How the Postnormal era will change everything
Organizations are becoming fast-and-loose, reconfiguring around social networks instead of business processes, becoming more decentralized and as autonomy increases, more egalitarian.
We will completely drop the pretense of objectivity — a tension that is eating away at journalism and old school media like hydrochloric acid — and accept the inherent need for partiality as the grounding of all belief.
We will belong to our networks — which are our own — and not to institutions that require us to subordinate our interests and selves.
Families will become less Leave it to Beaver and instead we’ll embrace a broad spectrum of alternative living arrangements that include the growing numbers of people who live alone but are very social, groups of friends sharing space and other intentional communities, and non-traditional families with multiple generations living together, gay and lesbian families and all sorts of extended arrangements.
The corner on the postnormal is when we actively work to build an economy that is not fueled by growth and globalism and instead is local and steady-state oriented.
Today’s political boundaries make no sense: they are the outgrowth of royal treaties, conquest, and the misuse of resources. We should start with the natural ecological unit — the watershed — and replace the notion of provinces (US states) with those. I for example, live in the Hudson River Watershed. Locale is still relevant, so people still would be tied to San Francisco, or Beacon NY. And regionalism is still meaningful, but not necessarily the way today’s borders fall. And finally, we need to consider the world and its resources as a shared commons, and not spoils to be owned by the fortunate or wealthy.
Participative media not mass media.
A major transition to restorative and sustainable relationship to the environment is essential, or we will all boil.
And a relaxing of the failed dogmas of orthodox religions, and a more taoist reorientation of our spirituality toward the enigma of life and the universe, and a greater acceptance of the myriad ways in which people might choose to express their awe and faith.
The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived 