The “Internet of things” has the potential to push large segments of economic life to near zero marginal cost in the years to come, and that will alter capitalism as we know it, says Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The Zero Marginal Cost Society”. The trend toward free sharing of information and entertainment, plus the rise in green energy and 3-D printing will spawn a hybrid economy in years to come which will be part capitalist market and part “Collaborative Commons”.

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Streamed live on Apr 29, 2014

via http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2014/a-world-beyond-markets

RSA Replay – A World Beyond Markets

20min et al – iot is the soul mate of …

25 min – ownership to access, market to networks

28 min – huge – 40 country study

37 min – pickety’s misunderstanding

(haven’t watched all yet)

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ted 2010:

http://on.ted.com/d0871

The Empathic Civilisation

actually soft-wired …. to belong.

attachment… and authenticity…  – empathy

empathy is the opposite of utopia 

no empathy in utopia because there is no suffering..

5:30 – is it possible that we human beings who are soft wired for empathic distress.. is it possible we could actually extend our empathy to the entire human race…

oikos ness

if it’s possible to imagine that – we could save our species/planet.. if it’s not possible to even imagine that.. i don’t see how we’re going to make it..

to empathize is to civilize…

we extended families – from blood ties, to religious ties, to nation ties, … fictions that allow us to extend our families.. is it really a big stretch to imagine that tech could allow us to go beyond the nation state?

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book links to amazon

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An increasingly streamlined and savvy capitalist system will continue to soldier on at the edges of the new economy, finding sufficient vulnerabilities to exploit, primarily as an aggregator of network services and solutions, allowing it to flourish as a powerful niche player in the new economic era, but it will no longer reign.

and ness – shrinking/enlarging things into perspective.. 24/7 – small is ginormous ness

Capitalism’s raison d’être is to bring every aspect of human life into the economic arena, where it is transformed into a commodity to be exchanged as property in the marketplace. Very little of the human endeavor has been spared this transformation.

Today, virtually every aspect of our daily lives is connected in some way to commercial exchanges. The market defines us. But here lies the contradiction. Capitalism’s operating logic is designed to fail by succeeding.

Imagine a scenario in which the operating logic of the capitalist system succeeds beyond anyone’s wildest expectations and the competitive process leads to “extreme productivity” and what economists call the “optimum general welfare”—an endgame in which intense competition forces the introduction of ever-leaner technology, boosting productivity to the optimum point in which each additional unit introduced for sale approaches “near zero” marginal cost. In other words, the cost of actually producing each additional unit—if fixed costs are not counted—becomes essentially zero, making the product nearly free. If that were to happen, profit, the lifeblood of capitalism, would dry up

imagine we can hasten that.. a quiet revolution ness

Many, though not all, of the old guard in the commercial arena can’t imagine how economic life would proceed in a world where most goods and services are nearly free, profit is defunct, property is meaningless, and the market is superfluous

Keynes hastened to add that technological unemployment, while vexing in the short run, is a great boon in the long run because it means “that mankind is solving its economic problem.”

earn a living ness

liberating the human race from toil and hardships and freeing the human mind from a preoccupation with strictly pecuniary interests to focus more on the “arts for life” and the quest for transcendence.

Nonetheless, Summers and DeLong concluded that in the “new economy” this might be the only way forward. In an incredible admission, the two acknowledged that “the right way to think about this complex set of issues is not clear, but it is clear that the competitive paradigm cannot be fully appropriate . . . but we do not yet know what the right replacement paradigm will be.

networked individualism as mechanism..

A near zero marginal cost society is the optimally efficient state for promoting the general welfare and represents the ultimate triumph of capitalism. Its moment of triumph, however, also marks its inescapable passage from the world stage. While capitalism is far from putting itself out of business, it’s apparent that as it brings us ever closer to a near zero marginal cost society, its once unchallenged prowess is diminishing, making way for an entirely new way of organizing economic life in an age characterized by abundance rather than scarcity.

2 loop theory ness

The term paradigm shift has been thrown around so much in recent years, in reference to virtually any kind of change, that it might be helpful to revisit the words of Thomas Kuhn, whose book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions made the word paradigm part of the general discourse. Kuhn described a paradigm as a system of beliefs and assumptions that operate together to establish an integrated and unified worldview that is so convincing and compelling that it is regarded as tantamount to reality itself

this unquestioning acceptance, and refusal to envision alternative explanations, leads to a festering of inconsistencies that pile up until a tipping point is reached where the existing paradigm is torn apart and replaced with a new explanatory paradigm better able to marshal the anomalies, insights, and new developments into a comprehensive new narrative

Physicists refer to the no-longer-useable energy as entropy.

so – most humans are currently entropical… ness. as we have lost our energy .. and are in need of detox.. to restore.. like Lessig‘s first problem (not biggest/only – but first) is to address the alcoholism.. to free the person/people from dependency.. or as Langer would say – mindlessness…

Engineers and chemists point out that in regard to economic activity there is never a net energy gain but always a loss in available energy in the process of converting nature’s resources into economic value

so let’s no longer..

The field of economics, by and large, has yet to confront the fact that economic activity is conditioned by the laws of thermodynamics. The profession’s glaring misunderstanding of its own subject is what’s forcing a rethinking of the paradigm by academics coming from other disciplines across the natural and social sciences.

ha. of math and men ness. no?

The IoT embeds the built environment and the natural environment in a coherent operating network, allowing every human being and every thing to communicate with one another in searching out synergies and facilitating interconnections in ways that optimize the thermodynamic efficiencies of society while ensuring the well-being of the Earth as a whole.

yeah that. but perhaps currently missing a key bit of data – self-talk – the energy to sustain/perpetuate betterness/equity

Some of the leading information technology companies in the world are already at work on the build-out of the Internet of Things. General Electric’s “Industrial Internet,” Cisco’s “Internet of Everything,” IBM’s “Smarter Planet,” and Siemens’s “Sustainable Cities” are among the many initiatives currently underway to bring online an intelligent Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure that can connect neighborhoods, cities, regions, and continents in what industry observers call a global neural network.

but perhaps .. until people are set free – and the focus is daily curiosity (pull vs push – the freedom of an echo chamber) we won’t access the brilliant network being built.. and we sure won’t have enough eyes free to keep its openness open/safe/alive.. none of us are free until.. ness.

Infrastructure requires three elements, each of which interacts with the other to enable the system to operate as a whole: a communication medium, a power source, and a logistics mechanism. [communication, energy, mobility]

mechanism – 1. tech handles communication initially 2. energy is from authentic daily curiosity 3. mobility/logistics – initially via redefining public ed – so that 7 billion people are free to play.. which feeds into 1 and 2.

I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that we find ourselves in uncharted territory and are on a steep learning curve to figure out how to best build out the new smart society.

oh my.

We are so used to thinking of the capitalist market and government as the only two means of organizing economic life that we overlook the other organizing model in our midst that we depend on daily to deliver a range of goods and services that neither market nor government provides. The Commons predates both the capitalist market and representative government and is the oldest form of institutionalized, self-managed activity in the world.

The Commons has proven to be a relatively successful governing model in subsistence-based agricultural communities where production and consumption are primarily for use rather than exchange.

tools of conviviality ness

While the capitalist market is based on self-interest and driven by material gain, the social Commons is motivated by collaborative interests and driven by a deep desire to connect with others and share. If the former promotes property rights, caveat emptor, and the search for autonomy, the latter advances open-source innovation, transparency, and the search for community.

The IoT is the technological “soul mate” of an emerging Collaborative Commons.

at the very least – initially.. getting us back to us. very cool sentence.

That’s because the democratization of communication, energy, and logistics allows billions of people to be individually “empowered.

7 billion + people… (none of us – partial freedom – ness)

being both entrepreneurial and social is no longer an oxymoron, but rather, a tautology

new word: the saying of the same thing twice in different words, generally considered to be a fault of style

oxymoron – a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction 

The GDP metric will likely decline in significance as an indicator of economic performance along with the diminution of the market exchange economy in the coming decades.

credential by community – how well are the people around you doing. that’ll do it.

In the unfolding struggle between the exchange economy and the sharing economy, economists’ last fallback position is that if everything were nearly free, there would be no incentive to innovate and bring new goods and services to the fore because inventors and entrepreneurs would have no way to recoup their up-front costs. Yet millions of prosumers are freely collaborating in social Commons, creating new IT and software, new forms of entertainment, new learning tools, new media outlets, new green energies, new 3D-printed manufactured products, new peer-to-peer health-research initiatives, and new nonprofit social entrepreneurial business ventures, using open-source legal agreements freed up from intellectual property restraints. The upshot is a surge in creativity that is at least equal to the great innovative thrusts experienced by the capitalist market economy in the twentieth century.

heard so often – if no market – no incentive.. how will you get people to do anything – to be creative/share – (won’t people will be lazy ..etc. like mentioned from his interview above – love his answer) – he responds –

..millions already are

– being creative/sharing et al..

which is so cool – now we’re back to turning oxymoron to tautology – and this is ridiculous to – this is not ridiculous…

The democratization of innovation and creativity on the emerging Collaborative Commons is spawning a new kind of incentive, based less on the expectation of financial reward and more on the desire to advance the social well-being of humanity. And it’s succeeding.

what if money/credentialing/etc were no object…  (because curiosity overtook ownership ness et al)

The changes brought on by the establishment of an IoT infrastructure and Collaborative Commons go far beyond the narrow confines of commerce.

yeah.. it’s not that it’s ridiculous… it’s that we’re not even thinking big/small enough..

That’s why paradigm shifts are so disruptive and painful: they bring into question the operating assumptions that underlie the existing economic and social models as well as the belief system that accompanies them and the worldview that legitimizes them.

which today – are making us all deathly ill… so what’s a little disruption.. to save our souls… no? something we are all craving.

Fast, cheap, steam-powered print encouraged a drive for mass literacy across Europe and America. Public school systems were established and compulsory education was mandated in the newly industrialized cities to prepare the future workforce with the communication skills they would need to attend to the more complex business operations that accompanied the First Industrial Revolution

mandated to ensure readiness to communicate – (shaw huge) – and here we are.. not knowing much about communication.. no?

AT&T enjoyed a head start on any potential competitors because of Bell’s ownership of the patents on the telephone. After the patents expired in the early 1890s, competitors swarmed into the market

In 1921 the Senate Commerce Committee went on record to state that “telephoning is a natural monopoly.”37 The committee argued that because of the enormous amount of capital required to install a nationwide infrastructure for communications and to achieve economies of scale, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine competing infrastructures across the country. Economists began to talk about phone service as a public good

peter joseph – all working on one mobile co – is it a monopoly or a collaboration for betterness..

The construction of the interstate highway system from the 1950s to the 1980s—the biggest and most costly public works project in history—led to a frenzy of suburban commercial and residential development along the interstate exits.

Today, in the sunset of the fossil fuel era, the oil industry remains the most concentrated industry in the world, followed closely by the telecommunications and the electrical power generation and distribution industry

Although neither Luther nor Calvin had any intention of despiritualizing the faithful and creating homo economicus, eventually the idea of improving one’s calling became indistinguishable from improving one’s economic fortunes. The new emphasis on diligence, hard work, and frugality metamorphosed over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into the more economically laden term of being “more productive.” Self-worth became less about being of good character in the eyes of God and more about being productive in the new market exchange economy

productivity ness

Locke then used his theory of the natural right to private property to tear apart the feudal property regime based on proprietary obligations on the commons.

property and obligation ness

Adam Smith followed on the heels of Locke. In a final rebuff to the communal life exercised on the feudal commons, he declared that market behavior represents people’s true nature

Thomas Paine, the great American revolutionary, once remarked that “every age and generation must be as free to act for itself.”

as every individual – in a networked individualism..

What would the human race do, and more importantly, how would it define its future on Earth, if mass and professional labor were to disappear from economic life over the course of the next two generations?

what if money were no object.. earning a living wasn’t our goal… credential wasn’t our obsession..

The term Internet of Things was coined by Kevin Ashton, one of the founders of the MIT Auto ID Center, back in 1995. In the years that followed, the IoT languished, in part, because the cost of sensors and actuators embedded in “things” was still relatively expensive. In an 18 month period between 2012 and 2013, however, the cost of radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, which are used to monitor and track things, plummeted by 40 percent

IPv4, which allows only 4.3 billion unique addresses on the Internet (every device on the Internet must be assigned an Internet protocol address). With most of the IP addresses already gobbled up by the more than 2 billion people now connected to the Internet, few addresses remain available to connect millions and eventually trillions of things to the Internet. Now, a new Internet protocol version, IPv6, has been developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force; it will expand the number of available addresses to a staggering 340 trillion trillion trillion—more than enough to accommodate the projected 2 trillion devices expected to be connected to the Internet in the next ten years.

imagine 7 bill people set free to play this game. as the day. in the city. it won’t take 5 yrs..

Valérey is quick to point out a number of big unresolved issues that are beginning to dog the widespread rollout of the IoT, potentially impeding its rapid deployment and public acceptance. He writes: The questions then become: Who assigns the identifier? Where and how is the information in the database made accessible? How are the details, in both the chip and the database, secured? What is the legal framework for holding those in charge accountable?

In 2013 The Economist’s intelligence unit published the first global business index on the “quiet revolution” that’s beginning to change society

unless we wake up and help it.. help hasten it.. no?

take a closer look at the meaning of the word exponential. I remember when I was a kid—around 13 years old—a friend offered me an interesting hypothetical choice. He asked whether I would accept $1 million up front or, instead, one dollar the first day and a doubling of that amount every day for one month.

Exponential growth is deceptive; it creeps up on you.

well – it’s not deceptive. we’ve clouded our vision/understanding – ability to grok it.. of math and men ness.. taking up the day/mind.. no?

By the thirty-first day of the month, the doubling of that dollar had topped $1 billion. I had just been introduced to exponential growth

Most of us have a difficult time grasping exponential growth because we are so used to thinking in linear terms. The concept itself received very little attention in the public mind until Gordon Moore, cofounder of Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor chip maker, noted a curious phenomenon, which he described in a now-famous paper published in 1965. Moore observed that the number of components in an integrated circuit had been doubling every year since its invention in 1958: The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase.28 Moore slightly modified his earlier projection in 1975 saying that the doubling is occurring every two years

Network capacity—the amount of data going through an optical fiber—has achieved an even steeper exponential curve: the amount of data transmitted on an optical network is doubling every nine months or so.

What experts failed to take into account was exponential growth in capacity and the falling costs of production. The invention of the integrated circuit (the microchip) changed the equation

deploying a chip to 7 bill – with standard function (and ability to ongoingly/personally re\fabricate)

In the year 2000, one gigabyte of hard-drive space cost in the neighborhood of 44 dollars. By 2012, the cost had plunged to seven cents. In 2000, it cost $193 per gigabyte to stream video. Ten years later, that cost had dropped to three cents

Nowhere is exponentiality more discussed today than in the renewable-energy industry. Many of the key players have come over from the information technology and Internet sectors to apply experience they garnered there to the new energy paradigm

imagine if exponentiality of renewable energy – tapped into our authentic (and perhaps on sustainably ongoing) renewable energy – human capacity – via grit from daily curiosity

Like the computer industry, the renewable energy industry has had to reckon with initially high capital costs in the research, development, and market deployment of each new generation of the technology

Industry analysts forecast that the harvesting technology for solar and small wind power will be as cheap as cell phones and laptops within 15 years.

or less.. if we first set people free… ni baan craze/dance

Today’s cell phones weigh a few ounces, can fit into a coat pocket, and cost a few hundred dollars. Sometimes they are even given away for free if the customer buys the carrier’s service plan. Yet they have thousands of times as much memory as the original Cray-1A computer of the late 1970s, which cost close to $9 million and weighed over 12,000 pounds.35 The marginal cost of computing power is heading to zero

Renewable energy, like information, is nearly free after accounting for the fixed costs of research, development, and deployment

part of the not ridiculous ness – initial – fighting fire with fire ness – to get us back out of our addictions.. detox… ness

When Internet communications manage green energy, every human being on Earth becomes his or her own source of power, both literally and figuratively.

unless vice versa… no? every one..

The creation of a renewable-energy regime, loaded by buildings, partially stored in the form of hydrogen, distributed via a green electricity Internet, and connected to plug-in, zero-emission transport, establishes the five pillar mechanism that will allow billions of people to share energy at near zero marginal cost in an IoT world

The sun beams 470 exajoules of energy to Earth every 88 minutes—equaling the amount of energy human beings use in a year. If we could grab hold of one-tenth of 1 percent of the sun’s energy that reaches Earth, it would give us six times the energy we now use across the global economy.36 Despite the fact that the sun is clearly the universal energy source from which all our fossil fuel and other energies are derived, it makes up less than 0.2 percent of the current energy mix primarily because, up until recently, it has been expensive to capture and distribute—this is no longer the case

Crystalline silicon photovoltaic cell prices have fallen dramatically, from $60 a watt in 1976 to $0.66 a watt in 2013

If this trend continues at the current pace—and most studies actually show an acceleration in exponentiality—solar energy will be as cheap as the current average retail price of electricity today by 2020 and half the price of coal electricity today by 2030

or sooner.. if we do first problems first (lessig ness) and unleash 7 bill people – like tomorrow.

The problem is that during certain times of day, the surge of solar and wind power flooding into the grid is exceeding the demand for electricity, resulting in negative prices

so as we tap back onto nature. listening/becoming its rhythm matters –Cage ness

Like solar radiation, wind is ubiquitous and blows everywhere in the world—although its strength and frequency varies. A Stanford University study on global wind capacity concluded that if 20 percent of the world’s available wind was harvested, it would generate seven times more electricity than we currently use to run the entire global economy.

Still, the powers that be continually lowball their projections of renewable energy’s future share of the global energy market, in part because, like the IT and telecommunications industry in the 1970s, they aren’t anticipating the transformative nature of exponential curves, even when faced with the cumulative doubling evidence of several decades.

The Internet uses up to 1.5 percent of the world’s electricity, costing $8.5 billion—again a small cost for enjoying global communication.

tony elumelu wish

Because most of the electrical power drawn by IT equipment in these data centers is converted to heat energy, even more power is needed to cool the facilities. Often between 25 and 50 percent of the power is used for cooling the equipment.

What hasn’t yet sunk in is that fossil fuel energies are never going to approach zero marginal cost, or even come close. Renewable energies, however, are already at near zero marginal cost for millions of early adopters. Scaling them so that everyone on Earth can produce green energy and share it across the Internet of Things, again, at near zero marginal cost, is the next great task for a civilization transitioning from a capitalist market to a Collaborative Commons

one that 7 bill could be up for – if set free

From Mass Production to Production by the Masses

yeah that.

The elimination of intellectual-property protection also significantly reduces the cost of printing products, giving the 3D printing enterprise an edge over traditional manufacturing enterprises, which must factor in the cost of myriad patents

ownership ness

The open design concept conceives of the production of goods as a dynamic process in which thousands—even millions—of players learn from one another by making things together

actually billions… no?

It is even conceivable that today’s overcrowded road systems will be less traveled and that the expense of building new roads will diminish as workers become owners and consumers become producers.

certainly will realize we have all we need. and most likely be much happier.. not traveling to find/get the things we don’t really want..

The democratization of manufacturing means that anyone and eventually everyone can access the means of production, making the question of who should own and control the means of production irrelevant, and capitalism along with it.

The 3D printing revolution began in the 1980s. The early printers were very expensive and used primarily to create prototypes. Architects and automobile and airplane manufacturers were among the first to take up the new replicating technology

The RepRap can already fabricate 48 percent of its own components

jeff moe

The Makers Movement took a big step toward the democratization of digitally produced things with the introduction of the Fab Lab in 2005. The Fab Lab, a fabrication laboratory, is the brainchild of the MIT physicist and professor Neil Gershenfeld. The idea came out of a popular course at MIT called “How to Make (Almost) Anything.

There are now over 70 Fab Labs, most in urban areas in highly industrialized countries, but many, surprisingly enough, are in developing countries where access to the fabricating tools and equipment creates a beachhead for establishing a 3D printing community.11 In remote areas of the world, unconnected to the global supply chain, being able to fabricate even simple tools and objects can greatly improve economic welfare.

The idea, says Gershenfeld, is to provide the tools and materials anyone would need to build whatever they can envision.

grazie @neilfershenfeld

The Fab Lab is “the people’s R&D laboratory” of the Third Industrial Revolution.

imagine that as public ed. free in every neighborhood. and connected per daily self-talk.. curiosity.

A Dutch student, Dirk Vander Kooij, reprogrammed an industrial robot to print customized furniture in a continuous line using plastic material from old refrigerators. The robot can print out a chair in multiple colors and designs in less than three hours. His 3D printer can turn out 4,000 customized chairs a year

Dini and Foster + Partners, one of the world’s largest architectural firms, have teamed up with the European Space Agency to explore the possibility of using 3D printing to construct a permanent base on the moon. The buildings would be printed using lunar soil as the feedstock. The goal is to construct lunar habitats with locally sustainable materials found on the moon in order to avoid the logistical cost of shipping in materials from Earth

very cool. even cooler to do that here. we have enough that no one should be w/o a living space…

Whether on the moon or here on Earth, human beings will need transport to get around. The first 3D-printed automobile, the Urbee, is already being field tested. The Urbee was developed by KOR EcoLogic, a company based in Winnipeg, Canada. The automobile is a two-passenger hybrid-electric vehicle (the name Urbee is short for urban electric), which is designed to run on solar and wind power that can be harvested in a one-car garage each day. The car can reach speeds of 40 miles per hour.

The automobile can be made from nearly free feedstock available locally, eliminating the high cost of rare materials and the costs of shipping them to the factory and storing them on-site

Among the first to glimpse the historical significance of a “Makers Infrastructure” were the local grassroots activists who constituted the Appropriate Technology Movement. The movement began in the 1970s and was inspired by the writing of Mahatma Gandhi, and later E. F. Schumacher, Ivan Illich, and—if it’s not too presumptuous—a book I authored called Entropy: A New World View. A new generation of DIY hobbyists, most of whom were veterans of the peace and civil rights movements, loosely affiliated themselves under the appropriate technology banner. Some preached a “back to the land” ethos and migrated to rural areas. Others remained in the poor, urban neighborhoods of major cities, often squatting and occupying abandoned neighborhood buildings. Their self-proclaimed mission was to create “appropriate technologies,” meaning tools and machines that could be made from locally available resources, that were scaled to steward rather than exploit their ecological surroundings, and that could be shared in a collaborative culture. Their rallying cry was “think globally and act locally,” by which they meant to take care of the planet by living in a sustainable way in one’s local community.

the Free Software Movement, whose aim was to create a global Collaborative Commons (that movement will be considered in greater detail in part III). Their slogan was “information wants to be free,” coined by Stewart Brand, one of the few who bridged the Appropriate Technology Movement and hacker culture

whole earth catalog

Brand saw early on the coming contradiction between intellectual-property rights and open-source access. That contradiction would eventually frame the battle between capitalists and collaboratists as the marginal costs of sharing information approached zero

What the two movements had in common was a sense of shared community and an ethical belief in the value of collaboration over proprietorship and access over ownership.

Microgrids—local Energy Internets—are already being installed in communities in the most remote regions of the world, transforming economic development overnight. In India, where 400 million people, mostly in rural areas, are still without electricity, the

The proliferation of microgrids in the poorest regions of the developing world, powered by locally generated renewable energy, provides the essential electricity to run 3D printers, which can produce the tools and machinery needed to establish self-sufficient and sustainable twenty-first-century communities

When asked about his economic vision, Gandhi replied, “Mass production, certainly, but not based on force. . . . It is mass production, but mass production in people’s own homes.”44 E. F. Schumacher summarized Gandhi’s concept as “not mass production but production by the masses

My idea of village Swaraj is that it is a complete republic, independent of its neighbors for its own vital wants, and yet interdependent for many others which dependence is a necessity.

swaraj ness

This does not exclude dependence on and willing help from neighbours or from the world. It will be a free and voluntary play of mutual forces. . . . In this structure composed of innumerable villages, there will be ever widening, never ascending circles. Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose center will be the individual.

ni

Today, the IoT infrastructure provides the means to advance the Gandhian economic vision, lifting hundreds of millions of Indians out of abject poverty and into a sustainable quality of life.

ch 7:

A zero marginal cost society, in which scarcity has been replaced by abundance, is a far different world than the one we’re accustomed to. Preparing students for an era in which capitalist markets play a secondary role to the Collaborative Commons is beginning to force a rethinking of the educational process itself

The idea of learning as an autonomous private experience and the notion of knowledge as an acquisition to be treated as a form of exclusive property made sense in a capitalist environment that defined human behavior in similar terms. In the Collaborative Age, learning is regarded as a crowdsourcing process and knowledge is treated as a publically shared good, available to all, mirroring the emerging definition of human behavior as deeply social and interactive in nature.

frustrated that his brilliant insight/expertise – isn’t quite honed in on the potential of ed.. the greatest source of ongoing energy. that’s the game changer. (human potential. of 7 bill humans. as the day.) and so far.. the weakest part of the (really good) book

ch 8:

Mr. Rifkin argued prophetically … (about work going to zero)

It wasn’t that I was clairvoyant. The signs were everywhere, but in the growth years, most economists were so attached to conventional economic theory—that supply creates demand and that new technologies, while disruptive, reduce costs, stimulate consumption, spur more production, increase innovation, and open up opportunities for new kinds of jobs—that my message fell largely on deaf ears.

exactly that Jeremy – only with ed.. people aren’t taking notice of that potential because even though we’re saying the words.. and trying to think different about school.. we’re keeping it the same (so that it takes up hours of the day and joules of the soul and money.. and health…_

 p131 – we are in the midst of an epic change in the nature of work. the 1st industrial revolution ended slave and serf labor.

really? i don’ think that’s right is it – more slaves today than ever…

The question economists are so fearful to entertain is, what happens to market capitalism when productivity gains, brought on by intelligent technology, continue to reduce the need for human labor? What we are seeing is the unbundling of productivity from employment. Instead of the former facilitating the latter, it is now eliminating it. But since in capitalist markets capital and labor feed off of each other, what happens when so few people are gainfully employed that there are not enough buyers to purchase goods and services from sellers? For starters, the emerging zero marginal cost economy radically changes our notion of the economic process. The old paradigm of owners and workers, and of sellers and consumers, is beginning to break down

are you employable.. 100% of humanity not needing to earn a living ness

the automation of work across every sector of the market economy is already beginning to free up human labor to migrate to the evolving social economy. In the coming era, deep play in the Collaborative Commons becomes as important as hard work was in the market economy, and the amassing of social capital becomes as valued as the accumulation of market capital. Attachment to community and the search for transcendence and meaning comes to define the measure of one’s life rather than one’s material wealth

huge – deep play

millions of young people are just beginning to make their way from the old order to the new. Members of the Internet generation see themselves more as players than workers, regard their personal attributes more as talents than skills, and prefer to express their creativity in social networks rather than laboring away in cubicled assignments, performing autonomous tasks in markets.

#catchingfire #divergent ness – fan\dom – quiet revolution unfolding

If the steam engine freed human beings from feudal bondage to pursue material self-interest in the capitalist marketplace, the Internet of Things frees human beings from the market economy to pursue nonmaterial shared interests on the Collaborative Commons

The Internet of Things is the first general purpose technology platform in history that can potentially take large parts of the economy to near zero marginal costs. And that’s what makes the marginal cost controversy so pivotal to humanity’s future. Whether the new potential inherent in the IoT infrastructure can be realized will be determined by who finances the platform.

is it financed? or is that mindset part of the old game/deal..?

and/or – the current public ed bill (counted at 1 bill a day in 2011) could cover the jumpstart… switch over.. ness.. no?

… the Internet, the communication medium of the IoT infrastructure. Who owns it? Actually, everyone and no one

Now that the Internet is converging with distributed renewable energies to create a nervous system for a new economic paradigm, the question shifts to who is financing the Internet of Things?

feed-in tariffs?

Had anyone suggested ten years ago that the big power and utility companies of Europe would begin to crumble as millions of small, distributed, renewable-energy micropower players began to generate their own green electricity for the grid, it would have been dismissed as fantasy by the powers that be. Not now. “It is a real revolution,” says Mestrallet.

study carried out by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the nonprofit think tank of the U.S. electricity industry, estimates that it will cost between $17 and $24 billion a year over the next 20 years, or about $476 billion, to phase in a national Energy Internet.20 Not cheap, but then again, not overly expensive either, especially when you consider the return. That’s approximately the same amount of money per year as the Department of Defense spends to build two new aircraft carriers—or, to put it in energy terms, Royal Dutch Shell’s annual revenue of $470 billion in 2011 nearly equals the cost of building a national Energy Internet over 20 years.

fresh as i’m reading – tweet – http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/molecular-approach-to-solar-power

and as i’m wondering – if we set public ed people free – so billions of people – might we not do all this faster.. cheaper …? now thinking luis von ahn style..

The EPRI study shows that the increase in “energy savings” to customers in the installation of a continental Energy Internet would be in the neighborhood of $2 trillion, well worth the up-front infrastructure costs.23 However, that $2 trillion doesn’t even begin to take into account the dramatic increase in potential productivity that will result from embedding all economic activity in an intelligent, networked IoT infrastructure that is continually using Big Data feedback and state-of-the-art analytics and algorithms to increase thermodynamic efficiency and productivity in every corner of society.

For example, millions of energy prosumers can preprogram their nodes—it’s a voluntary system—so that if the demand for air conditioning spikes because of a heat wave across the region, their thermostat will automatically take itself up by one or two degrees or their washing machine will automatically shift down to a shorter rinse cycle to save on electricity use, allowing the system to level off the increase in electricity demand. Prosumers who assist the grid receive a credit on their next electricity bill.

The Cleanweb Movement, also called energy IT or clean IT, is likely going to drive the paradigm change with lightning speed, leaving conventional business practices at the side of the road, with business leaders wondering how they failed to pick up on the cues—just

http://cleanweb.co/about/

The idea behind the Cleanweb Movement is to use IT, the Internet, and social media to cluster like-minded people together to create lateral economies of scale in the implementation of energy efficiencies and the introduction of renewable-energy harvesting technology

yeah. imagine that every day. as the day. via curiosity. call that public ed..for 7 bill. if we would have unleashed cleanweb (in 2011 or whenever it started up) for 7 bill people.. calling it school.. would we already be at near zero? i think so.

perhaps true that – on mary scott lynn believing that adding the social aspect of environmental action could be the missing piece to previous attempts to create an online community on energy… but perhaps the missing piece to the social aspect – is setting those people free (from their compulsory days) in the first place.. no?

In February 2013, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the oversight body that regulates the U.S. telecommunications industry, dropped a bombshell. The commission published a proposal that would create “super Wi-Fi networks” across America, making wireless connection free for everyone. The FCC plan is to require television stations and other broadcasters to sell back to the government unused airwaves so they can be reemployed for public Wi-Fi networks. The reused broadcast frequencies would have a reach of a mile or more, be able to penetrate walls and enclosures, and allow users to make free calls from their mobile phones on the Internet, as well as use the Wi-Fi connection in their homes and businesses for free, slashing the cost of Internet bills.

@ahumanright

Many industry observers say that the new technologies are going to make the airwaves “so abundant that there would be no justification for the government to ration access to spectrum or to give some services priority over others.”46 In the near future, everyone will be able to share Earth’s abundant free air waves, communicating with each other for nearly free, just as we will share the abundant free energy of the sun, wind, and geothermal heat

The use of open wireless connections over a free Wi-Fi network is likely going to become the norm in the years to come, not only in America, but virtually everywhere. It’s just too beneficial for the human race to turn down, regardless of the push back by conventional wired carriers. The notion of communicating over proprietary, centralized, wired communications networks is going to be little more than a historical curiosity to young people living in the mid-twenty-first century

The journey to an economy of abundance, however, is cluttered with roadblocks that could delay and even derail the collaborative era. The challenge is finding a governance model that can take society into the new paradigm

mechanism of networked individualism via public ed…

They support a third alternative that would take the nation’s communications beyond both government and market control. They call the new governing model the Networked Commons

Over the past 25 years, however, a younger generation of scholars and practitioners has begun to reexamine the Commons as a governing model. They sense that its guiding principles and assumptions, if updated and reworked, might offer a more practical organizational model for a transitioning economy where centralized command and control of commerce is capitulating to distributed, laterally scaled, peer-to-peer production, where property exchange in markets is becoming less relevant than access to sharable goods and services in networks, and where social capital is becoming more valued than market capital in orchestrating economic life

Ostrom’s insightful analysis of why commons governance had succeeded and failed in the past, and her pragmatic prescriptions for ensuring the success of future Commons management, won her the coveted Nobel Prize in economics in 2009—making her the first woman ever to receive the honor

The social bonds kept the commons from ossifying and falling apart. In the worst of times, the “social capital” proved to be the central asset that allowed the commons to soldier on.

Törbel is not an anomaly. More than 80 percent of the Alpine region of Switzerland is managed by a mixed system combining private property for agriculture and commons property for the use of meadows, forests, and wasteland.20 My wife, Carol, and I have had the pleasure of visiting these Alpine communities countless times over the years. What always impresses us is the high quality of life in these villages. The citizenry seems to have struck just the right balance between the traditional and the contemporary, mixing state-of-the-art commons management, market savvy, and enlightened local governance. The Swiss Alpine villages are an advertisement for sustainable practices and a clear demonstration of what can be achieved when the commons is a vital centerpiece of local life

helena – ladakh …. peter – tribes not saying thank you for food.. but also not knowing individual poverty/suicide..  jean – attachment.. song ness

If there is an essential theme to the commons, it is that the people who know best how to govern their lives are the members of the community themselves.

iwan baan, teddy cruz, self-organizing ness

Ostrom and her colleagues put this notion to the test in laboratory experiments. They found that when subjects are faced with a common-pool resource problem and are kept from communicating with one another and forced to make decisions independently and anonymously, they invariably overuse resources. However, when they are allowed to openly communicate with one another, overharvesting is dramatically cut.

huge.. what tech is allowing us .. perhaps what’s most been missing.. our ability/actualization/perpetuation/faciliation/mechanism/freedom to see each other…

A spate of studies and discoveries over the past 20 years is shattering the long-held belief that human beings are, at their core, utilitarian-seeking loners prowling the marketplace for opportunities to exploit their fellow human beings and enrich themselves.

people are good – i know you ness

By framing the historical narrative in terms of commons and enclosures, I discovered a more compelling account of the human journey over the past half millennium of history. I published my findings in a book titled Biosphere Politics in 1991. In the book, I urged a reopening of the global Commons and suggested that a rethinking of the Commons model for the twenty-first century might be a rallying point for bringing together diverse interests from disparate fields into a common cause

the Earth’s gene pool, in all of its biological forms and manifestations, exists in nature and, therefore, must not be claimed as intellectual property even if purified and synthesized in the laboratory,

ownership ness

the cost of reading one million base pairs of DNA—the human genome contains around three billion pairs—has plunged from $100,000 to just six cents

Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard University who came to personify the Free Culture Movement, coined the apt phrase “Code is Law.

Lawrence Lessig was one of the first to see the deep social significance of a medium that was democratizing culture

Lawrence

This metamorphosis of human sociability is taking us beyond blood ties, religious affiliations, and national identities to global consciousness. This is a cultural phenomenon on an unprecedented scale, and is being led by 2.7 billion amateurs. The global democratization of culture is made possible by an Internet communication medium whose operating logic is distributed, collaborative, and laterally scaled.

a quiet revolution

The very notion that an idea might come solely from within, as a unique creative insight, would have seemed strange, if not completelyincomprehensible.

(In a script or oral culture, the concept that one could own his or her own words and charge other people to listen to them would have been simply unbelievable.)

The Internet, by contrast, dissolves boundaries, making authorship a collaborative, open-ended process over time rather than an autonomous, closed process secured by copyright through time.

The interconnectivity and interactivity of the medium cries out for collaboration and gives rise to what Lessig calls the “remix” culture, in which everyone is playing off everyone else, using a mix of media and adding their own variations to a theme, and passing it down the line in a never-ending game. “These remixes are conversations,” says Lessig, and just as previous generations didn’t charge one another when they conversed, the Internet generation feels the same way, except their conversation is of a different nature.

Lessig and a number of colleagues founded Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization, in 2001. The organization followed the lead of Stallman and others in the Free Software Movement by issuing copyleft licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to anyone involved in creating cultural content.

Patents and copyrights thrive in an economy organized around scarcity but are useless in an economy organized around abundance. Of what relevance is intellectual-property protection in a world of near zero marginal cost, where more and more goods and services are nearly free?

In a distributive, collaborative society, the millions of individuals whose data contributes to the collective wisdom are increasingly demanding that their knowledge be shared in open Commons for the benefit of all, rather than being siphoned off and enclosed in the form of intellectual property owned and controlled by a few.

But can we lean on open-source licenses, Commons management, and a vague notion of the public domain to build out a new society? These are legal tools and management prescriptions but hardly qualify, in and of themselves, as a worldview. Missing from the script is an overarching narrative, a new story about the future of the human journey that can make sense of the reality unfolding

a narrative for 100% of humanity ness

The new, more holistic approach to ecology views the adaptation and evolution of individual species as part of a larger, more integrative process—the adaptation and evolution of the planet as a whole

networked individualism – the (improv\e) dance

They’re still looking because what they regarded as an analogy is, in fact, a common frame that unites our species. The same general theory that governs the biosphere dictates the general welfare of society

society of the society.. and… society of the individual..

If by advancing culture we mean the search for meaning, it is likely to be found in exploring our relationship to the larger scheme of things, of which we are irrevocably intertwined—our common biosphere and what lies beyond

beyond openness to interconnectedness

The opposite of enclosure is not merely openness, but transcendence.

The consumption of matter does not significantly exceed the ecosystem’s ability to absorb and recycle the waste and replenish the stock.

if… communication is not assumed.. but rather… ongoing...

hopefully to expand our empathic horizon to include the many other communities we live with

prejudice decreases as discrimination increases. – @ellenjl the ginormous small ness

The ecological sciences are teaching us that the well-being of the entire biological family depends on the well-being of each of its members

one. one love. written on each heart as well. the leveler..7 billion quiet enough to hear it.

the thrust is reversing enclosures of Earth’s various Commons—the central feature of the capitalist era—and reopening and restoring the Commons to allow the biosphere to reheal and flourish.

The symbiotic relationships, synergies, and feedbacks create a form of mass collaboration that keeps the extended family vibrant and the biosphere household viable.

oikos ness – esp jerry‘s

The breeding ground was globalization, a grossly misnamed metaphor that disingenuously cloaked government deregulation and the privatization of public goods and services in the wrap of a new global “interconnectivity.” The contradiction of privatizing the human and natural resources of the planet in the hands of several hundred commercial enterprises and labeling it globalization was not lost on a generation of scholars and activists whose ideas of globalization went in the opposite direction—toward greater participation by the marginalized and disenfranchised throngs of humanity in the sharing of Earth’s largesse

largesse – generosity in bestowing money or gifts upon others

This was one of the first protests to use e-mail, chat rooms, live Internet broadcasts, virtual sit-ins, and cell phones to coordinate the mobilization leading up to the event. The synchronization of logistics using IT and Internet media during the street demonstrations was a preview of what would unfold on the streets of Cairo and other Middle Eastern hot spots 12 years later in the Arab Spring

mockingjay

In 1999 Lessig challenged the Sonny Bono Act, taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court. The protestors who came together in Seattle were clear about what they opposed—the privatization of human knowledge and Earth’s resources.

sonny’s act was to extend copyright for 70yrs? beyond death

The demonstrations are more like swarms than orchestrated protests, are largely leaderless, and are informal and networked in nature. In every case, the participants flood into the central squares of the world’s great cities, where they set up camp, confront the powers that be, and create an alternative community designed to celebrate the social Commons.

swarms ness.. self-organising.. and bratton ness

Jay Walljasper, an author and early leader in the global movement to reclaim the public Commons, observed that while the media was devoting a great deal of attention to young people’s use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media on the virtual Commons to organize the protests across the Middle East in 2011, “the importance of a much older form of commons in these revolts has earned scant attention—the public spaces where citizens rally to voice their discontent, show their power and ultimately articulate a new vision for their homelands.”39 Walljasper makes the important point “that the exercise of democracy depends on having a literal commons where people can gather as citizens—a square, main street, park, or other public space that is open to all.

collaboratory (how to be us) and/or pi lab ness

The Commons, old and new, define the way human beings manage Earth’s bounty. To say something is a Commons is to mean that it is held in common and collectively managed. The term Commons describes a form of governance. Hess reminds us that something can’t become a Commons until the technological means are available to manage it. Forager/hunters enjoyed the bounty of nature, but did not manage it. The Commons begins with agriculture and pastoralism. The oceans didn’t become a Commons until the invention of vessels to travel on them

? – not following this.. struggling with managing and agriculturing ness…

The modern era brought with it a spate of new technologies that allowed for the management of new parts of Earth’s biosphere that were previously not subject to supervision.

? yeah. subject to supervision…?  – commons.. ness

I call this mode “Commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based modes of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.  – -Yochai Benkler

yeah- thinking that managing for doing… much like obligation for giving.. is partial ness.. that will only make this shiny and so not a sustainable betterness.. for everyone. ie: equity. now.

Peter Barnes, in his book Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons, envisions a future that mirrors our day-to-day work on the ground in countries around the world.

in the city. as the day. ness

While both the capitalist market and the Collaborative Commons will coexist—sometimes synergistically, and at other times competitively or even adversarily—which of the two management models ultimately prevails as the dominant form and which as the niche player will depend largely on the infrastructure society erects.

importance of mechanism/infrastructure being a ni (platform in each head – but 100% interconnected)- so that management goes to the art ist level.. the one who can’t not do/give away..

“Benkler does not fully examine what constitutes core common infrastructure or the challenges to ensuring sustainable public access to common infrastructure.”2 Frischmann goes on to explain that core common infrastructure refers to those foundational infrastructural resources that should be available to all on a nondiscriminatory basis. . . . The first difficulty is in identifying which resources are truly foundational and explaining why this critical subset of infrastructure resources should be managed on a nondiscriminatory basis . . . once that obstacle is surmounted . . . by what institutional means should commons management be achieved?

perhaps – one means (and maybe jeremy is heading toward this) – is to make the access piece simple enough as to be accessible/useable to everyone. access may be less about wifi ness (although that’s huge) and more about ability to be taken in by all. ie: is it simple enough 1. talk to self 3 min – curiosity 2. meet w/others 30 min – that anyone could do it today.. w/o training/reading/prepping..? because if not.. it’s not really accessible..and most likely won’t be sustainable.

about the resources that are truly foundational – perhaps that too is something we’re overlooking because of simplicity. what if it’s just authenticity and attachment.

about an institutional means – perhaps – because it’s where most people are now – and enough money is being spent now – that could jump start/spot it… public education. literally redefine.. as a means to haste/sustain equity..

If there is a failure of imagination here, it lies in a misunderstanding of the critical role energy plays in foundational infrastructure. As I mentioned at the very beginning of this book, the great economic revolutions in history are infrastructure revolutions, and what makes the great infrastructure revolutions transformational is the convergence of new communications media with new energy regimes. Every energy revolution in history has been accompanied by its own unique communications revolution. Energy revolutions change the temporal and spatial reach of society and make possible more complex living arrangements, all of which require new communication media to manage and coordinate the new opportunities.

imagine how human energy.. would change the game. 7bill. 24/7. ness. – matrix ness (i didn’t know)

the intelligent foundation:

1. communication of commons/internet

what – ecocystem – 2 conversations via city as school for 7 bill

2. energy of commons/internet – [energy wise – via cooperatives, et al. my insert – what if spending it on and finding it in different places than we think.. ie: people]

why – grit – authentic energy from daily curiosities – 7 bill people waking up every day – with the luxury – to do the thing they can’t not do

3. logistics of commons/internet – [the means by which these goods and services are stored and delivered to customers – the process by which suppliers and buyers connect and conduct business at every step of the value chain – superhighway – means of mobility]

how – sync – the revival/revolution of 7 bill listening to the map written on their hearts in order to dance the dance with all

Berners-Lee’s invention was simple in design and acute in impact. The Web allows anyone, anytime, anywhere to share information with anyone else without having to ask for permission or pay a royalty fee. The Web is designed to be open, universally accessible, and distributed

Tim 

While the Internet is a commons, the applications on the Web are a hybrid of nonprofit organizations, generally operated as Commons, and commercial enterprises with an eye to the market. Wikipedia and Linux line up in the first category and Google and Facebook in the second category

For social media sites operated by commercial firms, however, the business model Berners-Lee describes is the standard operating procedure. He continues: “The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space.”

In other words, the problem is that companies are operating a social Commons as a commercial venture. Zeynep Tufekci, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, calls this practice “the corporatization of the social Commons.”

In the first five years of the REA program, more than 12,000 rural schools were electrified.53 Having electricity and lighting allowed students to extend their learning day with homework assignments that could be done in the evenings after their daily chores.

what if we’re looking for.. using.. energy in the wrong things/places ..

The year 2012 was officially recognized by the United Nations as the International Year of Cooperatives, but a quick Google search shows barely a blip of news about the year-long celebrations. Perhaps it’s because the global media are concentrated in the hands of a few giant for-profit media companies that decide what is news.

cooperatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity. . . . Cooperative members believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility, and caring for others.

Even in the United States, which boasts the largest percentage of private homeowners, more than 1.2 million dwellings are cooperatives.

living spaces ness

Now the tables have suddenly turned. As mentioned in previous chapters, the Internet of Things gives the advantage to hundreds of thousands of small enterprises, but only if they are able to join together in producer cooperatives and take advantage of the lateral power made possible by the new distributed and collaborative communications and energy configuration

Cooperatives are the only business model that will work in a near zero marginal cost society

The Danes have found that the key to effective implementation of the new infrastructure is buy-in by local communities, and that cooperatives provide the best vehicle for building public trust and gaining local support for the new energy infrastructure.

Local residents explain to the island’s visitors, who are anxious to understand how they were able to achieve such a success, that it all boils down to democratic participation and community ownership

what if any enterprise could use all of the 535,000 currently used warehouses and distribution centers in the United States?

The technology is already available. What’s needed is the acceptance of universal standards and protocols and a business model to manage a regional, continental, and global logistics system.

The Internet generation, however, has come to think of freedom not in the negative sense—the right to exclude others—but rather in the positive sense of the right to be included with others. For them, freedom means the ability to optimize one’s life, and the optimal life is realized by the diversity of one’s experiences and the distributed reach of one’s relationships in the various communities to which one affiliates over a lifetime. Freedom is measured more by access to others in networks than ownership of property in markets. The deeper and more inclusive one’s relationships, the more freedom one enjoys

In a recent survey of drivers between the ages of 18 and 24, 46 percent said they would choose Internet access over owning a car

Rather than the market taming the Commons, it is the Commons taming the market—a reality that has yet to be fully grasped by those who continue to labor under the assumption that a sharing economy is a market opportunity rather than a devourer of capitalism

For the first time, millions of families began to look over all the stuff they didn’t need and hadn’t even fully paid for and asked not just “why me?” but “why?” It was a collective existential question—a soul-searching reevaluation of the nature of modern life. “What was I thinking?” became the unspoken litany of the so-called “consumer society.” Some began to question the value of accumulating more and more possessions that added little or nothing to their sense of happiness and well-being

A powerful new economic movement took off overnight, in large part because a younger generation had a tool at its disposal that enabled it to scale quickly and effectively and share its personal bounty

hans et al

Rachel Botsman, an Oxford- and Harvard-educated former consultant to GE and IBM who abandoned her career to join the new sharing economy, describes the path that led up to collaborative consumption. She notes that the social Web has passed through three phases—the first enabled programmers to freely share code; Facebook and Twitter allowed people to share their lives; and YouTube and Flickr allowed people to share their creative content. “Now we’re going into the fourth phase,” Botsman says, “where people are saying, ‘I can apply the same technology to share all kinds of assets offline, from the real world.

and when we do this.. no fear of cyber terror.. because we will have learned to be fluent/resilient.. to whichever realm the moment calls for.. and.. we’ll have back up

Again, it’s not that the capitalist market can’t find value on the Commons, but it will continue to shrink into ever more restricted niche spaces as the social economy comes to eclipse the market economy

sounds very much like ed.. and et al sectors.. it’s the time of and.. of perpetual choice.

Dell adds that “we are a free service. We have no business model!” A correction: SharedEarth does have a business model—it’s called the Commons.5

The two subsequently joined forces with Frank Moss, director of the MIT Media Lab, and out of that collaboration came thelamfoundation.org, a website that allows patients to report on their health. The data in the reports are aggregated and analyzed to aid researchers in mapping out new research scenarios. This crowdsourcing approach to research differs substantially from traditional randomized controlled trials used in conventional research, which are expensive and time consuming and conceived of and carried out by researchers from the top down, with patients serving as passive subjects. The LAM site, like other research efforts on the health-care Commons, starts with the patients’ collective wisdom, which helps determine the research protocols. Moss explains that “we’re really turning patients into scientists and changing the balance of power between clinicians and scientists and patients.

rhizomatic expertise – just as we need cross-generational – via the city – entire community/ecosystem

It was only in the 1920s, with the advent of modern advertising, that consumption was given a makeover, turning it from a scourge to a social aspiration. The advertising industry reoriented the popular psyche, casting out an age-old tradition of frugality in favor of a new ethos that lauded the spendthrift over the skinflint. To be a consumer became the very mark of success and the epitome of what it meant to be thoroughly modern

They are choosing access over ownership and using everything from cars to sports equipment on a “just-in-time” basis.

ed ness

It’s estimated that Craigslist single-handedly wiped out $10 billion in classified ad revenues in print publications annually, replacing it with $100 million in online revenues, with operating costs representing a fraction of the cost incurred by newspapers and magazines, which long relied on classified ads to stay afloat.84 Craigslist’s global online bulletin board is managed by a staff of just 30 people in its office in San Francisco.

rework

Corporate advertising on a peer-to-peer medium is so strangely out of place that it is treated more like an interloper than a mere distraction and nuisance

If we think of a collaborative economy as both gift giving as well as redistribution and recycling with or without compensation,

…everyone is covered.

According to an opinion survey conducted by Latitude Research in 2010, “75% of respondents predicted their sharing of physical objects and spaces will increase in the next five years. . . . 78% of participants felt their online interactions with people have made them more open to the idea of sharing with strangers.” And “85% of participants believe that Web and mobile technologies will play a critical role in building large-scale sharing communities in the future.”95 Many industry analysts agree with these optimistic forecasts. In 2011, Time magazine declared collaborative consumption to be one of its “10 ideas that will change the world.

Umair Haque, author of The New Capitalist Manifesto and a contributing writer to the Harvard Business Review, sees the collaborative economy as having a “lethally disruptive” impact at a much lower threshold of buy-in than normally expected because of its ability to undercut already dangerously low profit margins across many sectors of the economy. He writes: If the people formally known as consumers begin consuming 10% less and peering 10% more, the effect on margins of traditional corporations is going to be disproportionately greater

too big to fail.” The American public was enraged that $700 billion in tax revenue was handed over to banks, rewarding them for financial recklessness, while millions of Americans were losing their homes because they couldn’t pay off their mortgages. In other words, they were “too small to matter.

We began to realize that behind all the rules, regulations, and firewalls lay an empty chasm.

We have mistakenly come to believe that commerce precedes and makes possible the development of culture when in fact it’s the other way around

Edgar Cahn, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia, developed the idea of a time bank. He said it was inspired by people giving blood at a blood bank. The concept is based on a core principle that underlies the social economy—reciprocity. A neighbor helps another neighbor with the expectation that someone down the line will reciprocate in kind.

If a member deposits $95, he or she is given $100 worth of BerkShares from the bank, making the exchange a net gain for the member.21 He or she then uses the shares to purchase goods and services in local business establishments, which ensures that the money continues to circulate in the local economy

Success for social entrepreneurs is measured more by the improvement in the well-being of the communities served than on return on investment

Transforming the global energy regime from fossil fuels and nuclear power to renewable energies is extremely labor intensive and will require millions of workers and spawn thousands of new businesses. Retrofitting and converting hundreds of millions of existing buildings into green micropower plants and erecting millions of new positive micropower buildings will likewise require tens of millions of workers and open up new entrepreneurial opportunities for energy-saving companies (ESCOs), smart-construction companies, and green-appliance producers. Installing hydrogen and other storage technologies across the entire economic infrastructure to manage the flow of green electricity will generate comparable mass employment and new businesses as well. The reconfiguration of the world’s electricity grid into an Energy Internet will generate millions of installation jobs and give birth to thousands of clean Web app start-up companies. And finally, rebooting the transport sector from the internal-combustion engine to electric and fuel-cell vehicles will necessitate the makeover of the nation’s road system and fueling infrastructure.

all in a days work – if 7 bill are free and connected..

John Maynard Keynes’s futurist essay, written more than 80 years ago for his grandchildren and alluded to in chapter 1, envisioned a world where machines have freed up human beings from toil in the marketplace to engage in deep cultural play on the Commons in the pursuit of more lofty and transcendent goals. It might prove to be his most accurate economic forecast.

earn a living

These new approaches are so radically different from the existing economic paradigm, in both their overarching narrative and operating assumptions, that it is difficult to imagine how they might be absorbed, in total, into the current regime

perhaps via public ed.. since it’s such a focus and already spends so much time/energy/people/mindsets

when the marginal cost of producing those goods and services approaches zero and the price becomes nearly free, the capitalist system loses its hold over scarcity and the ability to profit from another’s dependency

The United States alone, with only 4 percent of the world’s population, was using 21 percent of Earth’s available biocapacity and the ecological footprint of the average American was a whopping 10 hectares of biocapacity.

What makes materialism so toxic is that it robs the individual of the primary drive that animates our species—our empathic nature.

Their attachment to things becomes a surrogate for a loss of attachment to people. Their obsession with material success, fame, and recognition also becomes a means to win social acceptance

trumping their authenticity – Mate

In a world driven by material success, every relationship becomes a means to advance that end. Others are treated expediently and become reduced to instruments to accumulate more wealth.

For the materialist, advertising becomes the powerful drug that feeds the addiction. Advertising prays on one’s sense of inadequacy and loneliness.

It’s by forcing one’s will into objects that one projects his unique persona on the world and creates a presence among his fellow human beings. One’s very personality, then, is present in all the objects one claims as one’s own. Our property becomes indistinguishable from our personality  – Hegel

The Boston College sociologist Juliet Schor notes that by the 1990s, children spent “as much time shopping as visiting, twice as much time shopping as reading or going to church, and five times as much as playing outdoors.”18 Even more disturbing, youngsters said that they “would rather spend time buying things than doing almost anything else” and more than half believe that “when you grow up, the more money you have, the happier you are.

In the interim, a Millennial Generation has come of age, and the evidence is contradictory on the question of how the young line up on the spectrum running from empathy to materialism.

perhaps contradictions shaped by sampling groups. ie: credentialing as unassumed materialism

What makes us happy, after our minimum requirements for material comfort are met, is affection and companionship.

after?

In a world where everyone’s material needs are met, the fear of going without is extinguished. The insatiable need to hoard and overindulge loses much of its currency. So too does the need to grab what one can from others.

Total public spending on infrastructure in the United States alone exceeds $300 billion per year.59 That figure is expected to rise dramatically in the decades ahead as a result of the increasing damage inflicted on infrastructure by extreme weather events.

money\ness – ridiculous ness

build a communications system in which data could travel several different routes to get to its destination so that no one part was totally dependent on the functioning of another

the dance – in and out…

We have the architecture of that plan as well as the technological know-how to implement it. Both will be for naught, however, without a fundamental change in human consciousness. We will need to leave behind the parochialisms of the past and begin to think and act as a single extended family living in a common biosphere

if much of human history was made up of primarily pathological episodes and disruptive events, and our true nature as a species was predatory, violent, aggressive, volatile, and even monstrous, we would have perished as a species long before now

Often, people mistake empathic consciousness with utopianism when, in fact, it is the very opposite.

Connecting every thing with every being—the Internet of Things—is a transformational event in human history, allowing our species to empathize and socialize as a single extended human family for the first time in history

oikos ness – one love. ness.

The collaborative sensibility is an acknowledgement that our individual lives are intimately intertwined and that our personal well-being ultimately depends on the well-being of the larger communities in which we dwell.

Today’s youth, connecting with one another across virtual and physical space, is quickly eliminating the remaining ideological, cultural, and commercial boundaries that have long separated “mine” from “thine” in a capitalist system mediated by private property relations, market exchanges, and national borders

fan\dom et al

when near zero marginal cost is reached, goods and services become nearly free, profit margins evaporate, and private property exchanged in markets loses its reason for existing. The market mechanism becomes increasingly unnecessary in a world of nearly free goods and services organized around an economy of abundance, and capitalism shrinks to a niche economic realm.

Admittedly, the very idea that an economic system that is organized around scarcity and profit could lead to an economy of nearly free goods and services and abundance is so counterintuitive that it is difficult to accept. Nonetheless, this is exactly what is unfolding.

Recall that the Second Industrial Revolution emerged in the 1890s while the First Industrial Revolution was in full throttle and ran parallel to it for another half century until it eventually became the dominant economic force

two loop ness

During the long transition, many First Industrial Revolution industries and companies withered and died—but not all. Those that survived reinvented themselves along the way and found the right balancing act that allowed them to be in two industrial eras simultaneously, while carefully retiring the old model and easing into the new one.

oh my. too many highlights..

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Michel on Jeremy and Yochai:

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nov 2014:

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/nov/07/radical-new-economic-system-will-emerge-from-collapse-of-capitalism

“We are seeing the final triumph of capitalism followed by its exit off the world stage and the entrance of the collaborative commons,” Rifkin predicts.

commons ness

Every economy in history has relied for its success on the three pillars of communication, energy, and transportation, but what Rifkin says makes this age unique is that we are seeing them converge to create a super internet.

You can create your own green electricity and then go up on the emerging energy internet and programme your apps to share your surpluses across that energy internet. You can also use all the big data across that value chain to see how the energy is flowing. That’s not theoretical. It’s just starting.

He believes there is a paradox operating here, which is that over consumption results from our fear of scarcity, so will go away when we know we can have what we want.

At the age of 69, Rifkin admits he may not live long enough to see his hope for a better future materialise, but says the collaborative commons offers the only viable way forward to deal with the sustainability challenges faced by humanity.

short. we can. we can’t not.

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convo with Nikola 2014 -Singularity 1on1: on the Zero Marginal Cost Society and the Decline of Capitalism:

emergence of new economic system: collaborative commons. – 1st since early 19th cent when socialism/capitalism…. trigger event – zero marginal cost

marginal cost – cost in an additional unit after fixed cost… paradox deeply embedded in capitalist system… reason for great success of invisible hand.. paradox: new tech’s increase productivity, decrease cost…

ie: music, knowledge, literature, film, … in less than 15 yrs… most economists held out that this would only effect info/virtual/bits… not physical/atoms..

what’s making this possible is the morphing of the internet – to internet of things.. 40% of people…

we’ve democratized communication… china $25 phone…

how is that democratizing if only 40%

3 forms: communication, energy, and transport …coming together…

19th cent – 1st industrial (steam-powered printing/telegraph, coal, locomotive) – brits

20th cent – 2nd industrial (electricity/phone/radio/tv, cheap oil, combustion engine/roads) – u.s.

21st cent – 3rd industrial (internet/internet of things as platform for all three via sensors)

by 2030 100 trillion sensors… an intelligent nervous system… a brain… everyone directly in touch with everyone else… one family

one ness.

if we can find a way to secure privacy, security, cyber terrorism… and we will.. this will be great.

13 min – nikola on – how to convince people capitalism will end – ending possibility of profit.. if all goes to zero… jeremy – this is the ultimate triumph of capitalism… but that triumph means downfall of part of that system and birth of collaborative commons.. we’ll see a hybrid system… those that benefit collab commons will remain

17 min – larry summers – we don’t know what the replacement paradigm will be

radical econ

19 min – ie’s: airbnb vs couch surfing; google, fb, twitter vs wikipedia

22 min – zero cost to physical in  energy and 3d printing

23 min – germany – 23% of energy free… who’s producing the new power? not big companies… millions of smalls; ie: when computers came around .. did not anticipate chip

27 min – how do businesses make money now? got to change business model… so make money by selling the smallest amount of electricity as possible.. ie: by being efficient… mine data, use analytics to help thousands of companies to increase productivity and reduce cost…

30 min – on u.s. and canada… not enough incentives to go to new model.. new energy.. …. (leaders earlier.. now letting outliers pass them by)

33 min – if u.s. and canada stay in 20th cent for 10 more yrs.. they’ll be left aside.. with no means/incentive to build the internet of things infrastructure

the silver lining – once u.s. gets this… we’ll move quickly

38 min – manufacturing is 3d printing – but if remains in 20 cent infrastructure – doesn’t do any good

germany – strongest .. both germany and china have embraced 3rd industrial revolution… 5 pillars… spending 80 billion in next 4 yrs..

41 min – on decentralization vs distribution

on how bitcoin fits this system

45 min – revenue did absolutely flow to bottom.. we are all better off now..

?

85 richest human beings… = wealth of half population of world..

47 min – etsy best model… in getting rid of middle men

49 min – social currencies… getting credit to be used in time bank… bypassing currencies all together..

50 min – my generation could only define power pyramidally… but for every young person.. they judge power differently.. not right vs left et al… they ask.. is this institutional power, centralized or distributive… lateral power is power of an economic revolution…. will take place over 40 yrs..

54 min – 3rd industrial revolution company.. all over..

imagine if we freed 7 billion people up – from old institutions (ie: school, work) as the day…. this wouldn’t take 40 years.. maybe one.

55 min – nikola asks… what’s your biggest dream.. jeremy: our species is in real trouble… i’ve been a social activist for 45 yrs.. at this point .. in 2014 – my concern is whether we have a future on this planet… the future of the human race is in doubt… terrible thing about climate change… changes water cycle..  for every 1 degree climate goes up.. atmosphere is absorbing 7% more precipitation from ground..devastating agriculture and infrastructure…  we are not grasping this. there’s no guarantee for our species.. we are asleep.

1:00 – the only way we can be different is we can manage ourselves and think as a single family.. tech allows it.. but we also have to shift our consciousness… my fear is also my hope

1:01 – amazing www in 1990 – how many people on line.. but the tech isn’t enough.. if we don’t change human consciousness

more amazing – how many we aren’t online – when they can be…… the changing of consciousness would come with that connectedness.. no?

1:03 – all ie’s of people changing consciousness.. from people getting access to (outside of curriculum/busyness of day ness… no?)

1:04 – what kids are learning is that everything is interconnected…

but still locked up in spaces where they can’t connect… or at home w/o connections…

1:05 – internet of things allows sustainability… circular economy

again – how to get there.. let’s do this first.. no? esp if we’re worried about running out of time.. (or if we care for those dying today.. no?)

1:06 – we need a commitment to take care.. heal planet..

1:07 – nikola – how do you see yourself in that process; jeremy: i didn’t plan any of this.. i became social activist in 60s.. one thing led to another.. i realized that my activism would not be effective unless i could actually think out the issues myself.. i had to spend reflective time trying to understand what’s going on in the world.. the books have been my reflective time…

deep/simple/open enough from what

1:09 – i’ve never liked the term resource… because we then use it.. to find some gain, rather.. planet has intrinsic value…  the moment we think of everything else as resource… we rob intrinsic value and it becomes material for manipulation…. our well-being depends on our honoring the intrinsic value

1:11 – nikola: on zeitgeist movement – remove monetary system altogether.. replace with smart centralized system  jeremy: i would be opposed to centralized.. berners-lee said .. let’s create a system that is stupid at center.. the planet is not centralized

www ness

1:13  – any try to control the pipes.. infrastructure… will be (and is) our downfall

1:14 – i love google et al.. but if the price we pay – is that they take our data for a global market/control/monopoly…

1:16 – so handful of players have created this space for collab commons – but at cost

1:18 – nikola – does ai change anything; jeremy: it’s changing work for sure.. eliminating it… we now don’t need all the lawyers, economists, ..et al… freeing us up…

1:21 – breathing space…

for what?

1:23 – employment moving to collab commons.. deep play.. not deep play… social capital not market capital… so we’ll have more and more people moving to social economy for employment..

employment?

1:24 – on our grandchildren thinking how crazy grandparents were to toil rather than deep play, deep meaning, et al

1:26 – my books: the empathic civilization (relook at evolution history), the third industrial revolution (framework to transition into new economy), zero marginal cost society (puts it all together..narrative how we actually make a shift)

… human beings actually are born the most social creature on earth… we seek engagement companionship empathy…

2 needs ness

1:28 – we are designed in our neural circuitry for empathic distress…

our interconnectedness

1:29 – today we can extend that to – our global family

machines cannot empathize..

an empathic world is never utopia.. because in utopia there is never suffering… machines can’t empathize with suffering of others… will never pass turing test..

empathy is the way we actually think

1:34 – single message – connect human race in order to share and think as extended human family…

1:35 – we don’t want to waste the i of t on trivialities

we can begin to know each other as one family…

a nother way.. let’s go faster.. more equitably…

find/follow Jeremy:

Jeremy Rifkin (born January 26, 1945) is an economic and social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor and activist. Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and the bestselling author of nineteen books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. His books have been translated into more than thirty five languages and are used in hundreds of universities, corporations and government agencies around the world. His most recent books include the New York Times Best Seller The Third Industrial Revolution (2011), The Empathic Civilization (2010), The European Dream (2004), The Hydrogen Economy (2002), The Age of Access (2000), The Biotech Century (1998), and The End of Work (1995).

Rifkin is the President of the TIR Consulting Group LLC which advises national governments, regions, and municipalities on developing Third Industrial Revolution Master Plans. He is also the founder and chairperson of the Third Industrial Revolution Global CEO Business Round Table, composed of the world’s leading renewable energy companies, construction companies, architectural firms, real estate companies, IT companies, power and utility companies, and transport and logistics companies. Rifkin’s global economic development team is the largest of its kind in the world and is working with cities, regions, and national governments to develop master plans to transition their economies into post-carbon Third Industrial Revolution infrastructures.

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 money\less