newspeak

Haiti study: Mass mobile phone tracking can be laudable • The Register.

As a guess–educated guess, of course–I’d say that “migration”–of bodies, but also of information and its proprietary attachments (those elements that make it useful but also valuable, or useless while still being valued)–is the character of this 21st century.

Why? Because, first, we can move as never before, where “we” means humanity. Sure, there are billions imprisoned in their regions. But with the advent of global climate change, and all that it entails, the movement of people, their exodus, will occur as never before.

Think: Equatorial regions, really, all those within the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn (and then more), will be in growing spots (nearly) uninhabitable: too hot, not enough (potable) water, scoured by insects, disease, storm. And it is within these Tropics that the vast portion of humanity lives now and has been trained to live for tens of millennia.

But with no fish, no arable land, no food nor water that doesn’t cause yet more disease and death, there will be a migration away from ancestral homelands to areas where there is still a living to be had.

These areas will of course be already inhabited, and inhabited by those with guns and lots of xenophobic bullets. The point is not that there will be (and there will be) wars over water and arable land–refugee wars, say–but that there will vast movements regardless, and that these will need to be not policed, contained, stemmed, but understood, first and foremost, so that humanity is not lost.