Listen closely, dear friends, for the words of a wise man ring true. These words, spoken by a "father of the Internet," hold a powerful message. Our actions today will shape the future for generations to come. And that the time to act is now.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, we have a sacred responsibility to future generations. Yet, our collective actions have created many global challenges that pose far-ranging potential consequences for future generations. The old ways of doing things are no longer enough. The current systems are failing us, and we need to shift towards a more sustainable future.
A future where humanity is more collectively intelligent and wise. A future where the Web develops our collective cognitive capabilities. A future that supports the unprecedented levels of connection, coordination, and collaboration needed to address our planetary challenges.
This shift calls for us to utilize our most collaborative tools at their highest expressions. Hence, we must mitigate the negative impacts of the Web on society and nature, and work towards building a Web that creates the conditions for a better, more democratic future. It's high time for a major web upgrade so we can ensure that our actions today make for good ancestors tomorrow.
If we had to guess, we'd say our capabilities for collective intelligence, on a 1 to 10 scale, are somewhere around a 2, and that may be generous. Why? We cannot think, learn, and build together in large groups. We see aspects of enterprise, government, libraries, and DAOs as being a low grade collective intelligence. Given its underdeveloped state, we're sure there are many opportunities for enhancing collective intelligence and a massive upside, assuming we are successful.
Through centralized hierarchies of businesses, organizations, and governments, we coordinate the actions of billions of people in a tapestry of fragmented and often conflicting endeavors. In democracies, we elect representatives to enact laws and give governments the authority to implement them through regulations and projects. In authoritarian governments, the leaders rule by iron hand.
Businesses and organizations – led by executive teams – work within the wiggle room of regulations and their access to human, material, and informational resources to advance their goals. Thus, actions at the individual level stem from top-down decisions made in private with the intention to impress their ideas of what's best from the perspective of the relevant hierarchy into the collective mind. It's a matter of coordination and control rather than intelligence.
Humanity isn't able to build collective intelligence from the bottom up beyond small groups meeting in person, on video, or perhaps an email group or forum. With larger groups of people, e.g., on social media, we do not have the tools or training to process the diversity of worldviews, points of view, and behaviors into collectively intelligent decision-making.
Elections in representative government are supposed to play a role. The premise of representative democracy is that delegation at a collective level through elections can achieve collective decision-making that represents the interests of the majority. The voter delegates their authority and decision-making capacity to an elected leader. But problems exist, especially in two-party systems like the US. The actual interests of elected individuals can differ from what they say. And acted-upon interests of elected officials, their parties, and allies rarely align with those of the electorate.
While the SDGs have value, they represent a centralized, top-down approach to moving towards a sustainable planet. The United Nations isn't a democracy. Many member states aren't democracies, and a handful of states have veto power.
The SDGs are a powerful fundraising mechanism that enables foundations to raise funds from those who prospered in the extractive economy to finance non-profit projects, often connected to people they know. The foundations, donors, and nonprofits are part and parcel of the existing system that can continue to thrive as the dominant system devolves.1 As a main UN initiative, humanity has been floundering in sustainable development for over two decades. But problems and inequities remain, and indeed may worsen. We have low expectations for what seems to be the nonprofit arm of "business as usual."
An indirect and bottom-up approach builds parallel systems that enable us to meet our needs without compromising ecosystems and that leverage our collective intelligence. This entails a shift towards building technology that supports unprecedented levels of connection, coordination, and collaboration required to not only transcend the problems of Today's Web but also to create a world that enables all beings to thrive.
Humanity inherits powerful and growing capabilities to innovate. Over centuries, we have built a rich technological infrastructure that supports innovation that would be unthinkable decades ago. We need to recalibrate our aims, build our communities, and innovate our way back on track, balancing inner and external technologies.
We trust that this great retooling will be emergent. We envision a Cambrian explosion2 of experiments to find patterns for sustainable life on the planet. Teams come together to perform experiments. They share their results, successful or not, so others can better structure experiments for their localities and situations. Feedback loops enable knowledge and processes to uplevel and refine in real time. Over time, we develop our collective cognitive capacities and intelligence.
This only happens when compatible people with aligned purposes can find one another. They need to connect, communicate, and collaborate on shared interests. We also need to protect and nourish our minds and bodies with healthy web practices and content.
Over the past several decades, we've dug deep into a hole regarding unsustainable resource use and ecological destruction. Extractive, just-in-time supply chains fuel ultra-high consumption lifestyles, which prop up our economy. We are converting nature into products, pollution, and waste. Meanwhile, the Web has devolved into a cesspool of false information, self-promotion, and antisocial behavior with little capacity for collective cognition. This cannot continue.
We need a profound shift, inconceivable without using our most fundamental tools to their highest expressions, foremost the Web. Over the past 15 years, the public has seen centralized platforms shape the Web for themselves. We accept the Attention Economy's outputs without question, lapping up new functionalities as they become available. Incapable of collective foresight or action, we ignore the effects on humanity and our future as we chain our conception of the Web to today's flat and static web.
We founded the People Centered Internet to advance an Internet of the people by the people. On the 40th anniversary (2014) of the TCPIP specification (tcpip40.com), I realized no official body or authority had coordinated the build out of the Internet. People took actions that involved both career and personal risks to bring Internet access to their universities, countries, and communities.
Digital technology is changing lives, economies, societies, and the potential futures for all people. At this genesis moment of an interconnected humanity, we make decisions that affect our planet without understanding their consequences. Policy makers, parents, teachers, workers and businesspeople, children, and young people are raising the alarm about a future of diminishing possibilities. Like the printing press expanded the reach of human thought, digital tools, and processes can connect over time and over space, expanding the reach of human impact at a pace so rapid that we don't know how to protect ourselves, our planet, and future generations.
There are actions we can take now to assure a People Centered Digital Future. We have to go beyond "education." We can't educate the new generation and wait for them to assume power. Therefore, under the canopy of PCI, we are showing how building resilient communities with digital equity and people centered services enables everyone to seize their opportunities and realize their aspirations. We began first with the Native American communities, where we joined forces with Tribal Digital Villages pioneer Matt Rantanen in Southern California. Next, we went to Puerto Rico after the 2017 hurricanes to explore how "Digital Recovery" might enable Puerto Rican people to respond to challenges as a collective. We joined our efforts with Echar Pa'lante, a network of 10,000 people developing the Enterprising Island.
We learned that something new is necessary: "digital public goods." Governments emerged as "public goods" so people could collectively have housing, roads, and other infrastructure shaped by their own values. Health and education are "public goods" that give access to vital services for better living. Collective investments have increased human thriving. "Rule of Law" is a public good that allows us to coordinate our actions and resolve our conflicts.
To develop resilient communities for a People Centered Digital Future, PCI proposes "Digital Public Goods" including "Digital Utilities" with local community oversight of the data they generate. By each community designing "in" common Digital Building Blocks, they can take both private and public goods and services and expand their reach to new communities and new countries. In partnership, we work with communities to become resilient, and test and learn what digital goods and services they need for sustainable growth. We encourage the communities we work with to help PCI accelerate more resilient communities by: LEARN one thing; if it works: DO one thing; if it works: TEACH one thing.
The 2015 book, The Future of the Professions: How Technology will Transform the Work of Human Experts3 predicts the decline of today's professions. It also describes the people and systems that replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, the work of professionals differs from what worked in the 20th century. This applies to doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, clergy, consultants, lawyers, and other professionals. The book explains how emerging systems are bringing fundamental change in how the practical expertise of specialists becomes available to society.
Drawing on hundreds of case studies, they give a sense of the transformation that had already taken place in the professions by 2015. In education, more people signed up for Harvard's online courses in a year than attended the actual university since its existence. In tax accounting, almost 48 million Americans use online tax preparation systems to file their tax returns, rather than traditional tax advisers. Regarding medicine, Stanford researchers developed a photo-based diagnostic system for cancer lesions as accurate as leading dermatologists.
In journalism, the Associated Press uses algorithms to write earnings reports and sports results. They produced 15 times more earnings reports than before AI. In law, J. P. Morgan uses a program called COIN to scan commercial loan agreements in seconds. They claimed it has saved 360,000 hours of a traditional lawyer's time. In divinity, in 2011, the Catholic Church issued the first digital imprimatur – the official license granted by the Church to religious texts – to a preparation app for confession. (It tracks sin and enables contrition.)
Analysis of the case studies identified patterns and trends that were driven by the four dimensions of technological advances. First, the exponential growth in the underlying technologies. Second, the increasing capability of these systems and machines. Third, their pervasiveness in economic and social life. Fourth, our increasing connectedness as human beings. The dimensions of technological advances enable professions to transform. They also apply to the digitization of human life.
The first dimension is exponential growth in technology. Reflecting Moore's Law, engineers double the number of transistors on a silicon chip every two years, which proportionally increases processing power. By 2050, assuming the trend continues, the average desktop computer will have the processing power of all of today's computers combined. Even if Moore's Law slows, processing power will rise exponentially in the foreseeable future.
The second dimension of technological advance is the increasing capability of systems and machines. They will increase in power and perform a wider range of tasks and activities. This increasing capability manifests itself in four ways.
The first is called "Big Data." Because our lives are becoming more digitized, technologies capture, analyze, and feed much more activity data into algorithms. This data improves the capacity to optimize what information and advertisements the user sees.
Second is the ability of the machines to solve problems and answer questions. IBM's Watson supercomputer could answer questions, in a particular format, on anything under the sun, more accurately than the leading human experts. Today's largest technology companies put similar problem-solving and question-answering applications on our phones, including Siri (Apple), Go Google (Meta), Alexa (Amazon), and Cortana (Microsoft).
The third originates in affective computing, which designs systems that detect and respond to human emotions. The fourth is the field of robotics. Advances in robotic capabilities are transforming how we perform procedures requiring manual dexterity.
The third dimension of technological advance is the increasing pervasiveness of new technologies. More smartphones (16 billion)4 exist than people. Meanwhile, the Internet of Things embeds processors, sensors, and Internet connectivity into everyday objects. For instance, alarm clocks linked to a train's timetable permit their owners to sleep longer if their train is running late and umbrellas that check weather forecasts and light up at the front door to advise when rain is coming. By 2030, there will be over 25 billion devices connected to the Internet.5
The fourth dimension of technological advance is humans connecting. Over half the world is online. New ways to research (search) and socialize (social media) are available. Massive amounts of user-generated content are available. New ways to cooperate are here. 69,000 main contributors have written Wikipedia, with over 35 million articles in over 280 languages. As well as new ways to compete. Kaggle supplies data to a network of statisticians who vie to provide the best analysis.
Alongside these four general trends, AI is a driver of technological advances because it handles much larger bodies of data than human beings. It makes sense of data in ways that unaided human beings cannot. Together with AI, these four dimensions of technological advance make an environment that supports transformational change, the type of change needed to deal with humanity's global challenges.
But we must prioritize safety in AI development. Open-AI is working towards AI democratization so no state, company, or group can control AI. Safety is a key concern whenever using AI technologies.
Reductionist responses don't work for complex systems. The initial problem may come back bigger.
A typical response to breakdowns in societal systems is for relevant experts to break the system into parts, analyze them, find the faulty part, and switch it out for a better one. But this approach doesn't work for complex systems. Instead, the initial solution causes new problems elsewhere, outside the frame of the problem. The initial problem may come back bigger. Think of the War on Drugs.
We can't avoid the whack-a-mole problem in complex systems involving humans and nature unless we see the connections below the surface. Humans and nature don't function like machines. Connections exist between neurons in human minds and are unknowable within nature, other than what is surmisable by observation.
As we move from the reductionist perspective to acknowledge human systems are emergent, we need to think about how emergent systems change. The two-loop theory of change is a model created by the Berkana Institute that describes nonlinear emergent processes.6 The inspiration for the model is the growth and decline cycles of living systems. Living systems (e.g., an ant, a mushroom, a human) have a life cycle: they are born, they grow, peak, then decline, and die. We'll use the model to show a path for transitioning from Today's Web to the Web's next level.
Figure 7.1 The Two Loop model.7
The Two Loop model (Figure 7.1) shows how dominant systems decline and new systems emerge. Although the model works on all levels, it isn't linear. Societies have "dominant" systems that drive economy and culture. They also have "emergent" systems and trends that are less known but making progress. Some will become the dominant system. This process can take years (e.g., like Web 1.0 to Web 2.0) or decades (e.g., regulating alcohol and driving) depending on the resilience and inertia of the dominant system.
To explain the model, we use the US dollar hegemony as the world reserve currency to be the dominant system.
As systems move towards becoming the dominant system, they become more powerful and entrenched. Since the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, the US dollar has been the primary reserve currency used by other countries. Since then, other countries have pegged their exchange rates to the dollar, which was once convertible to gold. The stability of the gold-backed dollar enabled other countries to stabilize their currencies. The stable dollar benefited the world.
Most commodities, including gold and oil, trade in the reserve currency, causing other countries to hold US dollars to pay for these goods. Holding the US dollar as a reserve currency minimizes exchange rate risk, as the purchasing nation does not have to exchange its currency for the current reserve currency to make a purchase. Because of the demand for the dollar as a reserve currency, the United States prospered from the favorable exchange rate of its currency.
But when the US dollar decoupled from gold in 1972, the United States printed dollars backed by the debt held as US Treasury notes. As the United States printed more money to finance its spending, the gold backing of its dollars diminished. As the increased monetary supply of dollars overwhelmed the gold reserves, the value of the currency reserves held by foreign countries decreased. This instability reduced the dollar's value as a reserve currency.
Figure 7.2 The Dollar Index peaked a long time ago.
As a system is peaking, it is at its zenith of dominance, whether measured by use, popularity, or outcomes. At the peak, the money flows and the economy booms. The US Dollar Index is a measure of the value of the United States dollar relative to a basket of foreign currencies. The Index goes up when the US dollar gains "strength" relative to the other currencies. As you can see from Figure 7.2, the US dollar index has been in a see-saw decline since February 1, 1985, when it hit its peak.8
After the peak, the system declines. People propping up the system and protecting it are stewards or stabilizers. They're comfortable with the established system and want it to endure. Stewards do their best to maintain the system despite the inevitable decline. Their motivation is some combination of self-serving interests (i.e., they have invested in and/or benefit from the system) and the altruistic belief that sticking with the existing system is for the greater good. Their efforts help keep the system stable for everyone else. As shown in the figure, the US currency is down almost 40% from its 1985 high.9
All systems break down and lose their significance. They eventually enter hospice when they are in steep decline and their death is foreseeable. For example, the hegemony of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency is declining. One indicator is that some oil-producing nations, including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Libya, had in the past considered accepting the Chinese Yuan for oil sales.10 Now the BRICS nations – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – are working on a new world reserve currency and are buying or stockpiling gold. Other indicators are the recent albeit choppy emergence of cryptocurrencies and dozens of complementary currencies operating in communities in the US and elsewhere. These all signal the end of USD hegemony.
As shown in the diagram of the two-loop model, as the dominant system peaks and begins its decline, an interesting phenomenon occurs: some people drop out. In 1985, people realized the US dollar would no longer be a good store of value and started alternative currencies. These pioneers extricate themselves from the dominant system to some extent and start a new system. Releasing beliefs that underpin the current system, they see other ways are possible.
We know from experience that this radical act – leaving the comfort of an established system at its peak to start a new one – can be lonely because almost everyone else still buys into the current system.
Pioneers are divergent and isolated when the new loop begins. They focus on the groundwork, preparing for their next moves. Satoshi Nakamoto, alone in the bat cave, writing a white paper. What do the pioneers need? They need to find others and work together, aligned in purpose. Once they decide what they stand for and how to approach the new system, they can name themselves. Satoshi called it Bitcoin. We wonder what the BRICS countries are thinking of for their currency's name.
The next step is building the community and social capital, which requires connecting, networking, and a common conception of the new system. Once the pioneers have regular connections and start building the system as a community, it becomes a community of practice. The community of practice nourishes the new system with time, space, money, expertise, and skill-building to continue growth. This stage involves a lot of experimentation, failing forward together and upwards as the new system continues to build and emerge. The systems and experiments which stick grow in influence.
Once a new system becomes a system of influence, it hits an illumination stage where success stories inspire the old system to transition. As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies grew in market capitalization to surpass silver and the GDP of many countries11 during the past handful of years, many retail investors have entered the crypto market. In 2021, El Salvador became the first country to accept Bitcoin as a legal tender. The Central African Republic followed in April 2022. In November 2022, Brazil's Congress passed a bill that regulates Bitcoin as a means of payment, although not yet a legal tender.12 While more countries are embracing Bitcoin, its future as a major monetary system is still uncertain due to regulatory scrutiny and potential resistance from established financial systems.
The Two Loop model helps us think and visualize how paradigms shift, which is unintuitive. Since paradigm shifts occur over long periods of time, sometimes longer than a human lifetime, and involve many imperceptible factors, people may not notice the gradual shift from a dominant system to an emergent system as it's happening.
The Two Loop model can apply to any fundamental shift of paradigm and even nested shifts. It's a product of the regeneration movement, providing a conceptual map of the transition to the New Earth. The New Earth is the regenerative future we want, where people, communities, and nature are thriving. The model posits that parallel systems and structures should be in place before the dominant system reaches a steep decline. We need to build parallel pathways and systems that do not rely on the dominant system. This increases the possibility of a graceful transition without devastating harm to humanity.
A Two-Loop transition to the New Earth includes the shifts to the SDG-attainable world and the human-centric, privacy-honoring worlds that EU legislators covet. Both nest within the shift to the New World. They are necessary but not sufficient for the New Earth shift. Another shift nesting within the New Earth shift is the shift from today's flat static web to the hyper-dimensional Metaweb.
As we've seen, the Two-Loop model provides a roadmap for navigating the transition towards a regenerative future, where people, communities, and nature thrive. However, as we've also established, this transition requires not just changes in systems and structures, but also in the very technology we use to connect and communicate with each other. In the next chapter, we'll begin exploring the ways in which we can transform the web using existing technologies to build upon and beyond a statement made by a web insider in 2012: that the web browser has a big missing feature, one that prevents us from layering knowledge on knowledge. This statement may have been disregarded, but it holds the key to unlocking the potential of the web as a tool for not just connection and collaboration, but for building knowledge and addressing our global challenges. Let's dive in and discover how we can make this a reality with each other.
1. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/nonprofit-starvation-cycle.
2. Cambrian explosion is the unparalleled emergence of organisms between 541 million and approximately 530 million years ago at the beginning of the Cambrian Period. Many of the major phyla (between 20 and 35) that make up modern animal life appeared at that time. Many other phyla also evolved during this time, the great majority of which became extinct during the subsequent 50 to 100 million years.
3. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/future-professions
4. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/multiple-mobile-device-ownership
5. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/connected-devices-worldwide
6. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/two-loops
7. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/how-change-happens
8. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/united-states-currency
9. Accessed on May 26, 2022
10. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/saudi-arabia-yuan-chinese-oil
11. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/too-big-fail-market-size
12. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/countries-accept-bitcoin