Cosmo-Localism as a New Model of Civilization
* White Paper: Cosmo-localism. Outlines of a new model of civilization. Whitepaper 1.0. Ralph Horat & Jan Baeriswyl, March 2021
Description
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
"How to read this Whitepaper:
"The following Whitepaper is not built upon a particular conception of the human being, such as the "homo economicus" or "homo cooperativus," but rather assumes that the organizing system creates a structural matrix for our actions which produces certain outcomes. Thus, the central question is not “What is human nature like", but rather “How might human beings evolve under different systemic conditions?"
This whitepaper aims to provide a first rough draft of one possible model on how society could be organized in a way, opened up by new technological possibilities, in which some of the greatest social and environmental challenges in the current organizing system could potentially be overcome. We (the authors) are well aware, that this Whitepaper is a very bold attempt with a lot of questions still unanswered and assumptions yet unproven – and so should it be. It is not our aim to present a “grand plan” since the limits of theory are reached fast when it comes to complex social systems. This is why we need a committed community of social explorers that build together a smart village infrastructure, test new socio-economic and governance-mechanisms in iterative cycles and learn, adapt and evolve from these experiences. With this Whitepaper, we aim to spark our collective imagination beyond what we thought is possible. When you read through this Whitepaper remember that it is not a manifesto, but rather a living document, which constantly evolves through the exchange of new ideas."
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Contents
"Structure:
Part 1:The Age of Disruption
... outlines some of the great challenges and disruptive technological developments of our time and aims to foresee where the world might be heading.
The first chapter
- Signs of a Dysfunctional Organizing System
argues that some of the greatest challenges in the 21st century are the result of the current organizing system.
The following two chapters
- The Power of Open Networks and Automation, decentralization & disintermediation disrupting Foundational Sectors
lay out how new technologies have the potential to fundamentally disrupt our existing economic order, while at the same time opening up completely new ways on how to organize the value generation process on a universal-virtual and local-physical level.
In the fourth chapter
- The Social Impact of Automation,
we argue that the process of new technologies replacing human labor can lead to a competitive race between man and machine or a new age of freedom, depending on the ability of a society to evolve its culture and the underlying organizing system.
The last chapter
- Meaning crisis and the call for new utopias
addresses the psychological and cultural crisis of our time and empathizes why our society needs to have again the ability to imagine a brighter future that is worth striving for.
Part 2: Cosmo-localism – Outlines of a new model of civilization
... presents a glimpse of how life in a new civilizational order might look like.
In the first chapter
- Structural Architecture,
we describe how our virtual and local realities could be interlinked in a crosspollinating way, which enables a free and self-determined life as part of a thriving community on a local level (Cosmopolis), while at the same time belonging to a universal and collaborative open network (Cloud City).
The second chapter:
- Economics
- which is the most extensive section of Part 2 - sketches the outlines of a new socio-economic model. After having drafted an alternative socio-economic strategy that is based on a fundamental paradigm shift towards distributed, highly automated, self-sufficient, and globally connected circular economies, we describe one possible model on how the value generation within the Cosmolocal Ecosystem could be organized and which new roles and institutions might emerge. The chapter also explores new possibilities in the field of alternative money and tokenized exchange systems. The third chapter looks at new ways of cosmo-local governance and
- in the last chapter, we provide an outlook, how the culture within the Cosmopolis might develop under the newly gained state of freedom."
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Discussion
Cosmo-Localism as a Political Philosophy Beyond the Nation-State
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
"Currently, we can observe a rising tension between locality, nationality and universality. The local community can in most cases solve its problems better than a bureaucratic central state. Many states therefore follow the "principle of subsidiarity". At the same time, however, the great challenges of the 21st century, such as climate change, pandemics, nuclear weapons or the rising power of data monopolies are global and can therefore only be solved at a global level. Global Internet communities such as the Democracy Earth project are striving for a digital identity for world citizens and a direct right to vote for every person around the globe. It may be just a question of time when the legitimacy of decisions made by supranational organizations is being seriously questioned by a digitally represented world community. Meanwhile, nationalization trends continue to proliferate in various countries, as many people see themselves as the "losers of globalization". What is needed is a fundamentally new understanding and experience of locality and universality and their interdependencies. Some political theorists and philosophers suggest that in the internet age, the bureaucratic nation-state could be outcompeted by governance structures better suited to the emerging reality, namely the network and the node.16 However, a clearly defined set of issues from climate change, data privacy to risks of nuclear catastrophe, needs to be subject to global governance and compliance of all nodes needs to be credibly enforced. The key here is “global governance, not government”. A “world government” would introduce a whole set of new failure modes and fragilities, but without any global governance mechanism for managing global issues at all, our civilization is doomed to fail.
A sketch of any viable solution therefore needs to include both striving for a maximal degree of sovereignty and self-sufficiency on a local level and forging a viable path towards global governance. This principle is at the very core of the Cosmo-local vision. Following the “principle of subsidiarity”, the vast majority of decision-making should happen at the level where the impact of the decision in question is felt most directly. As a result, the entire network including Cloud City, the physical Cosmopolis, Cosmovillages and neighborhoods will all have their own governance processes. Digital voting infrastructure will enable these governance processes to be much more fine-grained and adaptable than the antiquated voting systems most today’s democracies are locked into. Just like in the domain of finance and money, we have seen an explosion of new governance mechanisms in the digital: For example, liquid democracy combines direct and representative democracy, while quadratic voting measures the relative importance of the different issues voted on, and thereby allows minorities a voice on issues they care most about. There are exciting possibilities for building deeper democracies where actually have a say.17 These mechanisms are being described in more detail in the next Chapter “Governance Innovations”. The same blockchain-based infrastructure used to implement economic policies can be used to manage and secure democratic governance protocols. The different mechanisms, each with their own trade-offs and suitable to different situations, should be provided as open-source templates in Cloud City.
Each governing body at the different scales can freely decide 16 See Seba & Arbib (2020), Rethinking Humanity 17 The RadicalXChange community has documented some of those promising mechanisms. which mechanism of governance they choose to organize themselves, creating an environment of innovation and iterative improvement. When it comes to global governance, this is evidently not up to any party to unilaterally decide. However, it should be an integral part of any suggestion for a new socio-economic operating system. For example, local governance of the Cosmopolis can be constrained to include global considerations from the start, specifically in the form of a prohibition to externalize costs or risks from the local to the global level. In addition, compliance with a set of minimal global standards can be negotiated in any external relationships and otherwise incentivized. Approaches such as Simpol – short for simultaneous policy – is an example of how incentives can be used to influence national decisionmaking towards globally relevant issues. It defines a bundle of policies, from environmental to disarmament, that are in the strong interest of the global community. These policies are to be simultaneously implemented once the required support threshold is reached throughout the different nations that agreed to the package. Simultaneous implementation allows overcoming game-theoretical stale-mates that have halted progress e.g. on environmental issues in the past. We found this mechanism to be a great example of the kinds of policies we could imagine Could City and the larger network to adopt as “minimal cooperation requirements” with external actors, whether national or corporate.
It becomes evident that governance applies to all scales (from Cloud City to local neighborhoods) and also across the different projects. As a result, finding the right governance mechanisms for the right processes is likely the place of most leverage. If we can leverage collective intelligence while making most participants feel heard, we stand a chance of iteratively designing better political, financial and social systems."
Excerpts
From the Introduction:
"We are probably on the edge of the fastest and most disruptive transformation of human civilization in history. While extraordinary technological progress in the foundational sectors holds the possibility of a breakthrough to a new age of freedom, our current social organizing system1 which emerged in the industrial age is becoming increasingly dysfunctional and unstable. Ecological crisis & climate change, growing inequalities, the rising power of tech giants, covid-19 and the resulting economic crisis and the looming crisis of our work- and social system due to automation – are all signs that our current organizing system is unable to evolve in a meaningful and intelligent way that contributes to the flourishing of society in the 21st century.
What we currently miss is a positive vision about the future of human development that brings meaning to the unfolding reality.
Utopian thinking as a constructive force of progress, as it was still present in the 1960s, remains absent from socio-political discourse today. While politicians are kept busy by adapting framework conditions to the rapidly changing environment and reacting to various systemic crises – the lack of a future perspective leaves a vacuum, which is being filled by populist movements that want to turn back the wheel of time by reestablishing nationalism and a past industrial order or tech giants who have gained the interpretative sovereignty about “progress”, promising a better future through ever more connected consumer products, while at the same time continuously expanding their power position through harvesting our personal data. In the midst of technological determinism, social nostalgia and the manifested belief in the system as an uninfluenceable order of things, we need a society that has again the courage and the ability to imagine a brighter future.
While our current system might have been the best way to organize society in an industrial age, the world is changing rapidly and completely new technological possibilities are emerging. We believe that in the light of the unfolding reality and groundbreaking innovations in science & technology there is a new model of civilization emerging that bears the potential to outcompete the current organizing system since it is far more resilient against economic shocks, enables a symbiotic relationship with the planet, leverages the collective intelligence of open networks on a whole different level, could liberate people from the imperative of having to spend most of their lifetime with monotonous and alienating work to be able to secure their existence and enables a life with more freedom and self-determination as part of a thriving community."
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The Interdependent Relationship Between Locality and Universality
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
“The perception of locality and universality shapes our social and historical consciousness, as well as our sense of belonging in a fundamental way. Locality is the spatial dimension where our life takes place in the here and now, whereas Universality is the imagined reality of us as part of the human community which transcends our local and personal world and gives us a sense of our shared responsibility and common future. While the greatest challenges of our civilization are of global nature and therefore have to be addressed on a global level, they require at the same time local action. The epic universal feeling that we can transcend all boundaries as a human species, is nothing more than an unattainable light on the horizon when this momentum remains locally absent. Hence, we need to interconnect these two dimensions in a new meaningful way, which is possible for the first time 10 The term was originally used by the environmental scientist Wolfgang Sachs (2010) who wrote: «Cosmopolitan localism seeks to amplify the richness of a place while keeping in mind the rights of a multifaceted world. It cherishes a particular place, yet at the same time knows about the relativity of all places. It results from a broken globalism as well as a in history due to the global information and communication network. In the following, we use the term “Cosmo-localism10” to express this newly emerging and interdependent relationship between locality and universality. As a consequence, it is not enough to just simply build a high-tech “off-grid” village but to take on a pioneering role in shaping this new world in the digital sphere and putting it in a symbiotic relationship with the physical space. It seems important that physical spaces scale in a manner that supports their livability. Lessons from biomimicry in general to self-organizing systems in particular converge on a fractal hierarchy as an organizing structure. In this chapter, we imagine how the structural architecture within the cosmo-local network could look like at different scales.”
Cosmopolis
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
“While village communities have for a long time been the place where social bonds were being forged and one’s own identity was being formed, that changed radically in the course of industrialization. Our everyday life has been divided into private and professional life, our space into individualistic housing estates and private office buildings, and our social environment into a circle of family and friends and work colleagues while the largest part of society just appears as service providers or strangers. But it is precisely this dichotomy that is beginning to dissolve as many jobs will become automated and most work is no longer bound to a specific place or time. As there is a growing number of people feeling isolated and alienated in their homes, we need to reinvent what it means in the 21st century to live as part of a thriving community ecosystem. A highly automated, distributed and open technological supply infrastructure and the possibility to be constantly connected with the world lay the economic ground for free, autonomous and cosmopolitan communities. The physical place of such communities we call the “Cosmopolis”. The word “Cosmo” is referring to the idea of “world citizenship”, while the second term “polis” (originating from ancient Greece) stands for self-governed and autonomous city-states. Thus, the Cosmopolis could be seen as a self-organized, self-sufficient and autonomous citystate that acts at the same time as a node in a universal and collaborative digital network. Below we propose various physical growth stages.”
The Nested ‘Cosmopolis’
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
Neighborhood (approx. 150-200 residents)
On the smallest scale, we could have thriving, modular and largely self-sustaining neighborhoods with a size of around 150 - 200 people. This corresponds roughly to the Dunbar number, which throughout history proved to be the natural group size, within which we could maintain and organize social relationships around the principle of generalized reciprocity, meaning that individual contributions are not being quantified or settled with money, but instead imbedded in a social and cultural context, in which social capital played the major role. The flourishing of the community on a neighborhood scale depends largely on the open access to the smart supply infrastructure (see chapter economics) enabling to live in a state of freedom, the culture and values, as well as the chemistry on an interpersonal level. Whereas today the specific composition of a community in neighborhoods is being randomly determined by market mechanisms with the ability to pay the price as the main criterion, new possibilities are opening up enabling people to form co-living communities in a more meaningful, coordinated and fluid way.
Cosmo-Village (approx. 600 – 1’200 residents)
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
“The neighborhoods together could form a Cosmo-village. While each neighborhood is largely self-sustainable, they could at the same time have a specific economic and/or cultural function. This specialization could create a mutual dependency, ensuring constant circulation and exchange amongst the members in the village preventing the formation of bubbles, while at the same time giving each area a unique identity and thus creating a social magnet for like-minded people to be in a certain neighborhood they feel attracted to. Living in an age of freedom means that no one has to confine oneself to a certain “job” or “role”, but rather has the freedom to have multiple identities, roles and areas of self-actualization, spending daytime in different neighborhoods of the Cosmo-village.”
Cosmopolis (approx. 3’600 – 7’200 residents)
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
“On an aggregated scale, the Cosmo-villages could form the Cosmopolis, which could be the largest self-organized body on a local level. As history has shown, there is a strong correlation between the degree of social self-determination and the size of a city. Whereas the Greek polis left enough space for thinkers such as Plato and Aristoteles to imagine a better world by formulating a new model of civilization, that freedom and optimism was taken away under the vast administrative apparatus of the empire after the conquest of Alexander the Great. The bigger a certain administrative district becomes, the smaller and more irrelevant the citizens feel, and their quest to create a better world together turns into a search for individual happiness – or as Theodor W. Adorno has put it – to “the right life in the wrong one”. There are many parallels to today’s society where utopian thinking as a constructive force of progress remains absent since the capitalist market structure paired with the administrative apparatus of the nation-state leaves not enough civic design space. Therefore, we propose that the Cosmopolis needs to be limited in size within the physical dimension in order to prevail social self-determination and freedom. “
Cloud City
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
“After a city has reached a certain size we argue that physical growth no longer contributes to social flourishing. The reverse side of mega cities are a shrinking civic design space, overused infrastructure & overcrowded physical space, lost connection to nature and faster spread of viruses. To further increase our collective intelligence, forge meaningful relationships beyond our local environment, expand our cultural horizon and strengthen our innovation capability the virtual dimensions become essential. Cloud City can be thought of as the global and virtual metaspace, acting as digital commons for the citizens of the Cosmopolis-Network and the world at large. It could be built from the ground up by its members as a virtual and augmented reality world, creating a whole new experience of social interaction between people around the planet. In contrast to the physical city, it can harbor an indefinite number of people due to its non-rivalrous nature and facilitate meaningful relationships amongst them due to the extensive information network Cloud City is built upon. Below we outline some of the functions that Cloud City could provide (not exhaustive).
Cloud City could function as the “brain” of the Cosmopolis-Network, where knowledge, data, software, production designs and other immaterial assets are being pooled, intelligently organized and made openly accessible to everyone. The more data that is being gathered, organized and shared in an intelligent manner, the more powerful the network becomes, resulting in a drastic increase of the collective intelligence.”