The network age without courage
„And that has many implications. That means your connections are more of a source of power. If you go back a couple hundred years, the land you owned was a really big source of power.
I wonder if part of what is happening is, in an age of network power, courage becomes harder. Because if you think back to that person whose power came from being rooted in the community — they had some land, they were somebody in the town, maybe they were the deacon in the church on the weekend. They had multiple kinds of clout. They had some money they gave to the local civic thing. They maybe had a bunch of different things that might make them courageous about some other thing, so that if someone started to take over their political party who was a fascist, they would have support from their church community or from the sports league they were associated with — these other things.
A lot of those things have vanished. And your power really consists of your position and your number of connections and the density and quality and lucrativeness of those connections in the network.
And if you go to a place like TED or the Aspen Institute, you see this working. No one cares about the land you have or your family name or these other things that have mattered for most of human history. It is really about: Do you know this person? Do you know this person?
I just wonder if courage is a value that has suffered in a network age, because to be courageous is to break ties. And the more valuable ties become — the more exponentially valuable more ties become — the more exponentially expensive it is to cut off that tie, to burn that bridge.“
by Anand Giridharadas
This is the result when #buyEuropean and #buyfromEU works. 👏🏼