The Hames Report

Convergence@Speed

A few years ago I started talking about the emergence of a plausible planetary technoculture resulting from the unpredictable conjunction of a few seminal streams of human invention, and the activities related to them. I was particularly fascinated by the effects of information-based technologies on what we currently do and how we do it – especially when divorced from more serious questions related to why we do it.

But now we also need to add the speed of change as an additional defining factor. Outside of its more everyday use as metaphor there is little current appreciation of the speed of change - still less concerning the conditions the speed of change could generate through technological innovation.

There are a number of significant convergences occurring that will transform human cognition and performance. The convergence of biotechnology, nantechnology and robotics, for example, is already radically transforming healthcare, war, security and manufacturing. Similarly the merging of in-memory computing, the Cloud and device mobility is shifting our capability to access knowledge, anywhere, in real-time – impacting how we interact with each other, undertake business transactions, and move to more participative forms of democracy.

Of course there are other more estoeric intersecting epistemologies that are potentially far more interesting than focusing on computer science and informatics (the convergence of quantum science, indigenous wisdom and spirituality, for example, that could well give rise to a new human cosmology) but these are outside the scope of this article.

How these conjunctions evolve, and how they will overturn everything we take for granted, make for a fascinating study for one overwhelming reason: the perceived rate of technological change is exponential. In other words we will arrive in the future much faster than anticipated. This is not a new phenomenon. One only has to review the time it took to decode the human genome or comprehend the illusion of time created by the exponential growth of a toxic weed in a pond, for example[1]. But it is still so often misconstrued and leads to patterns of human behaviour that lack foresight and wise judgement.

For the most part we cannot readily conceive of change at this magnitude because our intuition about the future tends to be commonly expressed as linear extrapolations of the past or the present. Consequently we tend to ignore, misinterpret (or drastically underplay) the impact of exponential change on our lives. This has huge implications for investors, ethicists, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs and government policy makers, as well as technologists themselves.

Let’s spend a few moments considering what exponential change implies vis-a-vis how we currently think about progress and habitually make decisions based upon assumptions derived from more conventional understandings.

The arithmetic of logarithmic (or exponential) functions is easy enough. Essentially it is a simple formula: when relative growth of any kind (e.g. population growth, compounded interest, resource extraction, inflation or consumption) is a constant measured as a percentage over time, the doubling rate of what we are measuring (in other words the time it takes for a quantity to double in size or value) will be 72 divided by the unit of growth. So for example, if the economy grows at an average 7 per cent per annum it will double over the span of ten years. If the growth rate is an average of 10 per cent per annum then the doubling factor will be just 7 years. And so on…

In this context consider what China has achieved since 1980. The Chinese economy has been growing at an annual rate of 10 per cent for the past 30 years. That means the economy has doubled a total of 4 times over that period. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty during that time. Many new cities have been built. A modern infrastructure of highways and railways has transformed the landscape, opening up the hinterland and making it far easier to travel to the major cities. In 2010, China had 18 million households with an annual income above USD 16,000. By 2020, this number will be 167 million households. That's almost 400 million people! What is more, Chinese brands are now competing with (and out-performing) the world’s best.

Astonishing economic acceleration of this nature is unprecedented on such a scale. But there are always unintended consequences. For example, if you were motoring on the highway between Zhangjiakou and Beijing in late 2010 it would have taken you many days to reach your final destination. Massive traffic jams regularly clog this highway – occasionally stretching to more than 60 miles. On this occasion thousands of commuters were stuck on the road for days, living off water and food sold to them by vendors wandering through the semi-parked cars. Apart from ongoing construction on this highway and the carriage of illicit coal and other materials from Mongolia, it is the explosive growth in car ownership (Beijing alone is adding cars at an astonishing rate of 1,900 every day) that's the most likely cause of this urban nightmare. It has created a paradoxical situation where the number of drivers on Chinese roads now negates any benefit from travelling in cars.

Back to our exponential function. We can apply the same mathematical logic to population growth. In 1986 there were 5 billion people on the planet. The growth rate was just 1.7 per cent per annum, meaning that by 2027 we would have reached 10 billion people. By 1999 the population had reached 6 billion but the growth rate had slowed to 1.3 per cent per annum, meaning that it will take until 2052 to reach 12 billion. That still means we are growing at a rate of 80 million people a year on a planet unable to provide adequately for 7 billion. Problematically most growth is occurring in undeveloped countries that can least afford large populations and where education hardly exists – nations like Burundi, Niger and Uganda.

But the population problem also exists in economically developed countries. In Australia, the city of Melbourne has experienced 1.88 per cent population growth over the past decade. One might regard that as modest growth, but that is not the case. Indeed if growth continues at that rate Melbourne will overtake Sydney in 2028, when each city will have about 5.6 million people. No other city in Australia has ever experienced growth of this size. It has taken city planners completely by surprise (because they presumably did not do the maths) and strained the city's infrastructure and services - adding to road congestion, overcrowding on public transport, increased waiting times in hospital emergency wards, the demand for energy and water, and a host of other undesirable outcomes. All of this in a relatively affluent country where annual immigration numbers are controlled by the Commonwealth government; the total fertility rate, of 1.78 per woman, is below that normally considered to be the replacement rate for a population; and where the potential impacts of exponential population growth on the city should have been apparent and handled differently in terms of systemic urban design.

Obviously we can also apply the same mathematical logic to the extraction of fossil fuels (like oil, gas and coal) the loss of biodiversity, the rate of global warming – and, of course, the increase in computer processing power.

All of which brings us back to the matter in hand: namely the speed at which technologies are converging and the subsequent role they will play in the future. For the astonishing truth is that it is not simply the rate of change in discrete fields or disciplines to which we should remain alert, but also the rate of change in that convergence. It is this speed of change that led US inventor Raymond Kurzweill to predict that the “singularity” (the year in which artificial intelligence exceeds that of humans) will occur at some stage within the next two decades.

The examples to which I have referred should show us that exponential change demands a far more sophisticated approach to systemic design, taking into account many potential features and points of view, while also pondering deeply the social, moral and ethical dimensions of the futures we are creating. All of which is easier said than done, especially when the subject is rampant, seemingly unstoppable, technological invention.

Kurzweill maintains that by 2030 we will be interacting with technologies that are billions of times more powerful than those available today. While this is correct in terms of logarithmic change I can’t help wondering if this is what we really want.

There are three paramount dilemmas we encounter when considering such possibilities as those anticipated by Kurzweill. The first has to do with distinctions between fate (the inescapable future) and desire (the preferred future). The second concerns the inability of human minds to imagine beyond what is known through experience and to translate these imaginings into a design capability. The third raises the issue of morality. In the end all three dilemmas relate to our intentions – the territory where the most difficult choices must be made.

1. The enigma of fate and desire

Depending upon the culture in which one is literate, the potential for shaping events is taken either to be severely limited (i.e. it is the role of a higher intelligence) or theoretically infinite (i.e. mankind is creator and capable of anything). Most of us occupy a space somewhere in between these two extremes.

For me, as a Buddhist and a practising futurist, the main problem I have with the kind of positivist determinism confidently proclaimed by many scientists and technologists is the irrefutable inevitability accorded most technological expressions of the future. Currently there seems to be a huge disconnect between what convergent technologies can potentially bring to humanity, and what we want those things to be. Nor are there many opportunities to discuss or debate such issues.

The notion of a reinvented species of humanoid with super intelligence in which humans can finally discard their earthbound carcases holds no joy for me. Nor do I believe there is anything inevitable about this evolution.

2. Imagining beyond the event horizon

Envisaging how our lives could be so utterly different from how they currently manifest is problematic for most of us. Other than artists and other visionaries we tend to construct our “probable” futures from linear extrapolations of present circumstances and past memories. This is the “here and now” of our daily experience and it undoubtedly limits our ability to step into a place of infinite possibilities – an “expanded” now compressing all past, present and possible options. One of the reasons Steve Jobs was not interested in asking customers what they wanted from Apple was because they had little idea of what was actually feasible. They did not know what they wanted until they could feel and see it in their hands and play with it. In other words they could not see beyond a particular event horizon.

Apart from those rare individuals who perceive the world from an altogether higher plane of awareness, there are several accepted ways of amplifying human creativity and imagination. Using hallucinatory drugs, for example, or accessing new tools such as virtual reality, allow us to perceive possibilities that would have been previously barred from us. Few people have access to simulation facilities and the immersive experiences these provide, however, as most are still privately-owned or used purely for entertainment purposes.

Perhaps we need to think more seriously about investing in the capability for the expansion of human imagination as a pre-requisit for more sophisticated social designs. Obviously an increased capacity for imaginative cognition may ultimately be provided by the technology itself. But by then it will be too late to influence the design of the technology and many ethical concerns will possibly have been overlooked.

3. The Moral Dimension

The moral issues, including many ethical questions that require resolution and will have a considerable bearing upon the various choices that may need to be made, have incredible consequences and are too important not to be considerd as part of the original impulse for design of any socio-technological ecosystem.

Meanwhile the inexorable tide of technological innovation that sweeps everyting before it gives us little time for any considered thought on these matters. For example, some clusters of transformative technologies could improve the human condition by prolonging life, enabling the human-machine interface, and eliminating disease. One might consider these critical to humanity’s future did they not exacerbate the population problem. It is ironic that most of what we regard as being good for humanity (medicine, peace, sanitation and law and order for example) actually worsen the population problem, while an alternative strategy for resolving the problem, (by promoting conflict and disease and encouraging murder for example) is morally obscene.

 

 

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[1] If a toxic weed doubles every day and covers the entire surface of the pond in 30 days, then it wil only cover half of the pond’s surface on day 29. This, of course, is part of the reason we see so little action to combat climate change. Looking at it today doesn't seem to be so bad. Unfortunately we do not see past the 29th day to tomorrow!

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.

 

 

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/

The Self-Attribution Fallacy

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1 per cent make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers, across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill. Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers across Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out they blanked him. The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture.

 So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. As for other kinds of business, you tell me. Is your boss possessed of judgement, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshit and bullying?

In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses. They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses’s scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact on these criteria they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.

The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family you’re likely to go to business school.

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. CEOs now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they’ve captured than oil sheikhs.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are the chosen ones, possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed upon the earth’s natural wealth and their workers’ labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world’s common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Thatcher and Reagan. I am now going to bombard you with figures. I’m sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattoed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119 per cent, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122 per cent. But between 1979 and 2009, productivity rose by 80 per cent, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4 per cent. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1 per cent rose by 270 per cent.

In the UK, the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12 per cent between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest 10 per cent rose by 37 per cent. The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from 26 in 1979 to 40 in 2009.

In his book The Haves and the Have Nots, Branko Milanovic tries to discover who was the richest person who has ever lived. Beginning with the loaded Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus, he measures wealth according to the quantity of his compatriots’ labour a rich man could buy. It appears that the richest man to have lived in the past 2000 years is alive today. Carlos Slim could buy the labour of 440,000 average Mexicans. This makes him 14 times as rich as Crassus, nine times as rich as Carnegie and four times as rich as Rockefeller.

Until recently, we were mesmerised by the bosses’ self-attribution. Their acolytes, in academia, the media, think tanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people’s wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.

This is now changing. On Sunday evening I witnessed a remarkable thing: a debate on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral between Stuart Fraser, chairman of the Corporation of the City of London, another official from the Corporation, the turbulent priest Father William Taylor, John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network and the people of Occupy London. It had something of the flavour of the Putney debates of 1647. For the first time in decades – and all credit to the Corporation officials for turning up – financial power was obliged to answer directly to the people.

It felt like history being made. The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back.

This article was written by George Monbiot and reproduced here with his permission. The Self-Attribution Fallacy was first published in The Guardian on 7th November 2011 (see www.guardian.co.uk). George's blogs are online at www.monbiot.com

 

 

Occupy Your Mind

Regular readers will recall it is my occasional habit to reprint articles of particular consequence in The Hames Report. In that spirit I recently asked my US-based friend and colleague Dr David Martin if I could print a piece he had just published on his BlogSpot Inverted Alchemy. He did not hesitate.

But then I read this important piece again. And again. I realised that merely reprinting David’s article would not satisfy the insatiable desire I had to elaborate on some of his most critical points. Consequently I am publishing David’s article in italics below and then making some further comments of my own.

Returning from Salt Lake City to Charlottesville via Chicago provided a suboptimal venue to listen to the audio of Ken Wilber’s interview conducted by my friend Todd Goldfarb. It turns out that cheap courtesy headphones from a hotel gym have no sound dampening value to overpower the engines on a CRJ-700. The good news was that the audio quality was so dreadful that I had to concentrate. So, I sat next to the window, focused on the ground passing below and listened to Ken describe the passage of humanity’s transitions. And it was in the observation of the millions of acres of industrial farmland over which I was passing at 38,000 feet that I settled in on the puzzle: Is it possible to perceive human transformation as a first person actor or are evolutions of consciousness only discerned in retrospect?

Let me provide a bit of background. Todd and Ken were discussing the notion that we are on the edge of a new inflection of the human experience. This edge is, in part, defined by previous inflections (from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to modern to post-modern, etc.) and has several particular characteristics that are noteworthy. In his description of the ‘Integral’ transformation, Ken suggested that, in contrast to previous inflections, rather than rejecting past human narratives, a hallmark of this inflection is the explicit inclusion of wisdom and experience from all previous epochs. And, for a moment over Iowa, I found myself trying to reconcile this vision with the reality from which I had just come.

You see, I had just been at a board meeting where I had heard representatives from one of New York's leading investment banks talk about the merits of fixed income investments and had heard them discuss the fact that they were encouraging investments in revenue-based instruments (like water) rather than debt issued by cities and counties. After all, they argued, even unemployed poor people have to drink! The neatly groomed fields below me, the echo of merchants peddling water as a safe investment, and Ken all converged in an unholy trinity between Cedar Rapids and Oxford Junction. I can recall the moment. Ken was in the middle of one of his many “never before in human history” generalizations…

Who do we think we are? We have got a real problem. I have described with effusive affection my respect for Karl Popper on numerous occasions so I will not belabour his criticism of our Occidental hubris again. As I have commented in my recent posts on the Occupy movement, what I find most disturbing about our present consensus delusional state is the intersection of our belief that we access information and our resulting belief that we’re informed.

Has capitalism ‘worked’ when:

1. The largest communist country on earth actually owns a controlling interest in our debt and supplies a considerable amount of our consumables

2. There has never (since the Land Act of 1820 and the Morrill Act of 1862 to our modern military, technology, and service profit-subsidized government procurements of today) been a phase in US history where we actually had open, unsubsidized free markets; and,

3. Our income distribution and growth is at its all time greatest asymmetry?

Has our social conscience evolved when:

1. Ken Wilber describes our evolution past slavery, for example, at a time when there are more humans (per capita) in slavery today than at any recorded period of history

2. When we continue to promote 19th century narratives about wisdom traditions ranging from Egypt to Peru to Mongolia without consideration of the possibility that these civilizations actually may have out-engineered our self proclaimed modern marvels; and,

3. When ‘hope’ and ‘change’ has led to more remote control assassinations than the notorious Bush / Cheney regime?

It would be lovely to imagine a world in which we would hold ourselves to an abiding commitment that ‘evolution’ might actually involve some notion of improvement. Improvement of the means by which we interact with the Earth. Improvement in the manner in which we engage cultures diverse from our own. Improvement in how we assess the qualities of ourselves and our ecosystems. Improvements in how we engage in dialogue and discourse holding genuine respect for alternative points of view.

Alas the evidence shows us that we seem to be more drawn to evolution that involves the selective repression of ever larger numbers of voices – voices who have long memories and have alternative views to our own. Is humanity at a tipping point or are we walking past the masses from whom our ignorance has extracted humanity?

The fulcrum around which a real tipping will occur will be discerned when it is set into place by the hands of all tribes, communities, families, and peoples. We will know it by their presence; not tell them in their absence.

If one explores below the surface of this highly considered response to an experiential dilemma the implications in David Martin’s cautionary thesis appear to me to be profoundly disturbing. Not only do they call into question the degree to which we are actually sentient individuals (in comparison, say, with herd animals possessing relatively uncouth instincts and unvarying habits) they also point to Occidental “maturity” as a delusion in which many of us are still trapped.

This may be partly to do with the hubris arising from our recent technological prowess and subsequently assumed moral authority – though the latter (if it ever existed) is clearly in a state of rapid collapse today. It may even have something to do with the so-called six “killer apps” (i.e. competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the Protestant work ethic) identified by the economic historian Niall Ferguson as an explanation for the West’s prominent (now declining) position in the global world-system over the past 300 years or so.

More ominously, I suspect, is an ingrained belief that those of us with an Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage are somehow smarter, wiser and creatively superior than others. This is not just arrogance. It is intensely foolish. Yet if we needed evidence we have only to recall the number of occasions during the past half century where assumed Occidental superiority has led to our military powers trampling over the cradles of our civilisation in Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East. As David Martin queries: Who do we think we are?

I am reminded of some research undertaken by professor Robert Sternberg at Yale University who undertook and extensive study of stupidity, which he identified as a lack of applied wisdom rather than the absence of intelligence. Sternberg argued that specific aspects of life as a smart person actually cultivate stupidity. In other words that it sometimes takes a really smart person to do something truly stupid.

Sternberg concluded there are four main tendencies that lead us into this quandary:
1. Egocentrism – the fallacy whereby we foolishly come to believe that because we are so smart, the world does and should revolve around us
2. Omniscience – the fallacy whereby we foolishly come to believe that part of the reason the world revolves around us is we know much more than we do, or even all we need to know
3. Omnipotence – the fallacy whereby we foolishly believe such knowledge makes us invincible. We can do whatever we want and get away with it
4. Invulnerability – the fallacy whereby we foolishly believe we can get away with it because our intelligence makes us invulnerable to attack and even to criticism.

We move into a very vulnerable space indeed when we are either too smart (believing we know everything we need to know and that we can get away with any act) or too dumb (to realise we lack the cognitive capacity to recognise and overcome our stupidity). I suspect one of these characteristics are present in the majority of people occupying leadership roles today.

Of course the worst possible scenario would be if the world were led by really stupid people. However the situation gets almost as ludicrous when smart people use their intelligence or influence to quarantine themselves from the very feedback that would appraise them of the reality of a situation. This is commonplace in the corridors of power.

Furthermore, if we have already arrived at a point where we believe other people, or nations, or cultures, or social groupings, are less capable of defining a collective future for humanity and that consequently it is incumbent upon us to re-establish a future in which our failing social, economic, political and commercial systems continue to endure, then our collective stupidity is profoundly entrenched.

Like David Martin I fail to understand how we can imagine our society (i.e. we are implicitly referring to the so-called developed world remember) has reached the zenith of its evolution as a civilised global community, and that we are consequently approaching an inflection point that will enable us to include and transcend all previous experiences and knowledge, when we still reach for the sword before the pen; still fiercely exclude those who hold differing beliefs to us; still feed an industrial war machine that can easily annihilate humanity; are still fearful enough of the unknown as to worship primitive deities; still innately disengaged from the natural environment that sustains all life; still arrogant enough to believe our ways of knowing outweigh alternative epistemologies; and still bound up with our own overwhelming sense of individual pride and self-importance.

The single, most important, feature for enabling intentional evolution is expressed within David’s final paragraph. He says: The fulcrum around which a real tipping will occur will be discerned when it is set into place by the hands of all tribes, communities, families, and peoples. We will know it by their presence; not tell them in their absence.

Because of our tendency to deliberately exclude others we are not at a global tipping point by any stretch of the imagination. For that we need a critical mass of the world’s citizens to be able to convey new possibilities within a fresh narrative for humanity arising from a higher consciousness and sense of self-awareness. That will be a new human story.

In contrast we are still content to perpetuate ideas, principles, models and values that were outmoded long ago. Can anyone really state that our collective state of being (our empathic consciousness) is more advanced than that which existed fifty years ago?

That is not to deny a palpable feeling of anticipation, articulated by many in words and deeds and expressed in the Occupy Wall Street and other similarly motivated movements, that numbers of concerned people in Western society may be coming out of their hubristic slumber and awakening to the realities of the human condition. They may be challenging the linearly-constrained models that are still in play across our society and that have given rise to astonishing affluence and opportunity on the one hand and ingrained poverty, hunger, injustice and inequity on the other. They may be standing up and shouting “enough is enough” and that we must craft new intentions regarding our relationship to each other and to planet Earth if we are to survive the extinction of our species. But all of this in no way adds up to a universal tipping point.

I grew up in the United Kingdom immediately following World War II. Through my public school education I was inducted into a Western empirical culture that strongly believed in its own superiority and invincibility. As I became more accomplished and comfortable in that social milieu it did not dawn upon me that I was illiterate when it came to alternative cultures. Only later did I begin to comprehend that I existed in a bubble of blissful ignorance.

Vast numbers of people are in a similar state today. In an age of unprecedented travel they do not journey far from home. Their views are parochial. They watch the kind of infotainment on television designed to keep them docile, content and compliant. Inducted into a way of life they do not challenge they have little conception of what poverty or hunger (for example) actually means. Nor do they really appreciate the freedom, democracy or liberty they supposedly have in abundance.

As an Australian living in Asia while working across the Global South I am constantly dismayed and frustrated by the continuing conceit I perceive in the US-Eurocentric view of how things are and how they should be. Occidental traditions are relatively young in comparison with the great Amerindian, Indigenous, Oceanic, Indic and Sinic cultural mindsets. The sooner we are able to embrace these alternative traditions and benefit from their wisdom the sooner we may reach a genuine tipping point for the authentic advancement of humanity. That will be the moment we are able to shift from involuntary to intentional evolution. I hazard a guess that a shift of this nature, entailing a new inflection of the human experience, will not be triggered from those trapped in Western mindsets. In fact you can bet on it!

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.

Thinking for a Change

The dilemmas facing humanity have become so complex they can only be resolved by comprehending the situation from a higher level of collective consciousness. Once that new state of awareness has been reached, however, we will be able to choose a profoundly different evolutionary path to that recently pursued with such self-interest and short-sighted enthusiasm.

Disruptions to the way planet Earth works, particularly those induced by the ingrained habits of seven billion people all aspiring to similar levels of affluence, can no longer be ignored. At some stage myths must give way to truths if disaster is to be averted.

As Paul Gilding points out so eloquently in his recent book The Great Disruption there is plenty to be positive about. But only if we think differently and more deeply about the human condition and rise above those beliefs and practices that have become an impediment to genuine progress.

Three priorities have surfaced from the fog of scientific evidence, propaganda (and sheer mischief) surrounding issues like climate change. First, policies aimed at putting a stop to unsustainable activities must be scaled up. Second, smart technologies must be applied to the underlying causes of our problems rather than to their symptoms. Third, we must reframe our thinking to embody entirely new possibilities for reimagining what we do (that is both socially desirable and economically feasible) and how we do it.

These priorities are as relevant for business as they are for governments and civil society. The time has long since passed when business could simply mind its own business. Indeed many of the institutions and practices conceived within the 19^th century model of industrial economism, a model that initially brought such affluence to so many, appear now to be steering us down a path to ruin. I am aware that it is impossible to prove such a thesis. But nor do I intend waiting until I have evidence I am correct.

There are many alternatives available to us, ranging from cleaner, adaptive industries and smarter, benign practices to fewer toxic raw materials and biomimicry as a model for organizing and innovating. Most of these alternatives are preferable to what currently exists. However we need to let go of old prejudices and fears that the future will inevitably be worse than the past if such new options are to be implemented quickly. This is the prime lesson informing Gilding’s thesis.

All of which is easier said than done of course. Tackling any one of these imperatives would be difficult enough. Finding ways to adopt all three presents a formidable challenge, not least because the customary ways for administering human affairs have shifted responsibilities to others. Deliberately reframing our thinking to escape the gravitational pull of the past will demand an expansive emancipation of mind, liberation from obsolete ideologies and dogma, and a collective, progressive and audacious awakening to higher levels of consciousness concerning our shared purpose.

Changing behavioural patterns is relatively easy. We do it all the time. Government policies, corporate marketing and public relations campaigns all effectively play on our desires or fears in order to manipulate how we behave. But whereas most present-day marketing efforts are commercially orientated, using psychology to escalate consumerism - even where prosperity without economic growth would be a more sane goal in today’s circumstances - we are failing to use those same mechanisms to endorse the reduction, re-use and recycling of our most precious resources. Clearly much has still to be done even in that regard. But changing our underlying beliefs is far more difficult.

Ultimately though, permanent behavioural change will stem from the structural redesign of our most life-critical systems – particularly those in which human beings interface with nature and with each other. It is often forgotten that all systems are perfectly designed to get the results they get. That is why natural systems remain so resilient.

The problem is that none of our social systems have been designed to consciously evolve. We are, quite literally, trapped in the past. That is precisely why our thinking has to change. In effect we must become architects of our own evolution rather than pawns in a game we assume to be controlled by others.

The inevitable transition to cleaner, low-carbon sources of energy (like solar and hydrogen for example) together with the use of smarter, more efficient, distributed networks that reduce the amount of energy we use, will eventually enable the complete eradication of toxic fuels. At the same time the industries spawned from this transition will generate untold wealth. Designing a sustainable and secure food system capable of providing nourishment for seven billion people or more is also desirable – and readily achievable. Re-engineering the fundamentals of the global economy to eradicate waste, promote equity and protect the resources we all share is also realistic.

But there is a catch. Before the trapeze artist leaps into space he must step off the platform on which he is standing. Systemic reinventions of this nature requires a strategic, emotional and “transcendent” commitment to the new story in addition to an appreciation of systemic design that is rare, so devoid of integral intelligence has our conditioning become.

In terms of systemic design and renewal there are two crucial keys to success. Both rely on our capacity and willingness to reframe our notions about what really matters, to boldly step into new ways of knowing and being, and to openly engage with others in that metamorphosis.

The first key is the ability to imagine and communicate an alternative social “meme” (together with compelling narratives) that supersedes more utilitarian goals – at least encompassing happiness, love and compassion in healthier balance with material wealth and well-being. This key unlocks hope and restores fairness. The second key is the ability to elude the curse of knowledge that traps us in an industrial past and allows us to make significantly different choices about the future. This key unlocks a sense of new possibilities and restores trust.

Unfettering an economy based on value exchange in the context of abundance (rather than one of compounding debt in a framework of financial scarcity, for example) could emancipate new forms of enterprise employing many more people than today’s sunset industries. Using renewable sources of energy to establish industrial ecologies that transform and adapt to a warming planet is far wiser than defending the past in an attempt to protect that which could destroy us. [Industry lobbyists take note!] Likewise, accessing peer-to-peer digital media to invite the collective expression of policies and even constitutions (instead of putting our faith in the increasingly detached whims of a few elected representatives) might provide a platform for a far more democratic and empathic society. And so on…

Such strategic choices become possible because of the most fundamental shift in human history: the emergence of a mode of inventiveness (comprising intelligence, foresight and wisdom) that allows new ways of being, thinking and doing to be envisaged and, through cooperation and invention, to be attained.

No doubt humanity can flourish. But only if we learn to transcend obsolete beliefs and fears to engage in deeper conversations that (i) include all salient features of the system we desire to create, (ii) anticipate the intended and unintended consequences of those desires, and (iii) lift the human spirit out of the mire of believing the past cannot be surpassed and that our situation is dire and will only get worse.

In facing a range of complex dilemmas it does us no good to continue to deny the truth. The global outlook is tense. Natural disasters, the spiraling cost of food, geo-political conflict and the collapse of natural systems all seem to herald an end-game in which the extinction of our species is conceivable. We are witness to cascading failures in the systems that support life. Family incomes are being squeezed. We try to do more with less. Politicians focus on trivia. Simple things seem not to work as well as they once did. We fret about how best to survive the present even though we care passionately about the planet and our children’s future.

Yet the solution is in our own hands. Burying our heads in the sand and ignoring reality will not help. Quarantining ourselves from reality we begin to lose the thread of affiliation that otherwise nourishes and sustains us. We cannot isolate ourselves from the truth however hard we might try. It only aggravates our anxieties.

Over a century ago an ambitious geo-engineering project was implemented. Responding to a major planetary issue of the time two German scientists, Haber and Bosch, made nitrogen-rich fertilizer available to farmers, thus significantly increasing the annual amount of nitrogen fixed on land. The unintended consequences were catastrophic: the human population mushroomed exponentially.

But having created the problem we must live with it. By participating in the actuality of our predicament we can restore hope while exploring practical pathways into the future. Our starting point is not the changing of a light bulb nor the purchasing of a more fuel-efficient car. On the contrary renewal begins with a sense of responsibility to each other and to the planet. Re-envisaging a new purpose for humanity must now become our prime goal. We must think big for a change.

A Moment In Geological Time

The sun rose again this morning. Looking out of my window, eighteen floors above the streets of Bangkok, I still see familiar skyscrapers punctuating the horizon. And as the ambient noise of human activity begins to cut through the lazy dawn it is clear that life is going on much as before.

Or is it? Something extraordinary is happening. You can almost feel it in the air. I do not mean the imminent arrival of my son Dominique Oliver Hames into the world, although that too is very special. I am not talking about an Armageddon following the return of Jesus Christ to Earth in a “rapture” moment or the likelihood of aliens observing us from afar even though there are possibly billions of planets, some just like ours, in the Milky Way. I am not referring to the waves of civil disobedience that have been sweeping across the Arab world of late, mixed reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden, the cascading failures of a global monetary system based upon compounded debt, nor even the inexorable rise of China and the corresponding economic and moral collapse of the US empire.

On the contrary I am suggesting a phenomenon that will have us scrambling to re-write textbooks and re-examine the most deeply-embedded of our hypotheses concerning human identity and purpose.

It turns out we are living through and contributing to a defining moment in geological time. As incongruous and as unlikely as it seems, the human species has become a force of nature, the sheer scale of our activities reshaping the Earth’s surface and the natural processes upon which all life depends. Unlike fateful events of a transitory nature this intervention actually does change everything! Not necessarily for the worse as many claim, although the final outcome is far from certain and probably will be for some time.

A number of leading Earth scientists have suggested this is happening from observing a set of life-critical, natural, recycling systems. For example, carbon and nitrogen cycles are both speeding up. While natural fluxes of carbon dioxide are many times larger than the amount put into the atmosphere each year by people burning fossil fuels, the effect of human intervention is disproportionate. It is possible that even a small increase can can cause a catastrophic tipping point to occur in the climate system. A recent report by the International Energy Agency now suggests human intervention in the carbon cycle will generate global heating of between 3 and 5 degrees celsius over two or three generations. That posits a degree of global chaos for which we are not at all prepared. 

Over the past century the nitrogen cycle has accelerated by almost 150 per cent. Although some of this increase is accidental it has mostly arisen through a deliberate attempt by scientists at the end of the 19th century to increase the supply of nitrogen fixates into the food chain. The Haber-Bosch process harnessed the atmospheric abundance of nitrogen to create ammonia, which could then be oxidized to make the nitrates so essential for the production of artificial fertilisers. Unfortunately Fritz Haber and his associates failed to anticipate the scale of unintended consequences flowing from this early attempt at geoengineering. Their intervention increased the human population by a quantum!

There are numerous other salient factors to be taken into account which arise from an acceleration in these natural cycles. The oceans are acidifying and warming faster than predicted. Sediment flows in the world’s great deltas, home to hundreds of millions of people, are eroding faster than they can be replaced. Seasons are shifting. Water supplies are threatened by retreating glaciers. Extinction rates are higher than normal. The Arctic ice shelf is melting, puncturing the permafrost and allowing vast stores of methane to leak into the atmosphere for the first time…

Human curiosity, possibly more than a sense of responsible stewardship, obliges us to enquire into the source of such shifts. It is actually quite simple. We have become Creator, architects of our own evolution, not only at a nanoscale level of genetic and cellular manipulation but at the macro level of geological shifts. In effect humanity’s disruption, modification and acceleration of natural processes has triggered the age of homo sapiens. The Anthropocene age has dawned and there are important consequences to consider.

The evolutionary clock is ticking loudly. As hard as we might try we cannot wind back the hands. Returning to a more reassuring or comfortable past is ethically untenable as well as an impractical illusion. Instead we must learn to live wisely with our creation. At a minimum this means safeguarding the continuing viability of life-nurturing systems - such as clean air and pure water; halting the rampant despoilation of natural ecosystems - such as the rainforests and the oceans; prioritizing our most critical needs (like nutritious food, love and happiness) more prudently and transparently; enhancing environmental, social and institutional resilience; commissioning new technologies responsibly; and creating an ecology of mind grounded in appreciation, abundance, sufficiency and collaboration.

Simply put, it is time to let go of past frameworks - and with it the fears, superstitions, protocols and practices that constrain potential and set us against each other – to design a future capable of generating sufficient well-being and prosperity for everybody. That objective will be impossible to achieve through incremental or cosmetic changes to current ways or fiddling at the inconsequential fringes of the existing paradigm. We need an archetypal metamorphosis: a suite of profound transformations  that will shift human praxis from competition to cooperation, from economic growth to well being, from inequity to integrity, from despair to hope and from inward-looking interests to a planetary consciousness.

I find the idea of metamorphosis, resulting from positioning human development at the centre of the natural sciences rather than some kind of peripheral sideshow, genuinely inspiring. On the one hand it sounds simple and obvious. Indeed it is. But in order to accomplish a panarchical transformation of such ambition and scope we would need to initiate a wave of societal innovation, the audacity of which is unprecedented. For what we are proposing here is nothing less than an awakening to a conscious human evolution where human purpose and intent is reconceptualised at its most fundamental levels. At the same time a transfiguration of this nature would presumably offer profound alternatives to the popularly held view (of a synthesis between biological and digital life forms) proposed by some overly-enthusiastic technocrats as the most likely future for our species.

Consciously designing a world that can comfortably accommodate ten billion people will require all the empathy, compassion, ingenuity and imagination we can muster. What I am intimating is a contemporary renaissance of humanity and the human soul possibly unlike anything we have previously envisaged.

Just as the natural world is working differently as a result of our presence, so the world we are creating will need to operate differently from the one which effortlessly accommodated two billion people at the end of World War II in 1945. We have to adopt ecological design criteria and alternative governance methods; invent more aligned, responsive and adaptive institutions based on an appreciation of the need to conserve our common wealth; find smarter ways of producing life’s necessities by working with nature rather than against it; reduce waste; establish an economy in which prosperity is decoupled from corruption and motives of greed or self-interest - all the while embedding efficiencies to ensure that our planet can continue to provide abundantly for us all and not just the privileged or wealthy few.

In that context it is vital we seek to transform how we think - about our relationship to the planet and to each other. This will require a profound transition of individual and collective consciousness. That is the extent of the task facing us. The scale of this challenge is astonishing.

To comprehend the dynamic complexities entailed in such a transformation we can use the carbon cycle, which I referenced earlier, as a typical example of the entangled nature of the issue. You are probably already aware of the claims being made by our leading climate scientists. But I will restate some relevant statistics if only to ensure you are up-to-date with the most recent science.

According to the International Energy Agency, Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount in 2010, reaching the highest carbon output in recorded history. Not even the financial crisis, considered by many observers to be the most serious global recession of the past 80 years, has done much to curb rising emissions. The eminent economist Nicholas Stern, noting this fact, stated that the heating resulting from increased emissions "will disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict."

In spite of an extensive and prolonged search from numerous sources I have found no credible information that is seriously at odds with this prediction - apart from the banal observation that we cannot possibly know for certain. This being the case, in order to avoid the most damaging effects of global heating annual energy-related emissions will need to be no more than 32 gigatons by 2020. If emissions in 2011 rise by as much as they did in 2010, that limit will be exceeded nine years ahead of schedule. This would make it all but impossible to keep the rise in global temperatures to within 2° Celsius, the tipping point, many scientists believe, before exponential feedback loops lead to abrupt, asymmetric and potentially irreversible changes to the climate system.

I confess that I find this news terrifyingly bitter-sweet. As the room for maneuvering contracts by the day, urgent action is still not forthcoming – even when it comes to the relatively less painful implementation of energy efficiencies through reduction, re-use and recycling. Instead, the reverse seems to be happening. For example, since the earthquake and tsunami damage to the Daiichi reactors at Fukushima earlier this year several countries have been re-evaluating nuclear power. Germany has seemingly declared a halt to its nuclear reactor programs although it had been on the verge of doing so for some time. Japan is teetering on the brink of electing to go down a similar path. Community paranoia over nuclear energy has been evident since the accidents at Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986). Yet it is one of the safest forms of electricity generation. It also happens to be one of the major technologies for producing electricity without carbon dioxide. The gap left by scaling back the world's nuclear facilities is unlikely to be filled entirely by renewable energy, meaning an increased reliance on fossil fuels, at least in the foreseeable future. Some of these can be made cleaner, that is true. But they remain damaging to our climate in spite of the reassuring messages being disseminated by the oil, coal and gas lobby.

Then there are locked-in emissions to consider. About 80 per cent of the power stations likely to be in service in 2020 are either already built or under construction. Most of these are fossil-fuelled power stations unlikely to be taken out of service early. So they will continue to emit carbon – possibly for a further 40 years or so.

Add to all of this the fact that the significance of climate change in international policy debates is being taken less seriously than it was a few years ago, mostly as a result of intensive lobbying and fear mongering from certain sectors of the business community, and that developed nations have really only managed to reduce carbon emissions by importing goods from countries like China, and we have a recipe for catastrophe. At least without a shift in consciousness….

It is worth repeating here that it is not just global heating caused by increasing amounts of carbon in the air that is of concern but how climate is intricately linked with other life-critical systems. For example, we are witnessing an unprecedented rise in the cost of staple foods like rice, grains and potatoes. Food is getting more expensive as successive grain harvests fail. Unless urgent action is taken to reform the global food system the cost of these staples will more than double within 20 years, forcing many more millions into poverty. Half of that increase will be directly caused by global heating while the remainder will be the result of a combination of factors including geopolitical conflict, soil erosion, a scarcity of arable land and water for irrigation, and access to affordable energy.

But let us step out of our linear thinking habits to incorporate ever more salient data. If we pause to examine the entire contextual system of human behaviour in the environment over a period of several hundred years (the panarchical relationship) the picture of cascading problems becomes much more evident. Take the sum of around thirty environmental trends (including for example, ocean acidification, worsening oxygen levels in large cities, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, desertification, falling water tables, declining fish stocks, or methane venting from melting icecaps) and we can plot exponential deterioration over at least the past 75 years. It is clear our species is changing how nature works. There is no other feasible explanation.

When I was born there were just under two billion people on the planet. Later this year the figure will have grown to seven billion. By the end of the century it is likely to exceed ten billion. In spite of such ballooning population growth our desires and behaviours have not changed one iota. We still aspire to become more affluent than our neighbors. We still rely on technology to solve our problems. We still wait for a crisis before we act. We still delegate our responsibility for each other to those less capable than ourselves. I have no doubt that unless excessive consumption is outlawed, which is highly improbable, marketing gurus will continue in their obsessive quest of getting us to buy more and more stuff from manufacturers being urged to produce more and more goods, a large proportion of which will eventually go to waste.

The truth is there to see. Yet even now, against such dire scenarios, politicians and industry lobbyists in each of the great powers are eyeing up extraordinary and risky ways to extract the world's last remaining reserves of fossil fuels in the name of corporate profits and economic development. Furthermore they all seem to be willing to fight each other for resources that will pour even more carbon into the atmosphere, thus pushing the climate system into unknown territory.

How can this be? If it was simply the storyline to the latest James Bond movie we would applaud such imaginative fantasy and gasp at the implausible stunts. But Dr No and Spectre are no more than naive delinquents in this political playground. This is real. No repeated denials or political posturing is going to make it all vanish. Science is telling us that nature has limits and that we need to dismantle the fossil fuel industry (as it is currently structured) as fast as we possibly can. We cannot win. Yet we persist, choosing to ignore science, preferring the hubris of inaction and denying the risk to future generations and to the poor who have few means to protect themselves from the impacts of a changing climate.

It appears we are not fully awake to this reality but sleepwalking. Sleepwalking towards a crisis that is of our own making and that might still be avoided – if only we were more sensitive to the dangers and can see the wisdom of changing our minds about how we choose to live our lives.

Nor is being awake the only issue. As I have repeatedly said, changing our minds entails a shift in consciousness so that we perceive the systemic nature of the risks confronting us with greater clarity and can take appropriate and rapid corrective action. Only then will we be in a position to transcend potentially catastrophic consequences. In view of the implacable nature and recklessness of those who continue to pollute the atmosphere I wonder if this is really possible, especially in view of the increasing urgency of our predicament, given that individual epiphanies must necessarily occur along with any collective shift of consciousness.

After the debacle at the COP15 climate change talks in Copenhagen (and in spite of scientists warning us that climate change poses the greatest threat to our species in its history, that we are running out of time, and that we may even be facing the prospect of our own extinction) it is clear that many political and business leaders are inept at dealing with complexity. Moreover the majority are ill-prepared to tackle intertwined issues that would loose them votes or profits. Leadership has become a lost art. Disregarding autocrats and the existence of ingrained corruption in most sovereign states, nearly all representatives of the modern world-system are either unwilling or incapable of putting aside self-interest for the common good. Meanwhile public awareness will increasingly lead to frustration and protest. More attuned to the truth, yet distressed by its existential nature, communities around the world are increasingly opting to vent their anger and bemusement in various forms of civil disobedience and protest.

But if we are bemused by the extent to which human behaviours are causing climate change, concerned by the lack of clarity concerning the potential impact of continuing fires, droughts and floods on our lifestyles, and puzzled by the lack of concerted and coherent government action, at least let us be clear about one thing. We the people, social witnesses to official dithering, scare-mongering and apathy, are no longer the revolutionaries. Nor for that matter are the scientists, environmentalists or outliers crying out for societal transformation via a shift in consciousness. In this instance the real radicals are those political and industry militants, together with their benefactors, who refuse to relinquish their financially-driven motives, who will go to any lengths to protect their collapsing ideology and who mindlessly insist that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy designed to bring down capitalism. In due course this open defiance of rationality, coupled with a reluctance to put the common wealth before individual profit, must be called to account. Through inaction and hubris these radicals are pilfering the prosperity and viability of future generations. They are now the anarchists and their selfish sedition must not be allowed to succeed.

But how can we overcome such a compelling force when most of the investment capital required for securing even easy gains (e.g. the rapid advancement of energy efficiencies in conjunction with the deployment of proven renewable technologies) is stashed away in the vaults of governments and corporations fixated on quick profits, big profits and gratuitous homage to obsolete economic theories?

For me the real crisis facing homo sapiens is not climate change per se, nor any of the resulting effects articulated above, but the erroneous set of assumptions about human nature that condones excessive production and consumption at a time when the impact of such behaviours on those who do not have access to similar resources and opportunities are self-evident. Most of these assumptions, with their emphasis on individual self-interest and competitive materialism were laid down during the 18^th century Enlightenment. They have been taken, incorrectly as it happens, as fundamental to human endeavour ever since. Indeed these beliefs are trotted out with tedious regularity as the primary defence and rationale for globalisation. It is worth examining how these assumptions are flawed in today’s context. 

In his topical book The Empathic Civilization US economist and futurist Jeremy Rifkin is unequivocal about this issue. Human beings, he says, are naturally empathic. It is built into our biology. Yet most of our assumptions and hence our business, social and governance institutions, are founded on an entirely different set of cultural and behavioural norms. Namely, that we are intrinsically competitive. “In 19^th century Europe this impulse regarding human nature was mindlessly embraced by the newly-conceived sovereign states where they were commonly perceived as autonomous agents entangled in a relentless and never-ending battle with other sovereign states in the pursuit of material gain and the protection of its citizens.”

Rifkin notes that recent discoveries in neuroscience and child development (for example mirror-neurons - nerve cells that enable human beings and some other species to feel and experience another's situation and emotions as if they were one's own) pose a credible challenge to these long-held assumptions. The detection of mirror neurons suggests we are social and empathic creatures after all and that we constantly seek intimate participation and companionship with our fellows. This view also happens to reinforce observations made by Russian zoologist Pyotr Kropotkin who, barely 25 years after Darwin’s pioneering work, observed cooperation within and between species in the icy tundra of Siberia. Such discoveries overturn many of our previous beliefs concerning human motives. The growing scientific evidence that we are a fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching consequences for society.

Uppermost in any ontological re-framing of the human condition, Rifkin postulates, is the proposition that human evolution can be measured not merely by the expansion of supremacy over nature “but also by the intensification of empathic connection to a broader diversity of living beings.” Throughout the sweep of human history we have seen successive technology revolutions leading to leaps in economic prosperity. They have also brought about shifts in consciousness, which has then led to further technological advancement… This cycle has also been accelerating until today’s scientific innovations have the potential to change paradigms in decades rather than over centuries.

Once again Rifkin’s assessment is precise. “Forager-hunter societies relied on oral communications and their consciousness was mythologically constructed. The great agricultural civilizations were, for the most part, organized around script communication and steeped in theological consciousness. The first industrial revolution in 19^th century Europe was managed by print communication and ushered in ideological consciousness. Electronic communication became the command and control mechanism for arranging the second industrial revolution in the 20th century and spawned psychological consciousness.”

Like Rifkin I have no doubt that today’s distributed technologies, peer-to-peer social media and the potential for cleaner, renewable, open source energies, will create an opportunity for human civilisation to transcend current dilemmas by virtue of the most momentous evolutionary step we will ever have taken. By abandoning parochial self-interest and embracing an appreciative sensitivity towards the diverse richness of life we will step into a new epistemology (a biospheric consciousness) where the depth of social intimacy and interaction will become both the primary design principle and central nervous system for a new pangaian society.

With good fortune and foresight that giant step might also steer the human narrative away from fear to one of hope and inclusion. In an age where information frequently overwhelms us, where faith has been torpedoed by its own institutions, where we can design, manufacture and acquire more or less anything we can imagine, and where our access to a range of mind-blowing experiences is virtually unlimited, we lack just one thing: an overriding sense of purpose for this Anthropocene age.

Why have we been given the skill to invent technologies that enable instant communication and constant connectivity? Where is the real added value? Is it just to be entertained or to hasten commercial exchange? Surely not. But what additional benefits are created, over and above material gain? What (if anything) in all of this nourishes the human soul or our deep desire for empathy through connection? What is the transcendent purpose that extends beyond mere tribal or religious affiliations and national identity to embrace the whole of humanity? And how should we engage with this? 

Along with these unknowns there are many reasons to be optimistic. Transcending the civilizational worldview can help create a new global ethos in which the rich and diverse variety of relationships comprising the planet’s life-sustaining forces can harmonise and come into a new equilibrium. It can move us beyond the disconnected, self-interested and utilitarian ideals that burden our daily lives with matters of ultimate inconsequence. It can rise above the state-dominated geopolitical mess we have fashioned to allow new forms of planetary management and governance to evolve. Above all it can restructure our lives to become more collaborative and empathic.