Super Higway

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

W. B. Yeats

 

Take whatever you want from Yeats. Different groups have done just that for decades. Don’t we just love double entendres!

But then again, knowing the story of people like Tim Berners-Lee and the growth of his spawn, the Internet, one can’t help but look with a worried backward glance as the creature slouches towards ‘Bethlehem.’

We are now on the cusp of the information age. Things are good. It’s amazing that just 15 years ago, there was no real internet. Fifteen years.

Right now, he who can store as much information as possible rules. When the President of my country calls on journalists from a neighbouring country to make his case for negative comments attributed to him, he knows there will be blood. So he makes sure he is well-prepared with his information. he hits them with all this information and one journalist goes back singing his praises.

People still employ workers on the basis of what the applicants say they know. Yes, papers can still get you a job. You go to school for two decades and come out with an impressive dossier. Hit your prospective bosses on the head with the tome and you are home free.

What’s going to happen tomorrow though? What happens when your papers don’t really matter anymore?

The creature seems to have been sighted already. It’s in the rebels of today who stare down their dads and refuse to go back to school because they have found the answer. If their dad won’t understand that, sayonara papi.

The dirty jeaned, sandal-wearing, shaggy-haired nerds of today are the business. They have the papers but they don’t really need them. The rules of today’s world are becoming obsolete fast.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow it’s going to be about how well we use the knowledge we say we have. Tomorrow, the 5 PhDs you hold won’t be worth the papers they are on if you can’t turn this sand into water.

The wisdom age is only a click away.