The information age is bringing rapid changes and challenges to our businesses, our schools, our institutions, our government agencies, our communities, and our family households.

This brings us complexity in dynamics across all aspects of society: culture, politics, national security, commerce, crime, and civil liberties.

This also brings an onslaught of regulatory challenges, that quite frankly, I’m incredibly pessimistic our regulatory agencies will not be able to move quick enough and capable of adopting smart-regulation that doesn’t slow down the speed of light productivity required to be successful in the Cyber domain.

What ultimately can we do today? What do our children need to be prepared for? How has internet culture dominated influence across Cyber-space?

Cyber is short-hand for Cybernetics.

According to Wikipedia, Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach concerned with regulatory and purposive systems — their structures, constraints, and possibilities. The core concept of the discipline is circular causality or feedback — that is, where the outcomes of actions are taken as inputs for further action. Cybernetics is concerned with such processes however they are embodied, including in ecological, technological, biological, cognitive, and social systems, and in the context of practical activities such as designing, learning, managing, and conversation.

The basic premise of complexity theory is that there is a hidden order to the behavior (and evolution) of complex systems, whether that system is a national economy, an ecosystem, an organization, or a production line. In business and finance, complexity theory places its focus on the ways a factory or company resemble an ecosystem or market, rather than a machine “whose parts and functions have been plucked out in advance,” according to David Berreby. He maintains that the organization of systems is no accident, but “the results of laws of nature that we don’t yet fully understand.” Once understood, managers will learn that if left to function on their own, systems organize themselves, bringing about “order for free.” Source: Reference For Business

Wow that just got really complicated, really fast — let me simplify… All this means is within Cyber-space is the infinite feedback loop of our interactions with a variety of complex systems in the Information Age.

Our interactions with our work and daily tools — social platforms, the content we ingest, the media we consume — which by now you can understand is primarily done through the means of internet systems whether financial/accounting, HR, social media, monetary (SWIFT), IT solutions, automation tools, marketing, etc.

The point is: all data, networks, complex systems and their inter-connected cause and effect create our inter-connected reality.

Children in school live in this Cybernetic society yet go through education without being taught the nuances on how deep it affects our society.

Our education system, that was designed in the 1900s, is not doing the justice needed to prepare our children for the road and problems ahead.

Therefore, we must take it into our own hands to evangelize even just conceptually cyber dynamics and not be afraid of digging into the technical disciplines it requires to understand. We must share and learn from each other the techniques advantageous to our well being and livelihood in this environment.

We often think of STEM as a non-creative discipline. I fundamentally disagree, creativity by combining the arts and science opens infinite potential for our future generations to build. We must not shy away from getting uncomfortable with our skill development.

We are constantly over-stimulated in this cyber society. So mindfulness, breathing, and detoxing our minds from this space will become integral to conquering the challenges ahead, together.

What should children be learning?

  1. Learning what's under the hood of these powerful desktop and mobile devices that enable instant information sharing, business collaboration, and communications especially in a post COVID world such as basics of computing, OSI model, Cloud, web 3.0, cyber security, networks, RESTful, learning new software tools, leveraging open-source, etc.
  2. Understand the psychological and mental health impacts of constant internet media consumption and addictions. Be aware of the disassociate disorders and depression pro-longed isolation and lack of physical human connection brings. The power memes serve to individuals and even nation-states.
  3. The paradoxes quantum theory brings across the board for the arts and sciences. Big questions to make them curious about the world around them. Actionable leadership to drive manifestable change with problems humanity has not encountered before.

What should organizations be doing?

  1. Adopting zero-trust security as an organizational principle. Enabling the health and telemetry of identity and devices across their networks to reduce the blast radius of Cyber threats.
  2. Defensive & offensive methodologies that enable a Cyber educated + aware staff such as phishing, suspicious emails/senders, red team + blue teams, etc.
  3. Ongoing education and enablement centered around community & organizational cyber security.

What should government be doing?

  1. Enabling collaboration and partnerships with small business owners, mom and pop shops, and companies to be prepared to deal with nation-state Cyber threats such as China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea.
  2. Enforcing repercussions and immediate offensive responses to threat actors causing damage to our market and critical infrastructure.
  3. Forcing legal minded regulators to adopt agile and innovative growth mindsets to not burden those on the grey line of policy that have good faith intentions for their community, cities, and country.
  4. Fundamentally understand the technology their agency is regulating while maintaining ease of entry to markets for small-business and entrepreneurs.

What should families be doing?

  1. Strategizing their Cyber estate through a variety of elements such as: protecting and monitoring you children's online activity against predators and malicious traffickers, fortifying digital-assets primed for expanded cyber economics while understanding custodian and counter-party risks. Pushing your children to lead the family in these new-age disciplines.
  2. Communicating and processing trauma of the family lineage to organize, collaborate, and build deeper family relationships specifically with mental health and wellbeing front and center within an information era context + history.
  3. Getting uncomfortable and having humility to accept that older generations do not have the answers for these new-age challenges and embracing dialogue and ideas from younger family members.

Information is moving faster than we can process with our brains. Adopt and learn the tools that augment your human experience, enable your family for abundance, and be apart of and build the holistic success of our inter-connected future.

Cyber education is essential. Start thinking how Cyber education can augment and enhance your quality of life by saving time, automation, simplified understanding of systems, know the cause and effect to your feedback loops.

Godspeed.

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Content produced by Yeetum, LLC and authored by Cristobal Torres-Valderas. If you’re interested to learn more about our work, what we do, and partnering with us — visit yeetum.com

Yeetum LLC, Yeetum is a hybrid cloud & investment cyber agency.