21st Century Revolutions, Sustainability, and the Challenge to Power

The new enabling factor in 21st century revolutions arising since year 2000 is global hyper connectivity from computers, search engines and now cell phones; it is obliterating the local and creating a new global-local geography. Dignity is the old and eternal motivational factor in 21st century revolutions.

Hyper connectivity has empowered a new societal capacity for smart innovation from the bottom by enabling access to self-education and resources. This has created a new role for leadership of companies, communities, and countries: "[inspiring, empowering, enabling, and then editing and melding] all that innovation coming from the bottom up. But that requires more freedom for the bottom."

Understanding this new shift in the source of economic and political power presents leaders, and the people of the world, with a unique option: embrace the change and ride the wave, or resist the change and wipe out. History is on the side of the latter, but the sustainability challenge of the 21st century demands the former.

OP-ED COLUMNIST Advice for China By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: June 4, 2011

FROM: Ministry of State Security TO: President Hu Jintao

SUBJECT: The Arab Spring

Dear President Hu: You asked for our assessment of the Arab Spring. Our conclusion is that the revolutions in the Arab world contain some important lessons for the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, because what this contagion reveals is something very new about of how revolutions unfold in the 21st century and something very old about why they explode.