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Its a real honor to stand in front of you and have you give me your attention.
And its a real honor to be in this beautiful place, this theatrical place. and it is about
place that I'd like to talk, because we are at a transformative evolutionary shift about
place because the concept of place has changed forever. Now, everybody in this room didn't
choose your parents, which means you didn't choose where you were raised. That was
done unto you. And, its a really formative experience- childhood where you were raised.
Yet we dont really think about how much place shapes who we are, how we think. But it is
something that we always kind of intuitively know is important and I'm sure that all of
you have had this experience: you get on the plane, buckle up, haven't quite put on your
noise reduction headset. Or you've just had your first day of vacation at a wonderful
resort, and you're just sitting down to have a nice cold drink, look at this beautiful
visage. And somebody comes up to you sits down next to you and says "So- where are you
from?" But intuitively we know to lead with that, even though its not a very smart, intelligent
way to open a conversation. But why do we do that? Because place has always shaped us.
it shaped us our entire lives and the entire history of humanity. Why? Because of where
we live.
If we live in France, we live differently than if we live in south Florida. How we speak
if where born in Alabama we speak differently than if we're born in Boston or born in Hamburg.
We speak differenetly because of our placeness. What we think and believe is obviously clear.
If you live in Mumbai you think differntly than if you live in Baghdad because of your
placeness. The way you live if you live on the equator, you live differently than if
you live above the arctic circle. Completely differently ways to live simply because of
the place in which you are living. What we eat, that's pretty obvious- national cuisines
came about because nations are places and cuisines kind of bubbled within that nation
state. And of course who we root for- if you're rooting for the Toronto Maple Leaves or if
you're rooting for the Boston Redsox of Manchester United, it is probably because you live near
there or you grew up there or you passed through there. Or who do you root for in college?
Most of us are out college here, most of us, and yet we root for our college team because
spent four years there. So that was the place. It meant a lot to us so we're gonna root for
that team through good or bad. Kind of interesting
So place really defines us. But it also limits
us and it has limited us throughout history. Just think about how you learned about
ancient civilizations. You know you learn about em individually, but that's because
place kept them apart. Now the Roman Empire, a little bit before BC, about 476 AD, happened
in the Mediterranean. It was a great civilization we have read about the decline
and fall of the roman empire. decline and fall in large part because it imploded on
itself it didnt have any interactivity with anywhere else and it could have because simotameously
to the roman empire was the great dynasties of china. Chinese never interacted with
the romans because place, distance, kept them apart. At the same time there was the
Mayan civilization. All three of these civilizations coexisted.
But they didnt know that they did because
the distance kept them apart. They were completely based within place. Remember that if you think
about history, how we learned about them separately. What if these three existed today? We would
know everything within 24 hours -we're all so connected. So place has really limited
civilization. Now, the Agricultural Age started 10,000 years ago and thats where the
concept of place began because we stopped following the food and following the weather
and put down roots, literally, and place began.
So the 10,000 years of the Agricultural Age is when all the great civilizations, and all
the great religions that come to mind occurred. Up until about 200 years ago so only in the
last 2% of all of recorded history has distance begun to shrink. and that's because of technology.
technology and connectivity shrinks distance. clearly, 200 years ago, roughly- the telegraph.
that was the first thing that closed distance that started to make the world smaller. The
radio 100 years ago roughly you know market penetration first electronic medium landline
75 years later television 60 years later and the internet
But if you look at these words, and you think
about when they first came into being, they were entirely place based. You had to go to
where the telegraph was, you had to plug the radio in in the home, you had to have the
television in the living room, the landline was connected to the wall and even early
stages of the Internet was connected to a wire. So even though these technologies shortened
distance, made the world smaller as we refer to it, we still were stuck in places. The
profound thing is cellular connectivity. Completely eliminates the concept of place. Why?
There's 7 billion of us, little bit more, closer to 7.1 billion now on this planet.
And 5.6 billion of us have cellphones. Take away the very young and those those in the
very remote parts of the world and you have cellphone ubiquity.
What does that mean? That means if I were
to call anybody in this beautiful room, cellphone to cellphone- one one-thousand two one-thousand
three one-thousand four one-thousand, five seconds! Your phone would ring. If I were
to call somebody on another continent 12,000 miles away, maybe another two seconds because
of the relay of the satellite. So the first thing that cellphone ubiquity means is that there's
no time or distance\'a0limiting human communication. You couldn't say that 10 years ago, certainly
100 years ago. And when you're on a cellphone, cellphone to cellphone, after "Hey how ya
coin?" one of the things you ask is "Where are you?" Or in my case, "What time zone are
you in? Is it okay to talk?" So there's no time distance or place any longer limiting
human communication. That could not be said even 5 years ago, let alone all of recorded
history. So theres no time distance or place limiting human communication, so human communication
is one of the things we humans do more than anything else- we communicate. So the concept
of placeness has left one of our major activities
We've gone from place to space. Think about that. Think if you had a grandma that say
had been dead more than 10 years, and she had come back to you today. And you go "grandma
I've got this great space i go to to hang out with my friends. I've got this space I
go to where I can buy anything I want! I've got this great space where I can watch a movie.
I've got this great space were I can go and learn about anything I want that has ever
existed." And she'd go "Wait hunny don't ya have to go to the playground to play with
your friends? And don't you have to go to a shopping center to buy something? And
don't you have to go to a theatre to see a movie? and dont you have to go to a library
to find out?" No -its called cyberspace! So everybody in this room and the current iteration
of humanity its the first time that a majority of humanity can share the same space.
And the digital natives as I call those born from 1997 till now- digital natives because
they're the first generation born into the digital landscape. Everybody older than that
is a digital immigrant into the digital landscape. \'a0So they are the first generation in human
history who will spend their entire life completely living in a global space. So think about that.
I was thinking about this stuff and I was going down some other thought. I looked up
the definition of utopia- I was following some of the line of reasoning. Here's
the definition of "utopia": in ancient Greek, "utopia" means "no place". Thomas More,
1605, called it "no where". Again, they where place based. Utopia can't exist,
there's no such place as that. That made me think of one of my great, intellectual heroes-
Buckminster Fuller. Now, Buckminster Fuller said several decades ago that humanity is
moving to a fork in the road. The fork in the road is Utopia or Oblivion. So
hopefully the fact thatf the concept of space has been changed forever is giving us an indication
of the road we're going to take.
Thank you.