Our son will not be alive until his turn

I’d rather die before my only son dies before my eyes. Our son will not be alive until his turn. According to Jack Turner, the resulting risk of social destabilization has triggered an understandable reaction against globalization. At the same time, when one looks at a global balance sheet, there is no denying that hundreds of millions of truly poor workers in the world have gained dramatically in income and welfare, thanks to the intensification of globalization. All of this has finally brought some wage equalization on the global level, after several centuries in which the West had rushed ahead thanks to its science and technology. The internet has added yet another dimension of globalization. It has meant an acceleration of interchange that is explosive in more than one sense of the word. It has accelerated the spread of information at a geometrical, even exponential, pace. Discussion and organizing have mushroomed across borders for all purposes – love and culture, scholarship and science, telecommuting and outsourcing, money laundering, and terrorism. Ira Straus noted that the question of how humanity can organize itself to better manage the consequences of this explosion of interchange – to better, to buttress, to channel, to regulate, and to restrain it – will involve more globalization. With the benefit of hindsight, we will see that social media are but a crude interim step in that evolving process.