In the summer of 2007 around a hundred people gathered in a large room in East London. They were there to find out about and take part in 24 weeks. As evidenced here 24 weeks was a project to create an “evolutionary platform” to “enable communities to communicate and work together”. It was, in short, a gathering of well meaning folk who wanted to make the world a better place.

I was only there for a few minutes but I caught a vignette during which Mamading Ceesay perked the crowd up into spontaneous applause. I, sadly, can’t remember the short speech he gave verbatim but I think I remember his core point: we (the people in that room) were cultural creatives and there were more of us out there than we thought and if we worked together we could really change the world. (I paraphrase badly and beg Mamading’s forgiveness). One of the people there was Mia Bittar. A colleague of mine at the time, Mia was and is a talented and committed documentary producer. She was there to find out what she could be doing to help. Unfortunately, she never got an answer to her question.

24 weeks failed not for want of an audience or community but for want of direction and comprehension. Nobody knew what they were trying to achieve or what they should be doing. Tav, the project’s leader, feeling the pressure of so many people relying on him, retreated to his bedroom to try and code the impossible. The 100 slowly dissipated, dissapointed, their energy and enthusiasm untapped. I’m going to wager here that this is not an isolated tale (certainly it seems to be a cycle for those involved, as recorded here).

Cultural Creatives

As the web has developed, more and more people have become entranced by the power of technology to change society (“for the better” is generally assumed). All over the world, right now, socially engaged, Internet inspired cultural creatives are blogging wildly, tweeting and amplifying. People like Vinay Gupta and Josef Davies-Coates. However, despite the frequent pleas from within the social media community to the self-evidence of their own relevance, those outside that world tend to look in with bemusement, if not contempt. What do these self-styled progressives think they’re going to achieve? Do we really know what progress is?

I think it’s fair to say two things. First that there’s no universal clarity on any of those questions. Secondly, and as a “however”, we do have to acknowledge that this widespread amplification of progress-orientated ideas has at least helped raise awareness of the questions. It’s a dynamic that’s characteristic of the web in general. There’s more and more information but there are very limited mechanisms to distill and refine it. Thus for those of us that don’t have super human focus (Vinay) nor super human energy (Josef) nor monitor every social media channel (Mamading), it’s nigh on impossible to seperate the signal from the noise.

Think back to science lessons at school. Your teacher holds up a small iron bar. On a desk is a pile of iron filings. She holds the bar close to the pile and shows that it fails to attract any filings. Then she takes a bar that’s been magnetised and holds it near the iron filings. They all jump up and stick to the bar. What’s the difference between the two? In the first, the electrons within the bar have randomly oriented spins. The attractive and repulsive forces of all of the electrons end up cancelling each other out. Whereas with the second bar, all of the electrons are exerting their force in the same direction. The tiny force they each individually emit is multiplied by the number of electrons and creates a large force capable of picking up iron filings and making them fly across the desk.

The visual metaphor above is just that: a metaphor. However, allow me one thought experiment. Imagine that all of the cultural creatives in the world were aligned so their “force” was cumulatively multiplied by their number. What then would they be able to achieve? If you grant at least “more than they are at the moment” (either because you agree or because you’re interested in what would follow from it as a premise) then the next question becomes, what or which orientation should cultural creatives unite behind? Mia’s question (“what should I should be doing to help?”) becomes the question for us all.

Answering Mia’s Question

I had lunch yesterday with Tav and Mamading. At one point, Tav raised both his hands towards his head, grimaced and tensed as if he wanted to tear out his brain as he explained how he wished he could communicate his understanding of what we should be trying to achieve. To get it out of his head, so other people could internalise it with the same clarity. He feels trapped because he can’t communicate it. So here’s my attempt to set him free.

It’s about actualisation. We (all of us, you, me, Mia and the rest) should help people be who they are and who they can be. If you’ve read Maslow, you’ll recognise the term actualisation. He believed that people have a hierarchy of needs. At the bottom, basic survival stuff like food and warmth. With those satisfied, people need and want to feel safe. Then belonging: they want to feel accepted in their community. On top of belonging, Maslow puts self-esteem, the desire to be respected in a community, held in good regard by our peers. Then at the top of the pyramid comes self-actualisation. Much as you might ask, what do you buy someone who has everything for a Christmas present? You ask, what does a person who is well fed, safe, accepted and respected need? Maslow’s answer is to live in the moment as themselves, to do what they most enjoy and feel most liberated doing. As Elliot Smith put it, to exist “in the place where they make no mistakes”.

For me, Maslow makes sense. I feel like I’ve lived part of that journey, from belonging through esteem to the beginnings of actualisation. Yet, how could everyone do what they want all of the time? After all, there are surely very few of us who’s self-actualised role in life is to work in a petrol station or do night shifts in a logistics warehouse. The answer is that things aren’t quite so black and white. There is a sliding scale between the extremes, which we can represent as follows:

I’d suggest that it’s possible to plot everyone at some point on that scale. Chris Guillebeau and Lionel Messi are both towards the right hand side. They’re doing what they love every day and they’re seriously good at it. Child labourers held in slavery through debts incurred by their parents, people forced to work long shifts in chicken factories or Dubai building sites. They’re at the other end (and those of us in the middle feel for them and their plight provides much of the moral agency that drives cultural creatives).

So is our direction to scrap all boring jobs and create anarchy? No. Instead, what we can do is help move the cumulative average of all our positions on that sliding scale from left to right, perhaps starting with those closest to the left hand edge (raise the Rawlsian baseline). Now, imagine that, over time, this happens. That each individual lives a slightly more fulfilled life, higher up Maslow’s hierarchy, so that the “actualisation temperature” of humanity increases. What’s the result?

The cultural creative community is well versed in the concepts of social physics, like Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point. In short, things go from one state to another via phase changes. This can be seen most simply in water. Imagine the sliding scale from above but this time set the left hand side to absolute zero and the right hand side to some arbitrarily high temperature, like the centre of the Sun. Take a bucket of water. Its temperature will have a position somewhere on that scale. Now get a Bunsen burner (presumably from the same teacher who was demonstrating magnetism earlier) and start gently heating the water. The temperature increases. Not much seems to be happening. It gets a bit hotter, still not much seems to happen. Then suddenly, at the point when the water gets to 100 degrees, it starts to boil and turn into gas.

Now, we know that water turns into gas at 100 degrees centigrade. Because we’ve done the experiment before. In fact, scientists and school children have done it ad infinitum. Yet, imagine the first time that anyone heated water. (Or imagine that you’d never been told what happened and you were doing the experiment for the first time). What’s going to happen when you start heating the water? You don’t know. You have no idea what’s going to happen. So the response to our question above, "what happens when the “actualisation temperature” of humanity increases?" is two fold. First we need to state that we quite simply don’t know. However we also need to state that we must expect that at some point, we may encounter a phase change. (If you’re not convinced of this point, Philip Ball’s Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another is a must).

When it happens for water, when H2O reaches the tipping point from liquid to gas, the combined energy of all of the water molecules all of a sudden becomes strong enough to break the bonds they’re trapped by. The molecules fly off, free. What’ll happen for humans if they reach the next actualisation phase change (from the status quo to whatever is the other side of the tipping point) is pure speculation but the water parallel certainly illustrates the potential.

Explaining Tav’s Vision

Tav’s thoughts, as you can, for example, see here, here and here range widely across the progressive technology spectrum, from distributed peer-to-peer architecture and trust metrics to alternative economies. He’s refined his ideas down over the years and he has one core objective at the moment. To monetise the attention and gift economies by creating what he calls the Plexnet. Or, in other words, to help people get paid for what they’re doing out of interest and enjoyment already. 24 weeks planned to get towards this by building the communication tools viewed as a necessary precursor to such an economy. However, in these mashable days post Twitter and Facebook, that infrastructure is already in place. So now, Tav’s aiming to use them to provide a simple system where people can voluntarily reward people who help them.

How’s this going to work? Well, you can read the first “here” link in the previous paragraph for the implementation details (the section on “pecus”). In summary, though, it works as follows. The Plexnet provides a mechanism for people to allocate points (they call them pecus) to people who do useful things. For example, if I post a link to one of Tav’s blog posts, or if I re-tweet one of his tweets, I’m making a very small (but nonetheless real) contribution to supporting his online presence. If that’s valuable to him, he can voluntarily choose to pay a certain amount of money (could be low, could be high) to all the people who have earned points over a certain period. This money would be rationed out in proportion to the amount of points each person had earned. This way, people can earn money and it becomes an alternative economy (however small). Over time, this second or extra income may help people move from left to right on the actualisation scale, for example, by allowing them to cut their hours working in the logistics warehouse and spending more time with their children.

There are many factors that influence whether this alternative economy would be a force for good. For example, it needs to be secure and not allow people to game the system. Points need to be allocated fairly, etc. Let’s assume that Tav has these aspects covered off (he’s nodding vigorously). The crucial question is why would people give their real hard earned cash to other people when they don’t have to? After all, they don’t at the moment. It’s all very well saying if there were this wonderful gift economy, then we’d be more fulfilled if such an economy just breaks down when confronted with human nature. Which brings us to our last sliding scale:

The beauty of Tav’s voluntary gift economy is that it harnesses self-interest to make the world a better place. At the moment, even if we grant that cultural creatives start using the Plexnet, we have to assume that we start right on the left edge of the scale, with nobody currently paying anybody for anything. This is an equilibrium position and a stable state. If nobody pays anybody then nobody loses anything by not paying. Like asking for directions in real life. (Aside from one car journey into Panjim when on holiday in India) no one has ever asked me to pay them for directions. They simply don’t expect to be paid and I don’t expect to pay them. Much as, at the moment, I don’t expect to get paid for including the links to Tav in this blog post. However, the key to unlocking the potential for a gift economy is that this is a weak equilibrium.

As a weak equilibrium, not paying is exactly strategically equivalent to not ratting your partner out in prisoners’ dilemma. Consider what happens when one well known blogger starts making payments to people who’ve earned pecus. Word gets around (if you’ve seen O Brother Where Art Thou, think back to Delmar “tellin’ tales” about the radio DJ stupid enough to pay $10 for singing into his tube). Before you know it, the blogger who made the first payment will start getting links and re-tweets from people eager to cash in on the rich “fool” who’s paying money out. AN Other well known blogger takes note. He’s losing ranking relative to the “fool”. To compete, he starts making payments too. Eventually all bloggers who are concerned to maintain their profile will end up having to pay the Nash equilibrium, aka going rate, just to achieve parity. (If you’re not convinced, I refer you to Dixit & Nalebuff’s book Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business Politics and Everyday Life, a standard text on game theory which explains both the parallel with prisoners’ dilemma and the concepts of weak and Nash equilibria).

It’s worth noting first that this logic is not limited to bloggers, links and re-tweeting. People can earn pecus in many different ways. Secondly, that the going rate is reached through each player maximising their own outcomes. As Adam Smith put it, “from their regard to their own self interest”.

Conclusion

Now we know what Tav wanted to communicate (at least a core part of it) and what 24 weeks was trying to achieve. They were and he is still trying to create an alternative economy as one aspect of showing people another way of living so they can be more actualised. This leads us to the answer to Mia’s question, for her, for the hundred people gathered in that room in East London and for all of the cultural creatives around the world: do whatever you can to help move people from left to right on the actualisation scale.

It could be you, like Tav, want to do something in this online technology space. Or it could be in any other, from buying one fairtrade product at a time to sponsoring a child’s education. The key is to maintain and share this single point of focus. We may not know what we’ll accomplish but we do know that there’s a societal phase change ahead of us and that this means we may turn out to achieve more than we could ever have imagined. As Ted Honderich once signed off, “It is possible to hope, with reason, and I do.”