Hi! I’m futurist David Houle and I want to talk to you about the five contexts of the Shift Age. 

Now, the Shift Age is much more contextual than the Information Age was. In the Information Age, the cliché was “content is king.” In the Shift Age, “context is king.” If you understand the context of the Shift Age, you can better understand all the change and all the dynamics that are occurring. 

The five contexts of the Shift Age are the Earth Century, Retrofitting the 20^th Century, the Concept of Place has Changed Forever, the Merging of Technology and Biology, and the New Evolutionary Shift of Consciousness.

The Earth Century, this is a century where humanity is the single greatest impact of anything on the planet on the biosphere. The subset of that is thinking about Earth as Spaceship Earth. As McLuhan said, “There are no passengers in Spaceship Earth, we are all crew.” So the Earth Century.

The second context, Retrofitting the 20^th Century. This is the first time in human history where we’re going to have to go back and retrofit what we did in the last century. In the 20^th century, we’d quadrupled our population and we basically paved the planet and we’ve institutionalized transportation to say the internal combustion engine. We’re going to have to go back and retrofit the 20^th century to fully live out and change for the 21^st century. 

The third, the Concept of Place has Changed Forever. Since there’s no time, distance, or place limiting human communication, we are stepping out of placeness which is always contained throughout history. In fact, we’re stepping into spaceness, the global space of the neurosphere.

The fourth, the Merging of Biology and Technology. That’s pretty apparent. We get bionics in the body. There’s biological chips going into computers. It used to be as recently 10 years ago, biology is nature and technology is humanity. Now, they are merging.

The fifth and final, perhaps the most important ultimately, is the New Evolutionary Shift in Consciousness. I think sometime by the 2020’s, we’re going to start going to a higher level of consciousness of connectivity directly with each other. All the directions point to that.

The five contexts of the Shift Age, if you understand them and hold them in your mind, you’ll better be able to navigate the future of the next 10 to 20 years.