In a recent post on Transition Culture, Rob Hopkins linked to a Jeremy Rifkin video. The first half is one of the strongest cases for TEOTWAWKI* that I’ve seen so far – so pleased be warned, but in the second half he talks about his theory of a Third Industrial Revolution. He suggests that the same kinds of peer to peer networks that have changed the music industry so drastically, might also be the key to more sustainable world economies. The example he talks about is developing decentralised energy production using smart grids and millions of home based power generation sources. So rather than a few massive, centralised power companies, there would be a distributed network of suppliers (something I actually remember John Seymour talking about in his 70’s classic – The Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency). If Napster could put a serious dent in the profits of major record labels, could a Napster inspired energy sharing project have a similar effect on ExxonMobil and Shell? For that matter, what kinds of effects could a peer-to-peer banking system such as Funding Circle have on the out-of-control investment banks? There are, of course, questions of developing new infrastructure, particularly in the case of peer-to-peer energy sharing, and of scaling up, but it’s an exciting idea. As Buckminster Fuller argued: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
What do you think?
*The End of the World as We Know it
It’s difficult to disagree that there is a need for some form of “third industrial revolution”
Those of you who know my local economic and regeneration background will know that I’ve long postulated the need for economic localism, and for something I call the “third culture.” To me, the third culture is a place of opportunity that sits between economics and society. Or to put it another way, it acknowledges a gap that exists, which is possibly widening, between economic theory and social impact. Whilst this gap might be dire and frightening, it is also a place of opportunity. I use the term third culture because it seems to me that it is society that pays when economic concepts or theories, or decisions, fail. Thus, we need something new and something different. This is ironic, as economics is a social science borne from societal needs, which in simple economic terms meant, desire, demand, supply, and transaction. These needs arose long before “money” was invented or before terms like this had names. So how can this happen? Well, possibly because economics has become an “expert system” and to some extent opinion based, which inevitably includes politics, and decisions which don’t necessarily add to the common good. For example. It’s long been said that if you lock 100 economists in a room and gave them a problem you’d get 101 answers.
Author/Scientist CP Snow talked, some 50 years ago of the “Two Cultures” in that humanity was theoretically (and puzzlingly) split between the sciences and the humanities, in a theory about human attitude. In an era no far removed (in time) from idealists Marx, Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Oppenheimer, DH Lawrence, Orwell, Huxley, Lucien Freud, Snow was probably right. These people were distant from each other compared to the polymathic nature of the European Enlightenment and Renaissance, when science and art were often the same. Think Leonardo, Wren, and so on.
These days that same “two cultures” is increasingly apparent between economics and society, and despite a range of catchy words and ideas that claim to want to address this, the reality is that politics is still driven my markets and privilege, and not society, so you have to ask whether this post-modern political re-dress of societal need can work
So all of this brings me to conclude that there really is a need for a “third industrial revolution.” And given the pure good of most human beings, their need interact, take actions, and be part of a group as well as retaining the self we do have the capacity. We also have unprecedented access to information and networks in a new form of digital enlightenment. And whilst you don’t need to be a scientist to extract digital knowledge from the internet (as a humanitarian aspect of the natural human condition), you do need a certain technical ability
So are we becoming polymaths again? And are we becoming enlightened at a time of intense economic, social, political, and environmental insecurity? I think Yes. And does even the third culture have third dimensions, and indeed other dimensions? I hope so