Off to see Clay Shirky talk tonight about his new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Lots of ideas about human potential in the 21st Century and living in a world that is moving to being less about consuming and more about doing.

I’ll be intrigued to find out how far down this road he thinks we are. Does the Foxxcon assembly line worker in Shenzen or the Mcjobber in the suburbs of Sao Paulo get to be part of this creative rebalancing? Or are they just allowed to be the last targets for growth hungry legacy companies of the 20th Century and an easily forgotten part of our own personal supply chains?

create or consume?

To me, we need to move faster with footprinting and lifecycle education and also think that the person on the assembly line has just as much right to be part of this creative, collaborative world. They also may just turn out to have more creative juices in them than the person who purchased the product on the other side of the world.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ycih_jMObQ] This from the Enough Project highlighting conflict minerals in consumer electronics is good on getting footprinting out there… and this response email from Steve Jobs, himself responding yo a customer who had seen N Kristoff’s NY Times Op-ed Death by Gadget, is an impressive example on new skool pr in action.

The world’s new middle classes need to be part of this new reorganising of priorities. At the moment, access for the largest segment of the world’s population is blocked. This means that whatever comes out, regardless of the merits of its creative output, it wont be representative and wont help in tackling the urgent social and environmental challenges we face.

UPDATE: Just back from Clay Shirky talk which was great (mp3 here). He went into detail on squeezing social capital out of our networked world. For him 3 types of networks exist:

• communal ones that dont break out or perform much civic purpose like lolcats
  

  funny but...

• wikipedia ones that are great big public libraries.
• civic ones which change the playing field for everyone and contribute in a meaningful way to solutions to big challenges like Ushahidi

And… he was big on mobile phones and simple networking solutions for driving mass participation in the developing world.

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