The Hames Report

The Next Renaissance

To me, "Personal Democracy" is an oxymoron. Democracy may be a lot of things, but the last thing it should be is "personal." I understand "personal responsibility," such as a family having a recycling bin in which they put their glass and metal every week. But even then, a single recycling bin for a whole building or block would be more efficient and appropriate.

Democracy is not personal, because if it's about anything, it's not about the individual. Democracy is about others. It's about transcending the self and acting collectively. Democracy is people, participating together to make the world a better place.

One of the essays in this conference's proceedings - the book "Rebooting Democracy" - remarks snarkily, "It's the network, stupid." That may go over well with all of us digital folks, but it's not true. It's not the network at all; it's the people. The network is the tool - the new medium that might help us get over the bias of our broadcasting technologies. All those technologies that keep us focused on ourselves as individuals, and away from our reality as a collective.

This focus on the individual, and its false equation with democracy, began back in the Renaissance. The Renaissance brought us wonderful innovations, such as perspective painting, scientific observation, and the printing press. But each of these innovations defined and celebrated individuality. Perspective painting celebrates the perspective of an individual on a scene. Scientific method showed how the real observations of an individual promote rational thought. The printing press gave individuals the opportunity to read, alone, and cogitate. Individuals formed perspectives, made observations, and formed opinions.

The individual we think of today was actually born in the Renaissance. The Vesuvian Man, Da Vinci's great drawing of a man in a perfect square and circle - independent and self-sufficient. This is the Renaissance ideal.

It was the birth of this thinking, individuated person that led to the ethos underlying the Enlightenment. Once we understood ourselves as individuals, we understood ourselves as having rights. The Rights of Man. A right to property. The right to personal freedom.

The Enlightenment - for all its greatness - was still oh, so personal in its conception. The reader alone in his study, contemplating how his vote matters. One man, one vote. We fight revolutions for our individual rights as we understood them. There were mass actions, but these were masses of individuals, fighting for their personal freedoms.

Ironically, with each leap towards individuality there was a corresponding increase in the power of central authorities. Remember, the Renaissance also brought us centralized currencies, chartered corporations, and nation states. As individuals become concerned with their personal plights, their former power as a collective moves to central authorities. Local currencies, investments, and civic institutions dissolve as self-interest increases. The authority associated with them moves to the center and away from all those voting people.

The media of the Renaissance - the printing press - is likewise terrific at myth-making. At branding. Its stories are told to individuals, either through books, or through broadcast media directed at each and every one of us. Its appeals are to self and self-interest.

Consider any commercial for blue jeans. Its target audience is not a confident person who already has a girlfriend. The commercial communicates, "wear these jeans, and you'll get to have sex." Who is the target for that message? An isolated, alienated person who does not have sex. The messaging targets the individual. If it's a mass medium, it targets many many individuals.

Movements, like myths and brands, depend on this quality of top-down, Renaissance-style media. They are not genuinely collective at all, in that there's no promotion of interaction between the people in them. Instead, all the individuals relate to the hero, ideal, or mythology at the top. Movements are abstract - they have to be. They hover above the group, directing all attention towards themselves.

As I listen to people talk here - well-meaning progressives, no doubt - I can't help but hear the romantic, almost desperate desire to become part of a movement. To become part of something famous, like the Obama campaign. Maybe even get a good K-street job out of the connections we make here. It's a fantasy perpetrated by the TV show West Wing. A myth that we want to be part of. But like any myth, it is a fantasy, and one almost entirely prefigured by Renaissance individualism.

The next renaissance (if there is one) - the phenomenon we're talking about or at least around here is not about the individual at all, but about the networked group. The possibility for collective action. The technologies we're using - the biases of these media - cede central authority to decentralized groups. Instead of moving power to the center, they tend to move power to the edges. Instead of creating value from the center, like a centrally issued currency, the network creates value from the periphery.

This means the way to participate is not simply to subscribe to an abstract, already-written myth, but to do real things. To take small actions in real ways. The glory is not in the belief system or the movement, but in the doing. It's not about getting someone elected, it's about removing the obstacles to real people doing what they need to to get the job done. That's the opportunity of the networked, open source era: to drop out of the myths and actually do.

Sadly, we tend to miss the great opportunities offered us by major shifts in media.

The first great renaissance in media, the invention of the alphabet, offered a tremendous leap for participatory democracy. Only priests could read and write hieroglyphs. The invention of the alphabet opened the possibility for people to read or even possibly write, themselves. In Torah myth, Moses goes off with his father-in-law to write the laws by which an enslaved people could now live. Instead of simply accepting legislation and government as a pre-existing condition - the God Pharaoh - people would develop and write down the law as they wanted it. Even the Torah is written in the form of a contract, and God creates the world with a word.

Access to language was to change a world of blind, enslaved rule followers into a civilization of literate people. (This is what is meant when God tells Abraham "you will be a nation of priests." It means they are to be a nation of people who transcend heiro-glyphs or "priestly-writing" to become literate.)

But this isn't what happened. People didn't read Torah—they listened as their leaders read it to them. Hearing was a step up from simply following, but the promise of the new medium had not been seized.

Likewise, the invention of the printing press did not lead to a civilization of writers - it developed a culture of readers. Gentlemen sat reading books, while the printing presses were accessed by those with the money or power to use them. The people remained one step behind the technology. Broadcast radio and television are really just an extension of the printing press: expensive, one-to-many media that promote the mass distribution of the stories and ideas of a small elite.

Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them. Everyone is a blogger, now. Citizen bloggers and YouTubers who believe we have now embraced a new "personal" democracy. Personal, because we can sit safely at home with our laptops and type our way to freedom.

But writing is not the capability being offered us by these tools at all. The capability is programming - which almost none of us really know how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our blog text in the appropriate box on the screen. Nothing against the strides made by citizen bloggers and journalists, but big deal. Let them eat blog.

At the very least on a metaphorical level, the opportunity here is not to write about politics or, more likely, comment on what someone else has said about politics. The opportunity, however, is to rewrite the very rules by which democracy is implemented. The opportunity of a renaissance in programming is to reconfigure the process through which democracy occurs.

If Obama is indeed elected - the first truly Internet-enabled candidate - we should take him at his word. He does not offer himself as the agent of change, but as an advocate of the change that could be enacted by people. It is not for government to create solar power, for example, but to get out of the way of all those people who are ready to implement solar power, themselves. Responding to the willingness of people to act, he can remove regulations developed on behalf of the oil industry to restrict its proliferation.

In an era when people have the ability to reprogram their reality, the job of leaders is to help facilitate this activity by tweaking legislation, or by supporting their efforts through better incentives or access to the necessary tools and capital. Change does not come from the top - but from the periphery. Not from a leader or a myth inspiring individuals to consent to it, but from people working to manifest it together.

Open Source Democracy - which I wrote about a decade ago - is not simply a way to get candidates elected to office. It is a collective reprogramming of the social software, a disengagement from the myths through which we abdicate responsibility, and a reclamation of our role as citizens who participate in the creation of the society in which we want to live.

This is not personal democracy at all, but a collective and participatory democracy where we finally accept our roles as the fully literate and engaged adlts who can make this happen.

The Next Renaissance was Douglas Rushkoff's keynote address at the Personal Democracy Forum that took place June 23-24 in New York City, at Frederick P. Rose Hall. Douglas is an author, lecturer, and social theorist and The Next Renaissance is reprinted here with his permission. His books include Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace, Media Virus! and Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say.

 

 

Dichotomies

Recently I was drawn into an intriguing and entirely amicable exchange of ideas relating to the fiscal position of the US relative to the state of the global economy.

Three points were being made by an online trader who chooses to characterise himself as a right-wing libertarian on his blog. I will refer to him simply as Alan. Although I would never think to classify myself in that manner I found myself agreeing, at least in part, with Alan's initial claims about the decline of “Brand America”.

Alan’s first claim described the US economy as one burdened by unsustainable debt, a worsening in living standards and an inability to compete internationally. The second declared the US dollar, being the global reserve currency, a two-edged sword within that specific context: in other words it uniquely permits the US government to print money which, especially after the financial crisis of 2008, has extended its liabilities to the point of insolvency. The third indicated the critical role innovation must play (especially as a universally-recognized value in US culture) in restoring the American economy to its former vitality.

Differences only became evident when Alan began to insist there is only one way to go about the latter task. That way, according to him, is to give people the freedom to create enterprise, relying on individual entrepreneurs to generate wealth for society and allowing markets to self-regulate, with little or no interference from the state. He then started to deride countries like China where a communitarian ethos, nuanced by a relatively short period of communism, has since resulted in a society where, he contends, creativity does not exist and most people live under a yoke of oppression.

I am on the record as having been highly critical of many of China's approaches to its problems - especially environmental and human rights issues. But I always attempt to put such criticism in perspective - to appreciate the conditions under which Chinese leaders have brought millions of people out of poverty, while making adequate provisions for the needs of the new middle classes, recovering from the worst excesses of Mao's cultural revolution, and dealing with the soul-destroying impacts of massive environmental degradation, all at the same time. This is unprecedented. No other nation in history has been faced with such dilemmas on such a scale. I happen to think they are not doing a bad job of it. Furthermore they have not been distracted by deliberately and systematically initiating conflict and societal disruption around the world – unlike some who claim to be purer than pure. 

Alan's views endorse the popular, though thoroughly discredited, monetarist notions of Milton Friedman - especially in the form of the economic "shock therapy" he advised should be used in pre-revolutionary Chile and Cuba to effect regime change. Basically Friedman believed that an individual’s right to generate wealth should supersede community interest – a view similarly expressed by Friedrich Hayek.

And so it was that I was reproached by Alan for being a socialist. This contention apparently arose from his hypothesis that if my thinking did not explicitly accord with his own interpretation of “an individual’s liberty and rights” then I must inevitably advocate collectivism - which would then brand me as a socialist or, even worse, a communist.

The fact that I neither advocate collectivism as a panacea, nor belittle individual rights, is neither here nor there, though the sloppy use of language in assuming socialism to be synonymous with collectivism irks me somewhat. My real irritation arises from the fact that so many people are still taught to think in this generalised manner – divorced from any ethical taxonomy of ideas and readily accepting theoretical abstractions they often do not understand, and are even less inclined to contest, in which to frame their beliefs.

But perhaps all of that is about to change. As communities around the world rise up against unfairness and injustice, awakening from their lethargy to confront the more obvious inequities in our current systems of production, governance and consumption, many subtle distinctions for expressing and organising ideas are starting to populate the language. Labels we may have happily used to represent an idea in the past are mostly inadequate for describing the variety of opinions, feelings and desires emancipated into our world today. Far greater precision and granularity is needed. Resorting to orthodox classifications such as collectivism and individualism in order to portray the differences between highly sophisticated, multilayered agendas and ideologies, especially when that is done merely to discount or deny a pivotal idea, is either laziness or sheer mischief. In either case it is inexcusable. And if emotionally charged statistics are triggers to this sloppy way of thinking, let us remember that the Soviet experiment with communism taught us far more, and ultimately damaged far fewer lives, than the US's imperialistic, neverending (yet ultimately futile) war on terror.

But back to my main point. A new panarchical language is evolving - its vocabulary a developmental technology enabling the human family, connected to each other and embedded within nature, to remain individually and collectively inventive, but also ensuring altruistic qualities such as empathy and wisdom are fundamental design criteria for shaping progress on this planet. This is a language that includes and transcends obsolete generalisations and abstractions in order that original ideas and motivations can evolve and take flight - but within a rewnewed shared purpose.

Let us take the concept of the market as an example. Markets are vital to our future. But markets are only one economic contractual mode, another being barter for example. There is certainly no reason for markets as currently constructed to apply to everything we produce, transact and consume. Nor are markets free - a delusion supported by nice theoretical statements and perpetuated by yet another sloppy use of language. It is just that the costs are hidden from view. Indeed in their current highly politicised form (driven by a toxic mix of competitive business interests and the maintenance of power – usually in the form of rich countries wanting to ensure adequate supplies of essential resources like oil, for example) many markets have become surrogates used to distort reality and fortify old industries and regimes. Unregulated, markets simply cannot be trusted to provide adequately for humanity as a whole.

I readily concede that is not the view shared by most conservatives. If we look at recent history, especially the way Milton Friedman and his Chicago disciples wreaked havoc in Chile and Cuba (and, by implication, in Thatcher’s UK and Reagan’s US) by applying "free market" principles as a weapon of choice to reduce potentially viable economies to a near state of feudalism and class warfare, we might be forgiven for thinking that money is all that matters and should be used purely to keep the rich wealthy by humiliating and destroying the poor and degrading the environment.

But if we are at all concerned for the wellbeing of future generations and the need to sustain the abundance of life on Earth, it is obvious that economies and markets must be designed differently – with a revitalized purpose that serves the majority, social architectures reflecting current and future priorities, and an autopoietic capability to maintain relevance and viability.

This is precisely why I am arguing for a better balance between individual wealth (generated by individuals through entrepreneurship) and the wealth of the commons (generated by nature and communities). The way capitalism is currently utilised is destructive because it rampages over the needs of the majority. But disaster capitalism is like a zombie in that it refuses to die. At least soviet communism had the good grace to admit defeat!

So a major problem still is in our thinking and in the language we use to explain that thinking. In the West we continue to construct reality in past heroic terms and are unwilling (or unable) to include and transcend orthodox economic mechanisms that have brought some of us so much wealth and comfort, even though they are no longer sufficient for our collective needs.

In Greek philosophy nomos (laws and customs) is used in the service of logos (knowledge and purpose). A more pertinent way of expessing this idea is to accept that economies should be implanted within (i.e. be of service to) social and natural ecologies. Since the early 20^th century when escalating production and consumption, aided and abetted by corporate public relations and advertising, became the engulfing credo throughout the developed world, we have succeeded in turning that moral genesis on its head – exclusively pursuing growth and affluence to the detriment of our peace of mind and sense of communal wellbeing and, in the process, damaging our vital connection to nature, upon which we rely for life’s essentials.

Unlike Alan, my overriding contention is that the future design of viable socio-economic systems must surpass any historical ideas - especially the Occidental mindset of free market economics – at least as this is currently construed, practised and regulated. If we are not able to do that it is probably because the thinking and the language we still use is so embedded in the ideological assumptions of past centuries – a reality based upon scarcity, competition and “every man for himself” – that it has become almost impossible to extract ourselves from this dominant worldview.

I am not that pessimistic however. I do not doubt new forms of empathic capitalism will emerge to displace disaster capitalism - where economies are embedded in ecologies and not vice versa. And I believe they will flourish because of that. That does not make me a socialist or a capitalist - or anything else for that matter! Nor does it in any way imply that individuals and entrepreneurship are of secondary importance to society’s collective aspirations. Indeed to fall into the trap of trading one off for the other is intellectually negligent.

The key to civilizational advancement is surely to find ways of accommodating both within socio-economic structures that are distributed, agnostic, and do not just favour a wealthy minority who sit back and trade on the misfortunes of others.

The Third Industrial Revolution

Our industrial civilization is at a crossroads. Oil and the other fossil fuel energies that make up the industrial way of life are sunsetting, and the technologies made from and propelled by these energies are antiquated. The entire industrial infrastructure built off of fossil fuels is aging and in disrepair. The result is that unemployment is rising to dangerous levels all over the world. Governments, businesses and consumers are awash in debt and living standards are declining everywhere. A record one billion human beings - nearly one seventh of the human race - face hunger and starvation. Worse, climate change from fossil fuel-based industrial activity looms on the horizon, imperiling our own species’ very ability to survive.

Since the beginning of the Great Recession in the summer of 2008, governments, the business community, and civil society have been embroiled in a fierce debate over how to restart the global economy. While austerity measures and fiscal, labor, and market reforms will all be necessary, they are not sufficient to re-grow the economy. Let me explain by way of an anecdote. Just months after arriving in office, the new Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, asked me to come to Berlin to help her administration address the question of how to create new jobs and grow the German economy in the twenty-first century. I began my remarks by asking the chancellor, “How do you grow the German economy, the EU economy, or, for that matter, the global economy, in the last stages of a great energy era and an industrial revolution built on it?”

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Second Industrial Revolution is dying and that industrial induced CO2 emissions are threatening the viability of life on Earth. What we need now is a bold new economic narrative that can take us into a sustainable post-carbon future. Finding that new vision requires an understanding of the technological forces that precipitate the profound transformations in society.

A New Economic Narrative

The great economic revolutions in history occur when new communication technologies converge with new energy systems. New energy revolutions make possible more expansive and integrated trade. Accompanying communication revolutions manage the new complex commercial activities made possible by the new energy flows. In the 19th century, cheap steam powered print technology and the introduction of public schools gave rise to a print-literate work force with the communication skills to manage the increased flow of commercial activity made possible by coal and steam power technology, ushering in the First Industrial Revolution. In the 20th century, centralized electricity communication - the telephone, and later radio and television - became the communication medium to manage a more complex and dispersed oil, auto, and suburban era, and the mass consumer culture of the Second Industrial Revolution.

Today, Internet technology and renewable energies are beginning to merge to create a new infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) that will change the way power is distributed in the 21st century. In the coming era, hundreds of millions of people will produce their own renewable energy in their homes, offices, and factories and share green electricity with each other in an “Energy Internet” just like we now generate and share information online.

The establishment of a Third Industrial Revolution [TIR] infrastructure will create thousands of new businesses and millions of jobs and lay the basis for a sustainable global economy in the 21st century. However, let me add a cautionary note. Like every other communication and energy infrastructure in history, the various pillars of a Third Industrial Revolution must be laid down simultaneously or the foundation will not hold. That’s because each pillar can only function in relationship to the others.

The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution are (1) shifting to renewable energy; (2) transforming the building stock of every continent into micro–power plants to collect renewable energies on-site; (3) deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies; (4) using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy internet that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of renewable energy locally, on-site, they can sell surplus green electricity back to the grid and share it with their continental neighbors); and (5) transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell green electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid.

The creation of a renewable energy regime, loaded by buildings, partially stored in the form of hydrogen, distributed via a green electricity Internet, and connected to plug-in, zero-emission transport, opens the door to a Third Industrial Revolution. The entire system is interactive, integrated, and seamless. When these five pillars come together, they make up an indivisible technological platform—an emergent system whose properties and functions are qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. In other words, the synergies between the pillars create a new economic paradigm that can transform the world.

The public/private financing of the Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure build-out across the world will be at the very top of the agenda for the international banking and financial community in the first half of the 21st century.

The Shift To Lateral Power

The Third Industrial Revolution is the last of the great Industrial Revolutions and will lay the foundational infrastructure for an emerging collaborative age. Its completion will signal the end of a two-hundred-year commercial saga characterized by industrious thinking, entrepreneurial markets, and mass labor workforces and the beginning of a new era marked by collaborative behavior, social networks and professional and technical workforces. In the coming half century, the conventional, centralized business operations of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions will increasingly be subsumed by the distributed business practices of the Third Industrial Revolution; and the traditional, hierarchical organization of economic and political power will give way to lateral power organized nodally across society.

Lateral power is a new force in the world. Steve Jobs and the other innovators of his generation took us from expensive centralized main-frame computers, owned and controlled by a handful of global companies, to cheap desktop computers and cell phones, allowing billions of people to connect up with one another in peer-to-peer networks in the social spaces of the internet. The democratization of communications has enabled nearly one third of the human population on earth to share music, knowledge, news and social life on an open playing field, marking one of the great evolutionary advances in the history of our species.

But as impressive as this accomplishment is, it is only half of the story. The new, green energy industries are improving performance and reducing costs at an ever accelerating rate. And just as the generation and distribution of information is becoming nearly free, renewable energies will also. The sun, wind, biomass, geothermal heat and hydropower are available to everyone and, like information, are never used up.

When Internet communications manage green energy, every human being on earth becomes his or her own source of power, both literally and figuratively. Billions of human beings sharing their renewable energy laterally on a continental green electricity internet creates the foundation for the democratization of the global economy and a more just society.

Distributed Capitalism

Energy regimes shape the nature of civilizations - how they are organized, how the fruits of commerce and trade are distributed, how political power is exercised, and how social relations are conducted. To understand how the new Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure is likely to dramatically change the distribution of economic power in the twenty-first century, it is helpful to step back and examine how the fossil fuel–based First and Second Industrial Revolutions reordered power relations over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Fossil fuels - coal, oil, and natural gas - are elite energies for the simple reason that they are found only in select places. They require a significant military investment to secure their access and continual geopolitical management to assure their availability. They also require top down command and control systems and massive concentrations of capital to move them from underground to the end users. The ability to centralize production and distribution - the essence of modern capitalism - is critical to the effective performance of the system as a whole. The centralized energy infrastructure, in turn, sets the conditions for the rest of the economy, encouraging similar business models across every sector.

Virtually all of the other critical industries that emerged from the oil culture - modern finance, telecommunications, automotive, power and utilities, and commercial construction - and that feed off of the fossil fuel spigot were similarly predisposed to bigness in order to achieve their own economies of scale. And, like the oil industry, they require huge sums of capital to operate and are organized in a centralized fashion.

Three of the four largest companies in the world today are oil companies - Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, and BP. Underneath these giant energy companies are some five hundred global companies representing every sector and industry - with a combined revenue of $22.5 trillion, which is the equivalent of one-third of the world’s $62 trillion GDP - that are inseparably connected to and dependent on fossil fuels for their very survival.

The emerging Third Industrial Revolution, by contrast, is organized around distributed renewable energies that are found everywhere and are, for the most part, free - sun, wind, hydro, geothermal heat, biomass, and ocean waves and tides. These dispersed energies will be collected at millions of local sites and then bundled and shared with others over a continental green electricity internet to achieve optimum energy levels and maintain a high-performing, sustainable economy. The distributed nature of renewable energies necessitates collaborative rather than hierarchical command and control mechanisms.

This new lateral energy regime establishes the organizational model for the countless economic activities that multiply from it. A more distributed and collaborative industrial revolution, in turn, invariably leads to a more distributed sharing of the wealth generated.

The extraordinary capital costs of owning and operating giant centralized telephone, radio, and television communications technology and fossil fuel and nuclear power plants in markets is giving way to the new “distributed capitalism,” in which the low entry costs in lateral networks make it possible for virtually everyone to become a potential entrepreneur and collaborator, creating and sharing information and energy in open commons. Witness twenty something young men creating Google, Facebook, and other global information networks, literally in their college dorm rooms and thousands of small businesses converting their buildings to green micro power plants and connecting with one another in regional electricity networks.

What I am describing is a fundamental change in the way capitalism functions that is now unfolding across the economy and reshaping how companies conduct business. The shrinking of transaction costs in the music business and publishing field with the emergence of file sharing of music, eBooks, and news blogs, is wreaking havoc on these traditional industries. We can expect similar disruptive impacts as the diminishing transaction costs of green energy allow manufacturers, service industries, and retailers to produce and share goods and services in vast economic networks with very little outlay of financial capital.

Democratizing Manufacturing

For example, consider manufacturing. Nothing is more suggestive of the industrial way of life than highly capitalized, giant, centralized factories equipped with heavy machines and attended by blue-collar workforces, churning out mass-produced products on assembly lines. But what if millions of people could manufacture batches or even single manufactured items in their own homes or businesses, cheaper, quicker, and with the same quality control as the most advanced state-of the-art factories on earth?

While the TIR economy allows millions of people to produce their own virtual information and energy, a new digital manufacturing revolution now opens up the possibility of following suit in the production of durable goods. In the new era, everyone can potentially be their own manufacturer as well as their own internet site and power company. The process is called 3-D printing; and although it sounds like science fiction, it is already coming online, and promises to change the entire way we think of industrial production. Think about pushing the print button on your computer and sending a digital file to an inkjet printer, except, with 3-D printing, the machine runs off a three-dimensional product. Using computer aided design, software directs the 3-D printer to build successive layers of the product using powder, molten plastic, or metals to create the material scaffolding. The 3-D printer can produce multiple copies just like a photocopy machine. All sorts of goods, from jewelry to mobile phones, auto and aircraft parts, medical implants, and batteries are being “printed out” in what is being termed “additive manufacturing,” distinguishing it from the “subtractive manufacturing,” which involves cutting down and pairing off materials and then attaching them together.

3-D entrepreneurs are particularly bullish about additive manufacturing, because the process requires as little as 10 percent of the raw material expended in traditional manufacturing and uses less energy than conventional factory production, thus greatly reducing the cost.

In the same way that the Internet radically reduced entry costs in generating and disseminating information, giving rise to new businesses like Google and Facebook, additive manufacturing has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of producing hard goods, making entry costs sufficiently lower to encourage hundreds of thousands of mini manufacturers—small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) - to challenge and potentially outcompete the giant manufacturing companies that were at the center of the First and Second Industrial Revolution economies.

Already, a spate of new start-up companies are entering the 3-D printing market with names like Within Technologies, Digital Forming, Shape Ways, Rapid Quality Manufacturing, Stratasys, Bespoke Innovations, 3D Systems, MakerBot Industries, Freedom of Creation, LGM, and Contour Crafting and are determined to reinvent the very idea of manufacturing in the Third Industrial era.

The energy saved at every step of the digital manufacturing process, from reduction in materials used, to less energy expended in making the product, when applied across the global economy, adds up to a qualitative increase in energy efficiency beyond anything imaginable in the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. When the energy used to power the production process is renewable and also generated on site, the full impact of a lateral Third Industrial Revolution becomes strikingly apparent. Since approximately 84 percent of the productivity gains in the manufacturing and service industries are attributable to increases in thermodynamic efficiencies - only 14 percent of productivity gains are the result of capital invested per worker - we begin to grasp the significance of the enormous surge in productivity that will accompany the Third Industrial Revolution and what it will mean for society.

Near Zero Cost Marketing and Logistics

The democratization of manufacturing is being accompanied by the tumbling costs of marketing. Because of the centralized nature of the communication technologies of the first and second industrial revolutions - newspapers, magazines, radio, and television - marketing costs were high and favored giant firms who could afford to devote substantial funds to market their products and services. The internet has transformed marketing from a significant expense to a negligible cost, allowing start ups and small and medium size enterprises to market their goods and services on internet sites that stretch over virtual space, enabling them to compete and even out compete many of the giant business enterprises of the 21st century.

Consider Etsy, a brash, web start-up company that has taken off in the past seven years. Etsy was founded by a young New York University graduate, Rob Kalin, who made furniture in his apartment. Frustrated that he had no way to connect with potential buyers interested in hand-crafted furniture, Kalin teamed up with a few friends and put up a website designed to bring individual craftsmen of all kinds, from around the world, together with prospective buyers. The site has become a global virtual showroom, where millions of buyers and thousands of sellers from more than fifty countries are connecting, breathing new life into craft production—an art that had largely disappeared with the advent of modern industrial capitalism.

Connecting multitudes of sellers and buyers in virtual space is almost free. By replacing all of the middlemen - from wholesalers to retailers - with a distributed virtual network of sellers and buyers and eliminating the transaction costs that are marked up at every stage in the marketing process, Etsy has created a new global craft bazaar that scales laterally rather than hierarchically, and markets goods collaboratively rather than top-down.

Etsy brings another dimension to the market - the personalization of relationships between seller and buyer. The website hosts chat rooms, coordinates online craft shows, and conducts seminars, allowing sellers and buyers to interact, exchange ideas, customize products, and create social bonds that can last a lifetime. Giant, global companies mass-producing standardized products on assembly lines operated by anonymous workforces can’t compete with the kind of intimate one-to-one relationship between artisan and patron.

Although still in its infancy, Etsy is a quickly growing enterprise. In 2011, Etsy’s sales topped nearly $500 million. In a recent conversation, Kalin told me that his mission is to help foster “empathic consciousness” in the global economic arena and lay the foundation for a more inclusive society. His vision of connecting up “millions of local living economies that will create a sense of community in the economy again” is the essence of the Third Industrial Revolution model. Etsy is only one of hundreds of global Internet companies that are bringing together producers and consumers in virtual marketing spaces and, in the process, democratizing marketing costs across the global economy.

As the new 3-D technology becomes more widespread, on site, just in time customized manufacturing of products will also reduce logistics costs with the possibility of huge energy savings. The cost of transporting products will plummet in the coming decades because an increasing array of goods will be produced locally in thousands of micro-manufacturing plants and transported regionally by trucks powered by green electricity and hydrogen generated on site.

The lateral scaling of the Third Industrial Revolution allows small and medium size enterprises to flourish. Still, global companies will not disappear. Rather, they will increasingly metamorphose from primary producers and distributers to aggregators. In the new economic era, their role will be to coordinate and manage the multiple networks that move commerce and trade across the value chain.

New Business Models and Jobs in the 21st Century

Germany is leading the way into the new economic era. The Federal Government has teamed up with six regions across Germany to test the introduction of an energy internet that will allow tens of thousands of German businesses and millions of home owners to collect renewable energies on site, store them in the form of hydrogen, and share green electricity across Germany in a smart energy internet. Entire communities are transforming their commercial and residential buildings into green micro-power plants. To date, more than 1 million buildings in Germany have been converted into partial green micro power plants. Companies like Siemens, Bosch and Daimler are creating sophisticated new IT software, hardware, appliances and vehicles, that will merge distributed Internet communication with distributed energy, to create smart buildings, infrastructure, and green mobility for the cities of the future.

The transition to the Third Industrial Revolution will require a wholesale reconfiguration of the entire economic infrastructure of each country, creating millions of jobs and countless new goods and services. Nations will need to invest in renewable energy technology on a massive scale; convert millions of buildings into green micro power plants; embed hydrogen and other storage technology throughout the national infrastructure; lay down a green energy internet; and transform the automobile from the internal combustion engine to electric plug-in and fuel cell cars.

The remaking of each nation’s infrastructure and the retooling of industries is going to require a massive retraining of workers on a scale matching the professional and vocational training at the onset of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. The new high tech workforce of the Third Industrial Revolution will need to be skilled in renewable energy technologies, green construction, IT and embedded computing, nanotechnology, sustainable chemistry, fuel-cell development, digital power grid management, hybrid electric and hydrogen-powered transport and hundreds of other technical fields.

Entrepreneurs and managers will need to be educated to take advantage of cutting edge business models, including distributed and collaborative research and development strategies, open source and networked commerce, performance contracting, shared savings agreements, and sustainable low-carbon logistics and supply chain management. The skill levels and managerial styles of the Third Industrial Revolution workforce will be qualitatively different from those of the workforce of the Second Industrial Revolution.

The lateral scaling of the Third Industrial Revolution shifts the fulcrum of power from centralized global companies to distributed small and medium size enterprise networks. The rapid decline in transaction costs brought on by The Third Industrial Revolution are leading to the democratization of information, energy, manufacturing, marketing, and logistics, and the ushering in of a new era of distributed capitalism that is likely to change the very way we think of commercial life. The Third Industrial Revolution offers the hope that we can arrive at a sustainable post-carbon era by mid-century. We have the science, the technology, and the game plan to make it happen. Now it is a question of whether we will recognize the economic possibilities that lie ahead and muster the will to get there in time.

This article was written by Jeremy Rifkin and is reprinted here with his permission. Jeremy is the author of The New York Times best selling book, The Third Industrial Revolution, How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World. He is an adviser to the European Union and to heads of state around the world. He is a senior lecturer at the Wharton School’s Executive Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania and the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, D.C.

Economies of Scope

The competitive dynamics of industrial capitalism are well-known, and they are all about economies of scale. Producing more of a unit enables companies to drive the unit price down and thus outcompete the competition. Multinational corporations and global brands now have very complex value chains, in which various parts of a product are mass-produced in different parts of the world.

Nevertheless, the system has obvious weaknesses. One weakness is that it tends towards monocultures, both agricultural and industrial. An example is the dependence of the Chinese coastal economy on exports.

Because competition drives prices down the dominant western players changed their strategy in the 1980s. They abandoned costly western workers, moved low-profit industrial production to low-wage countries, and expanded the intellectual property (IP) regime using patents, copyrights and trademarks. As Thijs Markus has written, if you want to sell $5 shoes for $150 in the West, you'd better have one heck of a repressive IP regime in place. Hence the need for SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and other attempts to criminalise the right to share.

But there is, of course, a more fundamental problem: the whole system of globalising the advantages of scale fundamentally rests on cheap global transportation and, thus, the continuous availability of fossil fuels. Once the era of cheap oil ends it is more than likely that the whole regime will come tumbling down. Competing on the basis of scale, even if it is still effective today, ultimately can only be played by those who do not care about the destruction of our planet. What game can the others play? Rising fossil fuel prices mean that innovation and competition have to find another outlet.

Actually, it's about inventing another game altogether.

This type of economic transition has played out before. In the late fifth century, as the Roman Empire was coming to an end, Christian communities prefigured the values of a coming era of relocalisation based not on an economy of scale, but on an economy of scope - in which the cost of production becomes lower through shared infrastructure costs.

As the Roman Empire decayed and supplies of gold and slaves became gradually more problematic, the smarter landowners started to free their slaves, but bound them contractually to the land as "coloni", or serfs. Meanwhile, the increasingly taxed and bankrupted freeholders sought protection from the very same landowners. Thus, one side of the equation was localisation, since the system could no longer bear the global scale of the empire. But the new post-Roman system also invented a new system of innovation, based on the advantages of scope, not scale.

Indeed, as the cities were emptying out, the Christians invented monasteries as a new type of agrarian knowledge centre. The Christian Church actually functioned as a global open design community. Monks and manuscripts travelled, and with it the many innovations of the worker-monks. While Europe initially decayed as the remnants of the Roman empire crumbled, eventually, after the first European social revolution in the 10th century, this new system created the seeds for the first medieval industrial revolution.

Between the 10th and 13th centuries, Europe started blossoming once again, based on a unified culture of knowledge. Its population doubled and its beautiful cities, many of which were run democratically by the guild councils, grew again. Peer-to-peer universities were founded in Bologna in the 11th century. This first renaissance was based on economies of scope, a unified body of knowledge that European intellectuals and artisans could build on. The guilds may have had their secrets, but they took them with them wherever cathedrals were built.

The same experience happened in 1989 when isolated Cuba was no longer able to rely on the Soviet system's advantages of scale. The Cuban crisis of 1989 prefigured the current world situation: the country experienced its very own peak oil situation when the Soviets abruptly stopped delivering oil at below world market prices.

While the Cubans initially went back to using donkeys, its government launched several interesting initiatives. It allowed some entrepreneurship by granting more autonomy to local agricultural co-operatives, and mobilised the population's grassroots knowledge. But perhaps most importantly, Cuba created several agricultural institutes with the goal of spreading local innovations. Whatever the other faults of the country's totalitarian system, this open design experiment succeeded beyond all expectations. As documented by Bill McKibben and a number of documentaries, Cuba now produces more nutritious and organic food, using less fossil fuel, because sharing knowledge created economies of scope. Agricultural innovations could spread quickly across the country and be adopted by everyone.

Indeed, economies of scale work well in periods of energy ascent, when the supply of energy is plentiful and increasing, but work less well in periods of energy descent. In these circumstances, economies of scope are needed. These types of economies are exactly what peer production (which encompasses open knowledge, free culture, free software, open and shared designs, open hardware and distributed manufacturing) is all about.

Our current system is based on the belief of infinite growth and the endless availability of resources, despite the fact that we live on a finite planet. Let's call this pseudo-abundance. The system also holds that innovations should be privatised and only available by permission, or for a hefty price, making sharing of knowledge and culture a crime, Let's call this enforced artificial scarcity.

Peer production methodologies are based on the exact opposite tenets. Peer production communities believe that knowledge is a commons for all to share. Therefore no innovation can be withheld from the human population as a whole. In fact, withholding a life-saving or world-saving innovation is seen as distinctly unethical. Peer production designs for distribution, inclusion and small-scale fabrication. Planned obsolescence, which is a feature and not a bug of the current system, is totally alien to peer production logics. In other words, sustainability is a feature of open design communities, not a bug.

So what are the economies of scope of this new age? They come in two flavours: the mutualising of knowledge and the mutualising of tangible resources.

The first principle is easy to understand. When an individual doesn't know something, it's more likely that a community, whether local or virtual, does know. Hence, the mutualising of knowledge and crowd-accelerated innovation are now well-known features of the collaborative economy. But the advantage of scope is created when that knowledge is shared and can be used by others. With this social innovation the cost of production that depends on knowledge can be dramatically reduced.

Take the example of the Nutrient Dense Project. This global community of agrarian workers and citizen scientists experiments with better nutrients to obtain better quality food. They carry out joint research on nutrients in various soils and climate zones, which can benefit not just the participating community but, potentially, the whole of humankind. Strategies based on privatising intellectual property cannot obtain such advantages of scope - at least not at that level. Or take the example of the urban homestead of the Dervaes family in Los Angeles who managed to produce 6,000 pounds of food annually on a tiny city plot. Because they share their productivity innovations many other people have learned how to improve their own lots.

The second principle, of sharing physical resources, is exemplified by the trend towards collaborative consumption. The general idea is the same. I may lack a certain tool, skill or service, but it is likely that someone else in a community has it, and that other person could share, rent or barter it. There's no need to all possess the same tool if we can access it when we need it. Hence the proliferation of peer-to-peer marketplaces.

Let's take an illustrative example: car-sharing. Car-sharing projects can be mutualised through the intermediary of a private company which owns the cars (like ZipCar), through peer-to-peer marketplaces that link car users to one another (like RelayRides), or through public entities (like Autolib, in Paris). But they all achieve economies of scope. According to a study cited by ZipCar, for every rented car there are 15 fewer owned cars on the road. Furthermore, car-sharing members drove 31 per cent less than when they owned a vehicle. So, in 2009 alone, car-sharing diminished global carbon dioxide emissions by nearly half a million tonnes.

What will the new system look like if economies of scope become the norm, replacing economies of scale as the primary driver of the economy? Global open design communities could be accompanied by a global network of micro-factories producing locally, such as the ones that open-source car companies like Local Motors and Wikispeed are proposing.

This would require organisations to organise their material activities in order to minimise the common costs of the various networks and not just in terms of sharing knowledge. In other words, who will play the role that the Catholic Church and its roaming monks played in the Middle Ages? This was not just an open design community but an effective material organisation giving leadership to a whole continent-wide cultural sphere. Do we have a potential peer-to-peer version of this that can operate globally? The answer to this question will be for a future article.

Michel Bauwens is a theorist, writer and a founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Asian Foresight Institute. This essay was first published in the opinion pages of Al Jazeera on the 22^nd March 2012 and is reproduced here with the author’s permission.

 

Scuttlebutt - The Dirt on Brown Coal

Last week the state government of Victoria in Australia announced its intent to release more than 430 billion tonnes of brown coal for export to energy-hungry countries such as China, India and Japan. Located in the La Trobe valley, east of Melbourne, these reserves are some of the largest deposits of brown coal in the world.

At face value it makes sound economic sense for these reserves to be unlocked and used to bolster the local economy, especially at a time when other industries are in trouble or face a slow decline. But there are traps for the unwary. 

In the resources pecking order brown coal is regarded as little better than peat. It is a sludge-like substance containing about two-thirds water, one-third carbon, and some ash. Extracted from huge open-cut mines it is used primarily in steam-electric power generation. While none of Victoria’s brown coal is currently exported, around 65 million tonnes is mined each year. Over 90 per cent of Victoria’s electricity is fuelled by brown coal, making Victorians among the most greenhouse polluting people per capita on the planet.

Fifty years ago investing millions of dollars in mines, processing and infrastructure might have been applauded as a visionary way of boosting the local economy and creating new jobs. Today it seems like a sick joke. For this is not merely an economic question but a moral one.

Brown coal is roughly three times more greenhouse intensive per kilowatt hour of electricity than natural gas. Abundant it may be. Clean it is not. In any sane society we would agree to leave it where it is. In the ground.

Let us agree then that we are not sane and move on! If additional brown coal is going to be mined for export there are inherent difficulties that cannot be ignored. The most obvious is its transportation over long distances. This has primarily to do with the high moisture content of the coal, requiring it to be dried or turned into diesel oil or gas prior to export. Setting aside for a moment the fairly crude centrifuge technologies currently used to extract moisture and to compress the coal into briquettes, the technologies needed to convert brown coal into a commercially viable and environmentally-friendly product at scale still need to be developed.

Any corporate investors would need to take this into account. Of course it is feasible that a commercially viable method of transforming one of the world's dirtiest energy sources into a clean form will eventually be found. But I would not bet on it. Clean coal is still a myth. But there are other, far more disquieting factors, which also need to be considered.

Firstly we need to think through the impact on local farmers and landowners. The viability and security of the current food system in Australia is increasingly under threat as the effects of climate change are felt. The Gippsland basin in eastern Victoria happens to be one of the richest dairy farming areas in the whole of Australia.

Even so there are many farms on the eastern and western side of the Latrobe Valley which have a mining licence hanging over them. Freehold titles are not exempt from acquisition should the state demand access to minerals underground. This creates massive uncertainty in the minds of the farming community, compromising planning and contributing to the exodus of farmers from badly needed agricultural production.

Secondly it is misleading to believe that many new jobs will be created by such a move. As mining technologies become more sophisticated fewer jobs are needed in the sector in absolute terms. Out of a total population of around 23 million people less than 200,000 work in mining.

Thirdly Australia cannot continue to be complacent about the role resources will play in future economic wealth. Not that overseas demand for coal, gas and minerals is likely to collapse in the near future. In my opinion such claims are merely a distraction. When mapping strategic paths to future prosperity the underlying economic complexity of our industries – or rather the lack of it – is of far greater consequence.

Economic complexity refers to the amount of knowledge embedded in the productive structure of an economy. It is amplified by the social connectivity inherent in markets, networks and business ecosystems that makes us collectively intelligent.

Recent research points to economic complexity as a key factor in the development of nations. Countries whose economic complexity is greater than what we would expect, given their level of income, tend to grow faster than those that are “too rich” for their current level of economic complexity. In this sense, economic complexity is not just a symptom or an expression of prosperity. It is a driver.

In the first Economic Complexity Index [ECI] published this year, Australia ranked 79 out of 124 nations; behind Sri Lanka, Egypt, Indonesia and Vietnam and just ahead of  Pakistan, Cuba and Uganda. In other words the apparent wealth of our nation (as measured in GDP per capita) is too dependent on the export of minerals than on tangible productive knowledge. At a time when the Australian currency is strong and many industries, particularly manufacturing, are struggling to survive, greater efforts need to be channelled into investments and policies that (i) augment and diversify embedded knowledge and (ii) expand tradeable activities in that knowledge.

Countries with a large natural resource assets like Australia can be relatively wealthy without being economically complex. But that wealth can only be sustained as long as those natural resources are there. Something else needs to take up the slack in the long term.

ECI research demonstrates countries tend to move towards an income level that is compatible with their overall level of embedded knowledge. Australia may well have a smart workforce but it is of little value if it is not being continually diversified and used to provoke and sustain industrial renewal.

Logically it is strategic innovation, the invention of new industries and markets, and the deliberate expansion of  diversity in Australia’s export product space, that are ultimately far more critical in creating a robust and enduring economy than short-term windfalls from mining.

It stands to reason that policies aimed at inceasing economic complexity must point to a far greater emphasis on, for example, distributed and open-source manufacturing; e-commerce; micro-engineering; healthcare; bio-agriculture; professional, employment and child care services; clean energy such as solar and wind; management, scientific and environmental consulting; digital arts and broadcasting; gaming; biotechnology; and higher learning, than on the export of mineral resources that add little economic complexity to that which currently exists.

So much for the economic factors. Most conversations instigated by politicians and specialist business interests would end right there, as if the economics of any situation (i.e. investment, productivity, employment and wealth creation) is the only thing that really matters.

Unfortunately this is not unusual. At least since the industrial revolution our society has tended to value only those assets we can see, grow, construct, assemble and measure. Indeed the Western cultural mindset currently driving the majority of global production and consumption as well as international trade, has systematically cheapened and eroded most other aspects of a unique and sacred gift: what it really means to be human.

In all economic debates there remain unspoken, complex, yet usually unresolved issues hiding in the shadows. Topics of consequence that go to the heart of the crises facing a human family of seven billion people. Such is the case with the issue of mining brown coal in Victoria for it is not just, nor even primarily, a simple economic issue.

I have briefly mentioned one of my concerns, namely the sense of profound insecurity being generated by mining leases on struggling farming communities. Such uncertainty is viewed by governments as an adverse yet unavoidable side effect resulting from legal distinctions between private property ownership relative to the assumed superior authority of the state. But it also relates to the sacred duty of any elected government to foster community wellbeing by conserving and protecting the wealth of the commons rather than kowtowing to the whims of sectoral interests.

Such duties are arduous in this day and age for there are many conflicting needs, and at many levels, expressed by the citizenry of any state. Yet it is vital to grasp this particular obligation in the longer term: ensuring the health and prosperity of future generations is as critical to humanity as safeguarding today’s wealth. Perhaps more so. As scientists and economists gather overwhelming evidence that we must combat the toxic impacts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as soon as possible in order to avoid what could become an unavoidable collapse in our quality of life, the ethical question of how long we can go on subsidizing dirty industries fuelled by coal becomes ever more acute.

Naturally this dilemma is excruciating for governments caught in a limbo between the exploitation of resources for commercial gain and their environmental responsibilities. Options seem predetermined when the former tactic allows an incumbent government to appear less reckless than the opposition and thus stay in power longer. It is a delusion of course. But such has become the paucity of political vision, aspiration and integrity in much of the developed world, regardless of political persuasion or explicit cultural legacy.

Another concern relates to ecocide – a reference to any large-scale destruction of the natural envioronment, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment of that territory by the inhabitants is severely diminished.

Because previous generations supposed the planet’s resources to be infinite, that growth was unlimited, ecocide routinely occurs on a massive scale and is getting worse by the day. Proposals to mine the extensive brown coal reserves in Victoria are only one example of ecological devastation occurring around the world; from Canada to the Antarctic and from Bolivia to China. It can be stopped by making ecocide a crime against humanity. Even now serious proposals are being considered by individuals in the UN seeking to create an international law of ecocide that would make CEOs and Heads of State legally responsible for the Earth.

Even if a universal law of this kind is some years off, an assumption I would personally be reluctant to adopt, intensifying public sentiment that environmental conservation is essential to our future health and wellbeing implies an awakening to the blind ecological destruction currently being undertaken by some governments and corporations on our behalf. It would be a courageous government indeed (or an act of sheer stupidity) to ignore such early warning signs of shifting societal values.

But even that should not be the end of the debate. Putting environmental concerns to one side, we should also consider the Victorian government’s proposals for industrial development in the La Trobe valley in the light of our values and culture. In this case public compliance with the case for industrial development as put by government (which has become the agent for big business) amounts to collusion to defraud future generations of their rightful legacy. Effectively we are giving our consent to people who have never been on the land and who have no history or connection to the countryside, legally securing the right to come in and by the very nature of their enterprises leave in their wake a cultural and physical landscape utterly devastated and transformed.

Furthermore, by placing no cultural or market value on the landscape itself we help to destroy a natural asset without comprehending its inherent worth if left intact. As long as there is a promise of money and employment it merely requires permission to proceed. Usually we give this not a second thought. We take it as a given. It is, after all, the foundation of a system in which commerce extracts value and profit in a resource-driven economy. From an indigenous perspective, moved and inspired by quite different visions of life and an orientation utterly removed from the Western tradition in terms of ecological space, any behaviour in which natural beauty can be reduced to a commodity at whim appears to be anomalous in the extreme.

When British explorers landed on the shores of Australia they were totally unprepared for the sophistication of the place - unable to fathom the subtle philosophy and profound intellectual, cultural and spiritual achievements of those early inhabitants. Two hundred years later and we are still unprepared, still utterly incapable of embracing our country’s timeless wonder, ignorant of its songlines and blind to its cosmological resonance as potential future wisdom.

Mining brown coal in Gippsland is an ill-informed folly dreamed up by deluded advocates of an industry that is in decline for more than one reason. But that is not what should really concern us here. My disquiet has much more to do with the inherent lethargy and lack of ingenious alternatives being expressed.

If Victoria is to prosper in a manner that is strategically relevant and enduring, all future pathways must provide a greater degree of economic complexity in our productive capacity than currently exists. Innovation in terms of rural development is important. But the constant digging of holes in the ground is equivalent to playground games.

Australia’s current wealth came from the exploitation of natural resources. Our future prosperity is reliant on a paradigm shift enabled by strategically sophisticated innovation, creativity, diversity and, above all, industrial renewal.

I would like to thank Alain Ruche of the EU for alerting me to the work of Ricardo Hausmann and his team who have been researching the economic complexity of nations for several years. Their work can be found in the Atlas of Economic Complexity at http://atlas.media.mit.edu/book/

Food Security on the Menu

A world with 7 billion people, threats from a changing climate and unsustainable resource use are intensifying pressure on humanity and world governments to transform the way food is produced, distributed and consumed. This global issue brings both responsibility and opportunity for Australia.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates 75 million to 130 million people were pushed into malnutrition and poverty when food prices spiked in 2008, and another 40 million joined them after this year's price spikes. There are many regions where large gaps exist between actual and potential production, and an estimated 12 million hectares of agricultural land is degraded each year.

Up to a third of all food harvested is lost or wasted as it is processed, distributed or consumed in our homes. Climate change is expected to exacerbate the problem: increasing temperatures, altered rainfall patterns and more severe weather will lead to dire social, economic and ecological consequences. Vietnam's fertile, low-lying Mekong Delta is already experiencing ingress of seawater.

The global challenge is to increase agricultural productivity and decrease our environmental footprint while adapting to changing climate patterns. We must increase global food production by 2050 by between 30 and 80 per cent while halving our greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.

This is the task facing the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change. The commission, chaired by Britain's chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, is calling for urgent action by governments, international institutions, investors, agricultural producers, consumers, food companies and researchers. It wants food security on the agenda at the next round of international climate change talks in Durban, South Africa, in recognition of its inextricable link with climate change. The commission's blueprint urges seven key steps:

• Integrate food security and sustainable agriculture into global and national policies.
• Significantly raise the level of investment in sustainable agriculture and food systems.
• Sustainably intensify agricultural production while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other negative environmental effects.
• Target populations and sectors globally that are the most vulnerable to climate and food insecurity.
• Reshape food access and consumption patterns to ensure basic needs are met and foster sustainable eating habits worldwide.
• Reduce loss and waste in food systems.
• Create comprehensive, shared information systems that encompass human and ecological dimensions.

I believe Australia will play a unique role in this transformation. Despite our highly variable and challenging climate, many sectors of Australian agriculture have achieved an extraordinary annual productivity increase of 2 per cent or more for the past 30 years. We feed 60 million people each year and we are one of only 15 countries that export more food than we import. The rapid growth of mega-cities in our region will mean growing markets for the food we produce.

Future climate change brings new challenges to lifting agricultural production, but Australia is well placed.

We hold the world record for the lowest proportion of rainfall ending up in river systems, with a staggering 89 per cent evaporating. Our temperate areas have the world's highest year-to-year variability of run-off. By 2030, climate change is likely to cut average river flows by 10 to 25 per cent in some areas of southern Australia. A key driver for achieving rapid adoption of new technologies and practices is partnership between researchers and farmers. Australian agricultural research has a long history of innovation and collaboration with farming industries and communities that can be harnessed to deal with the challenges of food security and climate change.

Across Western Australia grain growers have lifted production through better practices, such as conservation agriculture, despite lower rainfall. In Vietnam, where saltwater is intruding, some farmers have turned rice paddies into shrimp ponds. Our irrigators can now use precision satellite data, soil moisture and evaporation rates to determine precise irrigation times sent via SMS to their phones. Every one of these efforts can be scaled globally.

Real changes are necessary across the global food system if we are to achieve true food security for all. It will mean a shared commitment across society and around the globe.

This article was written by Dr Megan Clark who is CSIRO chief executive and a commissioner for the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change. The article first appeared in the Melbourne Age on 23rd November 2011 and is reproduced here with the author's permission.

 

Please Mind the Gap

I am normally wary of statements such as this changes everything. But there is something distinctly attractive about the Occupy Wall Street movement - especially if it is seen as a single thread in a tapestry of increasing social and civic unrest aimed at systematically deconstructing and challenging the more damaging aspects of our civilisational world-system.

The ground swell of civil upheaval we are witnessing around the world (admittedly for a variety of differing reasons) seems to offer the potential for a profound global awakening to the human condition that is probably unprecedented in modern times.

Before Occupy Wall Street any serious conversation about the negative aspects (misdirected power, corruption and discrimination) locked into the global financial system occurred rarely, and only then at private gatherings of cognoscenti or during off-the-grid brainstorming conclaves within left-leaning think-tanks. With little public discussion of the outlandish power of Wall Street and its links to the diminishing fortunes of the middle class it was fair to assume a deeply ingrained and pervasive public apathy. That assumption was wrong.

What had not been fully appreciated was the power of digital information and communications tools, and especially the new social media, to connect and ferment resentment among those who were doing it tough; people who were already feeling the pain from unemployment or from working in a system where senior executives could earn up to 450 times that of the average employee. Couple these factors to an increase in political inertia and corruption and the existential issues of a planet under threat from extreme weather events and climate change and we immediately have a recipe for revolution.

Occupy Wall Street is giving a voice to ordinary men and women who are victims of a world-system that is unsustainable. In fact, it may represent the best hope in years that "we the people" will step up to take on the critical challenges of our time. Sarah van Gelder (editor) and the staff of YES! Magazine claim that the Occupy movement is already "changing everything". In their new book, Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement, they name ten factors to support their thesis:

1. It names the source of the crisis
Political insiders have avoided this simple reality: The problems of the 99% are caused in large part by Wall Street greed, perverse financial incentives, and a corporate takeover of the political system. Now that this is understood, the genie is out of the bottle and it can¹t be put back in.

2. It provides a clear vision of the world we want
We can create a world that works for everyone, not just the wealthiest 1%. And we, the 99%, are using the spaces opened up by the Occupy movement to conduct a dialogue about the world we want.

3. It sets a new standard for public debate
Those advocating policies and proposals must now demonstrate that their ideas will benefit the 99%. Serving only the 1% will not suffice, nor will claims that the subsidies and policies that benefit the 1% will eventually "trickle down".

4. It presents a new narrative
The solution is not to starve government or impose harsh austerity measures that further harm middle-class and poor people already reeling from a bad economy. Instead, the solution is to free society and government from corporate dominance. A functioning democracy is our best shot at addressing critical social, environmental, and economic crises.

5. It creates a big tent
We, the 99%, are people of all ages, races, occupations, and political beliefs. We will resist being divided or marginalized. We are learning to work together with respect.

6. It offers everyone a chance to create change
No one is in charge. No single organization or political party calls the shots. Anyone can get involved, offer proposals, support the occupations, and build the movement. Because leadership is everywhere and new supporters keep turning up, there is a flowering of creativity and a resilience that makes the movement nearly impossible to shut down.

7. It is a movement, not a list of demands
The call for deep change (not temporary fixes and single-issue reforms) is the movement¹s sustaining power. The movement is sometimes criticized for failing to issue a list of demands, but doing so could keep it tied to status quo power relationships and policy options. The occupiers and their supporters will not be boxed in.

8. It combines the local and the global
People in cities and towns around the world are setting their own local agendas, tactics, and aims. What they share in common is a critique of corporate power and an identification with the 99%, creating an extraordinary wave of global solidarity.

9. It offers an ethic and practice of deep democracy and community
Slow, patient decision-making in which every voice is heard translates into wisdom, common commitment, and power. Occupy sites are set up as communities in which anyone can discuss grievances, hopes, and dreams, and where all can experiment with living in a space built around mutual support.

10. We have reclaimed our power
Instead of looking to politicians and leaders to bring about change, we can see now that the power rests with us. Instead of being victims to the forces upending our lives, we are claiming our sovereign right to remake the world.

Like all human endeavors, Occupy Wall Street and its thousands of variations and spin-offs will be imperfect. There have already been setbacks and divisions, hardships and injury. But as our world faces extraordinary challenges, from climate change to soaring inequality, perhaps our best hope is the ordinary people, gathered in imperfect democracies, who are finding ways to fix a broken world.

Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement, Edited by Sarah van Gelder and the staff of YES! Magazine. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011, 96 pages. $6.95 (30% off the cover price when you buy from YES!. All royalties from this book are donated to the Occupy Wall Street movement)

Disrupting How it Was

Unusually I have settled down to watch the evening news on television. I am astonished (and yet not) by the way the Gaddafi regime has simply crumpled under the force of people power. It sets my imagination racing as to what might be next in this unpredictable and rapid escalation of social unrest.

I am also fascinated by some of the more conservative reactions we are witnessing to what are essentially peaceful civic protests. Evidently some powerful interests, including once-venerated institutions and current power brokers, feel sufficiently threatened to suppress outbreaks of pure democracy such as these, particularly when they occur outside the established norms. We will return to this idea shortly.

In a recent speech Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), advanced what he called five global imperatives for the future of humanity. In brief they were:

1. Sustainable development (including lifting people out of poverty and advancing economic growth)
2. Prevention of conflict as a framework for international cooperation
3. Building a safer and more secure world by standing up for democracy, human rights and peace
4. Supporting countries in transition
5. Working with and for women and young people.

He also intimated, probably justifiably from his perspective given the hubris and empirical habits of some Western nations, that this was an opportunity for all countries to set aside their differences and narrow, short-term interests, in order to cooperate in addressing humanity’s long-term needs.

Anyone who knows the man would immediately appreciate the sincerity behind Ban Ki-Moon’s proposed forging of a common agenda aimed at ensuring peace, prosperity, freedom and justice. On the surface these five imperatives appear to be a consistent, well-intentioned vision, possessing all the gravitas one expects from a person in his position.

However behind the integrity of one individual there skulks a lumbering behemoth, an international agency in utter disarray and diminishing relevance. Looking closely at the language used in Ban Ki-Moon's statement I am inclined to challenge whether such imperatives are a genuine plea for a coherent societal metamorphosis - or just another of those ill-fated public-relations exercises that appear and evaporate so frequently from within our various political and diplomatic theatres.

Personally I doubt such grandiose aims can achieve anything much, at least within the framework of global officialdom; certainly no more nor less than has already been tried with other initiatives like the Millennium Goals, for example. But on what basis can I possibly make such a claim?

I am puzzled and constantly irked by five recursive issues:

1. Is sustainable development really possible if it includes both conventional approaches to economic growth as well as saving the natural environment? If not should we be designing new systems with new intentions, new priorities and a new language?
2. Is democracy as it is currently conceived and practised the only philosophy capable of building a safer and more secure world? Or are we at risk of using democracy as a virtuous substitute for something far more viable?
3. If these imperatives genuinely offer the opportunity to shape the world of tomorrow by the decisions we take today, what is it about the decisions we are currently taking that have failed to create the world we most desire?
4. If one necessity really is to liberate women and young people why is that demographic not already sufficiently represented in the forums convened for making the decisions that will create the future?
5. Are those individuals and institutions currently in positions of influence the right people and institutions to instigate and lead change? In that context is the UN the most appropriate agency to be tackling societal transformation? If not what alternatives should we be crafting?

Naturally all of these questions demand comprehensive consideration and plausible answers. There are undoubtedly numerous, equally valid, strategic questions one could pose. But for me the crux of the issue is to be found in my fifth and final question. Those responsible for making today’s decisions are the same people in the same institutions who designed the world-system to function as it does. They populate NATO, the UN and the G20. Imagining these same individuals and institutions can design a system capable of achieving such different outcomes is tantamount to believing in the tooth fairy.

But let us review the situation, keeping in mind reality and truth have become mutant hybrids in this continuously morphing world. In order to contemplate the contextual implications of my question, we must set modern society, in all its various dimensions, against the broader sweep of our civilisation’s past 2,000 years. That is not an easy thing to do. Individual and collective realities are determined and shaped by our “window” (weltenschaung) on a world that is so dynamically complex it is almost impossible to hit the “pause” button on any aspect of it long enough for it to become clearer to oneself, let alone others. To make matters even more complicated every discrete “window on the world” comprises implicit yet unique sets of filters driven by instinct, volition and transitory emotions.

For example, if you are the kind of person that trusts the boundaries drawn unerringly on maps, if you believe political ideologies endure in abstract purity, if you imagine that national agencies still shape international diplomacy and that elected representatives control a nation’s destiny, then you may find this question offensive or simply crazy. What “was” factual in the past, you might argue, remains intact today.

If however, you believe like me, that no two nations are alike (some prosperous and in decline, others impoverished yet making astonishing advances; some vulnerable to the forces of change, others inexplicably resilient; a few (such as the US) posing as empires alongside empires (China) posing as nations; city states such as the Vatican and Singapore; countries in name only like England, Scotland and Puerto Rico; and even a territory such as Palestine that has no universally-agreed state mandate as yet) and that, as a consequence, it is all but impossible to propose an all-encompassing definition of the nation state, then you could be forgiven for perceiving current globalised conditions as being closer to those that existed during the Middle Ages. Albeit on acid or cocaine! In that context my question would be entirely relevant.

But let us play with this notion and bring these two contrasting weltenschaung together. Viewed through a polyocular lens contemporary society is incredibly messy, yet also astonishingly abundant and diverse. Power functions asymmetrically in different ways via multipolar interactions that constantly wax and wane. A few transnational corporations are wealtheir than many nations, their entangled relationships an unseen manifestation of contemporary power. Even pluralistic social networks and online activists can wield considerably more political influence than national governments these days, which find themselves trapped in unending antiphonic modes of reaction and readjustment. Unlikely conjunctions of public and private interests generate novel yet potent forms of innovation. Entrepreneurial billionaires influence the agendas of social enterprise and fund others directly… This topsy-turvy world exists like a thinly-disguised membrane over the more Matrix-like world of competitive global trade and international policy making with which we are more familiar. But that is not to imply that it does not exist.

In this extraordinary multifaceted global milieu conventional borders and standard taxonomies have become almost meaningless in some contexts - yet remain immutable frameworks in others. Multinational organisations and universal governance structures such as exist within the UN can appear neutered in such chaos. What have been proven to work in situations of dynamic complexity are: (i) coherent whole-of-system designs with intimate alignment between the various components within the system (ii) greater levels of connectivity and collaboration at a local level (ii) more fluid, temporary and adaptive policies and activities, (iii) much less formality so as to increase the speed of learning and change. And these factors, of course, are precisely why I question whether the UN (or any equivalent agency) is responsive and adaptive enough to elicit rapid universal cooperation at scale.

Having described the incredibly convoluted nature of the context in which we find ourselves (that is the contemporary human condition) we can now bring greater degrees of granularity to my question as it concerns the nation state.

Actually an agreed definition of the term nation state remains elusive. Let us suppose the state is the government and its institutions, while the nation is the summation of the relationships we have with others who live in close cultural, ethnic, linguistic or geographical proximity to us and with whom we choose to identify. The nation state is the marriage of these two (partly discrete yet intimately braided) ideas.

Now let us consider how, over the course of the past 65 years at least, national devices for homogeneity (via partisan ceremonies and rites) versus statist mechanisms for coordination (via civic and political engagement) plus control (via protectionist legislation and administration) have often subverted the potential for these two ideas to harmonise in ways that would enable continuing relevance for the nation state as a mechanism of viable governance.

Over the past two decades there has been an explosion of social activism aimed at overturning one or more aspects of the status quo. We have witnessed extremes of nationalistic fervour (US patriotism after 9/11) and brutal oppression (Libya under the Gaddafi regime). We have watched the Burmese generals edge towards openness as their activities came under critical scrutiny, while other militaristic regimes have entrenched their hold on power still further in a myopic yet ultimately futile resistance. Online protest websites such as GetUp! have become commonplace. Meanwhile a growing tide of civic upheaval in mainland China is balanced by the emergence of extreme right-wing fundamentalism in the US.

Where there is oppression of any kind people will eventually rebel. The unprecedented social and financial interconnectedness of our times (facilitated in large part by new digital media) allows humanity as a whole to express outrage at the many blatant inequities and injustices perpetuated within our current economic and political systems. At its source, the universal cry for renewal as expressed through movements like Occupy Wall Street or contrarian online information sources such as Alternet (for example) can be compared to the widespread civic disruption spreading like a bush fire across the Arab world. There are at least four pertinent system-wide characteristics to note:

1. Civic disruption, wherever it has occurred, has generally been greeted by jubilation from a surprisingly broad range of citizens - irrespective of education, conventional allegiances or supposed embedded differences (such as ethnicity, religion and gender)
2. Traditional rules of organisation, intervention, diplomacy and negotiation (including making concrete demands and statements of objectives for example) are being avoided, wisely I believe as instruments such as these would merely accord further legitimacy to the ruling elites
3. In each case, sooner or later, the predictable response of the state has been to repress further civil disobedience by deploying police or military force to "end" the protest
4. Civic unrest (the overt strategy of a universal movement resisting categorization or a fixed identity but demanding whole-system change) is escalating. It is not going away!

In these acts of subversion or solidarity (depending upon one's point of view) the supposed raison d’etre of the nation state is being shaken to the core.

The UN currently comprises 193 member states. The invention of the modern sovereign nation in or around the 19^th century was designed (and further refined within the framework of globalisation) as a mechanism for protecting discrete interests and furthering explicit agendas - most often those of the elite within each nation. Because of this history it should come as no surprise that the inclination of the nation state apparatus is to compete with other nations (in ideas, politics, trade, commerce, crime, religion etc.) rather than to cooperate. We have seen precisely this predisposition play out during COP15 meeting in Denmark where the overwhelming scale of the task to overcome nation state and sectoral interests dashed any hope that we could craft a simple, universally-binding, consensus to lower carbon-dioxide emissions and thus combat climate change. The schemes some governments are pushing are still grounded in obsolete notions of scarcity, competition and economic growth.

While one could argue that this competitive inclination of the state served society well enough during the industrial age, contributing enormously to productive efficiencies and the creation of individual wealth, it is hardly an energising idea for our times. Recent events and new technologies have exposed its inability to adjust to contemporary realities fast enough. It has grown corrupt, stale and lethargic.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II the state’s interests started to align more with the motives of wealthy industrialists and corporations than with the needs of ordinary citizens. The promise of protecting and nurturing civic life and human rights (through the provision of education, employment, health and security) started to unravel and, as that occurred, the gap between the rich and the poor widened exponentially. Now the state found itself liable for a range of escalating inequities that became even more glaringly obvious with the advent of new information and communications technologies. Today, for example, it is commonplace for CEOs of major corporations to earn salaries many times that of their employees. Investment bankers who do not directly contribute to the productive economy take home millions of dollars each year in bonuses. Yet (until recently at least) we have quiescently accepted that non-sensical, obscene reality as a necessary evil. It is not!

Against the broader background of societal change, old institutions, their stewards and recipients, will whither and die - much more rapidly if they cannot shift course to reinvent inbred assumptions and transcend past habits. While the UN has had some limited success with cooperative ventures in certain diplomatic theatres, (peacekeeping for example) the degree of collaboration required to create a worldwide common agenda of the form Ban Ki-Moon envisages is simply unprecedented. The assumptions and habits of this massive organisation are gravitational in their inability to adapt quickly. Different or more aspirational goals are probably out of reach for the organisation at this juncture.

But while I harbour serious misgivings that the UN is an appropriate forum for whole-system change, the fact is no other formally-instituted forum currently exists that has sufficient credibility (and thence buy-in) from the world’s citizens. That is also the reason we are going to see an increasing number and intensity of insurgencies and demonstrations around the world. In that regard all eyes must now be on Syria, Yemen, Bahrain... In the future it might well be the US or China - for nothing and nobody is immune when revolutions take hold.

The exciting prospect such revolutions open up is for the emergence of new kinds of imagined communities that are at once more strategically appropriate and systemically viable for the issues humanity is needing to confront. The greatest danger is that we will avoid our destiny, repeating history and failing to learn from vital lessons regarding human nature under stress.

The UN was originally conceived and established to help sovereign states deal with distinct problems for which it had conspicuous (indeed obvious) solutions. It now finds itself increasingly out-of-touch in a world-system experiencing cascading organisational collapse. Indeed even the notion of a coherent international community seems more and more antiquated in a multi-polar universe where a variety of influential hubs, private corporations, fluid networks and gated communities coexist in a hyper-complex ecosystem. The world map of circumscribed geographies no longer accurately represents this fragmented reality. In this environment the very concept of the nation state is under threat – unless it can revitalise its penchant for competition in a manner that targets global issues (especially those identified by Ban Ki-Moon) rather than traditional national rivalries.

Meanwhile, weighed down by bureaucratic inertia, home to technocratic hordes more intent on setting targets and establishing new agencies than resolving complex issues or transforming society's relationship with itself, the UN exists because it does - not because it actually does anything transformational. Faced with wickedly complex issues in an increasingly borderless world (and largely incapable of perceiving the links in this world-system) the latest tendency has been to proclaim every issue - including food, energy, climate, population, health, terrorism and poverty - a matter of international security. This is a great ploy for fund-raising but not very useful for resolving complex, multidisciplinary dilemmas.

At a time when the UN is struggling to find its role in this messy, fracturing world, where no two states are the same and more diverse modes of governance (and indeed democracy) are emerging across all levels of society, Ban Ki-Moon’s task is not an enviable one. Of course it is always easy to find fault with a list such as his. However I suspect not much thought has been given to the implicit assumptions behind these imperatives nor, indeed, what it will take that is contrary to what is already being done – by the UN and similar bodies.

The greatest danger always is that the usual suspects will continue to do what they have always done, perhaps with more enthusiasm or resources than before, expecting that the results will be different. Or, if I was more cynical, that they will appear to be trying to change things when their actual motivation is to maintain the status quo. This concern applies equally to aurocrats and dicatators as it does to democratically-elected representatives. Indeed the leaders of the so-called "free" world are as culpable as those anywhere. That is the more disturbing concern.

Second Chance

Today President Barack Obama announced the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. After eluding capture for almost ten years, and following months of top-secret surveillance and detailed planning by the Pentagon, he was killed by a member of the US military's SEAL Team Six - with some reluctant assistance (or perhaps none at all) from the Pakistani government. Reaction to the news of Bin Laden’s death (at least in the West) appears to be one approaching almost total euphoria. That is understandable. For many people justice has at last been done. But it is not quite as simple as that.

Before we get too carried away we should take stock of a global system in which little has fundamentally altered. While the iconic value of Bin Laden’s death is self-evident it is by no means a strategic game-changer. In some respects it is irrelevant. Like the many-headed mythical Hydra of Greek mythology Al-Qaeda has spawned a global network of agile affiliate enterprises hell bent on disrupting lives and causing havoc wherever they can. While this ideologically networked group of fanatical offspring may still pledge symbolic allegiance to the Al-Qaeda “brand”, myriad smaller cells increasingly act autonomously, receiving nothing in terms of financial or logistical support from the parent organisation.

The death of Bin Laden may well provide an emotional setback for some of these terrorist groups and their interests. But to a great extent his messages and influence were already discredited, even in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Indeed the most radically anti-Western polemic (even from Muslim religious leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran) categorically rejected the Takfir doctrines pursued by Al-Qaeda’s conservative leaders years ago. Far more pertinent are the peaceful protests currently sweeping across the Arab world. These uprisings have shown young people everywhere that liberation from persecution and serfdom is in the hands of those who seek it. The so-called Arab Spring has made Bin Laden’s darkly doctrinaire views utterly irrelevant to all but a few hardened zealots.

The genesis of terrorism goes back centuries of course. It has been part of the human condition throughout recorded history. On September 11, 2001, however, human progress seemed to descend into an altogether darker void.

But as most of the Western world watched in horror at the scenes being played out on the East coast of the US a far deeper tragedy was unfolding – a tragedy which some of us are still trying to express and from which recovery is by no means certain. For the tragedy to which I refer is the folly of man’s inhumanity to man, the utter futility of conflict and the mindless calls for vengeance. This is the deeper tragedy, arising from our most primitive instincts, we must all ultimately confront.

The images of 9/11 are incised into the mind. Like the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, everyone has a story of where they were that fateful day. Yet now, when one chapter closes and we look with hope towards a future where we can all live together in peace, the real legacy of 9/11 hangs like a shadow over our civilisation.

Ten years ago Al-Qaeda's high profile figurehead provided the US administration with the pretext to commence its calamitous hostilities across the greater Middle East. Predictably Washington's wars provided terrorist outfits everywhere with new recruits and burgeoning support as well as prolonging a cycle of violence that appeared to know no end. Today, once again, Osama Bin Laden presents us with the pretext to think again - but to do things differently this time.

Fresh opportunities have emerged and we must seize the day. The choice is stark. We can persist in our bloody and humiliating way to continue prosecuting this so-called “war on terror” – a war without end, executed in a mood of compounding fear and desperation and from which the most sane among us accept it will be impossible to extract victory. Or we can reimagine our collective purpose and the relationships we most desire with our fellow human beings by celebrating the integral nature of what it means to be compassionate human beings.

If we set our minds to it we can envisage a far less violent and more tolerant future. For example we could enter constructive dialogue with those whose views run counter to our own, seeking to include and transcend differences, rather than waging war as an economic imperative and as a knee-jerk reaction to difference. We could build schools and hospitals rather than expand our arsenals. We could make innovative technologies and medicines available to those less fortunate than ourselves rather than continuing to deny them the most basic of life’s necessities.

I recognise that will take courage and a spirit of generosity that we will need to consciously nurture. But surely that is what leadership is all about? Besides there are far more serious, potentially catastrophic, failures we need to attend to with a similar level of passion and commitment: food and water shortages, climate change, pollution, declining oil reserves....

Of course to pursue peace rather than conflict is not solely our decision. Similar opportunities to think differently and to change direction have been afforded others, particularly those in countries like Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been ravaged by war. It is quite feasible, for example, that leaders of the Taliban may now be more receptive to negotiating some form of power-sharing arrangement in exchange for closing terrorist training camps and curtailing the use of their lands for the export of terror. It is equally possible that the focus of the powerful US industrial war machine will shift to Pakistan, especially given the level of support and protection Bin Laden possibly received from certain sectors of the Pakistani intelligence and military communities.

Whatever happens Bin Laden’s name, his aura and his perceived martyrdom will continue to resonate for a few years yet. In the long term, however, it is not the hunting down and slaying of one man that matters but rather the various autopoietic transitions taking place across Arab and Muslim societies. The most effective power is that wielded through peace. Ordinary people protesting peacefully against oppression and injustice will eventually close history’s page on Al-Qaeda’s particular brand of terror.

In the meantime we have a profoundly important role to play. We must do our utmost to ensure these transitions occur peacefully and compassionately, even if our own current “brand” of democracy is not the end result. Putting an end to the excessive waste, collective insanity and moral failure of endless conflict by eradicating the militarisation of democracy is the most important challenge facing us. If we cannot change our priorities there can be no hope for a brighter future. The war-mongering of old empires will continue to impede real progress by turning the world upside down.

A Tale of Death & Resurrection

As I grow older, more tolerant of a variety of cultural mindsets, more accepting of diverse views, faiths and belief systems, I detect an alternative wisdom reaching out to me with a persistence that has become irresistible. This wisdom is at once profoundly unsettling and intensely reassuring. Indeed such ambiguity makes it tough establishing which of these effects is the more authentic. An unresolved tension between them seems both palpable and necessary – a finely-poised attractor between contradictory forces that redefines human purpose and meaning.

I cannot lay claim to this being a new wisdom, though it manifests as such to me. I am deeply aware that human empathy and a benevolent ethos arise from a common impulse, innately grasped by many indigenous groups, for example, and which I will refer to as communion for simplicity’s sake, and that contemporary science as well as various social experiments have validated its critical importance to the future of the human species.

This wisdom is hard for me to fully digest and even more difficult to describe; partly because it emanates from emotionally charged convictions I find awkward expressing but also because of its relatively ineffable nature - a genesis arising not from Cartesian logic or rationalism but from a common bond illuminating and reflecting the sacredness of life.

Traumatic incidents during childhood (my father deserted me and my mother when I was eight years old and the suffering of losing the person I idolized most still intrudes upon my life in so many subtle ways) led to my avoiding any expression of intimacy with others lest these were misinterpreted, exposed my vulnerability, or were seen as a sign of weakness. But no longer. For some considerable time I have felt the compulsion to speak my mind. I have been branded a heretic, zealot, contrarian, amateur and an outlier. I suspect none of these were meant as compliments.

The world into which I was born, immediately following the second World War, was one of a strange and disquieting serenity – at least to a young boy growing up in rural England. After a century or more of unbridled nationalism and six years of bloody conflict across Europe and Asia a feeling of cautious optimism prevailed. Naturally life was still tough for many, including my family. We were very poor. In England at the time there was food rationing and recovery was slow at first. Gradually, however, a new normality emerged. I mostly recall unpretentious pleasures: train spotting at Uckfield railway station, harvest picnics in the fields at summer’s end, carpets of bluebells in the woodlands, gathering mushrooms in the misty dawn, cricket matches on the recreation ground, charcoal burners in the woods, itinerant gypsies in their brightly painted caravans, growing currants, raspberries and strawberries in our allotment and waving to the Breton garlic sellers as they cycled through the village...

In 1945 there were fewer than 2 billion people on planet Earth. Jubilation of having achieved victory in a war that shattered the ceremony of innocence dominated newspaper headlines. Confidence was at an all time high. There were scars to get over, their recovery assisted by the new movies celebrating heroics and creating myths that willingly distorted the truth. The futility and savagery of war received scant attention. A few people started to protest over the threat of a nuclear Armageddon but there was no mention of global warming, climate change, population growth, unsustainable consumer trends, endemic poverty or state terrorism. Early warning signals of an impending disaster went unnoticed. The future looked bright.

The distraction provided by wealth creation and the acquisition of goods grew exponentially. Affluent parish elders distracted ordinary men and women by organizing coach excursions to Brighton or Bognor Regis for those who had no other means of taking a holiday. Meanwhile big business, backed by a resurgent advertising industry, turned its attention to manipulating a gullible public and facilitating an explosion of productivity.

The stage was set although few people recognized this at the time. Distraction came in the form of peace. And possessions. From a situation where even sugar and meat were in short supply we rapidly moved into a situation where literally anything could be manufactured and bought. Televisions, automobiles, fashionable clothes, exotic fruit, vacations and experiences. Tools and gadgets to fulfill every possible desire began to saturate the market.

To be well-to-do back then meant owning a farm, small business, or having a car and being able to commute to the nearest town. School, too, seemed pleasurably humdrum. All the world’s problems had been solved. I sat in geography classes facing maps of the world where most countries, or so it seemed, were colored pink. The pink of the British Empire upon which the sun never set. A world in which anything now seemed possible and where certainty insinuated itself into every crack and crevice of community life.

Of course that world no longer exists – if it ever did. For the most part it was a comforting illusion. But one issue now dominates the future of human progress – an existential and potentially disastrous issue that few people saw coming. A global population fast approaching seven billion inhabitants, most with aspirations of increasing material wealth based on assumptions of continuing economic growth, had to be set against a progressively volatile context in which deteriorating environmental conditions, higher food costs, less available energy, escalating socio-economic and geopolitical failures and iniquitous gaps between the rich and the poor formed a potentially catastrophic fusion.

Today the situation is clear. The condition we created, deliberately and without conscience, is forcing us to face a new destiny. It now exposes the vulnerability of our thinking and points to the need to embrace an appreciative communion of interconnectedness and cooperation in stark contrast to more conventional mores and expectations (habitually driven by greed, envy, scarcity, competition and fear) resulting from the globalized system of industrial economism.

Seeing a new reality demands both foresight and conviction around a renewed purpose and intent. Accepting this as essential to human progress is tough enough. Redesigning society in order to practice a more appreciative collective wisdom is an entirely different proposition. Transformation and reinvention are pivotal as is the acceptance of physical constraints and finite natural resources. This, in turn, means relinquishing many of the assumptions we have long held regarding what is fundamental to human prosperity and what is not, what value we should place on economic factors in comparison with health, relationships, cultural well-being and contentment, and what is viable praxis rather than simply foolish habit.

So how does this wisdom of communion manifest? I can only speak for myself. I am more conscious of patterns, more able to map connections between scraps of information that were previously disparate, that seemed relatively unimportant at the time, or that somehow I simply convinced myself to discount. I recognize that sets me apart from many others, although I sense a growing affiliation around such wisdom.

Accordingly I and those of a similar outlook and persuasion are becoming more attuned to a reality (and its consequences) that many others seem unready to accept, unable to perceive or simply shy away from for fear of its more confronting implications. It is as though a veil is suspended between them and the improbable reality of a future existence in which it becomes both possible and desirable for all living beings to share equally in Earth’s available resources in a sufficient, altruistic and loving manner.

In truth my gradual awakening to an alternative wisdom, enabled by the thinking of new friends as much as personal reflection, has become a burden to me as well as a privilege I feel bound to honor. It is also a challenge I cannot avoid. As the birth of my new son, a gift in every sense of that word, draws closer I am conscious of an expanded sense of self and my purpose in life. This expanded consciousness goes far beyond anything I have previously experienced. It has transitioned me into a more empathetic and loving state uniting emotion with cognition.

The truth is never enough of course. Immunity to the reality of the human condition (through the spin and widespread deception of a vigorous public relations machine) is so inculcated in society it is easy to live an illusion and ignore contradictory evidence. But as each day reveals more of a truth that will determine our fate on this planet, I also feel more and more frustrated by the status quo and a greater compulsion to do something (anything) to disrupt thinking-as-usual.

In my view it ultimately comes down to fairness and morality. The critical domain requiring our unconditional attention comprises those established patterns of globalized production, distribution and consumption that have become utterly unsustainable - given the changing context. The mode of economic thought we take for granted, indeed blindly insist on pursuing, is enshrined within this exploitative system. At its extreme it is epitomized by the US model of capitalism. This model, so easily corrupted as we have recently observed, is an expression of rules based upon assumptions that are deeply flawed though seductive, nevertheless, in the overall scheme of things: namely that scarcity and competition drive human behaviour and that continued economic growth is necessary in order to maintain the social order.

Those last three words the social order are crucial to any proper comprehension of the situation we are facing. The rules as applied are crafted quite deliberately to benefit a small sector of society - namely the wealthiest individuals, corporations and nation states. It is a relentlessly iterative and untenable formula: by fostering competition for business and trade between countries, corporations pay lower taxes and produce more goods for consumption on world markets. Thus economic growth drives material wealth simultaneously mesmerizing entire communities and resulting in an unprecedented psychological lock-in to excess, greed and waste. Coincidentally it also destroys many of the social, cultural, environmental and spiritual conditions vital for human contentment, health and well-being while undermining the rights of workers and marginalizing the poor who remain slaves to this system.

We are only just awakening to the veracity of our predicament. Since the 1920’s a well-oiled public relations machinery, arising from an unholy alliance between governments, the media and corporations, and exploiting Freud’s research into our psychological motivations, has manipulated public opinion, keeping us compliant customers instead of alert citizens. In the words of Walter Lippmann it has “manufactured consent” and it has done this extremely efficiently by playing to our unconscious desires.

Sadly the mass production and consumption of goods we are taught to want but rarely need has instigated the crises we see all around us today – from the rising cost of food, to ethnic conflicts, the provision of energy from finite resources, the impact of a global monetocracy upon indebted states and individuals, the despoiling of the natural environment and the criminal practices of dictators, autocrats and unprincipled politicians and industrialists.

The need to speak out has become overwhelming. A new narrative is required; one of hope and happiness rather than hate and humiliation. Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed differently. If, instead of competing on the basis of scarcity, we were to encourage collaboration to generate new knowledge, grow uncommon capabilities and share skills within a spirit of abundance and self-sufficiency. Of course competition would still exist, but in a transformed setting governments and corporations alike would compete in providing economic and socio-political security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, a decent education and a healthy and sustainable environment.

Most of today’s grassroots social activists and young entrepreneurs are desirous of such a shift. Furthermore they now possess infinitely more computing power on their laptops and iPhones than the entire US government had at the time of the moon landing. All we actually require is to generate trust, unity and a sophisticated appreciation of how best to liberate this new moral energy of communion in order to achieve success.

If collective power can be wielded with empathy and integrity, with coherence and conviction, corrupt and unsustainable practices will be dealt a death blow and elected officials will be kept honest. We will not need to jump through hoops in seeking common ground with those that currently ride roughshod over our humanity or despoil nature in pursuing their own selfish ends. We can change the world. I know it. You know it. So what is stopping us?