Wake Up, Participate, Share What You Know: These The Keys To Safeguard Our Future

"Pay attention. Practice compassion. ;-) "

Recently, science and technology blogger Roland Piquepaille interviewed Howard Rheingold, and asked him a number of questions about the future.

Howard, is the author of SmartMobs, a best -selling book about the emerging power of small and large groups of individuals operating as one thanks to the use of mobile communication tools like cellular phones and SMS messaging. Here is a short excerpt from that interview, pointing to where you should look and pay attention to, to become an active, responsible actor of this reality game we are all part of.

Photo credit: Kiyoshi Takahase Segundo

"Of course, I believe that open technologies like the Internet promote innovation and provide political, economic, and cultural opportunities to entire populations that used to be reserved for elites, and I fear that the current efforts by incumbent wealth and power holders might successfully enclose what was once open.

Extension of copyright into every realm, digital rights management building control into cultural products, trusted computing baking control into the hardware itself, the death of net neutrality recentralizing control of the formerly radically decentralized network -- all these battles in political arenas, financed by huge amounts of money, are going the way of the powers-that-be.

I don't think there's anything inherently democratic in new media.

Many-to-many communication and commons-based peer production will produce social and economic capital only if large numbers of people understand what is at stake in these esoteric techno-regulatory conflicts and take the power that is temporarily theirs into their hands and do something with it."

Roland Piquepaille: "Where will we be in 2010? Do you see a new massive trend emerging (or more than one) affecting the whole world?"

Howard Rheingold: "This business with climate change is going to be a lot more obvious, the odds of very big terrorist or natural disasters goes up, and it isn't at all clear whether authoritarian states will be able to use the surveillance powers of our otherwise wonderfully empowering and democratic communication network to institute systems of control far more effective than Orwell's obsolete visions.

Much will depend upon which way the battle for open systems goes.

Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control."