Viva la Phaseshift
Enough has been said about the phase of humanity on this planet that is currently coming to an end. Enough has been said about the future that we need to build in order to stabilise our ecosystems and make every human equally wealthy on all levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. (If you want to learn more, begin here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and so on)
The time has come to start building this future. May the phaseshift begin.
Triggered by the Corona-Virus pandemic there will be long lasting and dramatic consequences in the way we go about our lives as humans all across the globe and societies. This pandemic can teach us a lot about the nature of exponentials and what an integral part of nature exponential growth is. We can learn a lot about how we lack an intuition of exponentials and how relevant such an intuition is.
But the most important thing to learn is that our systems are failing.
Of course not all of them. I have no inclination of dismissing the value of science and the entrepreneurial spirit to transform scientific knowledge into usable artefacts that help and often save people. At the core of our systemic failure is a broken system of ownership and value tracking. A system that creates an interlocking of political and economic powers and interests that works against the benefit of everyone.
None of this is new. We know this, but we don't know how to break that cycle and initiate the phaseshift into a new paradigm that solves these problems because we are afraid to lose. This is not new. We all have experienced this when confronted with a new opportunity in life that forces us to step out of a comfortable way of doing things. The only way to find out, whether we're on the right path in such a situation is to "play" — to "try on" this new life.
This is the opportunity we as humanity are presented at the moment in the guise of COVID-19. We can play a new way of organising our societies. We can try all of these outrageous ideas and concepts. Why? Because most of the old ways of doing things fail or don't work at the moment. We need alternatives. These alternatives will likely be long term as Harari points out, so they better be good.
The governments and companies are only as powerful as we make them. If they fail us, we should take away their power. In times of crisis we can test whether they are working for us or for something or someone else. And we can also take more drastic measure than waiting for the next election cycle or voting with our feet and buying decisions.
We have all the tools and concepts we need to start the action. We can distribute power and money to those who contribute the most to the greater good. We can create a world that maximises the wellbeing of every single human far beyond what previously thought possible. (Anyone who tells you differently tries to protect something that cannot be protected anymore.)
The first building block in this is to transfer ownership back to the people. In this crisis, which could easily and quickly be solved with the right data, the ownership in question relates to personal data. If we know which people someone with a confirmed infection interacted with, we can test these people and very quickly isolate all cases.
Currently this data is held in several silos with different ownerships. This is good because there are things we don't want our phone companies to know about our health and there are things we don't want our government to know about our interactions. But this thinking in silos does not apply anymore. We now have the technology to keep the data and share the knowledge selectively. We can maintain control. All of us. We can be globally connected and hyperlocal at the same time.
What if we allowed an app to store our personal health, interaction and location data in a thing like this? And then allow someone in a thing like this to makes sense of the data and warn individuals of potential risk to themselves or to others?
What if we then started using this in combination with this to generate consensus (formerly known as politics) and to generate income (formerly known as work) for everyone?
What if we could pull this off and create a world that is actually worth living for everyone?
