The post Vinay Gupta returns to Meaning with his biggest vision yet for global systems change appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>By Emily Yates, reposted from Medium.com
From open source innovation to the vanguard of the blockchain movement; the ‘global resilience guru’ discusses the conflicts, dangers and opportunities of the world to come.
The future we are facing calls for new perspectives, new concepts and new guides. How, then, should we introduce Vinay Gupta — a man who more than any other speaker at Meaning challenges our basic assumptions about reality, and the extent of the problems we are facing? In a simpler era we might have called him an inventor, a philosopher, or a spiritual activist. But all of these definitions are breaking down, and perhaps they must. If we are facing a fourth industrial revolution, then all our beliefs and assumptions are due for a radical overhaul.
We first heard from Vinay at Meaning 2012, where he began with a nod to his reputation for apocalyptic thinking — identifying himself as a ‘merchant of doom’ confronting a whole spectrum of ‘plausible utopias’. If the source of our creativity is to be found in our limitations, then Vinay draws his from worst case scenarios; unafraid to depict the likely trajectory of climate disaster and hypercapitalism. I caught up with him last month to inquire about his current outlook.
“The world is dying, and we have a 30% chance of making it through the end of this century. Certainly, we’re likely to see a capitalist famine in which maybe a few hundred million or a few billion starve to death. The first time that global warming gets heavily intersected with the food supply is going to be a massive termination event. And everybody is going to turn around and say ‘Oh my god this is terrible, we never saw it coming!’”
In the five years since Vinay shared his hexayurt housing project with Meaning, the stakes have clearly got higher. At the time, Vinay described how the hexayurt’s simple, open source structure could change the game in the housing market, returning the commodity to its use-value and removing the banking and speculation aspects that keep the market artificially inflated and static. In this, as in other disruptive grassroots technologies, he has argued that the creation of abundance (or the removal of scarcity) is the route to breaking industrial stalemates. How much has his hexayurt mission progressed in the interim; given the prospect of looming climate disaster and increasing political volatility in the West?
“At this point, what I’m working towards is trying to redesign how we handle refugees — for example, climate refugees. I came to the conclusion that I’m going to have to do a lot of privately financed, fairly large-scale research and development, so that has taken me into a kind of indirect loop forward which is: go into the markets, make some money in technology, hopefully come back and follow the Elon Musk strategy of ‘pay for the change you want to see in the world’. I tried ‘being the change’ and it wasn’t working all that well, but ‘paying for the change’ — that seems like it might work.
“So, step one is to make about £800 million. Step two is to spend this money setting up charter cities that are designed to accept refugees, and finance the process by having the refugees export goods and services on preferential tax rates; which would basically be a subsidy provided by the first world countries as a way of getting the refugee problem solved. So, you have a jurisdiction where the refugees can export goods into Europe without paying taxes on them, and that encourages foreign direct investment. You basically set up free trade zones for the refugees to be able to take care of themselves; rather than us trying to find the budget to cover 300 million displaced people.”
Hexayurt communities at the Burning Man festival
While on course to realising his vision for the hexayurt project, Vinay has emerged as one of the leading thinkers in the second generation of blockchain; speaking and publishing prolifically on the revolutionary potential of crypto-currencies to cut out the middle man. Now an undisputed pioneer of the smart contracts platform ethereum, he recently designed the Dubai blockchain strategy as well as presenting his new thesis — the Internet of Agreements — at the World Government Summit. Could Ethereum be the route to the £800 million he needs?
“I certainly ran into capitalism in a really dedicated way three years ago because I figured out that we were just screwed. It is time to run. If I was attempting to run now, I wouldn’t be at the head end of the blockchain as basically a late entrant. I’m in the position that I’m in because I started running early enough that I got a good position as I ran into the system. If you wait too late it’s quite hard to get a decent position inside of the next round. So, the awareness landscape is basically a sort of a stress network — I look in society for the places where stress has accumulated and I use that map to position myself forward, because I’m carrying this hexayurt thing. It’s going to require the investment of enormous sums of money to build hexayurt cities and then hexayurt countries for the climate refugees. If I get squashed now, none of that is going to get done.”
It seems that we are now entering a cultural explosion around the blockchain. This has come with a large amount of political baggage — with crypto-currencies claimed by libertarians, anarchists and survivalists as a revolutionary tool to break free of both the state and existing markets. I was interested to know to what extent Vinay would agree with their creed — that decentralisation is the key to political liberation:
“I’m running around with a view of the future which is far more realistic than almost anyone else in the blockchain space has. Therefore I’m continually three or four steps ahead because I don’t believe that decentralisation is utopian. I don’t think it’s going to produce a better world at all. Centralisation can be the FDA ensuring you don’t have dioxins in your food. Decentralisation can be people marrying their thirteen-year-old cousins in rural Utah. This all cuts both ways. There is getting it right and there is any particular given political dogma. And all of the political sides are wrong — all of them are wrong.
“I think accountability could produce a better world, and you could get accountability from blockchain; but decentralisation in the mode that people are currently practising it is simply hypercapitalism with another set of fangs. I also believe that the state is not going anywhere because the nuclear weapon stockpiles are exactly the way they were when we started and they’re not going away. So, at that point whatever we’re building is going to end up interfacing with the state. I have a fundamentally different view of where cryptography fits into the future — and I take the risk of terrorists using this stuff completely seriously. These are all fundamentally anathema to the vast majority of people in the blockchain space. They think you’re going to get full decentralisation, they don’t want to think about the black state and its weapon stockpiles, they absolutely don’t want to think about environmental constraints. It’s just a ‘yeah it’s all going to work out’ kind of future. But it’s not all going to work out. It might work out for well-armed white people in rich countries, but it’s certainly not going to work out for everybody else.”
With his arguments for post-scarcity economics, Vinay has also become associated with ‘left-accelerationism’ and the development of simple, open source technologies — even setting down principles for how ‘open source appropriate technology’ should be ethically approached. His hexayurt falls into this category, along with water filters and solar panels; commodities with an economic rationale of “the lowest investment for biggest increase in quality of life”. Where this kind of technological progress is emancipatory, ‘right-accelerationism’ is considered its technocratic counterpart; further intensifying the concentration of wealth under capitalism. I asked Vinay if this is still a battleground on which he wishes to fight:
“I’m going to get back to that stuff in ten years if I’m still alive. The ‘if I’m still alive is important, right!’ Of the 1960’s generation of leaders — the vast majority of them were dead by the 1990s. The Alan Watts and all the rest of that kind of crew, even the Robert Anton Wilsons of the world — he was broken down to a shadow of himself by the time the 90s came round. Over and over and over again we lose the top end of leadership because they just get crushed in history. People just stick to their guns and they carry the weight until the weight crushes them.
The mind-set should not be one of ‘stick to your guns, die with your boots on’. Every generation has tried that approach and it’s been completely ineffective. The activists keep getting suckered into that trap again and again — this is spiritually right, this is spiritually wrong, we’re only going to do the spiritually right — then they get materially broken and they get shoved off the wreck. Another generation of totally inept youngsters then stands up as the next round of spiritual leadership and then gets the shit kicked out of them again in the next round. Armies that go into battle with no general will lose, and the generals are dying in the streets — twenty years too young to actually have any real effectiveness. Forty-five is the age that you begin to enter structural power, and for the most part the hippy leadership never made it that far. It’s a recurring, inter-generational cycle.”
It seems significant that Vinay evokes the activism of the 1960s, and I get the feeling that it’s a cultural trajectory he’s spent a lifetime thinking about; one that could not be better expressed than by one of his favourite literary passages, Hunter S Thompson’s description of ‘the wave’ from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I once heard him quip that the aftermath of the 60s would have been very different if the activists had emerged with something like blockchain. For Vinay, this is a time for building, not fighting.
Our discussion goes on to survey the contemporary political scene — the rise of the right and infighting of the left on both sides of the Atlantic. If activists have allowed themselves to be drained of their effectiveness, could this be because they have too often prioritised sensibility above strategy? I can’t help but raise that old bone of Marxist contention — does Vinay believe that the contemporary focus on identity politics has diverted the left from addressing the more urgent question of resources?
“This is why I think basic income is the next winnable fight — and the proper response to global hypercapitalism. Because you could potentially unite the shattered disparate wreckage of the left and indeed the former middle classes under basic income as a banner in the age of robot socialism. So, after the manufacturing economy is gutted by robots, after the drivers are gutted by self-driving cars, as all that stuff unfolds and the right promises the world to get into power and then completely fails to deliver, there will be an opportunity for large scale renegotiation. So, the objective is basically to keep the powder dry and keep the front line activists safe until that large scale renegotiation occurs. No one really understands the issues, you’ve got to wait until people are actively beginning to push for basic income before you start dropping everything to go and deliver basic income. It’s a waiting game.”
Vinay warns that we might be waiting ten years before the scene is set for the “next round” of activism for basic income. But, if activists are to leave the front lines and reinvent their strategies, is there really nothing to fight for in the meantime?
“The one thing that I think might be worth fighting for is laboratory grown meat. It’s now close enough that a fight for that might be really important. If the lab meat thing works and you wind up with the ability to get the population off cow, it will make an enormous difference to our global warming emissions. Enormous. Bigger than getting rid of cars. It takes all of the land use pressure of nature. So, you get the jungles beginning to grow back, you get the English countryside beginning to come back — you get a huge restoration of natural systems because you’re no longer grazing everything in sight to turn it into hamburgers, because the hamburgers are coming out of an enormous factory on the far side of Dundee for a pound a kilo! So, I actually think that beating the hell out of green resistance to lab meat — a ‘tech will save us’ kind of thing — is a really good idea. And getting into the lab meat industry — can you imagine how much money is going to come out of lab meat? Cutting greenhouse gas emissions by maybe 20%, hugely improving access to protein in the developing world, saves the lives of untold millions of cows by simply failing to have them exist. It’s something where the culture gets all up in arms about it, you can imagine the farming lobby now. But if they ban it we are screwed, because it’s the next big shift we could make technologically that could protect the ecosystem from our stupidity.”
The lab meat question is exactly the kind of pressure point that Vinay Gupta likes to hone in on, for the extent they challenge our comfort levels and ask us to think through our contradictions. He will regularly remind you that it’s impossible to confront the future without also tearing up your sensibilities; and it is clear that this is a deeply held existential position. As an advanced practitioner of Kriya Yoga, Vinay likens the task to the ancient principles of Tantric philosophy: ”the continual pursuit of truth over social conformity.”
This November, Vinay will share his experiences at the vanguard of Ethereum — in particular The Internet of Agreements, his thesis on how blockchain can build the future of global trade and co-operation. In approaching how data and commerce should interface with the state in the era of blockchain, he is sure to be fearless in addressing the blind spots created by the blockchain craze; and in deconstructing the belief systems that have so strongly influenced its first wave. As with any topic on which Vinay holds forth — you pigeonhole him at your peril.
You can hear more about Ethereum at the Meaning conference in Brighton, UK on 16 November 2017 — where Vinay Gupta will join a line-up of diverse speakers exploring the role of business in creating a more sustainable, equitable and humane world. Find out more via the event website.
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]]>The post An Economy of Meaning, or Bust appeared first on P2P Foundation.
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John Boik: It’s not often that a scientist gets to use the words love, creativity, and wisdom in a paper, especially when writing about economics. Perhaps that’s because economics, the dismal science, is obsessed with dismal systems — make that abysmal systems, relative to need.
To be clear, I’m not speaking of the specific policies of the US, the EU, China, the World Bank or others. I’m speaking of dominant economic systems as wholes — especially their underlying conceptual models (macro and micro) and the world views upon which they are based.
A human has only so many minutes in life. Time is the bedrock scarcity. If a person isn’t doing something meaningful in a given moment, he’s doing something less than meaningful. He’s wasting at least some of his potential. By meaningful, I don’t mean productive, in an economic sense. I mean important to the person, to her own wellbeing. The Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef identifies nine categories of human need: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity, and freedom. Others might make a slightly different list, but the important concept is that meaning stems from addressing real human needs.
It’s not that we should be doing something meaningful with our time, it’s that we want to. We want to express and receive affection, for example, and to fulfill the other eight needs. We want to, that is, unless external pressures so exhaust, distract, distort, or confuse us that we lose touch with who we are.
Current economic systems are dismal-abysmal because they waste our precious time. As a case in point, only 13 percent of workers worldwide are engaged in their jobs. This means, in effect, that 87 percent of workers feel more or less forced to go to work. Short of force, why would someone spend half their waking hours (or more), day after day, doing something that didn’t engage them?
Except for receiving a paycheck, it appears that most workers don’t really care about their jobs. That’s not surprising. Work doesn’t count as a real human need. It’s only a vehicle by which some needs can be (but for most people aren’t) met. Work doesn’t meet our needs because economic systems, as they exist, didn’t evolve to fulfill the real needs of ordinary people. They evolved largely under pressures exerted by powerful people and groups who wanted to maintain and expand their own privileges.
Suppose that we pause to reevaluate. Using insights from psychology, environmental sciences, public health, complex systems science, sociology, and other fields — that is, using as clear and scientifically sound a picture as we can muster of what humans and natural environments actually need in order to thrive — we can ask ourselves the following question: What economic system designs, out of all conceivable ones, might be among the best at helping us meet real needs?
Strange as it might sound, this question is rarely asked in academia, the science and technology sector, or elsewhere. Or if it is asked, the investigation usually lacks imagination. Surely we can move beyond a discussion of capitalism vs. socialism, as if these were the only two possibilities. A wide-open, largely unexplored space of interesting, potentially viable systems exists.
In my recent paper, “Optimality of Social Choice Systems: Complexity, Wisdom, and Wellbeing Centrality,” I call on the academic community, and science and technology sector, to begin a broad exploration in partnership with other segments of society into what optimality means with respect to economic and political system design. I term this nascent program wellbeing centrality, due to the central role that the elevation of wellbeing would play in systems that help us to fulfill real needs.
Viewed abstractly, economic and political systems are problem-solving systems. One could call them technologies of a sort. As such, they are subject to scientific inquiry and engineering innovation aimed at discovering new designs that improve problem-solving capacity. Further, if we seek ideas for new designs, we don’t have to look far. Nature provides a blueprint.
From a complex systems science perspective, the environment is replete with successful problem-solving systems (cells, organisms, immune systems, ecologies, and so on). Although all look different physically, successful systems tend to exhibit similar underlying mathematical properties. That is, nature has hit upon a good problem-solving approach, and repeats it widely. If we wish our problem-solving systems to be successful, to be as good as they can be, we might want to pay close attention to what nature does.
Moreover, we can view the eight needs Max-Neef identifies as gifts of nature, stemming from eons of evolution over countless ancestral species, to help us focus on and solve problems that matter. Our need to express and receive affection, for example, is also responsible, in part, for our tendency to seek cooperation in solving difficult problems.
Engage global, test local, spread viral
In short, “good” economic systems would produce economies of meaning that help us to help one another live meaningful lives — to meet real needs and solve problems that matter.
We don’t have much time to make a transition from current systems to better ones. Mass extinction and other global catastrophes loom on the horizon. We face the unthinkable, not so much because a few CEOs, companies, or politicians have acted greedily (some have), but rather because today’s problem-solving systems didn’t evolve to help us meet real needs. They waste our precious time, as mentioned, rather than focusing our talents and natural drives on things that do matter, such as caring for others and the planet.
But how do we get from here to there? No matter how promising the design of a new system might be, it would be unreasonable to expect that a nation would abruptly drop an existing system in favor of a new one. Nevertheless, a viable, even attractive strategy exists by which new systems could be successfully researched, developed, tested, and implemented. I call it engage global, test local, spread viral.
Engage global means to engage the global academic community and technical sector, in partnership with other segments of society, in a well-defined R&D program aimed at computer simulation and scientific field testing of new systems and benchmarking of results. In this way, the most profound insights of science can be brought into play.
Test local means to scientifically test new designs at the local (e.g., city or community) level, using volunteers (individuals, businesses, non-profits, etc.) organized as civic clubs. This approach allows testing by relatively small teams, at relatively low cost and risk, in coexistence with existing systems, and without legislative action.
Spread viral means that if a system shows clear benefits in one location (elimination of poverty, for example, more meaningful jobs, or less crime) it would likely spread horizontally, even virally, to other local areas. This approach would create a global network of communities and cities that cooperate in trade, education, the setup of new systems, and other matters. Over time, its impact on all segments of society would grow.
Cities, big and small, are the legs upon which all national systems rest. Already cities and their communities are hubs for innovation. With some further encouragement and support, and the right tools and programs, they could become more resilient and robust, and bigger heroes in the coming great transition.
By John Boik, PhD. To learn more about the wellbeing centrality R&D program, the LEDDA economic democracy framework, or to download (free) Economic Direct Democracy: A Framework to End Poverty and Maximize Well-Being (2014), visit http://www.PrincipledSocietiesProject.org.
Please share and republish. Originally published at www.principledsocietiesproject.org.
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]]>The post Team Human: Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen “The Thrill of Democracy” appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Playing for Team Human today are Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen from the Small Planet Institute. Lappé and Eichen are out on the road with a mission to reinvigorate “civic courage” and inclusive participation in democracy. Their latest book Daring Democracy Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want offers a diagnosis of what has come to ail our democracy and recommends the necessary cures, offering concrete examples of ballot initiatives, reforms, and collective organizing happening across the country. Counter to a despairing narrative on the current state of democracy in the U.S., Lappé and Eichen argue that people are indeed rising to take the reigns. Inspired by examples of deep organizing and the convergence of movements in places such as Democracy Spring, Democracy Awakening, and Occupy Wall Street, Lappé and Eichen see power shifting back into the people’s hands. Their analysis of how we got to where we are, coupled with their passion and optimism for change, is both contagious and empowering. In this Team Human conversation, Lappé and Eichen join Douglas to make a case for hope, courage, and optimism in this moment of turmoil and division.
Rushkoff begins today’s show with a monologue on the theme of democracy inspired by this conversation. Though it may have been easy to have lost faith in democracy after the 2016 election, perhaps election day is the wrong place to look if we really see democracy in action. It’s a monologue that asks: where does democracy begin for team human?… and lucky for us, today’s guests Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen are ready with the answer.
This episode was made possible thanks to listener support. If you enjoy this show, consider subscribing via Patreon. There you’ll find subscriber rewards and the opportunity to connect with other listeners through the Team Human Slack Channel.
Also, if you enjoy this show and want to spread the word, please review Team Human on iTunes or your favorite podcast platform.
Democracy Spring Photo By Michele Egan (alsacienne from Washington, USA) (Democracy Spring “Elders” edition) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons
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]]>The post Visioneering an information system for P2P practice and research appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Poor Richard: I hope no one will mind if I indulge in a little visioneering here. I am imagining an information system of P2P practice and research. The P2P collaborative economy, free culture, and new commons movements are creating a lot of digital content. Most is in discursive and narrative form that is time consuming to read. Among this volume of content are case studies in a variety of formats (many very informal), business plans, proposals, and presumably many legal documents (charters, agreements, etc.).
I am imagining a semantic ontology according to which the key ideas and data of this content could be parsed and tagged to form a distributed database using semantic linked-data structures. This would help transition the collective knowledge base of the research, activist, and social entrepreneurial communities into a machine-readable, semantically linked, searchable form.
The P2P Foundation Wiki is an excellent searchable resource, and perhaps the semantic wiki extensions for the wiki engine could eventually be applied. “A semantic wiki is a wiki that has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages. Regular, or syntactic, wikis have structured text and untyped hyperlinks. Semantic wikis, on the other hand, provide the ability to capture or identify information about the data within pages, and the relationships between pages, in ways that can be queried or exported like a database.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_wiki
A fringe benefit of creating such data structures for existing content would be to provide common templates for future content creation and data collection.
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