Updated on 20 April 2024

Laws and social norms in industrialised societies have been shaped by the metaphor of society as a factory and the metaphor of people as machines more than most people realise. In the emerging technoverse, biological life is perceived as becoming irrelevant. The many ways in which atomised nuclear families depend on abstract institutions is considered normal, and all those who depend on assistance from others in unusual ways are pathologised. Social power can be understood as the privilege of not needing to learn. As we live through the current human predicament we are well advised to understand capitalism as a collective learning disability that actively contributes to human and non-human suffering. A holistic social justice approach rather than a mechanistic rule based approach to collaboration between groups is at the core of the neurodiversity, disability, and indigenous rights movements.

1. Fossil fuelled scientism of progress
2. Social consequences of neoliberal ideology
3. A social systems theory for the digital era
4. The illusion of technocratic control
5. Beyond the illusion of control
6. Reflections with the vision of hindsight
7. Inherent limitations of formalising social systems
8. Evolutionary design
9. Mental health is a function of communal health
10. Collective learning disability induced by social power gradients
11. Adopting a human scale aware precautionary principle
12. Rediscovering the beauty of collaboration at human scale
13. Conclusion
14. References

Fossil fuelled scientism of progress

The preoccupation with technology and the exploitation of fossil fuels to expand industrial production accelerated following WWII, fuelling an illusion of infinite growth on a finite planet (Meadows et al. 1972). Anthropocentric confidence in technology and growth seems to have peaked in the 1980s, when neoliberalism was installed around the world as the future engine of wealth and prosperity.

Under the hood, the neoliberal engine was powered by the availability of computers and software, and by the economic logic of Moore’s Law (1965). The entanglement of digital communication technologies and neoliberal economics can be understood by examining the evolution of the dominant and most profitable use cases for digital automation.

Initially, the automation of logistics afforded by computers, software, and robotics allowed the production of material goods to be increased without the need for additional workers. By the 1990s however, many wealthy Western countries had reached a level of material affluence, automation, and offshoring that made it difficult to generate further profits from industrial automation. Instead, the invention of networked computing and the Web opened up new opportunities for economic growth in the abstract, non-physical digital realm, which was sold to investors and entrepreneurs as a virtually unlimited territory that awaited to be conquered – powered by the magic of Moore’s Law and neoliberal ideology (Palmer 2006).

Economic activity and the focus of automation thus shifted into domains that were one or more levels removed from the physical realm, i.e. into various forms of financial speculation, including the development of complex derivatives and entangled bundles of financial products. This increased the leverage of capital and the velocity of financial transactions, culminating in high frequency trading, speculative asset bubbles, and in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

Laws and social norms in industrialised societies have been shaped by the metaphor of society as a factory and the metaphor of people as machines more than most people realise. Humans are referred to as human ‘resources’, and human lives are assessed in terms of ‘net worth’ and ‘purchasing power’ (Hedges 2021). As these metaphors have expanded into the digital realm, they have not only warped our relationship with the natural world and our conception of humanity. They have also led to technocratic cults, in which corporations have taken on the role of sacred places of worship, and in which CEOs are the high priests, praising the divine qualities of artificially intelligent technologies (Rushkoff 2023). In the emerging technoverse, biological life is perceived as becoming irrelevant. When society is a factory, the only things that count in are things that can be measured (Deming 1982, 1984).

It is no coincidence that Taylorism, so-called scientific management, was conceived in the wake of the invention of the steam engine and machine assisted manufacturing, to complement the the laws of physics that governed the mechanics and the productivity of the machines on the factory floor.

Formalising the discipline of economics with mathematical tools allowed the scientific approach to managing humans to be extended to the scale of nation states – another conceptual building block for organising human activities in industrialised societies. There are a number of parallels between the impact of the development of economic theories on human society and the social impact of the development of the Internet.

Neither the Internet nor economics draw directly on an evidence based understanding of physics, biology, and human behaviour. Both the Internet and economic theories are best understood as prescriptive rather than as observational tools, as language systems that are based on specific European and North American cultural conventions that are assumed as ‘sensible’ (common sense) or ‘obvious’ (self-evident). With these language systems in place we can measure data flows and economic performance, but only in terms of the scope and the preconceived categories afforded by the formal protocols and languages (Rees 2023), (Alkhatib 2021), (Bowles 2016).

The introduction of a formal economic language system and the introduction of formal protocols for digital communication have shaped human culture around the social ideologies espoused by early industrialists and early information technology entrepreneurs. Over course of the last two centuries governments have become increasingly dependent on economists and information technology entrepreneurs in order to understand and engage with society, and also to understand what what technological options are on the horizon, to the extent that corporations directly advise heads of states (Pennington 2023). In this process anything that lies beyond the scope of what is deemed relevant or acceptable is discounted as non-essential or unproductive.

In the multiple bottom line approaches that have become popular in the context of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, the conveniently simplistic thinking becomes evident when metrics from the natural world are translated into monetary metrics, as if a monetary number can adequately represent the loss of biodiversity and the destruction of entire ecosystems in the name of economic progress.

Astute observers have been lamenting the chasm between digital hype and the way that technology manifests in our lives for decades (Nelson 1999). Based on what we have seen so far, we have to conclude that the design of digital services, when conducted within the bowels of transnational corporations, with millions and in some cases billions of users, without giving these users the ability to shape the design, is a form of corporate social engineering, whether intentional or not.

Social consequences of neoliberal ideology

The institutions and accepted cultural practices of the modern globalised world that consistently prioritise free flow of capital are traumatising the entire planet. The polycrisis, which is the modern human predicament that we are all living through, can be illustrated with three short cultural narratives:

1. ‘Prayer for the Earth: An Indigenous Response to These Times’ (Rushworth 2024).
2. The effects of the one-dimensional logic of global capital, illustrated by looking at the overall cultural and ecological impact on the small island nation of Nauru (Çenet 2023)
3. The effects of the arbitrary anthropocentric cut-off points (Bettin 2024) of the bell curve in the social realm, illustrated by looking at the overall cultural and ecological impact on a small island nation such as Tuvalu (Malie, G. et al. 2023).

These narratives illustrate the cognitive and emotional blindspots that are baked into ‘normality’.

The life destroying impact of the modern human obsession with measuring, and then reducing the dimensionality of all problem spaces to the one-dimensional metric of financial capital can hardly be overestimated. The classic novel Flatland (Abbott 1884) comes to mind. Flatland illustrates the confusions and the loss of meaning created by reducing four dimensional spacetime to two spatial dimensions and the dimension of time, i.e. a reduction of a four dimensional problem space to three dimensions.

The semantic chemical building blocks of the biological world we inhabit contain thousands of dimensions. If we add emergent phenomena at larger levels of scale, we live in a world of millions and billions of semantic dimensions. We all have our own unique way of making sense of the world, from the perspective of the relational ecology of care that surrounds us.

And yet, we live in a world where human social affairs, across all levels of scale, are dominated by a one-dimensional metric. Some still recognise that there is biological life beyond finance, but our minds have been warped by extensive exposure to a one-dimensional metric.

The Anglosphere is leading the world in legal engineering and perception management.

A social systems theory for the digital era

The pioneering work on a universal social systems theory by Niklas Luhmann (JSTOR 2021) in the 1970s through to the 1990s provides a deep and insightful analysis of the effect that the emergence of modern one-to-many communication technologies, i.e. mass media, has had on the evolution of social systems. Many of Luhmann’s insights have only gained relevance in our era of ubiquitous many-to-many communication technologies, i.e. digital social media, which are controlled by global technology corporations.

Luhmann’s perspective and working method were informed by his background as a legal scholar. His work relied heavily on his idiosyncratic ‘Zettelkasten’ note-taking method, over the course of thirty years resulting in a set of drawers with over 90,000 index cards for his research. A digitised archive of all his index cards is available online in the Niklas Luhmann Archiv (University of Bielefeld 2024).

In Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, culture is analysed and constructed at a population level scale that transcends human cognitive and emotional limits, in the form of explicit communication between abstract social subsystems, such as the media system, the legal system, the family system, the economic system, etc.

The illusion of technocratic control

Attempting to explain cultural evolution of socially powered-up super-human scale societies from a top-down, outside-in perspective is appealing from the perspective of the established institutional landscape. The top-down approach prioritises the perspective of so-called authorities over the perspectives of the thousands and millions of local and cosmolocal (Niaros et al. 2020) communities that shape lived experiences at human scale.

On the surface, mass media and digital social media seem to expose billions of humans to billions of perspectives. Upon closer examination this assumption turns out to be an oversimplification that obscures important systemic social power differentials. A small number of mass media organisations and social media celebrities have audiences that measure in the millions and billions, but at the receiving end of all acts of communication, all humans are constrained by cognitive and emotional limits, and by the physical limit of days that are constrained to 24 hours. By design, mass media and social media algorithms guarantee that a very small number of perspectives benefit from being thousands or millions of times more visible than others (Metzler et al. 2023).

Digitally connected humans are exposed to continuous communication overload, including the sensory overload generated by digital technologies. Niklas Luhmann’s theory is well suited for understanding the effects of the small number of perspectives that are amplified by digital algorithms. It is less well suited for understanding the bottom-up development of social movements that involve billions and trillions of communication acts at human scale.

With the help of machine learning algorithms, the latter factor of cultural evolution can be analysed to some extent, but in the current legal landscape, data usage rights and access limitations effectively only makes this capability available to the dominant players in the institutional landscape. The questions of interest for these players are by definition limited to the comfortable sphere of discourse that is framed by the world view of powered-up authorities. In fact, any analytical results that may threaten dominant cultural narratives are likely to be fed into the re-configuration of social medial algorithms, in ways that dampen inconvenient perspectives and that reinforce dominant cultural narratives.

By design, thoughtful critical narratives are highly unlikely to reach the wider public within non-judgemental framings and containers. Instead, the operators of social media platforms benefit greatly from simplistic attention grabbing narratives of all colours, thereby allowing established authorities to promote their perspectives as the ‘voice of reason’, consistently in favour of perpetuating the social power structure of the capitalist institutional landscape (Fischer 2009).

Beyond the illusion of control

Regardless – or rather due to – the way in which social medial algorithms evolve and the ways in which mass media are tied to dominant cultural narratives, peer-to-peer (P2P) communication at human scale is being used by billions of people, including encrypted and anonymous forms of communication. This somewhat less publicly visible infrastructure, which is increasingly de-centralised, diverse, and distributed, is the substrate in which social movements increasingly operate.

Human scale P2P collaboration ‘Together we know everything, together we have everything’ (P2P Foundation contributors 2023) is what remains after subtracting all the communications between mass media organisations, social media celebrities, big governments, and corporations. In contrast to the pre-Internet era, such collaboration has become cosmolocal, and is catalysing intersectional solidarity and global sharing of lived experiences on the margins of societies, and across social movements.

The diversity and the many millions of cosmolocal collaborations do not neatly fit into any finite comprehensible number of categories, and thus they escape analysis within Luhmann’s framework.

In Luhmann’s theory the focus is on communication between abstract systems, each of which may include many social agents, e.g. institutions and people. In this theory semantic integration between systems occurs in the explicit communication between systems.

This is a pragmatic approach to collective sensemaking in a powered-up social world of super-human scale systems in which one-to-many communications play a substantial, if not the dominant role, in maintaining cultural inertia. Relevant metrics include opinion polls, votes, and economic transactions. Typical outputs include persuasive communication, laws, and social norms. Key tools include mass media and social media.

Luhmann assumes culture is encoded in explicit communication between systems of social agents (Strauch 1989). In this context social agents can be individuals or institutions at any level of scale.

The public digital realm is entirely socially constructed in terms of explicit communication and explicit encoding of many rules. Therefore it lends itself to analysis with the help of Luhmann’s systems theory of society. 

Strengths

• Analysis of socially constructed large scale systems involving millions of people.
• Awareness of human cognitive limitations.
• Awareness that anthropocentric control is an illusion.
• Awareness that all large scale human decisions are likely to cause harm, often out of immediate sight of the decision makers.
• Staying clear of moralising and recognising the dangers of moralising.

Weaknesses

• Lack of acknowledgement of the role of collaborative niche construction within the evolution of all living ecosystems.
• Lack of awareness of the limits of human scale, the diverse possibilities and dynamism that open up at human scale, and how corporate and state controlled large scale digital systems exclude all these possibilities, and, with the help of protocols and algorithms, cultivate public perceptions of both paradigmatic inertia and insignificant yet somehow dangerous irritants.
• Lack of awareness of the innate collaborative tendencies of humans.
• Naive belief that socially powered-up systems such as markets can channel self-interest into collective benefits.
• Due to a focus on second order cybernetics, limited focus on the feedback loops between socially constructed super-human scale systems and biological and ecological systems, including the extent of ecological externalities, which already became apparent with the Limits to Growth, a weakness that could be rectified by considering higher order cybernetics (Yolles 2021), and with the help of the recursive formalism of higher order category theory (nLab 2024).

The Australian human scale permaculture pioneer David Holmgren (2023) would likely see similar limitations in Luhmann’s theory. The diversity and the many millions of cosmolocal collaborations today do not neatly fit into any finite comprehensible number of categories, and thus they escape analysis within Luhmann’s framework. Collaborations amongst permaculture practitioners are a good example.

Reflections with the vision of hindsight

Forty years ago we had less scientific evidence regarding all the factors that we can identify as weaknesses in Luhmann’s theory with the vision of hindsight. But already in the late 1990s, during Luhmann’s lifetime, educated people had access to plenty of indicators and warning signs, that all along indigenous people intuitively understood many of the flaws in our powered-up and hypernormative society. 

Collective cognitive dissonance in WEIRD societies (Henrich 2021) has been rising, yet has been kept out of the public discourse, precisely because of the way the modern media system functions in entirely socially constructed super-human scale systems, exactly as described by Luhmann. This is how WEIRD became truly WEIRD Theatre, i.e. WEIRDT (Bettin 2023c), and how hypernormative social norms and laws dehumanised, pathologised, and criminalised growing segments of the population, to an extent that has started to visibly erode the social license of established institutions and the associated paradigmatic inertia from the bottom up.

Like Marx, Luhmann is an excellent analyst. Unlike Marx he avoids speculating about the future. To avoid gambling with the future of humanity and to avoid unleashing even greater harm on the planetary ecosystem (Michaux 2023), we can build on the strengths of Luhmann’s insights as well as on what we now recognise as weaknesses in his theory. 

From what is known about Luhmann and his lifetime project of conceptualising the social world (Moeller 2021), (Schmidt 2021), (Morgner 2022), his perseverance, his idiocyncratic sense of humour, and his unique system of working, today many in the Autistic community would likely regard Luhmann as neurodivergent.

Inherent limitations of formalising social systems

The introductory lecture ‘Introduction to Luhmann & Systems Theory’ (Tohme and Gangle 2021) outlines how category theory can be used to formalise Luhmann’s theory.

Systems are human mental abstractions, they live in human minds, and via communication, especially dialogues, they incrementally find their way into other human minds with varying levels of fidelity (Lakoff and Johnson 1981). Luhmann’s theory focuses on the explicit communication between abstract systems, ignoring that these abstractions can only come into social circulation with the help of symbolic language, and that different people may have different mental models of a specific system (Milton 2012).

In the above introductory lecture, the abstract conceptual nature of systems is illustrated in the observation that ‘the system needs the environment, the environment does not need the system.’

The very definition of systems like the the legal system, the media system, the economic system, the family system, etc. will always be fuzzy, and the commonalities tend to be hard to pin down. The legal system is one of the least fuzzy systems, as only laws that are written down and have been enacted count. In contrast, the definition of a system like the media system is much less well defined and less formalised – yes, all communication acts can be identified, but which ones involve agents that are part of ‘the media system’?

Evolutionary design

Evolutionary design (Bettin 2021a) is an approach to sensemaking and adapting sociotechnological systems based on the principles of cultural evolution that can be derived from anthropological observations and from archaeological evidence about human scale societies that predate the emergence of civilisations.

In evolutionary design the notion of intentional design is entangled with the concept of evolution within an ecological context, resulting in a profound shift in underlying assumptions about the ability of human institutions to reliably produce predictable design outcomes, especially at larger scales, at which human cognitive and emotional limits come into play.

Cultural evolution entails not only the evolution of collaborative relationships and supporting tools within a group, but also the evolution of collaborative relationships between groups with many cultural commonalities, as well as between groups with few cultural commonalities.

In Evolutionary design the focus is on communication between concrete social agents, specifically on the evolution of shared understanding and knowledge co-creation, recognising that knowledge may pertain to the system or to the environment, and that the internal models that agents maintain act as the semantic integration points between systems. Many of these semantic integrations are not visible as explicit communication but show up in the form of tacit knowledge, i.e. as unobservable and often subconscious processes within each social agent.

This is an approach to collective sensemaking at human scale that aims to maximise shared understanding and long-term collaborations, which in turn depends on the ability to nurture psychological safety and maintain lifetime relationships. Relevant metrics are hard to quantify objectively and include mutual trust, wellbeing, and biodiversity. Typical outputs include tacit and explicit models of shared understanding of the world, not limited to social norms. Key tools include de-powered dialogue (Bettin 2023a), Open Space (Owen 2008), prosocial principles (Ostrom 2015), and design justice principles (Design Justice Network 2018).

The evolutionary design approach builds on experience with the bottom-up Socialisation, Externalisation, Combination, Internalisaton (SECI) model of knowledge co-creation (Nonaka et al. 2008), and on collaboration in Open Space.

The principles that underpin evolutionary design complement the social systems theory by Niklas Luhmann. Whilst the principles of evolutionary design have been distilled from thirty years of personal experiences with cultural evolution in human scale groups and between human scale groups (Bettin 2020), informed by foundational principles for the emergence of nested complex systems (S23M 2023) from a bottom-up, inside-out perspective, Niklas Luhmann starts with a top-down, outside-in perspective.

In contrast to Luhmann’s theory, the multi-level approach of evolutionary design does not assume completely functionally closed systems. Instead of the social system as a whole including a model of itself, evolutionary design recognises that each social agent within a social system is assumed to maintain an internal model of the whole social system and the environment. These internal models are always simplifications, as all agents are understood to have cognitive and sensory limits. In both approaches social agents may be part of one or more systems. 

In evolutionary design, culture is experienced and co-created at a human scale that is comprehensible for humans, adapted to human cognitive and emotional limits, in the form of shared understanding, by nurturing trustworthy lifetime relationships.

In complex, socially powered-up empires and modern nation states, i.e. hierarchically structured large scale societies, which are governed by abstract institutions with formal authority to make decisions that affect millions and sometimes even billions of people, both approaches have their place and complement each other.

Mental health is a function of communal health

The modern disciplines of psychology Fechner (1860) and psychiatry Reil (1808) are a product of the European industrial era, focused on helping individuals to cope with the mental burden and cognitive dissonance that is generated by having to function – or pretending to be functioning – as a cog in the industrialised machine. The problems of alienation are as old as industrialisation. Karl Marx is famous for writing extensively about the topic (1844).

After decades of outsourcing and offshoring, many of the so-called rich nations are no longer heavily industrialised in the classical sense of producing material goods. Instead, many people are employed in the so-called service sector, and many of those who have attained higher levels of education, i.e. certified professionals, work in bullshit jobs (Graeber 2018). Those performing such jobs feel that their job is largely meaningless, and in many cases, that it actively contributes to the modern human predicament.

This is the result of an oxymoronic economic system that literally optimises for the appearance of busyness. This is not a joke, and many marginalised people are fully aware of this fact.

The specific challenge that mental health professionals face is a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual American Psychiatric Association (2013) that reflects the cultural bias of Western ‘normality’, in which sanctified bullshit (Spicer 2020) is the informational fuel that runs the so-called economy. Therapists and psychiatrists have the best intentions, and most genuinely want to help people, but whatever assistance they provide, at the latest when their patients are sent back into the economic engine to ‘perform’ in the so-called economy that is liquidating the living planet, they will again suffer from predictable mental health problems.

Surviving on the edges of modern society is an art. The arts and regular immersion in genuinely safe Open Spaces help us imagine and co-create ecologies of care in which care and mutual aid are the primary values. Healthy artistic and Autistic life paths by necessity differ from ‘normality’ (AutCollab 2024).

There is an urgent need to catalyse Autistic collaboration and to co-create healthy Autistic, artistic, and otherwise neurodivergent whānau, i.e. extended chosen families, all over the world. Marginalised people depend on assistance from others in ways that are pathologised in hypernormative WEIRD societies (Bettin 2019). However, the many ways in which atomised nuclear families and individuals depend on abstract institutions in far away places is considered ‘normal’. The endless chains of trauma must be broken. 

Collective learning disability induced by social power gradients

The story of infinite economic growth and technological progress portrays a completely delusional and scientifically impossible world (Meadows 1972), (Rees 2023), which not only ignores biophysical limits, but also human cognitive and emotional limits. Nurturing the human capacity to extend trust to each other, and engaging in the big cycle of life as part of an ecology of care beyond the human is the biggest challenge of our times.

Social power can be understood as the privilege of not needing to learn, and taking the liberty of making decisions that affect large populations, in complete ignorance of our own individual human cognitive and emotional limits, which prevent us from fully comprehending the needs and unique circumstances of thousands of diverse communities and millions of people (Bettin 2021b).

Stepping back, looking across all empire building civilisations, the collective learning disability induced by powered-up social relationships can be traced to the following ways of systematically distorting and dismissing lived experiences:

1. Oversimplification – by reducing complex problem spaces to a much lower (one!) dimensional space. This is the commonality across all pyramidal systems of power – there is one perspective that dominates over all others (Shiva 1996).
2. Inducing a systemic power differential – by distorting the oversimplified one dimensional metric with the notion of ‘interest’. This is the religion of economics (Graeber 2011).
3. Watering down the precautionary principle – via cognitive blind spots created by the arbitrary normalising cut-off points of the bell curve in the social realm. Example: entire island nations completely get ignored until they are doomed. Their local existence is deemed ‘insignificant’ in relation to what happens in the so-called ‘real’, i.e. the big ‘normative’ world where all decisions are made. This is the scientism that is blooming in the era of big junk data.
4. Systematically exploiting the ambiguities of linear narratives – by nominating a convenient ‘authority’ for interpretation. For a current example, we only need to look at the way Julian Assange is treated by the British Crown. Last century the world had Soviet dissidents. This century the United States are producing American dissidents. The Anglosphere is ‘leading’ the world in legal engineering and perception management.
5. Systematically exploiting cognitive blind spots – created by translations between different languages, again by nominating a convenient ‘authority’ for interpretation. Aotearoa is a poster child for this approach (Network Waitangi Whangarei 2012). This goes hand in hand with implicit assumption that some languages are more ‘primitive’ than others.
6. A misguided focus on ‘winning’ arguments – rather than engaging in omni-directional learning to better understand each other. This is the bullying that is taught in business schools, i.e. the art of marketing, sales, and corporate power politics. The most honest conversation that I have had on this topic was with a former technology investor who describes business schools as ‘places that train people how to become a bad person’. My own attempts at educating MBA students in the neurodiversity paradigm were also disillusioning and traumatising.

None of this is new. The old Daoist scholars such as Lao Zi and Zhuangzi knew as much from lived experiences with powered-up empires over 2,500 years ago. The elements above are the cultural foundation on top of which it becomes possible to cloak highly coersive and abusive ‘normalisation’ therapies such as Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) as evidence based best practice (AutCollab 2021).

Adopting a human scale aware precautionary principle

On the basis of the evidence available to us today, we are well advised to fully acknowledge human limitations, including the limitations of human science and technologies conceived by humans. This entails adopting a scale-aware precautionary principle in all human endeavors:

At small (human) scales, practicing a high level of autonomous communal self-governance and applying a political conception of the precautionary principle: ‘Communal decision making in Open Space, supported by an advice process and mutual trust, should incorporate a margin of safety; activities should be limited below the level at which no adverse effect has been observed or predicted (margin of safety)’.

At large (super-human) scales, respecting the sanctity of the living planet, and applying a strict, science based conception of the precautionary principle: ‘Activities that present an uncertain potential for significant harm should be prohibited unless the proponent of the activity shows that it presents no appreciable risk of harm (prohibitory)’

Together, the two parts of the scale-aware precautionary principle imply that no community, regardless of scale, is entitled to conduct an activity that presents an uncertain potential for significant harm beyond small (human) scales.

To avoid the potential for unlimited harm, the scale-aware overarching precautionary principle tells us that social governance should never be placed in the hands of any powered-up person or institution with super-human scale decision making abilities.

A principle based and scale-aware social justice approach rather than a rule based approach to collaboration between groups is at the core of the evolutionary design approach that has been distilled from a range of sciences and transdisciplinary practices, including from the intersectionality between the neurodiversity, disability, and indigenous rights movements (Walker 2013, 2014), (Bettin 2023b). The evolutionary design approach is compatible with Luhmann’s theory in that the smallest unit of knowledge creation is a dialogue within or between systems.

Rediscovering the beauty of collaboration at human scale

We currently live in traumatising super-human scale societies.

There’s a “pervasive warlike culture” in the U.S. that leads us to approach just about any major issue as if it were “a battle or game in which winning or losing is the main concern,” she wrote. It’s a deeply entrenched cultural tendency that has shaped politics, education, law, and the media.
– Kate Yoder, War of words, (2018)

Growing numbers of marginalised people are involved in de-powering and co-creating alternative human scale social systems and communities (Bettin 2023e), whilst at the same time still interacting with super-human scale powered-up institutions out of the necessity to survive (Bettin 2023d). 

The evolutionary design approach infuses social construction with:

1. Lessons from our current understanding of biological ecosystems and organisms.
2. The scale aware precautionary principle that reflects the timeless patterns of human limitations, which become visible when synthesising the insights from anthropology, archaeology, and history, including the rise and inevitable fall of all powered-up civilisations.

Individual social agents (organisms) are not only participants in a system, within ecological and biological processes they are also complex systems themselves, resulting in a structure of nested systems. For example, a mammal can be understood as a collection of interacting subsystems, i.e. the circulatory system, the nervous system, the mental system (all the mental models of the environment), the digestive system, etc. Each of these subsystem consists of specific agents (organs and cells). Whilst Luhmann’s theory could be used to describe the communication between these systems in abstract terms, evolutionary design is also equipped to describe the communication between specific organs and cells, and allows us to take a holistic approach to human wellbeing at human scale that is compatible with our evolutionary history.

Innovation and cultural change can only be transformative if it substantially redefines social norms and so-called best practice (de Decker 2022), and for this we need appropriate conceptual tools (Bettin 2017), including therapies that help tackle the modern addictions to social power and convenience, to overcome cultural blind spots and expand the sphere of discourse.

Conclusion

Nearly all our current platforms and applications in the digital realm are socially powered-up by the religion of the invisible hand, in contrast to biological ecosystems and organisms. As we live through the current human predicament we are well advised to understand the religion of the invisible hand as a collective learning disability that actively contributes to human and non-human suffering.

All of the above is just a long way of explaining what many indigenous grandmothers have understood about human scale all along, without needing to resort to modern science and modern social theories (Angarova 2023): 

 “Leave us alone, we know what we’re doing.”

References

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American Psychiatric Association (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR).

Angarova, G. (2023) ‘Understanding Suffering and Knowing Our Place.’ Holding the Fire: Episode 4. Resilience.org. October 2023.

AutCollab (2021) Ban of all forms of Applied Behaviour Analysis. https://autcollab.org/aba/ .

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Bettin, J. (2020) ‘Autistic people – The cultural immune system of human societies.’ AutCollab.org. April 2020.

Bettin, J. (2021a) ‘Evolutionary Design.’ https://jornbettin.com/2021/08/15/evolutionary-design/ .

Bettin, J. (2021b) The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale. Timeless patterns of human limitations. S23M.

Bettin, J. (2023a) ‘De-powered dialogue.’ AutCollab.org. November 2023. https://autcollab.org/2023/11/28/de-powered-dialogue/ .

Bettin, J. (2023b) ‘Intersectional solidarity and ecological wisdom.’ AutCollab.org. December 2023. https://autcollab.org/2023/12/09/intersectional-solidarity-and-ecological-wisdom/ .

Bettin, J. (2023c) ‘unWEIRDing Autistic ways of being’. AutCollab.org. November 2023. https://autcollab.org/2023/11/03/unweirding-autistic-ways-of-being/ .

Bettin, J. (2023d) ‘Surviving + De-powering + Thriving’. AutCollab.org. October 2023. https://autcollab.org/2023/10/30/surviving-de-powering-thriving/ .

Bettin, J. (2023e) ‘De-powering human societies.’ https://jornbettin.com/2023/05/18/de-powering-human-societies/.

Bettin, J. (2024) ‘Life defies the dehumanising cut-off points of the bell curve’. AutCollab.org. February 2024. https://autcollab.org/2024/02/21/life-defies-the-dehumanising-cut-off-points-of-the-bell-curve/ .

Bowles, S. (2016) The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives are no Substitute for Good Citizens. Yale University Press.

Çenet, R. (2023) ‘Visiting the Fattest, Most Cigarette-Addicted and Least Visited Country’. November 2023. https://youtu.be/x1KrGZRzVGY.

de Decker, K. (2022) ‘De-Electrify everything’. Estonian Green Movement’s Degrowth summer school. August 2022. https://youtu.be/GqcMnrUWNM0.

Deming, W. E. (1982) Out of the Crisis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Deming, W. E. (1984) ‘The 5 Deadly Diseases.’ 1984. Deming Institute. https://youtu.be/2F1rhik2_X0.

Design Justice Network (2018) ‘Design Justice Network Principles.’ https://designjustice.org/read-the-principles .

Fechner, G. (1860) Elemente der Psychophysik. Leipzig : Breitkopf und Härtel.

Fischer, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.

Graeber, D. (2011) Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House Publishing.

Graeber, D. (2018) Bullshit Jobs : A Theory. Penguin.

Hedges, C. (2021) ‘The Cult Of The Self.’ April 2021. https://youtu.be/QZIVQ8ExqEY .

Henrich, J. (2021) ‘The Weirdest People in the World. How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.’ Penguin Press.

Holmgren D. (2023) ‘Small and Slow Solutions – Permaculture Design.’ The Great Simplification #96. October 2023.

JSTOR (2021) ‘Unlocking Luhmann: A Keyword Introduction to Systems Theory’, pp. 259-274 (16 pages). https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2f9xsr5.72 .

Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1981) Metaphors We Live By. The University of Chicago Press.

Malie, G. et al. (2023) ‘A country being lost to rising sea levels.’ Channel 4 News. December 2023. https://youtu.be/H-ar5drhjzU .

Marx, K. (1844) ‘Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844’ (the Paris Manuscripts).

Meadows, D. (1972) The Limits to growth; a report for the Club of Rome’s project on the predicament of mankind. A Potomac Associates book.

Metzler, H. et al. (2023) ‘Social Drivers and Algorithmic Mechanisms on Digital Media.’ Perspectives on Psychological Science OnlineFirst. July 2023. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231185057 .

Michaux, S. (2023) ’Industrial transformation away from fossil fuels will not go as planned.’ Part 1: https://youtu.be/iqjsPa8bUaA. Part 2: https://youtu.be/QqEjHZZiqAg.

Milton, D. (2012) ‘On the Ontological Status of Autism: The ‘Double Empathy Problem.’.’ Disability & Society 27, 6 (2012): 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008.

Moeller H. G. (2021) ‘Luhmann & Cybernetic Identities.’ Undisciplined. January 2021. https://youtu.be/j5SaBSFApwc .

Moore, G.E. (1965) Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. Electronics 38: 114–117.

Morgner, C. (2022) ‘Luhmann’s Evolution of Meaning.’ Undisciplined. December 2022. https://youtu.be/je97cYGO7k8 .

Nelson, T. (1999) ‘Ted Nelson’s Computer Paradigm, Expressed as One-Liners.’ Xanadu. https://xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/WRITINGS/TCOMPARADIGM/tedCompOneLiners.html .

Network Waitangi Whangarei (2012) Ngāpuhi Speaks. He Wakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni and Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Independent Report, Ngāpuhi Nui Tonu Claim.

Niaros V. et al. (2020) ‘Cosmolocalism: Understanding the Transitional Dynamics Towards Post-Capitalism.’ tripleC Communication Capitalism & Critique Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society. September 2020. DOI: 10.31269/triplec.v18i2.1188 .

nLab (2024) Higher Category Theory. https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/higher+category+theory .
Nonaka. I. et al. (2008) Managing Flow: A Process Theory of the Knowledge-Based Firm. Palgrave Macmillan.

Ostrom E. (2015) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.

Owen, H. (2008) Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Palmer, M. (2006) ‘Data is the New Oil’ ana.blogs.com. November 2006. https://ana.blogs.com/maestros/2006/11/data_is_the_new.html .

Pennington, P. (2023) ‘Amazon celebrated ‘ambitious partnership’ in letter to PM.’ RNZ. September 2023. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/498150/amazon-celebrated-ambitious-partnership-in-letter-to-pm .

P2P Foundation contributors (2023) ‘Main Page’, P2P Foundation. https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Main_Page&oldid=136305 .

Rees, W.E. (2023) ‘The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable.’ World 2023, 4, 509–527. https:// doi.org/10.3390/world4030032.

Reil, J. C. (1808) Beyträge zur Beförderung einer Kurmethode auf psychischem Wege. Halle : Curt.

Rushkoff , D. (2023) ‘The End of the Billionaire Mindset.’ SXSW. April 2023. https://youtu.be/3ryB_gjz0us .

Rushworth, S. (2024) ‘Prayer for the Earth: An Indigenous Response to These Times.’ The Poetry of Predicament. March 2024. https://youtu.be/anVEGa43xvM .

Schmidt, J. (2021) ‘Archiving Luhmann.’ Undisciplined. February 2021. https://youtu.be/kz2K3auPLWU .

Shiva, V. (1996) ‘Trading our lives away : Free trade, women and ecology.’ Durgabai Deshmuhk Memorial Lecture. Council for Social Development. https://csdindia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/1996-Memorial-Lecture-Dr.-Vandana-Shiva.pdf .

Spicer, A. (2020) ‘Playing the Bullshit Game: How Empty and Misleading Communication Takes Over Organizations.’ Organization Theory, Volume 1: 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/2631787720929704 .

Strauch, T. (1989) ’Beobachter im Krähennest.’ WDR. https://youtu.be/qRSCKSPMuDc.

S23M (2023) ‘Collaboration and learning tools for the next 200 years.’ AutCollab.org.

Tohme, F. and Gangle, R. (2021) ‘Introduction to Luhmann & Systems Theory.’ GCAS Media. March 2021. https://www.youtube.com/live/pyp9r-TY7Mg .

University of Bielefeld (2024) ‘Niklas Luhmann-Archiv.’ https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/ .
Walker, N. (2013) Throw Away the Master’s Tools: Liberating Ourselves from the Pathology Paradigm.’ neurocosmopolitanism.com. August 2013. https://neurocosmopolitanism.com/throw-away-the-masters-tools-liberating-ourselves-from-the-pathology-paradigm/ .

Walker, N. (2014) ‘Neurodiversity: Some Basic Terms & Definitions.’ neurocosmopolitanism.com. September 2014. https://neurocosmopolitanism.com/neurodiversity-some-basic-terms-definitions/ .

Kate Yoder, K. (2018) ‘War of words.’. Grist.org. December 2018. https://grist.org/climate/the-war-on-climate-the-climate-fight-are-we-approaching-the-problem-all-wrong/.

Yolles, M. (2021) ‘Metacybernetics: Towards a General Theory of Higher Order Cybernetics’ Systems 9, no. 2: 34. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems9020034.

Big is Bad, Small is Beautiful, Less is More

The preoccupation with growth and technology accelerated following WWII, fuelling the illusion of infinite growth on a finite planet.  The rise and fall in the belief in technological progress can be illustrated with data from Google Books Ngram Viewer.

I have been observing these trends since the mid 1980s, when anthropocentric confidence in technology and growth seems to have peaked, and when neoliberalism was “installed” around the world as the future engine of wealth and prosperity. Under the hood, the neoliberal engine was powered by the availability of computers and software, and by the economic logic of Moore’s Law. Looking back over the last 30 years, the entanglement of the evolution of digital technologies and neoliberal economics can be summarised as follows:

Software product design conducted in isolation, without giving customers and marginalised groups the ability to shape the design, is a form of social engineering, whether intentional or not. All users of the Internet are familiar with the social externalities.

Our laws and social norms have been shaped by the metaphor of society as a factory and on the metaphor of people as machines. These metaphors have not only warped our relationship with the natural world and our conception of humanity. They have led to techno-cults in which technology corporations have taken on the role of sacred places of worship, and CEOs are the high priests, praising the divine qualities of artificially intelligent technologies. In the emerging technoverse, biological life is perceived as becoming irrelevant.

When society is a factory, the only things that count in are things that can be measured. It is no coincidence that scientific management (Taylorism) was conceived in the wake of the invention of the steam engine and machine assisted manufacturing, to complement the the laws of physics that governed the mechanics and the productivity of the machines on the factory floor.

The discipline of economics allowed the scientific approach to managing humans to be extended to the scale of nation states – another conceptual building block for organising human activities in industrialised societies. There are a number of parallels between the impact of the development of economic theories on human society and the social impact of the development of the Internet. Neither the Internet nor economics draw directly on an evidence based understanding of physics, biology, and human behaviour. Both the Internet and economic theories are best understood as prescriptive rather than as observational tools – as language systems that are based on specific European/North American cultural conventions that are assumed as “sensible” (common sense) or “obvious” (self-evident). With these language systems in place you can measure data flows and economic performance, but only in terms of the scope and the preconceived categories afforded by the formal protocols and languages.

The introduction of a formal economic language system and the introduction of formal protocols for digital communication have shaped human culture around the social ideologies espoused by early industrialists and early information technology entrepreneurs. Over course of the last two centuries governments have become increasingly dependent on economists and information technology entrepreneurs in order to understand and engage with society, and also to understand what what technological options are on the horizon. In this process anything that lies beyond the scope of what is deemed relevant or acceptable is discounted as non-essential or unproductive. In multiple bottom line approaches the conveniently simplistic thinking becomes evident when metrics from the natural world are translated into monetary metrics – as if a monetary number can adequately represent the loss of biodiversity and the destruction of entire ecosystems in the name of economic “progress”.

Astute observers have been lamenting the chasm between digital hype and the way that technology manifests in our lives for decades.

In the face of the multiple existential threats created by industrialised civilisation, we are well advised to adopt less life denying filtering, collaboration, thinking, and learning tools for the next 200 years, a topic that I have been been working on since 2006.

A couple of months ago Douglas Rushkoff publicly connected similar concerns from his perspective. He starts off with his usual story of the NZ bunkers of the tech billionaires, and then does a great job of painting the bigger picture in accessible terms, concluding with an appeal to reconnect technology and abstract metrics to the beautiful diversity of the living world and to the limits of human scale.

I would add that the cult of busyness has not only infected billionaires, but has been force fed to a broader class of professionals who find themselves trapped as employees and investors in super human scale corporate and government bureaucracies. Some of these people have become as addicted to the drug of social power as the billionaires. Their decisions, some of which affect many millions of people, need to be understood as decisions made by power drunk addicts.

Nate Hagens recently facilitated an an excellent panel discussion on natural resource accounting, exposing the extent of wishful thinking and denial of material constraints in the cult of busyness. The barrier to the urgently needed transition to degrowth is ideological inertia, an artefact of WEIRD psychology. The sooner the life destroying cancer of economic growth collapses under its own weight, the less the overall level of suffering. Locally, my friend Deirdre Kent illustrates the effects of the invisible hand in the context of “emissions trading”, and points to the conceptual tools and metrics needed for coordinating economic activity on a path of degrowth.

The longer the established power structures prevail, the greater the overall amount of suffering. From here on onwards, it’s materially downhill across all potential scenarios. The open question is how far down we’ll take the entire planet. The current monocultural and energy intensive way of life has no future. The kinds of technology that humans will be able to maintain and operate sustainably over the next 100 or 200 years, will be much simpler and less energy intensive – much more economising. Manual human labour and in-depth understanding of local ecosystems will be back in demand, and will be appreciated. We can start with that today.

Whilst all paths into the future involve a radical decrease in material consumption, how the transition will be experienced is very much a question of cultural evolution and adjustments in expectations. No matter how various local cultures evolve, the unavoidable suffering will be greater the longer the inertia of established institutions prevails, as it only deepens the level of destruction of the biosphere and the remaining human habitat. Pedal to the metal, running on the neoliberal engine for another decade, as far as that is even possible, will lead to delayed but ultimately greater suffering.

Joseph Tainter’s timeless conclusion (1988) about collapse from his analysis of collapsed civilisations applies and provides useful guidance:

The notion that collapse is uniformly a catastrophe is contradicted, moreover, by the present theory. To the extent that collapse is due to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity, it is an economizing process. It occurs when it becomes necessary to restore the marginal return on organizational investment to a more favorable level. To a population that is receiving little return on the cost of supporting complexity, the loss of that complexity brings economic, and perhaps administrative, gains.What may be a catastrophe to administrators (and later observers) need not be to the bulk of the population (as discussed, for example, by Pfeiffer [1977: 469-71]). It may only be among those members of a society who have neither the opportunity nor the ability to produce primary food resources that the collapse of administrative hierarchies is a clear disaster. Among those less specialized, severing the ties that link local groups to a regional entity is often attractive. Collapse then is not intrinsically a catastrophe. It is a rational, economizing process that may well benefit much of the population.

Meanwhile, there is no shortage of examples of good human scale initiatives on the margins. Our friends from Local Futures have just run an online knowledge sharing workshop with participants from a range of countries: part 1, part 2. As the old system is dying, new systems are being birthed as part of the big cycle of life.

We can learn a lot from the Congolese forest people. Humour is the ultimate weapon. It is time to have a good laugh, and to show power addicted capitalists the immediate exit – without any further returns. At the same time, we can offer education that guides those who feel trapped towards safe exit paths into emergent alternative human scale realities. 

Onwards!

Further reading

Meadows, D. et al. 1972. The Limits to Growth. Club of Rome.

Schumacher, E. F. 1973. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Harper Perennial.

Tainter, J. A. 1988. Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press.

Babiak, P. and Hare, R. 2006. Snakes in suits: When Psychopaths go to Work. Harper Business.

Graeber, D. 2006. “Beyond Power/Knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity.” London School of Economics. May 2006. http://libcom.org/files/20060525-Graeber.pdf.

Owen, H. 2008. Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Tomasello, M. 2009. Why We Cooperate. Boston Review Books.

Weinberger, D. 2012. Too Big To Know: Rethinking Knowledge now that the Facts aren’t the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room. Basic Books.

Low-Tech Magazine. 2012. “Electric Velomobiles: as Fast and Comfortable as Automobiles, but 80 times more Efficient.” Low-Tech Magazine. October 2012. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/10/electric-velomobiles.html.

Ostrom E., 2015. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.

Bowles, S. 2016. The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives are no Substitute for Good Citizens. Yale University Press.

Sale, K. 2017. Human Scale Revisited: A New Look at the Classic Case for a Decentralist Future. Chelsea Green Publishing Company.

Sloman, S. and Fernbach, P. 2017. The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. Macmillan.

Manevich, D. and Chwe, H. 2017. “Globally, more people see U.S. power and influence as a major threat.” Pew Research Center. August 2017. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/10/chinas-government-may-be-communist-but-its-people-embrace-capitalism/ .

Dell, K. et al. 2018. “Economy of Mana.” MAI Journal 7, 1 (2018). University of Auckland Business School. DOI: 10.20507/MAIJournal.2018.7.1.5.

Levine, B. E. 2018. Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Being an Anti-Authoritarian – Strategies, Tools, and Models. AK Press.

Aldred, J. 2019. Licence to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us. Allen Lane.

Bauwens, M. et al. 2019. Peer to Peer : The Commons Manifesto. University of Westminster Press.

Ramos, J. 2019. “Cosmo-Localism.” P2P Foundation. October 2019. https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cosmo-Localism.

Eisler, R. et al. 2019. Nurturing Our Humanity : How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future. Oxford University Press.

Hickel, J. 2020. Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. William Heinemann.

Saijo, T. et al. 2020. Future Design: Incorporating Preferences of Future Generations for Sustainability. Springer.

Bettin, J. 2021. The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless Patterns of Human Limitations. S23M.

Townsend, C., Ferraro, J. V., Habecker, H., Flinn, M. V. 2023. ‘Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 378(1872). doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0414

Replacing monologues and monocultures with dialogues and biodiversity at all levels of scale

1. Cultural inertia
2. Attempting to apply the scientific method in complex domains and transdisciplinary contexts
   1. Visualising conceptual causal models as an antidote to sloppy reasoning and invalid statistics
3. Modularising complex domains
   1. A practical example
   2. The limits of understandability of linear languages
4. Linear language – the ultimate learning disability
5. Recovering diversity
   1. Open Space
   2. Multi-solving in Open Space
6. The tomb stone of powered-up civilisations : Consistently Too Little Too Late
   1. The planetary reboot sequence

10,000 years ago, homo sapiens began farming a grain surplus. This surplus led to the creation of societal and cultural hierarchies which divorced our species from our long relationship with the natural world.

The biggest lie in our culture is the normal language of WEIRD success, finance, legalese, economics and technology.

The current human predicament is a result of the cultural disease of super-human scale powered-up civilisation building endeavours, the origins of which can be traced back to the beginnings of “modern” human history and the social power dynamics resulting from the invention of interest bearing debt around 5,000 years ago.

Maybe now is the time to write a new book: “Debt – The Last 20 Years”. Towards a more honest language to navigate the path ahead:

• Missing words
• Ecologies of care
• Not for sale
• Risk sharing and resource sharing in small scale societies
  

Cultural inertia

The following presentation to investors contains some interesting numbers, and along the way, it reveals the short-term thinking of those who are caught up in the cult of busyness.

Skagen is a Norwegian investment fund.

On the one hand, for the general public, given growing concerns about the climate and the environment, politicians and clean tech companies enjoy pointing to Norway as green and clean, as a poster child for the energy transition.

On the other hand, for investors, Norwegian fund management companies advertise the bullet proof investment opportunities in the energy sector – across the board, for further oil and gas exploration, and for mining.

I have not independently verified the numbers, but irrespective of the accuracy of the absolute numbers, even if some numbers are off by a factor of two or more, there is one true message:

The so-called energy transition is a feel-good exercise for the general public, and at the same time, it is [marketed as] a rock solid investment opportunity to investors. Norway is one of the biggest oil and gas exporters as well as a poster child for the dream of “clean” energy, propping up the other great investment opportunity, related to mining, globally – and therefore also again for the Norwegian oil and gas that is needed to meet the energy demand resulting from the anticipated extreme increase in mining activities. A win-win-win scenario, with a double win for Norwegian oil and gas.

The presenter correctly points out that mining won’t be able to scale 50-fold and more, to meet the theoretical demand of an “energy transition”, but given the current cultural inertia, this does not diminish the investment opportunities.

The cultural inertia and the optimism of investors is based on the following assumptions, none of which are mentioned anywhere in this presentation:

1. Societies will continue to rely on GDP as a measure of progress
2. The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is going to rise indefinitely, because oil and gas will be consumed indefinitely,without any disruption to the growth in GDP (so-called “wealth”)
3. Industrialised countries (the WEIRD ones and China) will continue to rely heavily on the convenience of fossil energy powered technology hyper busy ways of life (the equivalent of several hundred energy slaves per person)
4. The state of the biosphere and the planetary ecosystem is an irrelevant externality on the road of GDP growth and technological “progress”

Investors are obviously having a good time traveling on the “pedal to the metal” bus: No matter what lies ahead, capitalism is the best religion that has ever been invented.

You don’t need to be a genius to see that over the next 10 to 20 years at least two of the above assumptions will blow up in our face, and of course also in the face of investors. It does not matter which assumptions blow up first, the downstream effects will be massive, putting an end to energy intensive, i.e. to industrialised ways of life. Globally fungible money issued as interest bearing debt won’t survive.

In fact, the sooner the bizarre techno optimistic assumptions start to blow up, the more of the planetary ecosystem will still be around, to assist humans in the forced transition to [very] low energy ways of life and in rediscovering that we are part of nature.

Attempting to apply the scientific method in complex domains and transdisciplinary contexts

Visualising conceptual causal models as an antidote to sloppy reasoning and invalid statistics

Modularising complex domains

Modularisation of complex domains and creative collaboration across a diversity of domain boundaries maximises collective intelligence at human scale.

A practical example

The limits of understandability of linear languages

Unfortunately, so far most software has been written in linear languages, resulting in systems that are nearly as opaque, incomprehensible, and subject to surprising and unknown modes of failure as are state-of-the-art artificially intelligent systems. Over the last 50 years, in the busyness of frantic attempts to digitise and automate the tools of civilisation, we have un-learned the art of de-powered dialogue and the art of modularisation – the signature traits of the human species.

Ending the curse of software maintenance

Once we rediscover and appreciate the limits of human scale, we are equipped to replace the busyness of muddling with human dialogue and human comprehensible explanatory models.

Agent based semantic modelling and validation via instantiation is an urgently needed form of grassroots theory building and theory integration (knowledge archaeology) beyond academia. Wherever there is deep human domain knowledge, wherever people still trust each other and are not corrupted by social power dynamics, many experiments in the social sciences and in engineering can be improved and sometimes entirely replaced by semantic / causal modelling and instantiation. 

The semantic approach can be understood as a rapid iterative cycle of theory building and experimentation that surfaces and validates structural and causal mental models. It involves validating a theory, i.e. a formal semantic model, against the collective mental models of all available domain experts, resulting in explicit representations of the domain specific nonlinear multivariate mental models that participants use on a daily basis, usually without even being conscious of it. As an added bonus, instantiation catalyses shared understanding amongst all participants. 

From Muddling to Modelling from Jorn Bettin

Side note: The Cell Platform is designed to track the number of times categories are instantiated in the context of a particular model artefact, including the reasons for non-instantiation, i.e. unknown information or category is not-applicable in the context at hand. That’s exactly the meta data that turns a semantic model and a corresponding set of instances into a human scale, i.e. an understandable Bayesian model.

A big part of the journey of de-powering human societies involves taking an honest look at the relevance and quality of the digital data that we have been busy collecting – treating it as “the new oil”.

The antidote to misuse of mathematics and junk data

Linear language – the ultimate learning disability

How did we get caught up in a cult of busyness? Humans are curious creatures, we are easily distracted by shiny new toys. At human scale, in a de-powered social environment, our curiosity is a wonderful adaptive trait that generates cultural diversity. Beyond human scale, especially in powered-up environment, our curiosity degenerates into a maladaptive trait with the potential of causing untold harm.

Are you a model builder or a story teller?

Recovering diversity

Designing filtering, collaboration, thinking, and learning tools for the next 200 years

Open Space

Multi-solving in Open Space

Humans acquire knowledge or become aware of new information as individuals, and as part of groups of different sizes: households, teams, organisations, communities, societies, and with the help of ubiquitous global communication tools, even collectively as humanity. Creative collaboration in Open Space can help us break through the barriers of established disciplines and management structures, and power a continuous SECI (socialisation, externalisation, combination, internalisation) knowledge creation spiral at human scale.

Creativity = multisolving + neurodiversity + thinking tools

The tomb stone of powered-up civilisations : Consistently Too Little Too Late

Here is an excellent summary of the human predicament that may come in handy to shorten fruitless conversations with techno optimists and members of other anthropocentric faiths. I only have very few quibbles with the terminology used by Michael Dowd, and I love that he refers to industrialised civilisation as a religious cult, which I fully agree with.

One quibble refers to the use of the word “reality”, as it detracts from the vast diversity of lived human and non-human experiences. Instead I simply refer to the diversity of lived experiences and the commonalities and differences between lived experiences. One of the commonalities of lived experiences amongst sensitive Autistic people is that they tend to reach the doom and post-doom stages of understanding the hubris of anthropocentrism [much] earlier than others, many of whom remain their entire life in a state of cognitive dissonance and denial. Ted Nelson beautifully captured the toxicity of the modern technological human arrow of “progress” back in 1999, which is perhaps my favourite quote from the entire industrial era:

A frying-pan is technology.  All human artifacts are technology.  But beware of anybody who uses this term.  Like “maturity” and “reality” and “progress”, the word “technology” has an agenda for your behavior: usually what is being referred to as “technology” is something that somebody wants you to submit to.  “Technology” often implicitly refers to something you are expected to turn over to “the guys who understand it.”

This is actually almost always a political move.  Somebody wants you to give certain things to them to design and decide.  Perhaps you should, but perhaps not.

This applies especially to “media”.  I have always considered designing the media of tomorrow to be an art form (though an art form especially troubled by the politics of standardization).  Someone like Prof. Negroponte of MIT, with whom I have long had a good-natured feud, wants to position the design of digital media as “technology.  That would make it implicitly beyond the comprehension of citizens or ordinary corporation presidents, therefore to be left to the “technologists”– like you-know-who.

The other quibble I have with the terminology of Michael Dowd is his complete rejection of the word hope, as if the only hope we can have is related to the longevity of industrial civilisation. In the stage that Michael refers to as post-doom, he acknowledges hope for collective action in-the-small in terms of a focus on minimising suffering, being compassionate, de-powering relationships, practicing mutual aid, etc. without using the word hope. He even acknowledges the benefits of gallows humour in terms of catalysing mutual trust and social cohesion, but frames it all under the broad umbrella of “acceptance”, which in my mind only makes sense when qualified to acceptance of civilisational collapse, which is liberating us from a diseased life denying culture.

Without trust in our ability to appreciate local life at [small] human scale and the hope that we can minimise suffering, we fail to be part of life.

The planetary reboot sequence

Mosses seem to be a part of the planetary reboot sequence that gets initiated after evolutionary hiccups like the one triggered by industrial civilisation. The next 200 years will reveal whether humans can be part of the reboot sequence. This documentary contains some superb footage and good commentary – if you ignore the last segment about exporting life to Mars.

The open question is how humans will treat each other and our non-human contemporaries on the journey towards being composted and recycled. Experiences may vary depending on the human scale cultures we co-create on the margins.

We live in a time of exponential changes in communication technology. Just a few decades ago humans only needed to learn one or two languages and perhaps the jargon of a particular profession to be equipped for a successful life. Today thousands of new apps (little languages) become available every month, far more than anyone can ever learn to use, appreciate, and trust. More and more people are realising that quantity does not equal quality when it comes to digital technologies.

The disciplines of design and engineering play increasingly important roles in a world where communication between people and all forms of economic activity are by default being mediated via digital technologies.

To understand the full implications of the new technologies that we are churning out every month, is it enough for designers to be familiar with the latest in pop-psychology and for engineers to be familiar with the latest economic fads and monetisation models? What if some important considerations about human limitations and delusions have fallen between the cracks?

Being able to design, build, and use technology does not equate to understanding all the implications.

Maladaptive evolution of corporations

Do technologies make us smarter?

Successful software products that are used by many thousands or millions of customers are best thought of as a domain specific language system that complements human cognitive abilities and that facilitates and mediates collaboration and/or social competition between humans. In a networked world with ubiquitous Internet connectivity and pervasive use of Internet enabled personal devices, software plays a significant role in guiding – or even forcing – human cultural evolution.

Software product design conducted in isolation, without giving customers and marginalised groups the ability to shape the design, is a form of social engineering, whether intentional or not. All users of the Internet are familiar with the social externalities.

The huge opportunities and dangers of mediating human communication and collaboration and/or social competition via software platforms can not be overstated. The language systems that we create with the help of software can either amplify the unique human capacity for compassion and creative collaboration or they can amplify social competition and the brutal power politics that characterise primate dominance hierarchies.

For a number of years Jaron Lanier has been warning that the Internet as it currently evolves might destroy our world [1]. Online social media platforms dictate the possible communication and collaboration patterns, and in doing so typically maximise the “return on investment” for the owners of the platform, in the metrics of success prescribed by the neoliberal cult of busyness. In developed countries, their arrival has corresponded to bizarre political dysfunction, while in the developing world, ethnic rivalries that had been waning have been re-ignited in the most grotesque fashion.

Our laws and social norms have been shaped by the metaphor of society as a factory and on the metaphor of people as machines. These metaphors have not only warped our relationship with the natural world and our conception of humanity. They have led to techno-cults in which technology corporations have taken on the role of sacred places of worship, and CEOs are the high priests, praising the divine qualities of artificially intelligent technologies [2]. In the emerging technoverse, biological life is perceived as becoming irrelevant.

Maladaptive evolution of governments

Can better regulation help?

Some of the most faithful disciples of the techno-cults are found within our government institutions and amongst our politicians. How come?

1. When society is a factory, the only things that count in are things that can be measured. It is no coincidence that scientific management (Taylorism) was conceived in the wake of the invention of the steam engine and machine assisted manufacturing, to complement the the laws of physics that governed the mechanics and the productivity of the machines on the factory floor.
2. The discipline of economics allowed the scientific approach to managing humans to be extended to the scale of nation states – another conceptual building block for organising human activities in industrialised societies. There are a number of parallels between the impact of the development of economic theories on human society and the social impact of the development of the Internet. Neither the Internet nor economics draw directly on an evidence based understanding of physics, biology, and human behaviour. Both the Internet and economic theories are best understood as prescriptive rather than as observational tools – as language systems that are based on specific European/North American cultural conventions that are assumed as “sensible” (common sense) or “obvious” (self-evident). With these language systems in place you can measure data flows and economic performance, but only in terms of the scope and the preconceived categories afforded by the formal protocols and languages.
3. The introduction of a formal economic language system and the introduction of formal protocols for digital communication have shaped human culture around the social ideologies espoused by early industrialists and early information technology entrepreneurs. Over course of the last two centuries governments have become increasingly dependent on economists and information technology entrepreneurs in order to understand and engage with society [3], and also to understand what what technological options are on the horizon. In this process anything that lies beyond the scope of what is deemed relevant or acceptable is discounted as non-essential or unproductive. In multiple bottom line approaches the conveniently simplistic thinking becomes evident when metrics from the natural world are translated into monetary metrics – as if a monetary number can adequately represent the loss of biodiversity and the destruction of entire ecosystems in the name of economic “progress”.

In industrialised societies governments increasingly find themselves in the role of pretending to be “in control”. Technology corporations and management consultants gladly assist governments in the pretend game of “managing the economy”. Since the Cold War empires have increasingly shifted their focus from overt conventional war to economic warfare and psychological warfare.

Corporations and governments have shared interest in managing public perceptions [4] and in supporting each other [5]. Furthermore, the judiciary often lacks transparency. In Aotearoa New Zealand for example, you can complain if you’re unhappy with a judge’s behaviour, but the complaints system is secretive, ineffective and broken [6]. Since the Judicial Conduct Commissioner’s inception in 2005, 3201 complaints have been made, and 95 percent were either dismissed because they were not about a judge’s conduct, or no further action was taken because the commissioner concluded the conduct was not concerning. Just two complaints prompted the commissioner to recommend a panel, but neither panel ever went ahead.

Maladaptive evolution of our participation in the natural world

Can civilisation be saved?

All of the above would be funny if the consequences of the industrialised “way of life” for the living planet would be less profound.

Industrial development has only been possible by exploiting the energy stored in fossil fuels and due to extreme transformation of our environment, leading to severe environmental consequences that humanity is experiencing around the globe: shifting and unpredictable climate, extreme weather events, and biodiversity collapse [7]. Humanity is paying the consequences for so-called technical and technological “progress”. Fossil fuels allow every human alive today to consume as much energy (directly and indirectly via the goods we consume) as if we all had 200 human slaves working for us. In rich industrialised countries the number of “energy slaves” per capita is even greater, between 600 and 1,000.

The extreme levels of energy consumption of the industrialised way of life are largely hidden in our daily lives. Most of the energy is consumed by industrialised production processes, by industrialised agriculture, and by the global supply chains that deliver goods from all over the planet to our door step. We activate this chain of energy consumption via 1-Click® from our mobile phones and web browsers.

Minerals are mined at scale in places far from our major population centres. Industrialised production has been off-shored to China and “less developed” countries with cheap labour, but over the last decade climate related extreme weather events and disasters have started to remind us of the many externalities that are not accounted for in our economic models.

It is more important than ever to understand that no techno-cult will ever be capable of replacing our 1.6 trillion fossil fuel energy slaves with 1.6 trillion “renewable” energy slaves. Within the short span of 200 years we have released most of the carbon from several hundred million years worth of biological growth, irreversibly changing the atmosphere and the oceans for many thousand years to come.

There is no silver bullet. The envisaged goal of industrial scale transition away from fossil fuels into non-fossil fuel systems is a much larger task than current thinking allows for. To achieve this objective, among other things, an unprecedented demand for minerals would be required [8]. Most minerals required for the renewable energy transition have not been mined in bulk quantities before. Beyond the inevitable ecological damage, the amount of energy required to mine these minerals may well turn out to be prohibitive [9] once we run out of fossil fuels or commit to leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

So-called “green” technologies such as biofuel have a negative energy return on investment and are simply part of the feel-good green campaigns of some of our governments. The familiar fossil fuel companies are increasingly re-branding themselves as energy transition companies, but of course driven by the profit motive. The last thing any of these corporations wants to see is a significant drop and a consistent downward trend in overall global energy consumption. Green industrialised growth is an oxymoron. The only growth that can ever be green is biological growth of plants.

Beyond raw energy consumption the industrialised human resource footprint on the planet has accelerated the rate of extinctions to more than 1,000 times of the historical background rate [10]. Amphibians have estimated extinction rates up to 45,000 times their natural speed. Most of these extinctions are unrecorded, so we do not even know what species we are losing.

We have replaced biodiversity with vast monocultures of industrialised agriculture and horticulture that can only be maintained with significant inputs of fertiliser, which in turn is produced via fossil fuel intensive industrialised processes. Croplands and grazing lands cover more than one third of the Earth´s land surface [11]. Furthermore, intensified land-management systems often result in high levels of land degradation, including soil erosion, fertility loss, excessive ground and surface water extraction, salinization, and eutrophication of aquatic systems.

Maladaptive evolution of our participation in society

Should civilisation be saved?

The level of disillusion with busyness as usual is growing, and not only in rich industrialised countries. 80% of employees are disengaged at work. Many people feel stuck in bullshit jobs. It is getting harder for the techno-cults to get employees excited about “disrupting the market” with “the next big thing”.

The climate crisis provided a welcome busyness opportunity for corporations to present themselves wrapped in clean and green feel-good credentials. Bright Green Lies [12] is a timely book to remind people that a green energy “transition” is not going to prevent biodiversity collapse and is not even going to prevent catastrophic levels of temperature increases and ocean acidification due to the massive amounts of carbon that we have already released.

The collective intelligence of industrialised civilisation can be summed up in five words:

Consistently too little too late

The sooner we unplug from the collective delusion, the fewer people will die or suffer needlessly. A radical reduction in energy and resource consumption can play out over the next two generations, and it can be the most civilised project of mutual aid humans have ever undertaken. Along the way we can learn a lot from indigenous societies.

You may wonder which aspects of Western industrialised knowledge may be worthwhile to retain (and for how long), given that cultural evolution is a dynamic process that unfolds over multiple generations. A few sets of knowledge are good candidates for preserving and cultivating in a global knowledge commons. However, any tools and sets of knowledge that are incompatible with a path of radical energy decent are legacy technologies that are only relevant from a historic perspective – to warn future generations about technological approaches that have lead to existential risks.

Trauma

The power of language

Language systems have been used throughout human cultural evolution to transmit cultural knowledge and understanding. They not only record lived experience, they also shape lived experience. In the absence of written language language systems evolve through daily use, and everyone in a local community contributes to language evolution. Those with particular areas of expertise and skills pass on their knowledge and new levels of understanding to peers and curious children by inventing appropriate symbolic representations and metaphors that are accessible to others.

Language systems are the most powerful cultural tools at our disposal. When the power of language and access to communication is equally distributed throughout society, language evolves in tandem with local needs and reflects the human understanding of the web of relationships within the local ecosystem.

Written language developed and symbolic notations for tracking who owes what to whom emerged when humans invented agriculture and when access to land became increasingly important. Written language allowed social power relationships to be codified and conveyed across space and time. This was the first significant step that allowed some people – those with access to written language, i.e. those who made the rules – to wield power over other people. Written language was the tool that very quickly gave rise to organised religions and to religious texts, some of which are still used to this day.

The language systems of economics and the protocols of the Internet are the main linguistic inventions of the industrialised era and the digital era. Over the last two decades digital data has frequently been described as the new oil. The intent was very obvious – systematic exploration and economic exploitation. In whatever domain data reservoirs were not yet available, social media and systematic gamification of social interactions offered the prospect of creating new valuable data reservoirs on-demand.

From one angle the critique of Jaron Lanier is only skin deep, not questioning the underlying project of civilisation and anthropocentrism. From another angle he drills right into the very foundations of our social operating system. If we can learn anything from the last 200 years, it is that the power of language needs to be distributed equally. The force of life is distributed and decentralised, and it might be a good idea to organise and collaborate accordingly, respecting the limits of human scale.

Those who examine human collective behaviour in terms of energy consumption and ecological impact in terms of biodiversity loss are broadening the sphere of discourse. We can no longer understand and make sense of the dynamics in our rapidly changing environment by attempting to shift the Overton window of industrialised civilisation. The notion of a tiny window is yet another convenient linguistic metaphor that allows corporations to translate incremental shifts in public perception into further profits and consolidated power within the carcass of a dying planet.

The planetary ecosystem is dying a death of a thousand cuts. Humans are simply one of the many externalities on the entrepreneurial exit path that involves liquidation of all biological life.

Collective trauma in 2021

The discipline of psychology is just as much a product of the ideology of industrialised civilisation as the discipline of economics – they are two sides of the same coin. In particular the pseudoscience of behaviourism is still with us today, and is used to justify and perpetuate untold harm.

In a desperate attempt to squash the sphere of discourse, and in the face of unprecedented climate disasters, the neurological makeup of 1 out of 6 people is pathologised, targeting especially those who refuse to participate in the pretend game of “normality”. The trauma caused by industrialised civilisation is ignored, and entire populations are encouraged to believe that getting back to busyness as usual should be our top priority.

What’s happening right now around the world fits both definitions of the word “trauma”: Climate change is a deeply distressing and disturbing experience. It’s also a physical injury. An injury, after more than 30 years of ignored warnings and broken promises, that can now be considered intentional.

Climate change isn’t something that’s just happening to us. It’s being done to us.

Climate change isn’t a natural occurrence that we need to be ‘resilient’ to. It’s a trauma that’s being inflicted on us against our will. It’s exhausting.

…

The consensus is clear: The vast majority of the world’s population now views climate change as an “emergency”, according to nearly two-thirds of the 1.2 million respondents in 50 countries in the largest poll ever taken on climate change, earlier this year. A recent survey of young people found 56% of respondents think that humanity is ‘doomed’. Children around the world are experiencing climate anxiety — something that no generation of humans before us have ever had to deal with.

Yet world leaders are acting at anything but an emergency pace. In fact, rather than “building back better”, 2021 has seen skyrocketing emissions growth around the world as factories, travel, and farms switch back into business as usual mode even as the Covid pandemic continues to rage on. At this growth rate, 2022 will have the highest emissions of any year in human history — a horrifically shocking fact that should provoke outrage on every street of every city in the world.

– Eric Holthaus, meteorologist, [13]

References

[1] Jaron Lanier. 2018. How the Internet Failed and How to Recreate It.

[2] Jaron Lanier. 2018. Who is Civilization for?

[3] Mariana Mazzucato. 2018. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. Public Affairs.

[4] Philip Martin Patterson. 2020. Virtue and the Three Monkey Defence: Regulating Ethical Conduct in the Australian Public Service.

[5] Richie Merzian. 2021. BS climate solutions: Carbon Capture & “Clean” Hydrogen. Juice Media.

[6] Anusha Bradley. 2021. Judges, bullying and a ‘broken’ complaints system. RNZ.

[7] Jean-Marc Jancovici. 2021. Will Technology Save Us From Climate Change? MIT Media Lab.

[8] Simon P. Michaux. 2021. Geological Survey of Finland The Mining of Minerals and the Limits to Growth.

[9] Bridget Burdett and Mike Joy. 2021. Transportation Group Chairs Conversation: 2. Engineering New Zealand.

[10] Elizabeth Boakes and David Redding. 2018. Extinction is a Natural Process, But it’s Happening at 1,000 Times the Normal Speed. The conversation.

[11] IPBES. 20218. The assessment report on LAND DEGRADATION AND RESTORATION.

[12] Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, & Max Wilbert. 2021. Bright Green Lies.

[13] Eric Holthaus. 2021. Let’s stop talking about climate ‘resilience’ and start talking about climate trauma.

^{Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash}

The many faces of busyness as usual

From a European or American perspective the stereotype of the Japanese salaryman [1] is easily recognised as a product of a social norms that are no longer compatible with universal biological and mental human needs. Perceived normality is a social construct, but from within a given culture it is often impossible to draw a clear line between universal biological and mental human needs and culture specific norms and practices.

Only outsiders and members of marginalised groups are well equipped to identify and articulate unspoken social norms. An understanding of universal biological and mental human needs can only be developed from a transdisciplinary and intersectional perspective, based on a commonality and variability analysis across many cultures and across the entire history of human evolution.

In terms of energy and resource consumption, the social customs in Europe and North America are even further removed from ecological sustainability than the culture in Japan. This insight is nothing new.

Growth economics were clearly identified as unsustainable in the Limits to Growth report [2] in 1973, and the latest data shows we are blissfully tracking along the busyness as usual scenario. Similarly the limitations our social institutions and the limits of digital technologies [3] were well understood in the 1970s. These two examples illustrate the reality and the power of paradigmatic inertia. Humans are the uncontested local champions of cognitive dissonance [4] on this planet.

Paradigmatic inertia is never beneficial. It constitutes an institutional collective learning disability, and it can only broken be broken by events that are beyond the control of the institutions within the system.

At this particular point in time, paradigmatic inertia still fuels our governments and corporations, driving them to strive for towards a seemingly reassuring state of “normality”. From within the established institutional framework it is impossible to understand or predict when the paradigm of normality has been shattered beyond repair.

The level of cognitive dissonance within hierarchically organised societies can build up over decades and sometimes centuries [5] before it is resolved via external forces. The industrialised paradigm of technological progress and economic growth has now been operational for more than 250 years.

Hypernormality

The paradigmatic inertia that paralyses our industrialised monoculture plays out in terms of Zombie-like levels of cognitive dissonance – what some people during the Soviet era referred to as hypernormality.

In his 2016 documentary “HyperNormalisation” [6] Adam Curtis shows how the concept maps to our era, where critical thinking and individual agency is increasingly replaced by magical thinking, including absurd beliefs in the powers of artificially intelligent systems [7].

Hypernormality can also be understood through the lens of institutionalised and sanctified bullshit. André Spicer’s detailed sociological analysis of bullshit (2020) explains how organisations get completely lost in competitive social games. The key ingredients of the analysis:

The origins of bullshit

During World War I ‘bullshit’ entered informal British, North American and Australasian English speech. The lexicographer Eric Partridge claimed that during World War I, British commanding officers emphasized ‘bull’. This meant paying significant attention to soldiers’ appearances by ensuring they were perfectly dressed and their shoes were shined, even when this focus on appearance hindered the daily tasks of waging war.

Australian and New Zealand troops mocked British officers by calling it ‘bullshit’. Partridge suggests the term became common in military life during World War II. Throughout this period, it was used to refer to excessive regimentalism and attention to appearances. For instance, if soldiers prepared their quarters for inspection by a commanding officer, they engaged in ‘bullshit’.  Partridge gives the following example: ‘We’ve got to get this place bullshitted up—the Commanding Officer is coming around tomorrow morning.’ The troops used the term ‘bullshat’ to refer to something which has been polished up for display purposes. For instance, ‘Don’t touch that, it’s just been bullshat!’ ‘Bullshit’ was also closely connected with high-level administration.

For instance, during World War II, New Zealand airmen referred to the air-force headquarters as the ‘bullshit castle’. The term bullshit entered into print during World War II. The first instance of the word recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is in a dictionary of North American slang published in 1942.

Defining bullshit – and differentiating it from lying

While lying is an attempt to conceal the truth, bullshit is to talk without reference to the truth. ‘It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth – this indifference to how things really are – that I regard as the essence of bullshit’. Underpinning this is a ‘motive guiding and controlling’ the bullshitter meaning they are ‘unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are’. Recent psychological research considers the targets of bullshit by examining how some people with an ‘uncritical open mind’ are particularly receptive to bullshit. More sociologically oriented research has pointed out that in some social settings ‘bullshit’ is expected, enthusiastically embraced or silently tolerated.

Bullshit is a form of linguistic interaction. It involves characteristic patterns of communication such as evasiveness or not being held to account for one’s claims. Bringing these three aspects together, I define bullshit as empty and misleading communication. A more substantive definition of bullshit is that it consists of evasive and/or persuasive communication involving an indifference to the truth or attempts to pursue the truth which are driven by epistemically maligned intentions.

The bullshitter falls short of lying because they make use of insincere and misleading statements rather than outright falsehoods. Recent psychological work has found that established measures of everyday lying are sufficiently distinct from bullshitting.

The purpose of bullshit

The most intuitive explanation for why bullshit exists is the individual bullshitter. Many philosophical accounts assume that particular individuals have questionable motives or moral flaws which predispose them to bullshitting. For instance, Frankfurt points towards questionable motives of bullshitters such as intention to mislead their audience for personal gain. Others point out that bullshitters are driven by Machiavellian motives like deceiving their audience to gain power and resources. More recently, Cassam has argued that bullshitters are plagued by ‘epistemological vices’ such as carelessness, negligence, dogmatism and prejudice. Perhaps the most important of these is ‘epistemic insouciance’. This entails ‘a casual lack of concern about the facts or an indifference to whether their political statements have any basis in reality’. Some have argued that bullshitters suffer from cognitive failures. Finally, a recent study of school children found that bullshitters shared demographic characteristics; they were more likely to be males from better-off socioeconomic background.

Mats Alvesson argued that wider socio-cultural concerns with ‘imagology’ (looks and appearance) has encouraged organizations and individuals to generate clichés and bullshit. In my own book on the topic, I explored how the changing nature of bureaucracy created ideal conditions for bullshit. The rise of ‘neocracies’ which are obsessed with constant change and novelty has led organizations as well as people working within them to produce a large stream of bullshit.

Bullshitting as a culture

Bullshitting is not about hiding a secret from specific people at specific points in time, it is about pursuit of a hidden agenda, often associated with long-term goals. In this context a smooth blend of half-truths, falsehoods, and common sense (culturally endorsed myths) is much more potent than a set of lies.

One of the rare examples of an analysis of bullshitting as a social practice is Joshua Wakeham’s (2017) theoretical account. Drawing on studies of social epistemology, he argues that we gain most of our knowledge second hand. This means that we do not do epistemic due diligence ourselves. We are usually not cognitively equipped to do such due diligence, and even when we are, it is exhausting for us and alienating for others.

Furthermore, in most social settings there is not one obvious correct answer waiting to be found. So instead of relying on common standards of epistemology, we rely upon social cues to sort out which knowledge claims are true and which are false. These include the characteristics of the person speaking, the background knowledge that people draw on, and the interactional dynamics between parties. Often our reliance upon social cues means we systematically relax our epistemic norms to deal with ‘the social pragmatic need to get along’. This makes us ‘accustomed to faking it and going along with social fictions when necessary’.

The cult of busyness

Jackall’s (1986) study of a large American corporation found that bullshitting was systematically expected of middle managers in the company. One informant told Jackall that his job involved ‘characterizing the reality of a situation with any description that is necessary to make that situation more palatable to some group that matters. Everyone knows that it’s bullshit, but it’s accepted. This is the game’. A crucial aspect was not using too much or too little bullshit, and also being able to judge the appropriate moment to bullshit. Competent bullshitters also needed to become competent audience members for performances of bullshit.

When ignorance is noisy, uninformed actors do not simply stay silent about what they don’t know. Rather, they are compelled to speak about an issue of which they have little knowledge or understanding. A recent experimental study found that this compulsion to speak (coupled with a lack of accountability created by a ‘social pass’) was an important factor in explaining bullshitting. For instance, middle managers are often relatively ignorant about the work their subordinates are engaged with, but are under pressure to act as the leader by doing or say something. They fall back upon generic management speak rather than engage with the people they manage in language they find meaningful. A second example is British government ministers who find themselves with a new policy portfolio. Often these politicians have little or no knowledge of the new policy area, but they are under pressure to say and do something. To address this tricky situation, politicians rely on empty and often misleading language.

The cult of leadership and entrepreneurship

Many conceptual entrepreneurs operate in the management ideas industry. This is a sector made up of consultants, gurus, thought leaders, publishers and some academics. The quality of actors operating in this industry tends to be extremely variable. A consequence is that some of the conceptual entrepreneurs seeking to peddle their wares in the management ideas industry are bullshit merchants. There are some sub-sectors of the management ideas industry where bullshit merchants are particularly concentrated. One is the ‘leadership industries’.

This sub-sector includes many consultants, speakers, experts and advisors who create and distribute pseudo-scientific ideas about leadership. A second sub-sector with a significant concentration of bullshit merchants is the ‘entrepreneurship industry’. This is the cluster of mentors, (pseudo-)entrepreneurs and thought leaders who push poorly evidenced, misleading and seductive ideas about entrepreneurship. Often their target is so-called ‘wantrepreneurs’. In some cases, these ideas have been found to encourage vulnerable young people to adopt what are seductive but empty and misleading ideas about entrepreneurial success.

Institutionalisation and sanctification of bullshit

Successful bullshitting enhances the image of bullshitters. This happens when bullshitters are able to more or less convincingly present themselves as more grandiose than they actually are. External audiences are more likely to make positive judgements about them and be more willing to invest resources in them. Organizations often use trendy but misleading names to attract resources (particularly from the uninformed). In recent years, firms have gained a boost in valuation by adopting a name invoking blockchain technology.

As well as enhancing one’s image, bullshitting can also help to enhance self-identity. This is because bullshit can enable bullshitters to conjure a kind of ‘self-confidence trick’. This happens when bullshitters mislead themselves into believing their own bullshit. Self-deception enables individuals to present themselves as much more self-confident than they would otherwise seem if they had to engage in cognitively taxing processes of dual processing (holding in one’s mind both the deceptive statement as well as the truth). The self-confidence which comes from self-deception can aid resource acquisition. For instance, entrepreneurs are encouraged to ignore their objective chances of failure so they can appear self-confident in their search for resources to support their venture.

When bullshit has become part of the formal organization for some time, it can slowly start to seem valuable in and of itself. When this happens, bullshit can be treated as sacred. Sanctification happens when an element of secular life (such as bullshitting) is elevated, a sense of higher meaning is projected into it, and deep existential significance is invested in it.

As long as life is framed as a competitive social game failure is guaranteed – because then the suffering of others is simply another great busyness opportunity [8].

In the rear view mirror, with a bit more historical distance, say from the vantage point of 2050, the commonalities between corporate capitalism (the “Western” model) and state capitalism (the “Chinese” model) may become more apparent, and the differences may be recognised as superficial.

Similarly, the changes following the collapse of the East German regime and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s will be recognised as superficial in terms of cultural evolution – as processes of assimilation rather then as an evolutionary step change in social operating models. However, the changes in Eastern Europe do illustrate that assimilative changes are not predictable and are driven from the bottom up rather than from the top down within an established system. Changes from the top down tend to either amount to decorative window dressings or take on the form of violent conflict.

Wake up call

In aggregate, the COVID 19 pandemic, increasingly severe manifestations of the climate crisis, and growing levels of social inequities represent a powerful external force and an opportunity to cut through the façade of hypernormality.

While in earlier decades slower rates of ecological destruction and a lack of tangible climate related disasters have allowed baselines to shift with only few people paying attention, the rate ecological destruction and the frequency of climate related disasters has made it impossible for people to not notice the changes [9].

I think we should all start writing down our personal climate change baselines, stretching back as far as we can. This is what summer (winter) was like when I was a child. This is what it was like ten years ago, or two years ago. A small way to fight the pull of normalization.

— Dr. Elizabeth Sawin (@bethsawin) August 24, 2021

A growing number of people from all over the world are waking up to the fact that faith in leaders is what is likely to lead to the end of our species and countless other species. Any tools and sets of knowledge that are incompatible with a path of radical energy decent are likely to rapidly become legacy technologies that are only relevant from a historic perspective – to warn future generations about technological approaches that have lead to existential risks.

“Normal” busyness as usual is slowly killing all of us. The sooner we unplug from the collective delusion, the fewer people will die or suffer needlessly. De-growth (a genuine reduction in unsustainable energy and resource consumption) can play out over generations, and it can be the most civilised project of mutual aid humans have ever undertaken.

Cultural evolution vs cultural revolution

Revolutions can be understood as phase shifts that occur when the level of cognitive dissonance that a population experiences between daily life and the fictions that are perpetuated by rulers and elites can no longer be maintained. In a revolution a large part of the population openly dismisses established institutions as dysfunctional and establishes new institutions based on ideas that often have been “fermenting” within the population for decades. Only some revolutions constitute a genuine shift in the paradigm of governance. The typical result tends to be a new set of institutions, a revised composition of the elites, and a new set of rules for maintaining an oppressive primate dominance hierarchy.

In contrast, the language system of evolutionary design provides us with a collaborative framing and terminology for evolutionary processes that allows bottom-up social movements to participate in the evolution of a living system, and to integrate their knowledge into a living system that includes humans, non-humans, and human designed systems.

Where to from here? We live in a highly dynamic world, and our capability to understand the world we have stumbled into is quite limited. Our destination is beyond human comprehension, but ways of life that are in tune with our biological needs and cognitive limits are always within reach, even when we find ourselves in a self-created life destroying environment. All it takes is a shift in perspective, and corresponding shifts in the aspects of our lives that we value.

In a world of global heating and ecological collapse, the direction of cultural evolution will determine how much suffering human societies will experience over the coming decades, and what kind of world will be available as the starting point for ecological regeneration.

David Graeber had a refreshingly down to earth and entrepreneurial approach to activism, which consisted of embarking on actions that seem appropriate to create a new reality (rather than simply engaging in civil disobedience) – and ignoring the established status-quo as needed to overcome crippling paradigmatic inertia. He conceptualised the revolt of the caring classes [10] and encouraged the activation of bureaucratically suppressed knowledge, i.e. the things that people are not allowed to talk about, into a power that can transform society.

I have a very similar philosophy. Our team at S23M is actively involved in catalysing cultural evolution in the healthcare sector. If you are stuck in a place where busyness as usual is getting in the way of cultural evolution, just follow the money to know where to start building new models from the bottom up. As long as governments operate healthcare like a busyness, from the top down, rather than from the bottom up, based on the needs of local communities, whānau, and patients, healthcare organisations remain paralysed by paradigmatic inertia.

Related documentaries

[1] Studio Kronikeur. 2020. I Work, Therefore I Am (Life as a Salaryman).

[2] ABC. 1973. Computer predicts the end of civilisation.

[3] PBS. 1979. The Information Society.

[4] Double Down News. 2021. Why Jeff Bezos’ Space Dream is Humanity’s Nightmare by George Monbiot.

[5] No Future. 2016. Chapo Trap House Episode #65 with Adam Curtis.

[6] BBC. 2016. HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis.

[7] Minhaaj Rehman. 2021. Natural Language Understanding with Walid Saba.

[8] WSJ. 2021. Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes on Trial: What to Expect.

[9] A Natty Nook. 2021. The Role of Literature in a Climate Crisis.

[10] Nika Dubrovsky. 2020. David Graeber Revolt of the Caring Class and Visual Assembly.

People talk about a global ecological crisis, a climate crisis, an economic crisis, an institutional crisis, a pandemic, and a mental health crisis. These crises are highly interconnected.

Gaining a comprehensive understanding of human potential and limitations is not possible from within any single discipline. Not only is each discipline focused on specific aspects of human behaviour, but the different disciplines that examine human behaviour rest on mutually contradictory assumptions about human nature.

Understanding the co-creation of values

Economist Mariana Mazzucato points out that the activities that societies consider “productive” or “valuable” are subject to significant shifts over the decades and centuries. She observes that GDP is a hodge-podge that invites lobbying rather than reasoning about value and that the continuously evolving values within society need to become part of economic reasoning for the discipline of economics to remain relevant.

Mariana Mazzucato also explains why we shouldn’t try to go back to “normal” after the pandemic, but should instead rethink how governments can work together with businesses in partnership to solve big problems. She advocates making use of multi-dimensional metrics to track progress towards desirable goals. Trained in contemporary economics, she does however rely on the implicit assumption that markets are essential tools for coordinating human activities at scale.

It requires a transdisciplinary understanding of human collective behaviour to realise that fungibility of abstract metrics (the currencies that are used to coordinate activities within markets) is a major problem, especially as long as individuals have radically different levels of access to fungible currencies.

The mathematics that optimise markets are blind to externalities, and as long as market based incentives are used, people will look for ways to circumnavigate or co-opt any regulatory constraints to invent new competitive games, thereby shifting or obfuscating rather than reducing externalities.

Understanding humans

Michael Tomasello has spent many years working with children and with chimpanzees to understand the evolution of collaborative behaviour, and to explore how human behaviour differs from the behaviour of other primates. From a recent interview on the foundations of human cultural capability:

“When children produce sweets collaboratively they feel they should share them equally… So if you look at all the things you think are most amazing about humans – we’re building skyscrapers, we have social institutions like governments, we have linguistic symbols, we have math symbols, we have all these things – not one of them is the product of a single mind. These are things that were invented collaboratively…”

A range of simple experiments show that in contrast to chimpanzees, human babies and young human children are highly collaborative, which may come as a surprise to many economists.

However, to understand human creativity and collective intelligence beyond the most basic forms of collaboration, we must look beyond the experiments conducted by Michael Tomasello and his colleagues. To appreciate the full range of human collaborative ability we need to consider the influence of individual neurological variability on sensory processing and social motivations. Unfortunately on this topic Michael Tomasello’s understanding of autistic people is limited to literature references and “autism research” conducted under the pathology paradigm.

In this article I dive into the cultural evolutionary pressures that allowed autistic traits to proliferate and persist, and I rely on personal experiences to illustrate (a) why autists collaborate in ways that differ from “normal” expectations and (b) why we are uniquely equipped to act as catalysts and translators between different cultures and groups.

The innate collaborative human tendency demonstrated by Michael Tomasello is also supported by anthropological research.

Samuel Bowles is an economist that has spent his career researching the origins of economic inequality over the last 100,000 years, and he comes to very interesting conclusions that are consistent with my own understanding of human cultural evolution and my observations on the new forms of collaboration and communication that have become possible in a digitally networked world.

Designing complex collaborations and flows

Our future depends on the adoption of new forms of creative collaboration. The kind of mathematics that can assist us in reasoning about dynamically evolving value systems and the coordination of non-trivial circular resource flows involve groups and graphs rather than numerical calculations.

The ecological lens is a modelling language for evolving ecosystems. It connects the human lens and the evolutionary lens via the activity of play and a critical perspective/motivation. The ecological lens catalyses diversity within the living world from an ecological perspective.

The evolutionary lens is a modelling language for collaborative niche construction. It consists of five categories that correspond to core elements of modern evolutionary theory (selection, variation, replication, understanding, and sustaining). The evolutionary lens allows organisations and people to participate in the evolution of a living system and to integrate their knowledge into the living system that includes humans, non-humans, and human designed systems.

The human lens is modelling language for human social behaviour that allows us to understand living systems and to reason about such systems. It consists of thirteen categories that are invariant across cultures, space, and time. The human lens provides a visual language and reasoning framework for transdisciplinary collaboration. The human lens allows us to make sense of the world from a human perspective, to evolve our value systems, and to structure and adapt human endeavours accordingly.

Within the human lens the logistic lens provides five categories for describing value creating activities: grow (referring to the production of food and energy), make (referring to the engineering, and construction of systems), care (referring to the maintenance of production and system quality attributes), move (referring to the transportation of resources and flows of information and knowledge), and play (referring to creative experimentation and other social activities). The logistic lens can be used to model and understand feedback loops across levels of scale (from individuals, to teams, organisations, and economic ecosystems) and between agents (companies, regulatory bodies, local communities, research institutions, educational institutions, citizens, and governance institutions).

From wealth to good health

The categories of the logistic lens assist in the identification of suitable quantitative metrics for evaluating performance against a multi-dimensional value system articulated via a configuration of the semantic lens (the five categories of social, designed, symbolic, organic, and critical).

In the transition from a paradigm of economics based on competition to a to an ecology of care based on collaboration we will incrementally discover valuable metrics of health, well being, and waste flows, and we will become less and less concerned about abstract and potentially misleading metrics of wealth accumulation.

In an ecology of care the focus shifts from speculative investments for profit (where the people actively involved in a venture are viewed as tools towards a profitable “exit”) to investments in the health of ecosystems and people (where the people actively involved in a venture are co-investing in each other, resulting in a network of trusted relationships that connects the venture into an ecosystem of multi-dimensional resource flows between suppliers, customers, and partners).

Our society faces the unprecedented challenge of making a transition towards significantly different values within a single generation. This is the real challenge, rather than finding our way back to a state of “normal” that only ever worked for a very small minority.

From an ecological perspective waste flows are destined to emerge as the most critical flows that need to be tracked and quantified meticulously. It will also make sense to quantify selected biological health metrics, but it may not make much sense to attempt to quantify all aspects of well being.

Reading list

Beyond the articles and talks referenced in the article, below is a list of related books and background articles:

Atkins P. W. B. et al., Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups, Context Press, 2019

Babák D., Management of People: Weird and Feared, Da Vinci Institute, 2013

Bauwens M. et al., Peer to Peer : The Commons Manifesto, University of Westminster Press, 2019

Benyus J., Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, William Morrow Paperbacks, 1997

Bowles S. and Gintis H., A Cooperative Species : Human Reciprocity and its Evolution, Princeton University Press, 2013

Bowles S., The New Economics of Inequality and Redistribution, Cambridge University Press, 2012

Costanza-Chock S, Design Justice : Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, MIT Press, 2020

Eisler R. et al., Nurturing Our Humanity : How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future, Oxford University Press, 2019

Everard M., The Ecosystems Revolution, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Graeber D., Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House Publishing, 2011

Kropotkin P., Mutual Aid : A Factor of Evolution, 1902

Mazzucato M., The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, Public Affairs, 2018

Milton, D., On the ontological status of autism: The “double empathy problem.”, Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887, 2012

Milton, D., Embodied sociality and the conditioned relativism of dispositional diversity, Autonomy, the Critical Journal of Interdisciplinary Autism Studies, 1(3), 1–7, 2014

Milton, D., Autistic expertise: A critical reflection on the production of knowledge in autism studies, Autism, 18(7), 794–802, 2014

Paul R. A., Mixed Messages : Cultural and Genetic Inheritance in the Constitution of Society, University of Chicago Press, 2015

Pluchino A., Biondoy A. E., Rapisardaz A., Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure, [physics.soc-ph], 2018

Reinhartz-Berger, I. et al., Domain Engineering : Product Lines, Languages, and Conceptual Models, Springer, 2013

Saijo T. et al., Future Design: Incorporating Preferences of Future Generations for Sustainability, Springer, 2020

Schumacher E. F., Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, Harper Perennial, 1973

Stanish C., The Evolution of Human Co-operation : Ritual and Social Complexity in Stateless Societies, Cambridge University Press, 2017

Tomasello M., Why We Cooperate, Boston Review Books, 2009

Tomasello M., Becoming Human : A Theory of Ontogeny, Harvard University Press, 2019

Wahl D.C., Designing Regenerative Cultures, Triarchy Press, 2016

Wilson D. S., Does Altruism Exist?, Yale University Press, 2015

Wilson D.S., This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution, Pantheon Books, 2019

Yergeau, M., Authoring autism: On rhetoric and neurological queerness, Duke University Press, 2017