• Skip to content

Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

header image
  • Home
  • Books
    • The Third Ingredient
    • Age of the Customer
  • Speaking
  • About Jim
  • Press Room
    • Jim In the News
    • Press Materials
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Home
  • Books
    • The Third Ingredient
    • Age of the Customer
  • Speaking
  • About Jim
  • Press Room
    • Jim In the News
    • Press Materials
  • Blog
  • Contact

It’s the Digital Age – Ethically Speaking, Things Here Are Different

October 20, 2022 by Jim Blasingame

As arrogant occupants of 21st-century Earth, who can rightly boast of creating exciting innovations, like the computer, talking paint, and the margarita blender, it serves us to believe we’re also the more enlightened generation.

But honesty demands an acknowledgment that contemporary applications of wisdom, morality and ethical behavior are in fact derivative of concepts first proposed long ago by the ancients.

Consider the 10,000-year-old Chinese wisdom, I Ching, The Book of Changes. Then there are the 5,000-year-old Upanishads from India. And of course, the new kid on the block, the four-millennia-old Mosaic Laws (Thou shalt not …). Indeed, no wisdom is handier than that of King Solomon, from the first millennium BCE in Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and the Psalms.

It must be noted that much of this awesome introspection and self-awareness was first contemplated at a time when receding Ice Age glaciers were still carving Scotland’s Loch Ness and the Great Lakes of North America, on the threshold of the written word.

Alas, ethically and morally speaking, we moderns are merely the new models, not necessarily the better ones. Hold that thought. 

Contemporary humans must remember one immutable fact that ties us all together: You and I are, have always been, and always will be analog – made of the exact same stuff as our forebears. From Euclid to Edison to Eddie, your brother-in-law, we’re all physical, analog beings. And our analog-ness has suited us completely for dozens of millennia as we’ve created and thrived in a 100% analog world – including our analog ethics. Hold that one, too.

Until now.

Today, we’re increasingly occupying a digital world and things here are different. For the first time in human history, we’ve created something truly unique by merely not being analog. It’s a new force that’s more than different, it’s unprecedentedly disruptive; an innovation with its own energy: digital leverage.

Analog leverage is a pry bar, a wheel, an elevator, or a potato masher. Analog telephonic technology allows you to sit in one place and in minutes, make nine phone calls to deliver news to family and friends. Analog leverage: 1:9.

Digital leverage is the same message posted once on a digital platform, potentially available to millions in a millisecond. Digital leverage: 1:∞. Pretty exciting, huh?

But what about digital leverage applied with greater implications than a family report? Slow your digital adoption long enough to consider the awesome leverage sitting under every “Enter” key on every “keyboard.” For good or ill.

Take a sec to think about that.

In analog history, humans have innovated tools over generational, if not epochal chronology. But in transitioning from an analog to a digital world, leverage has gone from RPM to GHz. From speed of sound (760 miles per HOUR) to speed of light (186,000 miles per SECOND). In less than two human generations – a nanosecond in geologic time – we took a lumbering IBM Mainframe as big as an SUV, squeezed into it a ball-point pen, a telephone, typewriter, television, radio, and a mailbox, and transmogrified all of that into a magic wand that fits in the back pocket of your jeans. The smartphone. No previous human generation ever experienced such a disruptive and seductive conversion of leverage.

Remember those thoughts you’re supposed to be holding? Ethically and morally speaking, we moderns are merely the new models, not the better ones. As analog beings, we possess a primordial requirement of trust in every aspect of our lives. Humans require trust, regardless of whether the leverage is analog or digital.

It took humans 10,000 years to go from slaying a mammoth to operating a mainframe, but we’ve accelerated from mainframe to mobile in the lifespan of this Baby Boomer. That sounds exciting until you realize that we’ve yet to perfect how to install our primordial trust requirement into the digital leverage of a 9 GHz, nitrogen-cooled, 28-core processor and deliver it over the Internet at the speed of light.

You’ve likely never owned a railroad or factory, but you have more potential power in either of the several “Enter” keys you own than all of the Robber Barons combined. And once that key is pressed, there are no backsies or mulligans.

Are we so arrogant to think that knowing how to physically navigate a browser interface somehow results in the ethical employment of digital tools? Are we so ignorant as to believe that wielding unprecedented leverage with the twitch of a fingertip promotes trust? We have a lot of work to do.

Just because no one ever had to teach a class on the ethics of using a hammer doesn’t mean it’s okay to go from RPMs to GHz in 30 years without a conversation about the ethical use of digital leverage. This is different. In the Digital Age, things here are different.

Ever wonder why analog humans are reporting increasing anxiety about technology? It’s because while digital leverage is sexy and compelling, it’s simultaneously disrupting our analog expectations, challenging our primal nature, and troubling our requirement of trust. And as we continue to race into the ever-more-digital 21st Century, hell-bent-for-light-speed, there’s the rub.

Want a good place to start your own transition to digital ethics? Next time you’re about to press that “Enter” key, say this to yourself: “Just because I can, doesn’t mean that I should.”

Write this on a rock … Being ethical and fulfilling our trust requirement in the Digital Age is different from anything humans have ever done. Let the conversation begin.

Filed Under: Cybersecurity, Ethics / Trust, Technology / General, The 3rd Ingredient Tagged With: 3rd ingredient, Digital Age, digital trust, ethical, ethics, small business, technology, trust

Categories

  • Banking
  • Business Planning
  • Buying a Business
  • Cash Flow
  • Communication
  • Coronavirus
  • Corporate Culture
  • Customer Care
  • Cybersecurity
  • Demographics, Generations
  • e-business
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Ethics / Trust
  • Finance / Accounting / Taxes
  • Franchising / Licensing
  • Futuring
  • Government / Politics
  • Human Resources
  • Innovation / Creativity
  • Intellectual Property
  • Investors
  • Leadership
  • Legal
  • Management Fundamentals
  • Marketing / Branding / Advertising
  • Mobile Computing
  • National and Global Economy
  • Negotiating
  • Networking
  • Profitability
  • Sales / Sales Management
  • Social Media
  • Start Ups
  • Technology / General
  • The 3rd Ingredient
  • The Age of the Customer
  • Trade: Import, Export, Globalization
  • Uncategorized
  • Work-Life / Balance

Archives

  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017

© 2023 · Jim BlasingameContact Us