Hacking human constructs
Posted on October 27, 2017
Do we really need that new smartphone with an extra megapixel?
I have always been troubled by the excesses of our economic systems. Don’t get me wrong; I particularly enjoy the variety of choices that the capitalist economy provides for every kind of economic transaction. But beyond a point, creation of new options with infinitesimal or no improvement over the others, begins to question our time and capital investments in this structure. The socialist model, on the other hand provides for almost no choice, where personalization and choice are seen as frivolous preferences with no real value to the greater good. We have all seen, how pure socialistic models de-incentivize innovation from ground up leading to perceivably slower progress[*]. A few approaches to a mixed version of these two systems have been attempted, sometimes explicitly, as in India, and sometimes as a result of patterns that have built up over time (social healthcare for example), as in a large part of the western world.
The sequence of readings from Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems [1] to Steven Johnsons’ Emergence [2], have revealed to me a large interconnected system that was previously invisible to my mind, one trained in the linear problem-solving paradigms of engineering. The economic system does not operate in isolation, and to make models of it that treat it as such, while useful in some cases, are disastrous in many. The economic system is tied very closely to our social, environmental and technology systems. Making economic gains our baseline for measurements, obscures from us, the gains we might be able to make in the other systems. I posit that we need a dramatic change in our thinking of economic systems, as a spectrum from free market to socialism, to one with more dimensions – a multi-dimensional plane rather than a unidimensional line.
This complex map created at the 2nd annual World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, displays a glimpse of the complexity of what we’re deaing with
As I wonder what such a system would look like, I am faced with the hard questions of how we might have to redefine the meaning of some of our most valued human constructs to achieve this. Such intangible constructs as value, ownership, purpose, currency etc., form the cornerstone of the world model in our minds. At the end of the day, however, these are essentially human constructs, and hence open to hacking. Over our history, we have seen countless instances of this very kind of hacking of human constructs –the ownership free world of the Native Americans, the Free Software Foundation’s hack of the concept of ownership, Bitcoin’s hack of currency, the Kurds hack of the nation state etc. Some have been successful, and some not so much, but it is precisely through this mechanism of experimentation that will help us gain better understanding of this massively complex system. I wonder what we will learn from playing around with these systems that seem set in stone, and how we will change our reality with what we learn.
Stills from the movie, ‘The Dictator’, where the protagonist of the movie changes the law so that the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ are replaced with his own name – Aladeen. Construct hacking, if you will
And finally, we have the missing piece of technology, my ideological home. Technology and its creation is a building block of my identity, and I hold firm in my belief that its transformational power can be used to grasp and work with some of this ‘wicked problems’ [3] in previously unexplored ways. Ideas like platform co-operativism resonate strongly with my views of a more collaborative socio-economic system, moving away from the excesses of our competitive system, but keeping the pieces of it that foster great pace of innovation. Technology is most definitely not the answer to these problems, no one tool or field can be, but it stands to play an important role in creating new feedback paths in our meta-systems, ones that will allow for more balance in the system while continuing to aid global progress[*].
– Anurag Dutta
* progress – for the purpose of this essay, defined as goals born from a sum of human understanding of the socio-enviro-economic systems at any point of time.
[1] Meadows, Donella H. (2008-12-03). Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.
[2] Johnson, Steven (2012-09-11). Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Scribner. Kindle Edition.
[3] Rittle, Horst; Webber, Melvin (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.