I am reading Shoshanna Zuboff (author of In the Age of the Smart Machine) and James Maxmin's The Support Economy. They advance a startlingly fresh synthesis of social psychology and business theory and suggest that we are, in fact, just past the threshold of what I have been calling the "post-everything" era, and that we have entered a new phase of human civilization, driven by a new sort of people, who are driven by new dreams.

Shoshanna Zuboff and James Maxmin

[from The Support Economy]

Now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, people have new dreams. In spite of the heterodoxy and diversity that mark the advanced societies, we observe a common source for many of these dreams. It is expressed in a psychological awareness of one's own complex individuality. Today's people experience themselves first as individuals and shares a common longing for psychological self-determination. There are many who have lamented this, seeing only an erosion of community and the spread of narcissism. We, on the other hand, celebrate this psychological achievement as an important milestone in the evolution of humanity.

As a result of these new dreams, a chasm has opened up between people and the organizations upon which they depend. People have undergone a discontinuity in mentality, but organizations have not. Business organizations, and other institutions too, continue to treat the new individuals' actions according to the terms of the older mass society. Individuals reach out from the intricacy of their lives in search of understanding, accommodation, and support, but the complexity of their needs and desires is ignored. Instead, they are greeted by metaphorical equivalent of the assembly line, expressed in the internally consistent set of practices, attitudes, and assumptions we call an enterprise logic.

But the chasm between new individuals and old organizations contains the seeds of the next economic revolution. History suggests that the next great era of commercial innovation will require more than the production or exploitation of new technologies, however creative that undertaking may be. The next revolution in wealth creation will draw life, first and foremost, from a profound grasp of the new society of individuals and its expression in a new kind of consumption. Only the full force of this understanding can ignite the entrepreneurial innovation capable of leading such a revolution and paving the way toward a support economy and new episode of capitalism. That innovation will entail discontinuity. It will be as radical a break with the past as the break that today's people have made with the lives of their grandparents an great-grandparents. It will be as radical a break with the past as managerial capitalism was a break with the practices of proprietary capitalism and craft production that preceded it.

Because of the social media context in which I am operating these days, the authors' contentions about personal meaning arising from an inner suite of feelings rather than through identification with larger groups or institutions drives home. In contrast to the paternalistic, elite-directed political and social movement s of the past, today's bottom-up, emergent, grassroots movements are based on a completely different dynamic:

In contrast, the values surveys of Ronald Inglehard indicate that the new postmaterialists demand true voice. [emphasis mine] Theirs is a psychological reformation that suggests some interesting parallels to the religious reformation of the sixteenth century. Today's individual rejects organizational mediation, seeking instead to have a direct impact on matters that touch his or her life, just as the early Protestants rejected priestly mediation of their relationship to God. In the early twentieth century people joined organizations as a way to reestablish a sense of influence and control in a world that was spinning away from individuals. Now it is those very organizations that make them feel "out of control." They shun those associations in favor of an unmediated relationship to the things they care about. The new individuals thus demand a high quality of direct participation and influence. They have the skills to lead, confer, and discuss, and they are not content to be foot soliders. As one political scientist put it, "legitimacy based on inclusion is replacing legitimacy based on hierarchical authority."