Revolution2.0

Defining alternative pathways for our future

As the United States sinks into despotism, I find my 2016 book How Soon Is Now very relevant for this historical moment. In this newsletter, I sometimes excerpt chapters from it. How Soon Is Now was my sincere effort to analyze the failure of our civilization in how it treats the Earth as well as human beings. I tried to envision a successful alternative, as well as a strategic path to attaining it. I explored many different ideas and models for what could come next.

Why is How Soon Is Now relevant today? The rapid shift in the U.S. toward a more extreme form of techno-feudalism and oligarchic or dictatorial control does not indicate the strength of our system. I suspect, instead, it reveals severe weakness and fragility in our social order. The underlying instability is only increasing. There are many reasons for this, as I have explored in past newsletters.

One important reason is the rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence which can be utilized to intensify dictatorial controls over the human population — or we could use it to build a hyper-responsive participatory democracy while liberating people from boring work and manual drudgery. As a result of AI, millions will lose their jobs in the next years, many of them knowledge workers or cognitive laborers. These people could form a new revolutionary class, particularly if they discover their affinity with working class people as well as farmers across the world, including the global South. The tools of network communication have been mangled and booby-trapped to support Capitalist exploitation and oligarchic control. But these tools could be repurposed and redesigned to allow for a rapid self-education of the populace and the emergence of new social and political movements for planetary unity, ecological restoration, and justice.

I would say that the legitimacy of the ruling elite has become increasingly shallow and hollowed out. They know this and they fear the people discovering it for themselves. For this reason, many billions of dollars have been spent on a massive “PsyOp” that seeks to fragment the human Psyche and make people unable to think clearly or reason for themselves. The controlling elite seek to intensify racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and hatred of immigrants or minorities as tried-and-true techniques for maintaining social control. As we now see in the US, we are moving quickly from a society based in the rule of law (even if there was often injustice in how that law was implemented) to a society based on pure “power over,” where the elite controls through fear of punishment, imprisonment, and death. Without a Constitutional rule of law, a despotic regime’s legitimacy can only be based on its monopoly of violence. While this can be effective, it provides a very thin basis for legitimacy. On average, dictatorships last for around eight years.

What we need at this point are working visions and models for what our society could become after this destruction of our rules, laws, values, and norms. In his February 5th editorial, “There Is No Going Back”,NY Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote:

Trump and Musk really have altered the structure of things. They’ve taken steps that cannot be so easily reversed. If American constitutional democracy is a game, then they’ve flipped the board with the aim of using the same pieces to play a new one with their own boutique rules.

And so the president’s opponents, whoever they are, cannot expect a return to the Constitution as it was. Whatever comes next, should the country weather this attempted hijacking, will need to be a fundamental rethinking of what this system is and what we want out of it.

I agree with him — also, when we consider its devastating impact on the planet’s ecology, our civilization was not going to last much longer in any event. Perhaps Trump and Musk are accelerating the speed of destruction so we get to the other side faster. Perhaps the masses will break out of the PsyOp mind-control trance to reach an authentic relationship to our real circumstance, as this extremist effort at anti-democratic control falls apart. I am not offering false hopes here — I am not feeling very optimistic — but I do think it is useful to follow the investigation I took in How Soon Is Now, and at least consider our alternatives.

Revolution2.0

As it widens the ‘metabolic rift’ between humanity and nature in its insatiable quest for more profit, for endless growth, capitalism has revealed a fatal design flaw. There is nothing in its internal logic to interrupt its momentum — to stop it eating its way through our planet, and ultimately collapsing our global ecosystems. Therefore, we must intervene and redirect it. The only way to do this is to make the global population aware of the dilemma, while those with the technical and creative capability design, field-test and distribute a functional alternative.

I find it helpful to look at the problem — as if we are seeing it from outside, like space aliens observing the Earth from an observatory on a moon of Jupiter — through the paradigm of design. When designers want to make something new, they expect they will have to build and field-test a series of versions and prototypes. When the first model breaks down, they build a second version. When that version fails, they create another. They keep iterating until they get it right. Artists similarly experiment in their studio, destroying or painting over their failed attempts until their vision emerges.

When it comes to building a social, or a political-economic, system, humanity has followed these steps — experimenting, building a prototype, field-testing it, discovering where the model breaks down, developing a new prototype, experimenting, field-testing, watching it fail and so on — over and over. Unfortunately, however, when the current version of society crashes, it doesn’t happen in the laboratory or studio. It takes place across the much broader canvas of nation-states and civilizations. It tragically utilizes human beings – swarms, masses of them – as its Jackson Pollock-like splatters and drips.

Perhaps the greatest systems thinker of the twentieth century was the design scientist Buckminster Fuller. Fuller combined two strains of American thought, transcendental idealism and pragmatism, in a long career. He was a prolific inventor, mathematician and visionary. He passed through his own initiation as a young man, contemplating suicide at the age of 32, after the death of a beloved child. He decided that, rather than kill himself, he would dedicate his life to accomplishing the greatest good for humanity, without thought or consideration for personal gain. Fuller wrote many books expounding his philosophy, including Synergetics, Critical Path, Operation Spaceship Earth, and Utopia and Oblivion — they remain very relevant today.

In the 1960s, Fuller foresaw only two possible outcomes for humanity: we would either continue our current social and political arrangements and soon destroy ourselves, or we would undergo a design revolution in every arena. As part of this design revolution, we would apply our technical powers to allocate resources efficiently, working together to elevate everyone on Earth to a high standard of living and education. Even a half-century ago, he saw that we already possessed the technical means as well as the resources to do this. But the opportunity has been blocked by the inertia of our out-of-date political and financial arrangements, as well by as the ideology behind this antiquated system.

‘All who are really dedicated to the earliest possible attainment of economic and physical success for all humanity — and thereby realistically to eliminate work — will have to shift their focus from the political arena to participation in the design revolution,’ he wrote.

Fuller believed that the current model of work would be abolished in a truly rational society. I wholeheartedly agree with him. Deep down, nobody wants a job to occupy so much of their time. People want a mission that inspires them — that compels them to dig deep to apply their reserves of creativity, cunning, compassion and courage. Fuller noted that most of the work people do is a drain on the Earth’s resources. All around the world, people are driving in cars to offices, using computers, toner cartridges and polystyrene packages. All of this is costly from the perspective of the planet’s ecology (apparently the words ‘ecology’ and ‘economy’ have the same root).

It would be much more economical and efficient, Fuller reasoned, to subsidize people so they could live in self-sufficient communities where they produced their own food and energy. He proposed giving everyone on Earth who didn’t already have a mission, a ‘research grant for life’, in whatever subject interested them. I love this idea.

Oscar Wilde, who was also a brilliant social thinker, arrived at the same conclusion over a half-century before Fuller. Instead of the current system, Wilde believed, we need some form of socialism, where people share property and reduce government to its most basic utilitarian functions. He thought that attaining a liberated society required developing our machines so that they could do all of the depressing and miserable labour — the drudgery — freeing people to develop their unique individuality. Wilde saw ‘cultivated leisure’, not work, as the ultimate purpose of human existence.

I find it significant that the field of robotics is developing quickly, reaching the point where machines can in fact do all of the horrible, dehumanizing tasks. Depending on what kind of society we construct for ourselves, we could liberate ourselves from meaningless labour, within the next half-century. For this to happen, we need a new vision of human purpose and possibility.

Buckminster Fuller made one error: he believed that the design revolution could happen without a major transformation in the political arena, forgetting that social systems are also artifacts of human design. As Hannah Arendt recognized, Western thinkers have tended to ignore our political and social system, which has developed through trial and error, experiment, failure and innovation. Also, it seems obvious that the only way we can address these areas is by changing the underlying beliefs, values and ideology that make up the consciousness of the collective.

In this book, we are exploring three areas: the technical infrastructure, which includes agriculture, energy, industry and so on; the social or political-economic system; and consciousness — the beliefs, values and ideology that are reinforced and reiterated through media, laws and education. These three main areas all work together, like three wheels with intermeshed gears that turn each other. When our technology changes, for instance, it opens new possibilities, which can change the social system as well as the collective consciousness.

As an example, we can look at the evolution in media technology, which has profoundly reshaped society over time. There would never have been far-flung empires like Rome’s without a written code of laws, which could be disseminated across its territories, homogenizing how people behaved. The modern nation-state, our current form of liberal democracy, would have been impossible without the printing press, which allowed people to stay updated with regular news, so they could participate in elections as informed citizens. Following this logic, the interactive media we have developed over the last decades should also lead to a profound social transformation, beyond what we have already seen.

Karl Marx developed a model of how the technical, social and ideological areas supported each other as part of a whole system. He named them base, structure and super-structure. Marx also realized that the eighteenth-century revolutions had been incomplete, because they supported a false mode of individuality, protecting each person’s rights (including the right to property) against those of other people.

The revolutions of the eighteenth century degraded ‘the sphere in which man conducts himself as a communal being’. They enshrined ‘the freedom of egoistic man . . . Man was therefore not freed from religion; he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property. He received freedom of property. He was not freed from the egoism of trade, but received freedom to trade.’ The revolutions therefore led to the commercial society we have today, where people protect their interests against each other.