Burning Man has become a meme.  A fast moving, rapidly expanding, global meme.

That was my take away from being at Burning Man this year.  It has moved beyond the San Francisco Bay area word of mouth organic growth of the 1990s and the 2000s and blown up into a phenomenon.

I first became aware of the Burning Man gathering about 10 years ago.  I was struck by the unique and amazingly creative images I saw in the media.  As a non-camper I was impressed that thousands of people would journey to a dusty Indian reservation in the northwest corner of Nevada …

In the last column here I wrote about the decline in what used to be called privacy.  The definition of privacy is mutable, ever changing.  What was considered private 100 years ago, even 20 years ago is practically non-existent today.  As I wrote in 2006 before the iPhone and all devices that have followed  “Technology Increases, Privacy Declines” One of the characteristics of the Shift Age is that all of us now live with two realities, the physical  reality and screen reality.

So, the uproar around Mr. Snowden’s disclosure of PRISM and how much the NSA, with …

Now that PRISM has been revealed, there is and will be significant discussions about personal privacy and government monitoring of personal communications.  There are several levels or developing issues and trends that this very significant revelation triggers for all of us to think about.    Here and in future columns we will look at the major dynamics at play and take a look at what they suggest for the future.

Privacy

It is the rare speech Q&A session that I am not asked about privacy and the future of privacy.  The fast answer is that there is no longer any privacy.  Privacy as …

In two recent columns, here and here, I wrote about two of the three consumer economic trends that are and will dramatically change consumer and buyer behavior well into the 2020s.  In this column I address the third major consumer economic trend, moving from an ownership to a rental society.  This trend as with the prior two will be prevalent primarily in the developed world and then spread globally in a decade or so.

Four years ago I started to suggest that in the United States, the reorganizational recession of 2007-2010 might have broken the aspirational, patriotic …