Bleeding Edge

On New Year’s Eve of 2019, revelers gathered around the globe to ring in a new decade. Many jubilantly attended “Roaring Twenties” parties, adorned in elegant evening wear, cloche and Panama hats, and knickerbockers, harkening back to an exciting, culturally vibrant era of economic prosperity.

But whatever veiled hopes partygoers had for a booming future soon met jarring realities: a once-in-a-century pandemic, global lockdowns, an economic recession, and widespread civil unrest stemming from an incident of police brutality.

The Roaring 2020s were not to be seen as convincing, as I would argue with evidence, that humanity is about to take a great step forward in the coming decade.

And unlike the first Roaring Twenties, these 20s, in the third millennium, won’t need to end with the sadness, poverty and a Great Depression like the 1920s.

The original Roaring Twenties didn’t start off so auspiciously and yet the fact that we are separated by a century, still makes our situation seem eerily similar. The 1918 flu pandemic ran well into 1920, triggering a severe U.S. recession that lasted through the summer 1921. Violent riots and political instability were also prevalent. Yet from this pit of public despair, Americans pulled themselves up & out. Propelled by remarkable advancements in productivity through industrial mass production, in modern medicine, in the general electrification, in communications via telephone and radio, in movies, in automobiles, and of course in the general aviation — the United States saw its GDP rise by an astounding 43% between 1921 and 1929.

Sadly in 1929 — we crashed, but we again recovered through war and rebuilding that followed the war soon enough.

Methinks that we’re now ready for a similar wave of growth after this terrible bumpy ride we’ve had so far, and what comes next will likely be more consequential than the comparable technological flourishing that began in the 1920s. We will again see a boost to the economy’s productivity, which always increases overall wealth. The ‘rising tide’ does ‘lift all boats. The future will repeat a central pattern of the past. The 25 percent in the near future will live like the 5 percent today, and the future 5 percent will live like today’s 1 percent, and so on.

The key driver of this new collective economic boon will be the human ingenuity and technological developments that have already arisen and await widespread acceptance into society. This new liquidity, along with the knowledge and technologies of distributed capital supplies and advanced economic distribution of resources, via the new currencies and the blockchain algorithms that this tech-trend spawns — will lift all boats and all enterprises for ever.

The most basic definition of these nebulous terms is software and services run on computer servers in data centers accessed via the Internet that are able to convert currencies into goods and services. But the blockchain [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain] is much more than just a means for buying your weed with Crypto currencies or using Bitcoin to buy Dogecoin and do your own arbitrage, or even buying your popcorn and watching your movies on Netflix or other streaming media.

It stands to reason that digital currencies democratize banking, finance, and access to goods and services as a kind of technological productivity as never before, connecting everyone and everything, allowing unprecedented gathering and splicing of information. Cloud data centers – the new tech era’s “digital cathedrals, now occupy vastly more space than skyscrapers who were formerly the hubs for office work, for business and for innovation. The most powerful supercomputers are now 3 million times more powerful than the top machine of 2000, and they already fuel the discovery of new technological marvels and even rare new materials and medicines, as well as powering machine-centered manufacturing of important bio printing, 3D printing and also the creation of more frivolous things like NFTs and comics.

And because the blockchain coupled with the cloud and informatics — brings together the three foundational spheres for technological revolution: the means for gathering and propagating information, the means (machines) of production, and the class of materials available to do everything.

There are copious examples of recent advancements in these three spheres. Numerous discoveries currently relegated to esoteric academic journals; any of these innovations could profoundly affect our everyday lives soon without us really noticing.

Those effects take center stage in the arenas of work, health, education, entertainment, and science will all profoundly change in the near future, he writes. Services and manufacturing will be robotified, but doomsday predictions of mass unemployment will not happen. Luddites, who fret that more-efficient machines will replace them in their jobs, have always been wrong, because efficiency doesn’t eliminate jobs in the long-term — but it drives job growth.

Indeed, the reason productivity expands wealth is that it’s the only means for liberating human time, the most precious commodity in the universe. When humans have more free time, they educate themselves, innovate, and create new industries – such as, for example, entertainment industries in cloud-based gaming or the metaverse. Moreover, the Cloud will enable more people around the world to obtain more education.

At the same time, big data, stored and analyzed in the Cloud, will lead to new breakthroughs in health and science. Research that once took months or years in fields like medicine and materials science can now be done in mere hours or days with AI algorithms available via Supercomputing with all of your data situated in the cloud meta verse.

We do in fact live in a time of a new normal, but instead of our future being one of perennial slow growth and technological stagnation, it might just well be the opposite…

It is a rose tinted view that requires a healthy dose of optimism, but we must also explain what could get in the way of this optimistic view?

Yet, we must also ask what could spiral a new Roaring Twenties down into a second Great Depression?

China and climate change are the biggest dangers, primarily because they are linked with thinking, business practices, and government policies that encourage controlling or even limiting growth and innovation.

Whether societies ultimately prosper by taking advantage of what technology offers depends on having a culture that encourages free thinking and risk taking, and it also depends on governments that not only allow but encourage markets to operate with plenty of liquidity, even when some outcomes are initially sees to be less than ideal although they all turn out very positive indeed.

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

On top of everything else, it’s apparently time to prepare for a vibe shift, or the moment when a “once-dominated social wavelength starts to feel dated,” as New York Magazine helpfully explains.

According to millennial trend forecaster Sean Monahan, who coined the term, we’re on the precipice of shifting away from partisan, cancel culture-obsessed 2010 vibes to “early-aughts indie sleaze.” Optimized workflows, social media mania and blogs are out; decadence, podcasts and irony are in.

Humans, CEOs, Corporates, Digeratis, Ignorantis, Brands and Illuminatis, and/or anyone else trying to stay in the know and the know-it-alls, please take note and try it out for size.

All of that will come to pass — that is if we succeed to keep the peace away from the dogs of war that are now circling the Central-Eastern part of Europe and other hotspots of the globe.

Take my word for it, because my optimism is contagious and there is evidence based hope for the greatest future ever…

So, who’s your daddy? War or Peace?

Here’s to the new Roaring Twenties.