Holotopia: Power structure

H O L O T O P I A:    F I V E    I N S I G H T S

Power structure

Powered by ingenuity of innovation, the Industrial Revolution revolutionized the efficiency of human work. Where could the next revolution of this kind be coming from?

System ideogram

We look at the systems in which we live and work. Imagine them as gigantic machines, comprising people and technology. Their function is to take people's daily work as input, and turn it into socially useful effects.

While the ingenuity of our innovation has been focused on small gadgets we can hold in our hand—we have overlooked this incomparably more important creative frontier.

We will here be taking about the very heart of our matter: Innovation, understood as "using our creative abilities", is what drives our civilization or 'bus' or societal and cultural evolution forward. The value or the rule of thumb we are using to direct our creativity is to rely on free competition, or the market. How well does this serve us?

Stories

Power structure Consequences

The direction is wrong—and very costly!

How much did ignoring "the systems in which we live and work" cost us? How well is the way in which we direct our creative capabilities serving us?

On Page 4 of the article The Game-Changing Game–A Practical Way to Craft the Future we answered these questions by a summary of our Ferguson–McCandless–Fuller thread, of which we here provide highlights.

The money leaks were systemically caused

A quick look at David McCandless' Billion-Dollar-o-Gram 2009 will show that the costs of two issues ("Worldwide cost of financial crisis" and "Iraq & Afganistan wars total eventual cost") dominate the image so dramatically, that the costs of issues such as "to lift one billion people out of extreme poverty", or "African debt" or to "save the amazon" seem insignificant in comparison.

We tell the story of Charles Ferguson's two award-winning documentaries to highlight that those two issues were systemically caused or "inside jobs", as title of Ferguson's second film suggested.

We can end scarcity

Having predicted that by the end of the century science and technology would have advanced sufficiently to enable us, the people on the planet to "end scarcity" and scarcity-driven competition, Buckminster Fuller undertook to create a computer-based solution that would enable the people on the planet to collaborate instead of competing. In 1969 Fuller was presenting his idea, which he called World Game, to the American Senate.

What we have just seen suggests that Fuller was right. For all we know, we may have sufficient resources to take care of our world's various problems. Our core problem now is the way in which those resources are being used.