Systems thinking provided a way of conceptualizing as well as comprehending a planet which had grown dangerous and hugely more complicated. Radical new ways of thinking about time, scale, power, death, responsibility and, first and foremost, control – control of technology, folks, ideas and information were demanded by nuclear weapons.
We're now used to thinking about the present time in global terms – globalization, global communications, global warming, global security. Laptops and mobile phones connect us to a huge global network so we are able to upload and download information. We need this information to guarantee and broaden the connections of ours even as it flattens the identity of ours right into a trickle of binary code being monitored, traded, sorted and kept.
Daily life is firewalled and password protected. We go under a canopy of invisible digital cameras as well as sensors, exactly where the personal details of ours and likenesses, the associations of ours, preferences and transactions fabrication waiting to be called upon – by friends, strangers, snoops or employers. And what then? All of us do it – we're already conscripted. We've actually become elements, checking up on folks by rifling through social media accounts or perhaps poking around on the streets.
Confronted with the unfathomable complexity of climate science, or world events, or perhaps the consequences on the technologies that gives updates on such things to us in a quick manner, info is both the cause of the dilemma of ours and a refuge from it.
This's a world created by the Cold War, by the anxieties and energies which discovered in the labs, government offices, boardrooms, think tanks camps. Universities tasked with managing a lasting state of emergency. The geopolitics may be unique, although technologies, infrastructure, and worldview which made up and hardened during the Cold War era remain with us, embodied in the daily products we take as a given, and the precarious identities they recommend.
Normalized surveillance, generalized nervousness, an infatuation with protection, nationalized identities, pervasive suspicion as well as secrecy, spectacular military technology as well as proxy wars, whistle blowers, spies, so the enemy within. Francis Fukuyama famously reported in 1989 that the conclusion of the Cold War marked the "end of history" – the fantastic ideological struggles had been over as well as Western liberal democracy had received, based on the thesis of his. No matter how wrong he was in the assessment of his assessment of the post Cold War community, Fukuyama's argument did indicate exactly how easy it could be to kick current history into the lengthy grass. History, however, didn't come out to be over, and also we're still currently in it. The world we're in is, in ways that are many, the planet the Cold War created for us.