I have been working on this list for sometime. Here is a(n ordered) list of TED videos that have offered useful things to think about. Complete with my take-away points / summaries from the official transcript. Here's to a pensive new year!
All of these talks intersect in interesting ways, so I have listed them in the viewing order I feel is best to bring out some of these connections.

Individuals and the Organization

Susan Cain discusses our cultural oppression of introverts and how it deprives our society of important voices.

A third to a half of the population are introverts.
It's different from being shy. Shyness is about fear of social judgment. Introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments. So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us.
Solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity.
We can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions.
And groups follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.
In America's early days, we lived in what historians call a culture of character, where people were valued for their inner selves and their moral rectitude.
In the 20th century, a new culture called the culture of personality had evolved from the transition from an agricultural economy to a world of big business. Instead of working alongside people they've known all their lives, now people are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers.
Three call to action:

Stop the madness for constant group work.
Go to the wilderness. Seek a contemplative environment.
Introverts: Share your ideas and creative products.

Daniel Pink makes a case for more autonomy in the workplace based on evidence from studies on motivation.

21st century tasks, requires overcoming what's called functional fixedness which requires cognitive effort.
[For tasks requiring cognitive effort, financial incentives] dull thinking and blocks creativity.
Once a task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger [extrinsic] reward led to poorer performance.
This has been replicated over and over again for nearly 40 years. This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored. [It's culturally independent, too.]
There is a mismatch between what science knows and what [institutions do].
Too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science.
We need a whole new approach. It's built much more around intrinsic motivation [and] revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose:

Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives.
Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters.
Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

In the 20th century, we came up with this idea of management. Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works better.
[In Summary:]

Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances.
Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity.
The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive — the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things because they matter.

Margaret Heffernan discusses the value of social capital and how superstar or celebrity members of an organization are contraindicated for success.

Companies don't have ideas; only people do. And what motivates people are the bonds and loyalty and trust they develop between each other.
Some groups do better than others, due to their social connectedness to each other.
The really successful teams had three characteristics:

High degrees of social sensitivity to each other
Gave roughly equal time to each other's ideas
Had more women in them (we don't know if this is due to increased social sensitivity or diverse perspective)

Social capital is the reliance and interdependency that builds trust.
It means that time is everything, because social capital compounds with time.
Conflict is frequent because candor is safe.
Motivating people with money erodes social connectedness
We need to redefine leadership as an activity in which conditions are created in which everyone can do their most courageous thinking together.

Margaret Heffernan discusses how disagreement in a safe organization environment is fundamental to problem solving.

In Oxford in the 1950s, there was a fantastic doctor, who was very unusual, named Alice Stewart. Alice Stewart rushed to publish her preliminary findings in The Lancet in 1956. It was fully 25 years before the British and medical — British and American medical establishments abandoned the practice of X-raying pregnant women.
Openness alone can't drive change.
She worked with a statistician named George Kneale, and he actively sought disconfirmation. Because it was only by not being able to prove that she was wrong, that George could give Alice the confidence she needed to know that she was right.
A fantastic model of collaboration — thinking partners who aren't echo chambers.
What does that kind of constructive conflict require? Well, first of all, it requires that we find people who are very different from ourselves. That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy.
We have to be prepared to change our minds.
If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking.
Most of the biggest catastrophes that we've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information [...] that we are willfully blind to [...] But [...] when we dare to see, and we create conflict, we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking.

Biases & Blind Spots

Bruce Schneier acquaints us with how we perceive risk and reality in the context of security.

Security is two different things: it's a feeling, and it's a reality. You could feel secure even if you're not. And you can be secure even if you don't feel it.
If you look at security from economic terms, it's a trade-off. The question to ask when you look at a security anything is not whether this makes us safer, but whether it's worth the trade-off.
We respond to the feeling of security and not the reality. [Due to a number of cognitive] biases in risk perception, [such as:]

We tend to exaggerate spectacular and rare risks and downplay common risks.
The unknown is perceived to be riskier than the familiar.
Personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks.
People underestimate risks in situations they do control and overestimate them in situations they don't control.

[Other biases affect us as well:]

The availability heuristic, which basically means we estimate the probability of something by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind.
The confirmation bias, where we tend to accept data that confirms our beliefs and reject data that contradicts our beliefs.
We respond to stories more than data. So we have trouble with the risks that aren't very common.

These cognitive biases act as filters between us and reality.
If you know stuff, you're more likely to have your feelings match reality.
Feeling is based on our intuition. Model is based on reason. So a model is an intelligent representation of reality.
Where do we get these models? We get them from others [and from experience]. So models can change. Models are not static.
Security depends on the observer and stakeholders with specific trade-offs will try to influence the decision, [this is] their agenda.
Changing models is hard. If they equal your feelings, you don't even know you have a model. New models that extend long periods of time are hard [to create]. Strong feelings can create a model.

Kathryn Schulz talks about being wrong and how we are indoctrinated against it despite how crucial it is to innovation.

We all [feel] very right about everything [in life].
Why do we get stuck in this feeling of being right?

One reason, actually, has to do with a feeling of being wrong. Being wrong [...] feels like being right.
Second reason [is] you've already learned that the way to succeed in life is to never make any mistakes.

We just insist that we're right, because it makes us feel smart and responsible and virtuous and safe.
This internal sense of rightness that we all experience so often is not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in the external world.
Think for a moment about what it means to feel right. It means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality. How are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you? By resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions:

Assume they're ignorant
Assume they're idiots
Assume they know the truth, and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes.

If you really want to [innovate], you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness.

Jonathan Haidt discusses the morality and how morals contribute to one's political leanings.

When people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team, and once you engage the psychology of teams, it shuts down open-minded thinking.
We think the other team must be blinded by religion, or by simple stupidity. So, if you think that half of America votes Republican because they are blinded in this way, then my message to you is that you're trapped in a moral matrix, in a particular moral matrix.
What is morality and where does it come from? We found five — five best matches, which we call the five foundations of morality.

Harm/care — we bond with others, care for others. It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm.
Fairness/reciprocity — The Golden Rule, as the foundation of so many religions.
Loyalty/in-group — It's only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate
Authority/respect — authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality, as it is in other primates. It's based on more voluntary deference.
Purity/sanctity — that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling what you put into your body. While the political right may moralize sex, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food.

Everybody agrees that harm and fairness matter, [even if we debate what's fair].
Moral arguments within cultures are especially about issues of in-group, authority, purity. Order tends to decay. The truth of social entropy.
[Progressives] want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos.
Conservatives want order, even at some cost to those at the bottom, [because] order is really hard to achieve. It's really precious, and it's really easy to lose.
To solve problems, you can't just go charging in, saying, You're wrong, and I'm right.
Everybody thinks they are right.
First, understand, then step out of your moral matrix — that's the essential move to cultivate moral humility

Jonathan Haidt discusses political polarization in the US and proposes some ideas for mitigating it.

Morality binds and blinds: It binds us into teams that circle around sacred values but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.
When people circle [sacred values] together, they unite, they can trust each other, they become one.
You can see the moral electromagnet operating in the U.S. Congress. in the decades after the Civil War, Congress was extraordinarily polarized, but after World War I, things dropped, and we get this historically low level of polarization. This was a golden age of bipartisanship. But in the 1980s and '90s, the electromagnet turns back on. Polarization rises. The polarization is strongest among our political elites.
We will never get back to those low levels of polarization. But there's a lot that we can do.
Three broad classes of problem:

Hyper-partisans get elected [due to self-selection of close primaries]
Congress punishes independent thinking [via corporate speech and the money gun]
The nature of social relationships in Congress [low social capital]

Nothing pulls people together like a common threat, unless of course that threat hits on our polarized psychology, in which case, it can actually pull us apart.
Americans on both sides care about the decline in civility
Let our first mission be to press Congress to reform itself, before it's too late for our nation.

Jonathan Haidt discusses with Chris Anderson the tense cultural-political climate in the US and its origins through the lens of moral psychology.

Three basic principles of moral psychology

We're tribal
Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Driving confirmation bias.
Morality binds and blinds

The size of what we consider us and what we consider other or them can change.
What's possibly the new left-right distinction:

People who want to stop at nation (people who have much more of a sense of being rooted, they care about their town, their community and their nation.)
People who want more global governance, they don't like nation states, they don't like borders (anti-parochial)

The big issue is the issue of immigration: [cultural] diversity cuts social capital and trust. [Ed. Note: This comes from a pro-diversity researcher (Putnam, Robert D., E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century, Scandinavian Political Studies, 30(2), 2007). We don't know how malleable this result is, just that it is robust in the early 21st century American culture.]
If you emphasize our cultural similarity, then race doesn't actually matter very much. So an assimilationist approach to immigration removes a lot of these problems.
You can't persuade the person with reasons and evidence, because that's not the way reasoning works.
What's changed that's deepened this feeling of division?

If your country was at war, especially when you were young, then you'll be more cooperative, even 30 years later, so the loss of the World War II generation, is one.
Another is that the Baby Boomers, now in power, spent their youth fighting each other.
The purification of the two parties.
The Internet as a stimulant for post-hoc reasoning and demonization.
Increased ‘disgust’ – Anger is different you can easily diffuse anger.

You can diffuse disgust through personal relationship, through empathy – not the empathy the you get points for on the Left, empathy with a preferred class of victim, but rather empathy with what your tribe labels as the enemy.
Given the rise of negative partisanship makes it easier for us to vilify each other, it's important to realize that each moral community is living in a matrix, a consensual hallucination, and that, in fact, both sides have value and are correct about different issues.

Creativity & Change

Brene Brown talks about how vulnerability is the crucial ingredient to human connection, authenticity, and creativity.

[Human] connection is why we're here. It's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.
Shame is the fear of disconnection: Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won't be worthy of connection?
Two types of people:

People who really have a sense of worthiness
Folks who struggle for it

There was only one variable that separated them: the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging.
And so these folks had the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly.
We numb vulnerability, [through shopping, eating, addiction, and medication].
The problem is you cannot selectively numb emotion.
The other thing we do is we make everything that's uncertain certain.

Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty.
This is what politics looks like today. There's no discourse anymore. There's no conversation. There's just blame. You know how blame is described in the research? A way to discharge pain and discomfort.

In this talk, Brene Brown continues her discussion of vulnerability examining the epidemic of shame and its gendered realizations.

Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous.
Vulnerability [is defined] as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty [and] vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.
Shame is the gremlin who says, Uh, uh. You're not good enough
[Shame and Guilt are NOT the same:]

Guilt: I'm sorry. I made a mistake.
Shame: I'm sorry. I am a mistake.

Shame [in American society] is organized by gender.
For women, shame is, do it all, do it perfectly and never let them see you sweat. Shame, for women, is this web of unobtainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we're supposed to be. And it's a straight-jacket.
For men shame is one [thing], do not be perceived as weak.
Shame is an epidemic in our culture.

Perspective & Behavior

Dan Gilbert expounds on how and why humans are poor at predicting the value of one's actions and how this leads to bad decision-making.

There are two kinds of errors people make when trying to decide what the right thing is to do:

Errors in estimating the odds that they're going to succeed,
Errors in estimating the value of their own success

[Bad assumption]: the quickness with which things come to mind can give you a sense of their probability. [If] They don't come quickly to mind, we vastly underestimate them.
Estimating odds, as difficult as it may seem, is a piece of cake compared to trying to estimate value.
[It] requires that you ask one, and only one question, which is: What else can I do with [X dollars]? [This will depend on] the context!
Rather than asking, What else can I do with my money, comparing this investment to other possible investments, [people, erroneously,] compare to the past.
This tendency to compare to the past causes people to pass up the better deal [in many situations].
Even when we compare with the possible, instead of the past, we still make certain kinds of mistakes:

The comparisons we make when we are appraising value, are not the same comparisons we'll be making when we consume them.

And the problem, of course, is that this comparison you made is a comparison you'll never make again.

The problem of shifting comparisons is even more difficult when these choices are arrayed over time.

It's notoriously difficult to get people to be farsighted. We [tend to] imagine the near future much more vividly than the far future

By and large people are enormously impatient.
People always think more is better than less and now is better than later, [but] when people get to the future, they will change their minds.

The only thing that can destroy us and doom us are our own decisions. If we're not here in 10,000 years, it's because we underestimated the odds of our future pains and overestimated the value of our present pleasures.

Barry Schwartz discusses the idea that freedom is choice results in too much choice and lowers our quality-of-life.

The official dogma of all Western industrial societies: The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice.
All this choice has two negative effects on people:

It produces paralysis, rather than liberation.
We end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from. [Due to:]

The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose.
Opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose, even when what we choose is terrific.
Escalation of expectations

The secret to happiness is low expectations.
People have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high.
There's no question that some choice is better than none, but it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice.
Income redistribution will make everyone better off — not just poor people — because of how all this excess choice plagues us. [Limits and restrictions on choice and affluence are beneficial.]

Ad-man Rory Sutherland discusses how reframing things can add value by radically changing how people react.

The power of reframing things cannot be overstated.
One of the problems with classical economics is it's absolutely preoccupied with reality. And reality isn't a particularly good guide to human happiness.
Our experiences, costs, [and] things don't actually much depend on what they really are, but on how we view them.
How you frame things really matters. [It] affects how you react to them, viscerally and morally.
We've probably given too much priority to what I call technical engineering solutions, Newtonian solutions, and not nearly enough to the psychological ones.
There's an imbalance, an asymmetry, in the way we treat creative, emotionally-driven psychological ideas versus the way we treat rational, numerical, spreadsheet-driven ideas.
If you're a creative person, you have to go in and you have to have a cost-benefit analysis, a feasibility study, an ROI study and so forth. But this does not apply the other way around. And so we prioritize what I'd call mechanistic ideas over psychological ideas.
[When solving a problem with people involved there are] three domains to consider:

Economic
Technical
Psychological

Economics fails to understand that what something is, is a function, not only of its amount, but also its meaning.
Now if your perception is much worse than your reality, what on earth are you doing trying to change the reality?
Choose your frame of reference and the perceived value and therefore the actual value is completely transformed.

Education

Sir Ken Robinson notes the industrial character of our education model and calls for not reform but innovative revolution.

There is a second climate crisis, which is as severe, which has the same origins — a crisis of human resources.
We make very poor use of our talents.
Education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents.
Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep.
You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.
[We need] education to be transformed into something else.
There are things we're enthralled to in education:

The idea of linearity, [but] life is not linear; it's organic.
The idea of conformity. [By way of metaphor], There are two models of quality assurance in catering.

One is fast food, where everything is standardized.
The other is like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized

We have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.
We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture.
We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process.
And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.

Sir Ken Robinson discusses the principles that cause humans to flourish and how high-performing dictation systems are set up to encourage these principles.

America spends more money on education than most other countries. [Yet we have a] dropout crisis.
Human beings are naturally:

Different and diverse

Curious

Creative

Children are natural learners. It's a real achievement to put that particular ability out, or to stifle it.
Curiosity is the engine of achievement.
There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers.
Teaching, properly conceived, is not a delivery system.
You know, you're not there just to pass on received information. Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, and engage. Education is about learning.
The whole point of education is to get people to learn.
The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. And part of the problem is that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing. Testing, standardized tests, should be diagnostic.
All the high-performing systems in the world:

They individualize teaching and learning.
They attribute a very high status to the teaching profession.
They devolve responsibility to the school level for getting the job done.

[Here, in the states] It's like education is an industrial process that can be improved just by having better data. [It's not and can't]
The real role of leadership in education is not and should not be command and control. The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility.

Sal Khan notes that mastery is crucial for learning and helps students develop a mindset of grit.

Two ideas that are the key leverage points for learning:

The idea of mastery.
The idea of mindset.

This is how you would master a lot of things in life: you would practice as long as necessary, and only when you've mastered it you would move on.
This is not the way a traditional academic model is structured: [We'll take a test] and even though the test identified gaps in our knowledge, the whole class will then move on to the next subject, probably a more advanced subject that's going to build on those gaps.
[This is where disengagement starts].
To appreciate how absurd that is, imagine if we did other things in our life that way. Say, home-building.
The idea of mastery learning is to do the exact opposite.
And it's important to realize that not only will this make the student learn […] better, but it'll reinforce the right mindset muscles. It makes them realize that if you got 20 percent wrong on something, it doesn't mean that you have a C branded in your DNA somehow. It means that you should just keep working on it. You should have grit; you should have perseverance; you should take agency over your learning.
In the industrial age, society was a pyramid. At the base of the pyramid, you needed human labor. In the middle of the pyramid, you had an information processing, a bureaucracy class, and at the top of the pyramid, you had your owners of capital and your entrepreneurs and your creative class. But we know what's happening already, as we go into this information revolution. The bottom of that pyramid, automation, is going to take over. Even that middle tier, information processing, that's what computers are good at.
If we let people tap into their potential by mastering concepts, by being able to exercise agency over their learning, they can get there. Think about the type of equity we can we have, and the rate at which civilization could even progress.

Mathematics & Machines

Roger Antonsen demonstrates the relationship between imagination, empathy, understanding, perspective, pattern, and representation to mathematics.

Understanding has to do with the ability to change your perspective.
That mathematics has to do with patterns.
A pattern is a connection, a structure, some regularity, some rules that govern what we see
And mathematics — it's about finding patterns, it is about representing these patterns, it's about doing cool stuff.
Representations are all over mathematics.
An equation says something is equal to something else: two different perspectives.
Every mathematical equation where you use that equality sign is actually a metaphor. It's an analogy between two things. You're just viewing something and taking two different points of view.
[This is] one of the essential parts of mathematics — you take different points of view.
This is what mathematics is all about. It's about seeing what happens.
Because you have to generalize over everything you see and hear, and if I give you another perspective, that will become easier for you.
And this thing about changing perspectives [...] it's called empathy. [It] requires imagination.
Mathematics and computer science are the most imaginative art forms ever.
There's a really deep connection between empathy and these sciences [if you're doing it right.]

Hans Rosling shows how many in highly industrialized nations misconceive the world and that the data shows a different story.

Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees.
The problem was not ignorance; it was preconceived ideas.
[Students thought:] The world is still 'we' and 'them.' The Western world (‘we’) is long life and small family, and Third World (‘them’) is short life and large family.
In 1962, there was really a group of countries here that was industrialized countries, and they had small families and long lives. And these were the developing countries: they had large families and they had relatively short lives.
In the '90s, we have a completely new world.
If we don't look in the data, I think we all underestimate the tremendous change in Asia, which was in social change before we saw the economic change.
It seems you can move much faster if you are healthy first than if you are wealthy first.
Health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health. You have to get kids into schooling. You have to train health staff. You have to educate the population.

In this talk Susan Etlinger calls for strong critical thinking skills and a greater focus on humanities and social science education, in order for us to better create meaning from data, especially big data. She also points out some of the fallacies we can make otherwise.

You can take data, you can make it mean anything. Data doesn't create meaning. We do.
We have a responsibility, I think, to spend more time focusing on our critical thinking skills.
We have the potential to make bad decisions far more quickly, efficiently, and with far greater impact than we did in the past. Great, right? And so what we need to do instead is spend a little bit more time on things like the humanities and sociology, and the social sciences, rhetoric, philosophy, ethics, because they give us context that is so important for big data, and because they help us become better critical thinkers.
Show your math, because if I don't know what steps you took, I don't know what steps you didn't take, and if I don't know what questions you asked, I don't know what questions you didn't ask. And it means asking ourselves, really, the hardest question of all: Did the data really show us this, or does the result make us feel more successful and more comfortable?

Zeynep Tufekci reveals a bit of how machine intelligence is used and its dangers. Arguing that we should not be surrendering our moral responsibilities as we have so far.

Machine intelligence is here. We're now using computation to make all sort of decisions, but also new kinds of decisions. We're asking questions to computation that have no single right answers, that are subjective and open-ended and value-laden.
We have no [universal computational standards] for decisions in messy human affairs.
Our software is getting more powerful, but it's also getting less transparent and more complex.
Currently, computational systems can infer all sorts of things about you from your digital crumbs, even if you have not disclosed those things.
Not only do you not know what your system is selecting on, you don't even know where to begin to look. It's a black box. It has predictive power, but you don't understand it.
These systems are often trained on data generated by our actions, human imprints. Well, they could just be reflecting our biases, and these systems could be picking up on our biases and amplifying them and showing them back to us, while we're telling ourselves, We're just doing objective, neutral computation.
We cannot outsource our moral responsibilities to machines.
Artificial intelligence does not give us a Get out of ethics free card.
We need to cultivate algorithm suspicion, scrutiny and investigation [and] we need to accept that bringing math and computation to messy, value-laden human affairs does not bring objectivity.

Democracy & Social Change

Ivan Krastev points out five revolutions that both deepened and undermined democracy. He argues that transparency in government is about the management of mistrust and that the extreme push for government transparency may backfire.

I want to question is this very popular [idea] these days that transparency and openness can restore the trust in democratic institutions.
Democracy is the only game in town. The problem is that many people start to believe that it is not a game worth playing. Basically people start to understand that they can change governments, but they cannot change policies.
How did it happen that we are living in societies which are much freer than ever before — at the same time that trust in our democratic institutions basically has collapsed?
Five revolutions which deepened our democratic experience, but at the same time undermined democracy:

The cultural and social revolution of 1968 and 1970s, which put the individual at the center of politics, but which destroyed the idea of collective purpose, in a way.
The market revolution of the 1980s, which signaled: the government does not know better, but which caused a huge increase in inequality.
The end of Communism: the birth of the global world and the destruction of the social contract – wealthy elites have been liberated, don't fear the people, and can't be taxed.
The Internet, which empowered the masses in terms of communicating, observing, and participating in politics, but which creates echo chambers and political ghettos, making it more and more difficult to understand the people who are not like you.
The revolution in brain sciences, changed our understanding of how people make decisions and taught political consultants what really matters is to manipulate the emotions of the people.

What went right is also what went wrong
Some of the things that we love most are going to be also the things that can hurt us most. These days it's very popular to believe that this push for transparency, this kind of a combination between active citizens, new technologies and much more transparency-friendly legislation can restore trust in politics.
Transparency is not about restoring trust in institutions. Transparency is politics' management of mistrust.
We are assuming that our societies are going to be based on mistrust.
Now we're going to have 1984 in reverse. It's not going to be the Big Brother watching you, it's going to be we being the Big Brother watching the political class.
But is this the idea of a free society? For example, can you imagine that decent, civic, talented people are going to run for office if they really do believe that politics is also about managing mistrust?
Are you not afraid that this is going to be a very strong signal to politicians to repeat their positions, even the very wrong positions, because consistency is going to be more important than common sense?
Democracy is about people changing their views based on rational arguments and discussions.
Any unveiling is also veiling. [Regardless of] how transparent our governments want to be, they're going to be selectively transparent.

Yanis Varoufakis warns against taking democracy for granted, reminds us that the corporate world is a democracy-free arena, and suggests two alternative futures.

Democracy. In the West, we make a colossal mistake taking it for granted.
We mistakenly believe that capitalism begets inevitably democracy. It doesn't.
Democracy would be banned if it ever threatened to change anything.
I want to present to you an economic case for an authentic democracy. We need an authentic, boisterous democracy. And without democracy, our societies will be nastier, our future bleak and our great, new technologies wasted.
Speaking of waste, allow me to point out an interesting paradox that is threatening our economies [in 2015]: the twin peaks paradox. One peak is the mountain of debts — its twin, a mountain of idle cash belonging to rich savers and to corporations, too terrified to invest it into the productive activities.
The result is inflated stock exchanges and [increased] house prices, and stagnant wages
This is my quarrel with capitalism. Its gross wastefulness, all this idle cash, should be energized to improve lives, to develop human talents, and indeed to finance all these technologies
Might democracy be the answer? What do we mean by democracy? Aristotle defined democracy as the constitution in which the free and the poor, being in the majority, control government.
[In Athenian democracy,] working poor, who not only acquired the right to free speech, but more importantly, crucially, they acquired the rights to political judgments that were afforded equal weight in the decision-making concerning matters of state.
Now, of course Athenian democracy excluded too many. Women, migrants and, of course, the slaves. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the significance of ancient Athenian democracy on the basis of whom it excluded.
But our liberal democracies today do not have their roots in ancient Athens. They have their roots in the Magna Carta, a charter for masters, not working citizens.
Liberal democracy only surfaced when it was possible to confine the democratic process fully in the political sphere, leaving the economic sphere — the corporate world, if you want — as a democracy-free zone.
Have you wondered why politicians are not what they used to be? It is because one can be in government today and not in power, because power has migrated from the political to the economic sphere, which is separate.
So the more capitalism succeeds in taking the demos out of democracy, the taller the twin peaks and the greater the waste of human resources and humanity's wealth.
Clearly, if this is right, we must reunite the political and economic spheres and better do it with a demos being in control...
The lesson that we learned from the Soviet debacle is that only by a miracle will the working poor be re-empowered, as they were in ancient Athens, without creating new forms of brutality and waste.
There is a solution: eliminate the working poor. Capitalism's doing it by replacing low-wage workers with automata, androids, robots. The problem is that as long as the economic and the political spheres are separate, automation makes the twin peaks taller, the waste loftier and the social conflicts deeper.
What could it look like to have this democratic reunified sphere, instead of dystopia?
At the level of the enterprise, you [would] earn capital as you work, and your capital follows you from one job to another, from one company to another.
Companies are solely owned by those who happen to work in them at that moment. No more separation between capital and labor; no great gap between investment and saving; indeed, no towering twin peaks.
At the level of the global political economy, our national currencies [would] have a free-floating exchange rate, with a universal, global, digital currency, one. All international trade is denominated in this currency with every government agreeing to be paying into a common fund a sum of currency units proportional to the country's trade deficit, or indeed to a country's trade surplus.
The world that I am describing to you is simultaneously libertarian, in that it prioritizes empowered individuals, Marxist, since it will have confined to the dustbin of history the division between capital and labor, and Keynesian, global Keynesian. But above all else, it is a world in which we will be able to imagine an authentic democracy.

Zeynep Tufekci compares recent social change movements for the Civil Rights Movement to reveal why current movements' outcomes are so poorly given the size and energy of the movement.

The way technology empowers social movements can also paradoxically help weaken them.
Nowadays, a network of tweets can unleash a global awareness campaign. A Facebook page can become the hub of a massive mobilization. Amazing.
The achievements they were able to have, their outcomes, are not really proportional to the size and energy they inspired.
Easier to mobilize does not always mean easier to achieve gains.
[You can go from a single e-mail to] one of the largest global protests ever organized.
Now, compare that to what the Civil Rights Movement had to do in 1955 Alabama: mimeograph 52,000 leaflets, distribute those leaflets by hand, massive carpool was organized. The logistical tasks were daunting [and] They had to meet almost all the time to keep this carpool going.
The Civil Rights Movement in the United States navigated a minefield of political dangers, faced repression and overcame, won major policy concessions, navigated and innovated through risks.
In contrast, three years after Occupy sparked that global conversation about inequality, the policies that fueled it are still in place.
What we're doing is taking the fast routes and not replacing the benefits of the slower work. Because, you see, the kind of work that went into organizing all those daunting, tedious logistical tasks did not just take care of those tasks, they also created the kind of organization that could think together collectively and make hard decisions together, create consensus and innovate, and maybe even more crucially, keep going together through differences.
[In] 1963, you don't just see a march and you don't just hear a powerful speech, you also see the painstaking, long-term work that can put on that march. And if you're in power, you realize you have to take the capacity signaled by that march, not just the march, but the capacity signaled by that march, seriously.
Today's movements scale up very quickly without the organizational base that can see them through the challenges.
The magic is not in the mimeograph. It's in that capacity to work together, think together collectively, which can only be built over time with a lot of work.
Today's social movements want to operate informally. They do not want institutional leadership. They want to stay out of politics because they fear corruption and cooptation. [...]But operating this way makes it hard for them to sustain over the long term and exert leverage over the system, which leads to frustrated protesters dropping out, and even more corrupt politics.

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