It is
hardly news by now that digital technologies have made available an abundance
of information and knowledge on the Internet and the Web.
New
technologies have created a global digital infrastructure, which, in turn, has
become the basis for a new information economy, whose most obvious feature is
the abundance of free or low-cost information and knowledge. With few
exceptions, I have usually found a needed piece of information, skill or
knowhow — if it is public knowledge — on Wikipedia, YouTube, a blog, a Web
site, or a mailing list somewhere. The Internet search results below illustrate
the extent of the abundance (search done on Feb. 28, 2011; Oct. 2010 hits are
in parentheses). The first few hundred hits are usually more than enough for
most purposes.
A
number of disturbing issues persist, including problems of inappropriate
content, unaffordability, exclusion, embedded value systems, toxic production
and e-wastes.[1]
But those who are looking for information abundance will definitely find it on the
Internet. To turn this wealth of information into wisdom though, users have to
carefully pick true from false, grain from chaff. But this also holds true even
under information scarcity.
Because
it has become a dominant feature of our time, information abundance is forcing
a deeper look at the concept itself. One of the most fundamental assumptions in
economics is scarcity.[2]
This, in effect, assumes away abundance.
Thus, most mainstream economists have few concepts that explain it. They
have no equations that describe it. Confronted with abundance, they fall back
on inadequate theories based on scarcity.
With
the growth of the information economy, however, it is now imperative to deal
with the phenomenon of abundance.
Wellspring of information abundance: the
human urge to communicate
Think
of a bottle. You can bottle water, food, air and most other goods for sale. If
you use up the bottle's content, it's gone. That's scarcity. But drinking from
a bottle of ideas will never use up the contents of the bottle. That's
abundance.
Think
of a curious child. It will touch, smell, taste, look at and listen to almost
anything. And once it learns to talk, anything and everything bottled up in its
mind will come out, because the
child has an innate urge to absorb information and to communicate
information. It is, in fact, a universal human urge. For the child in all of
us, the Internet offers a huge collection of bottled ideas. And we can all drink from each bottle without
using up its contents. That is why we have information abundance.
Information
goods become abundant because ideas grow — not diminish — with sharing. As
Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Its peculiar character … is that no one possesses
the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an
idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine…."[3]
With a marginal cost of almost zero enabling the reproduction of exact copies
over any number of generations,
the cost has become "too cheap to matter," as Wired editor-in-chief
Chris Anderson puts it.[4]
Furthermore,
it does seem that "information wants to be free".[5] Something is
driving it to multiply. This driving force, I suggest, is the human urge to
acquire and exchange knowledge. We did so when it cost much. We will certainly
do so even more, now that sharing costs practically nothing.
On
the Internet, we can fully express the primal human urge to communicate. This
is why we have information abundance.
Wellspring of ecological abundance: the
biological urge to reproduce
Think
of DNA. They are also like bottled ideas. Nature bottled these ideas into
genes, cells, organisms and species, and built in a reproductive urge in every
living organism to spread one's DNA, to reproduce one's own kind.
That
is why nature — and if we do it right, agriculture too — can also keep on
giving us its bounty, without using itself up.
Nature's
abundance is hard to miss: bacteria can double their numbers every half hour;
some plants release a million pollen in a single day; a fish can release one to
ten million eggs in one breeding season; one rice grain can produce a thousand
grains within a planting season. In seas, lakes, swamps, grasslands, forests,
and other ecosystems — abundant life blooms. Where they do not anymore do so,
something must have upset the natural abundance. Even such damaged ecosystems,
if left alone, soon teem with life again.
While
abundance in nature can last indefinitely, it does not grow without limit. As
species multiply, they soon settle into balance with other species and the
natural environment. The food chain of plants, herbivores, carnivores and other
predators, and decomposers such as arthropods, fungi and bacteria becomes webs
of material and energy cycles and exchanges, highly-productive ecosystems that
provide us perpetual streams of natural income – new soil, clean air, food,
materials for clothes and houses, medicine, fuel, industrial inputs, a thousand
other goods and services and psychic rewards too.
Abundance
comes from these inner logic of sharing in humans and reproduction in living
organisms.
Other wellsprings of abundance
Abundance
can also come from the massive
bulk of water, carbon, iron, silicon and other minerals on Earth as well as
energy from the sun.
The
Earth's non-renewable mineral abundance must be managed differently from
renewable solar energy.
As
oil production peaks, for instance, cheap abundant oil will soon come to an
end.[6]
Peak oil should teach us an unforgettable lesson in abundance management. Those
who miss the lesson will go for more coal, nuclear power and agrofuels. Those
who get it will shift to clean renewables, energy efficiency and energy
conservation, that will result in planned energy "descent". Transition towns
are already leading the way.[7]
Solar
energy makes possible other abundant energy sources such as water, wind and
wood. In 2009, renewables supplied 25% of total world energy capacity, thanks
in part to China's surging interest in biogas, wind power and photovoltaics.[8]
Germany, too. Hydrogen from water also promises another abundant energy source.
There
is one more wellspring of abundance: the webs of positive human relationships –
acquaintances, friendships, family, community – which generate feelings of
peace, contentment, love, happiness and other psychic rewards which defy
quantification.
Each
of these wellsprings of abundance creates an archetype — a distinct category —
of abundance: information, biological, bulk, psychic, and others.
Creating cascades of abundance
If we
do not learn to recognize or to tap these archetypes when we come across them,
we can become poor by default. People with access to land often stay poor
simply because they have forgotten how to tap and build on the abundance that
nature lays at their feet, or the wealth of knowledge humanity has accumulated
over time.[9]
All of us must learn again to recognize abundance when it happens, to tap
existing abundance, and to make it last indefinitely.
Beyond
tapping existing abundance and making it last indefinitely, we can learn to
recognize the conditions that generate each archetype, so that we can
subsequently create cascades of new abundance. To cite examples: the System of
Rice Intensification (SRI) improves yields dramatically; permaculture creates
through conscious design a self-regenerating "forest" of food and cash crops;[10]
remineralization rejuvenates our soils; biodynamic farming taps distant forces
to raise the quantity and quality of farm produce.[11]
Photovoltaics
are made from semiconducting silicon, the elemental basis of the digital
revolution. Six-thousand-dollar LCD projectors 10 year ago now cost less than a
thousand. If photovoltaics follow similar plunging price trends as other
digital goods, then we can create more cascades of new solar-based abundance
and bring in a Solar Age.
On
the Internet, the original protocols have spawned cascades of abundance. First
came mailing lists, download sites and home pages; then the search engines;
other innovations followed, such as blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, and
social networking portals, with no end in sight.
Creating
cascades of abundance is hardest in the industrial sector because its
substantial material and energy needs (and wastes) tend to disrupt ecological
systems. If industrial processes could be turned into closed material loops
fuelled by renewables, this may yet provide the key to cascading industrial
abundance.
As we
get better at building balanced ecologies of agriculture, industrial and
information abundance, our communities will enjoy even more continuing streams
of goods, services, psychic rewards and other benefits.
Abundance creates commons
We
have identified several archetypes of abundance. All these archetypes have
created commons.
Human
societies learned early on to deal with abundance – including temporary ones –
from forests, rivers, and other hunting and gathering areas by managing them as
commons. Taken for granted for a long time, the oceans, the atmosphere, and
other global commons are just getting due attention. Likewise, the creative
commons of information, knowledge and culture are now getting renewed attention
with the rise of the Internet which, by the way, has become a great showcase of
both the concepts of commons and abundance (and their problems, too).
Markets
and governments are also public spaces. Therefore, rather than dismiss them
outright as completely anathema to the commons, should we not try to reorient
them, to be managed as commons? (After all, public markets and village meetings
still show features characteristic of commons. Perhaps, we should see the
failures of markets and governments – the financial bubbles in the West or the
communist collapse in the East, for instance – as the real tragedies of the
commons, from which valuable lessons can be drawn.)
Although
abundance creates commons, the pooling of resources in common is not the only
mindset that abundance spawns. Abundance in fact spawns two contrary mindsets:
holding its source in common is great for the whole commuity and for future
generations, but monopolizing it is great for private profit-making.
Two contrary mindsets: commons or
monopoly.
These
two mindsets are engaged in a contest for our minds. Which mindset will
ultimately win this contest is by no means clear.
An
example in agriculture is the contest between — one — farmers who share
commonly-held seed varieties among themselves, versus — two — multinationals
who extract monopoly rents from their hybridized or genetically-engineered
proprietary seeds through plant variety protection, patents, and the
"Terminator" technology.
In
the industries of the West, very little is commonly-held now. One — the
corporate mindset holds sway. Curiously, however, the world's main source of
industrial abundance today is China, which boasts of a huge but less dominant
State sector — two — in precarious balance with a growing corporate sector,
under the Communist party's schizophrenic ideology of "market socialism."
In
the information economy, user movements — one — for copyright and patent
exemptions, open access, free software and other forms of non-exclusivity have
made big inroads in building commons of information techniques, tools and
content for sharing.[12]
However — two — corporations and
governments are trying to stem the tide of sharing by tightening enforcement of
intellectual property rights and through agreements like the GATT/WTO and the
up-and-coming ACTA.[13]
So,
two mindsets are contesting control over abundance: one is commons and two,
monopoly. There are three mindsets, actually, whose dynamics are shaping the
economies of the 21st century. The third mindset is competition.
The
main carriers of the monopoly mindset are business firms organized as
corporations. Corporations are also driven by an urge, but one that is different
from the human urge to communicate, and the biological urge to reproduce.
The
urge our legal systems put into these business automata was a single urge — the
urge to seek profits. This one-track mind has made them take over commonly-held
sources of abundance — from seeds, to land, to knowledge — and turn these into monopolies
because it is profitable to do so. What they could not take over, they have
undermined or sabotaged, to create artificial scarcity. Corporations have
destroyed the fertility of our soils, substituting commercial synthetics in
their place; they have stopped the natural flow of mothers' milk in favor of
commercial formula; they have bought out independent seed companies, to
force-feed us with genetically-modified toxic foods, all in pursuit of profit.
They have become, in Hoeschele's words, "scarcity-generating institutions".[14]
Corporations have become the dominant
life form on Earth
It is
unfortunate that corporations came in before Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of
Robotics. In the 1950s, when robots were mostly figments of imagination of
science fiction writers, Asimov wrote the novel, I Robot, where he laid down
the three laws, to ensure that intelligent, man-made automata did not take over
the world and enslave humankind.
The
First Law was: "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction,
allow a human being to come to harm." The Second Law: "A robot must obey orders
given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First
Law." The third law is about self-preservation, as long as it did not conflict
with the First or Second Laws.[15]
We
would be much better off today if all corporations — which, like robots, are
man-made automata — were constrained by these laws. But when we granted legal
personhood to corporations, turning them into a de facto man-made species of
business automata, we built into them not the three laws for automata but the
single urge to seek profits. Corporations have since confirmed the science
fictionists' worst fears about runaway automata.
They
have become super-aggressive players in our political, economic, and social
worlds. Beating us in our own game, they have taken over governments,
economies, and media. Having become masters in domesticating Homo sapiens,
they now house, feed, train and employ tamed humans to serve as their
workhorses, pack mules, milking cows, watchdogs, stool pigeons and smart asses.
Thus,
corporations are now the dominant species on Earth. They routinely ignore human
orders, injure human beings and foul up ecosystems in violation of laws for
automata. These man-made mammoths now occupy the top of the food chain[16].
They have become the greatest threat to our well-being and the survival of many
species on this planet, now in the throes of a great wave of extinctions.
Postscript
With
our conscious mind, unique intelligence, and creative powers, Homo sapiens,
says a new story of creation, is the Universe's own way of looking at itself,
of appreciating its own beauty, origins, evolution and the grandeur of it all.[17]
Thus we carry a huge burden of responsibility not only to the living world, but
to the whole cosmos as well.
In
facing up to this responsibility, three fundamental and interrelated challenges
in the twenty-first century confront us:
First,
we must reacquire a species consciousness as Homo sapiens. We need to think as
a species and to reestablish our intimate connections with other species and
the rest of the natural world.
Second,
we must free ourselves from corporate control. We must learn to keep ourselves
healthy through the right food and natural environment. We must learn to raise
and educate our young under a new mindset. And we must learn to do all these without
depending on corporations, relying instead on each other and on sources of
abundance we ourselves can build, maintain and hold in common.
Third,
we must reestablish control over corporations. This involves reprogramming them
to obey Asimov's three laws for automata or their equivalent. It also involves
– as we did against big prehistoric predators – hunting down disobedient
corporations and disbanding, bankrupting or otherwise driving them to
extinction.
Given
the powers of corporations today, these are daunting tasks indeed. But we have
no choice, if we want to reclaim our role as stewards of the natural world and
masters of our own creations.
[1] In my book Towards a
Political Economy of Information (Foundation for Nationalist Studies,
Quezon City: 2004), I discuss in detail many of the critical issues raised
about the Internet and the technologies that built it. For the full text of the
book, go here.
[2] One definition of economics
says, "Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources
(Mankiw, 2001, p.4)," as cited in Backhouse, Roger and Steven Medema. "On the
Definition of Economics". Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 23 No.
1 (Winter 2009). pp. 221-233. The authors discuss in detail the place of
scarcity in the definition of economics.
[3] The full quote (see here)
is: "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea,
which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself;
but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every
one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character,
too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole
of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without
lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without
darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the
globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his
condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature,
when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening
their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move and have
our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
[4] Anderson, Chris. Free: The
Future of a Radical Price. Random House Business Books, London: 2009. pp.
75-93.
[5] Brand, Stewart. The Media
Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. Viking, New York: 1987. p. 202. On the
next line, Brand also wrote "information wants to be expensive", which shows
that he saw the whole picture. See the assertion below about abundance spawning
two opposite mindsets.
[6] See Leggett, Jeremy. The
Empty Tank: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Coming Global Financial Catastrophe.
Random House, New York: 2005.
[7] Hopkins, Rob. The
Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience. Green Books,
Devon: 2008. p.50.
[8] Ho, Mae-wan. "World Reached
25% Renewable Energy Capacity", ISIS Report Oct. 25, 2010.
[9] It is painful to see some
rural folks sell their coconuts, sweet potatoes and leafy vegetables – all very
healthy foods – in the market and then treat their children to junk foods such
as French fries, burgers and Coca-Cola, or to raze edible or medicinal "weeds"
to clean their backyards or maintain their monocrops.
[10] See Mollison, Bill. Permaculture:
A Designers' Manual. The Deccan Development Society & Permaculture –
India, Hyderabad: October, 1990.
[11] For these and other solutions,
see Tompkins, Peter and Christopher Bird. Secrets of the Soil: New Solutions
for Restoring Our Planet. Rupa & Co., New Delhi: 1989.
[12] See CopySouth Research Group
(ed.). The Copy/South Dossier: Issues in the Economics, Politics, and
Ideology of Copyright in the Global South. April 2006. The full text is
available here.
[13] Anti-Counterfeiting Trade
Agreement. For critiques, see here.
[14] See Hoeschele, Wolfgang.
"Research agenda for a green economics of abundance". International Journal
of Green Economics. Vol. 2 No. 1 (2008). pp. 29-44.
[15] A Zeroth Law was later added:
"A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come
to harm." The First Law ("A robot
may not injure a human being…") is in fact consistent with the economist's
definition of efficiency, which is to make at least one person better off,
without making anyone else worse off.
[16] Excellent readings on corporate
power and anti-social behavior include Korten, David. When Corporations Rule
the World. Kumarian Press Inc., Connecticut and Berrett-Kohler Publishers,
San Francisco: 1995 and Bakan, Joel. The Corporation: The Pathological
Pursuit of Profit and Power. Penguin, Toronto: 2004, including the latter's
documentary film version. See also my piece "Prehistoric peoples could kill
mammoths: how about corporations?"
[17] Swimme, Brian and Thomas
Berry. The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic
Era – A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos. HarperCollins: 1994.
Image by takomabibelot, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
