The Resilience Science blog recently posted on an article by Kim Stanley:

In the consulting company McKinsey’s magazine What Matters, science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson writes about climate change and post-capitalism in an article Time to end the multigenerational Ponzi scheme:

Capitalism evolved out of feudalism. Although the basis of power has changed from land to money and the system has become more mobile, the distribution of power and wealth has not changed that much. It’s still a hierarchical power structure, it was not designed with ecological sustainability in mind, and it won’t achieve that as it is currently constituted.

The main reason I believe capitalism is not up to the challenge is that it improperly and systemically undervalues the future. I’ll give two illustrations of this. First, our commodities and our carbon burning are almost universally underpriced, so we charge less for them than they cost. When this is done deliberately to kill off an economic competitor, it’s called predatory dumping; you could say that the victims of our predation are the generations to come, which are at a decided disadvantage in any competition with the present.

Second, the promise of capitalism was always that of class mobility—the idea that a working-class family could bootstrap their children into the middle class. With the right policies, over time, the whole world could do the same. There’s a problem with this, though. For everyone on Earth to live at Western levels of consumption, we would need two or three Earths. Looking at it this way, capitalism has become a kind of multigenerational Ponzi scheme, in which future generations are left holding the empty bag.

The current models of capitalism need to evolve in ways that include attention to the future other than being a large landfill for products of the capitalist present. Socialism and other models can just as easily factor the future out of its equations.

For the hoards of wealthy who cringe at even the thought of a “post-capitalism”, the future doesn’t need to be the enemy of science or politics. When the future is no longer the enemy, more of us thrive in the present, and beyond.

Nicolai Ouroussoff of the NY Times yesterday penned a thoughtful long piece, Reinventing American Cities. One of the more figural trends in city planning for so many municipalities is the healing of divisions, creating and in many cases restoring accesses between neighborhoods, institutions, and walkable ways to waterways and parks.

These expensive strategies would bring about urban vibrancies at a time when the inevitability of suburban decline continues. Costs always being relative, creating architectural and civic connectivity would make the status quo more expensive in terms of energy and cultural thrivancy that would result from reinventing. Much of it will begin with dismataling the highways that created the divisions and sprawl contributing enormously to the massive creation of energy inefficiencies. The new mores will be investment in culture and connection.

If the planet is full of people who continue to curate and savor the music and art of 500 years ago, there is reason enough to expect that people 500 years from now will continue to curate and savor today’s music and art. Technologies will continue to be innovated to sustain all forms in formats that can be accessed 5 centuries from now. There is no more clarity about what will survive than any other evolutionary species.

What we know for sure, that resonates loudly in the new book on storytelling I’m now finishing, is that what will endure is what speaks most directly to the truth of human existence.

In his studies on animal armaments, Douglas J. Emlen, a biologist at the University of Montana, explores how animals have evolved an unusual diversity of competitive weaponry, designed more to prevent than engage warfare among the species. It suggests that we may see countries flaunt nuclear possibilities to prevent confrontation rather than provoke it. Without scale-equivalent diplomacies and other cultural and scientific exchange innovations, prevention can be misinterpreted as provocation. If we don’t build peace together, we all suffer from war together. It is incumbent on intelligent leaders across all fields to make all manners of armaments irrelevant.

Quotes from Futurists Alvin & Heidi Toffler:

“The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”

“Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.”

“If you don’t develop a strategy of your own, you become a part of someone else’s strategy.”

“Cultures that promote desire and pursue wealth do not necessarily obtain it. On the other hand, cultures that preach the virtues of poverty usually get precisely what they pray for.”

“Many countries today have begun the transition from an industrial wealth system and civilization to a knowledge-based system - without appreciating that a new wealth system is impossible without a corresponding new way of life.”

“Are there conspiracies? Yes, at least 10,000 of them at any given time, mostly canceling each other out. In rare cases, conspiracies succeed - and then disappoint the conspirators.”

“Idea-assassins rush forward to kill any new suggestion on the grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd.”

“The control of knowledge is the crux of tomorrow’s worldwide struggle for power in every human institution.”

“We will only keep people from fleeing the countryside into urban favelas, villas miseries, shantytowns and squatter villages when the productivity gap is closed between what brute labor on the soil can accomplish and what advanced technology makes possible today - and will make possible tomorrow.”

“Perhaps the greatest cost of wave conflict in America will be paid by the millions of children currently compulsorily enrolled in schools that are attempting to prepare them - and not very successfully at that - for jobs that won’t exist. Call that stealing the future.”

“We cannot say whether the emerging world will be mostly “good” or mostly “evil” because the very definitions of these terms will change, and it is not we, but our children and their children who will do the judging, according to their own values.”

“To think that the new economy is over is like somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke.”

“Change is not merely necessary to life, it is life.”

“The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.”

“Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur”

“Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.”

There are fewer stronger human addictions than the passive consumerism of fast, starting with passive consumption of fast media, fast food, fast shopping. Like all addictions, the more we consume, the more we crave, making it continuously less possible for us to become active creators in our lives.

In sustainable communities of the future, people will make what they use and barter what they don’t make. This becomes even more possible as my friend Rick Pollack suggests, that it is now affordable to design and build so many personal technologies using open source software.

Everyone knows that the people most aware of what executives actually contribute to organizations are many of the people across layers and functions, not necessary board members and corporate sycophants who will say and do anything to protect and compensate for senior level incompentencies.

That being true, a dozen or so anonymous representatives from trusted employees and board members would set executive compensations, within social responsibility guidelines.

Bob Stein has some thoughts on the future of books:

• Don’t confuse an object with its purpose. The physical book is not its content
• Books are the vehicles that humans use to move ideas around in time and space
• A book is a place where readers (and sometimes authors) congregate
• In non-fiction authors become leaders of communities of enquiry
• Old school authors’ commitment is to engage with subject matter for the benefit of future readers. New school authors engage with readers in the context of subject matter.
• Authors will need to engage with the community around the work they create
• The anxiety about saving a ‘version’ of the content as a printed book will go away. The content will have more of a timeline, a snapshot approach, developing all the time.
• The author will become more like a professor in a class of students. S/he will lead the conversation and point out what may be relevant but the ideas will be in collaboration with the audience/readers.
• Traditional booksellers may be safe in this lifetime, but “your children should go into another career”
• Traditional publishing acts as an intermediary between an author and a reader. Their role in the future will be to build and nurture the community that exists around the author and their work
• E-readers will soon be good enough that they will take off in mainstream. Bob will simultaneously publish his next book in print and ebook formats.
• Print-on-demand is fantastic and will play more of a part as bookstores and publishers go bust

I did a workshop today with health care leaders where we spent a half-day just on the question of how to cultivate a sense of passion in your work and your life. It was interesting to see in action the cultural ambivalence about the future still held by our current culture.

So many leaders and others don’t trust the speculative nature of the future, fear change out of their control, and are skeptical about plans that as a result might change.

This is why agile methodologies (initially from software development) will become critical to our relationship to the future, which is to say our relationship with the ubiquitous and inevitable nature of ambiguity, intention, and change. We will need to embrace planning as the creation of change rather than compliance to change-resistant and learning-disabled intentions.

Those who view the future with passion and engagement will be those who put learning above all things.

The White House is now open for people to post and prioritize their questions for the current administration. Just one more example of the power and possibility of closing the distance between citizen and legislator, bringing us one step closer out of the dark ages of representational govenernance.