Manhattan Project for Peace
Humans are a social being. Our evolution has shifted venues- from biological DNA inside our bodies to “cultural DNA” and technology. Humanity is facing threats to our existence on this planet, and our established cultural DNA (government, law, markets, mental models, education, etc.) does not appear capable of successfully adapting our civilization to avoid extinction.
The rise of decentralized computing technology offers a glimmer of hope- a new tool that, if held correctly, may allow us to create a new way of working together. This new digitally-enabled collaborative society must (re)design itself autopoetically such that life may continue to flourish on this rare planet. If we can do so, humans will have redeemed ourselves as a compassionate and responsible family member in the mysterious and invigorating web of life.
Origin
We evolved as bands of foragers, likely no larger than 150 people. At this scale, humans are capable of coordinated effort toward common goals and mutual benefit by direct social and verbal interaction. Organic, original, aboriginal. Trust and reputation are managed through gossip and information is relayed verbally about local edible plants, water sources and potential threats. It becomes difficult to manage a group larger than this because personal relationships and verbal communication have a ceiling, comically obvious to anyone who has played the parlor game “telephone” where messages are lost when relayed multiple times.
As complex language emerged, and particularly with the advent of a new information technology called writing, we improved our ability to coordinate with a larger number of people. Messages could be relayed exactly as communicated as far as a horse could trot or a ship could sail. The Roman Empire was made possible by a complex bureaucracy that used writing and accounting to manage trust, reputation, status, ownership and value. This accuracy and record-keeping allowed a larger group to play the same economic game, spending their time in specialized in trades and relying on trading with strangers for food and other necessities.
A new form of social coordination (or “collective intelligence”) flourished in the form of hierarchical, centralized, command-and-control organizations. This form of organization has brought us through the Industrial Revolution and is still the dominant form in business, government and civil society as we enter the dawn the Information Age. Only a few meaningful examples of decentralized coordination have emerged like Wikipedia and Linux, which still required a charismatic but benevolent figurehead.
Advancement
With each new advance in communications media, we’ve seen a leap forward in the number of people whose lives are interconnected: the US Postal Service, the cross-Atlantic telegraph, the global telephone network, the television, the fax machine, the personal computer, the internet, social media and now peer-to-peer “blockchain” technology.
The physical success of pyramidal organizations has been so great that their existence is now threatened by unintended outcomes of their own doing: climate change, nuclear war, etc.
Maturity
Humanity is now a single, 7 billion person tribe- our fates inextricably linked by the shared existential threats of climate change, nuclear war and frighteningly long list of other epic global challenges. We can no longer live in separate kingdoms and mind our own business, unaffected by the actions of unknown others in far-off lands. Together, we all face common threats so large that we must coordinate the whole of humanity toward swift, benevolent and coordinated action.
The challenges to this kind of mass collaboration are daunting. Who gets to decide global priorities? Won’t this just be mob rule? How do we deal with massive rifts in political worldview, differing levels of education, and outright physical conflict? How do we take fast and decisive action with democratic input of 7 billion people? Will incumbent powers actively work to dismantle anything that threatens concentrated wealth and power?
Luckily, the brutal realities of evolution leave us a clue. Unless this new system is substantially better than the existing ones, no one will adopt it. So the mission is simply to create a set of systems for social coordination that out-competes incumbent systems on all fronts. We can start small and build on what works in the real world, perhaps mimicking the design of DNA and incorporating a means of mutation and experimentation into the core of the working model. This new “organizational ecology” must be dynamic and adaptive by nature, thus enabling a rate of experimentation and testing that can drive the type of rapid evolutionary changes required. Evolution has always happened in frenzied periods of mass extinctions and ecological reshuffling, and we are entering one of those epochs now.
Mobilization
This is a call- to activate the global brain in service of what our hearts know is possible and our hands are eager to build. To assemble the wisdom keepers and synthesize as many well-tested best practices as possible. A shamelessly practical effort spanning diverse fields like group psychology, organizational development, indigenous tradition, innovative governance models, management consulting, distributed action, economics, political movements, behavior change and high technology. This is a call to begin real-world testing of viable and outstanding new systems that build on what works from the past, but which strive to move beyond their limitations.
Right now, people are beginning to use blockchain systems to enable new, decentralized and directly democratic governance models for companies, cooperatives and coalitions. However, in my opinion most of these governance models are not road-tested, and all to often are the arbitrary brainchild of technologists who have a cool idea about how to create incentives systems. Tokens alone will not save us. I believe there is a need for a committed, longitudinal effort to test and develop real, viable systems that people will actually use, and which are deeply informed by the expertise and practical experience of what works in social science, business and politics.
What’s an example of how this might look?
Imagine people volunteering their skills to help build a park in their neighborhood, and then the neighborhood coalition votes via online ballot to grant tax credits or event payment to the citizens who contributed resources toward building the park at a fifth of the cost of today’s contractors. Imagine if every bill were voted on directly by all citizens in a new house of Congress in addition to the Senate and the House! Imagine companies where instead of error-prone executives, employees voted on collective decisions so the intelligence of the group could be tapped to make smarter decisions!
Current Questions
What kind of trust and reputation systems will work best in these futures? How will a large collective decide what work to do, and who gets paid? Will companies become more like internal markets of freely associating sovereign free agents?
Who is already working on this Manhattan Project for Peace? Where are my elders? Who holds pieces of the puzzle? What role do I play in this effort? How do I make a living while on this quest? What specific problems do these new systems have to solve? Who gets to be at the table?
