If you look at the lessons of history, it's easy to conclude that:
- People change only when they must, or when a change is both very easy and very compelling
- When they do, reluctantly, change, people change their behaviour first, and their beliefs and values only much later, if at all
- Fast, enduring change has been wrought not by political
revolution (which usually replaces one despot with another, and takes a
century or more of agonizing, small change to get any real traction),
by war, or by broad change in social attitudes (which, even in
egregious cases like slavery and disenfranchisement of women, takes
centuries of sustained effort to become entrenched), but rather by new
innovations and technologies. The agricultural revolution and the
industrial revolution were both driven by new, frightening,
counter-cultural, and initially very unpopular innovative technologies.
Clay Christensen in The Innovator's Dilemma
explains that the undoing of most Fortune 500 companies has come about
when new competitors unexpectedly began to devour their markets,
sneaking up on them by stealth, often by accident, but always
because of a new technology. And Bucky Fuller echoed this when he said
that "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To
change something, build a new model that makes the existing model
obsolete."
Could we apply these lessons to invent technologies
that, like the technological inventions that ushered in the
agricultural and industrial eras, might usher in a new, post-consumer,
post-capitalist, post-corporatist, post-population-explosion,
post-environmental-destruction human culture? That means giving up on
attempts to bring about political, social, economic and educational
reform, and instead focusing strictly on what Christensen calls
'disruptive innovation' and what technophile Fuller calls 'a new
model', to undermine instead of trying to overcome the culture that threatens us all with catastrophic extinction.
Some definitions are in order:
- Innovation is an
invention or discovery with useful applications. Examples: The wedge,
agriculture, trade, the engine (steam-powered and later,
electrically-powered), solar and wind energy
- Technology in the broad sense is any useful application of innovation. Examples: Spears and
arrowheads (applications of the wedge), selective breeding of plants
and animals (application of agriculture), money and credit
(applications of trade), industrial and automotive machinery
(applications of the engine)
I have posited before that, as the systems thinking chart above
illustrates, the two root causes of our culture's destructiveness and
unsustainability are overpopulation and overconsumption. It may seem
crazy to think that we could invent some new, innovative technologies
that, without any social, political, educational or economic help,
would transform our culture (behaviour first, beliefs and values later)
so dramatically that they would solve these huge, intractable problems.
But imagine you were the inventor/discoverer of monoculture
agriculture, showing the first few unbelievers of your new technologies
that, after three million years of doing so, the only life they knew, they would never have to hunt or gather again?
Or imagine you were the inventor of automation and the assembly line,
trying to convince people that you can achieve orders-of-magnitude
improvements in productivity by having people work in the service of machines?
Both these improbable, radical new technologies succeeded quickly,
ubiquitously, extraordinarily, in part because they were easy, the path
of least resistance in very troubled times, and in part because people
realized that there really was no other choice.
| Is the possibility
of us now launching a third human cultural revolution, by inventing
technologies that encourage and enable us to live better with fewer
humans and less 'stuff', really any more incredible than the success of
these previous two revolutions? |
And, even more importantly, is it so hard to believe that, with the ingenuity and interconnectedness of six billion people, we could invent technologies that would, for the third time, transform our culture quickly and utterly?
Well, maybe it is. But it seems to me foolish not to at least try.
I don't have all the answers, but I think I have the problem-solving process that could allow us, together, to find them. And I have some interesting ideas to get the process going. For example:
- What if we started
providing the necessities of life free? Food, clothing, shelter,
information, music, literature, recreation, education, health care.
Just started giving them away, and getting them free from others in
return.
- What if we created
a new currency that would monitor our spending on non-renewable and
polluting resources? And then those that voluntarily minimized such
spending, kept their personal ecological footprint small, and boycotted
socially and environmentally irresponsible companies' products and
services, would get some kind of wearable award, a kind of reverse
status symbol.
- What if we created
sustainable living standards for communities that would allow them to
be Certified Green if their ecological footprint was less than, say,
50% of their total area.
- What if we
invented a safe, easy, highly reliable, free form of birth control that
you'd only have to take every five years, without a doctor's
prescription, and which ideally also protected you from STDs?
- What if we got
scientists to designate non-essential consumption and indebtedness as
dangerous and unhealthy addictions, as forms of mental illness?
- What if we invented reconfigurable, space-efficient homes with multi-functional rooms, so that 400 s.f. per person would seem huge? And what if we
built them underground, energy self-sufficient, surrounded by large
virtual digital 'windows' that made them look bright and airy, so that
the land above could return to its natural state? And what if that surface land was protected as commonwealth land, owned by no one, in perpetuity?
- What if we modeled solar energy collectors on nature's perfectly-evolved model, the tree?
Well, you get the idea. I think my problem-solving process, applied to
one problem at a time, and engaging as many people and as many ideas as
possible, could work.
| Instead of just blogging and worrying and conversing in aimless,
isolated small groups, what if we instead spent some of that time, that
million hours a day, focusing together, collaboratively on specific unsolved problems? |
Imagine what we could accomplish together
by learning, listening, understanding, organizing, thinking ahead,
reaching out, brainstorming, designing, experimenting, challenging, and
deploying collectively-developed solutions. We don't need to get
together physically to do
this, and with the right preparation and the right team working on it,
is there really any limit on what we might accomplish?
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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