Mapping Archetypes and After Capitalism

More from our “Mapping Archetype Scenarios Across the Three Horizons” research. Today, we look at how to apply it. Conveniently, we have the After Capitalism research, which is a domain for which we are looking ahead to the long-term future.

“Mapping Archetypes” starts with the Baseline that describes the current system in Horizon 1 (H1). In this case, we called it Neoliberal Capitalism. For the Horizon 2 (H2) transition zone, we will typically have one Collapse and one New Equilibrium scenario. With After Capitalism , I chose variety over specificity. Obviously, the scope of After Capitalism is huge and is open  to many variations. Since the major purpose of that research was to identify the H3 Transformation scenarios (which I refer to as “guiding images”), I treated the H2 scenarios relatively lightly. Rather than do the depth of research to put together one integrated scenario for each H2 archetype, Collapse and New Equilibrium, I chose instead to sketch some interesting alternatives.

For Collapse, I simply focused on the “mirror image” of each H3 Transformation guiding image.

• Overshoot is the Collapse version of Circular Commons.
• Class War is the Collapse version of Non-Workers Paradise.
• Rogue AI is the Collapse version of Tech-Led Abundance.

For New Equilibrium, the scenarios emerged from the decline of the H1 Neoliberal Capitalist Baseline as potential stepping stones to Transformation, but, of course, don’t quite get there. They sorted on a continuum between H1 and H3:

• New Sources of Value was closest to the H1 Baseline in that it maintains the capitalist structure, but the nature of value creation shifts.
• In between H1 and H3, Collaborative Sharing Platforms have one foot in the Baseline and one foot in Transformation – think in terms of Uber as an example, a new way of transporting people but ultimately the same old capitalist business model.
• Closest to H3, Sustainability Transition is comprised of concepts that originally were part of what became the H3 Circular Commons guiding image, but were ultimately judged to be not quite transformative enough.

Finally, of course we have the three H3 Transformation scenarios, aka guiding images. We typically do two scenarios, but in this case these three clearly emerged from the research.

• Circular Commons expands the concept of sustainability to embrace circular principles as part of a social, political, and economic commons.
• Non-Workers Paradise is a play on the attributed-to-Marxist idea of a worker’s paradise, but in the After Capitalism world we are not working in paid jobs as a means of sustenance.
• Tech-Led Abundance sees technological progress drives and leads to an abundance of wealth that fixes the core distribution problem of capitalism.

What the research suggests is that as the H1 Baseline decays, the domain will move into H2 by one of two routes: Collapse or New Equilibrium.  As we discussed in a previous post, Collapse appears to be much less common than we think. In the book, independent of this new mapping research, I had advocated an evolutionary rather than revolutionary approach. In” Mapping Archetype” terms, I was suggesting a New Equilibrium that was gradual would be more favorable than a burn-it-down Collapse and rebuild.

This approach provides a very handy foundation for thinking about the long-term future and helps to set reasonable expectations for what the journey might look like. It will be interesting to watch the pathway unfold.  – Andy Hines