History's First Opportunity for a (mature) Generational Upload

Boomers, here's your calling. The world needs you. We have blogs for those of you who like to write. We have streaming video, and Internet radio stations, and podcasts, and social networking, and instant messaging and chattering and twittering and mobile phoning for everyone else. Pick your medium, or your mashup of mediums, and start uploading your wisdom.

Upload all of it ASAP. This isn't retirement hobby stuff - this is urgent. Upload your hard won gems of wisdom to fill out the new planetary cerebral cortex with its first generational mind dump (I mean a mature generational mind dump; not the naive chirpings of those less experienced generations). Then we'll figure out how to classify and edit and index and connect it all, and as we do, something profound will happen.

I'm not sure what exactly. But if we do nothing and stay on our present trajectory, it's obvious we are going to hit a brick wall; and it looks like hitting that wall will happen a lot sooner than we used to think (as in: it's gonna happen in our lifetime, not our children's lifetime - that's the difference between a terrible thing and a tragedy - a terrible thing happens to others; a tragedy happens to us).

Once uploaded, our individual gems of wisdom can be linked to other similar bits of wisdom and bigger pictures will emerge and be available for all of us to act on. And that, basically, is how we're going to do a better job of collecting and using wisdom to guide the application of our technical skills. There are still some details to work out, but absolutely no reason not get to work right away on the world's first (mature) generational upload.

Some Gems Being Uploaded by this Boomer

This Boomer blogger has (apparently) chosen the written word and he's also working on ways to include pictures, video and audio. I figure the best way to communicate my bits of wisdom is to put them into stories about things I did and saw. Then whoever edits and indexes my stuff can link my stories to other similar stories and a pattern will emerge (or something along those lines; it's worth a try).

One story is about a young man and his brother Andy and his friend Jerry. He talked his Dad into letting him have one of the family cars so they could put sleeping bags, a tarp, a frying pan and camping food (that means instant pancake batter - just add water) into it and get in and drive it from the little town in Connecticut where we lived to a festival in upstate New York we had been hearing about on the radio all week called Woodstock.

At that time this young man dreamed of a career making movies, and he carried his super 8mm movie camera with him to record what he saw. Here's a frame grab from what that aspiring filmmaker saw when he got right up to the stage to be part of the scene when Jimi Hendrix played.

Possible wisdom in this story seems to revolve around insights about why people liked being at the festival and how we could use these insights in present situations. There were awesome musicians who performed, and yet still, it was fun mostly just because we made it fun. We were all real proud of ourselves for being so well behaved and having such a good time in spite of lots of other problems that could have produced a real bummer if we had allowed ourselves to get short-tempered and start being rude and obnoxious and inconsiderate to each other as if that would have solved anything anyway.

Another story is about the same young man several years later. At this time he was in college studying to be an architect in the finest traditions of The Fountainhead and Frank Lloyd Wright. He still carried his super 8mm movie camera with him and this time he and some friends went to Washington DC to witness the second inauguration of President Richard Nixon. Here's a frame grab from a movie he took as the president and his wife rode past in a limousine.