The Twitter Guys

One reason I never answer the question I'm asked most often--"What doyou think will come next?"--is because I don't know the answer. Idon't think anyone does. If past is the best predictor of the future,what does it mean to live in a time when the past isn't predicting whatcomes next? van Williams, the CEO of Twitter, was one of the judges of our firstHASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition inMarch 2008. Little over a year ago. Back then, folks were asking me,"Why him? What's Twitter? That's not going anywhere, is it?" Ha.

In his new book, "The Age of the Unthinkable," Joshua Cooper Ramo argues where we live in an age where what happens next is literally "unthinkable." So much is happening right now, change is coming so fast in so many areas, that we don't have the capacity to think what comes next. Un-thinkable. And, of course, he means the pun the other way in that there are many unthinkable catastrophes (such as global warming, pandemics, etc) also imminent. And, he would say, unthinkable opportunities too.

That's the thing about living in an era where something enormously, paradigmatically different is rearranging one set of global relations even while leaving other global relations (such as the inequal distribution of power, money, access, democracy, healthcare, education and so forth) in tact. It's not clear what the relationship of the former is to the latter, which means it is not clear what outcomes will be or what the future will hold.

That's the big think. For something closer to home, here's the url for an article in today's NY Times about "the Twitter guys." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/fashion/10nite.html?_r=1&em=&adxnnl=1&...