The World of the Future: What is the problem today?

Internet is changing everything. The worlds collective knowledge - nay humanities collective  knowledge since almost the beginning of time - is available to every one at their finger tips - any time. More information is being produced in 2 days on the internet than in the whole history of human kind. This is absolutely mind blowing and exhilarating. Everything is changing at such a rapid pace - so why shouldn't politics as well? In this blogging series I want to tackle and concentrate on the issues facing the world today and ways that they might pan out while paying special attention to the information revolution and its influence on the field.  This is interesting for several reasons that I will tackle and explore throughout this series but here is a basic run down - which is most definitely to grow.

                “Every two days we create as much information as we did up to 2003”

                                                                        -Eric Schmidt – 2008 (this is old news).

“60 hours of video are uploaded every minute, or one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.”

                                                                -YouTube Press Blog, 2012.

First - and quite obviously - access to information is available to everyone now - this shifts the whole social hierarchy upside down. There is no more privileged few who know something that you don't - no intellectual elite with a hold over information - it is available to everyone. However inequalities of course do not disappear and even in this new class of actively informed citizens new divides arise - between the ultra-connected and those of primitive connection. This can most clearly be seen between the super-fast networks and extremely high internet penetration rates of Scandinavians and the newly connecting third-world developing countries. The gap between speeds and access to the internet is great - but in no way does it belittle the importance of connectivity.

Secondly - in a very brief and oversimplified account of Marx's distribution of labor - means of productions begin to shift from the bourgeois elite to the proletarians - I will discuss this further in the future but I believe that information technologies is the key and most likely the closest utility available that can ever accomplish or seek to deliver what Marx envisioned without the radical revolutions he described. The distinction between the owners of production and the producers do not disappear but their relations change greatly. Owners of production have less control over their producers on the internet. EG, Google has no hold over its users they come as they please and it is incredibly easy for them to change search engines which are only a mouse click away. On the flip side users have such powerful publishing tools which are now considered ubiquitous and which are mostly free – because producers try to attract users to use their means of production – that the line between them starts to blur. Overall there is much to be said about economics and the internet.

Third - we must of course tackle the issue of the liberalized world order and Fukuyama's End of History that the world has so eagerly accepted. More specifically we must see how the emptiness of liberalism plays out in our real world and what this means for our future.

& we can go on and on and on there is just a myriad of issues out there. But what is the problem with the world today? The problem is that there is no outlets that seek to combine theory with social media and information technologies - which just so happens to be the aim of this blogger.

There are just so many interesting issues popping up all over the place - Wikileeks, anonymous, China's propaganda centers, online polls which ask citizens which government websites they want to see taken down, social movements and dissent utilities, "balkanisation" of the internet, complete isolation and control, creation and recreation of the internet such as in Iran, Obama’s Google+ page being flooded with Chinese citizen's pleas for democracy, and the most charming and loveable rants of the rock star political science philosopher Slavoj Zizek makes this the most existing time to live in. What will the world look like the years to come? Let’s try to find out!