It’s fascinating to see, in the course of history, what happens to our society and civilization when the paradigm of the incumbent world order shifts.

It doesn’t usually happen suddenly but it moves fairly quickly, once it picks up speed and reaches mainstream. Old structures and conventions get replaced by new ones; society acquires new habits, businesses move on to new models and, most of the time, society becomes better – although not always.

We are now going through one such shift and I for one find it fascinating and exciting. There’s a lot of people having a hard time with this one – particularly since the damn virus continues to be a nuisance. But looking beyond that, I think so many exciting things are happening and are yet to happen.

I drew a brief timeline of events that took humanity through paradigm shifts since the Middle Ages, just to put in context the nature, the scale and the intensity of the current shift. You can find that diagram right below:

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15th Century – the Gutenberg Press

Until then, books were the province of monks who wrote them in embellished ways inside monasteries. As you can imagine, the population of Europe at that time was mostly illiterate with no access to the knowledge contained in those books.

With the printed press, books became accessible to more people and proliferated in variety and volume.

The press led to the period of History called the Enlightenment, the age of Da Vinci, Michaelangelo and Rafael.

The Enlightenment led to Isaac Newson and Modern Physics.

19th century and early 20th – the next big shift

Modern Physics, fuelled by Isaac Newton in the 17th Century, catalyzed the development of scientists and from there to a flurry of inventions and profound changes in our civilization.

Electricity, the Telegraph, the Telephone, the Steam Engine, Oil, the Combustion Engine, the Automobile, the Airplane, Radio, Television, Refrigerators and others – all appeared into the main stream, sometime in that torrid 19th century or the early 20th century before the Great Depression in the 1930’s.

At the centre of this 19th century of great innovation, what surfaced as the core of the new 20th century economy, were two technologies: Oil and the combustion engine.

The 20th century could be called the Century of Machines. The best known Industrial Revolution (i.e., the second) emerged as a giant wave that swept through the world and transformed everything.

Before that, the world looked like farmed country. Communication between humans was sporadic and extremely slow. It was a very big world for most people, with an affinity range for an average human of maybe a few kilometres, everything beyond that extremely remote.

Fast-forward to after all those inventions and the world is not the same: the face of the world becomes factories and smoke stacks, cities and high-rise buildings, cars and trucks instead of horses and carriages.

With the Telegraph and the Telephone, Radio and Television, the world became smaller but still quite slow. News and awareness of the rest of the world now was in a much vaster range. European powers had news from the colonies more frequently; North America was very much connected to Europe. But the world still turned very slow.

Factories produced a lot more things and so there were many more products in the market for the consumers of the new middle class to acquire but then, the Depression killed all that.

Then came WWII and after that the Great Recovery with the Western World rebuilding itself from the ruins of the War. And, with that, the new, US-centred World Economy, emerged.

The Biggest Shift of all – the Microchip

The War brought us something extremely significant, as these things go. It brought us Enigma, Alan Turing and the Turing machine. This thread of history is what led to the development of computers and eventually, in 1958, to the invention of the Microchip by a Texas Instruments engineer called Jack Kilby.

The microchip changed everything. It brought us the Information Age and everything we know today. Look around you, at any piece of technology your eyes pick up. Every one of those things was made possible by microchips.

Look at anything else you may see around you – no matter whether it is technology or not; even the food you eat – anything that comes into your hands was made possible by the microchip.

Every action we take, everything we do, everybody we reach – no matter what activity you can think of in today’s humanity – is in all likelihood made possible by something involving a microchip.

And that’s because computer technology became so accessible, it was continuously miniaturized in the decades following 1958, but most especially because the microchip – and I should say, the Turing machine model (which the silicon microchip emulates) – was the first invention in humanity with the adaptability to be used for anything we can think of.

From food processing, to space engineering, to medicine, to pharmaceuticals, to government, to defence, to education and everything else – the functions that the microchip can performed are limitless. This never happened before – not with the Press, the Telegraph, the Telephone, Radio – or anything else that came before it: all machines were always single-mission – until the microchip.

The Current Shift – Massive, Global, All Consuming

In 1994, a small company called Netscape invented what was called the Internet browser. A browser is really a very simple concept – it is a window to data stored in web sites at what we called internet Domains. The browser opened the internet to everyone and within 7 years the Internet had reached 50 Million users – the fastest penetration of society main stream of any technology before it.

At some point, someone had the bright idea of offering services through the Internet. Since web sites stored content, it was possible to monetize content. This gave birth to what we now know as eCommerce.

21st Century – 1st Decade

At the same time, people started learning how to use the internet to communicate with each other, which popularized instant messaging applications. Out of all this internet-social activity, there emerged the biggest transformation in human communication ever – bigger than the Gutenberg press, or the telegraph of the telephone – Social Media.

Social Media caused a massive change in not only how humans communicate but how they perceive communication. It opened our minds to the world of Cyberspace, where distance and scale are not issues. It didn’t announce those things but by virtue of using My Space and then Facebook, we ourselves became open to the idea that we don’t need to be face to face or huddled around an octopus to communicate with tons of people. That was a big breakthrough.

But another powerful wave was building along with Social Media.

In 2001, the magical Steve Jobs brought us the iPod. That little tool brought about the awareness that a new generation of young people was emerging – the Millennials.

Millennials were the first true Digital Natives of our world. They were born into a world with the internet at the center. They naturally communicated in Cyberspace; they shopped in Cyberspace; they played games in Cyberspace; they felt that they could and should get content and service for free – because thus was the Internet commercial paradigm. And let’s not forget – they were children of Baby Boomers – and they were so, so many; the biggest generation ever!

Something to table of great importance regarding Millennials: because they were born ‘into’ the Internet, they grew accustomed to having lots of choices, choices that kept changing every day and to be spoiled with free services. This led to a mentality of zero brand loyalty; and, by extension, zero corporate loyalty. More on this later.

Around the same time that the iPod-Millennials wave took off, something else extremely significant happened: in 2003, scientists completed the sequencing of the first Human Genome, which gave berth to the field of Genetic Engineering. Around a decade later, in 2012, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna created the CRISPR Cas 9 system – a method to edit DNA and the field of gene-cell therapies took off.

So, here we are: at the end of the 1st decade of the 21st century, some massive waves of profound impact on society are building up: a new way of communicating; a new, massive generation of non-loyal youngsters; and a leap change in the level at which we understood the human body and could fix the anomalies in our natural systems. And we were about to enter a decade of explosive innovation.

21st Century – 2nd Decade

In the second decade, our understanding of Cyberspace and what could be done in it kept evolving and growing at a rapid pace. Shopping on the internet, learning, socializing, playing video games, gathering information, following the news of world events, working in virtual spaces, drug development, robotic surgeries, patient monitoring and even keeping our infrastructure in Cyberspace – these are the brutal changes that occurred in the few years after 2010.

The world was gradually changing to a new platform for the global economy. Remember me saying, early on in this article, that the 20th century economy was centred on 2 technologies – oil and the engine? By the second decade of this century, it became clear that at the core of everything there were 3 core technologies or platforms:

• The Internet, i.e., Cyberspace itself;
• AI
• Big Data

Ray Kurzweil showed us that any organized activity, no matter the field, that moved to a Digital space, i.e., that was Digitized, would grow exponentially.

In the economy of the second decade in particular, we saw this phenomenon of our time happening over and over with a consistency that was mind boggling. Digital Start-Ups grew at a phenomenal rate and by the time they were visible, it was always too late to catch them.

At the end of this second decade, then, we had a highly Digitized world, co-existing with the old world of brick and mortar. We had new, fast, social organizations competing with slow, rigid, hierarchical old companies. Science and Technology in every field of the economy, including currency and financial services, drug development, health care services, space exploration, oncology, virology, neuroscience – anything, really – developing exponentially at a heart-thumping speed. And we had a massive generation of Millennials who were to Cyberspace like fish is to water, now in their thirty-somethings, pretty much owning the economy.

21st Century – 3rd Decade

And then… in 2020, Covid-19 happened and pushed everything over the edge.

The virus SARS-Cov-2 forced lockdown measures that affected 2/3 of the world population (roughly 5 billion people). The biggest experiment in forced Digitization the world had ever seen. We’re all still leaving it, at time of writing, so I’m not going to talk about the pandemic itself.

What’s worth noting is that with the Pandemic, the waves that were building up since the invention of the Microchip in 1952, came crashing on the beach with overwhelming force.

People in the workforce changed their perspective on work and indeed on life in general. Several things stood out for those of us going through it, namely:

• We don’t need bosses to get things done. We can do it ourselves, in collaboration by the dozens.
• The status of the typical 20th century organization employee, which I refer to as wage-hostage, was rubbish. People are hiring from anywhere in the world; so I can find a job anywhere in the world.
• Loyalty to the company you work for crumbled like a house of cards. Millennials already had no loyalty. And the X Generation working right by their side, who were parents of Zoomers and having a terrible time with their teenagers stuck at home, quickly lost their loyalty to employer, for their own reasons.
• Digital companies actually thrived in Pandemic conditions because this was their world; this was their game; and they could more easily beat their brick-and-mortar competitors.
• Science and Technology got a ‘boost in the arm’ and many innovations that were expected to take years still, were completed in weeks.

And now, we’re here – again ‘harassed’ by a voracious variant of the virus. SARS-Cov-2, with its entire crime family, is daring us to survive; it’s telling us we haven’t done enough; it’s putting us back where its older cousins put us; and it’s saying – if you still didn’t get that you must change, you must go Digital, you must focus on new values – like family and the environment, instead of greed and capital – we’re going to come back with younger and stronger cousins.

At least, that’s my reading of the universe.

This is an exciting time, for those who can decode the times. Beautiful Science is being developed; much better therapies for old and new conditions are being invented at a rapid pace; humanity has never been more connected; the Zoomers are coming up and just as Millennials gave us Digitization, Zoomers will give us the Climate Economy and shift the values of society away from individualism and consumerism.

We’re on a Paradigm Shift like we’ve never been in the history of humanity. There are more technologies emerging to the main stream of our lives which are, individually, capable of shift the paradigm, all at the same time, then at any other time. This is the big difference.

The previous big change, around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, while it entailed a number of new technologies, took a century and a half to evolve and they were still very few technologies.

Now, the base took 50 years and the explosion is taking 2 decades. And the number of technologies is more than double what happened last time, each with far more reaching impacts.

In the middle of all this, if you’re a business and you’re still doing the same things or similar things to what you were doing 10 years ago, you’re as good as dead, if you don’t change really fast.

If you’re not structured and you don’t function like companies did last century, if what you do and how you do it involves ideas and technologies that weren’t main stream even 5 years ago, you are going to have a great time and be successful in the most riveting, exciting, transformational period of the history of humanity.