From the brilliant mind of Sarah Hoyt:
“Horrible tyrants don’t get toppled. Their softer, kinder successors do.”
Now get over there and read the rest, which explains the revolution we’re about to experience. (Warning: Sarah is an expository writer, and when she makes an argument, she buttresses it with all sorts of logic, reasoning, historical perspective and personal experience. In other words, she doesn’t do bumper-sticker aphorisms, she does wisdom. If you think it’s “TL;DR” then I feel sorry for you.)
From the link:
“We are in such a period now. People underestimate how big a change extremely cheap data storage and processing and communication at a distance have made.”
This. My wife and I both work for companies that have a mindset that worked in the 1970’s at the latest.
I’ll use my wife’s situation as an example. She’s an executive assistant at a large accounting firm. The woman for whom is works travels extensively, it’s not uncommon for her to go from New York to Japan to London to India to Boston and back to Japan in the space of a week or so. All flying first class, as befits her position with the company. All for meetings. I can’t believe SOME of that travel couldn’t be replaced by teleconference.
This is what happens when you double computer power every 16 months for a few decades, but the decision makers don’t keep up with the capabilities. Kinda like the guy I used to work with who printed EVERY email he got, including things like return-receipts, because he was just used to dealing with paper.
Of course now everyone has a computer in their pocket that would have filled a room and cost seven figures 30 years ago, and with that computer you can access any piece of information you could possibly want. And most people use it to watch porn.
Mrs Hoyt is a fixture on my must read list. Even before she showed up on the Instablog.