Let's face it, the world has broken and many of the institutions that have served us well for decades or even centuries have come to the end of their life cycle. From newspapers, record labels, and old models of financial services to our energy grid, transportation systems, and institutions for global cooperation and problem solving. The industrial economy has finally run out of gas. We're at a turning point in human history. At the same time, the contours of a new kind of civilization are becoming clear, as millions of connected citizens begin to forge alternative institutions, using the web as a platform for innovation and value creation. From education and science to new approaches to citizen engagement and democracy, sparkling new initiatives are underway, embracing a new set of principles for the 21st century. Collaboration, openness, sharing, interdependence, and integrity. This finally happening, with the proliferation of social media and social networks, we all have at our fingertips the most powerful tools and platform ever for growth, prosperity, social development, and a just and sustainable world. Social media is becoming social production. In every industry from all walks of life, people are self-organizing, taking us from collaborative innovation in business that we first discuss when we wrote WICANOMICS to macro-wicANOMICS, the art and science of collaboration to change the world, like the printing press before at the new media are enabling nothing less than the birth of a new civilization. Renovating science in healthcare with patients like me, where 80,000 patients are crowdsourcing their data to help doctors, scientists, and their own course of treatment. In Kenya, Ushahidi, a text messaging platform created to document election violence, has grown from helping emergency response teams in Haiti during the earthquake, to helping emergency snow removal in Washington, and even the BBC during the Tube Strike in London. With Galaxy Zoo, 275,000 teachers and students are reinventing science and education by helping astronomers discover and map new galaxies. Network models of the newspaper are providing good journalism, investigative reporting, and ensuring that journals get paid. Old-style radio is collapsing, TV is becoming nothing less than a cool new app, and the failing music industry is being replaced by streaming audio that gives access to millions of songs with fair compensation to musicians and to songwriters. Teachers, professors, and students are using the internet to reinvent education from the industrial model where teachers lecture and students are passive recipients of knowledge to student-focused collaborative learning customized to the needs of the learner. The wiki revolution sweeping the Middle East are harbingers of change. Social media didn't cause the Arab Spring and Justice did. Social media didn't create the revolutions. They were created by a new generation that no longer wanted to be treated as subjects, but just as the internet drops collaboration costs in business, so it also drops the cost of dissent of rebellion and even insurrection. Social change is in the air, perhaps like never before. Occupy Wall Street is the tip of the iceberg of a global movement for a world that's fair and just. The Coney 2012 video was seen by over 100 million people in a week, and the one hand that led to a movement that caused the U.S. Congress to take action and help hunt down the brutal warlord. But on the other, it raises tough issues about these networks. There are accountability, there are legitimacy, there are representation and leadership. Things that are new generation of social innovators and activists must address. This is a time of danger, but fundamentally it's a time of profound change and of great opportunity, and we can achieve a new age of promise fulfilled, but only if we get involved. Which is why I, along with Anthony Williams, wrote macro-wikonomics. We hope that the book will be your field guide to forge new solutions for our connected planet. Let's do this.