Ray Podder

Empowering Evolution

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

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

We hope.

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

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

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

I’m not personally responsible though right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does it really have to be this way?

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

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

This is hugely significant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, I am hopeful.

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

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

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

We are all one.

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Inequality

If there is any one fundamental idea standing in the way of a bright future for all, it is the idea of human inequality. The idea that someone is above you or that someone is below you. It is the most confused and most dangerous idea in our existence borne from the assumption of scarcity.

The root of the confusion I think stems from the idea that differences are gradable. No one is equal in ability. Everyone is a genius in something, but that genius is lost if the criteria for excellence is measured by a curve where their brilliance does not fit. IQ is one measure of cognitive ability but it is not the only one. Popularity is one measure of appreciation but not the only one. Wealth defined by the acquisition of money is one measure of success but it too is not the only one.

In nature everything grows and everything moves. How it grows and how it moves is contextually unique. We, in contrast have devised a singular modality for growth and think that we are brilliant for having done so. In effect what we have actually done is place our natural differences that creates interdependent value, and then proceeded to grade those values along a spectrum of worth we made up. This makes us judge economic value by production and consumption separated from human fulfillment and judge experts and their wisdom on popularity and their number of television appearances. Worse yet, it makes us treat living systems like plants, animals and even people like they were machines and to be discarded when we have sucked all the useful energy out of them.

That’s a shame. We can do better.

The problems plaguing us today have multiple approaches and multiple solutions that are contextually relevant. Controlled centralized solutions are not the answer. They are what got us here in the first place. They are based on the proposed idea of scarcity requiring control to manage it, but the deeper truth is that they are about those who have more keeping more of what they have at the expense of those who serve them.

With Renewable Energy (the subject I am writing a book about now), it is silly to think we need economies of scale to produce energy at a particular location at the expense of the local ecosystem and then distribute it to everyone for a profit. The sun, wind, heat, biochemistry, pressure, temperature, human and animal motion (kinetics) are everywhere. The electromagnetic spectrum is everywhere and accessible (as Tesla had proposed, and now proven in labs and garages around the world). But distributed energy systems shouldn’t cost $50K per home or $40K per car. That leaves majority of the 7 billion out of a renewable energy future. We need simpler ideas like the water and bleach in recycled bottles to create lights in the Philippines or the $100 fuel cell electrolyzer from water to bridge the gap. The technology is already here, what needs to go away is the politics of inequity that keeps it from proliferating.

The problems with water and food is in a similar predicament. We waste water for mass scale industrialized processes from everything from food to farming to energy production and it can be averted if solutions for capture, reuse and condensation is looked at from the local level. The Gates foundation has already conclusively proved that more food can be sustainably grown locally than with mass agriculture, which now leaves both people and land out of work.

At the core of all the problems are the ideas that confuse inequality with diversity. If we want the awesome future the futurist are now promising, we first need a new narrative that makes that first idea obsolete.

The fire in our belly is the fire of creation, but the world we have been creating is not of our own. It was told to us with the ideas of others who shackled our minds to sit on their thrones. Never by the creators we are who invent, build and make; but only by the few selfish fools we have blindly allowed to take!

It’s time to rethink those ideas.

Image: Theeconomiccollapseblog.org

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True Innovation

According to the dictionary, the term innovation derives from the Latin word innovatus, which is the noun form of innovare ”to renew or change,” stemming from in-“into” + novus-“new”. Although the term is broadly used, innovation generally refers to the creation of better or more effective products, processes, technologies, or ideas that are accepted by markets, governments, and society. Innovation differs from invention or renovation in that innovation generally signifies a substantial positive change compared to incremental changes.

Unfortunately, most of what we call “innovation” today are only incremental improvements on industrial era constructs of the economy. For example, Google patenting the process of monetizing the “like” button is not a true innovation. It does not by definition signify a substantial positive change compared to what it really is, an incremental change on the Adwords model.

I think at the core, today profits and power for the few drive the progress of what we now call “innovation”. Innovation is considered disruptive because it threatens the established mode of progress that some people are already too deeply invested in. We routinely run with limited understanding and knowledge and quickly scale that up until it becomes too big to fail, and that is at the root of the real problem slowing down the pace of innovation. If we look at natural systems however, innovation is anything but disruptive. In nature, it is actually welcomed because it is simply being adaptive to local challenges and that’s the foundation of evolution.

If we really want to increase the quality and quantity of innovation, our current equation for progress needs to flipped around. The progress of the true innovations of the few should deliver profits and power to the many. Historically, this actually has been the case. Gutenberg did not hit milestones on his term sheet to bring the printing press to the masses, the Wright brothers did not plan their IPO exit for us to take flight and Einstein did not measure the value of his equation in terms of his equity position. However, each significant step in human achievement from the democratization of literacy to human flight to breaking the exclusivity of the Harvard student directory to the accessibility we all enjoy on Facebook has been the result of ideas that help disperse the power of the few to the empower the many.

This is a topic I think about a lot because our current construct of innovation=profitability for controlling interests vs. the historical reality of innovation=adaptability to local issues is now holding us hostage to a war driven economic system where energy is perceived to be scarce.

In actuality, some of the scores of real innovators that are squeaking at the edges like Peswiki.com and others to be heard; some of them may have actually cracked the code of making renewable energy abundant enough to be technically free, but they do not have a real voice in the marketplace already established by large scale early investors and policymakers.

What is needed for true innovation abundance is a new framework for it. We have historical precedents and ancient wisdom to guide us, but we are often distracted by the next shiny objects to revisit them. The three key areas to shift our thinking framework on innovation for me are: Profit, Power and Progress.

Profit: Historically we know innovation happens when ideas are shared. Everything is a remix. Unfortunately, the modern profit drivers are doing all that is possible to keep good ideas apart. We should have learned our lesson when we realized that the Indians invented surgery thousands of years before the west or that the Chinese invented the rocket many millennia before we used it to put a man on the moon, and bridge the gap of lost knowledge and geographic and cultural distances now available to us through the Internet, but creating The Commons for ideas are still economically taboo. We worry about IP and copycats in China we can’t control, we discount good ideas like razor blades made from silk that both does not deplete the mines or create plastic in the dumps because there is no recurring revenue model for something that is built to last.

Power: The best and brightest that our society produces should aspire to be the next great innovators, but unfortunately they do not. The best and brightest measure their abilities by the biggest and the fastest things they can acquire for themselves so they end up on Wall Street and not in R&D. That should be outsourced anyway is their motto. Let the nerds and geeks figure that shit out! We’ve got the capital, so they will do their song and dance for us at demo while we decide what is what. This too is now being challenged with the advent of crowdsourced funding from sites like Kickstarter and Fundable. Things like Bitcoin are challenging the very idea of underwriter guaranteed currency to locally fungible currencies based on participation that cannot be manipulated by the few but that will naturally evolve to benefit all without a pedigree or capital as a prerequisite to entry.

Progress: Do the next innovations lift us out of our current condition and empower us, or do they just make just a few of us rich or make headlines? Should personal empowerment that profits the many or the personal profits of a few that robs the many of their power be the goal of innovation? The answer should be clear, but instead they pose both moral and economical dilemmas in a world that systematically cultivates greed and envy as the drivers or progress.

The good news is that in all three, the emergent network of the Internet is creating new conditions that not only question the current constructs but actually creating new ones to drive real innovation forward. The idea of The Commons has already been in effect in Silicon Valley as the best and the brightest move from one startup darling to the next, bringing proprietary understanding with them regardless of the stacks of NDAs signed.

Ideas are abundantly visible to all now in repositories of medicine, science and renewable energy and many others are emerging through TED videos and more to change the profit paradigm of control to a profit paradigm of connections. Power is now defined differently with relative unknowns influencing many with blogs Twitter and Facebook with their social capital generated from network friends and followers over dollars and cents. Marketers trained in the past era are harshly running up against the value of authentic recommendations and still cant’ recreate it with ad budgets. Progress is dispersing the power of the few to the many quite obviously as abilities like media creation and distribution that was once housed in buildings controlled by the few are available to each one of us through the multi-touch goodness of our smarter mobiles.

So what could be the new formula for innovation?

First, how about we measure it in terms of efficiency within any given context. The human heart for example requires only 0.2 volts, built up by the combination of 70 millivolt charges to regulate 2000 gallons of blood through all 4 chambers daily. It’s biochemistry is nothing more than potassium, sodium and calcium. There are no batteries, no wires and no metals needed. If we know all that scientifically, why are we still designing pumps for our plumbing systems that require much more energy and still call it innovation?

Second, we could measure the effectiveness of a solution in terms of net value created as a factor of that efficiency. All the things we make and use are a factor of materials and energy. Materials we can’t control, but renewable energy generation can have many options. If we can make the cost of energy go towards zero, we have higher margins and thus create more valuable things rather than crap with small margins we have to depend on scale for. In other words, the margin of profitability or some other measure of value should be a key evaluator of innovation.

Third, innovation should be measured in terms of an overall adaptability factor. Any process, platform or solution that enables more people to create even more creative solutions should be a marker for its innovation potential. Things like Quirky.com, Kickstarter.com or NYCBigapps are good examples of this. It’s an innovative idea simply because it creates more innovative ideas, or new ways to adapt to changes that are coming at us at a ever increasing pace.

We all say that change is faster than ever and it’s harder and harder to keep up, without really examining why it’s harder and harder to keep up in the 1st place. It’s harder and harder to keep up because as more older ideas get fixed in place with investment and policies, the harder and harder it becomes to turn those big ass tanker ships around. Change is much easier to adapt to when we organize in small, nimble dynamic groups as opposed to fixed, huge and established groups.

If we ever needed more innovation this is the time. The question is are we meeting that challenge with old ideas of centrally scaled control or the next ones of distributed empowerment to the entrepreneur in all of us? Thoughts?

Image: Morethanaminute.com

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The Reactive Force

We think with the ideas we have but we rarely question where those ideas come from.

The ideas we now think with to economically move forward started with the intellectual explanations from people from a very different world of the past. Adam Smith, Lord Keynes, Karl Marx or even Ayn Rand lived in a world where the religious dogma kept the inequities between people more permanent and the barriers to entry across social classes much higher. So they proposed ideas to use the tools of their days to break down those barriers.

Since the late seventeenth century we have been authoring an unprecedented era of material progress with practical energy and technical skills. The industrial and electronic revolutions led by the brilliant minds and fueled by the pioneering spirit of the west conquered countless new domains to improve the quality of our daily lives. Today we eat, drink, move and live with unprecedented ease. The interactions with innovation we have on a daily basis like the apps on our smartphones would have seemed like incredulous magic just decades ago. The welcomed byproduct of this is of course the dispersion of information in ways unprecedented in previous generations. Anyone with a network connection has instant connection to knowledge and information from eras past and the discoveries of today growing at exponential rates.

This dispersion of information afforded by The Internet has another significant effect.

Information Shift =Power Shift.

The dispersion we experience now in the digital realm also disperses power from the few to the many. The transition from mainframes to mobiles, centralized computing and creation to open/crowd sourcing everything or from exclusivity to accessibility as in the case of Facebook are the obvious examples. Just imagine what will happen to old delivery margins now that 3D printing and ecological farming is moving the production itself to become distributed. As controlled supply chains for anything lose their relevance, what does that mean for a success system based on control, centralization, scale and scarcity?

This democratization effect is not favorable to societies based on scale, control and scarcity.

The old ideas that has produced the management thinking that uses the work of others in a lower socioeconomic position to move the wealth upwards to the 1% cannot last. A mechanistic view of industrial progress that squeezes labor and resources at the risk of their health and depletion as if they were machines and factories cannot be indefinitely sustainable. We can’t have more of the same advancements that a few of us now enjoy just accelerated forward and spread across if fewer and fewer of us can access them. If the premise of the current framework for acceleration is no longer relevant, what then is the new story of progress?

How can it still be a future that is on the path of the past when that old path is the reason the reactive forces are now protesting on the streets? Regardless of whether or not they are misinformed, misguided or delusional in their demands..it’s happening! How can we think that taking a snapshot of what is visible in the present and extrapolating a future out of it is sound, when that has never really worked out before? Remember how we were never going to use any paper or stop traveling because we could telecommute or use our TV remotes to order pizza?

I see a dangerous trend of trying to turn a quick profit with half tested ideas without a full understanding of any domain in depth. We get excited about the possibility of hacking the family dog, but if any of your are coders you already know the risk of what happens when you take something with a thousand of lines of code (much simpler than our genomes) and just change a few characters. The whole system can collapse!

Today, with more data points available we can make even more convincing arguments on premises that may no longer hold true. For example, we stick to the tenet of ownership as means of job creation and thus justify institutions as too big to fail, while failing to realize that the original tenet was based on owning the means of production which now has already become distributed, or at the least for now in most of the digital realm.

I don’t know if a future based on exponentially extrapolating the discoveries of the day is true. What I do know is that there is a reactive force building just under the surface of the paradigm of progress we are chasing.

The real future will likely come out the ideas from the brilliance of those people we still can’t see yet. Just like the hippies that defined a generation, another wave of change is on the way. This generation though are not defined by their religion, race, age, gender, or geographic location but with their ideas. Ideas that go beyond the confines of those of the current times, but ideas whose time has definitely come.

Everything goes in cycles. The next opportunities are not with those who ride the crest of the current one, but the ones who are just rising up. This quote may be a timely reminder:

“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renewed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.”-J.R.R. Tolkien

(Image: Fast Company)

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March 19

Brightest at Our Darkest Hour?

The state of the world has had me lose a lot of sleep recently until those I am closest to reminded me that the real value any of us have is in the quality and strength of our relationships.

As obvious as that is, it’s ironic that we live in a world that still puts like souls in unlikely situations of largely invented perpetual competitions to acquire, consume and produce at the expense of the planet and each other.

While the worries over losing the value of institutions that guaranteed our current advancement and worth are legitimately founded, its’ also obvious that the old energy world order paradigms are inevitably coming to their logical conclusions.

Ideas and institutions like Wall Street and the debt based pyramid scheme of the Federal Reserve Bank version of global economics are now showing real cracks as the natural and political tragedies devastate us worldwide. The industrial economy relics like the once necessary capital-intensive centralized energy and resources production and distribution are now about to bear unmanageable costs. Unmanageable because the fossil fuel reserves that drive those practices of our modern world are getting finally and permanently depleted.

As the old energy world order that depended on oil and institutional guarantees start to erode, everything from mass production agriculture, medicine, materials and their manufacturing down to how we live and communicate is going to be challenged along with them. Why? Because, when consumption costs more than production while we continue to generate waste faster both, we have nothing short of a system fail. Yet…

I have hope.

The reason I, as I’m sure many of us also have hope is not just because human beings innately can project their future, but why we do it in the first place. The answer I believe lies in the first statement. We know that ultimately we have each other.

If the global tragedies of the last week has taught us anything, it’s that bravery and compassion are most boundless in times of crisis. People and even animals are more amazing than we give them credit for, and ingenuity, innovation and persistence are in all of us and not just the few who told us otherwise.

The old energy world order had sold us the perceptions that served their best interests. If you want people to consume finite resources at ever increasing paces, then propagating the behaviors that assume infinite growth regardless of consequences is the way to go.

That is what we have been doing and that’s what we are dealing with now. That meant that as long as we kept believing that resources are scarce and location specific things, rather than information specific ideas connecting unlikely dots, we were not in control of our destiny. Those who controlled our collective destiny had built a society controlled by fictitious man made rules like currency, country and competition, much like religion and royalty had done in the pre industrial age.

In the wake of current events some of us are starting to feel that maybe these assumptions are not right. The fact is that we’ve actually known it all along. For example, the myth and irony of modern competition is that the winners still are those who compete against no one other than the standards they’ve set for themselves, yet as a whole we still continue to believe in the idea that we are not entitled equal access to resources and the information marking them so we have fight each other for it. In our desperate attempts to control the outcome of things beyond our control we forget simple truths others have realized before us:

“Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit!” —Henry Adams

The habits born from a fossil fuel based economy felt good for a long time, but as we all know, all addictions have diminishing returns. Unfortunately this time the sequence of systemic glitches and failures over the coming months will be more than a hangover, not only for the unfortunate salt on the wound to Japan, but also on the global scale, it simply and mathematically cannot translate to business as usual afterwards. All of us had a hunch that our system of inequities was fragile and would eventually give way to the truth if geological devastation didn’t beat us to it. The sad part is that it’s all happening now, and not in some distant future we don’t have to deal with. We don’t yet know the full impact to our way of life with recent events unfolding but we can be sure of one thing:

We survive and thrive together, not apart.

“Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves”—Nagarjuna

There is no better time than right now to recognize those interdependencies. What matters now is what always mattered, our relationships. Reconnect with them, nourish them, and reach out to those who suffer from a scarcity of them.

The world is not going to end, we’ve survived worse and even the worse of our fears about it.

What will actually happen is rejuvenation for a better world whose time has come. There is no lack of ideas, insights and viable solutions ready to take the reins as the old drivers collapse. The only thing standing in how fast we can recover and get there is our openness to each other and the possibilities ahead:

“The powers in the universe are already ours. It is we who have put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark.” –Vivekananda

Let’s open our eyes and take in the beauty of our relationships. Relationships that make us feel good and even those that challenge our worldviews and assumptions. A better world awaits with more love and understanding not becasue its politically correct to say so, but becasue our future actually depends on it. I’ll continue to list the references I personally know of on Facebook, Twitter and in other media formats I’ve been working on to date. I urge all of you who took the time to read this to look for more of the same where you are and post and produce the most viable of solutions you know of. Many thanks in advance for your attention and contribution.

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December 1

Is Attention Worth Chasing?

Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs! This familiar mantra seemed to have served an industry and economy of consumption well, but is it still relevant? How effective is attention to conversion really? Can we even cram any more info into our already crowded consciousness when most of us can’t remember a phone number or an address without the aid of our computers and mobiles?

So why is it that capturing attention is still the preoccupation with brand advertisers? Why is our entire market ecosystem still hanging on to that notion, while ad impressions and page views return less and less against the effort?

Sure, it’s getting more sophisticated with pre and post roll placements on online video, sponsored tweets of Twitter, and an entire empire like Google ruling the online ad kingdom with “contextually relevant” placements. While contextually relevant placements after reading through all our emails and search queries maybe inevitable, but is this gold rush for attention really necessary?

What if it wasn’t about attention at all? What if awareness, retention and recall were actually counterproductive goals to chase? What if instead, the real goal was actually about “reference” and “access” to when and where the information/brand was relevant to our distributed consciousness? For example, if you find this post useful, will you try to commit it to memory or will you rather Tweet, Facebook, bookmark or copy the link to this?

Looking Up—Reference over Retention: The signs that our cognitive abilities are heading towards a paradigm or reference vs. retention are all around us. We not only manage our time with clocks, calendars and alerts, but we also refer to everything else by knowing where to fetch it over keeping all the details in our heads. We don’t ever need to remember the rules for long division when accessing a calculator is a much easier reference point!

Want to share a video, picture, article, post, book, product, tweet, directions, coupon, reservation, purchase, game, contact info, report, tool, message or your availability? Find the link or use the app. Want to remember what you did yesterday, the day before, over a year ago? How about what to eat, where to go, when and how much to pay or even how to think about something? Again, it’s finding the source by either looking it up and/or sorting through your collection of all the stuff you’ve collected or asking your connected network of “friends” or in other words, your extended consciousness enabled by those fancy interwebs.

Obviously as all of us become active participants in the sharing of our thoughts, memories, wants and needs, the signal to noise ratio continues to grow exponentially. What may not be as obvious is whether or not the answer to sifting out signals from the abyss is being aware of it being much less important than being able to find it. Our attention is increasing thinning out over the virtual and real mashup we now call our conscious existence.

Faster Expiration Dates: When Einstein had said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge”, I don’t know if could have imagined how much faster knowledge could actually spoil! Holding onto dated information is not only taxing to our overburdened mind space, it actually lessens our value in the world. Things get old fast! Much faster now, and even faster going forward as in when a month old media story today seems like eons ago. When the increasing rate of change is the only constant, the more old ideas you have about what the news is, what your options, abilities, knowledge and beliefs are and the fewer places to find/source them, the more you are limited in having a better life.

We see this economically manifest in the employability of the workforce and sustainability of companies, we see this socially and culturally manifest the latest wired vs. tired metaphor playing out in every community from fashion to tech to media, and we see this impact us physically when we hold on to dated ideas and references about nutrition, fitness and longevity.

Seems like now it just makes good sense to purge extraneous information that is about the “what”. Because the “what” is constantly changing, the “how” has to be getting better refined alongside it. For example, if you were in the business of making cars, knowing the names the parts of a combustion engine is far less important than knowing where to find the most efficient ways to make the next innovations like electric drive trains better. Knowing of course that tomorrow it’ll change again!

So as purging the unnecessary becomes the norm and information is integrated into everywhere and everything in the physical world, what is the next evolution of a reference based commercial ecosystem? Where do we start?

Easier Reference? How about making the actions associated with referencing and retrieving the referenced easier and easier? How about clarifying our objectives and the actions to achieve them context specific? How about we stop worrying about capturing attention altogether? Some very interesting things and ideas are emerging today to help us with just that… Here are a few examples:

Gamification: If you live in society you’re already playing it. From what you learn to what you earn, you are playing with society’s rules. The difference is that now those rules are now becoming crowdsourced and context specific as we access and share information to and from the collective pool with each other digitally. Collecting, acting, exchanging and more all game constructs that help us reference the next things to attend to rather than waste attention on. Gamification constructs like advergaming is still at its infancy, but as Jesse points out in the video below, it’s about to get way more interesting to reference:

Webification: Thoughts have always become things in our world as how we’ve designed the tools and rules for living better. Now those thoughts become more local and global as the web of things become more integrated into our lives. When “checking-in” at a location opens up new location-specific opportunities for everyone on the value chain ala Shopkick or Foursquare, it’s just the beginning. The web of things including places, objects and the information about them will become more ubiquitously local and global for that time and place context to be the “reference point” vs. details we will have to remember ahead of time. Think of how we had to travel with a place to stay with all our essential belongings and cash even 50 years back before bookable reservations with debit/credit cards became widely available and multiply that effect a thousand-fold. From reviews to statistics to current value, information where and when we are, do not just make things and places more intelligent, but us as a whole in the process.

Beautification: We are attracted to beauty, and if the invention of the mirror was any indicator, then you already know beauty gets referenced. If you look even closer, what we really find beautiful is also the most efficient for its purpose. A beautiful thing, place, animal or even a person is nothing more than a testament to better design (however you want to define “design”). Nature is of course beautiful because for the most part, we have yet to mimic its efficient design. As more information is referenced and accessed, the way we design our world becomes more efficient and thus beautiful. Just look at Apple’s product design from 20 years ago vs. today. Today’s clean energy revolution is exactly that, a beautification of our access to the planet’s energy through better design. Renewable inevitably becomes beautiful despite the fossil fuel economy’s reluctance to it, because when we can use less to get more done, we don’t just “save” what energy we have, but actually do “more” than we could have previously.

We’re just at the beginning of recognizing this shift, but the wise in our society have known it all along. If Gandhi’s “Being the change you wish to see” was actually a metaphor for behavior change mechanics, we are actually a lot closer to a truly beautiful future. A much better-designed future where our interaction with information by reference actually makes our lives better with positively reinforced actions, rather than being a burden by just sticking around in our minds and thus losing value much like the expired food in your fridge.

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September 29

RT @alltop What is good design? [video] - Holy Kaw! http://bit.ly/cZzadu

September 28

The part about the waiting to top-up your #EV and charging cost notwithstanding…this is still cool to see: http://is.gd/fwmAS

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Kickstarter - GAMEFUL, a Secret HQ for Worldchanging Game Developers: http://kck.st/aUx0Hf

September 27

Bootstrapping tips via inc. : http://is.gd/fw3RW