Compression

Description

Robert W. “Doc” Hall:

"Five hundred years of global expansion are nearing an end. The physical resources to support it are limited, and we must closely heed the global environment that supports us. However, the financial and business systems developed during expansion goad us to continue physical expansion. These old legacies to which we are attached will not shut themselves off. We must do that. Questioning them is emotional, but we have to squelch our emotion to find a path to new systems of thought and work. This will not be easy.

The author did not reach this conclusion quickly. Expecting others to instantly concur is unreasonable. But we cannot afford to wait much longer to start on this new path.

Compression has many physical analogies: mechanical compression as with springs or air, or compressing information as in an e-mailed “zipped” attachment. Compression is Moore’s Law in computer processing, doing much more using less energy in smaller and smaller packages. It also implies psychological stress from changes occurring so quickly that we can’t absorb them, and respond in a daze, if at all.

Compression implies that we must get out of this dazed state by learning how to learn faster. The goal of Compression is to learn how to continue improving human quality of life while greatly reducing our consumption of energy and virgin raw material, and releasing no toxic chemicals into either air or water. Compressing our physical economy while expanding our quality of life, having our cake and eating it too, is a supreme challenge to human intellect, technology, organization, and emotions. This implies a revolution in how we define and organize work – even how we think. Are we going to go for a higher state of civilization or relapse into a version of the dark ages?

Compression, the opposite of economic expansion, turns old economic and business assumptions upside down. Most business thinking; indeed most daily thinking, presumes an expanding economy. We expect money invested in a bank or corporate stock to grow. We expect companies and cities to grow. So we solve most problems by finding and using more resources – energy, materials, land. But in Compression, more is not better. Instead we must think “quality over quantity, always.” An arbitrary global objective is: Globally create at least the same quality of life as in industrial societies today, while using less than half the energy and virgin raw materials as in the year 2000, while cutting known toxic releases to nearly zero."

(Source:Compression. Document written by Do Hall in Sept 2009)