Manifesto #2: Welcome to the New Now
We are the people who will decide the future of our planet
It’s happening again. Life is changing. People, younger and older, friendly or fearful, vibrant or forlorn, intently focused, or nodding out while walking down the street of life—all feel global tectonic cultural shifts going on around them and rumbling through them. Look around. We’re standing in the historical river of history. And the flood waters are rising.
We are here to save the planet. We’re all now makers, creators, builders, and the people who will remake and reinvent our lives, which will propel us forward into a New Now.
Looking at the changing world we live in, we each ask ourselves what really matters. The future is calling us forward, and some of us are taking steps to rebuild how everything works and to create a new sustainable world.
Intent on keeping humanity human, we’re feeling expansive and ready for the adventures and challenges ahead. Along the way, we’re each building our own answers from the ground up. Reinventing our lives and our culture.
As we’re pulled deeper into the century stretching out before us, we’re heading into an uncharted land of transformative social and technical experiences at a time of challenge, renewal, and reinvention. We’ve learned the hard way that the best minds and hearts must lead a nation. Loving kindness matters, and it can change the course of history. It’s time to radiate out love. A jolt of love energy to the entire social ecosystem will alter everything in an instant.
The experiential nature of living in the New Now is altering everyone on the planet. At an accelerated pace, there’s a rebirth of creating and a new joy about making things, reinventing things, and completely rebuilding our dysfunctional and damaging social systems. No person or place has been untouched, and everyone has a say. Tattoo it on your skin or frontal lobe: We Are All Creators. The creative force lives within our cells and organs. Voices are rising up. We are saying it in larger numbers every day, and speaking up with strength and unity. Amidst the chaos, dying, and destruction—fresh flowers are rising up from the earth.
One day, not so long ago, communication devices began appearing in our hands and on our heads. As if by magic the interconnectivity communication devices were deployed—over time, even more transformative technological leaps have promised to make us newer, shinier versions of ourselves. All made to enhance communication, to each other, and to our living environments. Along the way, we’ve discovered that tech without heart rings hollow, like thumping on the Tin Man’s chest. Leaders in technology and media have claimed this era as the Digital Age, but a more accurate name for the times we’re living through is the Age of Reinvention.
In the Age of Reinvention, whole societies and individual lives are being re-envisioned, restructured, rebooted. As our cities and societies crumble and rise again, new ways of living and interacting are waiting in the wings, ready to be switched on. New minds have been installed. Science has shown us we can rewire and transform our own brain, in the same way Artificial Intelligence has just made a quantum leap forward, quantum computing is just around the corner. Time and space will be overcome and readjusted to reflect our new minds and new spines, and we’ll continue to adapt to the recurring tsunamis of environmental, societal, cultural, and global disasters and challenges.
We’re living in a time when being stuck in the past is a form of death. Living inside each day, we count experiences, ideas, emotions as they pass through us. Years accumulate and roll through our memories like pages flipping in books. Decades flow through our lives and we become more aware of how we fit into the changing world around us. In this New Now, we require visionaries, makers, poets, musicians, scientists, empaths, artists builders, and culture shifters in every field.
Learning from the past and time traveling through books, films, musical artifacts is a wonder and a gift. Accessing the historical brilliance of creative spirits compels us forward. But living in a cyclical past of repeating mistakes over and over isn’t sustainable, for a person or a culture. It’s time for each of us to create in the world of possibilities. Without hesitating and without giving into fear or willful ignorance —we’re remaking how we interact with each other while reinventing art, work, relationships, love, architecture, social systems, cities, bodies, food supplies, water sources, and modes of communication.
Being alive now is unlike being alive in earlier, unconnected centuries. The ecosystem of the planet is speaking to each of us. In shouts, cries, and whispers. At the same time, technology is morphing and mutating all of us. Speaking to us and transforming us in countless ways. New creative strands of DNA deep within each of us have been switched on. Nature is grabbing us by the collar and hollering into our ear-budded ears. We’ve opened digital doorways with our minds, and activated dormant survival systems that’ve been waiting millennia to be turned on. The New Now supports and believes in more social acceptance for everyone. Sad, it actually still needs to be said. Yes, we’re all one, and truly in this together.
With economic and technological disruption have come freedom, creativity, and chaos. People can experience all the effects of these three states of mind in one day, or in an hour of their lives. Dive into the creative flow state to make what you’re called to make, and become who you must become. Making personal changes centered on creativity and flow has become a universal imperative. Choosing our own essential imperative is included in the digital code that’s already melded with our biological code. Freedom and wonder have leapt off the screen and live on city streets, nearby oceans, and high on mountaintops.
In the Age of Reinvention, people have become more of who they were meant to be. There’s no hiding in caves of the mind anymore and there’s no reason to waste time. Time’s always been the great leveler. Now it is both the most important thing on the planet, and the most expansive and expensive thing around. Time turns on a dime and is worth billions. Time is free when you choose it to be. We’ve come face to face with time in generation-defining ways. Time is a renewable commodity carried around in invisible luggage. Time is what’s closest to our hearts and at the center of our being. Time can be an open door to forever when you’re in a flow state, or it can be a boulder crushing your spirit when you’re a bundle of suffering. It’s time for each of us to take back our internal clocks and redefine the meaning of time for ourselves.
Digital information surrounds us, chases after us, and forces us to be wiser curators of our own minds/lives. New Now and future generations will never have known a world where the Internet, smartphones, global pandemics, streaming media, a global climate emergency, AI, digital devices, clones, drones, robots, and all that’s yet to be imagined didn’t exist. Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth and Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village have become reality—not in a faraway future, but here and now in the early decades of the twenty-first century. The past and our future-to-be have collided and intersected, asking only one thing of us. Everything.
In the Age of Reinvention real human interaction is primary. Which isn’t to say new modes of being present and traveling through time and space are out of the question; someone has to eventually invent the time machine. As we travel deeper into the multiverse of Artificial Intelligence, rewiring our brains will be taught in grade schools. Connectivity and community may begin online, but people are hardwired to read faces, communicate ideas, collaborate on projects, and make significant and lasting changes together. The Age of Reinvention has begun, and what we do with this expanded sense of connectivity and creativity is up to each of us.
The New Now
Manifestos, Reinventions & Declarations
Updated & Expanded
by
Russell C. Smith
Michael Foster
My mom told me to never listen to other people's mothers.
I think Fuller and McLuhan stand the test of time.
As Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
My mother gave me some sage advice - "Keep away from those who want to "save" the world." This kind of optimism needs more balance and recognition of the rot and psychosis in Fuller's spaceship and the gluttony in McCluhan's global village. I'm going outside to keep cultivating my own garden, thank you.