Where are we going? Freedom and the Next Paradigm shift

I am going to quote from my essay on The Next Civilization.

Each new Age in human civilization brings its own mode of production and its own  barometer of wealth as also its own system of trade. The means of production in the Agricultural age was human labor and a piece of land, wealth was basically how much land you possessed and how much that land yielded in terms of crop. Money was around but barter was fine. Wealth was not measured in terms of money yet. Trade was an informal system of barter.

The industrial age changed all that. The means of production was machine and man’s labor. Capital and labor. Wealth was money itself. Money was no longer only currency - it was capital itself. You could buy and sell money. Trade was not possible without money. If you had land and couldn’t get rent or sell it for money, you were as poor as if you never owned anything. You might have owned a million shares but if you couldn’t monetize them, you were hoarding junk. Your labor was useless unless someone paid you money in exchange. This is the principal difference between the Age of Agriculture and the Age of Industry. In the Agriculture Age you produced what you consumed and what was extra you bartered for stuff you called luxury. In the Industrial Age you consumed what you could never produce yourself and you needed money to consume the bare necessities. It was complicated and it disconnected a vast majority from the cycle of consumption as they didn’t have the basic currency to be part of the exchange mechanism ' the market.

But that is changing in the information Age. Before EBAY came along ' imagine an unemployed Martin in Arkansas whose sole possession is his labor and a bunch of old Vogue magazines that his mother used to collect. What could he have done if couldn’t get a job. He couldn’t monetize his Vogue magazines in the small town he lived in. But in the Age of Information and EBAY, he sold his collection to me across 8000 kilometers just when I needed it desperately for my film shoot. He could monetize seemingly worthless junk as we could connect directly with each other. EBAY is not a conventional market. It is a peer to peer mechanism of exchange. Often it is only an exchange of information. It even facilitates barter.

We see outsourcing all around us. Why? Because everything that a man can do ' that part of a man’s labor that can be digitized will be digitized and become commoditized. This will proceed at such a rate that soon there will be very few things that man will be able to charge for as fees for his labor. Though this will be a destabilizing factor for millions of people, this is not a bad thing at all. At last man will be free from the tyranny of physical labor. He will have to find ways for monetizing who he is and not what he can do with his hands. How unique he is and what unique value he as a human being can bring to his fellow beings will determine how much he is worth. Surely a human being is not human because he can make his hands produce rice or turn a lever or punch a few keys. He is human because he can think, he can emote, he can empathize, he can help and he can entertain. In short he is as good as his imagination is.

Welcome to the Age of Imagination. A short 39-44 years away. In between will come the shortest of All Ages in History : from 2025 to 2037- 45. The Knowledge Age, where for a brief period the barometer of wealth will be knowledge. Some will also call this the Age of Energy as the only other measure of wealth will be who has the highest control of the World’s Energy. But all this will change with the Advent of the Age of Imagination. In this Age there will be a New Economy (not the one we now call the dot com bust) that will be as much about valuation as the dot com bubble. But the valuations will be of human beings and the product of their minds. And this won’t be a bubble. This Age will last a minimum Thousand years. The Next leap in Human Civilization will come only after that long a time because the implications of the Age of Imagination will boggle the human minds burdened with the baggage-thought of the preceding Agricultural (feudal), Industrial (imperial), Information (corporate marketing) Ages. That Age after 1000 years is beyond Imagination. It could be anything that our grandchildren wish to  create. Yes, it will be the Age of Creation. The Final Frontier. When finally we will be able to gaze at the face of God. And when finally, He will embrace us as his equals.

This is the process which the proponents of Censorship and Fatwas want limited and sabotaged. They want to gag our imaginations.

When I started writing for this presentation, a line kept bubbling up over and over again.

NEVER APOLOGIZE FOR YOUR imagination. YOU ARE YOUR imagination.