Some Days It's Hard to See What Really Matters, Until You Know It

Most days the Web seems about "buy, buy, buy" or "sell, sell, sell." Many a Web tourist peers through a Web-content window, framed by a virtual (and invasive) Times Square-like advertising zipper, stalking their online prey like sidewalk barkers of olden days.

Why complain? After all, didn't we sacrifice and sell our privacy to pay for the Web as we have it? Isn't transacting in our personal information without our knowledge or control what's made Web advertising the boom times they are? Personal identity management? Privacy rights and opt out? Where? How often? Until which mouse click to see what useful content?

But wait. Stop a second. Today, right now, take a deep breath, and then another.

The Web makes us happy. Doesn't it?

Think about your own happiness. Think about your family's happiness. Think about how happy folks are in your town or in towns on the other side of the planet.

Happiness is...? Perhaps not what we think it is.

Bill McKibben's Reversal of Fortune in this month's Mother Jones provides a powerful read to question why globalization (via the Web or during other periods of persistent consumerism) fails to deliver significant doses of lasting happiness.

Take McKibben's cue, browse the World Values Survey to meet your planetary neighbors and see how, once basic needs are met, happiness depends on non-consumption factors.

The Web and globalization are inextricably tied together. That's reality. Like others, I believe we need to trace and reengineer some of the unaccountable impacts of Web commerce that fuel it.

The globalization of our financial systems helps "rich" countries' consumers spend their expansionist economies into trade deficits, so that they resemble "poor" countries, all too dependent on foreign trade subsidy as a form of debt relief. As Frederic Mishkin asked in 2005: Is Financial Globalization Beneficial?

Reversing trends of global unhappiness may take all the promise that the social Web's new paradigm offers, and more: Commonsense.