Bio-Revolution
Description
Michael Haupt:
"A Bio-revolution ... differs vastly from the
Agri-revolution (12,000 years ago, which mechanized farming and high-yield crops)
Indus-revolution (250 years ago, which scaled manufacturing via steam, coal, and automation)
Digi-revolution (50 years ago, which connected the world through computers, the internet, and data, changing how we share information, run businesses, and automate tasks)
New neural connections have exploded, thanks to a BioHub seed planted by Ernesto Van Peborgh and recently formalized by Metabolic, which builds on the idea of Bioregional Financing Facilities from Samantha Power and Leon Seefeld. The core of the Bio-revolution is grounded in the evolution of human coordination, as laid out in David Ronfeldt’s TIMN model."
(https://frameros.substack.com/p/bio-revolution-seed?)
Discusssion
The BioHub
Michael Haupt:
"The BioHub is the physical anchor of the fourth node of coordination, and it’s the context that transcends the mainly ecological focus of most bioregional regeneration initiatives to include an economic focus. It does this by making promises and commitments to the parties who have externalized the costs of the Digi-node to rural communities, in exchange for economic rewards.
The BioHub name is fairly recent. The paper that formalized it was published by Metabolic in May of this year, building on work by Ernesto Van Peborgh, Samantha Power, Leon Seefeld, and others. The idea itself has been bubbling along below the surface of the regenerative movement for at least fifteen years, using different vocabularies.
A BioHub is a place-anchored coordination point that organizes activity around a defined watershed, in response to rapidly escalating externalized costs. It is the cradle that nurtures the land, water, biological cycles, and human creativity and ingenuity together as a single coordination node. It operates at the scale of the bioregion, which is the scale at which biological time is actually meaningful and measurable.
The BioHub includes the soil, and that inclusion completes the cycle of the evolution of coordination. Soil was the first coordination point; the BioHub is the first that can hold the soil inside a frame the farm alone couldn’t justify because the only service the farm priced was the provision of calories. Soil now becomes the substrate from which water and energy are priced. Stated differently, the provision of calories is now less profitable than the provision of kilowatt-hours (kWh). The land continues the same relationship to the Institution (state) and the Market (big tech) and the Digi-node, but this time on their pricing terms. The BioHub folds them all in by providing services no other coordination node can adequately provide. Data centers continue to run inside the BioHub’s energy and water budget, but what changes is which coordination node determines the prices for their services.
The BioHub coordinates living systems inside a defined watershed. It optimizes for the continued viability of the substrate it depends on. It externalizes nothing the previous three coordination nodes haven’t already exhausted."
(https://frameros.substack.com/p/its-about-time?)
Phases
Michael Haupt:
"The Evolution of Nodes of Coordination:
A few days ago I introduced the Bio-revolution in the context of three previous revolutions:
- Agri-revolution (12,000 years ago, which mechanized farming and high-yield crops)
- Indus-revolution (250 years ago, which scaled manufacturing via steam, coal, and automation)
- Digi-revolution (50 years ago, which connected the world through computers, the internet, and data, changing how we share information, run businesses, and automate tasks)
- Bio-revolution (currently emerging, which organizes activity around a defined watershed)
The important observation is that every revolution develops around a node, which is the physical place where the era’s coordination logic materializes or concentrates. Each node also externalizes certain costs.
The Agri-node began with a community settling in a particular place, which held kin, land, water, and labor. That coordination collectively produced surplus for the first time in recorded history. That surplus led to the emergence of the granary, and the granary led to the temple, and the temple gave birth to the state. I want to propose that this coordination node was a specific parcel of soil. Its optimization target was caloric yield per unit of land. Its time horizon was seasonal and generational. The costs the agri-node externalizes is the substrate it depends on: soil depletion, downstream water quality, and the untamed/untouched commons the soil was separated from.
The Indus-node has shifted location over time from the farm to the mill, then to the company that owned the mill, then to the exchange where the shares of the company were traded. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the stock market had become the node because it’s where ownership decouples from operation. The farmer who owns the farm is replaced by the shareholder who owns a claim on a factory the shareholder will never enter, run by managers the shareholder will never meet, producing goods the shareholder may never see.
- What is coordinated is capital, risk, and claims across financial time.
- What is optimized is return on capital.
- What is externalized is anything that isn’t tracked in the accounting department’s record-keeping: labor conditions, biosphere depletion, and the coherence of the communities the labor is drawn from.
The Digi-node is the data center. Personal computers and smartphones and the platforms that run on them are the endpoints, but the data center is where the coordination of attention, behavior, information, and computation happens. Its optimization target is prediction accuracy, which is another name for human coordination at scale. Real-time coordination is the design goal. The length of elapsed time between stimulus and response (a time period once filled by human deliberation and evaluation) is the field the industry is now competing to fill. The cost this form of coordination externalizes is energy and water. The grid is being asked to double its capacity in a decade to serve loads that produce no material good. Hyperscale data centers emerging globally consume watershed capacity at rates that break local hydrological budgets. The state permits this activity because, as we saw from the context-setting, the state thinks like a state (increased revenue) and the market thinks like a market (increased profits). No amount of reasoning or protestation can change the underlying incentives. Prices have shifted from goods to attention, and from capital to compute. Costs have been externalized to communities. This is the bad news.
The observation that comes from the evolution of coordination nodes is the increasing abstraction of the real cost of coordination. Each solved its coordination challenge by displacing those costs onto the substrate the next node would organize. The community’s substrate was soil. The stock market’s substrate is a claim. A claim is a promise about the future written down and made tradable. Claims can be manufactured in unlimited quantities; soil (and all natural capital) cannot — they have biophysical limits.
For two and a half centuries, the stock market’s coordination worked because the biosphere could absorb what the accounting department couldn’t price. The forests were still there, the oceans and all that swam in her remained abundant, and the atmosphere still supported life. The costs the stock market externalized were allocated to substrates that seemed inexhaustible (and in the beginning they were). Now the costs of water and energy (traditionally handled by the state) have been externalized to communities. The substrate below these communities can no longer absorb the cost. This is the point at which societies typically collapse."