the META MAN
Hyper Individual and Global > Life emerging beyond COVID 19
Introduction
Our world is rapidly transforming right in front of us — and probably for the first time in history, it is at a pace that even the most advanced technology built by us can not cope.
The impact of this crisis is unlike anything mankind has faced in the past. While we have had bigger pandemics, we have had our wars and we have had our financial meltdowns, but it has never enveloped the world simultaneously ever!
The various “big” crisis we have experienced in the past were gradual — at times local, at other times regional. Several of the big crisis had a global impact but its spread was gradual or more like dominoes falling slowly. It was a slow chain reaction.
Just a decade ago we were celebrating “the world is flat” ( ref Thomas L. Friedman) and assembled the most ambitious global supply chains that optimised information, finances, material resources and energy availability across the globe. These marvellous supply chains are hyperactive and dynamic in their response to global variations in currency values, political unrests, fuel prices, labour cost arbitrages and natural resource availability. We had seemingly mapped-in all possible scenarios including tsunami’s, earthquakes, hurricanes, pandemics, government failures, national defaults, rogue nations and dictators. We were confident about the ability of our consumption led economy to triumph over all problems. Sooner or later the equations resolve themselves and the balance is brought back. The world comes together to help nations in managing disasters and the world comes together in isolating a rogue nation, the world comes together in creating landmark agreements and treaties, the world comes together in regulating prices and controlling access to resources. The world looked like it had found this algorithm of success that was capable of adjusting to the dynamic set of variables our diversity was capable of generating. It was not a perfect algorithm but it was a stable one, well tested and evolving with each event as it was challenged.
Then along came the pandemic- initially it seemed like any other natural disaster — localised and peripheral in our mind. We thought that the rest of the world would go about business as usual. We would set into motion our disaster management systems and get the problem under control, isolate it and neutralise its impact. After all we are hyperconnected today, agile and managing everything with our “just in time” supply chains. We have multiple options in our global consumption led economies to boot up demands and supply, in case one fails the other can take over. Today that same advantage has become the biggest drawback as COVID19 spreads sweeping across nations, hammering boundaries and freedom. Within a short time its made our leaders realise the power of “non state actors”. At this moment we are still in the midst of the outbreak, how it will pan out is polemic!
What we do already know for certain is that it will upturn the global economy, affect lives, and the impact will linger for a long time to come.
An immediate and major emerging conversation is the impact of the pandemic on global trade and national self-reliance. Every country hit by the pandemic is struggling to best use its locally available resources or figure out how fast they can develop something of their own. As nations close boundaries and put an embargo on resource sharing, the visual of a world that’s “Flat” no longer exists. A secondary impulse in the brain triggers that most valuable of human emotions –TRUST –who can we trust to take care of us?
The rapid spread of the pandemic and the depth of its impact has exposed plaguing issues buried deep inside our current scientific, social, cultural, political and philosophical understanding of the world we have created. Suddenly it feels we have moved into a new world without being prepared for the outcomes of this move!
It seems and feels like we are at an evolutionary threshold that marks the emergence of the Hyper Individual- A Global Man.
META MAN is a collection of questions, thoughts, analysis and ideas that are descending into our landscape with the emergence of pandemic, the circumstances that we are in have not been created overnight, they have been brewing and layering to form a larger mass but the pandemic has magnified the impact and urgency of the debates that were on the fringes of our dynamic global consumer universe. META MAN will walk towards synthesising the inputs through a series of essays, and explore — What opportunities emerge from this change in our world perspective?
Chapter 1
Where do we stand today?
Where we are today is the culmination of the last 200+ years of Industrialisation and Globalisation. We have over this time continuously worked towards optimising our abilities to create value, utilising the best combination of available resources — material, technology and people. Working through rapid iterations of technological innovations and sharing of knowledge through universities, books and then the internet, creating global supply chains through colonisation initially and then capitalism. One thing has been consistent — evolution of mankind is happening at an unprecedented pace, it has led to the abundance that we see all around us today.
What’s also quite well established today is the fact that this rapid innovation and abundance has come at a cost to our environment and has polarised our idea of the future in recent times. Just before COVID19 hit us the biggest global debate was on climate change, its mitigation and required action. World leaders and nations are widely divided between the solutions and the benefits. From outright deniers to radical believers we have a communication dead end with stalemates like the collapse of the Paris Agreement. The younger generation has emerged as the strongest advocacy group for the cause of our environment. The Gen Z as they are “branded” view consumption led economies with distrust and suspicion [ ‘True Gen’: Generation Z — McKinsey ] While they fight with their heart for the cause they believe in ; they have little or no real tools to impact change. It is the nature and complexity of the ecosystem that makes it so difficult to modify industrial economy towards anything other than its core function — to optimise resources and create wealth.
The industrial economy has no room for the environment in its source code, earth and its other beings and minerals are all resources, for man to “optimise” for the creation of wealth. That also explains the kind of responses we see when debating sustainability — while everyone wants to identify the problems, there is little we can profess as solutions. As long as we continue to think from within the “consumption led growth algorithm” we cannot arrive at a solution to a problem that exists outside the equation itself.
One of the big failures of the sustainability advocacy has been its reliance on a dooms day scenario as a motivator, climate change will lead to rising sea levels will lead to the end of the world as we know it! As we have seen, throughout history mankind is drawn towards “a better world” towards “abundance” towards “pleasure and happiness”. Fear or scarcity or anxiety do not synchronise us, they do get our attention but it is not from the point of view of “inspiration” its leaning more towards “avoidance”. We don’t like it when bad things happen to us, while we surround ourselves with NEWS that’s mostly focused on tragedy and pain but what we get from that is a kind of perceived ability to dodge the bullet when fired at us, we don’t enjoy that pain or disasters we see in the news — we just want to be better prepared — if that was to happen to us. Till now the debate on climate change is mostly coagulated in that space of “information about doom” we see a lot of it, sympathise with it, participate in it — but don’t really know what’s the bright side of this situation. We don’t have a superhero leading us out of this painful situation.
Climate Change is now a mainstream agenda in many countries, political parties are taking pole positions and elected governments have made it their signature strategy. What will happen post pandemic to this tremendous momentum we have built in the last 2 decades around Climate Change and its linked sustainable practices?
While the Climate Change movement was led by environmentalists — COVID 19 has stumped everyone, it is the other face of Nature — the one that’s not seen in pretty pictures and clear pollution free skies, blue oceans and floating ice over the poles — it is the dark side of what man has always feared and wanted shelter from !!
In this time of healthcare crisis the first and most essential of things that we need are all made from plastics, we need sterile environments, inert materials, and we need to eliminate all forms of living contaminations — these products and conditions are best created with synthetic materials and technology that’s immune to nature’s fury of microbes and viruses and bacteria’s. The only hope today in our fight against the virus is the vaccine, what happens till we find the vaccine? How we respond to COVID 19 crisis and how we emerge from it might change our future forever.
What happens to the debate on climate change? What happens to the “dooms day” narrative post COVID19?
The other elephant in the room
Now lets try and see a different perspective — another narrative that is garnering prominent mind space in the world today! If we stretch our canvas across into spiritual dimensions -there is movement evolving around consciousness, mindfulness, non-duality or singularity. The conversation is now at the cross-section of ancient philosophies, material science, medical sciences and artificial intelligence — the rapid iterations of our technological evolution has put us face to face with the very essence of being Human! Who are we? Where have we come from and where are we going? What’s the energy that drives our intelligence? What’s beyond MIND? The introspection that gave birth to the oldest religions and spiritual philosophies is back on centre stage as we have conquered the material world and are standing at the door steps of the meta physical world. Are we just material beings or are we conscious beings? Are we individuals or we are parts of the same whole, children from the same source? Is there a collective consciousness — what if there is? Is this consciousness American? Or Indian or is it Islamic or Christian or did it come from Confucius ? Is it rich or poor or black or white or red or anything in between? Is it man or woman?
The nature of barriers and divisions that we have created over the 200,000 years of our evolution stand to be decimated in the light of this simple and emerging question- who are we? — And it is not surprising that the question is today reborn after centuries of technological and scientific breakthroughs — today as we stand at the doors of imagining singularity, we are forced to revisit almost everything we have built till now. All our theory and laws of physics stand to be rewritten as we factor in consciousness into our equation (ref. Donald D. Hoffman — The Case against Reality ). What happens when consciousness is recognised as a universal state of existence and a force that drives everything we know and do? What happens to the city, state, country, religion, colour, vocation, position and everything else in between?
When we prefix these emerging questions about consciousness, environment, sustainability and the universal nature of our existence into the current equation — what do we see?
What is driving our world at the pace that it is being driven?
The pace at which we work today is powered by the technologies we have created. These technologies have rapidly evolved at an exponential pace in the last 100 years. From globally interconnected wired and wireless networks to powerful microprocessors and computing devices planted inside almost everything from a washing machine to aircraft. These technologies are free from cultural, linguistic, national, philosophical boundaries. They can be built and deployed with plug and play convenience across the world. They are designed to have interphases that connects them with the culture, language, nation context of its users, thus making the technology itself free of pre-existing boundaries created by earlier civilisations.
What enables technology to flow across boundaries? What is the language of technology?
Just to put this into perspective if we compare the key discoveries of energy sources that have marked technological jumps for human race and created abundance for the civilisations that mastered them, we see a pattern. The pattern corelates source energy potency with our abilities to grow with it and build an amazing economic, ideological, philosophical, spiritual world using the fruits of this source. Starting with the steam engine that allowed us to move from horse power into mechanical power and changed the nature of our civilisation, moving ships across continents, carriages across rail roads and industries working 24 hrs, we became free from the limitations of animal energy as a primary source to move things. Then came fossil fuels, they presented an exponential jump in the energy they offered compared to steam driven machines. We can go to the moon with this fuel, power our cities, web the air with aircrafts and enjoy personal freedom to explore the world with cars and other roving machines, the availability of fossil fuels made our world what it is today. Somewhere in between transition from steam to fossil fuel we discovered electricity! There is something fundamentally different about this source of energy, both in its power, abundance and true nature. Let’s just pair the different sources to see how significant is the difference, the fastest steam engine could travel at 200 km/hr and the fastest jet today can race at 7,200 km/hr, compare that with the speed of light at 300,000 km/sec or 1.07 billion km/hr — that’s the speed at which light travels. This jump in speed is phenomenal! The difference is not just about the speed or power or its nature of being — the electric current as energy and light as a source is transient in nature, its availability in literally infinite and so is its power when we compare with anything we have experienced or created ever. It is the most powerful thing, may be it is not even a thing, it has no mass and has no resistance of its own, hence its not a thing! And yet it is so powerful.
What’s the true nature of electric current? How has its appearance in our world transformed us so rapidly?
These are questions we need to ask and find answers. While we have learnt to make things with it and are able to move the current across time and space, do we really know what it is?
Electricity transcends the dimensions of space and time, we are able to use it to create an amazingly diverse set of things with it. We can use its power to move physical things like cars and mechanical industries on the other end we can use its power to move information and ideas with bits of data and we can use it to connect with us at a non-material and neural dimension. It appears to be the source of source energy — it seems to be the thing that is closest to the idea of consciousness as we know it in our physical touch it, see it and smell it world. And while electricity has transformed the world as we know it, we are still at the entry gate of its true potential.
What is the science behind the electric current? What’s the language of electricity?
Today we harness the power of this magnificent energy source using the binary language. Modern world is built on a very efficiently paired combination of technological innovations that use electric current as primary fuel and digital bits as information modules. By exponential layering of these components we have created billions of complex variations that are contentiously evolving and learning from each other to create the advanced machines and the digital information networks.
This universe powered by electricity and digital bits is created by an interconnected network that speaks in binarylanguage and is able to bridge across nations, languages, cultures and all other boundaries set up by earlier stages of our evolution. This binary language is universal — it transcends everything, in many ways like the idea of consciousness. The binary logic of 0 and 1 / on and off / yes and no / right and wrong, is the foundational language for the complex logic based circuitry of a microprocessors and software that’s at the heart of electronics, computers, it is also the base language for the internet and all software that runs the world today. Every logic that we have built to run our efficient world today is based on the foundational language of binary.
We don’t get to see this world in binary code because we have built highly sophisticated interphase layers on top of the foundational language of the binary to help us connect with it using our existing linguistic and visual communication tools. These layers of software and hardware act as tools to enable us continue to function within our knowledge and comfort zone while highly sophisticated machines, logic circuits and code compilers instantaneously convert them to binary. The binary is the real language of the technological world we live in. It is the language of light and electricity, this is a the most significant and fundamental jump in our evolution from physical energy sources to non-physical energy sources.
This binary language has shown us how we can have an extremely personal and sensual experience without knowing anything about the language itself. No one owns this language, it belongs to humanity, its logic works in democratic nations as well as it does in communist nations, it is agnostic to any corruption at its source — its logic is so pure that it just “IS”. As technology builds a larger and larger part of our living world with this language we convert more and more of our “reality” into the “digital” realm. The digital realm operates with non-physical energy like electricity, it is not the same energy source like fire, water and minerals as we have known for millenniums. We have just discovered this source 200 years back, at this point we don’t understand it fully, but we can pull some impressive stunts and tricks with it. The real power of this energy source is just being understood by us. And with this little awareness we have already achieved a fully connected world in less than 100 years. It has already broken all the barriers we had built since centuries and has created a new layer of existence — the digital world with its connected electrical devices on top of the existing physical world. This digital world enables us to increasingly replace/substitute elements from our physical world and replace them with “binary” creations. Most of the time we dont even realise what’s getting replaced, the sheer powerful nature of this source and its undisputed speed and logic makes everything we create with it superior to the physical material based solutions. We will see the impact of this replacement of digital with physical more clearly when we study the disruptions caused by technology on the goods and services landscape later in the narrative. It is amazing to watch the speed at which we have evolved since we discovered it, and how profound its impact has been on our civilization.
The new Economy
We are interconnected like never before in the history of mankind. While the spiritual philosophies have believed for thousands of years that we are all connected and part of a singular consciousness, its been hard to verify empirically, but today the world is connected — through the internet and mobile networks. While our governments still sit and operate inside their boundaries, the flow of information is no longer arranged by geographic boundaries, this in many ways is amplified by the spread of COVID 19 too! This intensely interconnected world is sharing information in real-time. The time space boundaries of the past are already re-defined — what happens in one part of the world is immediately shared and available in an opposite time zone. Day — night and TIME — just 24 hr days are relics of the past, people are working in time zones different from where they are living, people are consuming information and goods from different parts of the world. Goods or services we use are now designed to be universal, and are consumed as intended. These goods and services are agnostic to state, country, religion, ‘ism orientations. While the civilisation scaffolding we have built over the millenniums still exists in various stages of evolution, this new layer amazingly sits detached from all of that — floating by itself, communicating in its own language and creating its own differential reality. This reality of the new layer of hyper connected world is free from the historical philosophical anchorages, its built using the energy systems that were not available to man in their physically consumable form until recently. Ancient cultures have experienced its potential via small nuggets of descending information and across few enlightened beings, but mankind at large never had access to this force in any conceivable manner when compared to today. Our wired and wireless networks now pervade the entire known world and have almost connected everyone to everyone.
The world and people are interconnected like never before and what opportunity does that bring?
The other big driver of change for the Global Economy is the blending of goods and services. Last century saw the services sector overtaking the goods based economy across the world, now we are seeing the digital economy creating a new layer on top of the entire value pyramid. Worldwide economists are figuring out how to account for this and incorporate it into existing economic models. The problem is not of how to but its about keeping up with the pace of change. The rapidly evolving digital universe seems to regularly vaporize existing value across goods and services into a new dimension leaving gaping holes and unanswered questions behind for the economists. For example the rapid recasting of the retail industry — from physical stores to online retail, or the movement within banking systems to digital payments, or impact of replacing physical meetings with video conferences, each of them impact and reshape multiple goods and services paradigms. This leads us to places we have no idea how to navigate. Many rules that were almost sacrosanct for earlier ways of doing business are no longer valid. Today it is possible to create distributed manufacturing networks that can deliver physical goods akin to the software coding and telemarketing networks built over the last decades to deliver digital products.
Two things are happening simultaneously — goods and services are blending more and more into each other as they become digital thus creating new business models that escape classification and existing legal and tax structures and secondly due to well established digital network globally our ability to optimise across time and space is becoming more robust which renders national boundaries futile. What does this do to our current economic frame work that’s based on a classification structure built on goods and services?
The interconnected world has created a new global economy that’s a mesh of goods and services interwoven and continuously being optimised for higher benefits and efficiency, while the economic world still seems to be relying on the old schools of economic balance and nation — state acrobatics.
One of the biggest challenges in the coming times as we get the full exposure of the Covid19 will be recasting of our economic modelling systems. The current modelling of global economy and supply demand paradigm is unfortunately driven by “limited” resource models and finite capital based on archaic institutional monoliths and concepts that were created before the new source of infinite energy were discovered. As the world gets more and more integrated and defined by the binary language and starts to understand the abundance of resources available to a conscious being, these archaic economic models will need to be completely rewritten. We are already in the midst of transitioning from fossil fuel to the new sources of infinite and unlimited energy like solar or wind, and we begin to see how the future Global Economy will be evaluated very differently. These new forms of energy are agnostic to national boundaries, they are abundant and eternal in supply. As we move towards more sustainable energy sources and create an interconnected world we will reach a new civilisation that’s not defined by the limitations of our ancients. It cannot be modelled on the current GDP paradigm or the nation, tax and currency arbitrages or the price of gold and debt we hold.
Do we need a new method to start the process of recasting Global Economics that are designed for the world we live in today?
Who is leading us?
One of the other significant and yet hidden factor in our world is the role of religion and social/cultural structuring — it almost feels like it is hardwired into humans, in realty it is just one of the longest standing structured conditioning in our civilizational history. What does this conditioning do to us? How has it benefited us in our evolution? From where do we inherit this? The world’s boundaries have been contentiously reshaped by racial supremacy campaigns or fanatical religious movements. But there was a time in history the same religions were ideologies or philosophies and were responsible for the most amazing breakthroughs made by mankind, it created marvellous structures in arts and philosophy that led their civilisations to prosperity and growth. There was a time when nation/state and religious belief were paired, they were the same thing, that created a friction free environment for innovation and intellectual explorations. Today as the world becomes more and more global, with free movement of individuals of different faiths and beliefs co-existing, cultural diversity is the new normal! What happens to the individual’s religious beliefs ? What happens to an immigrants idea of the architectured framework of nation states– will they belong to their belief or the place? This is creating one of the biggest friction point across the world. While intellectually we are moving into the age of the individual, socially and culturally we still are plagued by our definitions of our “way of life” and we are unable to reconcile that ideology as it stood for centuries with what we have emerging infront of us.
Today we don’t have defined philosophical frameworks that are equally evolved and established like the religious and cultural frameworks of the past. Its quite clear the pace at which such ideas take root in our mind and built environment takes lifetimes of evolution and refinement. In the last 100 years the world has transformed from states and nations into this massively interconnected ball of roving citizens and goods and money and cultures and beliefs.
Do we need a new religion that is able to assimilate our current state and cast us a path into our future?
Most religions are born out of core conditions existing at their times and a leader emerging that’s able to provide people hope and a way towards the future that’s brighter than the current one they are living in. With science becoming the new religion in the last few centuries, our modern world is defined in ‘isms — Socialism, Communisms, Capitalism, Consumerism, Fascism and other finer and nuanced variations. We do identify our current states and personal beliefs around one or a cocktail of these ‘isms.
What do we understand of the emerging state of the world — the one that’s extremely complex, diverse and yet operating under a single umbrella of unifying energy — that speaks in binaries and is able to morph itself into all ‘isms depending on our point of view and desired view. The technology itself in its pure essence is free of pole positions across our established ‘isms. Do we need to create a new ‘ism that can define our emerging world?
A new Era??
The spread of Covid 19 has brought to the forefront the problematic issues of an intensely connected world it also displays, amply, the pace at which the world can respond.
Its unprecedented to have global lists of the hourly impact of a pandemic, 100’s of countries, from remote islands to individual neighbourhoods pouring in data and every individual is having access to the number of people infected at all levels of magnifications! Just observing this information makes us see a new world emerging, its coming into existence as we see things morph every day.
What’s also clear today is that the industrial era institutions built on centralised information silos and capitalist and opportunist ecosystems that can only operate with information barriers are no longer suitable to help mankind advance to the next stage of our evolution.
Something new is evolving, this “new thing” is reaching out to us as an individual, the age of Individual is emerging, the individual who is connected to the world, it is a huge jump from Nation, State, City, Corporation, Religion, Family ecosystem into a new world where every individual has the power to access information, choose a destination and apply attention, create impact and measure success. We are seeing the new state emerging that’s global and personal at the same time. While nations and currencies and barriers and boundaries will remain, their effectiveness is going to change.
What does this emerging age of the individual tell us about the future? What is the power that this age is going to unleash? Where are we heading? Many many questions arise from the flood of information that’s hitting us today, also it is for the first time in the history of human civilisations stretching back more than 6000 years that the planet is acting as one, (well almost 🙂 barring Donald Trump and some others) — this resulting “lockdown” from the pandemic, has provided all of humanity a chance to “pause”, pause from the life as we knew it.
What happens to our collective consciousness when we all simultaneously “pause to think” what happens when the entire world is collectively thinking about only one thing — how to fight COVID 19 — what happens when we all think together from a common standpoint and question life as it is? or try and figure what this moment means for us — us as an individual!
We question where we are, what we are doing and most importantly — Why?
As our current way of life has suddenly come to a halt, we’ve almost tripped on the momentum we had built with our globally integrated economy and supply chains. What do we do now? How do we perceive the world we have created when its in Pause? When our cities are empty and the all-powerful “human” is forced into hiding, forced to abandon “our way of life” and to surrender to save himself by a an invisible bug? Not a bullet is fired and no bomb has exploded there is no villan no one to blame and blast off the face of the earth — but a microscopic creature from nature has in 5 months brought us to a grinding halt. Of course, we will recover from this and we will get back to business as usual, we will develop a vaccine and we will eliminate the threat — but will life be the same? What will be our learning here? What would be our collective learning from this “pause”?
End of Chapter 1
To be continued…
