A Gentle Introduction to Project NEOS

Birthing a playground for ideas about creating an entirely new operating system for the global family resident on Earth

“Culture arises and unfolds in and as play.” — Johan Huizinga, Dutch historian, 1872–1945. Original photo by Robert Collins, reworked courtesy Beachballs.com.

Consider the question: “How will humanity re-create humanity?”

Project NEOS (New Earth Operating System) is a sufficiently complex initiative designed to inspire and conspire with great regenerative minds who seek to create a new global operating system. The overall intention is to aid humanity’s next leap in maturity by intentionally designing a different operating system (OS) for the global family resident on Planet Earth — a human OS more compatible with a natural OS.

“Evolution advances by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses.” — Steven Johnson¹

For years, hundreds, thousands of individuals have created initiatives hoping to solve some of Earth’s problems. In many ways we have given our rightlihood away in order to help others and to improve the state of the world. Indeed, we have not been helpless or not engaging. It is simply that the operating system designed to engage from a central control and power system is not nearly agile enough to deal with the realities of the 21st Century. It has crushed the majority of life on Earth for gains for the few. It has removed, we the people, from believing it possible to create the world in our dreams. Very simply, Project NEOS is an attempt to draft new playground rules for the game of life. We ponder how we could discover deeper relationships and mutual contextuality with each other and how we could find new ways to engage with institutions, with other living species and with Earth herself.

The project is inspired by a comment from environmentalist, Paul Hawken:²

“Civilisation needs a new operating system. We need it within a few decades and you are the programmers. Get coding, before it’s too late.” — Paul Hawken

A new operating system for and by the entirety of humanity is a radical idea. It has not yet been attempted.³ Never before has it been more urgently required. And in this moment of great turning, of leaving one paradigm behind, and giving shape to a new one, we the people do have opportunity, possibility, potential, responsibility, cause for celebration.

Problems: our current reality

• Our human and planetary situation is far worse than we can comprehend within the prevalent paradigm. Our current operating system closes us down, squeezes us out, requires we take small steps, always being watched over by those seeking power, money, vast profits and a small mindframe for who really matters. ⁴ Mindsets of scarcity, competition, and artificial boundaries prevent us from seeing a better course of action. In essence, efforts to date to avoid an economic and ecologic collapse have failed. The predominant growth-based paradigm is dying, while consuming itself and everything in its path.⁵ All of this prevents us from accelerating the good work occurring all over Earth. The existing linear, top down, power statice stunts makeing small so many of our heroric efforts.
• Our institutions are failing humanity, when viewed through the lens of ‘where to next?’ (technology, science, religion, politics, economics, education, health, commerce, energy, defence). They have failed us because no institution or governing system views Earth as an interconnected, adaptive living system. We cannot speak or know one field without understanding and celebrating its reliance on every other field, ancient or within our future.
• The biggest belief system holding humanity back is money and how debt works. Behind the belief in debt money (where wealth is concentrated in ever fewer hands) lies a paradigm of scarcity, and even deeper lies the scientific worldview that the universe is in entropy, or a constant state of hopeless decline. This two-thousand-plus years old paradigm — rooted in a toxic combination of debt, scarcity and entropy — encourages short-term growth-only thinking and brutal competition. In short, we have rejected Darwin’s intended regenerative meaning of ‘survival of the fittest’⁶ and have instead adopted a degenerative, growth-at-all-cost, social Darwinism belief system.
• Humanity doesn’t identify as a whole. Instead, humanity operates as completely dislocated entities: individuals, families, communities, towns, cities, tribes, nations and continents. It’s an either/or, for or against, mechanistic, polarised and seemingly dead and disconnected world.
• Any healthy living system (the human body, an ant colony, the Amazon jungle are but three examples) views itself as a whole and relies on four core skills for survival: Collective Intelligence, Distributed Leadership, Swarm Creativity and Regenerative Value.⁷ As a species, humanity has not yet learned how to tap into relational collective intelligence, leadership is anything but distributed, competition has made swarm creativity impossible and we have stoically clung to degenerative behaviour. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that humanity has made little progress in addressing planetary crises, since we do not possess a single core skill for survival.
• Earth-based, community values have been rejected as incompatible with social Darwinism. A number of time-tested indigenous societies flourished for thousands of years in Australia,⁸ South America,⁹ Central America,¹⁰ North America,¹¹ and Africa.¹² Many of these cultures no longer exist and some claim — specifically in Africa — that the colonial ethic of competition and wealth accumulation theoretically condones a willingness to kill in the quest for domination and resource extraction. Their answers are not our answers but they contain hints, warnings, patterns of behavior. We have much to learn.
• Put simply, our current operating system was not designed to support living, life-giving, adaptive systems.

Why an “Operating System?”

“We cannot get THERE from HERE.” There are too many assumptions and mind frames that have been drilled into us by the paradigm we have all grown up with. “But we can get HERE from THERE!” First build the dream, the intent, the direction. Big audacious goals are often easier to realize than small, too little, too late ones. What is needed is a new operating system to hasten and accelerate the moving into a new paradigm, one based on justice and opportunity, healthy relationships for all life, birth through death.

Current global challenges are typically grouped into domains: ecologic, economic, social, political, and others. Effort is then invested to address each domain, assuming no connection with other domains. While this approach may work in a mechanistic system, it does not work in a living, adaptive system.

Since no word exists to collectively link all of these domains together, it may help to refer to an Earth Operating System: the collection of systems and agreements that manages resources and provides common services for participants within the system. Note that since we are considering Earth as a single, living, adaptive system, we are abstracting one layer above that of nation states, political, religious and economic structures (Not sure what this means, but I suspect the new operating system will be more like a meshwork, systematic nodes and patches, local and global, supporting collective genius and intracontextuality … a continual unfolding and enfolding weaving of new patterns and emergent energies)

In the world of computers, it is common to update the operating system — the system that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs — on a regular basis, to take advantage of new developments and new understandings. The Current Earth Operating System has not been updated in over 250 years and there are signs everywhere that what used to work for modernity in the past, no longer serves us.

Beliefs of our existing paradigm (basically, I don’t think we need this section as I am sure the people we first attract will pretty much realize this. I think it important that we don’t over explain)

The way we each experience daily life — our worldview — is made up of two kinds of beliefs: those we take to be facts, and the values we choose to adhere to. We steer our way through our ‘facts’ using our values to guide us. Some of the commonly accepted ‘facts’ that require challenging are:

1. Representative democracy is the best form of governance and works for the good of all.
2. The method of electing representatives (voting system) is accountable and legitimate.
3. The media is independent & impartial.
4. The judiciary is independent & impartial and the police provide protection for everyone.
5. Money is scarce and only issued by central banks.
6. The more you buy, the happier you will be.
7. Getting a job or starting a company and working hard is all that will make you successful.
8. Marriage and adhering to a monotheistic, patriarchal religion is the only way to uphold morals in society.
9. The Western scientific, materialistic worldview is the only way of knowing reality.
10. Everyone has free will.

An Open Invitation for Wildly Creative Play…

David Bohm, physicist, reminds us that “New thoughts generally arise with a play of the mind, and the failure to appreciate this is actually one of the major blocks to creativity. Thought is generally considered to be a sober and weighty business. But here it is being suggested that creative play is an essential element in forming new hypotheses and ideas. Indeed, thought which tries to avoid play is in fact playing false with itself. Play, it appears, is the very essence of thought.”¹³

The idea we are toying with is:

What healthy, dynamic operating system could be developed and deployed globally?

This is beyond the scope of anything attempted to date and is ours to create. This new model cannot be defined within mental confines and biases of any single group (for example Washington DC, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Zug, UN, WEF, BIS, communism, capitalism, etc.)

Here are some of the questions we intend playing with:

• Feedback Loops: What are the models capable of responding to feedback from the entire global system? For example, the immigrant problem has social, economic, ecologic, historic and political considerations, all of which must be taken into account before addressing the problem locally.
• Infinite Game: How will we ourselves as stewards engage in mutual learning, liminal leadership, new patterns and iterative processes? How do we ourselves define the game rich in play, laughter, poetry, with ancient memories calling forth new possibilities, new ways of seeing, sensing, connecting, and constructing new patterns of behaviour and value? Our efforts are vitally important and we can only succeed by bringing our best selves into this game and play for the long term.¹⁴
• Work In Progress: Instead of solutions, how can we find, sense, see new patterns emerge from our mutual learning. We know solutions are temporary, more like momentary stops along the way giving guidance to further knowing, further adaptation. How do we birth a new operating system that is alive and constantly in discovery… a dance with art, music, science, philosophy, and common knowing? Project NEOS is the ongoing adaptation, enhancement, merging and practical application of a number of significant bodies of work — creativity at it best!

Bodies of work referenced in Project NEOS

1. The evolution of living systems, with Earth viewed as a single, complex living and adaptive system based on the work of Elisabet Sahtouris,¹⁵ Nora Bateson,¹⁶ Paul Hawken,¹⁷ Marilyn Hamilton,¹⁸ James Lovelock¹⁹ and dozens more;
2. A new vocabulary, as suggested by Nora Bateson. We recognise the old as driven by unnatural hierarchies, war machines, lifeless products, linear Newtonian thinking where everything is prepackaged and given a price without accounting for what is mattering.
3. Complementary currencies, guided by the pioneering work of Bernard Lietaer,²⁰ the MetaCurrency Project²¹ and others;
4. Short-term prosocial²² reward systems to use as we begin, but designed to phase out over time as we come to know the culture being created is the reward, ethical circulation is the game. This body of knowledge is based on a reworked version of Universal Basic Income (UBI)²³ — the initiative attempting to address technological unemployment — and the Terra Trade Reference Currency;²⁴
5. Emerging Strategic Technologies²⁵ brought together and used with warm data,²⁶ symmathesies,²⁷ and transcontextual interrelationships.²⁸
6. The immense global movement of environmental and social activism, which Paul Hawken calls Blessed Unrest;²⁹
7. All brought together through a methodology capable of elegantly assembling complexity, pioneered by Gail Taylor.³⁰ The process works by first creating a new field of energy and vision and then brings together joyful, excited participants who have finally come to know the maturity of a new humanity.

An undertaking like this is beyond the scope of anything attempted by humanity³ and will require a species-wide coming together around serious activities, birthed as play. The first few rounds are laid out below.

We have no idea where this might lead, but this is a calling to those who can hear and to those who desire a different game.

“All things are impossible until they happen, and then they become inevitable.” — Paul Eldridge³¹

Our Rounds

[Links to additional detail coming soon.]

• Round 1: Architect a Human Rights Income. This is our “culture hack” — a method of quickly and at scale cutting through the noise and distraction of the paradigm the vast majority find themselves trapped within and attract attention away from a broken system and give humanity hope. We will simply give interested participants a monthly complementary currency income — in the form of a tokenised Human Rights Income, not issued or controlled by any government. Money is an (almost) universal and desperate need, and we don’t believe UBI is the answer. This culture hack is to fundamentally and unequivocally address the root issue: money. While seemingly impossible, developments in cryptocurrencies and a better understanding of how money works now makes this possible. The culture hack is the necessarily large jolt our collective consciousness requires in order to emerge into a higher level of maturity.
• Round 2: Inject Highly Contagious Culture Virus Into Humanity (the Human Rights Income)
• Round 3: Play hard, play fair, nobody hurt (From New Games). Only once the Idea Virus has been widely accepted, can we start work on what a new operating system might look like. We cannot design a new system while trapped in the paradigm of the current system.
• Round 4: Learn with the Team; celebrate awesomeness; magic; and the energies to sense new healings within Earth and all of us who depend on her and who she trusts to be in partnership with.

The Phases

[Links to additional detail coming soon.]

• Phase 000: Develop Initial Idea
• Phase 00: Form the Core Coaching Team ←we are here
• Phase 0: Secure Funding
• Phase 1: Initial DesignShop, where the core team will design the new complementary currency, to ensure maximum acceptance. “Everyone can create money; the problem is to get it accepted.”— Hyman Minsky
• Phase 2: Inject Idea Virus
• Phase 3: Onboard the Players

Want to Play?

Your stewardship would be a long-term commitment as there are no shortcuts to the game that needs to be played. The rewards are substantial. Find out more and express your initial interest here [link coming soon].

The 250-Mile View from Space

Perspective matters. Image courtesy SYFY.

NEOS is a constantly evolving, infinite,³³ fluid game. You can access the regularly updated high-level mindmap guiding its formation here.

Footnotes

1. From a WSJ opinion piece: The Genius of the Tinkerer by Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.
2. Quote slightly adapted from Paul Hawken’s 2009 University of Portland Commencement Address — unfortunately no video or audio recording of the speech exists.
3. For centuries, innovators have created enclaves in an attempt to escape institutional barriers. America itself was created to escape religious persecution in Europe. Small territorial experiments in alternative government have been attempted, using the Startup Society Framework. The Seasteading Institute believes that the oceans are our next logical escape plan. The Next System Project is an attempt to address the systemic challenges the United States faces now and in coming decades. Mars is being considered as an extreme option to escape planetary crisis. Clearly humanity has been captivated by the idea of independence. However, there is no historical precedent that considers our Pale Blue Dot as a living, adaptive system, where all its inhabitants collaborate in the same manner that the cells and organisms of a living body work together towards peak performance.
4. The framework for the world’s most challenging problems is encapsulated in the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. However, this framework has received criticism for the inadequacy of the program. See a growing list of SDG Criticism.
5. “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” — Edward Abbey, anarchist environmentalist. The Post-Growth Challenge was first identified by the Club of Rome’s 1972 report, Limits to Growth, and updated in 2004. In 2018 a new working paper by leading ecological economist Professor Tim Jackson, Director of the University of Surrey’s Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) on behalf of the UK’s Ministry of Defence, concludes that we have entered a fundamentally new age of diminishing returns.
6. See, for example, The Flaws and Dissemination of Social Darwinism by Michael Heeney and Evolution Myths by Michael Le Page.
7. Teeming: How Superorganisms Work Together to Build Infinite Wealth on a Finite Planet by Tamsin Woolley-Barker.
8. Ancient Australia: world’s first nation of innovators by Darren Curnoe, ARC Future Fellow and Director of the Palaeontology, Geobiology and Earth Archives Research Centre (PANGEA), University of New South Wales.
9. For an example of South American flourishing, see the Olmec civilisation.
10. For an example of Central American flourishing, see the Mayan civilisation.
11. For an example of North American flourishing, see the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
12. See Africa’s Development: The Imperatives of Indigenous Knowledge and Values by Dr. Martin Odei Ajei, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy and Classics, University of Ghana (pdf).
13. Science, Order, and Creativity by David Bohm and F. David Peat, pp. 48.
14. “Finite games are the familiar contests of everyday life; they are played in order to be won, which is when they end. But infinite games are more mysterious. Their object is not winning, but ensuring the continuation of play. The rules may change, the boundaries may change, even the participants may change — as long as the game is never allowed to come to an end.” From Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse.
15. Elisabet Sahtouris, PhD is an internationally known evolution biologist, futurist, speaker, author and sustainability consultant to businesses, government agencies and other organisations. Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Website.
16. Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and educator, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute, based in Sweden. LinkedIn, Company Site, Personal Site.
17. Paul Gerard Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist. Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Personal Site.
18. Marilyn Hamilton PhD is the Founder and President of Integral City Meshworks. As a city evolutionist, author, researcher and academic, Marilyn co-creates a global constellation of Integral City Meshworkers, Learning habitats, Peer Associations and City Institutes. She incubates resilience and transformation strategies with Civic Leaders, Civil Society, Business and Community Voices that enable the Human Hive — Gaia’s Most Reflective Organ — to balance Placecaring with Placemaking. LinkedIn, Company Site.
19. James Ephraim Lovelock, CH CBE FRS is an independent scientist, environmentalist, and futurist who lives in Dorset, England. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system. Wikipedia, Personal Site.
20. Bernard Lietaer is an economist, professor and author of numerous books including New Money for a New World. He studies monetary systems and promotes the idea that communities can benefit from creating their own local or complementary currency, which circulate parallel with national currencies. Lietaer joined Bancor as their Chief Monetary Architect in 2017, which means that since he authored New Money (authored prior to the arrival of Bitcoin), he has embraced the idea of cryptocurrencies. Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Personal Site.
21. The MetaCurrency Project is about defining the infrastructure and protocols necessary for an open source economy. This requires new technological capacities which need to function in a non-monopolisable manner. Founded by Arthur Brock (LinkedIn, Website) and Eric Harris-Braun (LinkedIn, Website). Project Website.
22. Prosocial Behaviour is social behaviour that benefits other people or society as a whole, such as helping, sharing, donating, co-operating, and volunteering. In the context of Project NEOS, we define prosocial behaviour as any activity that regenerates Earth. Wikipedia.
23. Universal Basic Income is a type of program in which citizens (or permanent residents) of a country may receive a regular sum of money from the government, with no means test. Wikipedia.
24. The Terra Trade Reference Currency is the name of a possible world currency. The concept was proposed by Belgian economist and expert on monetary systems Bernard A. Lietaer in 2001, based on a similar proposal from the 1930s. Wikipedia, White Paper.
25. Emerging Strategic Technologies (EST) is a phrase coined by by Nayef R.F. Al-Rodhan in his book, The Politics of Emerging Strategic Technologies: Implications for Geopolitics, Human Enhancement and Human Destiny. ESTs include blockchain, robotics, biotechnology, genomics, nanotechnology, materials science, artificial intelligence, computational logic and cognitive neuroscience. Al-Rodhan argues that future evolution into transhumans is inevitable. In preparation, the global community is urged to establish strict moral and legal guidelines balancing innovation with the guarantee of dignity for all.
26. Warm Data is a phrase coined by Nora Bateson and is defined as: transcontextual information about the interrelationships that integrate a complex system. Full explanation.
27. Symmathesy is a word in progress coined by Nora Bateson and is defined as: interaction within multiple variables to produce a mutual learning context. Wikipedia.
28. Transcontextual Interrelationships is a term coined by Gregory Bateson in 1969, which refers to the ways in which multiple contexts come together to form complex systems. It allows for a concentration on the interdependency between contexts that give resilience to both living and non-living systems. Also see a transcontextual analysis of the so-called ‘refugee crisis.’
29. Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming by Paul Hawken explores the individuals and organisations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organising from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people’s needs worldwide. Website, Amazon.
30. Gail Taylor is the co-founder of the MG Taylor Corporation and founder of Tomorrow Makers, who for more than 5 decades has been practicing and facilitating group genius, instructional design and experiential learning. The group genius methodology is called DesignShop and is described in the book, Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work by Gayle Pergamit and Chris Peterson of The Foresight Institute. LinkedIn, Company Website, MG Taylor.
31. Humanity In A Creative Universe, Stuart A. Kauffman, 2016
32. The quote “It always seems impossible, until it is done” is often incorrectly attributed to Nelson Mandela. The earliest form of the saying is attributed to Pliny the Elder who died in AD 79, but we have used an extended version, which appeared in the 1965 collection “Maxims for a Modern Man” by Paul Eldridge. Source.
33. With reference to Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse.