I would say that reports of collapse are premature, but certainly crisis. I agree, as we see from the U.S. to Greece and throughout the world that contemporary industrial models are under pressure and in crisis. And one of the sources of the crisis is obviously industrial organization, the abstraction of wealth in relatively small portions and relative lack of autonomy. The question becomes, what can we do?
And I think the answer is, there's no clear answer, the answer is one of continuous struggle. Because first of all, not all countries are the same. There are real differences in different countries, along different dimensions we care about. We might point to Nordic social democracies as places where there is substantially more social security, health, cradle-to-grave certain kinds of rights. But at the same time, and the expense, substantially, of pluralism. We might have problems with American culture and its ignoring the needs of the poor, and its complex problems with racism and ethnic hatred. But at the same time, it is one of the most pluralistic and open societies that there are. So we need to soften, to some extent, or sense that there is a clear model of a better society. We can talk about better things that work here, better things that work there, and see how we get to them.
Now, the problem that we have, I think, is that we live in systems of constraint and affordance, things that allow us to do things and things that constrain us from doing things, in the market environment, in the business environment, in the government environment, in technical systems, in social relations. And these have developed over the last 150 in a direction that, along some dimensions is much more liberating, and along others is better than it was 150 years ago for many people on many dimensions, but substantially worse than we can imagine it being. And so the question is, how do we act to pick the better ones?
And I think there, part of what we're seeing, at least the hope is that the capacity of people, both to participate more effectively in political debates, organize more effectively on the streets when they need to, and actually just build their own systems of mutual aid and systems of production.
So we're here at WikiMania 2011, and you see a bunch of people who basically aren't willing to accept knowledge from Britannica, but write their own. And then decided they're not willing to accept one authoritative encyclopedia in English, but actually one with hundreds of languages, with perspectives that are quite different on questions of what's important to write about. So again, that's a context on a very small scale, it's not a solution to all problems of justice. But on a very important scale of defining what we know to be the case, what we know to be true, of people basically just taking things into their own hands and doing them for themselves.
How scalable is that towards mutual aid societies? In the U.S. for example, there's an interesting effort to create the Freelancers' Union, which is essentially a mutual aid association between freelancers who don't, in the employment-based system in the U.S. of social welfare, have normal access to welfare. But people are beginning to develop these mutual-aid models, but we're very far from there.
So essentially, these are the primary dimensions, the greater participation in the public sphere allowed by the fact that the number of gatekeepers is smaller and there are many more pathways to try to influence the public agenda. It's the capacity to physically organize more effectively for direct political action, when we're sitting here at WikiMania 2011 in Haifa, and right outside there, the tents: a kind of protests that Israel hasn't seen in decades, perhaps. And this is obviously in the context of the much wider Arab Spring, which would have been inconceivable. So effectively organization to actual action.
And finally, domains, not everything, but domains in which people can actually go around and do things for themselves. So when Russians couldn't trust the government to tell them where there were fire outbreaks, they could use Ushahidi, which is a program developed by Kenyans, who couldn't truest their government to know where there was violence in the Kenyan 2008 elections. But in both cases, you essentially have people building systems of their own.
In the tension between a resurgent of industry that tries to recreate its own power and slowly growing networked model, it's not at all obvious to me that the networked model will win. We still have governments that very much listen to large corporations, we still have governments that are still interested in projected military power and political power. That's the battle we see today going on. So if you look at something like WikiLeaks, you see a networked model of forcing government transparency, and at the same time, we see an unholy alliance between government actors and VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal that shut down payments for WikiLeaks, so as to prevent a disclosure of something that, at least in the U.S., is clearly protected by the constitution. So the battle is there. You might say that we have a somewhat better chance. So that's in one dimension.
Another dimension is in the air of ideas, of trying to actually challenge the core ideas that were driving this model. A lot of what I'm trying to do now is actually work on allowing us to speak on a scientifically-grounded basis -- not just polyanna and these nice things, but on a scientifically-ground basis -- to speak about our capacity for empathy and for solidarity, the importance of our sense of morality and of fairness. And we see it in experiments in evolutionary biology in the last 15 years, in neuroscience in the last 10 years, in experimental economics in the last 10-12 years, in political science, across a wide range of disciplines, we're seeing the emergence of understanding that we are a much more complicated being than the standard economic model would suggest.
I think that one of the things that we do need to do in the next 5-10 years is change our basic understanding that the first question about why someone is doing it, is not, What's in it for him? The first question is, What's the situation? What kind of person is this? Are they doing something that they understand to be the right thing? That's not cheap, that's not a fake, that we really get to it, if we understand what's in it for them. We really *don't* get it if we think that we understand. And then to begin to learn how to build policing systems to technical systems, organizational strategies, or fair and more engaged workplaces, all the way to educations systems, not built on, Well, you have to pay the teachers and then punish them if they don't do well, and that's what gets teachers to teach. Moving away from that is another domain in the area of ideas, where we can try to at least moderate the probability that we slide back into the excesses of the olds.
