Please distribute to others who may be interested... You are hereby invited to a seminar in our twelfth interdisciplinary series on Evolution, Complexity and Cognition <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108> (ECCO 2016-2017) <https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marjoriikka_Ylisiurua>
Time: Friday April 28, 14h-16h Place: *room * *M.015*, building D, VUB ------------------------------ United Humanity Ledger as a bedrock for the fair, sustainable, and creative future: A case for an existential opportunity exploration Marta Lenartowicz Abstract: Good questions are powerful. One of them - called "A New Shape" challenge - has just demonstrated its power by propagating a brainstorming wave throughout global governance think thanks and research institutes around the world. "The shape of the system will always determine the outcome it achieves. The shape of our global governance system was decided after the second world war, when the world was very different. Is this shape still suited for the risks we face today? Is it the right shape to tackle climate change, and extreme poverty, and global conflict?" goads the video spot of the challenge <https://globalchallenges.org/en>. What the organizers hope to attain is a new design for the global governance of the 21st century, "such that it can be implemented within the foreseeable future." They formulate the task as if they were the proverbial someone who does not know what everybody else knows: "some things are simply impossible." However, as Albert Einstein pointed out, since it is the one who does not know that, the organizers of the competition are probably right: presuming that there is no implementable design is a certain path to not finding it. Therefore, engaging with the questions seems important and meaningful, if intimidating. My talk will be an attempt at a response. Perhaps it will be a bit non-compliant, as my response starts with a quite severe modification of the conceptual constraints that accompany the challenge. Instead of equating global governance with the activity performed by a specific configuration of international and intergovernmental organizations and institutions, however complex and multipolar, I propose going back to the essence of the notion of governance and taking it as an activity defined by its effectuality, not locus of control. Depending on which system one wishes to consider, its governance comprises this view of all effectual decision making, however positioned, which results in the arising persistence, transformation, or decline of anything that belongs to the *global system*. The global system does not require the instigation of an institutional government of the world to arise; it exists anyway. The system of global *governance*, consequently, does not need to be conventionally identified as global, or a system, to be continuously yielding effects throughout the planet. It encompasses all selections that affect what happens on the planet. That each such effect influences countless other selections made somewhere else, and that cascades of such influences spread around the entire globe in the 21st century, is already obvious and does not need to be argued. The shifted definition of the system of global governance modifies the search space in which new potential designs for it may be found. However, instead of expanding, the redefinition radically narrows our search space. This is because the radical, if conceptual, enlargement of the global government does not automatically make its newly added decision-making nodes operable from any reformer's position. Quite the contrary: the shift reveals that, even if a hypothetical political demiurge emerged able to overnight conduct any imaginable reform of all global institutions, IGOs, INGOs, all at once, a vast majority of impactful selections would continue to be made somewhere else. This realization invites surrender to the condition other approaches may consider an undesirable anomaly: the *actual *global governance system is unsteerable. It is inoperable from anywhere other than the myriad of locations among which it is distributed. Consequently, the global governance system cannot be steered coherently in a conventional sense. The shape of gridlock (Hale, Held & Young 2013), in which further progression towards an ever-greater executive capacity of a selected group of institutions has become nearly impossible, is not an anomaly to be overcome. Gridlock is the only shape in which the global system could have settled. It is the shape any system is bound to adopt when it is composed of a multitude of differently positioned, differently oriented, heterogenous selection-makers, operating in different dimensions and scales, none of them universally dominant, and all dependent and constrained by the others. As each decision maker ceaselessly explores and exhausts the range of choices and interrelations available to them at any given time, the overall system is note static - it evolves. There is no overall stagnation, then, even if an overwhelming number of participants may be continuously frustrated and held back, never facing an opportunity to make such choices and to forge such interrelations that would allow them to fulfill their basic needs, best interests, and greatest aspirations. In this seminar, I present a draft response to the "New Shape" challenge that I am developing in adherence to the above-redefined views. My point of departure consists of the following three propositions: (1) the actual government of the world is unreformable and unsteerable in any conventional, socio-politically positioned, manner (2) the actual government of the world has nonetheless proven to be remarkably successful in reaching an aspirational, symbolic agreement over a very broadly ranging understanding of what it needs to achieve, as a whole, regarding the life conditions of all its human participants (UN General Assembly, A/RES/70/1), and (3) the actual government of the world is currently more effective than ever in the pursuit of these goals (Hervey 2016). Moving from there, I start with the (rather uncontroversial) argument that from the human perspective, despite all the above, the system of global governance is far from being effective *enough*. I propose a definition of the "enough-ness" relevant int he context inspired by Donald Winnicott's (1971; Lenartowicz, Reichhart, & Zych 2010) psychoanalytic concept of the activity of good-enough mothering (care), whose presence is a threshold above which a human being becomes actually capable of making selections which are not, this way or another, hurtful for themselves. Offering a simple criterion of the good-enough system of global governance, I propose an approach that I see as global governance's less traveled, yet feasible path of evolution: the conducting of systematic explorations of existential opportunities. An existential opportunity itself is the flipside of existential risk, defined by Nick Bostrom (2013) as a risk "that threatens the entire future of humanity" - and argued to constitute the absolute global priority. However, the existential opportunities, as I see them, reside in such enablers of future scenarios that have the potential to transfer the entirety of humanity, finally and permanently, beyond the threshold of universal enoughness. While existential opportunity may be seen even as a special case of risk (the opportunity being interpreted as the risk of missing it), operationally and psychologically, as any entrepreneur knows, the containment of a risk and pursuit of an opportunity could not be further apart. My proposal is thus two-layered: in its most abstract dimension, I seek to operationalize an organized mode in which humanity's existential opportunities would be systematically explored until exhaustion. I envisage existential opportunity explorations as operational blends of philanthropreneurship, science, development, and social activism: non-institutionalized, self-styled, yet nonetheless intense, rigorous, and complete. At a more concrete level, I seek to demonstrate a tangible existential opportunity, which perhaps could be explored as a combination of the following three potential enablers of the good-enough future: (1) the postulate of *unconditional basic income *(UBI), which I approach through a dividend-based logic linked with increasing automation and operationalize independently of the existence of states. (Thus, the instrument of the unconditional global dividend will serve to counterbalance the fundamental social inequality between human beings and their choice-making capacities that is produced by the institution of nationality), (2) the technology of *blockchain*, a purely distributed peer-to-peer system of ledgers utilizing a combination of data structures, algorithms, and cryptographic and security technologies (Dresher 2017; Narayanan et al. 2016; Davidson, De Filippi, Potts 2016), which allows the achievement of an unprecedented integrity of social activity and interrelatedness of instances of autonomous decision-making *without *any socio-political positioning of the enabler of such coordination, (3) and the concept known as the *web of needs *(Kleedorfer et al. 2014), *offer networks *Goertzel 2015), or the *offer network protocol *(Heylighen 2016, 2017), which is an idea for achieving a radical increase of the number of choices available to all participants of social and economic activity by means of the direct matching of values without the unifying mediation provided by money. Devising a specific combination of the above three foundational concepts, I propose an existential opportunity scenario composed of nine instruments: *universal global dividend*, a "*New Settlers*" inclusion algorithm and social mobilization program, two blockchain authorization procedures called *prove of sustainability *and *prove of humanity*, a semi-penalty algorithm called *dimmed economy*, three techno-economical concepts linking offer networks to blockchain: *wisps of currency*, *wisps of value*, and *organizational patterning*, and finally a concept of *institutional anchoring*, as the path of the institutional legitimization of this entire bundle. Because currently most of these nine concepts are still formulated only tentatively, some being more speculative than others, the goal of the seminar from my perspective is to submit them for discussion against the general hypothesis of the seminar. That general hypothesis is that the United Humanity Ledger composed of the above-mentioned nine building blocks, once used as an *addition to *and a technological mediator of anything that operates already, might be *enough *to provide humanity with a bedrock for a fair, sustainable, and creative future. References Bostrom, N. (2013). Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority. Global Policy, 4(1): 15-31. Davidson, S., De Filippi, P. & Potts, J. (2016). Economics of Blockchain. Url: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2744751 Drescher, D. (2017). Blockchain basics: A non-technical introduction in 25 steps. Frankfurt am Main: Apres. Goertzel, B. (2015). Beyond Money: Offer Networks, a Potential Infrastructure for a Post-Money Economy. In: The End of the Beginning: Life, Society, and Economy on the Brink of the Singularity, edited by Ben Goertzel & Ted Goertzel. Humanity+ Press. Hale, T., Held, D., Young, K. (2013). Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation is Failing when We Need It Most. John Wiley & Sons. Hervey, A. (2016). 99 Reasons 2016 Was a Good Year. Url: https://medium.com/future-crunch/99-reasons-why-2016-has-been-a-great-year-for-humanity-8420debc2823#.o7h7wmzdj Heylighen, F. (2016). The offer network protocol: Mathematical foundations and a roadmap for the development of a global brain. The European Physical Journal Special Topics. 226(2): 283-312. Heylighen, F. (2017). Towards an Intelligent Network for Matching Offer and Demand: from the sharing economy to the Global Brain. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 114: 74-85. Kleedorfer, F., Busch, C.M., Pichler, C., & Huemer, C. (2014). The Case for the Web of Needs. 2014 IEEE 16th Conference on Business Informatics (CBI), 1: 94-101, 2014. doi: 10.1109/CBI.2014.55 Lenartowicz, M., Reichhart, W., Zych, B. (2010). Wystarczajaco dobra organizacja [EN.: "A good enough organization"]. Krakow: Advisio Press. Narayanan, A. et al. (2016). Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. UN General Assembly (A/RES/70/1). Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Url: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N15/291/89/PDF/N1529189.pdf?OpenElement Winnicott, D.W. (1971) Playing and reality. New York: Routledge. ------------------------------ Upcoming Seminars *May 5th* Orion Maxted THE MACHINE (pt. 2) *May 12th* Mark Bukarev The Genealogy of Becoming: Explicating the Constrained Stochastic Notion of Creativity Under the Auspices of a Teleodynamical Ground of Reference *May 19th* TBA TBA See also the ECCO/GBI calendar <https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=azMyN252aWluM2JoMnU3MXY5OGt2ZzliOGdAZ3JvdXAuY2FsZW5kYXIuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ> . You can add this calendar to your calendar application through here <https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/k327nviin3bh2u71v98kvg9b8g%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics> More info about the ECCO seminar program: http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108 <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108> -- Cadell ECCO Group (VUB) <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/1> Email: [email protected] Website: https://cadelllast.com
