Zack Exley

The Revolution misses you — Part III *BETA* 26 December, 2006

[This is a draft -- please help me out by emailing comments or typos.]

Over the last few weeks I’ve been trying to start up a conversation about reviving the goal of revolutionary change to our economic system.

Here’s my basic argument so far in a nutshell: Humanity’s job on Earth is to constantly upgrade our way of life. Beavers make dams, we make revolutions. It’s just our thing. This habit of revolution goes way back even to pre-historic times — long live the agricultural revolution! I have included some important disclaimers along the way: our democracy made violent revolution in the U.S. obsolete; we’re not trying to recreate somebody else’s revolution from the past; and revolution is no excuse for trampling the Constitution, civil rights or the rule of law. Intentional political revolution is a lost idea in our times, and we need desperately to bring it back.

So far, the biggest question in response to all this has been, “Fine, but what are you suggesting as the alternative to the present system?”

In my last post, I prefaced my answer by pointing out how insane it is that people like you and me should be the ones coming up with solutions to world economic problems. But since world economic leaders are not going to, we have no choice but to get started. And we should do so with the knowledge that all good revolutions in world history have relied on “non-experts” for spark and leadership.

OK. Answers. It’s really obvious, and really simple. And it isn’t my idea — this cause has been around for ages, it’s just been forgotten in recent times:

We need economic entities that are responsible to society. We need to start building them, experimenting with them, and, eventually, getting them right.

Now, explanations, qualifications and, at the end, some concrete examples.

First of all, we need to avoid the idea of “replacing capitalism with a new system.” That would be getting sidetracked by a destructive shadow of our true goal. Our true goal is to make as many fundamental, practical improvements as we can in the time we have — improvements that actually work, and that stick. Our purpose is to seize the incredible opportunities we face in the present day, opportunities the current system is incapable of seizing on its own — crazy big opportunities such as…use your imagination…employing advanced technology to turn making a living into a light chore for everyone on Earth.

The capitalist revolutionaries I discussed in Part 1 of this series set the “forces of production” free from the irrational boundaries and limitations of feudalism; our mandate is to make those same forces yet freer, this time from the irrational boundaries and limitations of our current system. Those revolutionaries of the Middle Ages and Industrial Revolution built up new kinds of institutions: factories and farms powered by wage labor, banking systems, stock markets and so many more. Those entities, which seem perfectly natural to us today, were once against the law. We should be following suit.

Let’s look at a specific example of how the current irrational rules can block growth, and then work through some solutions. We know we need a new energy economy, one that isn’t based on non-renewable technologies that trash the planet. However, under the current system, our only option is to “beg” the energy industry with a combination of tax incentives and regulations. Will it work in time? Or ever? Only energy industry spokespeople and extreme ideologues believe it will.

We need a new energy economy. So why can’t we just go build one for ourselves, as a society? Well, we are forbidden from doing any such thing under the current economic orthodoxy. In fact, it is dangerous blasphemy even to suggest the idea.

Before we get to fleshing out solutions. We need to take a couple of paragraphs to examine the assumptions of this orthodoxy that we are blaspheming — especially because most of us have absorbed a lot of it into our own world views without knowing it.

Today’s economic orthodoxy holds that economic activity organized by society is harmful (with only a few exceptions such as education and perhaps health care). Instead, all economic activity must be underwritten by private owners to serve a single, special purpose: to increase the capital of the owners (mind you: individually, not collectively).

It’s important to recognize the context in which the orthodoxy is playing out in today’s world. Contrary to the image held by many progressives, the owners of capital are not a handful of rich guys making deals at Davos. If they were, they might be able to organize solutions to world-threatening (and therefore capital-threatening) problems such as global warming. Only a plurality of the world’s wealth is held by super-rich individuals. Most is owned by hundreds of millions of middle class and working class people. Union members in the U.S. alone hold trillions of dollars worth of capital in stocks, bonds and other instruments. Also, the owners of capital increasingly live in the developing world.

Far from the problem being that a few super rich guys are piloting the world economy (which would suck too!), the problem is that the world economy is on auto-pilot — and we’re headed straight for a mountainside.

The shortcomings of basing the world economy tightly according to this orthodoxy are twofold. The first is that many undesirable activities (such as pumping trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere) turn out to be good ways for the managers of capital to grow it. The well-understood solution to this problem is regulation and incentives. Zealots of the current orthodoxy oppose all regulation of industry. They need to go back and read the work of their 20th Century intellectual grandfather, the right-wing economist Friedrich Hayek. He and most of his right wing contemporaries (who called themselves “liberals” then) believed that heavy regulation — as well as government pensions, public education, welfare and universal heath care — was essential to the health and survival of capitalism.

The second shortcoming of basing the world economy on this orthodoxy is that there are so many big problems that private capital couldn’t solve even if every owner wanted to solve them. If no managers of capital see a way to make a profit from solving a problem, it doesn’t get solved; or, if the only profitable solution to a problem is too costly to get going, even for a big consortium, then it doesn’t get solved. In other words, today’s energy industry, as profitable as it is, doesn’t command the trillions of dollars required to build an entirely new energy economy. And even if it did, the return on that enormous investment would take so long to realize that the present day managers of capital would have no interest in pursuing it. And even if by some miracle all the owners of capital great and small wanted to solve the climate problem, there is no democratic mechanism available for them to act on that desire as owners of capital.

The solution to the first shortcoming, regulation and incentives, has been well accepted by both progressives and preservationists of the current system for a long time.

The second shortcoming and its solution, a practical and constructive revolution in economics, is what this series of essays is all about. It used to be the most important topic for all stripes of progressives, but it’s been lost to the generations alive today.

Constructive revolution — the kind that has driven human progress forever — does not conflict with reform (e.g., regulation). Revolution is just one more necessary ingredient to progress, over and above the regulation and incentives that are today familiar policy tools. Let’s say we implement the “carbon tax,” popular in progressive policy circles, to discourage greenhouse gas emissions. Great. But how does that lead to that new energy industry we need? While it’s true that a heavy carbon tax might create some incentive for energy companies to develop alternatives, it doesn’t provide the trillions of dollars necessary to develop a whole new energy economy. If we only implement the negative tax on the old, without massive positive investment in the new, then we’re likely to just slow down the economy. Who knows, maybe after 150 years a new energy industry will rise up through this game of taxing and begging. But we don’t have that kind of time.

So once again, why don’t we just go build ourselves a new energy industry?

Against that idea, preservationists of the current system are smarter than to cry, “Never! All economic activity must fit into our orthodoxy!” Instead, they give a bunch of reasons that actually sound pretty reasonable. They say history has proven that economic efforts are much more likely to succeed when they take place within the discipline of free markets, subject to competition, and driven by material incentives for workers and managers who have the hope of exceptional payoffs for exceptional successes.

I could not agree more! But what do those things have to do with our current economic system? Sure, the current system sometimes uses those mechanisms. But it didn’t invent them — they were all around long before capitalism. This is a really important point that I’m guessing will be easily missed: What defines capitalism is not markets, competition or the personal profit motive. Rather, it’s this characteristic of “capital reproducing for the sake of capital.” Sometimes, markets, competition and the personal profit motive are involved — but, just as often, they aren’t. For example, when was the last time you got a choice of health care providers on an open market? I live in a rural area served by only one broadband Internet service provider, and, it seems, only one mobile phone carrier.

From our earliest days as human beings, when we made our living in tiny groups as hunter-gatherers, we converged regularly to create markets, we naturally competed with each other as a way of improving productivity (as simply as racing to make hard tasks go by quicker) and what other than the “personal profit motive” drove people to work to gather food, make clothing, and search for better land to live from? But back then we also relied on planning, cooperation, and free sharing. And guess what — so does capitalism today.

OK, I promised concrete examples of a solution. So let’s build our new energy industry!

Let’s make our energy industry one that (A) competes against the “old” energy industry on the free market; (B) is composed of many independent corporations that compete against each other on the market; and (C) pays out ridiculous material incentives to its CEOs, managers, scientists and workers for success. There: that covers markets, competition and the personal profit motive.

Let’s also make it an industry that cooperates internally. For example, by sharing innovations as soon as they are discovered, instead of keeping them locked up under restrictive patents. We’ll let new technological genies out of the bottle as soon as they’re discovered. We’ll reward the corporation that made the discovery up front instead of forcing it to withhold the discovery from wide use and further improvements in order to make a profit.

Let’s make it an industry where full costs are accounted for, including public costs to the environment. (And, yeah, let’s apply that same honest accounting to the “old” energy industry too.)

Let’s make it an industry where wages, benefits and working conditions are not a factor in competition — and an industry that treats its workers the same whether they live in Michigan or Malaysia.

Let’s require our new energy industry to be profitable or at least break even after an initial start-up period. Perhaps we should even require that our initial social investment is returned in cash dividends rather than only in the social benefit the industry produces.

Let’s make it an industry where the CEOs wake up each morning thinking: “How can I produce energy more efficiently? How can I make it less polluting? How can I deliver it at a lower cost? How can I reduce its impact on the environment?” This won’t be because our CEOs are such nice people, but because those are the criteria we set for them, and if they achieve those goals, then they get huge raises and year-end bonuses.

It sounds easy so far, doesn’t it? Now for the tricky part. The difference between this new hypothetical energy industry of ours and the old one is that ours would have a social charter that makes it responsible to all of society — to the goals that we set.

But that opens a whole can of worms: Who decides the goals? Who measures success? Who decides the awards? We’re justifiably cynical these days about the ability of human institutions to make social decisions like those well — we’ve witnessed so much backsliding to corruption and incompetence of so many social institutions in recent years. But if you look beyond all the temporary backward steps, the arc of history is clear: humans keep building better and better institutions to manage important social matters — law, parliament, militaries that are subjugated to civil authority, regulatory bodies that are independent of politicians’ short term political interests, etc… We’re just getting better and better at this — have some faith! Also, the bar is set incredibly low — today the goals are set completely arbitrarily by this numbers game of the capital-for-capital’s-sake system. So we should feel confident that we can do better.

So how will our new social economic entities — for example, our new energy industry — be governed? One current fashionable myth of capitalism is that it is self governing through the mechanism of the market. But publicly-traded corporations that are responsible to a mass base of shareholders have many of the same governance problems that our social corporations will have. Every day millions of shareholders lose tons of money because of the corruption or incompetence of bad managers. When the institution of the publicly traded corporation first arose, many capitalist thinkers spoke out against it because they believe the decentralized shareholders would always be at a disadvantage vis a vis managers at the center of the corporation. They predicted that every corporation would go the way of Enron. But systems of governance were devised: boards of directors elected by shareholders, systems of proxy voting, rules of ethics and disclosure, and so on. Ever generation tries to improve the system and generally succeeds.

But we will have to do better.

As has been true all through history, there is no magic bullet for governing organizations. It is the work of history to learn (and of course forget) better ways of managing institutions. We’re familiar with this process in government (the long process of evolution/revolution from tyranny to democracy), and now we just need to start thinking that way again about economics.

One major problem of governance is always the same: how do you prevent decision makers from being disproportionately influenced by individual private interests. That isn’t unique to government and other social endeavors, it’s a huge problem for private corporations in our current system too: for example, activist shareholders pushing disastrous courses of action to yield a short-term uptick in share price. Through all of human history societies have looked for ways to mediate this universal problem in all institutions. And we’ve succeeded over and over again in every age. One of a million possible examples from all ages: In many ancient empires it was a common practice to forbid local administrators from serving in their home districts to prevent corruption that resulted from personal ties to hometown interests. A well-governed system is made of countless such tactics.

We already have some examples of successful governance of social economic entities. The Post Office competes in the private market, pays for itself, but exists to fulfill a social mandate. Though there has been graft and nepotism through the history of the Postal Service, on the whole it’s served our country exceedingly well. These days, it’s downright kicking ass — just ask Netflix or Amazon, who prefer the USPS over UPS or FedEx.

The institutions that oversee sports industries are worth a look too. The Baseball Commissioner is mandated to mediate disputes between teams and leagues, to uphold fair play, to train and manage a system of empires, and to set and enforce the framework of rules both regulating the business of baseball as well as the game itself. The commissioner’s mandate is not to uphold the profitability of baseball teams, but rather to keep the game entertaining. (In practice of course, the commissioner, elected by team owners, spends a lot of time thinking about the profitability of teams.)

Today, in the world of open source software, all sorts of new governance models are coming into existence. And these are really interesting ones to watch because they are some of the first to utilize the power of the Internet, the database and the web tool in facilitating collaborative work and collective decision making. Right now, there are as many different models of governance in the open source software world as there are open source software projects. Over the years, we will start to see more and more general forms deemed reliable by developers. We should mine this world’s ideas while we try out different governance models for our social corporations.

In our new energy industry, many results will be measurable in a purely objective and numerical fashion, and awards will flow according to the same kind of market mechanism that we have today. For example, a lower price because of a more efficient production process will reward a social corporation with profits, just as with private corporations.

But one big problem we’ll have to solve is that of semi-subjective judging of results. For example, how can we reward our new energy corporations for reductions in environmental impact when it might take decades to prove the reductions? This will take some subjective judging. But who will do the judging? How will we make sure there’s no favoritism or graft?

Again, there’s no excuse for cynicism here, despite the recent failures we’ve seen in this department. Humanity has solved this kind of problem over and over again throughout history. In ancient China, a fascinating and incredibly arduous examination system produced the roster of possible imperial administrators. The exam was open to all. Over the centuries, an elaborate set of protections were developed to keep the tests and judging fair. Test takers were locked into cabins for the week of the test. Their essays were copied and recopied by scribes to prevent a judge from recognizing the handwriting of a family friend. Those and a thousand other extreme security measures guaranteed for a couple thousands years that the emperor did not have meat-heads protecting his interests. Why do I keep using examples from ancient times? Because if they could solve these problems back then without all the advantages we have today, then we have no excuse for cynicism. Every time one of these basic human problems has been solved, it’s simply been because people have striven to solve them.

So what kinds of mechanisms to prevent corruption and favoritism will we devise? Maybe the people involved in judging our energy industry should be anonymous — like the “Academy” who gives out oscars. And maybe there should be a ban on expenditures to influence the process, so that we avoid the kinds of PR campaigns that we see around the Oscars. Maybe judges will have to take a sort of “vow of material objectivity” which will forbid them from having investments that could be effected by their decisions or any personal ties to people working in the industry. That would be an extreme measure, but that’s why I brought out that example of the Chinese exam system: sometimes extreme measures are what it takes. And keep in mind that many of the counter-corruption measures in wide use today once seemed extreme.

An interesting place to look at subjective judging systems are judged sports such as gymnastics or figure skating. The communities around those sports generally suffer terrible problems of conservatism and favoritism among judges — and bribery inevitably pops up from time to time. But look past the anguish caused to the athletes and, for all its flaws, those systems never fail to produce amazing performers. From our perspective, as spectators who want to see great performances, do we care if the judges got the gold, silver and bronze winners in exactly the right order? It will be the same with our new energy industry from our perspective as customers and citizens: who cares if the CEOs are being paid in exactly the right proportions according to their accomplishments so long as all the corporations are doing a great job. And the preservationists of the current system certainly have no grounds to complain about incorrect subjective rewards to CEOs!

In sketching out these specifics of an “alternative system,” I don’t want to be misunderstood. These are just ideas to get the imagination going. If we set out with a new orthodoxy in our minds, we are guaranteed to screw everything up. In my first post, I argued that economic progress happens when people make revolutionary (i.e. fundamental) changes to the structure of the system. People rightly responded by asking for some specific examples of what kind of changes I was talking about. However, the specifics of the actual changes we make will only be worked out as we make them. The work of designing, building and troubleshooting new socially-responsible institutions will be carried out by thousands — millions really — over decades.

But that’s not to say we can’t be certain of the fundamental principle that’s guiding us: Our mission is to add economic activity to the world that is responsible to social goals, and that works, and that is sustainable.

Preservationists will cynically argue that economic activity guided by social goals can only fail. The purpose of this post has been to counter that argument. But that mentality of hopelessness doesn’t only belong to staunch preservationists — most of us progressives are bought into it in one way or another. In future posts, I’m going to be dissecting the logic behind of our own internalized cynicism which has held us back from dreaming revolutionary dreams for so long.

So, please help me gather some material to work with by sending your doubts, objections and grouchy instincts here: cynics@zackexley.com.

The Revolution misses you — Part II 16 December, 2006

Sometime in the warm Spring of 2000 — I’d have to look up when exactly — I was riding a cab into downtown DC from the airport the night before massive protests against the World Bank. It was just months after the bloody “Battle of Seattle,” and so both sides of this new war were rearing for a fight: it was this inexplicable roving army of anarcho-hippies vs. the combined DC metro-area police, Capital police, Secret Service and who knows who else. All respectable citizens interested in minding their own business had fled to friends’ places out of town or the Delaware beach, leaving their city in the hands of a rag-tag mob of anarchist teenagers and cops banking overtime and hazard pay.

The cab passed a teenage white girl with long dreadlocks who wore a homemade t-shirt proclaiming:

WE NEED A NEW SYSTEM

“Huh!” I muttered aloud accidentally. Was it a sign that these protests weren’t just about counter-parental rage, but actually, maybe, about changing the world. “Yes,” the cab driver agreed, “something good is happening here. I did not think I’d see this in America.” It turned out he was a former revolutionary student leader from Ethiopia who had spent most of his 20′s in jail. Because I had come for the revolution, he wouldn’t let me pay my fare.

Amid the evening’s chaotic festivities, I ran into Doug Henwood, a left-wing economics writer who is read by investment bankers because he is always so right. He invited me to come along to a party at, of all places, the home of the Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers.

It was like a scene transplanted from right before the French Revolution: this ornate room full of ambassadors, politicians, esteemed professors and what seemed like the entire combined senior economist staff of the IMF, World Bank and Treasury — the topic of discussion everywhere in the room was the collapsing world economy, and these people were finding a million new ways to say, “Let them eat cake!” It was a Friday night at the close of a week in which the stock market had collapsed, the NASDAQ and the DOW both losing 1/3 of their value. Asia was in a shambles. Whole countries’ currencies went to zero and hundreds of millions of people were spit back out after only their first few years inside capitalism — it all happened in a single planetary heart beat.

A lot of serious economists were actually thinking that this might be the Big One. On my lunch breaks I read them fretting about it on the editorial page of the Financial Times. I was working temporarily as a computer programmer in a boutique money management firm in Boston. The CEO of this small firm, with billions under management, had a giant corner office on the very top floor of the building with floor to 30-foot-ceiling windows — an office from which he could literally keep an eye on his yacht in Boston harbor. I started there right before the crash. The firm specialized in emerging market investments. A 24 year old Harvard grad ran a giant excel spreadsheet model with hundreds of variables to weigh the relative strengths of every national currency and market. When the Thai Baht collapsed, his model started to go haywire. He tried to patch it up with Scotch tape and Elmers, but I could hear him getting chewed out in the morning meetings. And then went Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Argentina, Russia. Would Hong Kong hold? Would Hong Hong hold!?! They were thanking God for China, who’s currency was not effected because it was not traded on the free market. It was a very uncomfortable time for capitalists. The senior money managers at the firm even stopped leaving in the middle of the day for golf.

So that teenager in dreads must have been an angel, because Larry Summers had seen her too. He was blow harding in his famed style:

“And so I asked the girl: ‘What is this new system that you want? Tell me about it!’ And the girl had nothing. Nothing! She had no fucking clue what this magical new system was supposed to be. No one is saying that there aren’t problems with the world economy the way it is today. But these kids out there — they don’t know what they want!”

From this massive living room, above the civil chatter and clinking of glasses and distributing of hors’ dourves, you could actually hear the milling about of those confused kids outside. You could also hear the sound of dozens of helicopters buzzing low above the city with flood lights pointed downward. Garrisons of police and national guard lay in wait on alert, holed up in parking lots right next door and all around the city. Riding to the party I had caught glimpses of them down short drive ways behind buildings. Because of Seattle, which had broken into open urban warfare, there was anticipation that something astonishing was about to happen this weekend.

“Mr. Secretary,” I said, not sure if my formality counted as pretentiousness in this setting, “You’ve got 50 economics PhDs in this room who pretty much run the world economy. And you’re asking that girl for a better system? Aren’t the solutions your job? You admit billions are living in hell, but it’s up to that girl to fix it?”

I got only a chuckle and then the conversation turned to something else.

The next day, the World Bank meetings took place without a hitch because the anarchists didn’t wake up early enough to carry out their planned sabotage of the delegate buses. Ten thousand kids formed an almost impenetrable ring around the facilities, but the meetings were already taking place inside — and there were plenty of gaps where stragglers could walk between the kids who had locked their arms into homemade iron links and thrown away the keys. There were a couple more of those big convergence-style protests in 2000, and then that movement died away as fast as it had risen. And I haven’t seen a “NEW SYSTEM” t-shirt since.
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So, after my post earlier this week, “The Revolution Misses You“, I got a ton of responses saying, “Fine! But what the hell are you suggesting as an alternative? What’s your new system?”

I’m going to write about that in my next post. But it really shouldn’t be our job, should it? If we had a functional world, then it wouldn’t be up to random guys on the Internet to fix the world economy, would it?

But Summers kind of proved his own point, didn’t he? In this world, the solutions aren’t going to come from the current batch of people in charge. (Or the people in charge under a Democratic administration either, like Larry and his crew.)

We, the ordinary people without economics PhDs, have to stand up to the task of demanding progress and rationality in this world. We should feel confident in that role. But to actually implement that demand in reality, we’re going to need economists, business leaders, industrial engineers, experienced policy wonks, and so on.

None of them seem very willing right now, do they? So, if you’re in college now and want to be part of this revolution, then here’s one really valuable thing you can do: major in engineering. Go to business school. Go work for a corporation and learn how the system works from the inside. Become a good manager — a good and skillful leader. If you’re already in the system, and are miraculously thinking about the big picture, then let’s hear from you.

But right now, without econ PhDs, without industrial leaders, without scientist sages, we’ll just have to get this process started ourselves. Come back for the next post and we will.

The Revolution misses you 12 December, 2006

At a conference last weekend (RootsCamp) I attempted a conversation about “revolution” with a room of about 50 or 60 thinkers and activists. It’s pretty much the first time I’ve attempted the topic outside of a 1-on-1 conversation with friends. It was just a start, and a pretty shaky one.

Here’s the main point I was trying to get across: A radically better world is possible, but it’s not going to happen unless we go out there and make it happen through…a revolution…a big, audacious world revolution.

I’m using the “R” word. I know that’s a little scary. So let me make some disclaimers right up front to calm everybody down:

I’m NOT talking about a violent revolution; our ancestors fought for democracy so we’d never have to do that again in our society. I’m NOT talking about a cultural revolution to change people’s values; the people’s values are just fine. I’m NOT talking about reenacting some past revolution; our solutions have to come out of our present situation and culture, not some long-gone era or foreign society. I’m NOT talking about a revolution that steps outside of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the rule of law; that would be a step backward, not forward. And I’m NOT talking about anything that gets in the way of or precludes incremental reform; there is no competition between reform and revolution — both are necessary ingredients to progress.

My topic was economic revolution. It’s an incredibly difficult thing to talk about because people’s minds still go straight to Russia, 1917; or China, 1949. But the revolution I want people to think about is the revolution carried out by the first capitalists, who grew up a whole new (and better!) economic system on top of feudalism. They started with an idea — one inspired by developments that were already taking place around them; and they organized to seize the opportunities that history was placing in front of them.

We just need to do that again. It’s not my idea, it’s just the mandate of history. Improving and upgrading our economic way of life: you could say that is humanity’s job.

But these days, it’s as if humanity is on strike. And that was well represented in the counter arguments raised in my session. I’ll try to answer one today, and then hopefully later this week tackle the other two or three.

The main counter-argument, raised by several people in the session, went like this:

“Don’t bother trying to make revolution — progress happens on its own, because of inevitable technological upheavals and other factors beyond the control of intentional political action.”

It’s true, technological revolutions are mostly beyond our control because they are made of so many independent and unexpected discoveries and initiatives. That’s half of what makes being human so exciting: the future is a mystery. But humanity does have the power to decide what to do with these innovations after they come along. We do that through political action — or, in times like the present, the lack of it. Whether you believe that God or nature or both gave us this power of action and decision, there’s no denying we have it. And that’s the other half of what makes being human so exciting: the future is our project — and even though the materials we have to work with are a constant surprise, what to make with them is up to us.

To deny humanity historical agency is to deny what it means to be human.

For hundreds of thousands of years we humans have been living in the same biological bodies and brains — but the shape of our societies keep radically changing. This makes us unique on Earth. All other animals have their way of life pretty much hard coded in DNA. The structures of ant colonies and lion prides have changed over tens of millions of years, but only with corresponding mutations to their physical nature — a very slow and boring process compared to the whirlwind of human history. Changes in human life have decoupled from changes in human biology. Physically, we’re the same as the first humans who walked the Earth hunting and scavenging. But look at the world that has exploded into being from our minds and hands!

Every time human life changes for a society — whether a band of 30 people 100,000 years ago, or a state of a 300 million people today — decisions are being made. Yes, technological revolutions set the parameters: think of the discovery that seeds could be planted and yield crops. But group decisions determine the outcome: think of the incredible revolutionaries back then who must have convinced their communities to try something radically new and stay put waiting for crops to grow.

Revolutions of that magnitude are coming more and more frequently. We now reinvent our whole way of life every century, maybe even every generation. How long before it’s every decade, every year?

Imagine watching this quickening of humanity from, say, the Earth’s perspective. When humans developed the capacity for language, it was a completely new and magical thing the world had never seen before. At the time, it was probably the first truly original development in a billion years. Then, just the blink of an eye later in geological time, the Earth again sees humanity at the center of something incredible and unprecedented: this insane explosion of human technology.

Humanity is literally on fire — we have ignited like a match head. From our perspective, we live out our microscopic lives watching just one of the first milliseconds of the process in fantastic slow motion. But from the Earth’s perspective: after billions of years of relative peace, suddenly there is this fury — cities sprouting up, industries encrusting the surface of whole regions, transportation and communication networks winding around the planet like it’s a ball of twine, and the exponentially growing sparks of our wars. Have you ever seen one of those super high-speed videos of a match lighting up? It starts with a few small crackles, then just a few sparks — so much happens before the flame comes. Imagine the last 500 years as just that very first instant.

So what comes next?

That’s the point: we can choose what comes next. I used the metaphor of the match to convey the explosive nature of what’s happening. But it doesn’t have to be bad. Sure, if we choose World War III, then the world goes up in literal flames. If we choose to continue attack the atmosphere and environment, then it’s slightly more metaphorical but basically the same idea.

I agree with the people in my session who said that the technological revolutions are coming whether we want them or not. Yes: We’re getting an explosion of change no matter what. But here’s the explosion I want: clean technology replaces dirty technology; technology turns the matter of making a living into an afterthought for everyone in the world; freed from drudgery, humanity ploughs its effort into education, culture and just having a damn good time; our great challenge becomes simply living well (which we will find is not as easy as it sounds).

Why isn’t that a realistic vision? If we formed a worldwide movement to bring that into being, wouldn’t we stand a chance of succeeding? History says, “Yes.” Humanity has pulled off improvements on that scale over and over. But the current zeitgeist says, “No way.” We been overcome by a lack of confidence — one that’s shared pretty much the world over.

All through history, ideologies have been built up and taught by preservationists of the status quo — ideologies whose purpose is to convince people that humanity is powerless to control its destiny. European feudalism was an economic system of complex, bizarre and oppressive rules and social relationships. Its preservationists said that the system was God’s invention and people better leave it alone. Fast forward 500 years: our current economic system consists of running all economic activity through publicly traded corporations, all sharing a universal mission statement: “Increase shareholder value.” It’s an interesting but roundabout way to fulfill needs. But today’s preservationists say that this system is perfect — better than any other imaginable system. Some have even proclaimed, “The end of history.”

One way to break the spell of the new preservationists is to remember that, in between feudalism and capitalism, there was a revolution. Yes, technological discoveries were part of it: everything from carts in mines, more efficient water power and faster sailing ships. Exploitation of colonies and the pillaging of the Americas were a major factor too. But it took an intentional, political revolution to determine the impact of those innovations. Capitalists were the revolutionaries. Books like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations were revolutionary texts. Thousands of books in every European language worked out the vision of the economic system we live under today hundreds of years before it was realized. They didn’t just write, they organized, got themselves elected to parliament, and eventually won ruling majorities. In most countries the very fight to establish a parliament was part of the capitalist revolution. Once in power, they tipped the playing field in favor of capitalist entities and against feudal ones.

For example, under feudalism, land lords bore a responsibility to the peasants who were born and spent their lives working on the land. In fact, feudal lords in England and many other countries did not even own their land: the monarch did. In the early genesis of capitalism, many British lords saw that they could get rich by throwing the peasants off the land and replacing them with sheep, to produce wool for the new textile industry that was growing in Holland and shortly after in England. (Thomas More wrote in 1516, “Sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns.”)

Kings and Queens, the Church and the people fought back, for reasons of economic self interest as well as simple conservatism. But the embryonic Capitalist class continued to organize. It took hundreds of years, but finally they decisively controlled government. The “Inclosure Acts,” from 1750 to 1860, converted about 20% of the total land in England to private ownership and made it free for Capitalist agricultural enterprise. The enclosures had the double benefit of forcing huge numbers of peasants into cities and towns, where they supplied unbelievably cheap labor to the growing textile industry. When the supply did not keep pace with demand, the capitalist parliament passed laws to force the homeless, debtors, vagrants and others into work.

Over hundreds of years, the revolutionaries passed countless laws, waged wars and built institutions all designed to bring this new capitalist utopia fully into existence and secure its future. Today they have exactly what they wanted — all that’s needed is a few more hundred years for true capitalism to establish itself in all corners of the world.

Yes, capitalism was made possible by technological innovations. But it took organized political action — a revolution — to actually give it birth.

Now, it’s our turn. And because the pace of history has quickened to such a fever pitch, we can hope that our revolution won’t have to take hundreds of years, like the last one. (Or thousands, like older revolutions!) If the next 50 years see only an equivalent magnitude of change as the previous 50, that’s more than enough change for us to work with. Poor Adam Smith had to dream of his Capitalist utopia which he knew was generations away from being realized.

But if I live a long life, then when I die 50 years from now, I want everyone on Earth to be raising their tri-lingual kids in cozy houses, with full bellies, fresh air and no fear for the future. And damn it, I’m going to be really pissed if we don’t get there. But the generations alive today seem to be still refusing to accept our responsibility to history. Change never stops. The system we have today will be replaced by something else eventually — maybe sooner than we think. The question is, what? That’s up to us.