Awakening zombies

There's of course the "Century of the Self" thing (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_Of_The_Self). It is clever marketing and control of the masses to make everybody feel really unique and self-actualized, while they still essentially buy the same products, just in more colors, produced by the same kind of companies, and they still vote for the same kinds of politicians, who just have become better at saying what people like to hear.

And at the same time, there clearly is something different here. A different way of organizing. Which, if can stay somewhat conscious of where it takes us, and where we take it, might really change power structures fundamentally.

But, as with many kinds of change, we're sort of mentally and emotionally behind, still acting to a large degree like we live in the world as it was. Like zombies in a shopping mall, mindlessly going through the same motions as we did before.

It is a paradox. We both get it, and sense it - that something new is evolving, which is changing everything - and at the same time we happily act like nothing is different.

It is like ... my computer now is 1000 times faster than my first computer and holds a million times as much data. But the structure of my experience hasn't changed very much, and it certainly isn't 1000 times better. Same way, we now can organize ourselves in fantastically different ways than we ever could before. And we do organize ourselves differently, but not nearly as much as we could.