by Rob Kall

Presented at the SoMeBizLife.com conference, June 1, 2011

Here’s the material I used to do my presentation — longer than the 15 minutes I was given — distilled down.

First, the quotes I collected to choose from:

There’s a native American saying: “It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story.”

“I honestly believe the future’s going to be millions of little things saving us.”
Pete Seeger on Democracy Now

You white people are so strange. We think it is very primitive for a child to have only two parents.
Australian Aboriginal Elder

“We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down. Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success — only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive, and free. Trust the people. This is the one irrefutable lesson of the entire postwar period contradicting the notion that rigid government controls are essential to economic development.”
Ronald Reagan

The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
Chief Seattle Squamish Indian Chief

Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up.”
Studs Terkel, Hope Dies Last.

Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth. Those who undergo it must take on a new form of existence; they can no longer remain as they were.
Paulo Freire

The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform a man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life freedom
Erich Fromm

Remember, the Ark was built by amateurs. The Titanic was built by professionals
Marian Wright-Edelman

If there is going to be change,” he said, “real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves.
Howard Zinn, author, People’s History of the United States

…”free, instant, worldwide connectivity” is the future.
Bill Moyers

What makes eBay successful… the real value and the real power at eBay is the community. It’s the buyers and sellers coming together and forming a marketplace.
Pierre Omidyar

“Not only will we have to repent for the sins of bad people; but we also will have to repent for the appalling silence of good people”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is in the giving up of self that human beings can find the most ecstatic and lasting, solid, durable joy of life.
M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled

* * *
In May of 2008 I was talking to Joe Trippi, who’s been credited with being the first campaign manager to run a campaign using the web — for Howard Dean’s Democratic presidential primary campaign. Trippi pointed out that Hillary Clinton had the most powerful top down campaign in recent history, and she was being defeated by Barack Obama’s bottom up campaign.

I’d also recently come to the realization that my website, opednews.com was taking off, with around half a million uniques and 1.5 to two million page views, because I was getting my users more involved, letting them decide and getting their input on major decisions. This was a much more bottom up way of running things.

A few weeks later, at Personal Democracy forum, I had a chance to bounce my emerging theory that we’re in the middle of a bottom up revolution, off anthropologists, web and social media luminaries and pioneers like Vint Cerf.

I’ve come to conclude that the social media, new media explosion is one firework, one manifestation of something much, much bigger– a bottom up tidal wave that is touching all aspects of our lives– business, work, relationships, education, sports, the arts– even the way our brains work.

This is NOT something you can avoid. It’s not something your grandmother can avoid.

If you don’t get it, don’t understand it, then it will wash over you and leave you behind.

If you DO get it and understand it, then you can tap its enormous power and ride it into a future that it will indelibly change.

Yes, Twitter and Facebook and Linked in and Youtube and Google and blogs, etcetera are major. But they are just one dimension of the bottom up explosion– the transition our world, our culture, our business, our lives, even our brains are going through, from top down to bottom up, from inside out to all sides in.

The bottom up explosion encompasses the technologies that Clay Shirky describes in his book Here Comes Everybody– technologies that enable groups to form and function at a fraction of the cost they used to.

The Bottom up wave replaces a handful of judges with hundreds of thousands of viewers phoning in American Idol winners. Even reality shows are bottom up compared to totally scripted network entertainment.

Thousands of websites are using crowd sourcing to make product development decisions.

Businesses are using sites like elance to get many potential providers to bid on service opportunities.

While I’m using the word “Wave” to describe the bottom up revolution, it’s really more of a spiral, because the truth is, the earliest humans, when they lived in tribes, were very much bottom up. Everyone had a say. Everyone shared food. Everyone worked as relative equals.

Agriculture displaced hunter gatherers. Then, civilization came to be on a top down wave and revolution, bringing humanity hierarchy, control, domination, monarchs and slaves.

Let’s talk some definitions for Top-down and Bottom-up.

Top down is about centralized control, directing orders and communications out, in a one way, one to many direction.

Bottom up is cooperative, participatory, decentralized, connected, integrated, with feedback loops, with many to many communication.

The bottom up revolution has been catalyzed by the internet and mobile phones–
technologies that have marinated the brains of people under 30 so their brains literally operate differently. If you are over 30, you need to understand HOW their brains work differently. If you are under 30,. then you want to understand how over thirty brains work.

For example, My 78 year old cousin is hurt and angry that her grandchildren don’t call her. The truth is, under 30’s don’t like to use the phone to call anyone. They prefer texting, or connecting through facebook. If they’re going to talk with their voice, it is very likely when they are playing MMPOLGs like World of Warcraft.

talk about how emerging technologies are affecting the way the brain works… Ten years ago, I volunteered to help grade “novels” 32 page cursive “books” my fifth grader’s class wrote. I found that every boy used the video game story structure– go through a level, confront and fight a boss, go to the next level… These technologies have unknowable effects on our culture.

Let’s talk about top down and bottom brain functions.
Bottom up brain functions provide the raw material– basic sensory information– sight, smell, hearing, touch. Under five percent of the brain is devoted to bottom up processes. This is the reality based part of our perceptions. The rest of the brain’s functions are top down– analysis, interpretation, association, hierarchizing, memory. Stories are built by the top down brain based on bottom up core material. The top down brain can become rigid and reflexive.  The closer we get to that core bottom up material the more power we have over the way we see and understand the world.

Nicholas Carr has written, in his book, THE SHALLOWS, that we’re becoming shallower. Look at the difference in the length of the average scene in a movie from 1940 to 2011 and we go from two or three minutes to half a second. The rhythm is verrry different.

An exciting development that I see evolving is the transition from an information era to a connection era. When Facebook passed Google last year, on some of the traffic stats, that told me that we’d entered the age of connection. That’s what social networking is all about. Even google’s algorithms are based on connections, ie., links.

Just as far north indigenous peoples have hundreds of words for snow, understanding the bottom up connection revolution requires that we understand hundreds of ways that people connect and interact.

Yesterday, I learned of a new movie. I checked out the website and searched for a share button. There was none. I was shocked. We take them for granted now. Soon, we’ll be sharing sales on items at stores, sharing tv shows as we watch them. The technology will evolve quickly, since it’s mostly software. Already, the facebook sharing code that I put on my site several years ago, when very few sites had facebook sharing, is out of date. We replaced it just recently. Things are changing very fast and it will only speed up more.

The connection economy means that you will be earning more of your income from the bottom up, that you will be working more and more at bottom up, connection related jobs.

Depending on top down systems is risky. They don’t like little people. They llike to deal with other top down operators. So you may find yourself working more with affiliate programs, with income sources that are based on many, many little payments, like google adsense or micropayments.

Now, it’s not that top down systems, models and processes are going to disappear. Leaders will always be needed, but bottom up leadership is very different than top down leadership. Trust is a major factor. I asked Craig Newmark what the next big thing was going to be on the web and he replied that Trust and trust technologies were going to very significant. More trust speeds up and empowers business and tranasactions and cooperation. That means letting go of control.

My 1993 25th anniversary copy of Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed indicated that over 500,000 copies had been sold. The book  describes how oppressed people and their oppressors are both victims who are dehumanized. Freire says that only the oppressed, not the oppressors can rescue the oppressed and the oppressors from the situation. The oppressed have to do it themselves. People can come in and help, but only by empowering the oppressed through education and awareness raising.

You may wonder “How does this apply to a social media conference?” The fact is, the oppressed are usually not even aware that they are oppressed until they are awakened. Your clients are very often not aware that they are already immersed in a bottom up revolution. We have the opportunity to wake people up so they can begin to tap the powers they have to raise themselves, to empower themselves in this new world.

Take one of my clients, an author…  top down mind-set. He had 50 people he’d trained and certified in his technique, but he didn’t trust them to write articles for a newsletter I proposed. He couldn’t let go of control. Bottom up engagement requires trust that opens us to interdependence and cooperation.

The tools we offer are not just marketing tools. They are not just technologies for reaching friends more often and more easily. They are tools that can and have begun to change the world, tools that are eroding thousands of years old accretions of power and cultural inertia.

We see this in Tunisia and Egypt and the Arab Spring. We see it in the collapse of the newspaper business as it is being replaced by online news, blogs and twitter as sources of news.

When I interviewed twitter inventor Jack Dorsey, he told me that he envisions twitter becoming like a utility company with applications in every area of our lives.

Prometheus stole fire from the gods.

The tools you are working with have the power to wreak massive changes upon the world. They’ve already begun to do so. So think big and look for new connections. We’re in a new age of connections and, if you’re doing your job, you’ll see bottom up connections every way you turn.