This video, an amazing on-the-ground point of view compilation of the protests in Rio de Janeiro—one of many throughout Brazil—is making the rounds.

This footage affected me because the fact that these protests are taking place right alongside those in Turkey, another significant country, along with the fact that both are occurring shortly after the Arab Spring and various Occupy movements makes the trend too big to ignore.

When I introduced this blog, I wrote about how we in the Valley can’t ignore the broader aspects of the society we live in—issues like inequality, justice, employment, and education.

As I stated then as well, Steve Jobs was able to create Apple and its iconic products because he appreciated aspects of the arts and humanity in general beyond what was immediately applicable to technology.

In his own words when he introduced the iPad 2:

It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.

And in his commencement speech at Stanford about dropping out of Reed College and auditing calligraphy classes:

I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

I don’t have a solution to offer, but at least we can start asking the questions and having the conversations that may ultimately lead to a solution. If we set the goal to improve the world as we build great technology and great companies, we’ll be able to do it. That’s the amazing thing about creativity—you don’t know when and where the solution will emerge.