Sustainable Earth Economy

Few days ago I watched the latest Zeitgeist: Moving Forward movie after being linked to it by a Facebook friend about a week earlier. I watched it out of curiosity, and since I watched the previous two Zeitgeist films. I also watched it because they tend to be entertaining, intriguing and daring. If you ask me Zeitgeist gets a lot of things right when it comes to identifying the problems we find ourselves in, but slips when it comes to identifying the causes and prescribing solutions.

But why is this at all relevant on a technology web site? Well, first off, Zeitgeist promises to be a growing cultural phenomenon. If you have doubts about that look at the claimed statistics:

“On Jan. 15th, 2011, “Zeitgeist: Moving Forward” was released theatrically to sold out crowds in 60 countries; 31 languages; 295 cities and 341 Venues. It has been noted as the largest non-profit independent film release in history.” (This is from YouTube’s movie description).

Additionally, after barely a month from its release on YouTube it has been viewed 3.2 million times. Meanwhile, the Zeitgeist Movement web site claims to have over half a million movement members around the world.

Considering these statistics in a context of a shifting world, from ongoing economic disturbances to political instability most evident in the ongoing array of revolutions in Africa, with dominant sentiments being very much in line to what Zeitgeist masterfully plays on, I think we can at least concede that Zeitgeist should not be ignored.

But apart from its apparent cultural relevance what makes it relevant to any technology enthusiast is the huge role technology plays in their proposed revolution, and this is what I want to focus and expand upon.

Whatever our opinions may be regarding their desire to rid the world of money and markets I think they are right about few crucial things, and it would be foolish to “throw the baby out with the bathwater”. Namely they are right about the currently prevalent economic paradigm being unsustainable, and about the use of science and technology as primary methods of remedying this.

They are in my opinion gravely wrong about this involving a wholesale dumping of the entire concepts of money and free markets though, as they fail to differentiate them from their corruption. For example, the fact that our money is essentially worthless and can be arbitrarily printed out of thin air by central banks doesn’t mean that all forms of money are immediately invalid. Someone selling you a substandard item while claiming it to be of top quality doesn’t automatically make the very idea of “selling” an evil one. All that’s evil about this is the fraud involved with the act.

I don’t know at what point may I talk about the lack of sustainability to the way our civilizations currently function as if it was something commonly understood. Who else out there needs convincing? This isn’t about whether resources are scarce or not, or about whether we can fix the problem we have or not. It isn’t about being a pessimist or a doomsayer either. It is about recognizing the problem as what it is to begin with so we can proceed to the talk about solutions, and actions that would materialize these solutions.

So to get back to what they’re right about, I think whatever our solutions will be there can be no better place to look for them than science and technology. Science is after all, quite simply, the pursuit of knowledge about the world and universe we are living in, with the built in understanding that this knowledge is never complete and always evolving. Technology is science’s biggest proof of validity and utility. Technology puts science to work at solving real problems and providing real power.

So even if getting rid of money and markets is an unsound, even pseudo-scientific, idea, I do think that thinking in terms of solving all social and economic problems through science and technology is the right way to go. Zeitgeisters just need to try harder, look deeper, and fight off the tendency to be taken in by irrational sensibilities of the moment.

Technology Drives Decentralization

3D printed item

This is impossible in a decentralized system, and as I’ve pointed out above, it is not how truly stable, durable and flexible systems in nature and the universe as a whole operate. Those claiming to learn from science when trying to create a sustainable economy should know this, and thus know the foolishness of proposals such as this.