If necessity is the mother of invention, today’s pandemic is the father! All of us alive in these trying times are witnessing a huge change in the economy. If we are lucky enough and smart enough, we are fully engaged in that process. How else can we survive – if not thrive – while working our way back to some form of personal financial stability.

This quandary, and how we are coping with it, is catching the attention of the media.

Events over the last several months have significantly affected not only how the mainstream media thinks about change, but how they portray it in their attempts to make sense of what we are facing. Just we are we dealing with circumstances that are forcing us to find ways of generating an income, any income, some income.

Here is how I see it. As we dived deeper and deeper into the lockdown, our faint hopes for a return to “normalcy” started to fade away into the grim realization of the likely permanency of it all.

A different financial community, connected through Social Media, is arriving

Anyone with a history book or who has a few decades of life under their belts know that humans have lived through adverse economic situations before. This time, however, we have the benefit of another revolution added to the mix: a powerful tool called social media.

This has reshaped our ability not just to receive news, but to comment and react to it in real time. This has created a whole new level of community and community awareness. We are not just passive receptors; rather, through our feedback, rethinking the landscape and sharing breakthroughs we are bringing into existence a different world.

You might ask, what this has this to do with finance?

Until recently we have never been able to shape the narrative or more importantly, co-create powerful, collaborative responses. We have stood on the precipice, never crossing the event horizon until now.

Imagine yourself in today’s casino (banking). Each individual is just that, an individual. On their own, each makes their a bet. Many reading this article can guess the outcome through their personal experience. The bank wins 90% of the time and the meager 10% payout is just there to lure new players and keep the present players somewhat pacified.

But what if the individuals are connected, what if they know the cards, what if they can collectively act on them? Prior to today, this precious group has been Wall Street and their “unfair advantage” has always been to almost everyone else’s disadvantage.

Until now.

Stay tuned to the Economies section of LRT and to later articles I will be writing as a member of its co-creator community. I will be one of many people revealing unusual and compelling ways in which finance is being rethought.

Rethought to the advantage of us, not them.