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BUILDING A WIN-WIN
WORLD
Author:
Hazel Henderson
Correspondence: Hazel Henderson's
Library, P.O. Box 5190, St. Augustine, FL
32085
Tel: 904/ 826-1381, Fax: 904/ 826-0325,
E-mail: unlisted
When Jim Fournier asked
me to come and speak at this conference,
I soon realized that I had been waiting
to be here and play with a group like this
for 40 years! Some of you may even remember
my electronic democracy scenario from my
1978 book Creating Alternative Futures:
The End of Economics, which was
an underground best seller before many of
you were born. My scenario of electronic
democracy was based on an article I did
for an early computer magazine FORUM70 in,
yes, 1970! My article was titled "Citizens
+ Computers + Communications = Community"
- very similar to the vision we are all
sharing today as we consider the work of
the Link Tank and The Augmented Social Network.
Naturally, I'm psyched to be here!My scenario
back in 1970 was for enhancing the machinery
of democracy by linking the power of computers
to simulate social conditions and map dynamic
complex interactive problems and issues
and include feedback from citizens (later
examples include SIM CITY, DAISY WORLD and
later, SUGARSCAPE, which was a perversion
- captured by economists, mathematicians
and mis-guided foundations). My scenario
included voting in elections using telephony
and smart-cards (there was no internet,
no PCs, no windows, no worldwide web).Neither
was globalization an issue then - even though
the world impinged on everyone's lives -
in the cold war threats of nuclear annihilation.
What I tried to envision was how US national
politics - still based on 18th Century conditions
- could be augmented to accommodate a vastly
larger electorate with exploding information
requirements to help manage regional issues,
watersheds and whole ecosystems undreamed
of by our country's founding fathers and
mothers. I updated these scenarios in Building
a Win-Win World, Chapter 10 "Perfecting
the Machinery of Democracy (1996). How the
world has changed in the intervening 40
years! The cold war superpower rivalry has
given way to mostly guerilla and civil warfare,
distributed terrorism by non-state actors,
global mafia, cyber attacks and hacker crime.
The world now must deal with a single neurotic
military superpower waging global war on
evil, while teetering on a failing democracy,
a tanking economy and a rapidly falling
currency. Regional environmental problems
and local crises have morphed into worldwide
issues of ecological sustainability, human-caused
climate change, desertification, species
extinction and ozone depletion. Globalization
of technology, markets and $1.5 trillion
of daily currency trading has eroded the
sovereignty of nation states. Driven by
laissez faire market fundamentalism, these
unregulated markets have become the flywheels
of ecological, social and cultural disruption.Democracies
are both spreading and being corrupted by
money. The governance gap is becoming critical
in every part of the world. The machinery
channeling feedback from citizens lags behind
accelerating social and technological change.
Both of the key feedback mechanisms from
individuals to decision-makers - votes and
prices are failing. Votes and elections
must be undistorted by money and prices
must include all social and environmental
costs. Thus, both governments and markets
are steered perversely in unsustainable
directions. Oligopolies and special interests
have hijacked our politics. Corporations
dominate our market choices and, together
with five commercial conglomerates, own
all our media, shape our choices and culture
- increasingly even on the Internet. A corrupt
Federal Communications Commission oversees
the giveaway of more of the electromagnetic
spectrum - a public commons - to these media
giants. And, now Microsoft, by agreeing
to license SCO's UNIX technology, seems
to be trying another sabotage attack on
LINUX!
Moore's Law is colliding
with Murphy's Law as heat becomes the problem
of ever more transistors on a single chip.
Even if Intel can continue doubling transistor
density for another decade, does it still
matter? Or is The Economist right in saying
that the IT industry has entered its "post-technological
period"? (May 10, 2003)
Now the Good News:
As my dear sister Barbara
Marx Hubbard has been reminding us for many
years - all these crises are forcing functions
driving us toward conscious evolution. This
is the birth time of planetary human awareness
and global citizenship. The planet is our
vast programmed learning environment - which
faithfully mirrors back to us all our errors
and behavioral shortcomings. As we've learned
- planetary citizenship as part of the 6-billion
member human family is a cooperative affair.Sharing,
bartering and cooperating are much better
ways for exploiting, Metcalfe's Law and
Reed's Law than going head-to-head in competition
with money-based corporate players.Information,
the World's New Currency, Isn't Scarce,
as I proclaimed in Chapter 9 of Building
a Win-Win World (1996). This is
the deep paradigm shift we can act on. Money
and money-based institutions and incentives
hypnotize most people and institutions.
Money was necessary in the Industrial Age
of material goods production. All traditional
economics is based on this material view
of scarcity: goods are often exclusionary
- giving rise to ownership and property
rights, land tenure - as many of these items
are scarce. As we move deeper into the Information
Age - services and information, knowledge
- even wisdom can be shared - because these
valuable assets are not scarce - they are
inclusionary. See my Beyond Globalization
(1999). The new debate is about public goods,
as economists call infrastructure: road,
rail and telephone networks, electricity
grids that underpin all cities and industrial
societies. Now a global economy needs global
public goods: water, health, clean environments,
peace, education and connectivity. My friend
Inge Kaul, has pioneered this debate in
her Global Public Goods (1999)
and Providing Global Public Goods
(2003).
Barter is no longer
primitive and inconvenient (which over 3000
years ago led to the invention of money
tokens). Today barter is high-tech. Check
out VIA3.net, which I co-founded with CEO,
John Theaker, in London and ManyOne.net,
founded by Joe Firmage, on whose foundation
board I serve - both with us here! Move
over AOL! E-Bay is getting into barter -
with its announcement recently of accepting
frequent flyer miles in exchange for its
own "Anything Points" (worth one
penny), which can be used to buy items on
e-Bay.
I have been ridiculed
by mainstream economists for recommending
barter, local scrip and credit-based exchange
for as long as I can remember. Now I'm having
the last laugh as they are scrambling to
understand money-free, electronic, global
and local exchanges that can match needs,
resources and productive people to fully
employ communities - whenever central banks'
policies are too restrictive. Developing
countries can barter their commodities directly
with each other - without needing to earn
hard foreign exchange. For instance, Venezuela
exchanges its oil by concessionary agreement
with Cuba in exchange for Cuban doctors
helping build public health clinics in rural
Venezuela. Very efficient for all concerned!
To meet the needs of
the world's 2 billion people still largely
outside money-economies, barter is the best
immediate answer - as Argentines have found.
Many survive this way (See Figure 1, Two
Ways of Transacting) - at local second hand
markets - trusting their own local scrip
more than official pesos. I have always
used the extent of barter systems as a leading
indicator of dysfunctional central banks
and national economic polices. Today, we
know the truth: money-systems are about
scarcity, competition and centralized control.
Barter and all forms of pure information-based
exchange are about abundance, sharing and
cooperation. This is how we can succeed
in end-running the complete commercialization
and corporate exploitation of the Internet
and free up other video, radio, cable and
broadcast media. Bartering of media time,
programming, bandwidth advertising and telephony
is already well established. Corporations
and governments barter over $1 trillion
in goods and services annually. These modes
can undergird all our public-interest non-profit,
civic society communities, while avoiding
greedy vulture capital and economic-returns
obsessed Wall Street analysts and their
clients. It's good to see my friends here
who are also promoting public-interest TV
and radio!
Now let me turn to the
Augmented Social Network (ASN) and the comments
I have shared with the Link Tank and the
wonderful authors. I applaud this initiative
- as do my partners at VIA3.net, and our
fellow board member, e-commerce pioneer,
Alan Kay, my life-partner and founder in
1969 of Autex, Inc., the first electronic
marketplace. I strongly agree with the goals,
purpose and rationale for building the ASN.Civic
society organizations cannot afford to continue
being marginalized as big corporate players
continue commercializing the Internet, balkanizing
it for profit and control. They are promoting
self-serving protocols like "opt-out"
(requiring consumers to spend precious time
filling out proliferating forms) rather
than "opt-in"; onerous intellectual
property and copyright rules, while forcing
us to do the beta-testing of their sloppy,
virus-prone software. All these industry
practices are eroding our choices, civil
liberties and access to vital information.
The IT industry grew
up based on the citizen's tax dollars that
subsidized electricity and telephone lines
and created the Internet - clearly a public
good, a commons, which now also underpins
the global financial system. Even traditional
neoclassical economics recognized that network-based
infrastructure industries are prone to monopoly
and need public-interest regulation. The
disastrous de-regulation of electric utilities
in California was a triumph of ideology
over common sense.We are learning the same
lessons with privatization of water systems.
In an early tech journal, OMNI, I predicted
the same lesson would be learned with the
now 30-year experiment in airline deregulation.
These vital network industries are generally
too capital and labor intensive to be profitable
without myriad subsidies and government
concessions. Today, we are back to a few
large airlines - most of them in bankruptcy
- surviving on over $15 billion of taxpayer
handouts - while squeezing their employees.
Smaller latecomers pick up market share
by cost and service-cutting - subsidized
by the existing infrastructure. All this
while some half of our citizens has never
flown in a plane and Congress is running
down our affordable, energy-efficient rail
networks, which receive a fraction of the
subsidies airlines are given.
Neoclassical economists
with their static myopic forms of equilibrium
analysis still warn against industrial policies
- used by many developing countries to subsidize
vital or infant industries. Yet all the
early industrializer countries, including
the UK and the USA, used such policies to
build their infrastructure and key industries.
The issue is rather, which networks and
infrastructures to subsidize. Today, education
is a key public investment, as is health
- since healthy, knowledgeable citizens
are the wealth of nations in an Information
Age. Yet, these two vital investments in
human capital are still "expensed"
in our GNP rather than being carried as
investments in the new asset accounts I
have advocated for GNP. All this is also
why connectivity and media are public goods
- indispensable for democracy - as our Founders
knew. I have long advocated corrections
to these GNP/GDP national accounts (See
Figure 2 "GNP Problems" and Figure
3 "Total Production" Cake). This
is why I co-created with the Calvert Group,
the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators
(see Figure 4) (updated at
www.calvert-henderson.com, click on
FOREWORD for my May update).The USA still
has three major industrial policies subsidizing:
(1) the military defense industry (2) the
fossil fuel and energy sectors and (3) the
IT and Internet-based industry. Agriculture
is also subsidized in the most inefficient
way possible. The US State Department reinforces
the prevailing US policy of not taxing e-commerce
by urging other governments to keep their
regulatory and tax authorities off this
sector. In fact, the whole pattern of perverse
subsidies, including those to medical intervention
rather than disease prevention, reflects
the obsolete structures of early-stage industrialism.We
know now that this favored tax-free treatment
together with government subsidies also
helped fuel the "dot com" bubble.
This additional subsidy may well have been
justified initially. But, it also contributed
to huge tax losses that led a majority of
our states into the huge budget deficits
they face today. While many states suffer
from the wave of tax-cutting fervor still
gripping our country - many revenue shortfalls
were caused by the competition to local
"bricks and mortar" companies
from untaxed e-commerce. Today, state governors
are still trying to figure out how to pay
for schools, police, fire-fighters and social
services once adequately-funded by local
sales taxes.All this is why I often teased
those early arrogant cyber-libertarians
about their actual reliance on the government
they despised! Another point I and others
made in the late 1990s was that the "new
economy" bubble was built on $10 a
barrel oil - a short-lived anomaly. Much
"new economy" hype was based on
a misunderstanding that cyberspace industries
could be "resource lite" (as Enron's
Jeffrey Skilling proclaimed). We now relearned
that you can't divorce industries from their
base in real world natural resources. Paper
and virtual asset-shuffling, like other
pyramid schemes, fall to earth sooner or
later. And just try filling up your car
with a tank-full of virtual gasoline!This
background understanding is the rationale
for a properly regulated and taxed IT sector
- with much greater effort to break up monopolies,
whether Microsoft or the cross-owning corporate
monopolies like NBC, Clear Channel, VIACOM,
Disney, News Corp and AOL Time Warner now
dominating our mass media. Today, we all
live in "mediocracies." Some may
be democracies, some still feudal, some
dictatorships or even failed states - but
all are mediocracies. The race to capture
all of humanity's eyeballs continues unabated
- leading to what I named in "Building
a Win-Win World (1996) the new "Attention
Economies."Emerging Attention Economies
are post-industrial and part of the information
age. As corporations, politicians, advertisers,
academia and other institutions vie for
our attention with increasing information-overload,
our time, attention and privacy become more
precious - as valuable as money (see Figure
5 "New Attention Economy"). Twenty-eight
percent of US adults now value their time
more highly than additional money income.
They have moved out of "the rat-race"
and into less-pressure jobs and rural towns
where community life is still valued, the
air and water are cleaner so as to improve
their overall quality of life. They and
their local officials belong to the International
Conference of Local Environmental Initiatives
(ICLEI), based in Toronto and promote local
quality of life indicators. (www.iclei.org).
These trendsetters are
reminiscent of Paul Ray's "cultural
creatives." They reject the corporate
and advertisers' view of consumer lifestyles.
They seek deeper purpose, values and spirituality.
They join civic society causes and groups
trying to create a better future for all
humanity. They have created the $2.3 trillion
market of socially responsible investors,
asset managers and cleaner, greener, more
ethical companies. They pioneered the open-source
movement, the copyleft initiative now being
adopted by anti-TRIPS campaigners against
GM foods and pharmaceutical patent protocols
of the WTO. They are environmentalists,
feminists, solar and renewable energy pioneers,
fitness buffs and organic farmers, health
foods store owners, vegetarians, human rights
activists and of course - all of you - working
to decentralize mass media and keep the
internet an open public commons for connecting
global civic society. I have created a new
TV series for us, "Ethical Marketplace"
and its website - so we can all watch a
regular financial show that reflects our
values, the LOHAS marketplace - and follows
all the new "triple-bottom-line"
and quality of life indicators as well.
Our promo video is here.
As the IT sector matures,
it continues to morph from hardware to software
and services and is being absorbed by other
older sectors and the whole society. Just
as the automobile industry shook out from
274 companies in 1909 to today's few giants,
we are seeing the IT sector consolidate.
The Gartner Group tells us that by 2004
half the vendors in 2000 will have disappeared.
Even industry optimist Larry Ellison says
that there are at least 1000 Silicon Valley
companies that need to go bankrupt.Where
does this continuing restructuring provide
niches for civic society providers? How
can we all align our community-building
service enterprises synergistically - without
blurring our diverse "cultural DNA"
and still serve our special constituencies?
How can we share and barter our intellectual
assets, human resources and enterprise models
to best take advantage of Reed's Law? I
believe it is utopian - and a misreading
of human nature to imagine that we can take
down all our walls. I am a pretty good networker
- but I cringe at the idea of too many people
and too much interactivity - even among
those I trust, admire and know I can cooperate
with to create great new ideas, strategies
and win-win planetary initiatives.A key
issue I raised was that of time. For example,
even if ASN's great introduction system
including customized brokering - produces
an exciting person that could be a win-win
match for one of my key projects - I still
might have to say "not now!" Perhaps
I'm on a deadline for an article - or maxed
out with an urgent project. I could store
the intro-bot's introduction for later -
but by then - the other person might also
say "not now!" We are up against
the human condition of being incarnated
on the material plane, where we must observe
the rules of thermodynamics, the needs of
our bodies and the time-spans of our lives.
I need to drop out into my own spiritual
space - every day. I don't own a cell phone
and can't image anything worse than WIFI!
I love my garden, the beach and the texture
of daily life. Am I a Luddite? Maybe!Another
issue for me is how we create the "doors"
between our e-communities - or as I prefer
to call them "permeable membranes"
whereby cells recognize the chemical catalysts
they need and let them through. This means
establishing a robust, specific, highly-differentiated
cultural DNA based on the group's core values.
These must be distilled into a set of well-articulated
principles, operating procedures and interaction
protocols. Flying this identity flag is
a community's high-fidelity bird-call! I've
been doing this all my life - in writing
and speaking, communicating on TV, radio,
my websites - or in personal conversations.
These kinds of high-fidelity bird calls
repel most people and attract only those
soul brothers and sisters with whom I want
to play or share aspects of my life.
Commercial marketers
reduce this kind of deep, values-based communication
of one's highest purpose and goals as market
positioning! Well, in a way they have a
point! When we were designing the vision,
mission, goals, principles and operating
protocols for VIA3.net, all this had to
be distilled into a statement of great clarity.
For example, VIA3.net and ManyOne.net share
a similar core mission: to serve non-profit
groups who are working for a better world
for all - by facilitating their barter,
exchanges and information sharing to conserve
their limited cash and helping steer donated
resources toward their projects. Both ManyOne
and VIA3 chose to sign the Earth Charter
and make its 16 principles the basis of
our respective enterprises (www.earthcharter.org).How
do you make sure that all aspects of your
operation: from its method of funding and
capitalization to all of its relationships
with its membership - are in integrity with
your vision, mission and goals. New shareholder
agreements, such as Alan Kay designed for
VIA3 are helpful. How to design cooperative
ways of aligning similarly designed organizations
to minimize bureaucracy, while allowing
synergistic division of labor and decentralized
autonomy?
The ASN has grasped
this nettle and moved us all toward deeper
modes of cooperation and sharing. Deeper
platforms based on open-source and collectively-agreed
standards can help us all harvest the exponential
synergies that are possible. The excitement
is that we are engaged in the practice of
conscious evolution - and we are learning
to let go of old mental models, memes, cultural
"disks" and "tapes"
that served our biological needs historically
- but have now become baggage. I think of
aggression and territoriality, which kept
species spaced out. The "baby program"
running in women, also needs re-examination
now there are 6 billion humans consuming
40% of the planet's primary biomass production!
Competition is essential
- balanced by systemic cooperation to steer
its energy - and creativity!Some additional
elements I offered to ASN's blueprint include:More
user-inputMore socio-political thinking
and strategy - for example from seasoned
community organizers and political coalition-builders
-whose methods of aligning groups around
specific activities and campaigns are analogous
to communities of practice.More interaction
with global issue networkers, which would
contextualize and concretize the plan. This
could also correct ASN's gender imbalance
- since women lead many of these global
networks and will be prime users of ASN.
A budget and business
plan!Involve more friendly UN people from
ILO, UNDP, WHO and UNICEF who share our
concerns - particularly on digital divide
issues. I just participated in a global
UN-based video conference on World Opinion
- which surely is the next superpower!Spell
out likely relationships between ASN and
other formal and quasi-formal technical
bodies (e.g., I-CANN), as well as to governments,
tax authorities and UN-affiliated agencies
ITU, WIPO and the WTO's TRIPS convention.
I'll help you make a system map of all these
players.Join with the Prep Com process for
the upcoming UN World Summit on the Information
Society. This is just as important as having
representatives on the various technical
standards bodies. Next meeting in Geneva,
December 5-12, 2003. (www.geneva2003.org)
Remember that
the Internet and the Worldwide Web can't
do it alone. It's not enough for SRI and
LOHAS providers to hire PR firms to get
them sound bites on CNBC. We must own our
own space and cooperative enterprises like
Worldlink, Globalvision and Ethical Marketplace
TV. We must re-capture space from all the
other media: radio, TV, broadcast, cable
and video conferencing. All are important
- reach different audiences and work synergistically.
That's why I do radio constantly and produce
TV programs - hard as it is to get carriage
in the USA. Never mind, my newspaper columns
reach 400 newspapers in 27 languages and
I get all the coverage I need in Brasil,
Europe, China and around the world. The
world is more important than any superpower!
In the planetary context, all our individual
self-interests are identical: surviving
and thriving in just, peaceful, sustainable
societies. To reach these shared goals,
sharing, cooperation and earth ethics have
simply become pragmatic. Thank you for all
your good works.
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