Disruptive Obama

Posted on May 4, 2008
Filed Under Sustainable Business |

Is government the friend of sustainability or its enemy? The most generous opinion on this matter from sources I consult is that government is slow, and this alone renders it inadequate to the emergency needs of the current global eco-decay.

Politics is supposed to be the discourse out of which government receives its consensual thrust forward, but there is an animal called Party Politics, and this, as we have seen most acutely in the last eight years, has had a tendency to strangle the discourse of the nation, acting as a deterrent to innovation.

The power of the political parties to get things done has thus been shown to have its limitations at the point where all their members become entrenched at the party line.

Enter now the disruptive force of Senator Obama, whose adherents at any rally are notable for their diversity, sprawling across the whole demographic spectrum of America.

Disruptive technologies are what we champion here at Hunter and Associates, and what we love to play with. The Web itself is the great disruptive platform, subverting all the cozy ways that used to be, and that don’t work anymore, and replacing them with better ways for humans to do things.

Disruption of the man-made status quo is a natural event that comes with life, and danger arises when the man-made so refuses to change that it distorts the natural systems themselves - the principal platform of which to most of our concerns is planet Earth itself of course. It is the distortion of the natural by the willful that needs to be disrupted.

So disruption is always worth a generous look, to see if change for the better may be coming. In the worlds of government, politics, party politics, and stagnant policy, a solo change agent like Obama promises much that may redound to the good of all.

Obama is a disruptive force like any other disruptive technology. And as Bob Morris points out talking in the same terms of analogy, disruptive technologies don’t just change systems, they replace them:

The key point about disruptive innovations is that they do not co-exist with what came before it, but rather that they replace it.
- Obama campaign as “disruptive innovation”

For Obama may not simply come in and deploy different policies within the same old order; the old order itself may be swept away, not so much from anything Obama does as by what he stands for in terms of change and possibility. After Obama, and the energy released from the numerous choke points loosened - and the new wealth and power represented by this unleashed energy - will the old order find any purchase anywhere anymore?

So let me be clear that while this piece of writing will stand nicely as the Hunter and Associates formal endorsement of Senator Obama for the next President of the United States of America, this viewpoint is not about him, the man, as opposed to any others, men or women. This is about change from a change agent - any change agent, of any stripe - as opposed to a system grown so obsolete that it costs increasingly more to sustain it every day than it will ever produce in true new wealth again.

The system I refer to is party politics, which stifles debate, and which obscures the underlying influence of interest money, and which increasingly seems to crush any scruple of principle.

A change agent such as Obama seems the greatest force imaginable still to exist within a party. The alternative is the further disruption of a rise of independents, with all their random mutational combinations, and the Web could enable this easily with current technologies.

Obama, then.

We delude ourselves when we believe that thought occurs in our brains, and ignore the knowledge of reality that speaks directly to our hearts. And so, since this IS a formal endorsement, what better than a taste of hope to end this piece:

For boomers Obama represents the last chance to see in their lifetimes the different world they wanted to create that was stolen from them by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
- McCain is a Lousy Candidate: He Will Be Clobbered in November

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