I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects.”

It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg? These billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy — the same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures — something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities. Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an anti-technology curmudgeon.

So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the demise of local retail.

But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now sadly refers to their products as “fairer” phones.)

Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.

Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.

Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the undead — and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, where one group’s survival is dependent on another one’s demise. Even Westworld — based on a science-fiction novel where robots run amok — ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: Human beings are simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we create. The robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few lines of code, and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices. Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.

The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.

Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space — as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and somehow survive in a bubble on Mars — despite our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar Biosphere trials — the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.

They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.

Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.

Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.
Team Human, the book, is ready for Pre-Order! Don’t be shy. Everyone who has emailed to ask what can they do to help? Preorder the Team Human manifesto!

———-

Douglas Rushkoff

http://rushkoff.com

Founder, Laboratory of Digital Humanism and Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics, CUNY/Queens

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus my new book on what went wrong in the digital economy and how to fix it.

Team Human – my new podcast!

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The post Douglas Rushkoff: Survival of the Richest appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Sarah Manski describes seven technological characteristics that are seed forms for different socio-technical systems and societies, which we will publish separately in a second installment. At the P2P Foundation we strongly believe in the necessity of a commons-centric society and a partner state. Sarah Manski describes how the increasing functional governance of a global technological commonwealth, could empower a global civil society which ‘engulfs’ the state functions and molds them to its service.

No Gods, No Masters, No Coders? The Future of Sovereignty in a Blockchain World. Law Critique (2018) 29:151–162

Authors: Sarah Manski and Ben Manski (Published on Academia.edu)

Abstract

The building of the blockchain is predicted to harken the end of the contemporary sovereign order. Some go further to claim that as a powerful decentering technology, blockchain contests the continued functioning of world capitalism. Are such claims merited? In this paper we consider sovereignty and blockchain technology theoretically, posing possible futures for sovereignty in a blockchain world. These possibilities include various forms of individual, popular, technological, corporate, and techno-totalitarian state sovereignty. We identify seven structural tendencies of blockchain technology and give examples as to how these have manifested in the construction of new forms of sovereignty. We conclude that the future of sovereignty in a blockchain world will be articulated in the conjuncture of social struggle and technological agency and we call for a stronger alliance between technologists and democrats.”

Seven tendencies of blockchain technology and the structural qualities that produce them:

Conclusion

How strange, then, that one does not find much democracy at all in synthetic worlds. Not a trace, in fact. Not a hint of a shadow of a trace. It’s not there. The typical governance model in synthetic worlds consists of isolated moments of oppressive tyranny embedded in widespread anarchy. (Castronova 2008, p. 207)

Technology can deliver more than one type of technological civilization. We have not yet exhausted its democratic potential. (Feenberg 2010, p. 29)

Earlier we stated that as a still young technology, blockchain offers interpretive flexibility. Yet as proposals become institutions, interpretation comes under the influence of structural forces. Structures possess within them powers that lean in some directions and not others. The structures of blockchain technology, we have found, tend more toward more distributed, democratized, and technologized sovereignties. Yet many of these same tendencies can be—and are being—channeled and recast both by corporate capital and states; actors that are well prepared and highly incentivized to take advantage. Corporations in particular have both a temporal advantage as early movers as well as the resources to hire technologists and rent state officials in attempts to both code and regulate the blockchain world of the near future. Against such advantages, we see little likelihood of effective disaggregated resistance by libertarian proponents of individual sovereignty.

Popular sovereignty, on the other hand, may have a future. Cooperatives and democracy activists may find themselves capable of overcoming their early structural disadvantages by building a coalition of technologies and broader publics. As we have repeatedly pointed out, much of the motivating ideology and daily practice of blockchain coders is idealistic, utopian, decentralist, and cooperative. Furthermore, many blockchain technologists became wealthy through early investments in cryptocurrencies and are thus free of the dictates of wage slavery. As the proximate constitutionalizers of the new blockchain world, technologists are in a potentially determinative position and their affinities matter. Add in the strong desire for the kind of world society that cooperatives are programming into their blockchain applications that was articulated in the global democracy wave of 2008-2014, and we see that a rising of global popular sovereignty may not be so improbable after all.

No Gods No Masters No Coders the Future shared by P2P Foundation on Scribd

Photo by Okinawa Soba (Rob)

The post No Gods, No Masters, No Coders? The Future of Sovereignty in a Blockchain World appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Originally posted on provocations.darkmatterlabs.org

We face a paradigm shift in the role of humans in our economy — The rise of the real C-Economy.

Indy Johar: Most of our human economy has since the industrial & managerial revolution functioned to fullfill and comply with roles & processes for predefined value and imagination.

The industrial economy made humans “labour”, designed, focused and instrumentalised in the fullfillment of corporate value creation and the imagination of the few.

This industrial human economy is coming to an end; we have begun a transformation which is massively signalled by a confluence of drivers and trends, from the rise of innovation labs & start up culture – all seeking to grow the innovation pie of cities, to the arrival of platform corporates, driving the disintermediation of middle management, to the growing capability of AI, automation and algorithms to manifest the reality of post managerial city. In fact it could be argued – our current paranoia of Brexit and Trump – extends from a deep worry for the growing redundancy of human value & labour and our perceived future as an overhead and liability to the capital class.

The above list could go on, but what is becoming apparent is process driven, codifiable labour – “jobs for bad robots” will be automated and commodified – it is only a matter of time and its also time to say good riddance. We need to liberate Humans from having to be “bad robots” as the industrial revolution liberated us from being bad domestic animals.

But the emancipation of Humans from labour – does not mean a redundancy of Humans, in fact its means the freedom of Humans from labour to discover what it means to be human in the 21st Century.

This is a future which needs us to embrace the awesome capacity of humans – for discovery, for expeditions into the unknown, to mine the future, to care, create, dream.

This is a future which needs us to invest and create the conditions to unlock the full potential and capacity for all citizens to care, create and discover.

This is a future not designed to instrumentalise and passively enslave humans and drive compliance – through debt and wage incentives but to use “Universal Basic Income” to unleash and liberate purpose, care, collaboration and the capacity to dream and disrupt the future.

This is a future which requires us to reimagine “Management” from being a means of control to a means to emancipate, nurture grow care and capacity.

This is a future in which the conditions for unleashing the full capacity of all humans must be the new 21st century public utility – where spatial justice is foundational to unleashing our democratic humanity.

This is a future we requires us to start by embracing the relatively infinite possibility of humans – as opposed to our limited capacity to make roles and manage process.

This is a future which is not about supply demand matching labour markets but about making the fertile conditions to grow the dreamers, disrupters and discovers of the future.

This is a future in which humans are not an overhead on the balance sheet but its foundational fragile asset.

This is a future where the human(e) corporate will be defined by its capacity to drive the 4C revolution — collaboration, care, creativity, contextual intelligence powered by democratized agency – not its aggregative efficiency to manage financial capital and procure in scale; these efficiencies are likely to distributed and platformed to the whole economy – with rise of zero overhead platform bureaucracy.

This is a future in which investing for the human development of an organisation manifests on its asset register.

This is a future which embraces a tomorrow, where humans are the source of economy not redundant to its function.

This is a future Beyond Labour, embracing the coming Human(e) Revolution.

Dark Matter Laboratories is a Strategic Design Studio at Project00.cc working at the interface of Disruptive Technology, Human Development & System Change with world leading organisations to transform and embrace the future.

Photo by 96dpi

The post Beyond Humans as Labour appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Alex Steffen: We owe the future.

People who will be alive in the future can make ethical claims on us. We have duties to them. They have rights.

Some people seem to have a hard time even understanding the concept of the rights of future generations. The idea that people who do not yet exist have the right to assert their needs in our lives is one that seems to be hard to fully grasp.

Think of this example: If someone sets a bomb to go off in a public square a year from now, is he committing a crime? Should he be stopped? Almost everyone would say yes. Should he be tried before a court of law and prevented from doing further harm? Most of us would agree that he should. What about ten years? What about 100? When does our obligation to avoid serious, predictable harm to others end?

Now, here’s the tricky part: climate emissions (and huge array of other unsustainable practices) are the bomb, and your grandkids and great-grandkids are the victims.

By transgressing planetary boundaries, we are seriously (and in human timescales, permanently) undermining the ability of the planet to provide the kind of climate stability, natural bounty and renewable resources that future generations will need to maintain their own societies. If we continue business as usual, we are in fact dooming millions of them to extreme suffering and early death. Life on a hotter, dangerous and destabilized planet is not something we would wish to have inflicted on ourselves.

We don’t really have the ethical right to inflict it on our descendants. There is no legitimate basis for thinking that we have the right to use the planet up, that the property rights of current generations trump the human rights of the next 100 generations to come.

Put it another way: ethically, with riches come responsibilities. Much of the wealth around us was handed down as a legacy by our ancestors, and we hold the planet itself in trust, as stewards.

As long as we don’t use more of the planet’s bounty than can be sustainably provided in perpetuity, we have the ethical right to enjoy the best lives we can create. But the minute we stray into unsustainable levels of consumption, we’re not in fact spending our own riches, but those of future people, by setting in motion disasters that will greatly diminish their possibilities. Unfortunately, nearly everyone living a middle class or wealthier lifestyle now enriches their lives at the cost of future generations. As Paul Hawken says, “We have an economy where we steal the future, sell it in the present, and call it G.D.P.”

Now, obviously, most of us did not intend to find ourselves in this situation, and so for a couple decades we had a legitimate argument that we needed a reasonable amount of time to change our ecological impact. It’s become clear that many of our leaders’ definition of a reasonable amount of time, though, is for things to change sometime after they’re dead.

This is what I mean when I say that we have a politics of “predatory delay.” Many wealthy people understand that their profits are extracted through destructively unsustainable practices, and they’ve known it for decades. By and large, they no

This allows them to been seen as responsible and caring. They want change, they claim; they just think we need prudent, appropriately paced change, mindful of economic trade-offs and judiciously studied — by which they mean cosmetic change for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, they fight like hell to delay change of any real magnitude, attacking not only the prospects of our kids and kin in the future, but increasingly of our society in the present. Their delay has real, serious human consequences, across generations. They’re taking, not creating; the harm they cause is measurable.

Tim O’Reilly, in 2012, turned this nice phrase: “Policy should protect the future from the past, not the past from the future.” Yet in every country on Earth, policies made at the top are still overwhelmingly designed not to meet our planetary crisis at the scale and speed it demands, but to protect the institutions, companies and systems causing that crisis from disruptive change. This is true at every scale, from large incumbent industries unfairly undermining newer, more sustainable competitors to wealthy NIMBY property owners blocking new housing in cities around the world so that they can benefit from the housing crisis by pushing real estate prices as high as possible before they sell.

The next time you hear a powerful person arguing against needed action in the name of prudence or process or tradition, ask yourself, “Am I hearing the voice of predatory delay?”

We owe it to the future to call it what it is.

A very different version of this piece was originally published on September 9th, 2009 at Worldchanging.com. Read the original here.

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Photo by DTRSY

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Playing for team human today, Dr. Richard Barbrook challenges this imaginary future by unearthing the neoliberal underpinnings of Silicon Valley’s vision of progress. Rushkoff and Barbrook engage in a conversation that both uncovers the economic forces driving the evolution of technology while simultaneously acknowledging the utility of our tech tools as evidenced in the recent organizing around Labour underdog, Jeremy Corbyn.

Rushkoff opens with a monologue challenging his own initial enthusiasm for Universal Basic Income. Is UBI just another gaming of the system in order to perpetuate consumption in an vastly unequal society?

• Team Human is supported entirely by listeners. Visit https://www.patreon.com/teamhuman to become a supporter and receive a variety of patron exclusives.
• Special thanks to Luke Robert Mason of Virtual Futures who facilitated this exchange and recorded this interview on location in London.
• Barbrook Photo By Sebastiaan ter Burg from Utrecht, The Netherlands (New Gamegrounds) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
• Music in today’s show: Mike Watt: beak-holding-letter-man , R.U. Sirius: President Mussolini Makes The Planes Run On Time, Fugazi: Foreman’s Dog

The post Team Human: Richard Barbrook “It’s capitalism, mate!” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Before you say no, take a moment to really ask yourself whether it’s the system that’s best suited to build our future society.

Jason Hickel and Martin Kirk: In February, college sophomore Trevor Hill stood up during a televised town hall meeting in New York and posed a simple question to Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. He cited a study by Harvard University showing that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a clearer contrast to right-wing economics.

Pelosi was visibly taken aback. “I thank you for your question,” she said, “but I’m sorry to say we’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.”

The footage went viral. It was powerful because of the clear contrast it set up. Trevor Hill is no hardened left-winger. He’s just your average o—bright, informed, curious about the world, and eager to imagine a better one. But Pelosi, a figurehead of establishment politics, refused to–or was just unable to–entertain his challenge to the status quo.

Fifty-one percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

It’s not only young voters who feel this way.

A YouGov poll in 2015 found that 64% of Britons believe that capitalism is unfair, that it makes inequality worse. Even in the U.S., it’s as high as 55%. In Germany, a solid 77% are skeptical of capitalism. Meanwhile, a full three-quarters of people in major capitalist economies believe that big businesses are basically corrupt.Why do people feel this way? Probably not because they deny the abundant material benefits of modern life that many are able to enjoy. Or because they want to travel back in time and live in the U.S.S.R. It’s because they realize—either consciously or at some gut level—that there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital, and do it more and more each year, regardless of the costs to human well-being and to the environment we depend on.

Because let’s be clear: That’s what capitalism is, at its root. That is the sum total of the plan. We can see this embodied in the imperative to grow GDP, everywhere, year on year, at a compound rate, even though we know that GDP growth, on its own, does nothing to reduce poverty or to make people happier or healthier. Global GDP has grown 630% since 1980, and in that same time, by some measures, inequality, poverty, and hunger have all risen.

Gains are seen as the natural property of the investor class. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

We also see this plan in the idea that corporations have a fiduciary duty to grow their stock value for the sake of shareholder returns, which prevents even well-meaning CEO’s from voluntarily doing anything good—like increasing wages or reducing pollution—that might compromise their bottom line. Just look at the recent case involving American Airlines. Earlier this year, CEO Doug Parker tried to raise his employees salaries to correct for “years of incredibly difficult times” suffered by his employees, only to be slapped down by Wall Street. The day he announced the raise, the company’s shares fell 5.8%. This is not a case of an industry on the brink, fighting for survival, and needing to make hard decisions. On the contrary, airlines have been raking in profits. But the gains are seen as the natural property of the investor class. This is why JP Morgan criticized the wage increase as a “wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion” to workers. How dare they?What becomes clear here is that ours is a system that is programmed to subordinate life to the imperative of profit.

There’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

For a startling example of this, consider the horrifying idea to breed brainless chickens and grow them in huge vertical farms, Matrix-style, attached to tubes and electrodes and stacked one on top of the other, all for the sake of extracting profit out of their bodies as efficiently as possible. Or take the Grenfell Tower disaster in London, where dozens of people were incinerated because the building company chose to use flammable panels in order to save a paltry £5,000 (around $6,500). Over and over again, profit trumps life.It all proceeds from the same deep logic. It’s the same logic that sold lives for profit in the Atlantic slave trade, it’s the logic that gives us sweatshops and oil spills, and it’s the logic that is right now pushing us headlong toward ecological collapse and climate change.

Millennials can see that capitalism isn’t working for the majority of humanity, and they’re ready to invent something better. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

Once we realize this, we can start connecting the dots between our different struggles. There are people in the U.S. fighting against the Keystone pipeline. There are people in Britain fighting against the privatization of the National Health Service. There are people in India fighting against corporate land grabs. There are people in Brazil fighting against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. There are people in China fighting against poverty wages. These are all noble and important movements in their own right. But by focusing on all these symptoms we risk missing the underlying cause. And the cause is capitalism. It’s time to name the thing.What’s so exciting about our present moment is that people are starting to do exactly that. And they are hungry for something different. For some, this means socialism. That YouGov poll showed that Americans under the age of 30 tend to have a more favorable view of socialism than they do of capitalism, which is surprising given the sheer scale of the propaganda out there designed to convince people that socialism is evil. But millennials aren’t bogged down by these dusty old binaries. For them the matter is simple: They can see that capitalism isn’t working for the majority of humanity, and they’re ready to invent something better.

What might a better world look like? There are a million ideas out there. We can start by changing how we understand and measure progress. As Robert Kennedy famously said, GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play . . . it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

We can change that. People want health care and education to be social goods, not market commodities, so we can choose to put public goods back in public hands. People want the fruits of production and the yields of our generous planet to benefit everyone, rather than being siphoned up by the super-rich, so we can change tax laws and introduce potentially transformative measures like a universal basic income. People want to live in balance with the environment on which we all depend for our survival; so we can adopt regenerative agricultural solutions and even choose, as Ecuador did in 2008, to recognize in law, at the level of the nation’s constitution, that nature has “the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles.”

Measures like these could dethrone capitalism’s prime directive and replace it with a more balanced logic, that recognizes the many factors required for a healthy and thriving civilization. If done systematically enough, they could consign one-dimensional capitalism to the dustbin of history.

None of this is actually radical. Our leaders will tell us that these ideas are not feasible, but what is not feasible is the assumption that we can carry on with the status quo. If we keep pounding on the wedge of inequality and chewing through our living planet, the whole thing is going to implode. The choice is stark, and it seems people are waking up to it in large numbers: Either we evolve into a future beyond capitalism, or we won’t have a future at all.

Dr. Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at the London School of Economics who works on international development and global political economy, with an ethnographic focus on southern Africa.  He writes for the Guardian and Al Jazeera English. His most recent book, The Divide: A Brief History of Global Inequality and Its Solutions, is available now.

Martin Kirk is cofounder and director of strategy for The Rules, a global collective of writers, thinkers, and activists dedicated to challenging the root causes of global poverty and inequality. His work focuses on bringing insights from the cognitive and complexity sciences to bear on issues of public understanding of complex global challenges.

Originally published at Fast Company

Lead Photo by Ignotus the Mage

The post Are You Ready To Accept That Capitalism Is the Real Problem? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Here’s an amazing fact: It’s 2016 and humanity is collectively moving toward a future that nobody wants. We are literally going somewhere that will hurt every single one of us.

Mass extinctions are terrible things. Impoverished societies create the conditions for radical extremism and violence. Depleting top soils create food insecurity and mass starvation. Debt-bloated economies become unstable and easily collapse. Extreme shifts in climate cause millions to become refugees. These kinds of things — all of which are becoming more likely with each passing day on our present course — are bad for business, harmful for parents raising their children, damaging to the psyches of people rich and poor, and downright devastating to non-human life.

Billionaires don’t fare well in a world where starving billions could storm the barricades to get food and shelter. Sick people create conditions for the spread of disease. You see what I’m painting here? It is all connected and the global crisis is arising because we have yet to realize this deep truth about the world we live in.

Then WHY IS IT that humanity is going in this very direction right now? Simply put, it is because the “powers that be” are disconnected so profoundly from reality that they have no idea what they are doing.

Elected officials in high office? These days they are bought and sold by the highest bidders. They only care about staying in power.

Corporate CEO’s at multinational companies? All they care about is playing financial incest on each others’ boards, enriching each other with golden parachutes and year-end bonuses.

Everyday people? They are just going about their lives, doing what their cultures tell them will lead to a good life. They just want to live and be free.

And yet, here we are. In late May of 2016 there are more greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere each year than ever before. The human population continues to grow at an exponential pace. And we are literally consuming the trees, rivers, and grassland meadows of the Earth.

What if it didn’t have to be this way?

The future isn’t written yet. We still have time to change it, but only if we know what we want.

Now imagine what kind of future most people do want. We would like to be healthy and happy, have time to pursue our passions, become skilled at doing things we love, and — of course — give abundance to our children who will inhabit the earth after we are long dead and gone.

It’s so simple in so many ways. Human beings enjoy leisure and human contact. We find pleasure in being seen and loved by others we care about. It is in our nature to be social, to make music and art, to make love and seek pleasure. Nowhere in our genetic code are we wired for destruction of all-things-sacred in the world.

And it is in this gap — between that which currently is and that which could possibly be — that I find deep hope for the future of humanity. My friends have written about the singular ideology that currently dictates core logics of the global economy. They describe how we are taught to believe in the rugged individual, a human island in the vast sea of self-reliant possibilities.

Yet no man (or woman) is an island. Each of us is born precariously fragile from a mother’s womb. We would quickly die in those first few years if caregivers were not ever-present to feed us, wipe away our excrement, and protect us from harm. Human beings are deeply social creatures. We arise from the natural world and are profoundly immersed in webs of dependency from the first drawn breathe to the last wavering exhale.

The sciences of human nature tell us much more than this. Not only are we social beings, we are also deeply moral in nature. A sure-fire way to piss us off is to be unfair, dominate or oppress us, or take more than your share. Which begs the question: Why is it that wealth and power inequality are the norm today? The answer can be found in the annals of research on hunter-gatherer societies. Our ancestors — once upon a time in the distant past — were strong males who ruled by physical domination (just as silverback gorillas do today).

But there came a time, several million years ago, when hunting technology combined with a good eye and agile shoulders. Some of our ancestors got together and ganged up on the dominator males. Throw rocks from multiple angles in an ambush attack and even the largest silverback can be taken down. Herein lies the great secret of democracies the world over. We use our ability to form collectives (and act as teams) to out-compete the lone bullies who would otherwise take more than their share.

Of course, a key difference between those ancestral times and today is that societies were much smaller then. Everyone knew everyone else. If someone was abusive or prone to cheating, word would get around quick. All of this changed with the advent of complex societies some 8,000 years ago. Empires were born around the settlements of agriculture. Strong men could organize wannabe strong men to form elite cabals and wreak havoc on the newly forming masses. They ganged up on the rest of us and have been dominating the game ever since.

Fast forward to today and you’ll see how our amazing ability to learn from each other and build upon what came before (called “cumulative” culture by the experts) made it possible for empire-builders to refine their craft. They invented things like corporations, accounting and bookkeeping, and the government control of property rights granted to those with existing wealth. This is what we call capitalism today.

For more on how capitalism actually works, see here…

And so it became possible to weave systems of dominance, wealth extraction and hoarding. Those who sought to have the most were able to invest in media institutions, marketing and advertising and make the greedy aspiration of the super-rich a run-of-the-mill aspiration for everyday working folk.

This is how it came to pass that we collectively began to serve power structures in the present that create the conditions for that future world no one wants. If we are to change course, we will need to understand how we got here. It will be necessary for us to pull back the veil and see how systems of wealth hoarding hide in our minds. We will have to understand how the stories that organize our lives are broken and begin to replace them with better alternatives.

And all of this is about healing. Capitalism is dying (can you feel it?) and it is our collective choice whether we die with it.

Now is the time to consciously introspect about what kind of future you want. If no one wants the one we are creating now, it might just be a good idea to start seeking common ground, explore shared intentions, and discover ways forward that the majority of us can agree on. We can cooperate together around these themes and overtake the would-be dominators at the helm today. Change the rules of politics and economies to serve all of humanity and life on Earth.

That will require a credible knowledge of human nature. And it will take some serious visionary thinking about how to get from here to there. I am up for the challenge!

How about you?

Onward, fellow humans.

Cross-posted from the Rules.org

The post Who is creating the future nobody wants? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Image by Darren Tunnicliff

Last week I gave an opening lecture at Hampshire College at the launch of its new center for civic activism, the Leadership and Ethical Engagement Project. It was a wonderful opportunity to reflect on how colleges and universities could engage more directly with changing the world — and how the commons could help open up some new fields of thought and action.  Scholarship has an important place, of course, but I also think the Academy needs to develop a more hands-on, activist-style engagement with the problems of our time.

I enjoyed the perspectives of LIz Lerman, a choreographer, performer, writer and founder of the Dance Exchange in Washington, D.C., who shared her hopes for the new center.  We shared an interest in the limits that language can impose on how we think and what we can imagine.

Below, my talk, “To Make Hope Possible Rather Than Despair Convincing,” a line borrowed from the British critic Raymond Williams.  My talk introduced the commons and explained why its concerns ought to be of interest to the new Hampshire College center.

Thank you for giving me the honor of reflecting on the significance of this moment and this initiative.  It is not every day that an academic institution takes such a bold, experimental leap into the unknown on behalf of social action and the common good.

I come to you as a dedicated activist who for the past forty years wishes there had been something like this when I was an undergraduate at Amherst College in the 1970s. I have always admired the image of what the French call l’homme engagé. I guess the closest American equivalent is “public intellectual.”  But neither of those terms quite get it right – because they don’t really express the idea of fierce intellectual engagement combined with practical action motivated by a passion for the common good. That’s the archetype that we need to cultivate today.

We stand at a precipice in history that demands that the human species achieve some fairly unprecedented evolutionary advances. I don’t want to get into a long critique of the world’s problems, but I do think it’s safe to say that humankind now faces some fundamental and unprecedented questions. These include questions about our modern forms of social organization and governance, and questions about our planet-destroying system of maximum production and consumption.

The dark menace looming over us all, of course, is climate change – an incubus that has been haunting us for more than a generation even as our so-called leaders look the other way.  That is surely because to confront the sources of climate change is tantamount to confronting the foundations of modern industrial society itself.  Climate change is simply the most urgent of a long cascade of other environmental crises now underway – the massive species extinctions, collapsing fisheries, soil desertification, dying coral reefs, depleted groundwater, dead zones in the oceans, and so on.  Our species’ impact on the planet’s ecosystem is so pervasive that it now qualifies as a separate geological era, the Anthropocene.

It is customary to speak about problems with “the environment” and economic inequality as if they were something “out there” as abstract policy issues somehow separate from us.  But in fact these problems are rooted deeply inside of us – in how we relate to the more-than-human world, how we relate to each other, and how we have structured our institutions.

As a culture, we still inhabit the Cartesian claim that our bodies and minds are separate, and by extension that humanity is quite different from what we call “nature.”  This lets us maintain our self-delusion that we can continue our reckless dominion of the biosphere, particularly if there’s money to be made.

So why do I bring up these troubling reflections at the inauguration of this Project?

I think we have a rich and rare opportunity here to plant a new seed for growing a different societal logic and ethic – and to make common cause with others who are searching for a new civilizational DNA.  This initiative can help us grow a different social imaginary.  It can start some different types of conversations, scholarship and projects.  The ripple effects could go far beyond our beautiful little patch of western Massachusetts.

Before I explain more on why I have these wild ambitions, let me share some of my experiences in the vineyards of activism.  It might help explain why I see this project catalyzing so much.

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I was an American Studies major at Amherst College in the late 1970s, but I surely learned the most during my junior year off when I worked for Ralph Nader. This generation may not appreciate the character of Nader’s career before the 2000 presidential election, about which we could have a long discussion.  Suffice it to say that Ralph – who’s 81 years old in two weeks – has been one of the most creative and effective change-agents of the past fifty years.

Ralph’s big contribution was showing how ordinary citizens could step up to become public citizens and use the formal machinery of government to make a difference. Prior to Ralph’s arrival as an auto safety activist, ordinary citizens had very little to do with Congress besides voting and still less to do with regulation, let alone initiating entirely new fields of public concern – airbags and product recalls, the Freedom of Information Act, food safety, nuclear power safety, whistleblower protections, and much else.

Following my time with Nader, I worked a Member of Congress, Toby Moffett, before moving on to become the first research director of People for the American Way, the constitutional rights and civil liberties organization founded by television producer and activist Norman Lear.  For those of you digital natives, Lear was a big deal in the 1970s when there were only three commercial networks on TV. At one point, he had five of the ten top shows on TV, mostly because they dealt with explosive social and political issues with great humor:  Shows like All in the Family, Maude, Good Times, One Day at a Time,The Jeffersons, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and many others.

If Nader taught me about the role of rational empiricism in activism, People for the American Way taught me about the role of non-rational religious fundamentalism. From the scrappy, low-budget style of Nader activism, I moved on to the culture wars of the religious right and issues such as textbook censorship, “creation-science,” school prayer and judicial nominations. Throughout the 25 years that I spent with Lear, from whom I learned a great deal about understanding people as people, not as political stereotypes, I also pursued my own projects as an activist, including the cofounding of Public Knowledge, a Washington public interest group that fights against anti-social expansions of copyright law and for an open Internet.

As the 1990s wore on, I became depressed at the sorry state of American political culture – and the even sorrier state of progressive activism. The supposedly liberal Bill Clinton was the one who gave us telecom deregulation that resulted in massive media consolidation, the loosening of securities and banking laws that culminated in 2008 financial crisis, and so-called welfare reform that was going to morally rehabilitate poor people. Meanwhile, most nonprofits were becoming so professionalized and locked into their funding base that they didn’t dare to experiment or innovate lest it marginalize them politically or tarnish their “brands.”

I slowly came to realize that liberalism, at least as co-opted by electoral politics, was not going to produce the kinds of changes our society really needs. It became clear that conventional public policy and law are captured by the two major political parties, which themselves are both in tight collusion with business elites.  I call it the Market/State duopoly, the incestuous alliance of the two great forms of power in our country, which systematically seek to diminish both democracy and the commons.

To be sure, we can’t simply walk away from politics, policy and law; they remain vital arenas of engagement.  But let’s be honest – our politics today is too structurally compromised to produce much significant change. As Elizabeth Warren has said, the game is rigged.  We live in a time of predatory business organizations, poorly performing government institutions, moribund democratic participation, and slow-motion ecological collapse.

But if the 1990s incubated despair in me, I also discovered the great, transformative potential of the commons– which has been my passion for nearly twenty years. One general way to understand the commons is as everything that we inherit or create together, which we must pass on, undiminished, to future generations. The commons should be understood as a social system for managing shared wealth, with an emphasis on self-governance, fairness and sustainability.  The commons is also a worldview and ethic that is ancient as the human race but as new as the Internet.

It was about this time that I discovered the scholarship of Elinor Ostrom, an Indiana University political scientist who had been studying collective-action institutions for decades. Ostrom had conducted scores of studies of commons of forests, fisheries, farmland, irrigation water, wild game and other natural resources in impoverished regions of the world.  t’s a little known fact, but an estimated two billion people around the world depend on these commons for their everyday survival – but because this self-provisioning occurs outside of markets, without producers selling to consumers, economists have relatively little interest in studying it.  Ostrom’s big achievement was showing that it is entirely possible for communities to manage shared resources over the long term without succumbing to the so-called “tragedy of the commons.”

Ah, yes, the “tragedy of the commons”!  If you mention “the commons” to someone today, that is invariably the first idea that comes to mind.  The term “tragedy of the commons” was launched by a now-famous 1968 essay by biologist Garrett Hardin in the journal Science.  Imagine a pasture in which no individual farmer has a rational incentive to hold back his use of it, said Hardin.  He declared that each individual farmer will put as many sheep on the pasture as possible, which will inevitably result in the over-exploitation and destruction of the pasture:  the tragedy of the commons.

The point of the story is to demonstrate that the shared management of resources will invariably fail.  It is true that finite resources can be over-exploited, but the “tragedy of the commons” does not really describe a commons. Hardin was describing an open-access regime that has no rules, boundaries or indeed no community. In fact, the situation he was describing – in which free riders can appropriate or damage resources at will — is more accurately a description of unfettered markets. You might say Hardin was describing the tragedy of the market.

But over the past two generations, the “tragedy parable” was elevated into a cultural cliché by economists and conservative ideologues.  They saw it as a powerful way to promote private property rights and so-called free markets, and to fight government regulation.

The point is that the tragedy story is simply not grounded in empirical reality.  Ostrom’s landmark 1990 book, Governing the Commons:  The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, powerfully refuted the “tragedy” parable by extensive fieldwork that revealed that people talk to each other and negotiate solutions to prevent the over-exploitation of resources.  From her studies, Ostrom identified eight key “design principles” in successful commons, which are broadly applicable to most commons today.  She went on to build a large international network of scholars who study the commons, blending sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, environmental studies, and other fields.  For her pioneering work in studying the role of cooperation in generating value, Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 – the first woman to win the award.

I think Ostrom’s insights as a woman in a field of male economists are worth noting here.  You see, Ostrom did not see economics as an ultra-rational mathematical science that sees the economy as a machine.  Ostrom saw economics as dealing with social relationships, collective-action problems, and the unacknowledged power of cooperation.

There were two other things going on in the 1990s that pushed me out of the liberal tradition and into the commons. The first was the emergence of the World Wide Web in 1994 as a popular medium.  It gradually became clear to me that cyberspace is a highly generative realm in which neither the state nor the market is the driving force. Here, social cooperation is pervasive and hugely productive without markets or formal law. I learned to see that the Internet is really a massive hosting platform, a new lightweight infrastructure, that is fantastically generative because it lets people self-organize their own commons.

When blogs, wikis, social networks and Creative Commons licenses began to proliferate in 2003 and after, it was clear that something very new and different had arrived:  a new sector of commons-based peer production! There is in fact a vast Commons Sector of non-market, not-state production and culture online. This phenomenon simply cannot be explained by mainstream economics and its model of human beings as selfish, rational, utility-maximizing materialists.

The second thing that I encountered in the 1990s was the unlikely rise of an eclectic social movement based on the principles of commons.  t has had two notable international conferences, in 2010 and 2013, which I co-organized, and it has many active hubs of strategic action. This movement – largely independent of Ostrom’s academic scholarship – consists of food activists trying to rebuild local agriculture; software programmers building free software and open source software; artists devoted to collaborative digital arts; and scientific communities sharing their research and data on open platforms.

The commons movement also consists of many people who are fighting the privatization and commodification of their shared wealth by the “free market” – a process that is known as “enclosure of the commons.”  These commoners include:  indigenous peoples trying to preserve their ethnobotanical knowledge from the biopiracy of big pharmaceutical and ag-biotech companies. Subsistence farmers and fishers whose livelihoods are being destroyed by industrial harvesting. South African shack dwellers who are asserting their rights to self-determination against developers. And Latin Americans fighting the neo-extractivist agenda of multinational companies plundering oil, minerals and genetic knowledge.

While these communities vary immensely, they are all asserting a different universe of value.  They all share a basic commitment to production for use, not market exchange…the right to participate in making the rules that govern themselves….the importance of fairness and transparency in governance….and the responsibility to act as long-term stewards of resources.

They also share a hostility to market forces that are trying to enclose wealth that belongs to everyone.  I consider enclosures of the commons one of the great, unacknowledged scandals of our times – a massive theft and dispossession of common wealth for private gain.

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As I studied the many tribes of commoners around the world, I came to realize that a large part of the problem that they all face is the very language that is used to perceive and explain problems. I came to realize that our very categories of thought, our vocabulary, are shot through with regressive political implications.  We all live under the sway of a moral narrative about economic growth, consumerism, progress and corporate control – and these stories have a logic and ethic that are deeply embedded in our language.

For example, such familiar pairings of words as “public” and “private”; and “individual” and “collective”; and “production” and “consumption” tacitly point to a world dominated by government and markets in the service of economic growth. The dichotomies have erased the very idea of the commons, quietly preventing us from even considering non-market relationships and social organization as possible or consequential.  We are given a choice between the “public” and “private” sectors – government or markets – but the void in our language prevents us from choosing to self-organize our own commons. It is assumed that government is the only legitimate agent of the public will.

So, upon encountering the idea of commons, I realized that its greatest potential is in helping to develop a different discourse – a way of imagining a new sector of life that is quasi-autonomous from both government and the market.

In the 1970s, I had seen how American business had quite deliberately set about neutering the nation’s health, safety and environmental laws by inventing a new discourse.  They called it cost-benefit analysis.  The goal was to use pseudo-scientific quantification to make regulatory decisions:  Is it “worth the cost” to ban a given pesticide?  Is it “worth” saving a species from extinction?  Cost-benefit analysis provided a number-based language of experts and economists to override the social and ethical policies behind congressional statutes.  And that’s one way that industry blunted or reversed much of the environmental activism of the 1960s and 1970s:  it required government to adopt the language of the market, cost-benefit analysis.

This was a revelation to me:  Discourse is law.  And it’s something that progressive advocates have never really learned.  They have never developed a discourse that can express their own putative values.  Wittingly or not, most have instead embraced the utopian narrative of American neoliberalism – that human progress will continue through economic growth, new and better technology, and a system of government that caters to the demands of capital while making grudging concessions to social or environmental concerns.

I suspect you can guess where I’m heading:  I think it’s time for a new grand narrative and a new cultural discourse.  I’m not talking about new sorts of political “messaging” or a retread of state-oriented leftist ideology.  I’m talking about a different worldview and ethic.  I’m talking about a different ontology for describing who we are and our relationships to each other and the more-than-human world.  We need a different epistemology to go beyond the neoDarwinian, free-market narratives that presume that humanity is mostly nasty, brutish, competitive and incapable of cooperation and mutual support.

Human beings are not self-made individuals.  We are not homo economicus.  Evolutionary science backs up the principle of “Ubuntu” that is used in South Africa – “I am because of who we are.”  Our individualism is nested without our collective relationships.

Let me stress that this is not just a philosophical discussion for the seminar room and learned journals.  In the world of the commons, it is a very practical discussion with countless real-life applications.

You see the commons among seed-sharing cooperatives in India, where women pass down native seeds from mother to daughter, as if in quiet compact among generations and the Earth.

You see the commons in thousands of open source software projects and among the 100,000 Wikipedians globally working on dozens of different language editions of that project.

You see the commons in more than 10,000 open access scholarly journals that bypass commercial publishers and let academic disciplines retain the fruit of their own works.

You see the commons in the movements within academia for open textbooks, so that students don’t have to keep paying textbook publishers for over-priced new editions.  And you see the commons in the open educational resources, or OER, movement, which is producing “open courseware” that is radically improving access to learning around the world.

You see the commons in the 882 million works internationally that use Creative Commons licenses, inverting the automatic propertization of culture under copyright law and making it legally shareable.

You see commons in local food initiatives such as Community Supported Agriculture, Slow Food, and permaculture – all of which privilege the social or regional community over the demands of footloose capital.

You see commons in the burgeoning movement to reinvent the city as commons.  This idea, paradoxically enough got its start when then-Prime Minister Berlusconi proposed privatizing the nation’s water systems – an idea that was defeated in a voter referendum by more than 90% of the vote.  Significantly, water was named as a commons in this campaign, which helped catapult it into mainstream political life.

Once people understood that water is a commons, they began to see endangered commons everywhere – in grand public theaters, in parks, in urban spaces.  And so they began to organize as commoners to reclaim them.  Now, in Bologna, for example, there are now serious efforts to create public/commons partnerships – cooperation between municipal government and self-organized commoners – as a way to move beyond corrupt public/private partnerships that steal our common wealth.

You see commons in localities that use alternative currencies such as the Bangla-Pesa in Kenya, which has made it possible for poor people in slum neighborhoods to exchange value with each other.  I am especially excited by the so-called “blockchain” technology that enables Bitcoin to function as a currency without any third-party guarantors such as banks or government. This technology transcends the particular problems of Bitcoin itself because it makes possible all sorts of trustworthy, large-scale cooperation as a self-organized phenomenon.

You see the commons in the explosion of open design and manufacturing – design that is globally shared but manufacturing that is local, inexpensive, accessible to anyone, and modular, in the style of open source software. This movement has produced the Wikispeed car that gets 100 miles per gallon of fuel….the Farm Hack community that has produced dozens of pieces of affordable farm equipment…. and specialized open-source prosthetic limbs that major medical suppliers don’t have the creativity or profit incentive to make.

I wanted to give you this brief survey of commons projects to suggest the breadth and variety of innovation going on.  What’s exciting is that these commons amount to ontological disruptions. They are developing new types of relationships among people and with the Earth.

Instead of focusing on stocks and inventories of things, the commons is all about flows of creative energy and production. Instead of focusing on impersonal transactions in the market, the commons is about nourishing enduring relationships among people.  Instead of focusing on bottom lines and the maximal accumulations of capital, the commons offers a vision of society based on the intensification of living systems. The commons gives us a way to reimagine and reinvent how we can produce things and govern ourselves – and in turn, develop new cultural identities that go beyond “citizen” and “consumer” as traditionally understood.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the immensity and scale of the world’s problems. The commons invites us to look at the sphere of influence that each of us has right now.  What are our talents and passions?  What peer group can be work with or create?  A friend of mine at UMass Amherst, the late Julie Graham, writing with her colleague Katherine Gibson, once wrote, “If to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history making is never a distant one but always right here, on the borders of our sensing, thinking, feeling, moving bodies.”

If we allow political parties, government, news and entertainment media, and large corporations to define our aspirations, then we will be capitulating to – in the words of anthropologist David Graeber – “a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures.”

On the other hand, if we trust our experience and bodies, we can start an upward spiral of change even if it that seems to put us on the fringe.  The great lesson of open networks is that seemingly isolated, marginal voices are often ubiquitous.  It’s just that each voice has not found the others and gone viral.

I hope it is clear by now that the commons is not just another word for “the public interest” or the “common good.”  It certainly aspires to produce those outcomes, but it has a deeper personal resonance. Notice that a commons is not simply a resource.  It is a distinct social system that develops its own rules and practices, and customs and rituals, for managing a shared resource.  Commons tend to embody certain recurrent principles:  Self-determination.  Fairness.  The inalienability of resources from the market.  Ecological stewardship.  Localism.  A different paradigm of development.

What I especially like about the commons is the new bonds of solidarity that it can foster among people from some very different realms – North and South, city and countryside, digital and subsistence, indigenous and modern.  This is what is happening right now as all sorts of transnational tribes of commoners around the world find each other.

There are now efforts among many alternative-economic and social movements to find ways to collaborate. They include:

· the Social and Solidary Economy movement, which is big in Europe and Brazil;

· the Degrowth movement, which is especially popular in Europe;

· the Transition Town movement that is developing new forms of sustainable localism in anticipation of Peak Oil and climate change disruptions;

· the Co-operative movement, which is pioneering new forms of multi-stakeholder co-ops that go beyond workers and consumers;

· the Sharing and collaborative economy movement that is using open network platforms to encourage new forms of sharing;

· the tech-oriented peer production world of hackers and FabLabs and the Maker movement; and

· the commons movement that provides a lingua franca to bring together the pluralism of voices.

I am pleased to add to this list the new Greek Government. Giannis Dragasakis, the new Greek deputy prime minister, last week explicitly endorsed a commons-based strategy for social reconstruction in an address before Parliament. Syriza clearly sees the commons as an important element in the social reconstruction of their austerity-ravaged economy.

These movements represent a disruption of the prevailing worldview. They are a deliberate flouting of boundaries set by conventional politics.  Each in their own way is struggling to move beyond some limitations of Enlightenment thinking to assert a new sort of cooperative humanism, which a good friend of mine, German theoretical biologist Andreas Weber, calls the Enlivenment. 

Weber is a biosemiotics researcher and ecophilosopher who argues that neoDarwinistic principles are a factually inaccurate, specious justification for free market ideology. The many reductionist, mechanical principles that science uses for studying living organisms prevent us from seeing that all living organisms are meaning-making creatures, from microorganisms to homo sapiens. As other evolutionary scientists such as Martin Nowak, David Sloan Wilson and Samuel Bowles suggest, an economy based on cooperation is not a fantasy – it’s our human heritage.  The homo economicus of free market theory is a grotesque aberration in history.

I find Weber’s arguments compelling because he makes the case that living systemsmust be understood as living systems:  creative, evolving, dynamic, relational, sense-making.  Living creatures can’t be understood as clockwork machines without creative or moral agency.  This is obviously a much longer conversation, but the commons makes so much sense to me because it insists upon seeing economics not as a machine or even a science, but as a rich social economy of creative moral agents – a living human system integrated with a living planet and myriad lifeforms to which markets must be subordinate and held accountable.

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What, you may ask, does all of this have to do with the Ethics and the Common Good project?  I like to think that the themes I’ve been discussing could animate this initiative in the years ahead.

Traditional higher education is being buffeted by the speed of change in contemporary life, the blurring of disciplines andthe power of network culture.  Traditional scholarship is being challenged more than ever by the vitality of practitioner communities outside of the Academy.  Meanwhile, most colleges and universities that I’ve encountered are disinclined to innovate or adapt.

What’s sorely needed are new sorts of experimental, hands-on engagement that link the Academy and the “real world.”  Education needs to become more about participatory learning, and not just about the transfer of expert knowledge from professor to student.

There’s an epistemological crises going on within the Academy, too:  What sorts of knowledge shall be deemed credible and respectable?  How should scholars engage with the world?

Scholarship often presumes to be morally neutral, but if I have learned anything from the commons, it is that subjective emotions and embodied knowledge are also important ways of understanding the world. So I hope that this project will provide a new vehicle to grapple with varieties of knowledge in transdisciplinary ways, and in new voices.

The questions raised here go further than Hampshire College.  By focusing on our fuller humanity and on the common good, the Ethics and the Common Good project can initiate new conversations about What is an education for, anyway?  It isn’t just about endowing individuals with new talents to earn lots of money.  It’s about imagining how we can play meaningful roles in improving the common good.  And more: education should try to catalyze such changes, beyond the contributions of scholarship.

Since I invariably see things through the prism of the commons, I see this project itself acting as a type of self-organized, collaborative commons – one that could empower a wider community to participate in imagining new forms of production and governance.  The Ethics and the Common Good project could help us reclaim the commons – the realm of social relationships and life that precedes the market and the state.

In the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher was insisting that Great Britain adopt the neoliberal agenda of privatization, deregulation, budget cuts and new privileges for capital, she insisted, as the European Union now insists to the Greeks, “There is no alternative!”  The phrase that was later shortened to its acronym, TINA.

Well, looking around at the commons and the many companion movements bursting out all over, it is clear that the more accurate acronym is TAPAS – “There are plenty of alternatives!”  The only question is whether we have the eyes to see them and the courage to commit to them.

The great British critic Raymond Williams put it well:  “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.”  That is the real challenge that we face, to overcome cynicism and hopelessness, and to quicken the many serious alternatives awaiting our creativity.

I hope that the Leadership and Ethical Engagement Project will make the most of this entirely realistic future. Thank you.

Originally published in Bollier.org

The post To Make Hope Possible Rather Than Despair Convincing appeared first on P2P Foundation.

[There] is an emerging industry aimed at using the tweetstreams of millions of people to help predict the future in some way: disease outbreaks, financial markets, elections and even revolutions. According to new research released today by Topsy Labs — which runs one of the only real-time search engines that has access to Twitter historical data — watching those streams can provide a window into breaking news events. But can it predict what will happen?

The theory behind all of this Twitter-mining is that the network has become such a large-scale, real-time information delivery system (handling more than a quarter of a billion messages every day, according to CEO Dick Costolo at the recent Web 2.0 conference) that it should be possible to analyze those tweets and find patterns that produce some kind of collective intelligence about a topic.

Wired also has an article about the same idea, but from another company seeking to do this sort of data-crunching and prediction:

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

Which all sounds very science-fiction to me, a cross between Minority Report and Asimov’s Foundation novels. One of the issues with both of these stories is the slight degree of hyperbole on the reporting of them; it seems that rather than predicting the future, it is more about a very close reading of existing data trends and being able to spot them before anyone else does. It’s not about the future, it is about the now.

The other issue I see is what famously former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld called, “unknown unknowns“. What I mean by this is that any algorithm applied to the data will only be sensitive to what the creators deem to be important. What is deemed to be important is what we know from the past was important. So to a large degree the warning the system gives of events always has one foot in the past. That is not to say it cannot generate meaningful results, I am sure that is possible, just that it cannot predict the future nor accurately account for trends that have little or no historical precedent.

Hat-tip to Michel for the link. (Also posted on my blog.)

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