I just wanted to clarify a line of thought this blog sometimes takes. I was well schooled, which I appreciate, at places like Saint George’s School of Montréal, where we read and critiqued books like George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—Huxley becoming basically my favourite writer. As one of my artist friends likes to emphasize, we were educated to be critical. This is how I interpret the world around me, with a sceptical and critical eye, and it is what I took to the companies I worked for all the while performing to the best of my ability as a technical writer, as a quasi-advocate for the user, but loyal to the company’s success as much as I could be. This is roughly how I approach writing on this blog, and my approach to business and technology, and is something I am now increasingly trying to cultivate as I write for more general audiences.
Some of my posts in this blog, I think in retrospect, perhaps go a little too far in their criticism. I am a moderate after all: I do not see the world as Left or Right, am not critical of all business, nor do I believe in easy, sometimes radical solutions, to complex problems. I had worked last year on a new suite of Green Tech Writer properties, where I hoped to offer this moderate view in what is indeed a hyper-complex often polarising issue: climate change. I further think terms like capitalism and socialism are loaded with unnecessary baggage from failed experiments in the 20th century, and perhaps a new vocabulary is needed to deal with issues like climate change, but also how we deal with problems in our technology and businesses as we progress further into this fourth industrial revolution, where the two issues of technological change through domains such as AI, 5G, IoT, quantum computing, and the dangers of climate change are only accelerating.
I have been discovering people, organizations, and businesses that seem to be enlightened to this new emerging outlook of the 21st century beyond simply consumption and shareholder value, and which I am now exploring and communicating with.
I am all for a serious reorientation to a circular economy, wholeheartedly, but I think we have to look at good businesses, science & technology, along with people and groups with innovative ideas and solutions, so we can continue to develop as a civilization.
There are some bumps in the road ahead surely, and the state of the planet is not great, but as the New York Times recently suggested, I think we can get out of messes we are in through moderate, reasoned, but concerted thought and action.
