Recently, we spoke with Leonard Brody, a highly respected entrepreneur, venture capitalist and international speaker to get his take on the unprecedented level of technology-led societal disruption.
Brody is particularly focused on how we are creating a new operating system for the entire planet from the bottom up, which he refers to as the “Great Rewrite.”
To kick the conversation off, Brody started off describing how disruption spreads from new technologies that make prior models suddenly viable. Here's what had to say:
Brody argues that the level of disruption we see today is so vast that it requires a different conceptual framework to understand it. This is where his concept of the “Great Rewrite” comes into play.
In creating this framework Brody asked himself a couple of questions, “Is what we’re experiencing a pattern we’ve seen historically before? And If so, where is it different? Secondly, what are the real drivers?” He said he really felt there was something going on more than just a technological revolution.
Brody argues what we’re experiencing is a massive, disruptive social and behavioral change. He offered the ways in which we’ve distributed communication over the years as a prime example of this shift.
“When we look back at the last 30 years, we saw something very unique,” Brody said.
Prior to the invention of HTML and the internet, human communication was tightly controlled. Thinking about moveable type and television, Brody said, “They were all identical. So mass-chain communication was broadcast ... one-to-one or one-to-many and it was incredibly expensive technologically and it was regulated by the government.”
Today, however, “you have the first many-to-many formula,” Brody said. “You have the first time historically where millions of people can speak to millions of people at scale with very little impact on their disposable income and it's impossible for governments to regulate. You enter a place where, for the first time in our history, we own our own communication as a species globally at mass scale. And that dynamic changes our behavior.”
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