I don’t claim to have a deep understanding of the matters upon which I speak; rather, I am so curious about them that I cannot help exploring them in unusual or deep ways.

I am thinking at the moment about how the peculiar character of our relationship to ‘news’ compromises our will and capacity to accomplish what is impossible to spectators. For spectators, the ‘result’ of their interactions is usually simply ‘an opinion’. This is a non-result. Or, at best, a contagion of helplessness wearing the costume of concern. Actual concern would have very different results that don’t resemble opinions in that they achieve goals.

But what I really want to think about is how humans become unified and bonded to groups, and how those groups represent species. That is to say ‘types’. In our modern world, most of the types are passive, and these produce opinions or words. But some types are impassioned. These types tend to produce two unique outcomes: atrocities and miracles.

I want to make a simple statement here: the technologies that you possess and relate with give you more power than anyone in history ever had. Your smartphone, your computer… and your ability to directly reach a vast number of people immediately endow you with powers unimaginable for most of human history. And yet we are not using them wisely. Not yet, at least. Your ‘contacts’ represent a possible unity that, if wisely motivated and impassioned could accomplish nearly anything we might desire or imagine.

But the roles we have been trained to largely place is in the passive categories. So we must learn, together, to participate in news, media and technology in very different ways, for purposes radically unlike those now popular.

The first instances of such wise use will become unimaginably contagious. Once a few people manage to use the assets at our disposal with tactical and humane intelligence, they will become a new species. A new kind of human. And frankly, the emotions they will generate in the wider populous will be so profound as to catalyze their need to join this new species.

So I am asking each of us to embark on this path, with a simple goal. To retrieve our humanity and the living environments of earth from the forces that dominate them, obliterate them, counterfeit them, and sell us back the dead results. In this matter I am as willing to follow wise innovators as I am to lead. But this is the task that faces us now, and both the history of life and humanity on Earth depend upon our success.

So let’s stop pretending we can’t change the world. After all, even passivity changes the world. We need a simple plan, a spark if you will, to begin a worldwide transformation. And I know not only that we can ignite this spark, but that we can do it tomorrow. What it requires is simple: a bit of unusual intelligence, one important goal, and the determination to learn how to do this.

The past and future depend upon us. It is time we live up to some of the myths we have too long been telling about human nobility and intelligence. It is time to become a new species; and to invert the dominance of systems and machines over our lives and planet.

Forever.