Possible Futures: Digital Cremation

Social media will evolve into the "Tree of Life," the humanities of personal learning networks, where we will be able to access and experience whole life stories, events as they happened, bodies of work, creative artifacts, and legacy... primarily in an open neural net and secondarily, in a private lineage.

Digital assets will be an end of life matter to contend with and rights to a restricted lineage - where the uncut version of one's story lives - will be willable. Digital will become a recognized part of the estate with secure, embedded programable options for distribution. The richness, quality, and uniqueness of one's life will determine its potential as a monetized annuity. Digital cremation and destruction of legacy will also be an option.

We will be able to leave our legacy directly to those our lives had messages and meaning for. 

Our life memories, lessons, personal learning systems (passions, interest, collected wisdom), artifacts, and stories will be searchable, experienace-able, and tradable where allowed.

We will be able to donate our digital lives to science or for public good. Our experiences will be a part of rehabilitation programs and philanthropic initiatives, offering the authority of personal experience and relatedness as comfort and inspiration to those struggling to overcome similar trials in life, i.e. illness, career crises, addiction, family dysfunction... Transparency quickens transformation as its revealed that life struggles are not unique, problems are surmountable, and innovative solutions exist. Long after we are gone, we may still continue to contribute in unique ways to the intelligence back of personal learning networks as "digital angels." The "self-help" industry will transform, no longer a 1-way dispensary of sage advice, books, and lectures, but will evolve as a democratized, interactive, coaching/learning network, rich with humanity and sharable, relatable life experience.

We will be able to find answers to questions like, "did my great grandmother go through this when she was my age? Who did? What was she like? Can I see what she experienced, what she went through? Can I skip through her life and see how the dots connected, how it worked out in hindsight? Can I study hindsight through others life experience and extract patterns? What was her life's meta narrative, i.e., what was the whole meaning of her life?"

Future of Business, The Feminization of Culture

We are witnessing the feminization of our culture. 

Look around you: are women wearing more pinks and purples, wearing their hair longer, on the cover of more magazines... are they earning more degrees than men, starting more businesses than men, raising more bars? Are the giving, compassion, transparent, social, and innovation trends in some mysterious way being born out of a woman's inherent nature and her new access to money, power, and influence? The answer is yes. The new evolution of Eve, backed by women with money, power, and influence, will be a deep and strong shift.  

So welcome to the future of business, where you will become increasingly familiar with and accepting of words such as “feeling,” “creating,” "experiencing," "being," and “knowing.” A future where a person's values, intuitive ability, range of interests, creative faculty, and ability to integrate new ideas and connect seemingly unrelated dots, will be just as highly regarded as their ability to provide sound logic and reasoning and specialization. A future where traditionally feminine qualities such as giving, creativity, and compassion will indwell a company's DNA and be guiding principles spelled out in more company mission statements.

We will see boardrooms become dens and even the most sharply-dressed executive suite will have more warmth, comfort, laughter and creativity. Statements like, “I feel” will be heard sounding down conference halls and bouncing off walls right alongside statements like, “the numbers indicate." We will see more space and ease in even the most boiler-room professions, and the need to prove oneself at all cost will take a backseat to the passion, purpose, and spark a person conveys in his or her thoughts, words, and deeds. We will even see the high tech and deep sciences - persistently male dominated fields - come to acknowledge and accept the breath of inspiration as valuable input to and an accelerator of high innovation. 

We will see very large, global MNCs with traditional, hierarchical business models scale down in numbers, becoming engulfed by the revolutionary rise of women-led businesses, a space which will experience tremendous growth in the coming years fueled by the dissatisfaction with and inflexibility of traditional business models and the democratization of funding, which could herald the end of venture capital as we know it. 

We will see traditional business models become integrated and interwoven with decentralized, flat, and self-forming business models, turning ladders to lattices and giving more employees the room to manuever, and ebb and flow in their careers as their life needs change. There will be more career fluidity in even the largest organizations, with lateral moves made more accessible and given greater support by management. No longer will it be a simple straight line to the top, instead it will also include an evolution of upwardly mobile experiences, culminating at the top.

We will see a future where HR departments no longer simply fill roles based on a historical account of skill and experience (as if swapping out a piece part on a machine), but we will see the valuation of non-specialist learning resources: resources with their passion, values, and accelerated learning capacity out front as differentiators, allowing companies to form teams based on aligned visions and values and “swarm” projects and initiatives, raising the organization capacity to learn while performing and remaining agile enough to maneuver against economic head winds.

We will also see less people on the roads between the hours of 9-5, reversing the trend of rising congestion, and will see more people trickling in and out of work throughout the day, moving with their own biorhythmic energy, cycles, rhythms and life needs. 

Over the next decade, we will see the equalization of masculine and feminine energies in the marketplace, with a strong and deep bend towards the feminine for the next 5 years, polar balancing at the 5-10 year mark. What does not fit a woman's natural needs and desires will fail if it cannot adapt in the coming market. More macro trends on the feminization of culture to follow.