I don’t know how this happened but during the holiday season I went back into a file on my laptop used to save articles for my forthcoming book, The Prophetic Backbone, a non-fiction about technologists who are proclaiming the future of mankind. From blogs to big online media sources -  I suddenly noticed that, on the subject of disruption, these were mostly male-written articles. I also reviewed many Fortune500 marketers and again, disruption, a tech buzzword, is proportionately greater as a male topic. Does this mean men disrupt business processes, projects, IoT advancements, artificial intelligence and robotics more than women? Not with the likes of Ginni Rometty, Sheryl Sandberg and Anne Wojcicki or Carla Hayden, the new librarian for the Library of Congress. Technology is their business, all kinds of it.

Many in the Fortune500 just can’t stop marketing disruption – even though 2016 is being compared socially and politically to the 1960’s disruptive revolutions and movements that re-wrote American culture. My thought, here at the start of 2017 is about the disruption that so many technology firms wish to advance and more critically; claim: our future. In a marketing context these big tech firms are claiming a stake on the future by upending our understanding of present day technologies.  I’m wondering if there is a sublime strategy for male dominance, of a presumed male ingenuity, of sports-like competitive gamesmanship to psych-out their competition. After all, if men don’t win, they lose.

Who is going to really make that autonomous car tick up the company stock?  Google’s Mr. Page and Mr. Brin or Ford’s Mr. Fields? Will the National Institutes of Health nail down cancer through genomics-based medicine or will it be Stanford’s School of Medicine, both led by men? When can Mr. Musk get us to Mars? But more than within academia and public entities, the whole “disruption” manifestation seems to me, a very corporate culture invention with the implicit goal to re-engineer human behaviors and human biology using personal data. And, as all prophets surely proclaim; “The world as we know it is about to change”.

RPW@2016

A red light means use the brakes to stop the vehicle. Some people do and some don’t which keeps insurance companies, lawyers and ER’s busy. But this applies to more and more decisions we, as a society, are making. The reason may be found in the sources of information. We’ve let down our guard, ignored the red light of wisdom embedded in our national destiny. Also, we have presumed all the big technology firms are on a solid ethical foundation in a new era. The big tech firms are the 21st century media.
There is a new story about how social media players played such a deceptive role in the election leading up to November 8th when a bright white beacon on a hill exposed every shadow and lie in the media valley by November 9th. The bright light was not just old white men; it was everyone who works hard for a living. Today, some are crying, “Change the red light to another color” and “These old-fashioned work ethics and American cultural values don’t work”. Social media and traditional media firms are at their call.  However, the USA has always had a deep sense of a national destiny: one nation under God, which made its way into The Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 at the request of President Eisenhower. Hit your brakes and think about that: the United States even now has a national destiny. As a nation we recently voted to stop at a critically important red light at an even more critical intersection where American democracy and some alternative meet – will we remain one nation under God or not? The alternatives to liberty could be costly.
RPW 2016

From,The Only Fields That Matter pub 2014.  *Author's note at end of section

  One movement that materialized in 2011 attempting to mitigate joblessness and economic oppression experienced by the college-grad demographic also had no solution for relief. You recall the movement that embodied the voice against the wealthy and getting wealthier 1%; it was Occupy Wall Street.  I tracked this loose assembly on Twitter and across the media for their two-year run and came to my own conclusion: OWS was a counterfeit movement frayed by a confused ideology. I believe that the counterfeit will soon be followed by another movement characteristically more aggressive; it will be validated and receive support from institutions and organizations and work in alliance with sub-cultures that demand recognition of their particular so-called oppressions.

What OccupyWallStreet inherited, philosophically, was an ambition and obligation to also incorporate a religious and ideological component; their only safe and easy targets were Republicans and Christians. Likewise, The Arab Spring was rooted in overcoming religious oppression. The United States issues are political and economic but are in reality, social and religious.

The next movement, on the next iteration, will certainly retain its comprehensive economic overtones concerning inequality but likely carry the analogy to victimization joined by those locked in racial, immigration and sexual rights issues. Could it be possible, too, that following after President Obama, himself a promoter of activism, that our next President identifies his/ her platform as a Movement Leader? There is another movement on the move.

Author's Note:
Although in the Great Recession after losing my career and retirement safety net, I didn’t find it necessary to join a movement. I job searched endlessly and worked low-wage jobs, leaving behind $41/hour for $9.10/hr. Now outside of corporate walls I began to focus on all the “other” voices in the world and our nation -  we were changing to a nation of  the movements which I elaborated in The Only Fields That Matter, published in 2014.
The Occupy Wallstreet Movement captured my attention in 2011 for one reason only: it seemed to be heralding the coming of a more ideological, more centralized, more victimized movement based on social injustices perceived by a younger American generation raised on social medias. They didn’t want to be Democrats or Republicans – they wanted liberties without restraint and responsibility. In other parts of the world the Arab Spring movement spread to 21 nations preceding Occupy Wallstreet only by a few months; as you can see from this timeline. The chaos in the Arab Spring uprisings always began in street protests. Presently, this new movement I believed in 2011 was forming  – neither Democrat nor Republican -  are now protesting in US city streets: not my President-Not my country.