Choose Your Own Adventure, Please!

This is a book I am working on, hopefully due for completion by mid 2018. The original purpose of the book is to explore where we are at, where we are going, and how we can get there, in the broadest possible sense. Your comments, feedback and constructive criticism are welcome! The final text of the book will be freely available under a Creative Commons By Attribution license. A book version will be sent to nominated world leaders, to hopefully encourage the necessary questioning of the status quo and smarter decisions into the future. Additional elements like references, graphs, images and other materials will be available in the final digital and book versions and draft content will be published weekly. Please subscribe to the blog posts by the RSS category and/or join the mailing list for updates.

NOTE: The outline below has been updated to reflect a pivot in intention from individuals to addressing systemic issues including the potential role of governments, in late 2017.

Overview

Where are we going and how do we get there? An optimistic book exploring the possibilities for our future as a species that shows how our global society is changing, what opportunities lie ahead, and what we need to collectively address if we are to create the kind of life we all want to lead. It challenges individuals, governments and corporations to critically assess the status quo, to embrace the opportunities of the new world, and to make intelligent choices for a better future.

We have seen a fundamental shift of several paradigms that underpinned the foundations of our society, but now hold us back. Like a rusty anchor that provided stability in high tide, we are now bound to a dangerous reef as the water lowers. We have seen a shift from central to distributed, from scarcity to surplus and from closed to open systems, wherein the latter of each is proving significantly more successful in the modern context. And yet, many of our assumptions are based on the default idea that centricity, scarcity and closed are the desired state. Are they?

Meanwhile the complexity of people’s lives is exponentially growing, with local, national and transnational rules and systems that overlap, intersect and contradict. This means new solutions need to be exponential by design as linear solutions simply won’t scale over time.

There are many books that talk about technology and the impact it has had on our lives, but technology is only part of the story. The immense philosophical shift, particularly over the past 250 years, has created a modern perspective that all people can be influential, successful and mighty, certainly compared to our peasant ancestors who had very little control over their destinies. People — normal people — are more individually powerful than ever in the history of our species and this has enormous consequences for where we are heading and the opportunities ahead. This distribution of power started with the novel idea that individuals might have inalienable rights, and has been realised through the dramatic transformation of the Internet and wide spread access to modern technologies and communications.

How can we use this power to build a better world? Are we capable of identifying, challenging and ultimately changing the existing ideologies and systems that act to maintain a status quo established in the dark ages? We have come to a fascinating fork in our collective road where we can choose to either maintain a world that relies upon outdated models of scarcity that rely upon inequality, or we can explore new models of surplus and opportunity to see where we go next, together.

This requires both individual efforts, as well as systemic transformation of the institutions and organisations we have created.

This book is in three parts and will include case studies, research and references and questions about the status quo:

• How we got here – looking at the history of modern society including our strengths, weaknesses and major paradigm shifts along the way, including the massive distribution of power from the centre to the periphery over recent centuries and decades. It will also consider the combination of human traits that have served us so well including communication, shared cumulative learning, curiosity, cooperation and competition, experimentation and a constant quest for new forms of stimulation.
• Exploring optimistic futures – exploring possible optimistic futures we could consider and the urgency need for a vision for our society for people to naturally converge on, taking new trends and technologies into account. Opportunities such as nanotech and 3D printing to address poverty and hunger, the possibilities of human augmentation given the brain’s capability to adapt to genuinely foreign inputs, the inevitable shift from the Olympics to the Paralympics, and the shift from nationalism to transnationalism, with significant implications for politics and other traditional geopolitically defined power structures.
• How do we get there – the final part of the book will look at the different actors involved in society and the potential roles of governments (public and political sectors) in enabling an optimistic and inclusive future. It will also address artificial systems, thinking and structures we have put in place that will continue to hold us back from our potential, including how the law is always behind reality, how a variety of entrenched systems of thinking present the next major philosophical hurdles to progress, how centrist competitive models are failing against distributed cooperative models, and how our ability to move forward relies on being able to let go of the past. This chapter will cover traditional thinking about property, copyright and law, capitalism and zero sum thinking, traditional belief systems, globalism and digital literacy issues.

Below is a more detailed index of draft chapters which will be linked as they are written on this blog for your interest and feedback. Many thanks to everyone who has encouraged me in doing this, and I hope to make you all proud 🙂 Enjoy!

Table of Contents

Foreword & Introduction

Chapter 1: How we got here

The skills, attributes and context that brought us to where we are.