I have my reservations about going. I fear we will see the
same “how to build one million visits in one month” ploys and the “how to write
a post to go viral” sermons. None of these offer any real incentives for people
to come together and build real progress—all of it is just about taking
advantage of the idiosyncrasies of a mass hysteria that self-perpetuates a narcissistic
need. Well, maybe there is a bit of narcissism in us that keeps us writing, but
I like to believe we write because we want to perpetuate something greater—something
far more useful in the long run for the people we reach. We want to help shape
the way you think about sustainability, about forward compatibility of a Human
Ecology with our planet; we want to shift the paradigm. And there are no quick
schemes or tricks that will shift the paradigm; the shift occurs when least
expected, upon a crisis, and we, the observers, are removed from our own perceptions.
That is why we decided to give it another chance—to see
things not as how we are, but as how they are. We decided to explore the
contours of a culture changing in a changing world, to see the technologies
come together to give us buoyancy, to know there is at least something to be
understood.
So we travel not to be somewhere, we do not intend to have
plans nor do we hope to arrive at some quintessential inkling of where this
blog is going. We travel to the expo following the sound advice of those who came before us:
“And even when the apparatus exists, novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong.”― Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
