Heroes Not Zombies

The world is changing.

Fact is, it’s never stopped changing since it came into existence. But what I mean is it seems as if we are in one of those phases of major and multiple interconnected change.

You can think of it in terms of economics, of social structures, of ways of living and thinking – wherever you look, there’s major change underway.

As the eras change the transitions can be hard to pin down. But when you are living it, you can feel it and you can see the signs.

One of the clearest signs for me is the unsustainability of many of our current paths – whether it’s the world economic order driving faster and faster towards ever greater inequality and unfairness, or “growth” which consumes ever more of our limited resources and heats up our planet. Or whether it’s our system of health care which costs more every single year as it struggles to keep up with increasing demand from patients with more and more chronic, incurable diseases. Or, well, you fill in the blanks.

The second clearest sign for me is the increase in command and control systems as societies, governments and enterprises struggle to keep human beings acting as obedient cogs in the machines.

Paul Mason writes about this in today’s Guardian (and he has a book on the subject coming out soon). He takes the perspective of economics and politics and by standing back and seeing the trends over a long period of time he describes the changes from feudal societies to capitalism to our current era of – well, what to call it? – he calls it “post-capitalism”.

What does he mean by that? –

Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all. Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue.

So the new information technologies are the game changer. I think this is true, but underlying those technologies is the greater discovery, which he talks a lot about in his article – networks.

The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next.

Let me highlight that phrase again – “Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy” – that’s it in a nutshell.

I think the change which is underway is a different kind of freedom from the one espoused by neoliberals – not the so called freedom of the individual to exist as if nobody else exists and to pursue their own selfish interests at all costs. Instead, it’s the freedom to collaborate and co-operate – to build effective informal networks to solve problems or to bring aobut change.

This is what is really exciting, because it’s the almost untold story of evolution – the most succesful species of life are those which develop the strongest collaborations. That was the message in “The Bond”, by Lynne McTaggart, and it was the message in “Global Brain” by Howard Bloom.

I think once you understand networks and the particular type of network found in all forms of life – the “complex adaptive system” – you realise that “command and control” management systems, “one size fits all” institutions, monopolies and the delusion of separateness are all about to hit the buffers.

Paul Mason does point out that things can go badly, just as he calls for a new utopian thinking, and as we look around it can seem the potential for disaster outweighs the potential for utopia – but, hey, I, for one, am up for making a contribution to the utopia scenario.

Only time will tell which way it’s going to go, but the key is – the world is changing and we, at this stage in history, can contribute positively to the direction it takes next.

The power of imagination will become critical. In an information society, no thought, debate or dream is wasted – whether conceived in a tent camp, prison cell or the table football space of a startup company.