visions | Hinesight....for Foresight

by Andy Hines on April 4, 2018 Leave a Comment

After Capitalism video

For those who prefer video, or listening, I’m posting a video summary of my After Capitalism ideas. It was recorded as part of third annual APF Virtual Gathering on September 15, 2017. It’s 24 hours of futures in which the virtual venue shifts across the globe: Americas, Europe, and Asia. I had 30 minutes and used it to tell the After Capitalism story from the comfort of my home office. The link is here: https://vimeo.com/258422017; the password is “foresight.”

Since the video, I have solidified the concept list – it has grown to 54 – and reviewed almost all of them. [I need to kick it into gear over the summer to get it finished]. While the concept list has expanded, the three visions — and their evil dopplegangers — still seem to be representative. And I’ve update my headshot to more accurately reflect the graying — Andy Hines.

by Andy Hines on February 20, 2018 Leave a Comment

Abundance: Tech to the Rescue

The title says it all: Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. If you’re a true believer in technology (technology will solve our problems), take comfort that “within a generation, we will be able to provide goods and services, once reserved for the wealthy few, to any and all who need them.” Those versed in integral futures are likely to say “not so fast;” our technological capacity development has outstripped our values and cultural development. That is, our abilities to wisely that technology is under-developed.

Regardless of which camp you’re in, let’s be very grateful for what the author Peter Diamandis does for us here. He provides a positive, hopeful, and plausible vision. There ain’t many out there! Abundance is a tale of good news. Yes, there are bumps along the way, but human [and AI-driven] technological ingenuity save the day. Diamandis believes that the greatest tool we have for tackling our grand challenges is the human mind. Some old-timers might remember Julian Simon, who used to horrify audiences in the 1980s — when we were really worried about population growth — by suggesting that the more people, the better (see the doomslayer).

In a nutshell creative ideas are the ultimate resource. Diamandis puts his money where he is mouth is. He founded the X PRIZE Foundation, which is a nonprofit dedicated to bringing about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity through the design and operation of large incentive-prize competitions. And he was a co-founder of the Singularity University, which studies technologies at the core of abundance: biotechnology and bioinformatics; computational systems; networks and sensors; artificial intelligence; robotics; digital manufacturing; medicine; and nanomaterials and nanotechnology.

Sure, one can and should question whether this tech fix approach can work (by 2035, the book says). I think it’s fair to ask what the alternative is? ….thus my own search for after capitalism visions. I am not drinking the whole glass of Abundance Kool-Aid, but I am very glad we have this vision to work with, and it surely is at least part of the solution! – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on January 3, 2018 Leave a Comment

Shrinking the [formal] Economy

We have made money more important than it should be. The economy is bigger than it should be. Charles Eisenstein in Sacred Economics suggests a new approach to money and the economy – namely, less of both! In short, in our search for economic growth, we continue to monetize more and more things that used to be “free.” The challenge is that there is little room in any highly developed economy for further domestic growth. And the author argues that “official economic statistics have hidden the probability that the Western economies have been in a zero-growth phase for at least twenty years.”

In this light, the idea of shrinking the economy may be less crazy than it seems at first. We could simply de-monetize things that no longer need to be monetized. And we could choose differently regarding consuming more or working less. (Hint: work less).

The sacred idea involves moving away from money and growth as “ends,” and re-situating the properly as “means.” It would move us way from everything having a price. Indeed, the sacred economy builds most closely on gift economy ideas, as well as some from ideas around commons. A key assumption is that giving triggers virtuous circles and win-win dynamics, in contrast to today’s economy fueled by winning and losing. Gift giving and receiving creates an ongoing tie or relationship between the participants, much different from the anonymity of cash and online purchases. He also steers us away from barter economy ideas, noting that “barter, in the strict sense of moneyless exchange, has never been a quantitatively important or dominant model or transaction in any past or present economic system about which we have hard information.” It’s a fine point for sure, whether we call something barter or ritualized gift exchange, but I also see the “back to barter” idea as a hard sell – not nearly as difficult as something like “communism” but not a winner either.

A really cool idea here is to shift the purpose of money away from “medium of exchange” and “store-of-value” to just “medium-of-exchange.” It’s the store-of-value, based on the fundamental economic assumption of scarcity that has triggered the demise of capitalism and its associated crises. In a world of abundance, store-of-value is less necessary, thus we see the gift economy, the commons, and introduction of concepts such as negative-interest money based on the ideas of the pioneering theoretician Silvio Gesell. Essentially, it would be a money that, like bread, becomes less valuable over time…that decays in value. This promotes using money rather than accumulating. In this approach, the only way to maintain wealth is to invest it at risk or, shall we say, to make wise decisions on how to direct the magical flow of human creativity. By making money impermanent, we preserve it as means but not as end.

The author is aware that he is proposing transformation. I liked his characterization of a “co-creative partnership with earth.” I really, really liked this book. There is so much more I could write about. It may be my favorite so far. Very much what we are looking for in terms of Horizon 3 visions, with lots of fresh ideas and hope, but not preachy or overly squishy. Well worth your time! – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on November 14, 2017 1 Comment

The Sharing Economy Transition

In my emerging scheme for organizing the concepts for what’s next and after capitalism, I am placing the sharing economy and its brothers and sisters in the Horizon Two Zone of Transition (and innovation). To put it simply, it seems to me that these concepts have one foot in the old neoliberal capitalist world (H1), and one in the emerging visions of H3. I found a nice book on sharing: Arun Sundararajan’s The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism that provides us some great ideas to play with.

The sharing family of concepts has some aspects of traditional markets and some aspects of “new” gift ideas. Some is profit-motivated and some is purpose-driven. Airbnb hosts typically join sharing platforms to make money. Couchsurfers do it as a way to meet people or to make new friends, as well finding a place to stay. Of course there is lots of overlap between these two.

Lawrence Lessig notes this dual nature in his 2008 book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy“ observes that there exists not just the commercial economy, which meters access on the simple metric of price, but also a sharing economy, where access to culture is regulated not by price but by a complex set of social relations.” Botsman and Rogers’ Rise of Collaborative Consumption observes that access in hyper consumption is defined by credit, whereas access in collaborative consumption is driven by reputation.

He also bring in Juliet Schor’s notion of “stranger sharing,” which shift the source of what we value commercially away from traditional corporations and toward a crowd of entrepreneurs we find through a digital marketplace.

Perhaps the shift could be summed up as:

Some questions

There are still lots of questions about how this might work:

Will the sharing economy ultimately represent the rise of the microentrepreneur—a generation of self-employed workers who are empowered OR will it represent the culmination of the end of broad-based and high standards of living that the United States witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s—a disparaging race to the bottom? For instance, Robert Reich asserts that a better name for the sharing economy would be the “share-the-scraps economy.”
While there’s clearly tremendous potential efficiency from “access over ownership,” are peer-to-peer rental markets viable at scale for anything other than really expensive assets like homes and cars?
Might we witness the emergence of new guilds—worker organizations that set their own standards of service?

There are some interesting ideas relating to p2p and Blockchain as well, but let’s save that for part 2. – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on October 31, 2017 Leave a Comment

From Apartness to Integrated

I have been working through ideas about “what’s after capitalism,” and think about what’s wrong and what could be right, ,and what could be useful/helpful/sensible visions. I keep coming back to the issue of we sapiens* putting our needs front-and-center at the expense of everything else. Literally, we are “apart” from everything else. The more we develop, the more apart we become, thus “apartness.”

It seems to me that a usefulness vision would need to address this apartness (togetherness?). It seems that if we need to re-integrate with nature, other species, and even new species, i.e. robots. As we futurists now, when you start thinking about something, you become sensitized to signals of it. Here are three within the last week that have hit my radar:

Environmental futurist Dave Bengston tagged this scan hit on the rights of nature “The Symposium will bring together key leaders in the Rights of Nature movement – from Ecuador, Nepal, the United States, and other countries, as well as from local communities and tribal nations. Today, communities, people, and even governments are recognizing that there is a need to make a fundamental shift in humankind’s relationship with the natural world by placing the highest protections on nature through the recognition of legal rights.”
While animal rights movements have been active for some time, the development of lab-grown meat offers some hope there. Our friends at the Futures Assessment Divisions of the US Marine Corps reported on Richard Branson explaining his interest in and artificial meat startup: “I believe that in 30 years or so we will no longer need to kill any animals and that all meat will either be clean or plant-based, taste the same and also be much healthier for everyone. One day we will look back and think how archaic our grandparents were in killing animals for food.”
Saudi Arabia Becomes the First Country to Give Citizenship to a Robot. The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman plans to put Sophia in a forthcoming megacity called Neom—a center for business and tourism. Setting aside the problems it raises given the situation of women there, and that it is a bit of a gimmick, we futurist remember Jim Dator talking about rights of robots decades ago.

So, we have three signals suggesting the notion of expanding the rights of others, and at least in some small way, indicating there is movement away from apartness to integrated — of course, last week in Alternative Perspectives class we did a module on Integral Futures. – Andy Hines

*See Yuval Noah Harari’s excellent book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

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by Andy Hines on September 6, 2017 Leave a Comment

Commons or Commodities?

We might think about two polar opposite and perhaps extreme visions of the “after capitalism” future: commons, in which things are not owned but shared by everyone, or commodities in which everything has a price. David Bollier gives us a nice introduction to called Think Like a Commoner, that espouses the former (and warns of the latter).

What do we mean by commons? Commons include physical and intangible resources of all sorts, but “they are more accurately defined as paradigms that combine a distinct community with a set of social practices, values and norms that are used to manage a resource. Put another way, a commons is a resource + a community + a set of social protocols.” More simply: “managing a resource for everyone’s benefit.”

If you’re like me, the first idea that pops into your head is Garret Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons. Bollier notes how it has become a cautionary lesson about the impossibility of collective action. One can sense his exasperation when he makes the case that Hardin’s commons is not a commons! Hardin describes an open-access regime, or a free-for-all. But Bollier notes that a commons has boundaries, rules, social norms and sanctions against free riders. A commons requires that there be a community willing to act as a conscientious steward of a resource.

A few key principles of commons (from Ostrom):

commons must have clearly defined boundaries so that commoners can know who has authorized rights to use a resource
the rules for appropriating a resource must take account of local conditions and must include limits on what can be taken and how.
Commoners must be able to create or influence the rules that govern a commons
Must be willing to monitor how their resources are used (or abused) and must devise a system of sanctions

The ambition view suggested by Bollier is that the commons could be a vehicle for social and political emancipation and societal transformation. Thus the “commons economy” found its way into my initial list of after capitalism concepts.

On to commodities. Bollier puts it bluntly: “privatization and commodification of our shared wealth is one of the great unacknowledged scandals of our time.” Okay, but the link to commons is the process of enclosure of the commons: “Enclosures convert a system of collective management and social mutuality into a market order that privileges private ownership, prices, market relationships and consumerism.” Think of the king owning the forest in Robin Hood. And over time, more and more commons have been enclosed. “The goal is to treat people as individuals and consumers, not as communities with shared, long-term, nonmarket interests.” Regular readers of this blog will note the one of the key findings about values shifts from ConsumerShift was the growing anti-consumer ethos.

It is noted how Polyani observed that numerous resources — especially land, labor and money — be redefined as commodities, which he called “fictional commodities….that quickly expanded to other realms, making virtually everything subject to purchase and sale. This is happening to nature and to culture and….

A crucial point for me. Bollier pans claims made by contemporary economists that humans are essentially materialist individuals of unlimited appetites, and that these traits are universal. Quite the opposite. The real aberration in human history is the idea of Homo economicus. I touched on that recently in a post “Wiring or Choice?”

For Bollier a top priority should be expanding the conversation about the commons. I agree! – Andy Hines

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by Andy Hines on August 30, 2017 Leave a Comment

APF Most Significant Futures Works Winners 2017

One of my favorite things to do each year is to coordinate the APF’s Most Significant Futures Works program. This year we announced winners at the APF Gathering in Seattle on Saturday, July 29th. We are building quite a library of significant futures works….stretching back to 2007. So, when someone asks “what does good futures work look like?” Point them here:

We had three winners this year out of the dozen nominees. Each winner is recommended by a two-judge team and confirmed by the full panel of judges.

Category 1 Advance the methodology and practice of foresight and futures studies “

Designing an Experiential Scenario: The People Who Vanished, Stuart Candy & Jake Dunagan, Futures, 86, Feb 2017, pp. 136-153. [link]
Let’s Talk about Success: A Proposed Foresight Outcomes Framework for Organizational Futurists, Andy Hines Journal of Futures Studies, June 2016, 20(4):1-20. [link]

Category 2 Analyze a significant future issue

Disruptive Futures: Nuclear Weapons Summit, (principals: Creative Santa Fe (Cyndi Conn, Executive Director), N Square Collaborative (Erika Gregory, Managing Director), Nuclear Threat Initiative (Deborah G. Rosenblum, Executive Vice President), PopTech (President, Leetha Filderman), Santa Fe, New Mexico, December 4-7, 2016, Conference (link)

Category 3: Illuminate the future through literary or artistic works

no winner this year

The list of nominated works that were judged included:

Category 1: What the Foresight: Your Personal Futures Explored. Defy the Expected and Define the Preferred, by Alida Draudt & Julia Rose West; The Critical Role of History in Scenario Thinking: Augmenting Causal Analysis within the Intuitive Logics Scenario Development Methodology by Ronald Bradfield, James Derbyshire, and George Wright, Let’s Talk about Success: A Proposed Foresight Outcomes Framework for Organizational Futurists by Andy Hines; Corporate Foresight, by Guest editors: Rene Rohrbeck, Eelko Huizingh and Cinzia Battistella; Designing an Experiential Scenario: The People Who Vanished by Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan; What is the Future? by John Urry; Epiphany Z: Eight Radical Visions for Transforming your Future, by Thomas Frey,

Category 2: NaturePod, by Situation Lab; Disruptive Futures: Nuclear Weapons Summit, (principals: Creative Santa Fe, N Square Collaborative, Nuclear Threat Initiative, and Poptech

Category 3: Hyper-reality, by Keiichi Matsuda, Everything Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction, by Arizona State University’s Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative; Science Fiction Futures; Marine Corps Security Environment Forecast: Futures 2030-2045, by Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory,

I would like to acknowledge my fellow core committee members Cindy Frewen and Rowena Morrow and this year’s judges, without whom this program does not happen, were: Nur Anisah Abdullah, Liz Alexander, Josh Calder, Bob Frame, David Hamon, Robin Jourdan, Jim Lee, Michael Lee, Tricia Lustig, Oliver Markley, Sam Miller, Guillermina Baena Paz, Gabriele Rizzo, John A. Sweeney. Thank you all so much for another successful program. – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on June 21, 2017 Leave a Comment

Postcapitalism and a world without work

Neoliberalism, the baseline, has failed. But the left has failed to capitalize (sorry for the double entendre there). In Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work, Srnick and Williams make a strong case for how a reliance on “folks politics” has rendered the left opposition to neoliberalism ineffective. Part of the problem is a defensiveness and reactiveness. In foresight we talk about reactive, proactive, and creative approaches to the future – with reactive being the least effective. Protests have been meandering and ineffective, with a sense of pessimism regarding the ability to create large-scale social change. Folk politics has “become out of joint with the actual mechanisms of power.” The authors are careful to not to reject working at the local level, but rather suggest it is one part of a campaign for what’s next.

To put it bluntly, the authors suggest that transformation is needed, borrowing from the foresight lexicon in which new rules of the game are needed. This book is full of both insightful analysis of how we got here and plenty of interesting and useful suggestions for what’s to be done. The authors admire how neoliberalism patiently built itself into the dominant paradigm over time and suggests that the left ought to learn lessons from it. My words here — stop whining and start learning! And: “a skill that the left once excelled at – building enticing visions for a better world – has deteriorated.” I’m so pleased to see a compelling argument being made for thinking visionary and big. Bravo! I think it’s a key point of the book: the need to think big, visionary, and strategic. It makes a strong case for how small-scale, situational, and tactical thinking is not working and is not enough. It also suggests working solely on the fringes is not enough; the movement must get in the trenches with the power structure and work from within.

And for those familiar with the values work – this sounds pure integral to me: “for any leftist universal – it must be one that integrates difference rather than erasing it.” I hope a useful contribution of our work can be to link the values shifts to “after capitalism.” I think it has a fundamental role!

Here’s a key assumption that seems to be a key part of ‘what’ s next’ thinking: “an essential demand in a post-work society is for a universal basic income.”

In talking about some of the hurdles, I thought this was a particularly insightful one: “Everywhere one looks, there is a drive to make people suffer before they can receive a reward.” Isn’t that the truth? Suffering is an expectation. This is the power of paradigm — it becomes assumed and the original reason why is often lost. I’m not suggesting a vision of “no suffering” as practical, but let’s not make it an expectation!

Another approach I enjoyed with this book in addition to big thinking, was the call to action. It reminds us that we can build ourselves the world we want. That sounds like a Polakian image of the future.

The ambition here is to take back the future from capitalism and build ourselves the twenty-first-century world we want. Bold thinking…..three cheers! – Andy Hines

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by Andy Hines on February 22, 2017 Leave a Comment

Whiplash: A Tale of [One of] Two Worlds

As a consumer of future visions, one is typically offered one of two main dishes: the super-fast, blurry, world of accelerating exponential technological change, and the slow, mundane, often obstructionist world of the “people.” My advice to my futures students is not to get overly enamored with either, understand both, look in between, and look outside.

But let’s face it – the world of super-fast tech change is very sexy. The people world is boring, and painting a picture of alternatives is maybe less boring, but not as sexy as tech change. Super-fast tech change has its own university, Singularity U, which I readily admit is far more popular than our study of alternatives futures here at the University of Houston. One might say that the parent or uncle of Singularity is the MIT Media Lab, which first captured the vivid picture of the emerging digital world with Nicholas Negroponte as chief prophet. It was exciting stuff, no doubt. For various reasons, the Media Lab has been somewhat eclipsed by Singularity, but they are making a bid to come back, with an updated manifesto called “Whiplash: How to Survive our Faster Future.”

The title pretty much gives away the story. Be prepared to be whisked away on a magic carpet ride of technological wonders. And they are wonderful. We should know about these great things, and be grateful that smart people are thinking about and inventing really cool things. While the book is basically a story of the reinvention/relaunch of the Media Lab, it is organized around some very useful principles

Emergence over authority
Pull over push
Compasses over maps
Risk over safety
Disobedience over compliance
Practice over theory
Diversity over ability
Resilience over strength
Systems over objects

These are excellent principles for navigating the world of super-fast tech change. But they really don’t help us in the world of people. It seems to me that we need more amphibious works that can live in the sea of tech change and the land of people (and their rules, institutions, interests, politics, etc.)

I recommend the book as an excellent trip through the world of super-fast tech. I will alert futurists that they may be annoyed by the all-too-common lazy treatment of us. Like, not bothering to get the field’s name right – futurism (although in fairness we’re still debating it too). Futurists are lumped in with experts, stock pickers, and predictors. The authors, Joi Ito and Jeff Howe, assume that futurists don’t do anything but think big thoughts – an old view (which, in fairness, we have not adequately corrected!). You’ll see that I think any time we might complain about our treatment, we have to take responsibility for our part in it!

These two worlds continue to co-exist. Whiplash gives us some excellent insight into one of them. – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on July 12, 2016 Leave a Comment

Indicator: “Mainstream” economist embracing uncertainty

Okay, I’m sure there are economists out there embracing or at least acknowledging uncertainty about the future. But a read of Paul Krugman’s review of Mervyn King’s The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy in the wonderful New York Review of Books suggests an indicator of, well, something. Maybe we can decide “of what” later.

Mervyn King, former head of the influential Bank of England, helped guide the economy the 2007 financial crisis. The book, according to Krugman is really about economic ideas for the future rather than a chronicle of the crisis (though that is in there, too).

Krugman is impressed by King’s assertion “that the whole intellectual frame we’ve been using is more or less irreparably flawed.” And on a side note, and to point out his willingness to challenge orthodoxy, he suggests that the euro is a mistake. Krugman comments that “if he’d said it while still in office, it would have provoked a diplomatic crisis.”

But for Krugman (and me) the really big point is that King sees the need for a complete rethinking of how we do economics. Skipping a very interesting setup by Krugrman, if we go straight to the point, King supports Keynes’s argument that “the future is inherently unknowable, and that we deal with that fundamental uncertainty essentially by kidding ourselves, telling and acting on stories about the future that are grounded in little more than convention. And these stories, Keynes asserts, are subject to occasional drastic revisions, with huge economic implications.”

King supports this position in asserting that “economic decisions always take place under conditions of ‘radical uncertainty’ — ignorance about the future that can’t be quantified by probabilities, so that there is no such thing as optimizing behavior. People cope with this uncertainty by settling on “narratives” that are conventionally accepted at any given moment, but can suddenly change.” Sounds like a futurist to me!

Krugman notes that it’s not such an outlandish position, but “it’s a remarkable one for an ex–central banker to take.” And Krugman notes that he “spends a whole chapter explaining why radical uncertainty, not quantifiable risk, is the essence of economic life.”

One might be tempted to say “about time,” but let’s not go there. I’m always on the lookout for good examples of indicators. I’ve found indicatros to be a tricky concept to teach. It’s one that makes intellectual sense, but is not so easy to carry out. Thus we need better examples. One powerful mainstream economist taking a position is noteworthy, but that is hardly a sign of a shift in the economic paradigm. But change starts somewhere, or rather is nudged forward in small ways. I think this is a nudge, but back to the question “towards what?” I think it means something for economics and economists, but that’s not something I track or know about. I was thinking it might fit as an indicator for our post-capitalism tracking. Perhaps. I think the strongest fit is movement of mainstream thinking toward futurist thinking. All of the above? What do you think? Andy Hines

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