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On The Information Revolutions

By Darryl Mason

An extract from a ramble-babble I wrote in August 2006. Hadn't re-read this in a long time, but it made me smile to remember how bizarre and uminaginable it seemed in 2006 that a worldwide youth movement, driven by internet information sharing, could revolutionise the Middle East and change the face of modern global politics. And it's only begun.
August 23, 2006

Bizarre, broken, swarming with change and chaos, magic and miracles, madness and joy.

This is our world today.

But for all the cries of 'Terror!' and 'Hatred!', the divisions amongst the youth of all nations are few and far between. There has probably never been a time before in the history of our races that so few young people view war as the way to remake the world for the better.

There is another way, a hundred other ways to make it better and a few million info-rich youth-fresh brains are chewing over those ideas into the early hours while you sleep. Before you wake, they will have discussed their ideas online in front of audiences in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The ideas will spread, the good ones will stick, the brilliant ones will change minds and lives and the future, subtle brick by brick, before you even finish breakfast.

Hope then is high, regardless of what the headlines may tell you.

The war pigs of the boomer-plus generations don't seem to understand that the world they knew is drawing to a close. They want bigger armies, they want wider wars, but how do they get such things when the majority of the world's youth simply do not want to fight? When the majority of the world's people are repeatedly asking, "Sorry? You want another hundred billion to buy more weapons? What exactly will that achieve?"

The will to fight isn't gone from the youth. But the drive to fight pointless, blood-soaked wars that solve little, change nothing, destroy everything, that drive is not only gone, but it seems it will now be impossible to motivate it, or reinstate it.

The youth of our world want to fight. They want to fight for their future, but they don't want to fight each other.

At least, they don't want to fight outside of the online world. There are a million battles underway tonight in the gaming worlds of another reality, but the bodies from those wars are not piling up in the streets of our real world, and most of the hatred is short-lived and is disguised admiration for the skill of their online enemies.

This weird and wonderful, strange and beautiful world.
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