The rise of technology has made our lives easier. Thanks to technology, we are no longer limited to people and places by proximity. Technology has allowed us to communicate and interact with people halfway across the globe and has also allowed us to travel to places beyond this world. People travel farther to work, companies expand into more and more countries, and governments deal with bigger and trickier problems often involving more than one country. However, as technology and globalization expands and changes society, humans and the way that we think and act, seems to be unchanged. We still deal with the same problems such as greed—from the power hungry king usurping a peasant’s land to the money loving CEO who’s willing to betray his company’s loyal customers to put more dollars in his pocket. Problems present in the past are still problems society deals with today. In society today, change is apparent, but it is not so much that humans have changed rather than the technologies and instruments that we use that have changed the most.

The three articles highlight the stagnant nature of humans despite changes in globalization and technology. In Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Berman notes that “Virtually no one today seems to want to make the large human connections that the idea of modernity entails.” In the past, making the large human connections as Berman described was a hard feat to accomplish due to factors such as distance, language barriers, etc. Now, however, technology has been able to overcome these obstacles, yet it is still hard for us to make these connections. For this reason, Berman argues, many artists and intellectuals have simply stripped modernity from their works, thus adding on to the stagnant nature of humans. In Beck’s “What is Globalization?,” Beck argues that despite the advances business have made, there is still a great divide between the rich and the poor. Beck argues that those who run transnational corporations have so much power to influence politics that they are undermining those who are actually working for a living. This problem of greed and class divide was what drove Karl Marx, and yet years after his death, are still ever so present. The article from The Economist, “Rocket Machine: How to Build Companies From a Kit,” focuses on an European company that regurgitates already working business models and implements them in new markets. This lack of idea originality also adds on to the idea of a stagnant human nature, because there is no innovation or novelty in the company’s business. Rather than create something new, as a business is supposed to do, the company is simply copy and pasting old ideas into new markets.

The idea of stagnancy of humans can help us understand the three articles and the increasingly complex world 21^st century New York is in, because it forces us to strip away the technological advances humans have made and focus on the intellectual and social advances and problems that are facing us today. Though technology is an useful tool, it is not the means by which humans solve the problems that we faced in the past and the ones that we will face in the future.