Over the last 50 years we have seen enormous change. From tinkering with the fabric of space in Large Hadron Colliders, to cracking the human genome, we now 3D print our doodles at home and on our way to reverse engineer the human brain and create AI machines far smarter than us.
Parallel to these technological innovations is an undercurrent of global social change. Less apparent in isolation, when joining the dots together we can see patterns emerging in the big picture. It’s a definite power shift from institutionalised top-down control to a decentralised bottom-up collaboration between people in an increasingly connected world.
The more you look at these patterns the more you can see the recurrent themes – Personalisation, democratisation and the dissolution of control structures.
Here are signs showing how this social change is irreversibly changing the institutions as we know them:
