturing of the same products, year after year. Especially in the United States, this trend defined companies like G.M., U.S. Steel, Procter & Gamble, Kellogg’s, Coca-Cola and other iconic companies who achieved their breakthrough insights in the pre-corporate era and spent the next several decades refining them, perhaps introducing a new product every decade or so.

During the corporate upstart period between 1870 and 1920, cars, planes, electricity, telephones and radios were introduced. But over the next 50 years, as cars and planes got bigger and electricity and phones became more ubiquitous, the core technologies stayed fundamentally the same. And although some notable exceptions include the washing machine and household appliances freeing women to join the work force, the fax machine allows to teleport documents and letters of all kinds, the television wasting the lives of countless millions of people, the nuclear power killing scores of civilians and perpetuating the Theatre of HORROR called détente, and of course disposable diapers overflowing our landfills…

Some good, some bad, and some in between. That is the story of Corporate Innovation and innovation in general when the profit motive is concerned or the advantage at war and love.

Still plenty of innovative ideas and projects came out of the celebrated corporate-research departments at Bell Labs, DuPont and Xerox who employed scores of white-coated scientists, but whose impact was blunted by the thick shell of bureaucracy around them.

As an example: Bell Labs of AT&T, conceived of some great vertical and horizontal radical inventions, like the transistor, the laser and many of the programming languages in use today, but its parent company, AT&T, ignored most all of them in order to keep focus on its basic telephone monopoly. Starting as a young innovative company itself a century earlier AT&T had now become a behemoth and a killer of technological innovation. As monopolies always tend to do, so did AT&T and soon fell victim to it’s own entropy. AT&T actually used it’s major muscle to stop innovation wherever it could by acquiring and shutting down competing companies, discrediting superior core technologies, and killing startups by suing their pants off. They were particularly good at shuttering important innovative upstarts and inventive StartUps, through litigation [if they resisted AT&T’s buy-in cyanide pill, known as strategic exit] in order to stop them from competing in what it considered it’s own turf. A gangster tactic but the thick carpet pile crowd of New Jersey had it too good lording over the world like T-Rex for far too long to adjust it’s reality and adapt to change. I know this from personal experience when me and my young company Seattle Wireless were both personally and separately sued by AT&T in order to stop us from propagating the Wi-Fi technology that I pioneered and to stop me from sharing the message of ubiquitous and cheap wireless internet and wireless telephony communications. They really got afraid and wanted to stop me from evangelizing the gospel of Wireless freedom for the masses because I was speaking in all the conferences and Telecoms meetings and was setting up Wi-Fi companies all over the world with the simple premise: We pay for home and office DSL and Internet connections and therefore we are the owners of our bits of bandwidth and we should just attach Wi-Fi routers and a pig tail or a multi directional antenna, at the end of our computers and thus share all of our bandwidth [when not in use or our excess bits and bytes] with our neighbors and all the people in our communities — in order to have robust WI-Fi enabled communities running our fully enabled wireless internet and VOIP networks.

This new approach to radical Innovation really irked AT&T as well as all other telephone giant monopolies and their cable barons, because it threatened their bottom line by taking away valuable revenue, and the most cherished customer of all. The traveling salesman. The corporate executive. The Mobile Man. And as their innovator’s dilemma came to a head, instead of adapting to the changing world, they decided to kill the Evangelist [Yours Truly], shut down his new companies, and stop the WI-Fi technology revolution hoping to stem the tide.

Good Luck with that.

This battle between David and Goliath ended differently than predicted by the wealthy and all powerful board members of AT&T and the company itself. Simply because I used the power of the Internet and we crowdsourced the WI-Fi knowledge by creating millions of revolutionaries and enabling them through sharing the Wi-Fi technology, open sourcing the basic code, the knowledge, and even instructions of how to built routers out of cheap Linux boxes, how to home brew WI-Fi community central stations, and also how to make simple antennas out of Pringle potato-chips cans, in order to create and run a wireless network in your own community. From Seattle Wireless and our community we open-sourced the code and the DIY wireless networking knowledge and soon Wi-Fi blossomed from Lassa in Tibet, to Manhattan in New York, and from Havana in Cuba, to Kremlin in Moscow. No sacred cows were spared. All the walls the Telecom monopolies put up — fell away and the behemoths withered about the future not recognizing that they are going extinct. The final nail in their coffin came when I made a deal with Steve Jobs to put Wi-Fi in the Apple laptops and then things really took off. We had also earlier unwired the Microsoft campus in Seattle eastern neighborhood Redmond, as we had done to several Seattle’s open source communities like Green Lake and West Seattle.

Little matters that the giant battle ended with me and WI-Fi winning, and thus becoming really successful, famous, and wealthy beyond compare, and with AT&T, then the richest company in the world, going bankrupt and disappearing from the face of the earth. And all this happened in the space of a few short years, because change doesn’t wait for the big Telecom CEO’s and the cable company bosses to put on their pyjamas before they are put to sleep for a very long time…

And thus we go from my fateful lawsuit settlement meetings with the all powerful Board of Directors of AT&T where I tried to school them in the ways of Innovation of a world full of “Wireless Fidelity” which for ease of understanding by their sclerotic brains and for popular convenience — I named it “Wi-Fi” and shared it as such on my blog and through my web of Wi=Fi companies across this earth. And thus Wi-Fi stuck with the people and all the consumers of computer hardwire started demanding from manufacturers that their machines come equipped with Wi-Fi. Heady days from a simple innovation existing in the physics and wireless propagation signals of IEEE for many years until we started sharing it with the public on the free spectrum we called 802.11 [a,b,c,d,g etc] and it was an unpronounceable name all made up of sets of figures and numbers only fit for geeky memory enhanced engineers. So I changed all that to Wi-Fi as in Hi-Fi due to my love of listening to high fidelity classical and jazz music.

And thus Wi-Fi came to being…

Now all the Top Executives use Wi-Fi and the Mobile Man is forever untethered from the big companies, but so is everybody else. Telecoms business models evolved and all things are becoming wireless. But back on the Board of Director Meetings with AT&T’s powerful oligarchs, where I told them God’s awful truth about Progress and Innovation of Wireless Fidelity… they wouldn’t see reason and thus we had a real fight in our hands. They were many and well lawyered up, but I don’t scare easy, so I persisted and they finally listened or at least tolerated me and allowed me to tell them all I could muster. Thus I spoke in earnest and painted a real bloody picture of the coming technological wireless Apocalypse and about how the sky is gonna be falling all over their heads — if they don’t heed the clarion call of Innovation in the Telecoms world that wireless Internet is bringing on. That’s all I spoke about. I spoke candidly. I spoke true. And I gave them the only road map to the future of Telecoms anyone had, not because I knew it all but because I was innovating in the midst of it. I deeply understood Telecoms and was innovating all of it.

Had they been smarter or had they truly believed me — they could have gone on and built the greatest Wireless company the world could have envisioned… And along the way they could have given a new lease to Life to the old AT&T for another hundred years of Good Profits and Upside to the shareholders of the first Telecom company to rule the world. I could see the doubt and incredulity in their eyes… Still, I told them everything. I held nothing back. Part of the deal you see…

And what came of it?

Do you think they listened?

Yes and No.

They heard what they wanted from our long and tense discussions. But embracing Wi-Fi and all it’s glory they didn’t want to do. As far as Innovating on the incoming wireless revolution — they just didn’t get it. When I told them that soon enough everything will be wireless — they simply became defensive and shut down. But that came to pass and they could have embraced the future rapidly becoming the present — yet instead they clinged to the past and simply followed their lawyers defensive position and started sending nasty threatening letters and suing all their best customers and consumers who dared to share. They sued their own livelihood by suing the consumers who shared their bandwidth wirelessly and all the other telephone and cable companies followed suit by sending millions of harassing threatening letters “Cease And Desist” orders to people. Trying to scare off your people is a far cry from actually scaring them off and by telling them to stop sharing their bandwidth as WI-Fi with their neighbors — they accomplished the opposite result. Overnight Wi-Fi became a national and international sensation and yours truly became famous and wealthy.

And of their idea to scare people off from sharing the Wi-Fi juice — well — we fought back on behalf of the people and even gained some hard Allies in our battle for the interests of Society and People. We even gor a dozen or so Amicus Briefs for our cause and we even got a celebrated Brief from a Progressive Federal judge who gave us a letter stating that since consumers pay so much per moth for their connectivity, they had every right to share the bandwidth, just as much they like. It is the same the judge stated as if I give a glass of water or  lend my waterhose, or a bucket of water to my neighbor to quench his thirst or water his plants oe wash the car etc. With the help of these Amicus Briefs in front of the court and also with a letter from the then FCC Chairman, we established beyond any doubt the benevolence of sharing Wi-Fi and that it was materially the same as you pay the water utility to give you a set amount of water per month so that you can use as you please. The same principle exists now for the Wi-FI bandwidth we receive in exchange for a monthly fee from the telephone utility. ANd all the consumers worldwide have me to Thank for this Innovation that took an abundant amount of work, risk, and treasure to accomplish on behalf of everyone…

That’s how Innovation takes root. First they laugh at you — then they fight you — and soon enough You have won.

And this Wi-Fi thingy, the old Wireless Fidelity, blossomed and conquered the world although it was not that fidel. It had all the problems of nascent technologies but with each iteration of the 802.11 standard, it got better. The “d’ got so much better that the “a” or the “b” version of 802.11, but the most important innovation was my calling this awesome new wireless technology “Wi-Fi”  instead of “IEEE 802.11” and acronyms followed by multi-lettered engineering jargons. Amongst my  many many innovative businesses and applications built on top of WI-Fi and many Billion dollar companies that were created upon this Technology I pioneered — I still count the naming of it as the most significant marketing achievement.

For the sake of the argument, I ask the rhetorical question: Could the At&T stop Wi-Fi in it’s infancy?

I doubt it.

They surely tried and gave it their best, but they failed.

They should have known better and embraced it… especially knowing whom they were up against.

But  now all that is history.

Yet as am gearing up for a second WI-Fi revolution I need to remind the troops that times are a-changing again in the wireless Telecommunications world.

Things are a-changing not only because I decreed them to be changing, but because we need to free up the Wi-Fi from fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

We need to free our people and our wireless connectivity because it’s the thing that brings us all together in community of purpose. We shall aim to free our wireless “Air” that we need to breathe in order to create meaning over our communities all over again. We need to free Wi-Fi from the password protected concentration camp of fear, that has been   set-up by the Telecoms in the minds of the people. We need to free up our wireless lives because this locking down of the WI-Fi with passwords and user identification, has only sprung up as a rear guard defense mechanism coming from the same soon to be extinct telephone companies trying to stop Innovation from occurring. They are holding their finger up the crack of the dam bursting on top of their silly heads. But for now they intimidate through fear the people holding consumers and their clients hostages, and thus limit people’s natural desire to share. In turn this blocks the built-out and the massive roll-out of robust wireless local area networked communities that we all need in order to create the Ecosystem of Meaning and Purpose we all want to inhabit.

We need this freedom in our midst and especially in our communities in order to fully function as accomplished human beings belonging and operating in communities of purpose and meaningful work, as intelligent cells of the global brain that is taking shape as we speak.

Further we need to recognize that limiting our Wi-Fi it actually imprisons us in a jail of disconnection, separation, and enmity. And wherever I travel and see this lock-down of Wi-Fi with silly long passwords and user identification, am also reminded that this is the way of the oppressors stealing your Liberty and tracking down all your communications. It is the snoops and the spies and the illegal trolls and haters that benefit the most along with the Telecoms, from the lock down of the Wi-Fi streaming from your home or office.

Do your self a Favour and remove the passwords from your router and allow this action to remind you that this is your first action of regaining your Liberty and your Democracy.

When you do this you’ll feel a bit of uncertainty at first worrying of what might happen next. But truly I must remind you that what you just did, is an Act of Loving Kindness to remove the limit of your mind’s reach and to offer a bit of wi-fi water to a thirsty traveler as you yourself will surely be when outside of your comfort zone.

I have a personal stake in this because removing the “password walls” that limit your Life, we can be creating highly intelligent communities of purpose and meaning — yet this also augments my Vision of a world communication infrastructure without artificial barriers. And it also makes the case for smarter telecommunication companies because it represents a far better business case to let people and their connectivity free in the open space of the wireless spectrum that is dedicated to the public, and make plenty of money from the abundant ecosystem of products, services, and applications, built upon it. And the new Telecom companies who get it — really get it — will be created soon based on this premise. Companies that will take advantage of the evolution towards the synaptically connected wireless Global Brain. And thus we will soon have far more free bandwidth for the Community and the people, as we move from analog to digital TV and new wireless white space is freed up in the wireless spectrum.

If you ask me, or if the FCC chairman and the board need input, I’ll tell you that this is the new greenfield opportunity for all. It will provide a great big push for innovation and jobs, far greater than the cellular spectrum and the internet enabled. It will allow us to create companies and services unheard of today, and many of them undreamed even by me. ANd although I’ve devoted my Life to it, there are things I haven’t dreamed of and yet am here to tell you that it is inevitable. Am here to tell you that this has to happen if we want to harness the power of the Global Brain, and usher in a new era of robust Telecommunications. But as usual we are slow on the uptake, always pussyfooting, and blocking our path, by hobbling our best Innovators in the field.

Net neutrality is nothing when compared with the benefits stemming from Wireless Freedom and Wi-FI neutrality.

Still we’ve decided that we are going to built the second generation Wi-Fi based on freedom of communication and speed of wireless internet in the best human communities across the globe. Communities based on information and communication pathways that are as varied as are the human beings building them and rolling out the Wi-Fi renaissance as we are speaking out here and now. We are building Wireless Communications that are completely unfettered and unfollowed by snoops, trolls, and haters of all kinds — while using the glory of the wireless brain.

That is Liberty.

Our Future as Humanity connecting into a Global Brain wirelessly is awesome. And if you see the growth of the few communities that have embraced WI-FI fully, we are on schedule to liberate your router and your bandwidth as soon as you finish reading this.

And by turning on your Wi-Fi to the community, you are also joining this movement to bring value and purpose to all of our communities that are actually doing it to not only reach each other but to also reach out to all seven billion of us and help us knit this incredible synaptic global brain.

A global brain made up of full bandwidth and fully fledged emergent Wi-Fi network that seeks and delivers Meaning, Purpose and Liberty.

And where is AT&T now?

Well, come to think of it, it is a strictly wireless company now. They apparently followed my logic and saw my “reason” but in their own peculiarly skewed way.  They are the cellular provider of wireless telephony. The once richest and most powerful company in the world, is now a zombie. A reincarnated company as a publicly held subsidiary of SBC communications. Southern Bell, bought AT&T’s assets at the bankruptcy court docket. All this because the AT&T board of Directors didn’t want to listen to my Gospel of change when we had our historic meeting in New Jersey and I told them that although as the father of Wi-Fi am a Radical Innovator am also an Angel of Change, and nothing would please me better than help the old company adjust to the new reality of Physics, Progress, and Technological Innovation taking hold in the marketplace. I told them that they can only hold the river back for so long with the artificial dams they put up like eager beavers — but when the rains will come as they always do, they will all be washed away.

Surely the AT&T mobile cellular company of today is far more agile and willing to change than their old namesake… Or is it not?

I’ll be testing that hypothesis soonest when I launch the next wave of Wireless Innovation and will see them trembling and falling off their high chairs. But for now radio silence…

Another company dying because of lack of innovation is Xerox whose research scientists came up with the graphical interface for computer operating systems, the computer directional mouse, the visual operating system, the laser printers, and even the Ethernet, but they couldn’t interest their bosses back East, who were focused on protecting the copier business. See where that got them today…

But judging from my meetings with the CEO of AT&T and with his lieutenants and then with the Top Brass of the Board of Directors, I know that the Big Bosses and the general run of the mill Corporate leaders aren’t stupid. They just want to protect their cashflow and faced with the Pioneer’s Dilemma seldom take the risky high road. Simple as that. They know they are on the job for a limited time and are simply making so much money that they don’t see any reason to risk it all on lots of new ideas and innovations that might or not pan out in the market place.

Risk Aversion becomes the Corporate Culture with predictable results. This Corporate Conservatism naturally extends through the rank and file workers and corporate managers and thus their people instead focus on killing competing innovation again in order to protect their cashflow. And this is how empires crumble…

Still for Society there are serious drawbacks but at least large Corporations allowed for Economic stability in society and for the slow pace of technological change, which in turn set Society’s rhythm in sync. This new slow and little risk pace, allowed many millions more people to forgo many of the risk-mitigation strategies that had been in place for millenniums. Family size plummeted. Many people moved away from arable land and found work and sketched out lives in inhospitable areas. Many young people, most notably young women, saw new forms of economic freedom when they were no longer tied to the routine of frequent child births, and went on to create careers of meaning. Since serious crop failure and famine, was no longer the dominant expectation, most people could predict with reasonable assurances what their lives and careers would look like decades into the future. Our institutions, corporations, unions, schools, career tracks, universities, finance and banking organizations, pensions and retirement accounts, and government’s public employees, were all predicated on a stable and rosy future of steady same growth like the big corporate behemoths annual results macro-chart posted on the Boardroom walls.

Of course this was the lucid dream in an otherwise good night’s sleep.

Now is Time to wake up.

Because although we had the lullaby and the deep sleep — we didn’t think of tomorrow, because we now know, that this golden moment was really a benevolent blip in time. In reality, the failure loop was closing far faster than we ever could have realized.

The American corporate era quietly began to unravel in the 1960s, all the way to the naugties.

Even plastic-fantastic is lost way back in the 70’s when Dustin Hoffman “The Graduate” opted out of a career in plastics, in order to live Life and “Cherchez la femme.” He pursued the girl and stole her away from the altar of mediocrity. He chose procreation instead of plastication and good on him. Plastics pollution is such a blight today that we need biotech to help us get rid of them with terrible side effects and unintended consequences. But even on the corporate world plastics were a giant flop as all byproducts of the fossil fuel industry are on the long term. As an example: When DuPont introduced Qiana, a kind of nylon with a silklike feel, whose name was selected through a computer-generated list of meaningless five-letter words. DuPont had helped to create the modern method of product development, in which managers would identify a market need and simply inform the research department that it had to produce a solution by a specific date. Over the course of decades, this process was responsible for successful materials like Freon, Lucite, Orlon, Dacron and Mylar. In Qiana, DuPont hoped that it had the next Lycra.

But not long after the company introduced Qiana to the market, it was met by a flood of cheap Japanese products made from polyester. Qiana, which only came close to breaking even during one year of sales, eventually sustained operating losses of more than $200 million. Similar shudders were felt in corporate suites across America, as new global competitors — first from Europe, then from Asia — shook up the stable order of the automotive and steel industries. Global trade narrowed the failure loop from generations to a decade or less, far shorter than most people’s careers.

Yet for the average American and European workers, the greatest challenge would come from computers, robots, and applications in successive decade long eras of upheaval. By the 1970s, the impact of computers was greatest in lower-skilled, lower-paid jobs. Factory workers competed with computer-run machines; secretaries and bookkeepers saw their jobs eliminated by desktop software. Over the last two decades, the destabilizing forces of computers and the Internet has spread to even the highest-paid professions. Corporations were created to coordinate and organize communication among lots of different people. A lot of those organizations are being replaced by computer networks.

And Wi-Fi is the killer App that has created more corporate vampires and walking dead company zombies amongst the old telecoms, than anyone recognizes even today. The impact of Wi-Fi has not even been estimated let alone quantified as of today. Much of it is because we do not yet have fully emergent Wi-Fi communities, mainly because the Telecoms have blocked the cities from unveiling it out. Also Wi-Fi is still hobbled in it’s massive roll-out by the illogical fear having been branded as a “security threat.” This is a manufactured fear that the incumbent telecoms have spread to the people thus holding them hostage. And people are locked in their self made prisons, by not sharing their WI-Fi connection and by hiding their greatness behind password protected routers.

Why?

This is not the world we envisioned, and this is not the wi-fi we created. We have advanced the WI-Fi standard so much that we have closed the possible holes in the security and thus when you share your bandwidth, your home office and your computer are not at risk of intrusion.
So through our work, the sharing of Wi-Fi will soon change and the unleashing of the wireless revolution will clean things up massively.

And when you look at it, many start-ups today are reliant on the wireless internet through wi-fi or cellular wireless, in order to enable startups like Uber, AirBnB, Kickstarter, and so many others who are harbingers of a much larger shift, in which loose groupings of individuals will perform functions that were once the domain of larger corporations. This will bring the jobs back into the community and working from home will be cool again. But only the communities that are massively wi-fi enabled and free for all will receive these benefits of wealth and glory.

Limiting and locking down Wi-Fi is like limiting the printing press. History tells us that those empires who prohibited or somehow limited the introduction or the use of the printing press and attempted to control books — all disappeared by the time of the European enlightenment. And the five empires that perished in the aftermath of the first world war — they all had significantly oppressed the book publishing industry and controlled the printing presses.

Knowledge is Power. No two ways about it. Educated people create and bring wealth to their communities. An educated and fully wireless enabled populace is the best guarantee against tyranny, oppression, and lack of Democracy. And we all need to preserve and strengthen our Democracies because we know that Democracies win in both war and peace. Very Simple principle to live by, for the Leaders and the smart Citizens — reading this. That is why the nations, the cities, and the communities, that will encourage the creation of robust Wi-Fi networks will thrive and become the wealthiest communities of this Earth. It’s all in the benefits of the network effects: Education, wealth, power, and glory. But it all starts with the wireless knowledge networks. We simply call it Wi-Fi.

Now you can start understanding where the “Fidelity” part of it comes from…

And Steve Jobs when I gave Wi-Fi to him, he understood it fully, and appreciated my gesture, yet still he wanted to appropriate it as big Egos often do — and then he went ahead and called it “Airport” a really daft name — but who is counting? The name stuck and although Apple helped greatly the outreach of Wi-Fi, by being the first computer manufacturer to include Wi-Fi in their machines — they still call it “Airport” today. But they have it built-in all their machines and smartphones and I don’t care that they still call it “airport” because the world knows it as wi-fi. And they know me as the Wi-Fi network guy and that is all that matters.

Call your wireless whatever you like as long as You have it open to all and sundry without artificial walls so I can come and land in your “airport” and built instant community with you and yours. That is the greatness of Wi-Fi and that is what we want to share again with all those left behind. Those people whose existence is minimized and whose lives are marginalized because they cannot reach out to all of us waiting for the human divine connection. Because when us humans join together in a big wireless global brain – we are Godlike and all of our actions, crowdsourced to the nines, are pure and glorious actions of Divine wisdom borne within us.

That’s the power of the Wireless Fidelity Networks. May the power and the wealth of the Wi-Fi networks is always with you. The wireless you. The wireless networked You. Because let us not forget that the “YOU” as I discussed with Steve Jobs and he correctly understood, is the network. And the “You” can only be a wireless network as long as you are free to move about in this beautiful community of ours. You are the end node of the intelligent wireless network and you can only be that if you are connected…

This earth and it’s communities of Life, is made up of networks and ecosystems knitted together out of networks and emergent life. And Wi-Fi will extend the reach of these networks and their resilience into the fabric of this grouping of networked communities. Wi-Fi networks represent the knots required in the fabric of Life in order to create instantly emergent communities of purpose, and meaningful employment. Whether people have lived there for thousands of years like in Saanna of Yemen, or for a couple of centuries like in Seattle, Washington, or a couple of millennia as in Athens, Greece, your wireless community is first and foremost “You” and then the community around you. The one city that gets it is London and the Square Mile of the “City” the financial heart of the world — where I’ve set up the most robust and the deepest Wi-Fi network that enables more finance transactions and Social Networking than any other city place on Earth.

And it is an intuitive personal Wireless Network because you can be the leader and the node of this community by having your Wi-Fi router open to all and sundry. Friends and competitors, Co-operation is what built this network and that’s Leadership and Community at once.

Evangelizing and rolling out Wi-Fi wireless networks in so many places on the map, where I have built strong resilient Wi-Fi community networks, in all the continents and many countries — has been gratifying but hard work. Still am here to tell you that wealth exists everywhere. From the midst of Africa to the poorest of Latin American countries. And I’ve been to 127 countries out of the 225 countries from the United Nations map, so I’ve still got some work to do…

Yet the revolution is fully loaded…

But out of the Wi-Fi revolution came many fruits whose impact we shall see in the next twenty to fifty years and if you had to know one thing that will explain the next 20 years, that’s the key idea: We are moving toward a period of evolutionary decentralization, crowdsourcing, and the ultimate of sharing economy.

And what our elders are saying for this?

How do you think the power brokers behind the Banks, and Telecoms, and behind the Washington Consensus, and the global leaders are going to address this sea change?

They are taking a page from the old AT&T playbook and are practicing the art of Ostrich style management of fear, threats, risks, and rewards. They stick their head in the sand and are saying that we will need stronger safety nets because technology is destroying jobs at an exponential rate.

Surely, the US, Europe, and the rest of the world, will be a very different place in 10… 20… 30… years, but we are humans. We are explorers, pioneers, change makers, adapters and adopters of all that is new and unseen. So what about doing some exploring and risking again?

Let’s start by embracing the “Constant” of change to begin with. Slowly at your own speed, but please get on with it because the laggards and the Luddites will soon suffer the abject poverty of a failed state.

Still Wi-Fi and all things wireless are great, but these changes are still new, in part because so many large businesses benefit from the old system of corruption, oligopoly, and monopoly and thus use their considerable capital and political muscle, to impede innovation. and that makes the elites richer but it makes society as a whole far poorer and institutes a neo-serf system for the people. The Road to Serfdom exists in all the nations that block innovation and are thus mired in corruption, and lack of progress and development. Case in point is Greece today. The Gaza of Europe, A corrupt place that resembles a “bombed-out” concentration camp under a dictatorial corrupt government that is unable to see it’s people as anything else but slaves. But the changes will inevitably come to Greece too, as they will arrive at breakneck speed to all those left behind. Except when they come at such speed they resemble more a train wreck than the sexy arrival of the orient Express from Paris to Istanbul.

You can see the Arab Spring and it’s end results as proof of what happens when you bottle up Innovation and Liberty for far too long. Blood flow ensues instead of the constant flow of change that brings wealth and glory to your community.

And please remember that it’s our choice which way we are going to go… After all you are Leaders — all of you reading this blog. So act like it.

The future is brilliant and the technological changes brought about by Innovation will become greater, and the results will be far more drastic, and the fate of these countries and companies even more dramatic. The seven incumbent industries — Telcommunications, Utilities, Banking & Finance, Healthcare, Higher Education, Energy, and Government — collectively represent far more than half of the Global Economy. The lives of billions of people will surely change. Their jobs will become easier and far more profitable — if only they agree to give up the false security for the future of wireless communities. Whether they like it or not one thing is certain. Change will come, because Change is the only constant we have.

Go with it. Flow…

Flow is the real meaning of the Universe…

We need to try new things like the freedom of Wi-Fi in all things including Public and Private Policy, and the great spaces of our communities. After all if we don’t try new things and if we don’t innovate how on earth are we going to solve the problems that are blighting us, and are threatening our very existence? Problems ranging from Climate Change and a Warming Planet to a massive Nuclear War and catastrophic nuclear winter. How are we going to solve the lot?

We need to Innovate and use wireless nanotechnology to resolve the nuclear blight nightmare. We need to do this and so many other thongs to engage into this era of innovation. But to get there, we need to take risks and engage in building a world-wide Wi-Fi network in order to allow us the richness of connection and communication between all the people of this earth. We can’t leave anyone behind anymore. We need to built bridges of Wi-Fi for education of the species as a whole. We need to connect the parts of the global brain that are now full of mistrust and fear and who are threatening to blow up our world simply because they feel disenfranchised. We need Wi-Fi globally in order to smooth over the divisions that can only be smoothed over through the constant reach of full bandwidth communication, positive interaction, social engagement, and through the trade of ideas and the Love of sharing. Mistrust and enmity goes away when we have full bandwidth Wi-Fi in a community and I’ve sen this over and over again. Even in a divided city like Cyprus shared capital — the last divided capital of Europe — when I built a wi-fi network spanning the two sectors, people started sharing music and videos and gifting to each other and talking across the wall, like it was Christmas, Eid, and Hannucah, combined.

Wi-Fi sharing of communication and support towards each other within a community — any community — only helps bring people together and fosters bonds of Love. Sharing is Caring. Wi-Fi is Love by another name. Opening up your Wi-Fi connection without password so others can use it even when you are away, is an act of Loving Kindness. It radiated outwards as an act of mercy, like giving water to a thirsty traveler.

No other community building tool, friendship fostering utility, and democratizing medium exists, that is as strong as Wi-Fi. Communities that are smart in deploying deep and strong resilient Wi-Fi networks are inwards and outwards effective. They are wealthy in the Network Effect way but they are also wealthy i the strength of their connections within. Something like the Venetian empire. A well connected community, small in size, but great in reach, brings the wealth of the networks and the world, home to it’s citizens. For Venetians it was the shipping lanes, and for us it is the airwaves.

Yet in order to built and nourish wealthy, powerful, and resilient communities — we need the sharing value of your personal Wi-Fi connection. Sharing Economy without Wi-Fi is impossible. Still the cleverest of ideas goes nowhere if there is no perceived need for it. And the course I always follow is that of inspired marketing demonstrating the need for something that can be a revolutionary game changer…

Still the powerful resist change and it has always been that generally those with power and wealth resist any signficant shift in existing institutions.

And today the nexus of the two most powerful social institutions are the government utilities and the telecommunications companies. And they are both ripe for change through my innovations for Wireless Fidelity and Wireless Electricity. Wi-Fi has already started to change the world massively.

Wireless Fidelity Redux will soon do the same and so much more…

Wireless electricity will follow suit and am working heartily on it too…

Yours,
Pano

PS:

As the corporate ownership was crowdsourced along with their parts and services sourcing in the 1920’s so it is now that the Wireless Telecommunication bandwidth will be fully crowdsourced in the 2020’s.

Wi-Fi is just that manifestation through technology and Community building. As usual the early adopters will enjoy the benefits of this and the laggards will take this short end of the stick.

And it is a just and fair deal because the members of the species that adapt the fastest, are the ones that earn the wealth and glory and thus get to have abundant sex with pretty mates, and then pass on their genes to the next generation. That’s just how it is and that’s how this species goes forward facing the sun. And as we are now entering a shift into an age of wireless computing, communicating, and even commuting, and the adjustment might just require us to retrain and move onward. Is good to know that in a time of constant change, it’s hard for us to predict the skills that we will need in the future but one thing is evident: Everything will be wireless and dematerialized. This is and always has been the world of Ideas. Adapt to it…

Whereas the steady same product corporate era, created a cycle of growing companies, better-paid workers, and richer consumers… we are now needing to move faster to attain the future game. And this vortex, will continue upwards, albeit in a more crowdsourced, random, and even decentralized way, because the wealth will become far more distributed amongst all those building things, creating innovation, and fostering change.

It is good for us to start being unafraid of change again, and to become risk taking pioneers, and explorers all over again, by always pushing the wheel of history forward, and by tilling the Idea land of our Creative Global Brain for innovative progress and development.

Now, real-time wirelessly networked software can make all of our Ideas forward-looking, a company created instantly, a product shipped at the speed of light, and a source of profits streaming in before dinner. It’s living in a flash of inspiration. and it’s great…

So flash your WI-Fi to the ‘hood and hopefully the ‘hood will respond in kind and you’ll get the booty you deserve. But it’s worth remembering, to keep your router open to all because this process never ends.

Wi-Fi Innovation will cause upheavals in both job creation and job destruction. But the net effect is that smart wireless fully Wi-Fi enabled communities will do far better and attract high paying jobs and development whereas the others will lag behind. It will of course be far easier now with Wi-Fi to catch up and we are all going to be independent agents like the footballers of old who made tons of money and had the sexiest chicks at their beck and call with many fans to boot, and plenty of booty.

So unleash your wi-fi to create this crowdsourced wireless revolution but don’t get caught counting your money and your blessings, because our best minds are constantly at work in order to come up with even newer ideas, and newer innovations that will surely put you out of business, and make your company roadkill. That is if you stop innovating and moving forward by embracing change.

So don’t be afraid.

Go Ahead.

Sail to the rim of the edge of the Universe of Innovation and Wireless Fidelity. The future is brilliant and progress everlasting and thus the black hole of failure will continue to suck in dying stars and spin out brilliant new ones..