Next Agenda

The Obama Moment and America's Next Agenda

This website is a temporary landing pad for Next Agenda, a new media startup business that brings together top people to help solve America’s biggest challenges and exposes the process to a wide range of audiences who also can get involved. The company Next Agenda now has secured significant angel investment and is creating a new website that will launch soon.

This website has been a base for Peter Leyden, the founder and CEO of Next Agenda, who has been working at the intersection of politics and technology for the last four years. Here I lay out a big picture analysis of the extraordinary historic moment America is going through – what I call “The Obama Moment.” I make the case for The Obama Moment in a short written essay and in this very intense, entertaining talk done in the style of the TED conference, with highly visual multimedia. The talk was done in Copenhagen this October and explains the paradigm shift that happened in politics and the one just now starting in policy-making and governing. The formal talk lasts 30 minutes, with the rest showing discussion with the European audience. Check out the video and the rest of the website where you can learn more about Peter Leyden and Next Agenda. Just below the video you can find occasional posts too.

Historic Election? It's Even a Bigger Deal than Most Think

The Obama election is historic for all the reasons that everyone has been talking about (first black president, etc.), but most people are not thinking big enough. Ultimately, in the long run of American history, this election will be seen as the beginning of building the great global 21st century civilization. It will go down as the moment when the American people flipped the switch from one path, one philosophy, one vision of America, and shifted to a very different one. That new path is not clear yet, but the general direction is toward finally confronting the challenges of the 21st century and creating system change on a level that we have seen only a handful of times in American history.

The ultimate solution for confronting 21st century challenges like global climate change, global financial collapse and global terrorism, (to name but a few), is to build a new kind of global system that would work for the long haul, meaning decades if not the entire century. A core component of that new system has to be the monumental shift from dirty oil and carbon-based energy to clean renewable ones, and a fundamental redesign of how people in both the developed and developing worlds live in a much more sustainable way. In effect, all that change adds up to the creation of a global 21st century civilization. We either figure that out in the next 25 years or so, or the planet and civilization as we know it won’t survive. That’s not hyperbole, but the growing consensus of all kinds of scientists and knowledgeable people who are seriously looking ahead.

Few people voting for Obama pulled the lever as a vote for creating a global 21st century civilization. Obama himself never articulated the choice that way and probably doesn’t think about it that way either. But if we are talking history, and looking at this moment in America from an historical perspective, then people in 50 years, 100 years, even 500 years from now will look back on the election of 2008 as the start of one of the greatest transformations in American history, the beginning of America leading the world into a new era of global cooperation and sustainable living that allowed those future generations of Americans to look back on their history with pride.