The Society of the Third

PROLOGUE THE SOCIETY OF THE THIRD MILLENNIUM New Narratives Of A Reimagined Future Synthesized As The Integral Vision Of S3K “Because of the interconnectedness of all minds, affirming a positive vision may be about the most sophisticated action anyone of us can take.” —Willis Harmon, Global Mind Change “A developing brain is a sort of snowballing cognitive leviathan that adapts to everything and anything close to it. Learning is one aspect of extreme plasticity, and creativity another. Any species that can do such things as play with the world, imagine it, remember it, and expand its cir- cles of experience…will ultimately start to experiment.” —Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare “If we can reimagine possibility it can result in an entirely new vision of how to create lasting change in our communities. Not in a dreamy, wish- ful, [naïve] sense, but rather through a bold and courageous commitment to practical and specific measures grounded in the daily experience of what has been proven to work over and over again but has not been tried on a large enough scale.” —Bill Shore, Revolution of the Heart “We need visions these days. Not the prognostications of cybergeeks and marketers and statisticians and trend-mongers who try to tell us where we’ll end up if we continue in the direction we’re going. Useful as these predictions may be, we’ve got plenty of those kinds of visions. What we need are visions of society the way we want it to be. Creative, seemingly impractical, catalytic visions of human possibility and achievement can inspire and motivate us to change our lives and the world.” —Eric Utne, Visionaries: People and Ideas to Change Your Life. 1 THE FIRST GREAT AMERICAN TRANSITION The last time America (and subsequently the entire world) was in a titan- ic threshold of transformation (as we find ourselves today) was when it was transitioning from an agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse through the “revolutionary improvements in transportation and communications that accelerated the extension of the American empire,” this according to Daniel Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. Railroads, canals, newspapers, and the telegraph dramatically low- ered travel times and spurred the spread of information. These innova- tions prompted the emergence of mass political parties and stimulated America’s economic development from an overwhelmingly rural country to a diversified economy in which commerce and industry took their place alongside agriculture. […Not to mention] the rise of Andrew Jack- son and his Democratic party […], John Quincy Adams and other Whigs—advocates of public education and economic integration, de- fenders of the rights of Indians, women, and African Americans—were the true prophets of America’s future. […] The power of religion to shape many aspects of American life during this period, including slavery and antislavery, women’s rights and other reform movements, poli- tics, education, and literature […]. In 1844 […] Ralph Waldo Emer- son [the father of American Transcendentalism] proclaimed that ‘America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.’ Emerson spoke a common sentiment in that heady age of what might be called America’s national adolescence […]. The American people, lustily doubling their numbers every two decades, dreamed without embar- rassment of extravagant utopias both spiritual and secular. Their economy, fueled by startling new technologies like the telegraph and the rail- road, was growing robustly. Their churches were rocked by revivalism, even as their political system was giving the world an exhilarating lesson in the possibilities of mass democracy. Yet Emerson’s America was already a country with a past. Its history held peril as well as promise— not least the noxious heritage of chattel slavery, a moral outrage that mocked the Republic’s claim to be a model of social and political en- lightenment and eventually menaced the nation’s very survival […].1 2 THE SECOND GREAT TRANSITION A Neo-Convergence Of New Energy & Communication Regimes “We are approaching the sunset of the oil era in the first half of the 21st century. The price of oil on global markets continues to climb and peak global oil is [near if not here already]. At the same time, the dramatic rise in carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels is raising the earth’s temperature and threatening an unprecedented change in the chemis- try of the planet and global climate, with ominous consequences for the future of human civilization and the ecosystems of the earth […]. The need for a new economic vision takes on an even greater urgency […]. “The great pivotal economic changes in world history have occurred when new energy regimes converge with new communication regimes. When that convergence happens, society is restructured in wholly new ways. For example, the first hydraulic agricultural societies—Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India—invented writing to manage the cultivation, storage, and distribution of grain. Surpluses of stored grain allowed for an expansion of population and the feeding of a slave labor force which, in turn, provided the ‘man power’ to run the economy. The convergence of written communication and stored energy in the form of surplus grain, ushered in the agricultural revolution, and gave rise to civilization itself. “In the early modern era, the coming together of coal powered steam technology and the print press gave birth to the first industrial revolution. It would have been impossible to organize the dramatic increase in the pace, speed, flow, density, and connectivity of economic activity made possible by the coal fired steam engine using the older codex and oral forms of communication. In the late nineteenth century and throughout the first two thirds of the twentieth century, first generation electrical forms of communication—the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, electric typewriters, calcu- lators, etc.—converged with the introduction of oil and the internal combus- tion engine, becoming the communications command and control mechanism for organizing and marketing the second industrial revolution. “Similarly, today, the same design principles and smart technologies that made possible the internet, and vast ‘distributed’ global communication net- works, are just beginning to be used to reconfigure the world’s power grids so that people can produce renewable energy and share it peer-to-peer, just like they now produce and share information, creating a new, decentralized form of energy use. We need to envision a future in which millions of indi- viduals can collect and produce locally generated renewable energy in their homes, offices, factories, and vehicles, store that energy in the form of hy- 3 drogen, and share their power generation with each other across a continent- wide intelligent intergrid. (Hydrogen is a universal storage medium for inter- mittent renewable energies; just as digital is a universal storage mechanism for text, audio, video, data and other forms of media). “The central question that every nation needs to ask is where they want their country to be in twenty five years from now: In the sunset energies and industries of the second industrial revolution or the sunrise energies and industries of the Third Industrial Revolution. The Third Industrial Revolution is the end-game that takes the world out of the old carbon & uranium-based energies and into a non-polluting, sustainable future for the human race.”2 A New Distributed Social Vision In The 21st Century “The Third Industrial Revolution makes possible a new Distributed So- cial Vision in the 21st century. Most citizens of the world, when asked what they most hope for, say they envision a good ‘quality of life.’ The dream of quality of life emphasizes individual opportunity, social and human rights, balancing the social and market models, and building bridges of cooperation and peace. Underlying this expansive new 21st century social vision is the commitment that millions of people share to create a just and sustainable society for their children and future generations. “The dream of a good quality of life is now endangered by the dramatic rise of oil and gas prices on the world market, and the real time impacts of climate change on communities and ecosystems across the continent […]. The shift from the Second Industrial Revolution to the Third Industrial Rev- olution is going to require a carefully constructed long term transition plan. The EU understands this, and has committed itself to pursuing a two-track process: Track one, increasing the energy efficiency and reducing the carbon footprint by 20 percent, respectively, by the year 2020, in order to clean up the mature fossil fuel energies of the Second Industrial Revolution; track two, aggressively pursuing a 20 percent renewable energy target and laying down the foundation for a Third Industrial Revolution during the first half of the 21st century. Every nation needs to aggressively pursue both tracks simulta- neously if we are to ease the transition to a post-carbon era. “In 2007, the EU Parliament became the first legislature in the world to pass a written declaration in support of the two-track approach to making the transition into a Third Industrial Revolution and a post-carbon energy era. “The story of a Third Industrial Revolution and a new Distributed Social Vision is powerful and provides the narrative we so desperately need at this critical point in history if we are to address climate change and peak oil and re-heal the Biosphere of the planet.”3 4 THE NEW AVANT GARDE OF METAMODERNISM “As public space becomes increasingly saturated by corporate culture, a new generation of artists is emerging. Frustrated by the insulated art world, en- couraged by the politicization of art in the 1980s, and desirous of the rupture between high and low art, artists are looking into the space of everyday life to find a new canvas.

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