Empowering Evolution

Progress and peril have been reluctant partners for most of our civilized existence.

The unprecedented material progress that we have now become accustomed to, has also passed on the real systemic costs to our people, places and planet. We still have no idea how to replenish the ecological resources we are using, at the rate we are using them. Unnecessary costs, conflicts and confusions seem endless during this snapshot in time, which will surely look like our immature ignorance in retrospect.

We hope.

Our economic systems know who gets the profit, who provides the revenue, but the true costs to the future we have yet to realize is still hidden. Sure, we all understand what happens to capital in the debt based market economy, such as when I make furniture in Los Angeles and then sell it to a customer in New York. I can account for what I owe my investors, what I pay to source my materials, what I pay for labor, and what I pay to deliver it to my customer.

But who pays for replenishing the tree and its supporting ecosystem where my wood comes from? Who pays for mined metals and the resulting geological instabilities that holds my furniture together? Who pays for the petroleum extraction and the byproducts created for cushions, paint, fabric and more? Who pays for the waste product created from the process, which ultimately gets dumped into our oceans resulting in mass extinctions of interdependent and interconnected living systems?

Who pays for the road that my product travels on? Who pays to ensure the enforcement of justice for the replacement of the shipment if it gets hijacked or damaged en route? Who pays the real health and societal costs of my vendor’s employees in China and India who are overworked and underpaid, to the point where mass suicides are now being factored into their operational costs? Who pays for the real cost of the so called “clean” natural gas that both fuels the truck, and also poisons the local ecosystem, and the drinking water supply because of the wasteful methods used to extract it from rocks and sands below? Who pays for the processing costs to the environment for the jet fuel to get my supplies delivered cheaper than my competitors into my factory? Who pays for the skies and waterways poisoned with tons of CO2 dumped in the process?

I’m not personally responsible though right?

Depending on the size of my market, my real worries now for all of these costs, are simply about doing the cost benefit analysis to manage my financial capital. I will keep paying the fines, the carbon taxes, the lobbyists and the politicians to keep my business running, as long as those payments do not exceed my profits, and just long enough to exit to the next big IPO payday regardless of the real systemic costs.

Mother nature is not handing me her past due bill, and even if she was, I don’t really have to pay it. So this is now the game that plays on. We conveniently pass the real costs on to our children’s children because that is the accounting principle we have come to trust. Accounting invented for industrial progress that has fueled us out of what felt like a geographically scarce and physically dangerous world. We are so invested in this mode of progress, that to imagine anything else in its place is considered as heretic as science was to the religious establishment when these economic ideas were originally conceived.

One can say that it is ironic we hold onto economic principles from a time when the earth was presumed flat, and exorcism and bloodletting were the dominant medical practices. Even more so, since now the science developed through these economic constructs have actually transformed the means of production we apply these ideas to, but its more than just ironic. It is actually clinically insane by definition to uphold ideals that are no longer in our best interest and yet insisting we continue to act on them.

We all know the problems, or at least we are aware of the symptoms we do not like.

It does not require but a few keystrokes or taps to discover the extent of the economic, environmental and ecological damage just below the veneer of shiny robotic progress sold to us 24/7. For all the promises of gene-hacking, biotech enhanced life extension, the technical singularity melding of machine and man, space tourism and material abundance extrapolated from assuming the continued trajectory of Moore’s Law from the progress of the past, we have yet to account for the stuff that is still running out!

How do we reach the dream if how we are getting there is costing us more and more the longer we stay on this path? What do we do about the compounded damage that has now already surpassed the total ecological capacity of the planet to sustain life by one and a half times? What do we do about global temperatures rising at such a rate, that by the end of the 21st century it will have risen a full 10˚ to melt all the glaciers and cause unprecedented catastrophes affecting all life on the planet? Who really profits when the phytoplankton, or the microorganisms that sit on the surface of our oceans, and responsible for 50% of the oxygen on our planet, when 40% of which have simply vanished since the 1950s?

Is it possible that we may have operated on some fundamentally wrong assumptions to only give ourselves the illusion of progress, when our actions to date actually point instead toward our extinction? Even though we seem to think that we know more than anyone on this planet before us, are we really paying attention to first what is worth knowing, for the sake of our survival?

We know for example, that the reserve value of the global currency is inextricably tied to fossil fuels. With a debt based market economic system that trades energy primarily in the dollar standard for capital markets worldwide, the cost of capital and the flow of investment is now directly dependent on the price of fossil fuels. Period. If dirty energy really became obsolete, so would the value of the global money supply within our current economic system. So which capitalist will bet the future value of their assets towards a 100% renewable energy economy, even if the technological means to do so are already here? Who in a power position will endorse policies that will require the reassessment of their net worth factoring in biospheric costs in relationship to the disproportionately favorable returns now enjoyed by the 1% of the population?

In other words, we seem to be stuck with an idea from a technologically scarce time that limits us to a system of economics, that must bet against our future in order to motivate us to use the planet’s resources to produce more, with more dirty energy as if both the finite ecology of the earth and the fuel sources were infinitely available. Even as supplies decline or get increasingly more expensive to extract. As in what is happening now with known oil and gas reserves diminishing, while we drill, frack and squeeze drops of it from oceans, rocks and sands destroying living ecosystems at alarming rates. Why? Isn’t that the classic definition of insanity?

Does it really have to be this way?

What if our fundamental assumptions about energy and economics were about to shift into a new era of abundance and prosperity, despite the dichotomy of progress and peril we have come to accept as the default condition? What if I told you that on the road to our selfishly sucking all the resources of the planet to feed the beast of our infinite desires, we have also inadvertently let the genie of generosity out of the bottle?

Consider what is now happening to the motility of information once confined to a specific time and place. Things requiring buildings full of equipment, resources and people like broadcasting stations, print shops, libraries, warehouses, clocks, maps, hi-fi stereos, supercomputers and more now fit comfortably in the palms of our hands. The dematerialization of physical assets into information affect every aspect of our lives that was previously bound to time and place. We no longer need to carry encyclopedias to look up facts, store maps on our person to check for directions or remember phone numbers to call our friends. Even our old jobs, when dematerialized into predictable processes can be imported and replicated anywhere.

This is hugely significant.

As fixed constructs dematerialize, untethered information moves instantly through time and space empowering each of us to do much more with much less, and often simultaneously. We effectively distribute what once required economies of scale to be viable into unprecedented localized abilities to produce. From distributed manufacturing using self-replicating nanomaterials and 3D printers, to urban grow technologies that use 1/100th of the water in 1/1000th of the space of commercial agriculture to deliver 3-5 times the yield per wattage, we are becoming more empowered than ever to live sustainably with less impact.

The fluidity of relevant information dynamically moving though the networks deliver more innovation per capita, and not only that, they inspire other innovations to occur exponentially faster because of their existence. The smallest improvements can have huge affects in aggregate and in influence to each other. It should be innovation butterflies all around, except that what is driving the activity is also bounding its potential.

All life is ultimately the unobstructed flow of matter and energy. From a systems view, metabolism is nothing more than just that. Except, that in our economic system based on betting on a future where energy continues to be assumed scarce, it doesn’t quite flow that way. The lower down the socioeconomic chain you are, the more units of energy you spend for fewer units of return. Simultaneously, if you control the production of capital, i.e. the value of currency tied to dirty energy, then you spend less and less units of energy to reap more and more returns at the expense of the rest of us and the planet. There is obviously a deficit in the distribution and an obstruction in the flow, and the rich get richer while we try to feed the beast. It’s no one’s fault, it’s just the design of a system that has outgrown its geographically isolated objectives.

Yet, this archaic system is what now runs our world.

It’s like we focused all of our resources in building a civilization like a car, but forgot that we are dependent on the behavior of the driver. The driver can drive the most advanced car into a wall and we have handed over the keys while we were too busy making the car. However, from a systemic networked view, civilization is much more like a horse. A horse will not drive into the wall, because it is a living, sentient being who negotiates multiple information exchanges with the rider, and establishes the interdependencies long before the ride. That may be the better analogy to see past our mechanistic preoccupations with progress.

The good news is that along with the dematerialization of our physical means of moving matter and energy, it is also empowering us to see the broader reality. The meta-level patterns that have only recently become visible can guide our actions towards a more sustainable future. Patterns like making the horse to rider analogy or understanding the fallacy of a debt based market ecosystem tied to feudalistic extraction economy based currency system. Patterns like network effects that catapult media phenomena like the recent Kony film or make superstars out of people like Kim Kardashian for publicly being ignorant. It is a kind of quantum consciousness emerging from our daily activities. We are connected to sources that inform us in ways previously unimaginable while we invoke the same in others.

We each become the network and the network becomes all of us.

It is the reason, why a college dropout brown skinned immigrant kid from modest means like me can contemplate these thoughts, and then write a comprehensive book about an energy abundant economically prosperous future with real world systemic solutions. Not only that, but actually be heard and supported by the brilliant, passionate, intuitive and resourceful people that I’m fortunate enough to be connected to (many of whom are tagged in this note). Their genius, wisdom and insights remix, with my relatively lame neurogenic activity in comparison, to often produce things that would have shocked my pre-networked self. This is not unique to me, because all of us sense the same is true of our own participation in the information exchange remix of the net.

We are finally reaching a convergence where the wisdom of the past is merging with the visions of the future in ways that are actually achievable. The next iteration of socioeconomic activity is already leading us to abundance, despite the current noise in the channels still deluded from the pace of our past paradigm of progress. We see the lies and nonsense faster, we find the solutions quicker, and we organize more people and resources more effectively to lead real change forward.

So, I am hopeful.

The progress and peril that have been reluctant partners for most of our civilized existence, are also connecting us in new ways to question the path itself. We are now starting to understand why our economics are still grounded in 5000 year old thinking, while our means of production have advanced exponentially with our imaginations in near real time.

This is a crossroads for humanity. We now have the means now to shift everything from investment to infrastructure, but that’s just a projection of what is yet to come. The real evolution we have empowered is actually much deeper. It is what we have known all along but may have dismissed in our ignorance. It is simply this:

We rule our thoughts. Our thoughts rule our behavior. Our behavior changes everything. Everything is connected. The network makes that abundantly apparent. We are not separate from it.

We are all one.

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