Ecotopia for realists
Succumbing to apocalyptic visions is not enough. Ecotopia is the idea that we can build more than sustainable, but rather regenerative and antifragile gardens of prosperity.
This article is a quick brainstorming influenced by a great outline of ecotopia concept by Andrew Sweeny here on Medium.
We need the concept of ecotopia. But the enlightened doomsaying is also an important art that can guide our vision for a definite future. This definite future will be either horrifying and pessimistic, if we don’t get our act together and don’t reverse the current rivalrous dynamics in the face of exponential tech and political polarization.
Or the definite future can be an optimistic one, a kind of phase shift (non-linear change) that we need to bring about by having a clear vision and pulling ourselves towards it by our bootstraps. This is what Jean Pierre Dupuy calls bootstrapping our desired future. We have a fixed point in time, a moonshot deadline of let’s say 2030 or 2025, which Dupuy calls a projected time. Because the desired future is staring at us from that fixed deadline year in the future and we are striving to bootstrap towards it by many coordinated efforts.
Taleb would use a strategy of optionality, a kind of hit-based investing and hit-based philanthropy focused on investing into as many projects as possible and reasonable in order to find a bit hit, a black swan an innovation catalyst.
BioCarbon Engineering leverages drones and AI to plant billions of trees per year, much faster and cheaper than before. An example of another catalytic technology was M-Pesa, a mobile banking revolution that started in Kenya in 2007. And now one can send universal basic income via GiveDirectly to whole African villages, using technologies like M-Pesa and “dumb phones” to double a monthly income of a family in extreme poverty for as much as 25 euros.
One can stage eco protests in days, but building invention catalysts takes years, and it takes sometimes decades before they gain momentum. Think 3D printers that are yet to become a commodity but are around for decades. So we need myriads of teams working on hard tech startups to make a dent and make an attempt at ecotopia, a phase shift, Game B, collective wisdom, singularity or whatever you want to call it. A fully automated luxury communism if you will.
Doing ecotopia in the morning, activism after work, and collective wisdom in the evening
Alexander Bard, a Swedish philosopher calls something similar an ecotopia, an ecological utopia, and contrasts it with environmentalism that he says is currently too focused on moralizing. This is a similar critique to Žižek’s view on modern liberal ideology — that it is more focused on recycling trash than rebuilding the system around some radical vision.
I think ecotopia can still be combined with collective action, better sensemaking and collective wisdom, and also a right amount of doom-and-gloom prophesies, that play their role, but shouldn’t paralyze us. So yes, ecotopia is a kind of antithesis to our current moralizing and panicking represented by environmentalism.
But we should strive towards some higher synthesis that can be more than a sum of all the views and parts. For example, by working on hard tech and deep tech startups (ecotopia and bootstrapping our desired future) in the morning, taking part in something like Extinction Rebellion protests in the afternoon (enlightened doomsaying, effective collective action), and nurture collective wisdom and effective learning with our peers and families in the evening (GameB, collective wisdom, regeneration and biohacking).
These doom prophesies compel us to take an urgent action now, to avoid a disastrous definite future in a couple of years or decades.
Here Žižek would probably reply, “don’t act, think”. Similarly, current thinkers in the “sensemaking internet” or Intellectual Deep Web circles would probably agree — world is complex and we need to think deeply and analyse the problems really well, go slow and don’t make things worse. In complex systems you cannot optimize for one variable and one goal — increasing crop yields, might lead to soil and water pollution, etc. We cannot solve complex problems with complicated approaches.
Daniel Schmachtenberger talks about generator functions of existential risk really well and Tom Chi, former boss of the secretive Google X research lab, has similar views and ideas on complexity and on what to do to fight climate change. He says, we should repurpose tech through rapid prototyping, and has a course on it, and we should create invention catalysts (catalytic technologies) that can make previously impossible, possible. For example, autonomous car is an invention catalyst, that can turn parking lots in cities into parks. Because we will need much less cars once autonomous cars become a reality. So catalytic tech is already a meta move — building technology, tools or platforms that can help us to build other technologies and regenerate whole ecosystems.
The idea of repurposing is crucial here, because if you repurpose an already existing e.g. military technology it is much safer vis-à-vis existential risks than creating a brand-new technology that can be repurposed later by someone else for nefarious aims. Put differently, repurposing is another word for the concept of exaptation (non-linear adaptation) that originates from biology — an accidental discovery of novel purpose for a tool or organ that was developed for something completely else. An engineer in the 1950s noticed his Hershey’s bar melting in his pocked when he was near a radar — and a few years later a microwave was brought to market. Similarly, Dave Snowden talks about how dinosaurs had feathers that were originally developed for warmth or courtship display, but later by accident served for flying, when dinosaurs kept falling of the trees.
Imploitation instead of exploitation, antifragility instead of fragility
Alexander Bard came with another cool word besides the concept of ecotopia, and the word is imploitation as the opposite of exploitation. The idea is to make the use of resource as long as possible, to prolong the life of things by upcycling (circular economy), but also to withhold pleasure for a time and postpone consumption for the sake of later investment. The original idea comes from tantric Buddhism. Again, there might be some useful explanation from biology and culture in what Nassim Taleb calls antifragility and over-compensation. Basically, if you fast for a while or if you endure weightlifting your muscles over-compensate and grow bigger to be prepared for yet heavier weights in the future. The main idea is to keep a healthy balance — not to over-do it with training, and to cycle off some practices and substances, to let your body recover and regenerate.
Tom Chi compares total mass of humans to total mass of ants, that is almost the same 350 million tons. People eat 3% of their weight per day in terms of food, and ants eat 30% of their weight in food. And they are also omnivores like us. So, the issue isn’t consumption or overpopulation as such, the issue is that ants are a net positive to nature, because they provide more ecosystem services than they take in ecosystem consumption. So this is the idea of over-compensation and antifragility explained differently. We should do the same, overcompensate the nature and provide more ecosystem services than we consume by employing catalytic technologies, like repurposed drones that can plant trees by shooting biodegradable tree pods into earth. Basically we should go beyond sustainability.
Tom Chi explains that sustainablity is too low of a bar, because it is a very unstable equilibrium. Dave Snowden and his peak predator theory explains why. Simon Wardley does the same by his visual mapping of evolution of business opportunities. Basically products turn into commodities, and companies tend to die. So even the sustainable companies might become unsustainable due to fierce competition, once their custom-built inventions turn into common products and later into commodities (think iPhones).
To avoid this peril, one needs to repeat the innovation loop, exapt and leverage existing commodities, create new innovations and bring them through product stage again to commodities to build a yet higher stake. So machine learning, drones and servers are soon to be commodities that can be leveraged for planting billion trees by some custom-build technology put on top of this existing stack.
The difference between antifragility and resilience is well explained actually by Jordan Hall in a short article, and not by Nassim Taleb. Robustness is to stay unmoved when someone pushes you, resilience is to hit back when this happens, and antifragility is to “invent aikido” when facing an attack. Antifragility deals more with information and less with just energy.
Deep tech and hard tech — merging circular economy and space industry into one collective endeavour
Circular economy is a practical example of imploitation — closing the loops on material production, trying to avoid and eliminate waste, and using waste as a new input in production. Interestingly the phrase of “closing the loops” can be understood more broadly in ethical terms to “have skin in the game” and to be exposed to the consequences of own decisions and actions. Closing the loops can be understood also as improving decision-making through faster OODA loops: observe-orient-decide-act.
Space industry is the current popular dream represented by Musk and “Occupy Mars” movement. Alexander Bard criticizes it as a childish dream of expoitation of new frontiers. On the same grounds, he also criticizes last such attempt — moon landing and the whole moonshot era of the 1960s, which for many thinkers, like Peter Thiel and Mariana Mazzucato, is an era we need to get back to, and a type of mindset represented by optimistic and definite future (a future with a clear deadline and coordination around projected time and a clear moonshot). But for Alexander Bard the idea to occupy other planets is childish, because we cannot live outside of planet Earth really well. Spending long time in arctic conditions, let alone space, damages our brain for example. Tom Chi and Daniel Schmachtenberger would say that an individual is an emergent property of our ecosystem. An individual is just an illusion and cannot be contemplated even as a concept, without thinking about plants that create the air that we breathe. We wouldn’t last more than 5 minutes without that air and so we don’t exist without trees and plants.
But of course, moonshot era brought us many unintended innovations thanks to the process of exaptation (repurposing). Something developed for space then can be used for outdoor hiking now. Similarly, today, space industry startups with nano satellites can help farmers in Africa, better protect animals from poachers, rivers from polluters, and forests from illegal logging.
We can look for better synergies between circular economy efforts to close the loops and the space industry efforts to reach further and further into space, and look for new moonshots, or better — reversed moonshots — by using space industry to “occupy earth” better and wiser, by using technology to better love the stranger, as Alexander Bard tells it.
So, we need to become not (just) astronauts, but (rather) psychonauts, as Jamie Wheal and others put it — exploring the inner universe of the psyche, biohacking, healing our traumas and regenerating our bodies and souls to get into flow, and into group flow, and into collective coherence more often and for longer. We need these altered states of consciousness to invent (exapt and repurpose) new technologies and to close all the loops, improve and speed-up our rapid prototyping efforts and OODA loops.
Further notes
Ecotopia compared to collective wisdom with effective action are two somewhat separate modes of viewing and acting in the world.
Ecotopia is a third-person view, the ideal of an antifragile and interconnected planet as a garden, where the complex and complicated are in a balance and synergy. It is a result of science, technology and engineering. Alexander Bard talks about Cosmopolis as an idea of interconnected charter cities or city states. This is the same thing in my opinion but on a smaller scale. On a yet smaller scale Bard talks about “wifi castles” or modern monasteries in rural areas far from big cities. From this third-person view, if I may use my limited understanding of Forrest Landry’s work, we could also propose something like interconnected glocal villages or rural communities — something like decelerators (opposite to urban startup accelerators) and modern monasteries or rural charter schools, rural startup hubs and retreat centers.
(With my Slovak and Kenyan friends, we have cofounded Sote Hub in Voi town in 2015, one of the first rural startup hubs in the world at that time. So, I am a bit biased in this direction of rural decelerators. A cool word I just discovered. But at that time, it was created without all this knowledge about collective wisdom, flow hacking, rapid prototyping, regenerative practices and deep tech / hard tech. So, we are excited to include some these practices in our annual Sote Innovation Fair and prototyping competitions.)
I propose a placeholder term for this third necessary element — rural decelarators — a deep tribe. These places can help to connect global nomads, or netocrats as Bard calls the new proletariat in the internet age, and help them to create deep embodied collective wisdom and deep relationships of trust, that enable effective collective action, and are working together on deep tech and hard tech startups. Locally in real life, but also over the internet and over the globe.
Effective collective action and collective wisdom is more of a peer-to-peer view and emergent practice in a complex system. It is a search for a Game B, a phase shift on a scale as big as switching from Dunbar coherence, to civilization some 5000 years ago (Game A from then until now). A deep tribe, a decelerator and a Game B could be the same — but the first two are objects or things viewed from above, the other is a process, a lived and embodied experience. An infinite game . I wrote about “something between charter cities and charter schools” and this Game B culture and communities that practice it could be it.
A third area that needs further work is personal regeneration and personal development, bio-hacking, healing trauma, and deeper and wiser living. This is the area of flow-hacking presented by Jamie Wheal, the innovations in nootropics, sound and light at music festivals, regeneration at spas and yoga retreat centers. This area can be connected to regenerative agriculture as meditation, of regenerating whole bio-regions as Joe Brewer does. So an idea of personal mysticism practices, can be connected to regenerating not just soul but also bio-regions, and this can be connected to decelerators as rural spaces and gardens and Game B communities that occupy them for short time or permanently.
If people talk about the need for a universal basic income (UBI) today, I am afraid it would not work in the context of big cities where everyone wants to live. But it could work to re-balance and reverse or slow-down urbanization, a major contributing factor to climate change (also because people want to imitate and out-compete each other, buying silly SUVs and pick-up trucks while living in the cities).
So an alternative to the universal basic income, something like universal scholarship, idea I wrote about here, would help to bring people to rural areas for a certain time during the year at least, and focus on deep studies and creating deep tech startups, away from loud crowds and constant competition and imitation.
