As any nuanced thinker will tell you, there are no easy answers in this world. However given the massive upheavals we are experiencing, it is incumbent on us to push forward through sense-making and connecting with our values and our visions. In this book chapter we offer three scenarios for the futures of the commons movement and social change. We argue that we need to build a meta language for commoning – a “protocol commons”. This will allow us to weave a broader movement across many different actors that are working for commons in their own way (even when they are not calling it commons or commoning). We call this an “ecology of the commons”. 

The book chapter is part of an ambitious anthology by Anne Grear and David Bollier titled ​”The Great Awakening: New Modes of Life amidst Capitalist Ruins​”  (​Punctum Books, Santa Barbara) ​​

​I​t is an ambitious ​anthology that brings together contributions from​ ​Sam Adelman, David Bollier, Primavera De Filippi, Vito De Lucia, Richard Falk, Anna Grear, Paul B. Hartzog, Andreas Karitzis, Xavier Labayssiere, ​and ​Maywa Montenegro de Wit​, as well as including our work.​ In their own words: 

“It is clear that the multiple, entangled crises produced by neoliberal capitalism cannot be resolved by existing political and legal institutions, which are imploding under the weight of their own contradictions. Present and future needs can be met by systems that go beyond the market and state. With experiments and struggle, a growing pluriverse of commoners from Europe and the US to the Global South and cyberspace are demonstrating some fundamentally new ways of thinking, being and acting…. We learn about seed-sharing in agriculture, blockchain technologies for networked collaboration, cosmo-local​ ​peer production of houses and vehicles, creative hacks on law, and new ways of thinking and enacting a rich, collaborative future. This surge of creativity is propelled by the social practices of commoning new modes of life for creating and sharing wealth in fair-minded, ecologically respectful ways.​” ​

The ​anthology will be available in September​ 2020 through Punctum Books here. A preprint of the book chapter can be seen here.

Lead image:  CityTree עץבעיר 

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Description

Bernard Lietaer calls for three paradigm shifts – With specific actions by individuals and leaders

With unsuitable means we half-heartedly try to repair the complicated clockwork of our world. This gets us nowhere. It won’t get us out of the crisis, because it will not result in a sustainable world.

The time has come to lead ourselves and our world through “three paradigm shifts”.

This is what Bernard Lietaer demands in this book, which he dictated on his deathbed.

First: Recognize and adhere to the law of sustainability

The book shows that in our world we are dealing with “living systems” that are linked in many ways. With forests, our money, our society, and .. and .. and. Our well-being depends on the future sustainability of these systems.

The “Law of the Sustainability of Living Systems“, developed with other experts, explains and specifies the principles of sustainability:  

It says that living systems are only sustainable if they achieve a balance between productivity and elasticity. Balance, therefore, between short-term benefits of long-term existence. Just like that of Yin and Yang – not an “either – or”.  

We violate this law criminally. We have driven most living systems out of balance, making them non-sustainable.. Monocultures of all kinds, for example, emphasize short-term benefits and are not even sustainable in the short term without massive additional costs, as Lietaer shows with the example of forests and today’s monetary system. 

The book calls on readers to ensure that this law of sustainability is recognized and complied with. Both as individuals and as leaders in business and politics, readers are challenged to balance the short-sighted overvaluation of rapid return with the preservation of resilience.

Second: Balance matrifocal and patrifocal values

In order to view our society within the framework of the law of sustainability, Bernard Lietaer uses the terms “matrifocal” (“give and maintain”) and “patrifocal” (“take and have”). Both men and women follow this pair of values, each person according to their personal orientation. 

From this point of view it becomes clear that here, too, we are violating the law of sustainability. All over the world we live by patrifocal (“have”) values and neglect the matrifocal (“give”) side of balance, as we can see in our dealings with education, the elderly, people in need of care and with each other. 

Even though Lietaer sees signs of improvement, he does not only demand a fundamental change in our values in this area. He invites his readers to become aware of these values in themselves and to achieve their personal balance. Leaders must also establish and maintain a matrifocal/patrifocal balance in their areas of responsibility.

Third: Make personal information personal again

An extremely important system for the sustainability of mankind is the flow of human information. It enables learning and solving problems together. This is also why the “General declarations of human rights” declares unhindered flow of information a principle human right. 

The book shows that this system, which is essential for survival, is completely out of balance. Companies have centralized flow of information and exploit it to their advantage. We individuals have thus been dispossessed of our information and, from the point of view of the law of sustainability the information system has deeply slipped into the “productivity corner”. 

The answer is to make this system of human resources sustainable by restoring personal ownership of our information. This must be achieved jointly by both IT companies and governments

A convincing message

Despite addressing  at first glance a seemingly complex matter the book creates a convincing message – in simple and clear descriptions, examples and pictures.

Find out more in the book’s website.

Lead image: * Planet * by pareeerica on 2009-02-01 16:05:33

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Charts the strategic thinking behind the movements challenging neoliberal globalization.

A Movement of Movements charts the strategic thinking behind the mosaic of movements currently challenging neoliberal globalization. Leading theorists and activists—the Zapatistas’ Subcomandante Marcos, Chittaroopa Palit from the Indian Narmada Valley dam protests, Soweto anti-privatization campaigner Trevor Ngwane, Brazilian Sem Terra leader João Pedro Stedile, and many more—discuss their personal formation as radicals, the history of their movements, their analyses of globalization, and the nuts and bolts of mobilizing against a US-dominated world system.

Explaining how the Global South and the experience of indigenous peoples have provided such a dynamic and practical inspiration, the contributors describe the roles anarchism and direct democracy have played, the contributions and limitations of the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre as a coordinating focus, and the effects of and responses to the economic downturn, September 11, and Washington’s war on terror. Their statements, at once personal and visionary, offer a dazzling new insight into the political imagination of the global resistance movements.

Available here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/170-a-movement-of-movements

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Market anarchists favor replacing the state with a fully free market, i.e., one with no restrictions on voluntary production and exchange; all functions of the state are either to be abolished (when they are inherently invasive of people’s right to live their lives peacefully) or turned over to free competition (when they are not). Many market anarchists – especially, though not exclusively, those associated with market anarchism’s “right” wing – tend to envision a fully free market as one in which all resources are privately owned. The essays in this book offer a different perspective: that a stateless free-market society can and should include, alongside private property, a robust role for public property – not, of course, in the sense of governmental property, but rather in the sense of property that is owned by the general community rather than by specific individuals or formally organized groups.The delineation of the theory of common property under market anarchism is a work in progress. Think of the present volume as a conversation-starter, not a conversation-ender.

Order the book at C4SS.org

The post Book of the Day: The Anatomy of Escape: A Defense of the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Description:

“The computerization of the economy—and everyday life—has transformed the division of labor between humans and machines, shifting many people into work that is hidden, poorly compensated, or accepted as part of being a “user” of digital technology. Through our clicks and swipes, logins and profiles, emails and posts, we are, more or less willingly, participating in digital activities that yield economic value to others but little or no return to us. Hamid Ekbia and Bonnie Nardi call this kind of participation—the extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labor in computer-mediated networks—“heteromation.” In this book, they explore the social and technological processes through which economic value is extracted from digitally mediated work, the nature of the value created, and what

Arguing that heteromation is a new logic of capital accumulation, Ekbia and Nardi consider different kinds of heteromated labor: communicative labor, seen in user-generated content on social media; cognitive labor, including microwork and self-service; creative labor, from gaming environments to literary productions; emotional labor, often hidden within paid jobs; and organizing labor, made up of collaborative groups such as citizen scientists. Ekbia and Nardi then offer a utopian vision: heteromation refigured to bring end users more fully into the prosperity of capitalism.”

Available at MIT Press

Header Photo by Janrito Karamazov

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The book, published in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation and its office in Sarajevo, is a rigorous yet accessible 170-page introduction to the commons, with an accent on developments in the region of South East Europe (SEE). Its main editor and author is Tomislav Tomašević, with  additional editing by Vedran Horvat and Jelena Milos, augmented by contributions from a number of individual authors and a larger team. 

The Institute’s primary goal in preparing the book is to “put this part of Europe….on the landscape of international academic and political debate on the commons.” By synthesizing knowledge about the commons in the region, the book aims to “provide an interpretive and theoretical framework” for understanding “numerous political actions and mobilizations that have emerged across the region of South East Europe, mainly with the ambition of creating the commons or defending and resisting further enclosure of the commons. Since practice has preceded in-depth theoretical understanding in many cases, we felt a responsibility to start bridging this gap.” 

I highly recommend the book. It’s a tight, well-written, and carefully documented overview of a region whose commons have not received enough attention. 

The book starts with a “compact history of the commons” featuring the classical theory of the commons and newer “critical theory.” From these chapters, the book introduces the history of the commons in the region, cases of commons governance there, and significant political struggles against enclosure.

Like most places around the world, there is a rich history of commoning here that is not widely known:

Ethnologist Jadran Kale writes that the common pastures in Croatia and Slovenia were called gmajna, which obviously comes from the German word Gemeine meaning “common.” In the see countries under the Ottoman rule, there was an interesting concept of vakuf, which comes from the Arabic word waqf and was an inalienable endowment in land, building or other asset under Islamic law that could be freely used by all members of the community but in sustainable way. Despite some of the differences between the SEE countries, historian, and philosopher Maria Todorova writes about the regionally specific social form of extended family cooperative, which became well known in international anthropological literature as zadruga. This was an agricultural socio-economic communal organisation based mostly on kinship, with rather democratic governance and common property institutions.

This chapter of the book traces the history of commons following World War II to the present, noting the distinctive history of Yugoslavia as part of the Non-Aligned Movement (neither market-capitalist West nor state-socialist East). The country hosted a variety of self-governance experiments such as workers self-management and “social ownership” of all means of production. Of course, despite the nominal ownership by workers and citizens, decisionmaking remained in the hands of an elite.  

This historical context is important because, as the book notes, “such a legacy is a major obstacle for advocating any forms of commons in the region today….Even words like ‘cooperative (zadruga), which are not controversial in Western Europe, are considered insulting and hostile by many people in the region” because of the previously mandated agricultural coops in socialist Yugoslavia.

With the past either vilified or bathed in nostalgia for a more stable time, it can be hard for contemporary minds to grasp the realities of peer governance. Would-be commoners in the SEE region must navigate the gap between the repressive totalitarian past, the bloody civil strife of the 1990s, and the fierce neocapitalist capitalist exploitation that has occurred under the auspices of representative democracy.

As the authors explain, the latter resulted in “de-industrialization, high unemployment and increasing poverty” while also disabling the instruments of direct and participatory democracy” that might have allowed citizens to control their elected governments.

So in grappling with the problems today, people in South East Europe confront problems of language, memories, and mindsets. “The neoliberal transition made many people in newly independent countries of South East Europe nostalgic about socialist Yugoslavia, while nationalist political elites still make some critical but honest evaluation of the self-governance practices impossible.” 

However, over the past twenty years, there have been important theoretical elaborations of self-governance advanced by Elinor Ostrom and Yugoslav economist Branko Horvat. The book also notes the landmark work by the working group within Balkan Forum of the 2013 Subversive Festival. (See The Balkan Forum, a 2014 book by edited by Danijela Dolenec and others.)

Most commons in the South East Europe region tend to take two forms — communities of userswho have organized themselves in various sectors (health, education, culture, housing) and people struggling against enclosure — “the commodification, privatization and statification of resources that should be accessible to all.”

Significantly, activist commoners have often embraced the governance practices of commoning in their struggles. In fighting to protect Varšavska Street against the construction of a shopping mall in downtown Zagreb, for example, and in student fights against the commodification of the education system, activist occupations self-governed themselves as commons. 

There is much more in this book worth checking out – the case studies of pasturing commons, the Rojc Community Centre in the City of Pula, and the Luke water supply system in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The book also chronicles the struggles against enclosure in the region, such as the effort to protect Srđ Hill above the City of Dubrovnik from construction of a massive, upscale golf course, villas and hotels.

While there is clearly a commons movement in South East Europe, the authors of this book are candid in admitting that “commons theory, discourse and practice occur within a well-connected but still rather small community of scholars, activists and practitioners, which makes its impact limited. Expanding the commons movement in South East Europe and increasing the amount of research on commons, struggles over commons and governance of commons remains a challenge for the future.”

The report can be downloaded as a pdf file here. 

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Enspiral is a rather unique organisation, often featured in this blog. Over the years the number of participants, its core structure and overall network have evolved in fascinating and informative ways. This evolution along with the many lessons learned is chronicled in their collective book “Better work together”.

As such the book does not theorise. Instead, it offers tales of success and failure as well as the occasional bread recipe. That is, it employs a diverse set of story-telling methods (which reflects the diversity amongst Enspiral members), enhanced by striking visuals to provide empirical accounts of peoples’ experience within this initiative which is driven by the nicer part of the human psyche. There is practical advice abound and even spiritual guidance to achieving personal growth but also better work results through meaningful collaboration and generosity.

The book is written by ten authors and structured in short essays that can be read independently. Different viewpoints with different insight to instil. Overall it offers a beginning but no end. Perhaps a set of principles or a template on social change which comes with hard work and positive negotiation. So, for those looking for a grand narrative about changing the world, this book might not be for you. For those interested in the nitty-gritty of how to build more democratic structures, however, as well as some stories to restore faith in humanity then it is definitely worth a read.

You can get a digital or physically here.

Chris Giotitsas is a Core Member of the P2P Lab research collective and a post-doctoral researcher at Tallinn University of Technology.

The post Better Work Together: A Short Review appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This has resulted in an “epistemological delirium.” As the ordering principle of “the modern” dissolves into thin air, we don’t know which way is up or how to proceed. Hence the title of the original French version of the book, Où atterir? Comment s’orienter en politique – “Where to land? How to orient yourself in politics?”

Humanity no longer has a shared framework of “becoming modern,” says Latour. It is hard for everyone to believe that globalized markets, “development,” and consumerism will yield a steady march toward civilization and progress. Corporations have proven themselves to be consummate externalizers of cost and risk. And climate change among other eco-crises suggests that relentless economic growth is simply preposterous — and grossly mal-distributed in any case.

Hence our profound disorientation. It’s hard to deal with the slow-motion collapse of a once-universal story of human aspiration.

The rich nations, or at least the US, remain mostly in denial about climate change, if only because acknowledging the truth would upend so much. The remaining nation-states of the world, meanwhile, have no clear path in a fractured, divided world for constructing a shared vision.

Without the unifying normative framework of “development” and its claims of infinite growth and progress, how can we figure out a new consensus narrative for humanity, one that acknowledges the existential reality that we live on the same, finite planet? How can we find a way to share and co-manage our only habitable space?

Donald Trump arguably triggered our deep epistemological confusion when he withdrew the US Government from the Paris Climate Accord, Latour argues. By declaring that the US will continue on the same path as it has for decades, with no changes in American lifestyles or reductions in carbon emissions, he was in effect declaring war on the rest of the world.

Or as Latour puts it, “We Americans don’t belong to the same earth as you. Yours may be threatened; ours won’t be!” Trump’s move officially ratified a mindset that President Bush I expressed so bluntly in 1992: “Our way of life is not negotiable!”

Down to Earth is a powerful look at how climate change is changing the tectonic plates of politics, economics, and culture. As the claims of modernity and globalized capitalism fall apart, revealed as ecologically and economically catastrophic, it has opened up an empty space that we don’t know how to fill. Latour brilliantly dissects why our epistemological delirium is happening, how it is transforming politics, and what a new paradigm might look like.

The coming shift is not simply a story of external institutions and nation-states; it’s mostly about our inner conceptualizations about the world and aspirations. For centuries, the Global, or modernization, has stood for scientific, economic, and moral progress. It later erected “the Local” to serve as a useful foil, a way of life that the Global helps us escape.

Modernization has meant progress, profit, development, innovation, and civilization — an escape from the Local, which situates our identities with secure geographic boundaries, ethnicity, and tradition. Modernity has positioned itself as “leaving our native province, abandoning our traditions, breaking with our habits, if we wanted to ‘get ahead,’ to participate in the general movement of development, and, finally, to profit from the world,” writes Latour.

The Local has served as a cautionary counterpoint — an impoverished realm of “the antiquated, the vanquished, the colonized, the subaltern, the excluded,” says Latour. “Thanks to that touchstone, one could treat them unassailably as reactionaries, or at least as anti-moderns, as dregs, rejects. They could certainly protest, but their whining only justified their critics.” 

Modernization has thus made “attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil” as antithetical to “having access to the global world.” One must choose between the two of them.

And so humanity has aligned itself with the ideals of global modernization, the grand project of moving forward in alliance with capitalism. Everything else is cast as lamentably premodern and backward-looking, a zone waiting to be properly modernized.

Defining modern life around these two poles of attraction may be coming to an end, Latour argues, saying “we have reached the end of a certain historical arc.” The onset of neoliberal policies in the 1980s marked a turning point for this change. Elites decided they were going to secede from the world, in effect, by privatizing wealth for themselves at the expense of sharing society and the polity with everyone else. This agenda is epitomized by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the Koch brothers, and the whole cast of neoliberal think tanks, PACs, Davos, survivalist billionaires, and more.

The Local – long the site of colonialist extraction – continues to be seen as “a rump territory, the remains of what has been definitely left behind by modernization.” While political movements have exploited sentimental notions of the Local using nationalist, authoritarian appeals – e.g., Trump, Brexit, Duarte, Bolsonaro, the National Front – these visions are ultimately cynical charades – attempts to capitalize on nostalgic, nativist reactions to the Global and its failures to deliver safety and security.

As the Global/Local framing of human development has fallen apart, Latour writes, it has exposed how neither is truly connected to the biophysical realities of the earth:

The terrifying impression that politics has been emptied of its substance, that it is not engaged with anything at all, that it no longer has any meaning or direction, that it has become literally powerless as well a senseless, has no cause other than this gradual revelation: neither the Global nor the Local has any last material existence.

Both are human projections, consensus fictions with little grounding in ecological realities. Climate change is blowing apart the fantasy of the Global as a realm of infinite possibilities and material extraction. It is also shattering the idea of the Local as a haven of sequestered safety, morality, and order.

What has propelled this change, says Latour, is that the earth itself is becoming a political agent. The earth can no longer be ignored as a powerful autonomous, living force in human affairs. This is making the grand project of modernization/development increasingly problematic because the finite and dynamic character of the earth is becoming quite visible, painfully so. Who can rally around the idea of modernization as a political project when its absurdly utopian dimensions and costs are increasingly plain to see? 

Latour argues that a new “third attractor” is gradually arising to harness political energies and revamp political alignments.The new attractor is based on a commitment to healing the earth and changing the dynamics of politics itself. The new vision, still emerging, is “perpendicular” to the Global/Local axis in the sense that it steps away from the arc of history plotted by capitalist modernization. It recognizes the gritty imperatives of living ecosystems and calls for a “sideway” shift of attention, energy, and innovation — a new narrative of the future.

This shift is occurring, says Latour, because earth systems are discrediting the idea of the world as a vast, limitless, and inert empty space in which human affairs take place. The Enlightenment idea that humanity and “nature” are separate entities is no longer tenable. As Latour notes, “How are we to act if the territory itself begins to participate in history, to fight back, in short, to concern itself with us – how do we occupy a land if it is this land itself that is occupying us?” (Paging John Locke….) 

In short, climate change is mooting many of the premises of modern consciousness itself. It is incubating a new attractor to organize our energies and imaginations. This attractor escapes the fantasies of the Global and Local by frankly recognizing the biophysical realities of the living earth as our destiny and mission. Humanity’s relationship to the earth becomes paramount. Latour decides to provisionally name this attractor “The Terrestrial.”

There is much else that Latour shares in his short book (at 106 pages, a long essay) that clarifies the macro-challenges we face in the coming years. Although he doesn’t mention the commons, it’s clear to me that the commons enacts Latour’s idea of the Terrestrial. Throughout the book, he cites the need for humanity to find “a place to land” – a way to escape the fantasies of modernity and to become more entangled with the biophysical life of the earth.

That’s what commons do! The commons has an ancient pedigree of being very “down to earth.” I think the commons holds great potential for serving as a new attractor for re-imagining life, politics, economics, and consciousness, in synergy with the Terrestrial. But how to hoist up this attractor and give it dynamic scope?

I suppose it takes a distinguished scholar of modernity to know how to critique modernity with such acuity and question some of its fundamental premises. By stepping outside of the conventional frames of discussion about climate change, Latour opens up a rich, grand structure for thinking about the future of politics in the Anthropocene. Now if only we can build out this new third attractor. Let us call it the Terrestrial Commons!

The post Bruno Latour on Politics in the New Climatic Regime appeared first on P2P Foundation.

As a more recent Enspiral member based in Europe, they asked me to write about the larger landscape I saw a network such as Enspiral being part of. I had gotten to know this space quite well and from a different perspective, by being in the midst of the global Ouishare community since 2012. I liked the prompt, and said yes.

A global movement with no name

My essay in Better Work Together, Welcome to the age of participation, puts forward a question: are organizations like Enspiral and Ouishare isolated phenomena, or are they part of a larger, emerging movement? If this is a movement, what are its characteristics? What are the key themes and commonalities? Who is part of it? What could be its’ impact on the world?

In reflecting on my experiences over the past 8 years in various countries, communities and (many) gatherings, the conclusion I reach is no — these are not isolated phenomena. They are part of a growing movement. This left me with a challenge: how do I describe a movement that my intuition tells me exists, but that has no name or quantitative measure? In my essay, I put words to my experiences to draw out the common patterns and themes I can see.

There is a movement on the rise that it is leveraging the power of community, networks, and participation to work on systemic challenges.

Here is how I describe this global movement: a movement that it is leveraging technology and the power of community to connect local and global action and form networks to work on systemic challenges. This not only exists conceptually, but is a tangible reality with a growing number of projects scattered across the globe. The organizations that are part of it come from a broad range of sectors — from environment, to agriculture, to education, to health, to business, to politics. This diversity makes it harder for them to recognize each other. Yet, while their areas of work may differ, their modes of operating are similar. They are aware that their work is a contribution — not a complete solution — to the challenge they aim to solve, and that it is a piece in a much larger puzzle (of global wicked problems).

To understand the facets of this movement more clearly, I identified five main fields (not the only ones) it spans across:

1. The Sharing & Collaborative Economy
2. Circular Economy & Ecological Activism
3. Social Entrepreneurship & Impact
4. Open Source & Decentralization
5. Digital Nomadism & Freelancer collectives

As broad and different as these fields may seem, many of the people and organizations working in them share an ethos, a culture, and many common values. In my essay I paint a colorful picture of this culture and those who are championing it.

Its’ stars are not famous figureheads, but the communities as a whole.

Here is a snapshot of some of the organizations I alone have encountered throughout my work, whom I see as part of this culture (and which are mentioned as examples in the book):

Amanitas Collective, B-Corp, Civic Wise, Commons Network, Edmund Hillary Fellowship, Fab City, Holochain, Impact Hub Network, MakeSense, Malt, Open Collective, Open Food Network, Ouishare, Platform Coop, P2P Foundation, Remotive, Scuttlebut, Shareable, Transition Towns Network, Wemind, Zero Waste Network.

And there are so many more.

Moving from connecting to collective action

This movement has matured a lot since I entered it in 2011, from a fuzzy niche to gradually becoming more defined. The level of connections between the people and organizations within this ecosystem has been increasing, but that is just the first step.

We can all be different and united in action.

Cross-community initiatives like Neotribes, Human Networks, and Dgov Foundation are demonstrating the value of working beyond your own community and networking the networks. Now it’s time we use the fabric we have been weaving between us to move from connecting to collective action. If this movement is to achieve the impact the world needs right now, we need to recognize: we can all be different while united in action.

Read the full essay in Enspiral’s first book, Better Work Together!

Better Work Together reflects on 7+ years of learnings from the Enspiral community through short essays, practical guides, toolkits and personal reflections. It covers different facets of the future of work, including self management, collective structures, cultural processes and tools to deliver a global perspective on how embracing new ways of working together can transform how we do businesses — with practical examples from real world learning.

If you liked this article, I appreciate your claps, following me on Medium and twitter.

Follow the organizations mentioned above on Medium: OpenCollectiveHolochain Design OpenFoodFrance B Corporation B Lab UK BCorpSpainRemotive Malt Shareable TransitionTown Media Fab City Global InitiativeImpact Hub makesense

Thank you Kate Beecroft for the edits and Joshua Vial for the title inspiration!Some rights reserved

The post Better Work Together: Reflections from a nascent movement appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A brief account of human history. Technology and economics 101. The human brain, belief systems and metaphysics. And lots of AI. That’s what’s included in Byron Reese’s book The Fourth Age, featured in CES 2019. There is no lack of ambition or ability to negotiate a variety of topics. But while the book succeeds in this, and shows methodical approach and intellectual honesty, its optimistic lens hampers its analysis and borders on solutionism.

“In The Fourth Age, Byron Reese offers the reader something much more valuable than what to think about Artificial Intelligence and robotics — he focuses on HOW to think about these technologies, and the ways in which they will change the world forever”.

“While we can probably agree that the exact future of AI has a lot of unknowns, and hence potential dangers, it doesn’t change the fact that we can choose to view the possibilities through an optimistic lens, as Reese does here”.

These are just some of the reviews people have written about The Fourth Age. The former belongs to John Mackey, co-founder and CEO, Whole Foods Market. The latter to an anonymous reviewer. They are both valid, in their own way. This may seem paradoxical at first, so an explanation is due.

Assumptions, and a brief history of everything

Byron Reese is the CEO and publisher of the technology research company Gigaom, and the founder of several high-tech companies. Reese has a keen interest in AI, and hosts the Voices in AI podcast. Reese gets to interact with some of AI’s top minds and entrepreneurs regularly, and is presumably embedded in the tech and entrepreneurship culture. This is the book’s greatest asset and most formidable liability at the same time.

Reese does a good job at presenting a brief history of everything: the course of humanity from prehistoric time to today, and how technology has evolved and affected humanity through the ages. This sets the stage well, and Reese also ventures on more ambitious undertakings, negotiating topics such as economics and labor, the human brain, free will and consciousness.

It may seem overly ambitious, but the fact is that when dealing with artificial intelligence and the future, adressing human intelligence and history is a necessary foundation. The good thing about how Reese approaches such topics is that he presents concise overviews of alternative theories or beliefs, showing how each assumption may lead to different conclusions.

The well-made point is that ultimately, some things are less about technology itself, and more about our fundamental assumptions about the world. If you believe in the divine nature of human soul, for example, it’s hard to see how you can also believe in the possibility of creating AI with consciousness. Reese states that he makes no effort to conceal his own assumptions, and that much is true.

Ideology and cognitive bias

Reese does mention ideology as a certain cognitive bias, for example claiming that Marx believed machines were at odds with workers. Marx certainly was no Luddite; his work shows admiration for technological progress, but questions the control of the means of production and the distribution of the fruits of this progress. But misrepresentation is not really the issue here – we could attribute this to what is probably a casual acquaintance with Marx’s work.

The issue is that Reese displays this ideological bias himself, albeit from a different standpoint. While he offers a grounded analysis of how capital accumulation interacts with technology to widen income inequality, for example, the conclusions he arrives at based on this analysis can only be justified seen through the lens of ideology and overly optimism.

Reese also discusses universal basic income as a means of accounting for technological disruption in labor and income inequality, citing statistics, quoting Warren Buffet, and even referring to the commons to build a case. While this seems like an open-minded approach, when Reese offers his own version of a vision for the future, his view on the topic is astonishing.

Reese’s view seems to be that in the long run, income inequality does not matter, because there will be abundance for everyone. This is the well-known “tide that raises all boats” argument, taken to its logical extreme. The issues with this are equally extreme, unfortunately.

Infinite growth and Climate change

What this basically says is that there is no limit in natural resources. This implies either infinite growth on a finite planet, or interplanetary travel and technological breakthroughs that offer practically infinite resources. That world may be a very interesting place, as shown in Iain M. Bank’s The Culture series. But it’s far from being our world, and seeing this as the end-all is not only misguided, but ultimately dangerous.

Our biggest challenge as a species at this time is not interplanetary travel or conscious AI, it is survival. Our current trajectory is towards irreversible climate change, resource depletion, environmental doom, and everything that goes with this. Reese is on the boat of those who think exponential technological progress can, and will, solve everything. Even if it can, and that’s a very big if and a convenient way to kick down the can, this is a short-sighted view.

According to the UN, humanity has 10 years to act before the damage on Earth and its climate is irreversible. One would expect this may be a concern for a book which is about, well, the future. We are not talking about some vague or remote possibility, after all, but about the most crucial challenge humanity needs to deal with to even have a future.

Reese mentions climate change in passing 1 time in the entire book, while he devotes chapters to things such as implants. This seems like a glaring omission for a book that is about the future of humanity – maybe that’s not futuristic enough to be popular. Judging on his belief that everything is a technical issue, perhaps Reese also believes that something like Geo-engineering can solve the problem within 10 years.

Decision making and Deus ex Machina

Which brings us to another issue. Dealing with climate change requires
decision making, coordination and action on a global scale. Reese believes that the underclass has a say in decision making in Democracies. Another oversight in the ‘inequality does not matter’ argument is that money does not just represent buying power, it also represents decision-making power. What happens when income inequality is left unchecked is that decision-making power follows.

Buying a bigger TV is not the same as deciding the world needs more TVs. Reese claims we have collectively opted for a “better standard of living”. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we have been collectively indoctrinated to consume.

Reese does mention that people have the power to step up, when given a chance. So it’s quite interesting that the innovation that is praised when applied to technology is so cautiously, if at all, applied to decision making and education. Democracy, often referred to as the means to counter decision-making inequality, is not that different today from ancient Greece: it warrants equality among a closed group of privileged.

Reese’s view is optimistic here, too: the patricians will not risk social upheaval, and will therefore grant something to the plebeians. Maybe so. But if history is anything to go by, the patricians may need a little push. Meanwhile, time is running out. So what may turn out to be the biggest obstacle towards this bright future of automation is the fact that social progress is not keeping up with technological progress. It may well be, in fact, that AI favors tyranny.

We are collectively unable to keep up with technology in terms of the evolution of our social structure and cognitive biases. Even if technological progress and the economic system that dictates infinite growth were to simply come to a halt now, we would still need time to level the playing field.

Offering more technology as the solution to everything is like giving a mad gunman an infinitely more powerful gun, in the hope he will use it better than the one he now has. Placing our hopes on AI that will sort everything out is like waiting for a Deus ex Machina.

Yes, technology offers the potential for a better society. But only if used wisely and fairly, and this is the part we are missing and need to focus on.
We need to reform the mad gunman, and no AI is going to do this for us.

Disclosure: The Fourth Age was provided to me free of charge for review via Gigaom. I used to have a business relationship with Gigaom before Byron Reese became its CEO. After Gigaom was shut down by its former management, myself as well as a number of people who had outstanding invoices with Gigaom lost their money. To the best of my knowledge, none of this debt has been repaid by Gigaom’s new management.

The post Book of the Day: The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity appeared first on P2P Foundation.