Building the Right Kind of Global Community

I’ve often noted that while AOL wasn’t the first service to connect people to the Internet, we were the first to make it a way of life. Before it took off, I saw myself as a sort of Internet evangelist, trying to get others to believe — as strongly as I did — that this online world would soon change our offline lives. Now, we have come so far that there is no real distinction between the two. The so-called Internet of Things is really the Internet of Everything. I, like Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, believed that building a global community through chat rooms and AOL Instant Messenger — precursors to today's social media platforms — was an unequivocal social good. I believed that these tools would open doors, not close them, for people around the world. I still believe that today.

But as Mark Zuckerberg notes in his thoughtful post, globalization and digitization have not come without costs — and pretty significant ones at that. I first realized this when I started traveling the country, first as Chairman of The Startup America Partnership and later with my firm Revolution’s Rise of the Rest tours — both efforts to shine a spotlight on startup growth and entrepreneurship outside of the coastal tech hubs. Jobs lost to technological progress and globalization have changed communities and altered paths for people and their children that once seemed solidly secure. Because startups are responsible for all new net job creation, I am hopeful that supporting entrepreneurial ecosystems in the middle of the country will change that trajectory. But it will take so much more — both in the U.S. and abroad — to turn the idea of connecting more into something that divides us less.

Mark Zuckerberg once told me that he got his start in coding by hacking Instant Messenger software. That may not have been too much of a challenge for him, but helping to build the right kind of global community is certain to be. I look forward to seeing how he and other tech leaders continue to rise to it.