Perhaps cultural insurrection is afoot, one that will resonate with existing demographic, cultural and economic trends so powerful that it will knock American society off its axis. One that will allow me and those I am connected to through social media and communities across the country to create a life where work and life are remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes an long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. Where our jobs are home based and we can restore life to bedroom suburbs that are today ghost towns from 9 to 5. We are going to build a new confidence that working citizens can change their lives and in doing so can change the world around them.
We are seeing the emergence of post-information economy, in Flocking Machinewhich routine professional work and even some high-end services are more cheaply performed overseas or by machines. This does not mean that work will vanish. It does mean, however, that it will take a new and unfamiliar form.
We are all taught from an early age that we should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college. Many economists attribute the sluggish wage growth in the U.S. to educational stagnation, which is one reason politicians of every stripe call for doubling or tripling the number of college graduates. But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that wont exist, we're on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that is sparking an era of new ways to learn and new ways to live.
Look at projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favor of new, strange, or flourishing ones.
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