Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.
Interpretation
Collective efforts toward change can lead to significant movements even if the individuals involved aren't aware of their shared goals.
In this quote, Steven Johnson highlights the organic nature of social movements, where numerous individuals and groups independently start thinking about change, potentially guided by a shared language or ethos. Over time, these individual endeavors converge into a larger collective force or 'wave' that can instigate significant change, illustrating how collaboration and solidarity can emerge without overt recognition of commonalities at the outset.
In practice
During a workshop on community activism, one might reference this quote to inspire participants about the power of grassroots movements.
How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.
The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.
Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on a more local level end up being more adaptive and resilient because there are more minds involved in the problem.
What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.
For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.
We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.
It is true that when there's a drone attack, those - that the - the terrorists are killed, it's true. But 500 and 5,000 more people rises against it, and more terrorism occurs, and more - more bomb blasts occurs.
I don't like to dwell on the past. I'm interested in Fischerandom now, I am working on a new clock, I'm trying to make chess a more exciting game today. I am not interested in sitting in my rocking chair thinking what I did 10, 20 or 30 years ago.
We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.
New beginnings – professional, personal, or come what may – are always uncomfortable, but being open to them is the only way to grow. In the end, we are all capable of so much more than we think.
When we are headed the wrong way, the last thing we need is progress.
In many regions, war and terror prevail. States disintegrate. For many years, we have read about this. We have heard about it. We have seen it on TV. But we had not yet sufficiently understood that what happens in Aleppo and Mosul can affect Essen or Stuttgart. We have to face that now.
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