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Welcome back to the Wild Globalization Project!

We’re still talking about “capital” and “capitalism.” In Part I we looked at the conditions of capital value – management of raw resources, work and the organization of labor, and finally knowledge-based innovation.

“Capital,” however, as most of us think about it, is really about “money…lots of money…banks, investment bankers…money means power…power to build, power to control, power to govern...power to exploit….”

Recall in Wild Money, we explored money as the “unit of account,” “medium of exchange,” “store of value,” and one we added, the “instrument of sovereignty.” The first three delineate “small” money – money to run the everyday grocery store economy.

Sovereign money, and here, “big capital,” were something different, harder to get our brains around – that is, money and value in the billions and trillions. The power of both small and big money emerges from two hyper-human powers.

First, we “believe” in money. Humans “hold” and “move” value in “belief systems” when we all accept that a piece of paper, a dollar, or digital currency, can “hold” or “represent” the “value” of things. Balaji Srinivasan, of Coinbase, describes this “belief system”:

“…If you take 10,000 people and they close their eyes hard and say, ‘Let this plane fly,’ it’s not going to fly. But if they close their eyes hard and say, ‘Let this thing have value,’ and they all value it, they’ve suddenly got a price for it.” They will exchange things of economic value among themselves, and the external world can interact with them. …So, belief is actually something you can now materialize into currency.”¹

Secondly, when we “believe” it, we let money “transvalue” the hard, physical world into a new “exchangeable,” “tradable,” and hyper-real playing field, that is, the “market,” whether your neighborhood grocery or the global stock, bond, and capital markets.

The whole “show,” the whole matrix of markets, small and big money, really boils down to “What is value?” “What’s something worth?” By placing value on things, “stuff,” we transform and transvalue potato chips or hamburgers, or smartphones or cars into hundreds or thousands of dollars, smartphone companies into billions, or economies into trillions – of dollars or cents or Euros or…etc.

Humans live and breathe in this virtual, belief-system, meta-physical time and space, in Marx’s elusive “mystery of the “value forms,” which he chased through Das Kapital’s 800 pages, only to realize that “value” couldn’t really be pinned down.

Value is hard to pin down for at least two reasons.

First, value is whipped incessantly, in this wild, quantum entanglement of ecology, demographics, tech, economy, governance, wealth. A gallon of gas gyrates with domestic and global politics (governance), or basic “supply and demand” (economy). A dozen eggs gets hit with “Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza” (HPAI) or the bird flu (ecology), and prices go through the roof!

Wild value!

But the second reason is even wilder. The “value” of coal, oil, natgas, nuclear, solar, and wind – isn’t just the sheer power we access when we turn on the light or gas up or plug in our cars. Value, especially “capital” value,” is not touchable, it’s not physical, it’s “meta-physical” because it emerges from our cleverness, our innate curiosity and ability to encounter a need, a problem, and then set out to discover and use “stuff,” to direct life, to “run” things.

Hominids, our deepest cousins, started playing with fire and cooking food – and therefore improving our nutritional and metabolic efficiencies – a million years ago, and we’ve been growing brains and having babies and playing the “human value creativity-destructivity” or “capital value” game ever since. All the “energy stuff” – oil and gas, uranium, even the wind and sunlight – that is, Wild Ecology’s “energy orders,” were there for those billions of years until we came along and dreamed up how to use them.

Value emerges. It’s whipped by the wild quantum game until our wilder imaginations and knowledge powers discover and exploit it.

Human Value Creativity: Evolution… Emergence… and the Ethical Imperative

Whatever we name it – “big money,” “capital…capitalism,” “civilization,” “globalization,” or even, as we just ventured, “human value creativity-destructivity,” – humans have upped the ante on the zero-sum and non-zero-sum games, we’ve opened the playing field and rules from mere “long” physical evolution – thousand- or million-year game changes – so that now we rock and roll with sudden, overnight game changes, that is, we’re playing a meta-physical emergence game.

For example:

▲ WWII? – horrific, industrial-scale warfare, but then, two imagination-innovation atomic bombs end it – but then…what?

▲ 1960s-70s Asian famine? – the Green Revolution ends it…but then… what!

▲ 1970-80s U.S. natural gas crisis? – “fracking” ends it…but then…what?

We’ll get to the “then what?” question in a moment.

First notice how this value creative-destructive response is a force of nature which humans have taken to new and hyper-natural levels. Recall how Seth Lloyd pointed out that, by the time our primal cousins appeared 250-500,000 years ago, physical life on Earth had already achieved this “meta-physical” nature in the form of information-processing deoxyribonucleic acid, “DNA.” The dinosaurs had DNA. Ants and honeybees have DNA.

However, DNA’s serpentine secret is that the component nucleic acids, adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G), merely carry the code, the information. The code itself lives “in” the connectivities of the nucleotides themselves, in their combinations and re-combinations, that then direct the physical world’s life forms. Consequently, the physical world’s rules cannot fully account for the code’s hyper-physical functionality.

No one has actually seen or touched “information,” whether in nature’s DNA codes, or the digitized “data” in your laptop or smartphone. Or your brain. Sure, we understand how DNA’s nucleic components combine and recombine, but the primary “information” remains elusive. Or, we can monitor the brain’s “synapses,” but the information, the code, whether the velociraptor, the orca, the honeybee, or the human, remains elusive except for its secondary effects – the orca’s cry, the bee’s honey, or the human’s “E = mc².”

The code itself is wild! Except for their sketches, or calculations – or their smiles or hands or stone creations – no one has “seen” or “touched” the information or imagination or knowledge that built Notre Dame or the Taj, or that sculpted Michelangelo’s Pietà.

Information-processing and “knowledge” responses abound in nature – ant colonies or bees manage resources and perform intricate labor tasks; dolphins and orcas live and communicate audibly in “social” pods; elephants form family groups and appear to mourn their dead.

But no other Earth creature transforms the hard, physical world of atoms and molecules and energy and “stuff” into “E= mc²” “virtuality,” into what we’re calling “information-imagination-knowledge-value.” No other creatures are deploying virtualization to build high-capital-value A.I. super-computers, or rockets to Mars. No other creatures fight over geo-politics, or money, or government budgets, or moral-ethical-religious “values.” Humans simply play the game differently, at a virtual, highly complex and language-bound level. A far more powerful, creative, yet more volatile and contentious, and therefore dangerous level. Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus were really scary dudes, but they didn’t dream up “nukes.”

Information, embodied and energized by the human imagination and knowledge, directs the physical world and thus achieves a hyper-physical functionality. This knowledge condition – the “logos” of the ancients – constitutes an emergent “boundary” condition that can’t be explained nor accounted for with physical paradigms and rules alone.

Capital and capitalism live and thrive in this emergent world.

Our “ideas-tech-strategies” driven human emergence world embodies a new “order” of evolution which in turn demands a new and expanded logic, a human value creativity-destructivity logic. A quicker, accelerated logic that attempts to anticipate and “own” the full set of consequences, or what we call those dangling “positive and negative externalities.”

For example, it took thirty years (1973-1992) to develop the smartphone – about one generation in anthropological time – and suddenly we can talk to or even see the eight billion, we can tap vast, encyclopedic resources (e.g., science, history, music, art). At the same time, it takes just a few finger touches for our kids to get lost in its social media. Both realities live in the logic of the creative-destructive event.

Or recall that the smartphone, and most rechargeable devices, are powered by the amazing lithium-ion battery developed over that same 20-30 year period⁴. Yet those batteries use cobalt that’s most often mined by Congolese “artisanal,” or “slave-cash” miners. If we moderns are so sophisticated, so smart, how did we come up so short-brained and short-hearted, how did we miss the consequences, the externalities, of cobalt sourcing when we conjured up these new devices?

We’re back to the “Then what?” questions, above. “Then what?” logic emerges from the quantumly entangled “matrix” (wild ecology-demographics-tech-economy-governance-wealth- learning) that human life plays in and that plays us. “Then what?” questions force us to consider how our more or less unrestrained creative-destructive powers can instantaneously shock reality and status quos. “Then-what?” logic reveals the “boundary condition” when our jet-powered and very cool devices break sound barriers. What might the speed of light boom break?

“Then what?” questions blindside the capital value wilderness. Ask Robert Oppenheimer, who, after Manhattan’s creative-destructive “success,” lived out his days bushwhacking and getting slapped around by “Then what?” logic. Same thing when we pick up our smartphones – we’re touching the artisanal miner who dug the cobalt, or the Uyghur and Turkic Chinese Muslim who may have assembled it.

And you thought “capital…capitalism” were just about “small-money…big-money “capitalists.” We are all playing this human capital value creativity-destructivity game. We’re all “players” and “users,” “winners and losers,” of wild value. We’ve all emerged from this universal drama of creation and destruction. It’s been a wild living for a million years. And it’s only getting wilder.

The human imagination and knowledge-based value response emerged from given, universal pre-conditions – faith traditions claim this emergence is “divine.” Others might leave it to “chance.” Either way, we have to wonder if accounts like the “Tree of Knowledge” Genesis story aren’t on to something? How do we talk about the “origin or logos of the Universe,” or Marx’s mysterious “value forms,” without this emergent meta-physical force of information and knowledge that pervades evolutionary footprints since the “Big Bang?” A knowledge power that in the hands of humans, can achieve both good…and evil?

So, we have to ask ourselves if these hyper-powerful creativities work not just for now, but really for the future, are they “paying and playing the game forward” for our kids, and their kids, and the future planet? “Pay it forward” is a present and a future logic. It forces our creativities to “get down and real and practical” decisions, but then to constantly re-work, re-think those our work! Include cobalt sourcing and the kids and mothers and all the artisanal miners who dig it up! Make real choices, complete the logic!

Of course, the logic is human and fallible, and so it’s always a work in progress, it’s always trying to catch up with the new stuff, new techs that often change or even sets up new rules, new games, new boundaries. As we’ll see, the human creative-destructive response transvalues the world and even what it means to be human. It can metamorphose value itself. How are our kids doing with social media, or adults with nuclear weapons and dirty bombs you can build off the internet?

Humans have been creating value since we first emerged on the African savannah. This modern “capital” version is bigger and more technologically powerful, but it’s connected at the hip with all the players who made us possible, those amazing cousins who engineered our trek through 100,000 year ice ages or volcanic winters to get us to from there to here.

Once we open our imaginations to capital and capitalism as the long trek of human creativity, we begin to live and perceive “capitalism” in the context of the entire “Homo Sapien Age,” what anthropologists call the “Anthropocene.”

The Anthropocene isn’t just the recent amazing 250-year techno-industrial explosion of tech and human populations, or even the 10,000 years since agriculture appeared. The Anthropocene has been a million years in the making, beginning on that African savannah when our outlying hominid cousins first exploited fire and cooked their food, a game and rule-changing innovation that triggered more efficient metabolisms and our high-energy, outsized, “sapient” brains.⁵

The Anthropocene emerged from the wild. Yet rather than taming this quantumly entangled wilderness with our techs and elegant strategies, haven’t we only made it wilder? We first picked up stones and made tools. Now we take stones and make nuclear weapons.

Yet by imagining capital and capitalism, or “globalizing civilization,” as the present emergence of the human value creative-destructive response, might we better grasp how we are living an original, universal human drama? By placing its amazingly creative – modern medicine, Apollo on the Moon – yet at the same time terribly evil and destructive – the 20^th century’s World Wars and Holocausts – acts into the full and swarming history of a universal story, an Anthropocene “time,” can we first gain a deeper and more humble sense of what it means to be this wild, virtually unrestrained human? Would it help us make better, more critical decisions, to better anticipate the bounties and risks of new ideas and strategies and techs?

This wild globalization Anthropocene response is a compassionate and incisive call to critical thinking and pragmatic decision-making. It’s a response to our virtually unrestrained imaginations and our hyper-natural will to power to do good or evil.

The Human Value Creativity-Destructivity Responses

We’ve been tracking these responses all along – cooperation, innovation-entrepreneurship-markets, excess production, reserving, agriculture, urbanization, debt, virtual capital, private property, SCALE, and the practical-ethical imperative.

To rethink “capital” and “capitalism,” we can first observe how human zero-sum and non-zero-sum knowledge-value creativities are responses to the playing fields’ given orders. In a high risk, high competition world, first with saber-tooth tigers and now our eight billion to feed, how do humans dream up and then deploy “E = mc²” intelligibilities to respond to and then direct their natural world? As Beth Shapiro observed earlier, how, or why, do humans create “kale from wild cabbage, or Boston terriers from wolves?” Or, as a wild globalization inquiry adds, atom bombs from dirt?

Cooperation: From “Working together to “Super-Wealth!”

“Capital” and “capitalism emerge from human cooperation. Cooperation is found in virtually every advanced life form, from microbes to ants to elephants, even “capitalists.” “Cooperation is everywhere: plants provide each other nutrients, fish remove parasites from each other’s scales, ants build nests together, predators hunt in packs and bees will even give their own life for the benefit of the hive.”

We noticed how humans first teamed with wild wolves some 15,000 years ago, and would then advance cooperation into longer-term planning and governance strategies as they deployed agriculture and settled in larger urban centers. By the 20^th century, 400,000 NASA engineers landed two guys on the Moon. Cooperation creates synergistic, non-zero-sum “value.” Smartphones are cooperatively “satellited” and “GPS’d” because we learned how to go into space. Together.

Cooperation is both a zero-sum – let’s work together – strategy, but it’s a core non-zero sum logic as well. Instead of just chasing rabbits together, I make a new gadget, like a non-zero-sum bow and arrow or atlatl to better feed my family, or maybe a smartphone to keep track of them.

And if it’s Jobs’ smartphone, then everyone on the planet gets connected, “co-operated.” Bezos’ might create a “marketplace” where you buy it with a Jobs’ “mouse click,” and then, whoosh(!), everyone’s off to the 21^st century’s latest human race. But then – whoosh – our kids get lost in “social media.”

The 21^st century is now as hyper-connected, hyper-integrated, globalized “bazaar,” where billions of consumers wait, ready to “co-operate” and buy stuff. And if your stuff is good, then Jobs or Bezos might become million- or billionaires. Overnight. The world’s first trillionaire may already be walking the planet. It’s one thing to build a Microsoft, an Amazon, or Apple, or a StarLink for your family or your clan or your hometown – it’s quite another when it reaches the eight billion.

Modern human value creativity can trigger “flash wealth” asymmetries and income inequalities that become flashpoints for rancorous resentment, envy and even violent geo-political conflict.

So how prepared are “modern,” globalizing humans, just 400 generations removed from hunter-gatherer, small-group psychologies, to cope with national markets of millions, or global markets of billions.⁸ Carnegie’s steel, Rockefeller’s oil, Morgan’s finance built early, 20th century’s infrastructures and gained asymmetrical wealth. Jobs’ smartphone, Bezos’ Amazon, Page’s and Brin’s Google, configure the co-operating soul of our century. Musk’s Starlink is even reshaping the modern battlefield in Ukraine.

Cooperation is a natural evolutionary survival strategy which human emergence has exploded and scaled to hyper-natural and seemingly unrestrained possibilities.

Excess Production and Reserves… then Prosperity

Excess production and reserving is everywhere in the natural world. Bees store honey. Squirrels “squirrel away” nuts. Humans, however, do something else – they think and plan, they adapt, often quickly, as risks and circumstances change.

Wild Ecology earth warming under the current climate optimum changed human adaptation strategies. People began to grow, plan and then trade food resources. Food was, quite simply, the earliest form of “capital.”

People, however, have always wanted and strived for more than just survival. In Wild Culture we talked about the “unrestrained desire to know,” and observing the 20^th century’s world wars, we added the “unrestrained desire for power.” We can add another here: the unrestrained desire to prosper. To make and buy and have “stuff.” Lots of stuff! Clever tinkerers, inventors, and entrepreneurs constantly entice and hook consumers with more and more non-zero-sum stuff. Economists dryly call this “consumer demand.”

Who or “what” actually “won” the 20^th century’s Cold War? Was it the $26 trillion (2025 dollars) spent on guns and rockets? Or was it because freer markets made better and lots more stuff – BMWs, Benzes, Toyotas, Fords, Chevies. By 1970, the U.S.’s 200 million consumers were driving 20 times as many passenger cars as the USSR’s 240 million consumers.

The Apple and iPhone didn’t happen in Moscow or Beijing, but in Jobs’ garage or with Bezos selling books. The West won the Cold War because its freer and wilder and “hotter” innovators, producers and consumers won the excess production, “prosperity” war.

Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Markets

Innovation-to-entrepreneurship-to-markets is how the unrestrained desire for value creation responds with non-zero-sum techs and strategies.

Wild human innovation dreams up clever devices and strategies from wild nature – from using fire for protection and cooking food and brains, to fabricating atom bombs made from the naturally occurring Uranium 235 fissile isotopes.

Innovation emerges from “outside the box thinking power,” what we’ll explore later as “wild learning” – it’s Edison’s 10,000 laboratory “failures,” or Jobs’ and Wozniak’s “garage” imaginations, or Musk sleeping on Tesla factory floors, that dream and wrestle up the “capital” values of the lightbulb, the PC or the EV.

Innovation lives and constantly changes human conditions and circumstances. Most of us have moved to cities and are having few kids because we’ve industrialized agriculture – for better and worse(!) And in just a couple of generations, birth control has transformed human demographics and the rules of sex!

Innovation needs entrepreneurs to get the gadgets out to the people. Recall how the Chinese cleverly invented printing, gunpowder, and navigation, but it was the scrappy, enterprising Northern Europeans who got Bibles and newspapers out to the folks, and it was their canons and compasses in the hands of enterprising sailors that dominated the seas and landed the scientific-industrial revolution in the Americas. Markets of freer producers and consumers test and confirm and reward the value of stuff. Would you rather drive a BMW or Tesla, or a Yugo?

Still, innovation routinely wreaks havoc with the quality of human and natural life. Innovation simply creates – and destroys – value. Imagine eight billion cars on the road?

Innovation and market distributions are curious and serendipitous and wild phenomena – we play in them, but they play us. Consider Bart, the grizzly bear. In the movie The Edge, Charles Morse, played by Anthony Hopkins, gets lost in the Alaskan wilderness and survives a grizzly bear attack by impaling it on a spear – it’s Hollywood, after all! Astonishingly, the bear was a living and breathing “griz,” named Bart, trained into stardom by innovators Doug and Lynne Seus. In real life, Bart never harmed a soul. Bart later made his own movie, The Bear, that grossed over $100 million box office “capital.” So is Bart just another innovating, greedy “capitalist?”

Ag, Urbanization and “Civilization”

Agriculture came along under the current Sun-triggered (Milankovitch Cycle) climate optimum. Urban centers appeared as early as Jericho (9600 B.C.E.) and began to change, really to transvalue, human and Earth life. Ag and cities appeared over 150-200 generations, or 3000-4000 years and together represent the two most dramatic and dynamic lifestyle changing momentums of what we call our modern “civilization.”

Ag and cities transformed the “capital value and reserve” game. Excess food stores became one of the earliest forms of “capital.” Whoever controlled food production and excess food resources became the capital “power-brokers.” These urban centers also became the most logical hubs for trading reserve goods.

Growing urban centers required new rules and more powerful leadership to maintain and manage both excess resources and more complex societies. By the latter stages of the first agricultural revolution, circa 4000-3500 B.C.E., cities had become power centers for expanded “state” governance and military power, as well as trade and human culture.

“Capitalism,” the market system that values and moves the excess human creative reserves through complex social-economic orders, and “capital,” the excess reserves of value, expanded and intensified under the emergence of agriculture and urbanization.

Civilization emerges from the entanglement of factors and now lives in our modern human-value strategies and systems, that is, production (economy), management (governance), culture (civil law and ethics, science, faith traditions, the arts), and wealth.

Debt… the Leverage of “Value”

Urban living required larger, more reliable, and so more complex food reserve management. Ancient governments, palace priests, and wealthy individuals in the Levant, Mesopotamia and Asia gradually concentrated control over both land and excess grain reserves. Food supplies could be increased by “lending” out excess grain reserves, or “seed-grain,” to aspiring farmers. Agricultural production was “leveraged,” multiplied, with the appearance of debt lending, which also increased the power of governance itself. Market players use the term “seed-capital” today.

Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mesopotamian cuneiform confirm that “…credit systems…actually preceded coinage [or money] by three thousand years...”

Debt lending, however, also casts a shadowy history. Aspiring borrowers would put up “promise to pay” collateral, so “hard” resources like land, but also the risk of indenture or enslavement if crops failed and the debt went unpaid. Chattel slavery persists today as global human trafficking estimated to exceed $30 billion.

Debt is the wildest and most dynamic quantitative story of the 21^st century global economy, totaling over $300 trillion,¹³ roughly three times the productive economy. Governments carry $100T of that debt. Even the Statue of Liberty, the welcoming lady and symbol of global capital, stands in New York City harbor today because Jospeh Pulitzer secured $100,000 of “crowdfunding” to beat out Baltimore, Boston, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

The Wild “Virtual Capital Value” Response

As we tracked in Wild Money, humans play this “hard-drive” zero-sum physical resources game with our information-imagination-knowledge powered, soft-wired, “virtual value” game. This “virtualized” world has come to life over the Anthropocene’s full trace, a million years of hominid and Homo sapien history. It runs through every virtual, language-bound artery and vein of “capital” and “capitalism.” We’ve played it on stone tablets, paper, and now “digitized” computer screens. Its numbers light up our digital lives, but its value is really “out there,” “on the street,” and it can dynamically mobilize yet also violently rock and rankle global civilization. Can you say the 2007-2009 “Great Financial Crisis?”

Recall that virtually anything of value can be “money-fied,” “capitalized,” or, to use finance’s term, “securitized” – essentially all ag-products (e.g., corn, cotton, pork bellies) into “commodity futures,” but then also student loans, auto loans, credit card receivables, and, as the Crisis revealed, “Mom & Pop” mortgages into mortgage-bonds, credit-default-swaps, and even wilder, “derivatives of derivatives.” The financial world is awash in dazzling, digitized trading schemes that move and “float” trillions on vast oceans of virtual value markets. Every minute of every day. And night. “Securities, we say?” How “secure” was the Financial Crisis, anyway?

So here we’re returning to the question of whether, as we get kicked around by history’s “great” crises, wars, depressions, fought over markets, or oil, or “power,” are we playing the game, or is the game also playing us? Are we back on M.C. Escher’s staircases?

The physical world’s quantum entanglements – from its gyrating climates, volcanoes, solar mass ejections, to our eight billion global players, to all the corn or wheat “bushels,” or oil “barrels,” even our clever and touchable inventions and innovations – the entanglement remains captured in this wild and fiercely high risk, high competition game. We’ve taken the zero-sum natural risk-competition game, virtualized it, and transformed it into an entirely new and higher-risk, and thus transvalued lifeworld. We play it and it plays us, on a constantly emerging, rules changing, value creation-destruction and multi-dimensional chessboard. We have arrived at a new, if still Earth-bound “wildness.”

Marx’s “value forms” remained mysterious for him because the economic physics he pursued was always incessantly being transvalued to this virtualized game that defies and compromises physical quantification. Just when we think we’ve pinned down the value of a product or strategy, markets trade, an innovator creates a new and destroys an old product, or automation and now A.I. transvalue production and labor, and we’re left swirling in the incessant transvaluation of value. Consequently, information-knowledge-imagination virtualized value is wildly more powerful. We’re still trying to catch up and imagine how wild it is. And it’s only getting wilder.

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Welcome back to the Wild Globalization Project!

We’re still talking about “capital” and “capitalism.”

Let’s talk about…

Private Property, Demand & Desire, and Wild Asymmetries

The human value game gets wildly real as we carry it around in our pockets, in our “titles and accounts,” or in our “bitcoined” smartphones. We call it “private property.” It’s “ours(!)”

The modern human value-creativity-destructivity ethos encourages us, through work, or smarts and ingenuity, maybe some luck, to acquire “stuff” – a car, a house, a business, a piece of land, a fortune. We “title” the high-value stuff in formal, legal systems.

The private property in your pocket or in your home or in your investment portfolio is the singular, “hard-wired,” example of the white and black magic power and incessant momentum of hyper-human value. In consuming and owning private property, we all live and own and propagate capital and capitalism, that is, our human creative-destructive powers.

So, in our modern lives we take “property” for granted, along with the “right” to “own” it. “How is that – how did private property come about?”

Again, as Thomas Sowell reminds us, human value-creation, exchange, and distribution (“economy”) starts with how we manage given resources. As we imagine the Anthropocene’s footprints, we need to reconsider how peoples have experienced their value relationships with the Earth’s resources.

Before the ag-revolution’s 8-12,000-year run to the present, hunter-gather cultures likely competed and maintained boundaries for the best hunting grounds. But they didn’t work the day thinking they “owned” or held legal “title” to those grounds. Rather, as their traditions and cultures reveal, they lived the Earth’s spaces as “sacred,” as “given” by “divine spirits.”

However, under the gradual emergence of agriculture, growing and controlling food resources meant managing and governing land spaces and food resources, especially grain but also husbanded cattle and sheep. “Land” and “space” and the Earth’s creatures were gradually transformed from fully “open,” “free,” even divinely given, to increasingly “acquired,” “owned,” and “controlled” spaces.

When you chase and kill the wild goat, or sheep, or hunt the great bison on the open plain, they’re indeed wild and free. And your life is at risk. But when you instead catch and pen up the creature, and you make it a permanent object in your coral or pantry, it’s no longer free. It’s now under your control, indeed, your “ownership.” It becomes a “reserve” to be “owned,” “managed,” “measured,” and even “traded.” Over hundreds of generations, the creature’s wildness is subtly demystified, it becomes an “object of value.” Husbanding practices transvalued the objects and creatures it controlled. Likewise, the Earth’s rich landed spaces gradually became “production spaces” to be managed, divided, apportioned, their wild and free openness also “demystified.”

Agriculture gradually, over thousands of years, transvalued the human production game’s relationship to the Earth. A new wild emerged. This transformation created vast new economic value. But it changed human nature and the nature of Nature itself. It diminished the free and mysterious “givenness” of creatures and spaces. By Marx’s 19^th century Das Kapital, land, cattle, or the apple would be transformed to “commodities,” their original value transvalued to “human use value,” that is, simply a raw, objectified, physical “resource” that human labor taps for its use.

For example, the nomadic peoples of North America’s Great Plains like the Lakota lived their lives in synchrony and synergy with the land’s vast and fecund ecologies. They lived in harmony with the Great American Bison (“tȟatȟáŋka” in Lakota) meaning “self-sacrifice…giving until there is nothing left.” The Bison “gave” the Plains peoples sustenance – food, clothing, and shelter – but also “spiritual” life. In their creation myths, the Bison were partnering souls given by the “Great Spirit.”¹⁶ “Kills of the hunt” were sacred events and ritually celebrated rather than objects on a “balance-sheet.” That divine connection would collide violently and tragically with the onrush of modernity’s new agriculture and industrial ethos value systems. Though their cultures were highly advanced and adaptive to the Plain’s ecologies,¹⁷ they were unable to compete with the more dynamic and scaled cultural-technological creativity-destructivity ethos of the peoples from the East.

By 1690 C.E., Europe’s John Locke had declared private property a “natural human right”¹⁸ which tended to overwrite Plato’s Republic’s “communal” property rights two thousand years earlier. Just one hundred years later, the Americans’ 1803 Louisiana Purchase consummated their “claim” to the Great Plains and would simply overwhelm the indigenous peoples’ primal, free-roaming, communal ethos.

Eurasian peoples had already moved through the advanced stages of agriculture’s 10,000 year run, and subsequently through the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. When these new Eurasian-European-Americans appeared on the Plains, their “modern” civilization had already been radically transformed and, indeed, “transvalued,” from its pre-agricultural roots. This modern Eurasian ethos valued technical innovation, consumer markets, private property, financial management, complex social governance, and advanced militaries. This force of this emerging ethos culminated in the Americans’ “doctrine of manifest destiny.”

On the American “frontier,” private property, sanctified into frontier law with the 1862 Homestead Act, gave permanent property rights to any settler willing to work the land for five years. The new wild had shown up on the Great Plains. By the end of the 19^th century, the great bison had disappeared, and the American frontier would be laced with railroads delivering ranchers and farmers every manner of Sears Roebuck manufactured private property consumer products.

Private property empowers and scales radical innovation, which then simply and logically gives rise to social-economic dominance. Private property resource management simply “works” the quantum entanglement of wild forces more dynamically and powerfully, if less compassionately and ethically. When many information-imagination-knowledge players use their brains and place their own private property “assets” at risk in a “winner wins” field, radical and powerful innovation emerges. The massive U.S. automobile market would emerge from this same late 19^th century ethos in the play of over 1,900 privately owned companies.

The human value creative-destructive response, transmitted in private property exchange systems, works because it also captures consumers’ more or less unrestrained human desire and demand in “free” markets. Free-thinking, paradigm-breaking, and value-seeking entrepreneurs – the Fords, Jobs, Musks, Bezos, Pony Ma’s, Daniel Eks, or Marie Curie – get ideas and gadgets and strategies to markets of private property consumers with money (“value”) in their pockets to spend. Those consumers want “stuff,” more stuff, so they buy and consume, and thus create even more, “scaled,” globalizing “value.”

As we noticed above, this hyper-powerful production-consumption phenomenon usually, emerges disruptively and asymmetrically – one nation or company or innovator can “get ahead…way ahead.” The new “prosperity” creates wealth but it overruns the current game. Suddenly we’re standing with the Lakota disappearing in the wagons dust-clouds rising on the Eastern horizon, we’re holding the Congo miners hand-dug cobalt in our smartphoned hands, or we’re haunted by the ghosts of the great bison.

This wildly globalized asymmetry is one of the most salient and dominant, and often tragic, signatures of our Anthropocene’s long run and time. Human emergence often happens, it turns out, on the heels of radical divergences – for example, this 10,000 year-long split between the pre-agricultural Americans and Eurasians, or the recent 1800-1990’s “great divergence” between Asian agricultural economies and the hyper-powerful European tech-industry we explored earlier.

Curiously, nature has its own value divergence plays.

“Ecology Capital” Responses

Wildly(!), the ecological stage for the Americas-Eurasia divergence had been set millions of years prior, deep in geologic time. Recently developed plate tectonics discoveries (1960s-present) inform us of the tremendous impact which the separation of the supercontinent Pangaea into Eurasia and the Americas (circa 200-65 million years B.C.E) would eventually have on the asymmetrical emergence of human cultures. The divergence gave Eurasia significant natural comparative advantages over the Americas during the breakout of agriculture and eventually industry in our recent Holocene period (11,700 B.C.E to present). Eurasia’s broad and connected geological spaces, its fertile river valleys (Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Indus, Huang He), its lack of severe mountain ranges, and its East-West versus North-South climatological orientation, all favored the more prolific creation and communication of ideas and innovations, which in turn led to the scaled growth of Eurasian populations.

This great Eurasian-American natural divergence was also set in play when the earliest Americans boldly ventured into the new continent before the dawn of agriculture (13,000 B.C.E. with the Bering Land Bridge theory; or 30,000 B.C.E. with the Pacific coastal migration theory). These earliest American explorers and settlors had simply cut themselves off from the more dynamic advance and diffusion of Eurasia’s agricultural and technological revolutions.

By the time their Eurasian cousins arrived in the Americas, even though the Americans had achieved significant advancements and begun their own agricultures, natural geological and demographic divergences thousands or even millions of years prior had played critical roles in the uneven advance of the human value creative-destructive response.

SCALE

Roughly ten million of us are thought to have entered the Anthropocene’s agricultural period 10,000 years ago. In “just” 400 generations – a relatively short evolutionary period - human populations have grown exponentially(!) – they’ve “scaled” – to our 21^st century’s eight billion. Our pre-ag and wildly globalized brains and souls are still trying to catch up.

Recall how Robert William Fogel’s “techno-physio-cultural evolution” reveals this exponential scale by tracking population growth against technological development:

Scale is both a driver and a result of the human value creative-destructive response – when more of us get together, cooperate, learn from, innovate, make lots of stuff, trade it on ever larger global markets, then – hyper-naturally! – more of us prosper, we all have kids, and POOF(!), there’s eight billion of us demanding this “stuff of life.” And more stuff! And our kids – more stuff!

Consequently, scale also changes the quality of life. For example, as we innovate medical research, new discoveries and technologies emerge, people live longer, and – POOF(!) – under modern industrial-technological medicine global human life expectancy has scaled from 32 years in 1900 to 73 years in 2023.

Likewise, while early British industry was powered by thousands of “scaled,” splashing water wheels, when Newcomen and Watts ignited their coal-fired steam engines – POOF AGAIN! – overnight, we’ve got Marx’s “monopoly capital,” 12-hour workdays, and thousands of kids diving into coal mines! We’ve got modern, industrialized “SCALE!”

Scale is evidence of how the human value creative-destructive response has changed the very nature of human nature, and also the nature of Nature. Yes, the “green revolution” saved India in the 1970’s, but now it may be facilitating the radical transformation of our human global community – a million souls a week migrating to Asian and African cities – and at the same time threatening the fauna and invertebrate micro-organisms that engender the survival of all life on Earth. As E.O. Wilson warns us, “The truth is that we need invertebrates, but they don’t need us. If human beings were to disappear tomorrow, the world would go on with little change. Gaia, the totality of life on Earth, would set about healing itself and return to the rich environmental states of 100,000 years ago. But if invertebrates were to disappear, it is unlikely that the human species could last more than a few months.”

Aha! So, notice how, once we survive catastrophes, like global famine in the 1950-1970s, or the WWII, the new “survival” paradigms trigger scaling change. Scaled, industrial agriculture scales food production but gravely imperils the planet. Manhattan ends the war, but nuclear weapons proliferate, scale. By the 1989 Cold War’s wind-down, in just 4 decades, the global nuclear weapon count would peak at over 60,000, and our 21^st century still holds 12,000. We call it “MAD,” for “mutually assured destruction,” when of course it’s really scaled and wild madness.

Physicist Geoffrey West brilliantly describes scale as emanating from what we’re calling this universal human circumstance which humans have taken to hyper-natural dimensions:

“[The study of scale] is a way of thinking, about asking big questions, and suggesting big answers…It’s about how some of the major challenges we are grappling with today, ranging from rapid urbanization, growth, and global sustainability to understanding cancer, metabolism, and the origins of aging and death, can be addressed in an integrated unifying conceptual framework. It is about the remarkably similar ways in which cities, companies, tumors, and our bodies work, and how each of them represents a variation on a general theme manifesting surprisingly systematic regularities and similarities in their organization, structure, and dynamics. A common property shared by all of them is that they are highly complex and composed of enormous numbers of individual constituents, whether molecules, cells, or people, connected, interacting, and evolving via networked structures over multiple spatial and temporal scales. Some of these networks are obvious and very physical, like our circulatory system or the roads in a city, but some are more conceptual or virtual, like social networks, ecosystems, and the Internet.”

The human value creative-destructive response plays under this “bigger” game’s rules. But with our hyper-natural creative-destructive powers, we’ve scaled even Nature. Our wild game and rules emerge from the scaling, quantum entanglement of protean, chameleonic, forces – ecology, demographics, culture, technology, economy, governance, and wealth.

Why would we expect “capital”, or “capitalism,” to be any different?

Scale Footnote: Accelerating Finite Time Creative-Destructive Singularities

West, however, points out a big “catch” to the human value creative-destructive response when he asks: “Why does the pace of life continually increase and why does the rate of innovation have to continue to accelerate in order to sustain socioeconomic life?”²⁵

His team is tracking what happens when unrestrained growth of wealth and resource consumption pressure zero-sum, “finite” resources. When, for example, our eight billion “need” – or demand(!) – well, everything – cars, food, smartphones, energy, etc. In just 10,000 years we’ve gone from survival “need” to “market-demand prosperity.” Homo sapien’s amazing emergence has also set in motion severe risks and challenges for our 21^st century and the our kids’ futures:

“Resources and energy are the necessary fuel for growth...[but] the superlinear scaling of wealth creation and innovation leads to unbounded, often faster-than-exponential growth consistent with open-ended economies. This is satisfyingly consistent, but there’s a big catch, which goes under the forbidding technical name of a finite time singularity. In a nutshell, the problem is that the theory also predicts that unbounded growth cannot be sustained without having either infinite resources or inducing major paradigm shifts that “reset” the clock before potential collapse occurs. We have sustained open-ended growth and avoided collapse by invoking continuous cycles of paradigm-shifting innovations such as those associated on the big scale of human history with discoveries of iron, steam, coal, computation, and, most recently, digital information technology.

…Unfortunately, however, there is another serious catch. Theory dictates that such discoveries must occur at an increasingly accelerating pace; the time between successive innovations must systematically and inextricably get shorter and shorter. For instance, the time between the “Computer Age” and the “Information and Digital Age” was perhaps twenty years, in contrast to the thousands of years between the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages. If we therefore insist on continuous open-ended growth, not only does the pace of life inevitably quicken, but we must innovate at a faster and faster rate. …This is clearly not sustainable, potentially leading to the collapse of the entire urbanized socioeconomic fabric. Innovation and wealth creation that fuel social systems, if left unchecked, potentially sow the seeds of their inevitable collapse. Can this be avoided or are we locked into a fascinating experiment in natural selection that is doomed to fail?”

What to do? We’re back to the “What’s next?” question.

Summary: “Capital-Capitalism…American Football…the “Pay It Forward Turn”

“Capital,” “capitalism,” and “money,” are sexy and powerful subjects for our “What’s going on?” question. Money might be the ultimate aphrodisiac. It’s money, after all! And all the cool and powerful stuff you can do and buy with it!

So, they’re sexy, but do the names, the labels, distract us from what’s really going on game?

Humans love to play games – basketball, football, baseball, soccer, poker, chess, etc.. Our games are usually named after the “object” in play – the ball, the cards, the chessboard. But labels don’t capture the “what’s going on” of the game, they can’t capture the thousands of hours of practice, training, conditioning, actually the wild learning it takes to play the game. So, we’re thinking of “capital” and “money” using “game” theory, and we’re wondering if the name misses the drama and the wild energy of the play?

Football may be the quintessential “modern” game. Football is primal, it’s tribal warfare fought with committee meetings (huddles) punctuated by violence. Football’s generals (coaches) direct their “troops” (players). It’s a “ground-attack” (“running game”) combined with an “air-attack” (“passing game”), all directed by a quarterback with a “canon” for a passing arm. It’s hyper-humans performing magnificent running, leaping, catching, tackling, and blocking athletic feats. It’s elegant technologies (instant replay, A.I. feedback) informing coaches’ and players’ decisions. It’s formal blackboard plays (“public governance”) that then blow up with the quarterback’s line-of-scrimmage, last minute “audible,” followed by the hike of the ball and the players’ spontaneous, instinctive, split-second, street-wise reactions (“private governance”). It’s black and white bureaucrat “officials” regulating the game’s “market-play” with “rules” and measuring sticks. And football is all about moving the “pigskin,” an ancient symbol the ritual hunt, down the field.

Football is also a theatre of human desire and power - “fanatic fans(!) put on war paint, they gather “communally” around the sacred “gridiron” and perform bonding and power rituals…the players emerge in fiery explosions to the pounding music of military marching bands and fighter jet flyovers. But unlike the Roman coliseum’s life-death thumbs up-or-down killing, modern football rewards the victors and the losers with sexy diamond rings, massive “capital” wealth, and fame.

So, the fans aren’t just watching and the players aren’t just playing. They’re all re-enacting an ancient warfare ritual. Remarkably, however, for the modern fan, football games actually “sublimate” – they transform and transvalue – our violent and deeply rooted Homo sapien natures into capital value “meritocracies” – the fans spend hundreds (thousands for the “Super” Bowl) to buy tickets and food and beer and swag, the players become multi-millionaires, and the teams are worth billions.

Football creates value – winners – and it destroys value – the defeated. We end up with extraordinarily wild and many would say irrational human “value.” We know that for a fact because other humans are willing to pay billions in “capital” to own a pro football franchise. But the value they’re buying is the consumers’ wild demand – the mystique – the wild desire to experience a universal human drama, and that, many would say, is very sexy! Football is virtualized warfare fought with knowledge and violence for the prizes of power and fame and money.

So, what is football worth? George Halas paid $100 to buy the Chicago Bears in 1920. Today, the team is worth $6-8 billion. “America’s team,” the Dallas Cowboys, is valued at $12-15 billion, and the National Football League (“NFL”) is valued at $228 billion. What has the NFL wildly learned, what does it “know,” to create that wild value? It knows that Americans and now people all over the globe enjoy ritualized communal power displays, hyper-human athleticism, beer and dogs, and violent play.

Like the football label, “money” and “capital” are sexy labels but they don’t capture the human creative-destructive value response, that is, the more or less unrestrained desire to know, to yield power, and to thrive. “Capitalism” and “money” abstract and so hide the raw, wild learning and knowledge and imagination that creates human value plays. This is the magic that lurked in Marx’s “mysterious value forms,” and that would eventually stifle and ultimately outwit his economic theory.

To understand the wild power, the risk as well as the potential of “capital” and “capitalism,” we have to see and live it as the full play of synergistic, hyper-variable and “black box” forces:

ECOLOGY: Capital and money are human value systems that live and play in natural ecologies. Human intelligence, once ecologically threatened with near extinction, has tapped into billions-year-old energy and natural value orders to turn the tables, to reverse the risk equation and now threaten the extinction of the planet’s natural orders.

DEMOGRAPHICS, CULTURE: Humans lived out their universal survival dramas to expand populations and creative-destructive value exponentially into the 21^st century’s eight billion. However, mass globalized urbanization is reversing hyper-population growth while dangerously over-concentrating human hyper-activities (e.g., energy demand, pollution, habitat destruction) in mega-cities. And like no other creature in the natural world, and for tens of thousands of years, humans have created immeasurable value by celebrating their existence in the mysterious universe through the practice of sacred faiths and art forms.

TECHNOLOGY: Tech initially emerged as power-tools of environmental adaptation and survival. Humans now invent and deploy tech to create new, hyper-natural capabilities (space travel, pharma, A.I.) which may simultaneously disrupt and destroy previous techs and tech cultures and trigger gaping socio-political asymmetries. Consequently, tech advances ahead of our abilities to manage its practical and cultural impacts.

ECONOMY: Human capital economy has always emerged from the advance, competition for, and exchange of knowledge resources to manage and exploit natural resources: knowledge to survive ice ages and volcanic winters; knowledge to hunt wild animals; knowledge to grow foodstuffs and husband animal resources; knowledge to invent new tools and innovate new strategies and exploit given resources; knowledge to advance science and to fundamentally wonder and explore the physical and metaphysical mysteries of the universe. On the wave of thousands of years of wild learning, often violent competition, and crisis survival, modern humans now deploy complex, globally connected valuation and exchange systems to manage economic values. However, the transformative power of the creative-destructive human value response routinely disrupts and then “transvalues” our definitions, measures of, and existential understanding of value itself. As knowledge economies advance, not only do its commodity deployments change (e.g. from wind and water to steam and fossil fuel power; stone tablets to paper to digitization), but the very measures of value morph imperceptibly over decades or millennia: Small village hundreds of familiar faces, to urbanized thousands-millions of anonymous faces (10,000 years); hunter-gatherer to agriculture (4,000 years); debt-based to coinage-based economy (3,000 years); agriculture to industry (250 years). Economy, like tech, advances ahead of our ability to fully manage legacy or “pay it forward” strategies for our kids.

GOVERNANCE: Humans deploy complex cultural governance systems to attempt to organize and regulate their more or less unrestrained creative-destructive powers and activities. Increasingly powerful demographic, tech, and cultural-economic human value development constantly pressures governance strategies. The governance of this wild value minimally necessitates formal, institutional “public” governance; however, governance optimally thrives with the presence of higher, “spontaneous-value” private governance (e.g., informed and competent citizen response, producer and consumer market-based decisions, corporate governance, and philanthropy). Like other factors, public and private governance lag behind the increasing velocity of change generated by these quantumly entangled and hyper-variable synergies which then periodically trigger finite time singularity crises.

WEALTH: The globalized creative-destructive human value response, “capitalism,” will birth the first trillionaires into our 21^st century. Individuals and companies are now more powerful than many nations. Sudden, globally scaled wealth can give rise to income and wealth and therefore cultural and geo-political asymmetries. Because of its more street-wise creativity, private wealth might more quickly advance a “pay it forward” ethical imperative for our kids.

WILD LEARNING: “Wild learning” may be defined as the formal as well as informal, extemporaneous advance of human information gathering, knowledge accumulation, and imagination, from which emerges the creative-destructive human value responses of invention and strategy innovation. This human value response has created its latest creative-destructive apex tool, artificial intelligence (“A.I.”). Human wild learning created A.I. as a “co-intelligence” of itself. However, by itself A.I. cannot embody the imperative for ethical decision-making because it doesn’t have “skin-in-the-game” risk and it doesn’t have kids. Nonetheless, A.I. is already demanding the re-thinking of learning and knowledge value in our knowledge economy and culture. A.I. is a quintessential example of the human creative-destructive value response – it will, like the factors above, create amazing new potentialities but very quickly disrupt and destroy status quos. Wild learning has always been and will continue to be the most essential and valuable “pay it forward” human resource that must be procreated to our kids.

In summary, perhaps our most significant takeaway here is the Geoggrey West team’s observation that 21^st century humans should routinely anticipate that the human creative-destructive value response will continue to trigger finite time singularity crises and furthermore that the velocity of these crises will also increase. It may be that the more effective way to read and re-define history is as the series of crises punctuated by the human creative-destructive response to crises.

We may takeaway “capital” and “capitalism” and re-imagine them as the quantum entanglement of the human creative-destructive value response. But, alas, “capital” and “capitalism” will likely remain sexier and therefore more marketable labels.

This “Wild Capital” YouTube is one of a suite of “Wild Globalization” YouTubes.
Visit www.substack.wildglobalization.com for transcripts or our web site at www.wildglobalization.com, and watch for our book out in 2026.

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Watch on Youtube

Welcome back

Welcome back to the Wild Globalization Project!

We’re in the middle of three talks about “money,” today’s focus, “capital,” and finally “finance.”

“Capital” & “Capitalism” – What are they?

“Capital…capitalism…capitalists…” now carry the baton of the modern global economy since the 1989 breakup of the Soviet “communist” experiment and then China’s 1990s move into the global “market” economy led by the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping. Recall that Deng had walked with Mao on the 1930’s Long March, yet survived Mao’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution and Great Leap to lead the Chinese “Communist” Party (“CCP”) and a billion people into the global, open market system.

So, if a card-carrying “communist” could be a “capitalist,” do we really understand “capital or capitalism?” What is it, anyway? How will we know “it” when we see it?

Do not the figure of Deng, and the “branding” of “capital…capitalists,” raise the more interesting questions, “What is ‘value?’ ” and “How do humans create it?”

To remind, as we tracked in our Wild Virtuous Knowledge Value talk, Karl Marx’s magnum opus, Das Kapital, attempted to root out 19^th century industry with his accounts of “monopoly capital,” “means of production,” or his “labor theory of value.” Marx’s and Engels’ vivid accounts of early heavy industry exposed brutal injustices, especially child labor – kids working 12-hour factory days or descending into coal mines because their smaller bodies fit through the tunnels and passageways. Yet Kapital’s core economic theory remained mystified by this problem of “value”:

“…the task is set before us, the task of tracing the genesis of this money form, of developing the expression of value implied in the value relation of commodities, from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline…[‘use,’…‘commodity,’…‘relative,’…‘exchange’ value]…to the dazzling money form…the whole mystery of the form of values lies hidden even in the most elementary form, and its analysis is our fundamental difficulty.”

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of the Political Economy, trans. From the 4^th German edition by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul, 2 vols., New York: E.P. Dutton, 1930), p. 18; quoted by Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies - After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U. Press, 1990, p. 32, 55.

Likewise, this question of “value” raises its head when economies experience crises like the 2008-2009 Great Financial Crisis. Economic historian Harold James perceives value as the fundamental challenge of globalizing civilization:

“…globalization has today become a ubiquitous way of understanding the world, but people fail to understand its volatility and instability. Globalization involves the international movements of goods, people, and capital, but also…ideas and technology, which affect and restructure our preferences. In consequence, globalization generates continuous uncertainty about values, both in a monetary and a more fundamental (nonmonetary) sense. It is much more than an economic phenomenon. Globalization is vulnerable to periodic financial catastrophes, which involve very sudden alterations of concepts of value…our values themselves are reevaluated during such crises. During a crisis, unexpected and apparently random linkages become apparent. People begin to see in what complex ways the world has become interconnected.”

Harold James, The Creation and Destruction of Value – The Globalization Cycle, Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 7-9.

James’ “unexpected…random…complex linkages” are tracking this “quantumly entangled” and wildly globalized 21^st century human condition.

Wild Globalization, however, wonders if human evolution hasn’t always been about the flourishings, and then apparent “collapses,” of intelligence or knowledge value as it bobs and weaves and expands through history. If, in fact, this “capital” thing is really about three evolutionary “playing fields” of human value creation that have led us from “there” – whatever humans were doing before we “settled into ‘cities’…into ‘civitas’…into what we would today call our modern condition – to “civilization”?

Wild Capital’s Playing Fields – Resources, Work, and Smarts

Conventional capitalist economics tracks two sources of value creation, introduced here by Louis-Vincent Gave:

“Capitalism finds its growth in two very strong forces:

1. Growth can come from a rational organization of talents. [e.g., David Ricado, Marx-Engels]

2.Growth can come from inventions put in place by entrepreneurs. [e.g., Joseph Schumpeter]”

Louis-Vincent Gave, The GaveKal Team, A Roadmap for Troubling Times, GaveKal, 2008, 63-64

Standard economics attributes capitalism’s creativity to, on the one hand, the “rational organization of talent…work” – this is Marx’s or Locke’s “labor theory of value.” And, on the other hand, capitalism creates value with clever new technologies – Schumpeter’s incessantly creative yet disruptive innovation.

However, in both cases it’s the “smarts,” the intelligence to organize productive work, and the intelligence to invent new gadgets and tools that drive human value creation. Isn’t that what’s going on with capitalism’s new “information age,” and now “AI,” or really over the entire course of human advancement?

“Capitalism” performs its magic on the playgrounds of intelligence. It’s just that we’ve moved out of our original jungle neighborhoods into shiny new steel and concrete and now “internetted” global jungles. All along, though, for maybe 250,000 years, we’ve been gradually reinventing the jungles. Today we call it the “global internet of people, information, markets, etc.”

We’re making a “smart play” here for a more common-sense re-vision of how we think about “capital and capitalism.” It’s up the same alley of history as Joel Mokyr’s claim about technology, that “The only way to think about technology…[or “capitalism,” or “human value creation”]…is in evolutionary terms.”[1]

We can start with how humans first discover and manage raw natural resources – light from fires, to olive then whale oil, then light bulbs, then LEDs.

Second, capital value creation is about how humans organize and manage their time to gather the wood, or grow the olives, or hunt the whales, invent light bulbs, LEDs, EVs, and now how AI is doing that for us!

Third, we could say “innovation,” but again, innovation is already present in smart resource and work management. So it’s really about the practical application of intelligence. Driven at times by violent desperation – surviving the night’s darkness with a grizzly or sabertooth tiger threatening our families. But at other times, humans have become the grizzly or tiger; for example the unrestrained, cold, and malign ambition or hubris that took out the sixty million magnificent bison to open the Great American Plains for farms and ranches.

[1] Kling, Arnold, & Schulz, Nick, From Poverty to Prosperity, Intangible assets, hidden liabilities, and the lasting triumph over scarcity, New York: Encounter Books, 2009, p. 115.

Humans survived, and now we thrive and dominate, with our over-sized brains, our curiosity, our willingness to experiment and adjust, our ability to teach our children, and so our unique abilities to accumulate and grow and apply knowledge. Knowledge-power and will-power, we’re suggesting, are the unique abilities that create, and also disrupt and even destroy, both human and nature’s “values.”

Warning! Capital Value Plays and Hides and Tricks Us

Resources, work, and smarts work and play – and hide(!) – in the quantum entanglement of ecologies, demographics, technologies, economies, governance, and wealth. Their amazing productions distract and play us! From raw stones, to iron and bronze, then oil and gas, steel, aluminum, plastics, then electronics, all crafted and transformed by human intelligence into spears and arrows and atlatls, automobiles, rockets, smartphones, and now “intelligence machines.” The entire exponentially “scaled” techno-industrial scene bedazzles and distracts us from the core knowledge and will power plays that create and catalyze it all.

Perhaps that’s because resources, labor, and gadgets are touchable, sexy, jaw-dropping, like Apollo landing on the Moon, or the dolphins swimming around the Dragon capsule as Crew 9 was recovered. They’re the sexy smartphones we hold and obsess over, our lightning-fast EVs, or big-ass, automated factories that produce all our “stuff…and more and more stuff…!”

We’ve totally forgotten and take for granted how our “fire skills,” acquired a million years ago, created value by protecting our families from those grizzlies or tigers, or how fire warmed us through 100,000-year ice ages. Fire skills that have now “scaled” into the billions of internal combustion engines (“ICEs”) and electric motors hidden away in our automobiles, all produced by some form of fire we’ve harnessed – fossil-fueled fire or wind and solar power created by the Sun’s fire.

We wander in awe through the Louvre, or Notre Dame or the Taj Mahal – we gaze at the Mona Lisa’s tangible smile, or stand beneath “flying stone buttresses,” or the Taj’s pure marble inlays and architectural elegances. Yet the intelligent ingenuity that painted or built them hides beneath their surfaces. What secret is Mona Lisa’s smile hiding? Is it Da Vinci’s genius, his intelligence? And what’s the “capital value” of the Mona Lisa today?

Beware! Intelligence conceals itself in its creations! Yet it’s the capital-creating driver of resources, labor organization, and innovation.

Resource Capital Value – from Stones and Bones to Microchips and Junk Food

In our Wild Economy talks we tracked Nobel economist Thomas Sowell’s observation that “the cave people had the same natural resources we have today…and the difference between their lifestyles and ours is the knowledge we can bring to bear on those resources….”[2]

“Capital” can initially be understood as the value created from the discovery, exploitation, and then excess production of all the “stuff” humans create from given resources – from our earliest ancestors’ food stores, clothing, shelter, or spears and arrows, often stashed “in reserve” under cairns along the migratory trail…TO (!)...gas stations and propane tanks, to grocery stores and refrigerators and wine cellars, to jerky and junk food, to Imelda Marcos’ 3,000 vanity shoe collection, or third homes in Aspen or fourths in the Hamptons, to enough stockpiled nuclear weapons to annihilate humanity and most of nature many times over!

Humans learned – we had to – how to manage the physical resources we found in the “Garden” of nature. But then, energized by our free and unrestrained imaginations, we changed the game from bare-ass survival to thriving and directing and now seemingly dominating creation itself. We started by managing raw values hidden in nature’s physical resources – homes from stones and forest woodlands, clothes from the critter’s hides we hunted and ate, to fossil fuel resources, then energies from the winds and sun and atom, to the insanely powerful smartphone in your hand. We expanded those raw values through experiment, test and failure. We kept what worked, got rid of the stuff that didn’t, and replaced the “obsolete” stuff.

Capital value creation has always been about our native human hubris to take and use what’s given and build it out. Indeed, we are freaks of nature, endowed with vulnerable physical bodies that are no match for the grizzly or tiger. In principle, we weren’t a good bet to survive. As we saw in Wild Sex-Demographics-Culture, those wild demographic bottlenecks could have squashed us from the archaeological record. But then, they didn’t, did they?

We’re here, and dominating, at least for the moment, because we first learned how to manage resources. With our smarts.

[2] Sowell, Thomas, Knowledge & Decisions, New York: Basic Books, 1980.

Human Management Value – Working “Together”

Human capital economies also organize and grow “human” capital resources – from “How do we hunt the Woolly Mammoth this afternoon…and not get our butts kicked…?” to “How do we feed the eight billion, with maybe two more on the way…?” To now, “How will we manage the 21^st century global demographic reversal when there will be fewer and fewer young people to care for all our old folks?”

So human capital value is about “How do we organize resources, human labor, and talent first to survive and then optimize our lives?” To, “Who’s our best spear-chucker to kill the Woolly Mammoth?” To, “How do we use or discover new resources to make all our stuff…so we can dream up new stuff?” Or, “Who’s the best plumber, electrician, engineer, or doctor, attorney or CPA, priest or guru, scientist, artist or composer?” To, “How do we bring 400,000 people together to launch Apollo astronauts to the Moon?” Or, as we learned in Wild Economy, “How did Microsoft’s long-haired hippies re-program civilization?”

Or, today, “How are SpaceX’s rowdy band of engineers rocketing past NASA and Boeing and maybe launching civilization to Mars?”

Clever resource production, more stuff with less work, gave us time to think, imagine, create, and devise new stuff and new ways. Human capital value intelligently created perhaps the most valuable “capital” resource of all, that is, freedom from labor. “Free time.”

From our “kicked out of the Garden,” time-intensive toil and labors, we came up with better and quicker ways to, as Larry the Cable Guy says, “Get ‘er done!” Recall that in 1900, 90% of Americans worked in agriculture. Today, less than five percent do, and todays’ farmers and ranchers are high-tech “Ag” engineers – from GPS-directed drone oversight to down-to-the-square-meter soil management. In just 400 generations, or 10,000 years, most humans have advanced from chasing and gathering food resources all day long, to a 15-minute drive to the grocery.

We created time for the great cave artists and then the Chagalls and Monets and Rembrandts and Da Vincis to paint their magic, time for Homer to sing the Iliad and Odessey, for Mozart to play the music of the gods, time for the Newtons and Einsteins and Gödels to unlock nature’s secrets. We created human capital value by intelligently organizing our time.

And we used that extra time and space and resources to create the most “valuable” creative-destructive creature on the planet, lots more kids! As we’ve noticed earlier, from 4.4 billion screaming, squirming humans in 1980 to 8 billion of us by 2020. And astonishingly, though we’re far from perfect and we pose grave risk to Earth’s other creatures, most of us are better fed, living longer, and we have literally tons more “stuff” than the 5-10 million who got the agricultural revolution started those short 400 generations ago.

Free (and Fighting!) Knowledge Capital Value

Resource management, plus labor and social organization were always imagined, catalyzed, and directed by vulnerable, risk-taking humans learning and then applying their knowledge.

OR NOT! It’s likely that human intelligence has failed perhaps only slightly less than it’s succeeded. Yet somehow, by the skins of our prey, and the hair of our own teeth, we “made” “it.”

We learned. We learned to try, re-try, to succeed or fail, and maybe not fail but, tracking Thomas Edison, to confirm all the ways that didn’t work. Sadly, we also battled brutally and mercilessly with each other over it all. But then, somehow, we seem to get back at it and hang on to hard-won lessons.

When we were wise about it, we taught our kids, which meant we also had to sit back and pay attention to their rebellions, new ideas, long-short-matted hair, crazy music, tats, etc. But when we’ve had it all working, we taught them and ourselves how to learn. To question anything and everything.

Learning and intelligence don’t act on their own or without brute force. Our “smarts,” our critical thinking, are relentlessly energized by “will-power.”

But again, “OR NOT!” – Humanity and civilization are still a work in progress – Let’s not lose sight of the fact that, with all our intelligence-created gadgets and “progress,” nuclear weapons are still the low-hanging fruit on the mythical “Tree of Knowledge.” They remind us that we’re just a button-push away from…what? And how do we tell our kids about that “what”?

Still, in spite of hardships and desperations and brutalities, freezing nights or scorching days, famines and tumults, and most of all our own vanities and flaws and evils, for more and more of us we’ve managed to coax and force what was for our ancient ancestors bare-ass survival into what for us is increasing prosperity. Even if we’re threatening every other creature on the planet, or pointing those thousands of nuclear bombs at each other.

Intelligence is wild…and messy. Why would we expect capital value creation to be any different?

Still, capital value creation elevates the game to new and wild and crazy heights, that is, to its “virtual” levels of performance. Applied knowledge gets transformed and disseminated into highly complex languages, including mathematics, scientific equations, now artificial intelligence, but also philosophy and theology, music scores and art forms. We’ve changed the natural game to “our” game. “E = mc²” exists nowhere in nature except in the human mind. Recall that, for Beethoven, his own 9^th Symphony played only in his soul’s “virtual ear.”

Likewise, market economies transform raw, hard physical resources into hyper-real “petro-dollars,” “stock tickers,” “big boards,” and now “bit”-coins. Into “money,” into virtual value that can “buy” and “sell” and “invest,” that is, that can become applied virtual capital value. Human virtual value has become projected and extrapolated into the hardest-core reality-metaphors – “figures” on paper-ledgers and IT screens that can literally crush the physical world and cause sentient, intelligent human beings to jump from high buildings.

More incredibly, knowledge capital is now entirely “free,” or to use the new caché term, “democratized!” The internet and information age have exposed for all to see what was already always there, that is, the now globalized, connected and integrating, living “trees” of knowledge. Recall Louis-Vincent Gave’s exclamation that knowledge is free, and that “in this new information economy…wealth [capital value] is in unlimited supply…and has a marginal cost of zero….”[3] We’ve always been an “applied” or real knowledge civilization.

Real knowledge-capital applied as money-capital is not only free, it’s wild and sexy. Indeed, as Alvin and Heidi Toffler think, “promiscuous…it mates with other knowledge.”[4] It can spontaneously reproduce and morph into new, virtual value-forms that energize, delight, and dazzle – and also disrupt and destruct and wreak havoc on everyday life. We’ll explore in Wild Finance how “mom and pop” residential mortgages were packaged into fixed income securities and suddenly became exotic, digitized “derivatives,” “hedges,” “swaps,” “collateralized debt obligations”[5] or “CDOs,” even “synthetic” CDOs, that could twist and inflate, distort and hide trillions of dollars of “mortgage value,” then move freely around the globe in microseconds, and that could warp the rational minds and souls of anyone who touched and traded them.

[3] Louis-Vincent Gave, and the GaveKal Team, A Roadmap for Troubling Times, GaveKal Research, 2008, p. 157-158.

[4] Toffler, Alvin & Heidi, Revolutionary Wealth, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, p. 100-101.

[5] A “Collateralized Debt Obligation” is a financial product that invests in other, non-cash assets and products, including swaps, options, and insurance contracts, in order to obtain exposure to other, usually fixed-income assets.

Once capital knowledge value is virtualized, it can play on an entirely non-physical gameboard. Curiosity-knowledge-invention relentlessly “splits the knowledge DNA,” now into digital “bytes” and “bits,” into entirely new and increasingly powerful, virtualized value-forms. Knowledge capital produces – reproduces – and relentlessly risks – new markets, mayhems, and wealth. And, as physicist Seth Lloyd observes, digital virtual knowledge capital value is “sexy”:

“The digital revolution under way today is merely the latest in a long line of information-processing revolutions stretching back through the development of language, the evolution of sex, and the creation of life to the beginning of the universe itself.

…The original sexual revolution was a tour de force, a huge success that came from what at first glance looks like a bad idea. Why bad? …Because it risked losing valuable information. A successful bacterium, reproducing asexually passes on its exact genetic makeup (absent the occasional mutation) to its offspring. But if an organism reproduces sexually, its genes are scrambled with those of its mate in order to produce the offspring’s genes, a process called recombination. Sex messes with success.

Why is sex good? From the point of view of natural selection, it allows for greater genetic variation at the same time as it faithfully reproduces individual genes. In sexual reproduction…the inherent scrambling or recombination affords a vast scope for change, yet still maintains genetic integrity.”

Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist takes on the Cosmos, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, p. 4-5, 14.

The playing fields of capital value are first managing resources, then organizing our work, and finally the entire quantum entanglement is powered by creative and disruptive human intelligence.

But then we can ask, “What are the playing conditions, the ‘ecologies,’ of the game?”

Knowledge Capital Value’s Ecologies: Risk and Competition

Risk

“Risk” is the primal, native experiential “ecology,” the native condition that all life lives “in,” including our knowledge and intelligence.

Human capital value creation emerges from the terror of existential risk imposed by nature herself: That voracious grizzly or now extinct saber-toothed tiger; climatological risks like ice ages; astrophysical risks like solar mass ejections; geologic risks like earthquakes, volcanoes, or tsunamis; biological risks like famine and disease.

Risk is so bred into our bones and DNA that, in our modern era, when we think we have a grip on most of nature’s existential risks – (OR NOT!...can you say “2025 Los Angeles Santa Ana Wind fires?”) – we seem to go out and dream up incredible, unimaginable to most of us, human-made risks – like our daring kayaker, or Messner’s and Habeler’s non-oxygen aided 1978 summit of Chomolungma (Mt. Everest), or Alex Honnold’s 2017 “solo” of Yosemite’s El Capitan, or Apollo on the Moon, or miraculous medical procedures like in utero surgery, or now, even 100 MPH human wingsuit flyers, and on and on!

Why would free and applied knowledge capital act any differently? Doesn’t it emerge from crisis conditions? And of course, also from human aspirations, audacities, curiosities, inventions, and unrestrained desire to survive and now thrive and dominate Earth’s natural risk conditions? It’s Captain Kirk’s mission statement “To boldly go where no one has gone before,” or entrepreneur and rocketeer Elon Musk’s challenge after watching the Starship rocket’s successful launch but then subsequent explosion and “failure” to enter Earth’s orbit: “This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.”

Human nature grew out of risk. Intelligent applied-knowledge-capital-value was born from and now lives and thrives on its response to, management of, and exploitation of risk. The existential condition of nature is risk. Humans create their own risk – Columbus’ voyages were all about curiosity and opportunity – and risk. Thomas Edison’s light experiments could have blown up in his face. Oppenheimer’s atom bomb exploded unimaginable new risk on the human capital playing fields.

Competition – Zero-Sum and Non-Zero-Sum

All of nature’s “at risk” creatures, particularly those voracious, unrestrained humans, compete against one another for essential natural resources – food, water, space, mating dominance, etc. As biologist Paul Keddy describes it, competition drives all life, from the cellular level to the species level:

“Competition is one of the most important factors controlling the distribution and abundance of living creatures. Sperm cells racing up reproductive tracts, beetle larvae battling inside single seeds, birds defending territories, and trees interfering with the light available to neighbours, are all engaged in competition for limited resources. …There are acacia trees that use ants to damage vines, beetles that compete for access to dung balls, tadpoles that apparently poison their neighbours, birds that smash the eggs of potential competitors, and plants that associate with fungi in order to increase access to soil resources.”

Paul Keddy, Competition, 2^nd Edition, Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001.

Competition is the primal, “zero-sum” game that nature plays with resource logistics. Zero-sum means simply, “If I win, you lose...if you win, I lose.”

“Zero-sum thinking,” either conserving or sharing what we first assume are limited resources, makes sense. Consequently, it tends to dominate the modern perception of resource management because it says, “Don’t run out of stuff!”

So recall, as we noticed in Wild Sex, Demographics, and Culture, Part 2, after the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-60 took 20-50 million lives, people were rightly freaking out about the foreboding possibility that a similar famine could hit India in the 1970s.[6] Or today, how will data centers power AI and eight billion folks watching movies on their smartphones?

Zero-sum thinking is consistent with Darwin’s theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest: “If I can run faster than you, I have a better chance of not getting eaten by that grizzly chasing us!”

Today, the plays of competition are civilization’s entertainment, and now $700 billion globalizing mega-business. America’s National Football League has grown from leather to plastic, from part-time players to full-time celebrity millionaire players competing on teams owned by super-celebrity billionaires.

Zero-sum thinking, however, doesn’t seem to fully account for how nature moves and shakes, or how we got to the eight billion. Or how India avoided a 1970s famine. Or how – our current question – how human capital value creation works. Shouldn’t we account for how we got from burning wood to nuclear energy, or atlatls and bows and arrows to nuclear bombs? Or from Fred and Wilma’s “Flint-mobile” to the Tesla? How did Fred steer that thing anyway without a Medieval front pivot axle? Ah, the magic of evolution…and cartoons!

We learned from Huber and Mills in our Wild Ecology talk that Earth’s energy accumulation and “order” are expanding over time:

“Starting from nothing 4 billion years ago, life somehow contrived to capture high-grade energy from here and there and used it to assemble more life…life now covers the planet…with the dawn of agriculture…human societies began selectively planting and breeding crops to capture solar energy…and they used the expanding supplies of energy mainly to breed more people, who planted more crops. Humanity’s total energy consumption doubled about every five to ten centuries, in step with the (slowly) rising population.”

Peter Huber, and Mark Mills, The Bottomless Well – The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy, New York: Basic Books, 2005, p. 174.

So, if we’re talking about “energy orders,” how did we get non-naturally occurring, or “hyper”-natural, uranium 235 (“U235”) from its naturally occurring cousin, uranium 238 (“U238”)? We got it from a band of very smart humans (The Manhattan Project), desperately at risk and competing against other humans (the Japanese and German Axis), experimenting and figuring out they could process the natural stuff with gaseous centrifuges and diffusion to end up with the U235 isotope. They created new applied-knowledge-value. And knowledge-power – The bomb’s new applied-knowledge-capital-value at once ended WWII and then radically transformed the human energy game. And nuclear energy also veered global civilization into an entirely new, and wild, age of risk and competition.

The “nuclear age” represents the most sudden and shocking “quantumly entangled paradigm shift” in human history. Nuclear energy’s knowledge power transformed military political and civil power overnight. It re-set the global order. Human knowledge-capital creation – and destruction – defeated military powers, it neutered political powers who didn’t have it, and it promised urban societies virtually indefinite energy resources.

[6] William and Paul Paddock, Famine, 1975!: America’s decision: Who will survive?, Little, Brown, 1967.

So, while life may appear “zero-sum” on its competitive, zero-sum surfaces, it’s really playing another, entirely elevated game that creates a new “plus,” or “non-zero,” creativity. And incessant disruption. New stuff and techs overwhelm and replace the old stuff and tech. More stuff-utility-order-power and hence expansive or add-on non-zero-sum value strategies (U235) emerge to create new hyper-forms of nature. Joseph Schumpeter would call it this capital value emergence the “perennial gale of creative destruction.”[7]

Robert Wright observes the paradoxical play of risk, both as zero-sum winners and losers, but, at the same time, “non-zero” sum strategies that grow value that in fact grow what we’re insisting is actually the seeds of capital value:

“…this primordial imperative to process information…has risen to higher and higher levels, following the logic of organic coherence, which is to say…the basic paradox of creation: non-zero-sumness, wondrous though it is, was created by, and for, zero-sumness...”

Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Knopf Doubleday, 2001, Kindle p. 325.

Human knowledge-capital-value creativity is an “ordinary,” everyday “fact.” Or even, as Einstein thought, a kind of ordinary, meta-physical “miracle” that can transform, direct, and expand the physical world. Whether you conclude that it’s a miracle or not, spontaneous value creativity appears on the scene long before “capital” or “capitalism.” Non-zero-sumness capital value creation is a force of nature itself.

[7] Joseph Schumpeter, Can Capitalism Survive – Creative Destruction and the Future of the Global Economy, New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 1976, p. 41-45.

For example, what “real capital-value” did Einstein’s non-zero-sum research create? A short list includes:

· Laser Technology – Einstein’s 1916 discovery of “stimulated emission” created the foundation for lasers used in high precision cutting, drilling, welding, and also measuring materials and distances.

· Global Positioning Systems (“GPS”) – Hyper-accurate GPS relies on principles derived from Einstein’s research, in particular his theory of relativity.

· Photoelectric Effect: Einstein won the Nobel Prize for his explanation of the photoelectric effect that was vital for the development of solar panels, photovoltaic cells, and optical sensors.

· Nuclear Energy – Einstein’s famous E = mc² equation laid the theoretical groundwork for nuclear energy development.

· Medical Technology – Einstein’s research contributed to the development of cancer radiation therapy.

Einstein’s life and critical, creative thinking demonstrate how the unrestrained human imagination changes the rules and expands the playing field of possibility for “capital value creation.”

Epilogue

In our Wild Capital in the 21^st Century Part II we’ll explore the “non-zero-sumness” tools and techniques that capital and capitalism deploy to create value and how this was always never physical evolution but rather, tracking now Einstein over Marx, meta-physical emergence.

So, stay tuned!

Watch on Youtube

Watch on Youtube

Welcome back

Welcome back to the Wild Globalization Project!

We’ve bushwhacked a lot of ground, through wild ecologies – ice ages, Milankovitch Cycles, mega-volcanoes, geo-magnetic solar storms, and “dark” matters; on to even wilder human sex- demographics and culture – from the wild savannahs and mystery Gardens to this 21^st century “condition” we call “civilization,” to – WHOOSH!

Systemic urbanization triggering “demographic reversals,” with a million people migrating to cities every week, where global companies can yield more power than governments; all of this carried by even wilder technologies – tech-industrial “knowledge” revolutions that electrify and demand massive energy inputs for our magical “devices,” EVs, “Clouds,” and “A.I.,” and at the same time shock and threaten culture with “nano” and “logarithmic” and “nuclear” powers, all while artificial fertilizers feed all eight billion of us; and it’s all bought and sold in wild economies – what were once scarce resources are now superabundant and produce lots and lots of “stuff,” stuff we need, stuff we don’t need, lots of stuff, good stuff, but also bad stuff, like black market human, drug and weapon trafficking, and it’s nonetheless moving economic “value” around the globe to Wal-Marted consumers but also “stealth” consumers who hang out in the exploding, informal, “stealth” economy, where half of humanity lives and works and sneaks under government radars. What’s going on!?

In the next three talks – Wild Money, Wild Capital, and Wild Finance – we’ll explore how civilization’s value-plays are moved through modern financial markets, shifting and slithering tectonically, like earthquakes, through logarithm-controlled, “intelligent machines,” moving trillions of dollars in and out of markets in micro-second “flash trades” yet, suddenly, out of nowhere, “flash crashes” – of virtualized value, as when, “ordinary,” “mom and pop” U.S. residential mortgages got “packaged” into contrived and “derived” financial gadgets that no one really understood, could value, or control.

The 2007-09 Financial Crisis demonstrated that civilization is wilder than whatever we were doing before we invented it – or – wait a minute – is this quantum entangled civilization actually inventing us?

This whole “quantum entangled” show of ecology-demographics-technology-economy- governance-wealth is powered, we think, by human knowledge, by what philosopher Bernard Lonergan called the “pure human desire to know.”

But Wild Globalization asks, “If knowledge is the unique power that has done the heavy lifting for human evolution, then doesn’t that say to us that human intelligence and knowledge really reveal the “desire for power, itself?”

That is, can our most powerful desire, our indomitable will to survive and then thrive with our smarts, can that desire become what Friedrich Nietzsche, that wild philosopher who was born into the 19^th century’s industrial age, can it become what he called our “will to power?”

All the pre-historical folks that got us here somehow hung in there with their cleverness, their ingenuity, their imaginations, their expanding “social knowledge,” their random luck – in a word, their “will-power” – through unimaginable risks and desperations – 100,000 year ice ages, volcanic winters, famines, horrific pandemics. They even pulled us through what anthropologists call the “great demographic bottleneck” some 50,000 years ago, when human numbers likely dropped to just a few tens or hundreds of thousands. “We” endured. “We” are the survivors. We are the children of those folks who miraculously, if hyper-precariously, defied the odds and the gods. To all eight billion of “us” today.

That will to survive what nature threw at us recalls Beth Shapiro’s observation that primal humans

“hunted, polluted, and outcompeted hundreds of species (including all our other hominid cousins) to extinction…”

Shapiro, Beth, Life as We Made It – How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined – and Redefined – Nature, New York: Basic Books, 2021.

That same survival instinct now dominates, and it threatens our children and that same planet and all her creatures. Humans have become the new and gravest threat to our own and the natural world’s survival. We are the new tsunami or ice age or saber-toothed tiger in the darkness bearing down on our chances. So who or what restrains us?

Aren’t we all, if we could “live” back the 20^th century’s unbridled global wars and atrocities and holocausts and environmental devastations – aren’t we all, or shouldn’t we be, trying to get a grip on these malign and evil chases and races for knowledge and power? Must we not do that? And then, how do we do that?

Money-capital-finance explode on the scene of this quantum entanglement of forces, and so Wild Globalization will briefly examine how they work – OR NOT! – by placing money-capital-finance in the light of the three unique human natures we’re tracking.

First, we’ve noticed how humans are intelligent creatures. We started cooking maybe a million years ago, and now we also cook up gadgets and techs – we come to a river and we invent kayaks! Our intelligence and passion for innovation make us not unnatural but “hyper-natural.” Yet we’re still creations of nature. We emerged from nature herself.

Second, we are free. If the 20^th century taught us anything, it is that our intelligence and our hyper-natural powers live in a state of unrestrained and shockingly dangerous freedom – we’ve been kicked out of the Garden. What restrains our intelligence, our hyper-nature?

Wild Globalization claims that it’s our third nature, our ability to love and care for each other and the planet. Our so-called “ethical or altruistic response.” OR NOT! This loving and caring nature, to mourn a loved one’s passing or suffering, to heal the sick, this ethical response is our own primal imperative and it simply has to get a grip on our unrestrained intelligence and our hyper-natural powers. It’s very simple: If we don’t get our loving and caring game together, we’re in trouble. PERIOD!

These “wild” natures live in the minds and hearts and souls of everyone on the planet today. It’s the magic in the newborn child’s eyes. It’s the future. So we ask ourselves, how can we help them make it through this 21^st century?

So, go get more popcorn! We’re bushwhacking, first into the money and then the capital and finance jungles. Wild creatures in the dark woods!

So what are “Money Entanglements”?

Global Money-Capital-Finance are the playgrounds where knowledge-power-value flows and creeps and leaks through human economies.

So, what is money?

In classic economics, “money” serves three basic functions:

• First, it’s a “unit of account”;

• Second, it’s a “medium of exchange”; and

• Third, it’s a “store of value.”

“Unit of Account”

A “unit of account” is how we tag or label some economic “thing” – an apple, a box of cornflakes, a smartphone, or a barrel of oil – with a “value unit.” – OR NOT! Money may seem like our first grip on economic value, but as we’ll see money actually appears late in the civilization game – long after capital and finance. So we’re backing into it here.

So, how is money “wild?” Money isn’t the real value of the “thing,” or the “stuff” – it’s the virtual value we explored in our Wild Virtuous Value talk. And because it’s virtual, a “representation” of value, it can be manipulated, inflated, deflated, even created out of thin air. Economies and governments play all sorts of value games with it.

MMT

The latest game is called “Modern Monetary Theory,” or “MMT.” MMT wants to think that governments, like the U.S. Treasury, can “expand its balance sheet,” which is gov-talk for “print more money” – lots more – whenever they think they need it to “pay” for some crisis, like Covid-19 or Middle-East wars, or some favorite pet “program,” like a “Green New Deal” or a “Great Society” or a “Star Wars.” In 2024 the government will use MMT to “pay” – can you say “borrow” – approximately $1.8 trillion (!) of its annual operating expenses, and which now total nearly $40 trillion.

Boiled down, the “theory” claims that sovereign governments who issue their own currency, like the U.S. Federal Reserve, can’t go broke or run out of money – they can always simply “expand” the money supply – meaning, again(!), print more money. From the government’s “big building in Washington D.C.” perspective, this “works,” in principle. Except that, on the street, from the consumer citizen’s or worker’s “pocket” perspective, lots more dollars mean their dollars shrink. Monetary inflation – your pocket dollar’s shrinking value – happens when an economy’s money supply expands faster than the economy is itself growing.

First MMT Takeaway

The MMT debate shows us how money value is, well, wild! We don’t know how it will turn out, but it could be a big mess for our kids long after the policymakers who tried it are gone down the road.

Second MMT Takeaway

MMT “works” best when you’re a “biggest-cheese” sovereign government, like the United States. Smaller nations’ currencies, but even large economies, and anyone trading essential commodities like oil and gas with “petro-dollars,” so really everyone in the global monetary system, everyone gets squeezed by MMT.

Third MMT Takeaway

Governments like the U.S. are likely playing with monetary fire because global money markets wrestle every day over whether they should keep the U.S. dollar as the default reserve currency, or instead try a “basket of global currencies,” say a mix of the dollar, the Euro, and the Chinese Yuan.

What about the U.S. Dollar?

So, since we’re talking globalization, why does the U.S. dollar dominate global money markets if its value is now, since the end of the gold standard in 1971, backed only by the “full faith and credit of the U.S. Government,” a government hanging that $40 trillion out there along with another $75-100 trillion in unfunded future liabilities (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security)? Why is that?

America’s and the Dollar’s “Comparative Advantages”

What are the dollar’s “comparative advantages,” it’s built-in strengths that other currencies can’t compete with? If you’re an American reading this, you may not appreciate that:

1. “Play of the Land”: After 4.5 billion years of Earth’s tectonic boiling and roiling, The U.S. has ended up with (1) More natural resources, especially energy (coal, oil and gas, favorable climes for wind and solar, uranium ore); (2) More navigable waterways to move industrial-scale goods than all other nations combined; (3) and the U.S.’s unique geography accesses both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, even more essential in the global economy; (4) Geographically, America is protected from history’s worst political hotspots like Europe, the Middle East, or Asia; (5) lastly, America’s so-called flyover “Greater Midwest is the largest and most productive food producer on the planet.” Summary: Americans can live “carefree” because, as geo-political analyst Peter Zeihan aptly observes,

“Americans didn’t need an empire because they already had a continent.”

Peter Zeihan, The Absent Superpower – The Shale Revolution and a World without America, Austin Tx.: Zeihan on Geopolitics, 2016

2. Economic Juggernaut: America is the most dynamic creator-innovator of new stuff and tech (e.g., nuclear energy, IT, smartphones, telecommunications, the Internet, the “Cloud,” A.I., pharma); more importantly, America knows how to “consumerize” and then make money with its innovations. And in our hyper-globalized 21^st century economy, Americans like Gates and Bezos and Dell developed the “platform” company model of productivity, where they control high-profit design and distribution and then “outsource” lower-profit assembly and production to China, Viet Nam, South Korea, Malaysia, Bangladesh, etc. [1] America isn’t just the leader at the mountaintop, it’s reinventing the mountain.

3. Talent Magnet: America’s resources, its freedom to innovate and distribute new ideas and technologies attracts the world’s best talent – think Scottish Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, Serbian Nikola Tesla’s AC electricity, South African Elon Musk’s Tesla-Starlink-SpaceX, Russian Sergey Brin and Google, Mexican Nobel chemist Mario Molina, or Austrian Hedy Lamarr’s spread spectrum communication technology.

4. Rule of Law: If you want to innovate and build stuff, and therefore risk a lot or even all your money and resources, or if you just want to raise a family, you demand a stable home culture. Which means “rule of law.” As Winston Churchill observed of a lawful, free society, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” America’s democracy and its rule of law maintains the most viable system on the global stage.

5. Military Dominance: The world can be a bad and dangerous place. So, for better or worse, like all of history’s dominant powers, U.S. can innovate and spend more money for the most bad-ass military on the planet.

6. Summary: Consequently, if you could ask money or people “Where do you want to go?” it’s likely, America.

America as Global Leader

Secondly, the dollar is dominant because, as the world re-set after the 20^th century’s terrible global wars, the U.S. domestic economy emerged unscathed, revived, and more powerful than ever, while Europe’s, the Soviet Union’s, Japan’s, and China’s peoples and infrastructures were devastated. Mainland Asia’s economies hadn’t gotten on the modern tech-industrial escalator and remained largely agrarian.

Yet, instead of conquest, America decided to help rebuild Japan and Europe so it could sell its stuff – cars, refrigerators, telephones, Coca-Cola, Corn Flakes, Harley Davidsons – to their consumer markets. America reset the global geo-political ecology by building trading and consumer partners. But to play in this emerging free market game, a re-building nation had to position itself under America’s political and security umbrella. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union forced an alternate, state-controlled, socialist market system, but with limited freedoms, and unappealing consumer stuff that didn’t work – can you say, “Yugo” automobiles – and, worse, catastrophically failed infrastructures – can you say Chernobyl 1986? These two political-economic experiments collided during the Cold War (1945-1989), but with the Soviet collapse in 1989, and China’s subsequent move into the global market economy, the U.S. led West had prevailed and the U.S. dollar would then dominate the world’s trading and economic system. Consequently, the “greenback” moves 60% of international trade, holds 59% of global currency reserves and 64% of global government debt. 

Finally, the U.S. dollar flies highest because it’s not the only sovereign government playing the borrowing/MMT game. Virtually all other national governments borrow to pay for their operations, infrastructures and safety-net promises. America’s biggest competitor, China, holds and hides even more massive public debt but also “dead” companies – companies that have stopped operating but still show up on government-owned bank balance sheets.[1] Likewise, Japan’s government debt hovers at 250% of its economy, or “gross domestic product” (“GDP.”[2]) France’s debt/GDP is 112%, and the United Kingdom’s 97%.[3] Most modern governments are swimming in their own debt.

So how can ubiquitous public debt and liabilities be a plus for the dollar? It’s not complicated. It’s because of the first two factors – the U.S. is the biggest and “baddest” global economy. By far.

But let’s be clear. MMT or no MMT, the dollar is not “backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government,” which really means U.S. taxpayers. How would American – or Chinese or Japanese or European – taxpayers ever pay off their governments’ debts and liabilities, anyway? (Hint – see our Wild Governance talk!) No, the dollar is the default global currency simply because the 21^st century U.S innovation-consumer-energy economy is the largest and most productive economy out there. As global financiers jokingly describe it, “The dollar is just the best-looking horse in the glue factory!”

Takeaway: as a “unit of account,” money is wild!

[2] GDP is typically measured as the monetary value of goods and services produced by an economy.

“Medium of Exchange”

Money gets even more frantic when humans start using these units of account as “mediums of exchange” – so trading, buying and selling – stuff, including money itself.

Monies – around $100 trillion every year as of 2024-25 – move and flow and slither every day through local grocery stores, car dealerships, Amazon jungles, petrodollar energy markets, etc., to pay for every kind of stuff.

That’s what we can see. Trillions more – maybe another 10-20 trillion, no one really knows – move through “informal,” “off-radar,” or “stealth” street kiosks in emerging global markets that sell off-label consumer knock-off Gucci’s and Rolex’s, or second-hand smartphones. Proctor and Gamble, a Fortune 100 company, generates much of its market share growth because it figured out how to sell its soap into these micro-markets.And at the criminal, “cartel” level, “laundered” monies move all sorts of stolen and rifled goods – high-end bicycles, catalytic converters ripped from parked cars, pick-up trucks – as well as brutal drugs like fentanyl, weapons of war, and still, in our 21^st century “civilized” global economy, men, women, and children are sold into indenture and modern slavery. “Money,” mostly dollars moves it all.

But national currencies are not merely direct mediums of exchange for goods and services. Currencies are themselves traded incessantly in global money markets. Every minute of every day, trillions of U.S. dollars, Japanese yen, the Euro, etc., pulsate electronically, algorithmically, through money exchanges. Non-stop. Global currency trading volume averages @$6-7 trillion U.S. dollars every day.Global money reserves churn and turn over currency values equal to the entire $100T formal global economy every two weeks.

Consequently, exchange prices and values of big-ticket items like stocks and real estate can contort and fluctuate wildly and randomly. Economists try to use statistical “standard deviations” to explain and keep track of the volatility of global currency markets. Three standard deviations are considered within a “normal” range and should, theoretically, explain 99% of expected fluctuations. But as Benoit Mandelbrot, a keen critic of “market misbehavior,” observes:

“Evidence abounds of abnormal foreign-exchange markets. A 2002 Citigroup study found unpleasantly sharp price swings in several currencies – dollar, euro, yen, pound, peso, zloty, even the Brazilian real. On one day, the dollar vaulted over the yen by 3.78 percent…that is 5.1 standard deviations…If exchange rates were Gaussian [“normal”] that would be expected to happen once a century. But the biggest fall was a heart-stopping 7.92 percent…The normal odds of that: Not if Citigroup had been trading dollars and yen every day since the Big Bang 15 billion years ago should it have happened, not once.”

Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson, The (mis) Behaviour of Markets – A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence, New York: Basic Books, 2004, p. 96-97.

Mandelbrot is exposing how modern economic methods and measures can’t really account for money-value. Yet it’s money-values that are supposed to carry and transact the global economy.

That’s because money as “units of account” and “mediums of exchange” plays a “knowledge-value” game on the global money market chessboard. Money, because it’s a virtual or “representative” form of value, simply takes on a life of its own.

It’s not unlike a cartoon character, say, Wile E. Coyote, who comes to life, gets constantly out-witted by Roadrunner – and only the money-market gods know what they’ll do – there’s no master money-value cartoonist!

“Store of Value”

Recall, however, that money is supposed to represent the underlying value of some hard-product “thing – a car, a bushel of grain, a building, a barrel of oil, a computer, a day’s labor, etc. Money is the way civilization measures and counts and transacts the “store of value” of real market stuff.

This sets us up for two challenges. First, we ask, “But value of what?” Drilled down, we’ve discovered that money really measures “knowledge value.” So not “oil” itself. Oil’s been around for millions of years, and no one knew what to do with it or how to get at it – as we’ve learned, oil is about what knowledge can do or make or power with it. So not the physical “oil-stuff” – rather, how do you know why or how to make it and then use it.

Even human labor is knowledge-bound – the Industrial Revolutions were about technology and the knowledge transformation of production labor, that is, how efficiently and expertly can the human hand – or now A.I. empowered automation – make stuff. Money represents knowledge value. But knowledge, as we’ve seen, is ephemeral, constantly being created, it’s evolving, churning and changing, getting tested, replaced, overrun, then re-emerging.

We understand money’s second great challenge when we consider that market “price” value of everything is immersed in what we’ve discovered is civilization’s wildly globalized “quantum entanglement” – ecological factors like climate or volcanoes or even Covid-19, demographic factors like population reversals and immigration flows, technological factors like Chernobyl disasters, economic volatilities like the 2007-09 financial crisis, and governance malfeasance factors like the government debt crisis.

Wild money – “units of value,” “mediums of exchange,” and “stores of value” – transact our wildly globalized human civilization.

Yet, as it turns out, maybe that’s not all money does.

“Instrument of Sovereignty”

Astonishingly, a new, game-changing “money power” has emerged from this civilization’s 19^th-21^st century monetary system.

As we’ve seen, under the modern socio-economic revolutions (industrial, technological, digital, communications, and now A.I.), the nations of the world have become increasingly integrated. Global economist Paul Tiffany observes:

“…[under] globalization the nation states of the world have become more closely integrated…trade, technology, and capital flows across borders…barriers have been reduced. It is the triumph of the market over the state…politicians no longer are able to tell their citizens what or where or how they can buy goods and services…That, [along with] the logistics revolution in supply chain management has turned the entire world into a bazaar…”

Tiffany, Paul, “Why the United States will Continue to Dominate the 21^st Century,” General Session #6, Investment Management Consultants Association (IMCA), Fall Professional Development Conference, Denver Colorado, September 26^th, 2008

Consequently, as the global economy has integrated, money is now an “instrument of sovereignty.” Milton Friedman observed in 1962 this emerging “discretionary authority of money”:

“Successive financial crises, in 1873, 1884, 1890, and 1893…[and] the panic of 1907…finally crystallized the financial system into an urgent demand for government action. A National Monetary Commission was established by Congress and… the Federal Reserve Act passed in 1913. At the time the Act was passed, a gold standard reigned supreme throughout the world… No sooner was the Act passed than World War I broke out. There was a large-scale abandonment of the gold standard… By the end of the war, the Reserve System was no longer a minor adjunct to the gold standard designed to ensure the convertibility of one form of money into others and to regulate and supervise banks. It had become a powerful discretionary authority able to determine the quantity of money in the United States and to affect international financial conditions throughout the world.”

Friedman, Milton, Capitalism and Freedom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, 40^th Printing, p. 43-44.

Friedman is observing recent modern history’s entanglement of money and political power. Money is now a global currency of political power. By the 1980s breakout of Western free-markets over the collapsing Soviet and Chinese socialist-communist models, it was no longer merely who had the most bombs and rockets and soldiers, it’s who had the biggest and baddest knowledge-innovation-consumer – and now energy – economy? Who’s inventing the Internet, buying and selling the most stuff over the Googles and Amazons, who’s private companies are landing rockets on ocean barges, who’s unleashing multi-directional fractional oil and gas extraction, who’s cooking up A.I.? Finally, whose money is unitizing, exchanging, and storing most of the value of all that?

It's the dollar, for now, a dollar that runs 60% of trade, holds 59% of money reserves and 64% of global government debt. The dollar is more than a currency. It’s a unit of geo-political power that is regularly used to influence and leverage other nations. The international money market is a kind monetary battlefield – nations push-back against the dollar but for now, because of the factors above, the dollar hangs on. But the old adage, “Speak softly and carry a big [i.e., military] stick…,” now reads, “…and invent produce, buy and sell, consume, and energize …more than the other guys!”

The Evolution of Money

Bit-Money and Blockchain

While governments are busy trying to run the jungle with Modern Monetary Theory (“MMT”), the street – thinkers, dreamers, innovator-technologists – are at it devising new “democratized” “units” of account that may actually be transforming the money jungle itself.

Bitcoin was first on the block, powered by de-centralized Blockchain verification technology – literally, multiple “street” IT systems using “decentralized” (meaning disconnected from government control), “immutable” (meaning non-accessible and unchangeable by politicians or others), digitized “public ledgers” to verify and record transactions across a network of personal computers. Instead of the chief-gov (like the Federal Reserve) running the jungle, the jungle’s own networked information technology runs the unit of account, medium of exchange, and value storage system. At least that’s the theory. Sounds like pretty cool jungle tech to me!

There are catches, however. Bitcoin is not designed to grow its units as the world’s economy value expands, so as we write, a single Bitcoin is a six-figure dollar proposition. And it’s still reflected in the market by “dollars” – a $5 latté will set you back 0.00005 bitcoins.

Blockchain, the tech that powers “bit-money,” however, is very likely here to stay and will expand, and may be at the forefront of what George Gilder suspects will eventually lead to the “de-centralization” – and liberation – of the global information system. The Achilles heals of the current centralized, “Googled,” “top-down,” system are 1/Disintegrating security and, 2/Exploding and impossible data-center energy demands when all eight billion of us start watching movies on our smartphones. At once. Blockchain’s bottom up, de-centralized security, where you own your security and data rather than putting it out into the Cloud, combined with already existing personal computer energy consumption, may be the future “out there in the dark wild.” But getting there won’t be fluid or predictable. So, for the time being, Blockchain – and its money players like Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. – will likely run as alternative new jungle money-players.

Epilogue

Money – these units of account that serve as our mediums of exchange for the wild values of civilization – money is evolving and probably on the same exponential scale and velocity as civilization’s own creative-destructive run through history.

And money – virtual knowledge-innovation value really – gets even more wildly and quantumly entangled as it morphs and “jungles” into “capital” and “finance,” exactly where our question, “What the heck is going on?” now turns its attention.

Watch on Youtube

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“The digital revolution… is merely the latest in a long line of information-processing revolutions stretching back through the development of language, the evolution of sex, and the creation of life, to the beginning of the universe itself. Each revolution has laid the groundwork for the next, and all information-processing revolutions since the Big Bang stem from the intrinsic information-processing ability of the universe. The computational-universe necessarily generates complexity. Life, sex, the brain, and human civilization did not come about by mere accident.”

Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe:  A Quantum Computer Scientist takes on the Cosmos, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, p. 4-5.

Welcome back

Welcome back to the Wild Globalization Project! In our last conversation, we heard Louis-Vincent Gave claim that, in this “new” information economy,

“…wealth creation is, for the first time in history, the result of something [information, knowledge] which is in unlimited supply…which has a marginal cost of zero and which questions the whole intellectual framework of economics…”

A Roadmap for Troubling Times, Louis-Vincent Gave

Wild Globalization hears Gave, but we’re reaching outside economics, to the confused Klondike sardine trader – remember him, “…but them’s were trading sardines!, ”or  Alvin Toffler’s prescient claim that “…a market is not simply an economic structure…it’s a way of organizing people, a way of thinking, an ethos…,” we’re searching for Benoit Mandelbrot’s “rough and wild randomness.”

We’re tracking how this new information economy, including A.I., is just the latest symptom of something economics alone can’t answer.

It’s the wilder question of “value” itself…human value and human value creation. We’re claiming that human “knowledge value” has been the “game” for now, what, a million years? Humans have always been about knowledge – who’s got it, who’s getting more of it, and what are they doing with it? And once we get it, how do we manage it – like sardines in the Klondike?  

What the heck is going on when these humans, take the given world, say a river, but then dream up a kayak, a paddle, and our wild and crazy kayaker?

A quick roadmap note: todays talk is our longest and wildest dive into the wild globalization river because we’re going to see how, and why, this human knowledge value thing is, in its heart and soul, getting wilder!

To recap Wild Globalization, we’ve noticed how humans are a unique life-form. First, we’re “intelligent” creatures who create – science, life-saving medicines, the Mona Lisa or Beethoven’s 9^th, and now artificial intelligence/“A.I.”  

OR NOT! – that same intelligence destroys – industrial scale warfare, genocides, it “disappeared” entire ecosystems, it committed  unthinkable atrocities.

 Second, we’ve considered how humans can care, protect, even die for those we love. And, we can be amazed and in awe of Earth’s spaces and creatures. OR NOT! – we can just as easily, in the same lifetime, be vicious and wantonly hateful and destructive.

Finally, we’ve also claimed that humans aren’t un-natural, rather we’re hyper-natural – we take what nature gives us, but then we can’t seem to leave it alone, so we come up with, voilà(!), the kayak and the kayaker!  We’re freaks, maybe, but, somehow, some way, we’re still “of nature.”    

Being smart and caring and hyper-natural are the strategies that have worked for us…OR NOT!  For good and bad, there’s eight billion of us running around the planet today, living longer and with more to eat…so something’s “working.”

Today the question we’re asking for our own, and Earth’s future, is:

“How does knowledge-value really work, OR NOT!”

So recall how we’ve tracked the 19^th and 20^th centuries, how they began with one billion humans on the planet, how they seemed to promise global cooperation, prosperity and amazing new technologies – steam power, continental railroads, electricity, telephones, automobiles – but then how it all seemed to collapse into chaos, global wars, pandemic and famine, genocide, holocausts, environmental destruction.

Like never in history, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created – and destroyed – human lives and cultures, ecologies and creatures. Incredible “value” was created – industry, consumer economies, cities, populations, food abundance, national parks, medicines, genetics, spaceships.

Farmers and ranchers turned North America’s Great Plains into a “breadbasket” for the world, but overran indigenous peoples and, along the way, casually, for sport and industry, slaughtered 60 million magnificent bison. Oppenheimer’s team invented the atomic bomb and “saved civilization.” Californians and Russians turned magnificent Tulare Lake and the Aral Sea into dust bowls. “Value” given, then created and destroyed, in the same sweeps of history. And then…what?

Still, wildly(!), six billion “modern” humans emerged into the 21^st century hell-bent to hyper-globalize trade and prosperity with a “rising tide” of wealth, foodstuff abundance, and even more amazing technologies. Today the global human family is the largest and measurably the healthiest, best nourished, and most prosperous in history.

OK, but this prosperity has exploded so wildly that it’s unevenly distributed. And people are on the move in immense global migrations – a million every week moving to cities, triggering “demographic reversals,” with too few young to care and pay for the old. Humans threaten – and we are threatened as never before – by the Earth’s wild ecologies – the possibility of climate change, yes, but other, even bigger stuff like ice ages, geomagnetic storms, or catastrophic volcanic winters if, or when, the Earth’s mega-volcanoes go off. Hateful wars rage again in the Middle East and Europe? Covid-19 wreaked havoc and killed millions.

This all boils down to much grittier, down and dirty, questions, to: “What value do humans bring to the planet…OR NOT?”  “What creates human “value…OR NOT?” “How and why do humans create and destroy it so easily, so casually?”

Human genome?...Voilà!

Tulare Lake and the Aral Sea?...Poof!

Moonshot?...Apollo!

Hiroshima?...Poof !

Breadbasket... Voilà!

Bison…Poof!  

So what is human value in our 21^st century time?

“What the heck is going on?” 

Virtue and Knowledge

In Wild Economy, Thomas Sowell and others reminded us how humans create value by observing, learning, thinking, experimenting, testing, failing, and finally succeeding – INNOVATING! For 8,000 years agriculture has grown more food because it grew food-growing knowledge.  

Human value, like more food, begins with smart, clever people, it begins with knowledge creation.

So what we’re tracking and bushwhacking here is “value” itself. What works? What makes things easier? Which of the natural world’s challenges are we responding to? We’re tracking a “knowledge (that works!) theory of value.”

But history’s horrors slap us in the face and remind us that it’s not just “knowledge that works,” it’s knowledge that works or tries to work for the “good,” the benefit, of humanity and life on planet Earth. It’s really knowledge that works “virtuously.”

It’s virtuous knowledge.  

Curiously, “virtue and virtuous,” mean “good, beneficial, wise” – Mother Teresa virtuously, lovingly, cared for the sick and dying of Calcutta, India.

Virtuous also means “an effective force or power,” as when we say, “by virtue of.” Responding to human suffering, Mother Teresa acted, decisively and pragmatically. She dignified the practice of hospice care around the world – today, 5,000 Missions of Charity nuns give care in 133 countries.

Knowledge creates human value. We see it and buy it on Amazon or at the grocery because it works(!). This creation, movement, and transaction of products creates “economies.”

But the final product, the smartphone or the atomic bomb, are not the magic. They’re the rabbit coming out of the hat, but the magic is the magician’s sleight of hand or the inventor’s or entrepreneur’s or farmer’s practical knowledge value creation. Or Mother Teresa’s leadership and inspiration. It’s Beethoven’s or Mozart’s genius, or Ford’s or Musk’s organizing brilliance, or the collective intelligence of the thousands who worked the Manhattan Project.

So behind all material value, what we see and touch, or buy and sell, behind the product, is the “knowledge-value-chain:” Data from experience; new, surprising, even game-changing Information gleaned from the data; and then new Knowledge from understanding and interpreting the new information. It’s knowledge value that responds to, adjusts and then innovates and builds something for what life puts out there.

Knowledge builds the bus and knowledge drives the bus.

The Knowledge Mystery – Freedom-Consciousness-Knowledge in the Garden of Eden

So, if knowledge value and innovation are so incredible, so “hyper-natural,” if we think we’re so clever, how or why can they be so volatile, so unpredictable, even mean and ruthless? Tracking the incisive twentieth century economist, Joseph Schumpeter, what does it mean to call knowledge innovation’s constant disruption of civil societies and economies the “incessant gale of creative destruction.”

It’s more than curious that the originating creation myth, Genesis, of Western Civilization – the folks who more or less led humanity into this very wild, so-called “modern,” tech-bound, scientific-industrial age – the story told for thousands of years in various versions by three of the world’s great faith traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – it’s curious how the story introduces the “world” in essentially three story-lines:

• First, “God’s” creation of the “Universe” and life on earth, including human life;

• Second, the story of Eve and Adam being tempted by the mysterious serpent and sweet (or bitter?) fruit of the primordial “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil;”

• Finally, it tells how, upon tasting the fruit, Eve’s and Adam’s self-awareness, their “consciousness…of themselves…the Garden…their nakedness…in fact this created ‘world’ ” – and so, their unique being, their human being, is transformed, like the butterfly’s metamorphosis from the chrysalis.

Expelled from the Garden and eternal life, they are now “free” (or condemned to be free?) to eke out a radically different life outside the Garden. And we may surmise that they now possess new and unique powers – this seemingly unrestrained yet awesome freedom, this mysterious new “consciousness,” and this new “knowledge of good and evil.”   

Whether one is “God-fearing,” OR NOT(!), faithful, “religious,” OR NOT(!), devoted to the teachings of Moses, Jesus, the Buddha, or Muhammad, Krishna, or, for example, America’s indigenous people’s “Great Spirit,” etc., OR NOT(!), the message appears to be that this “freedom…consciousness…knowledge” – how humans get (or sneak) it, how we are blessed (or condemned) to it, how we use (or abuse) “it” – is the cardinal mystery and power, the force, of the human experience since time immemorial. 

It still is – this mysterious story of human freedom-consciousness-knowledge only begins in the mythic Garden.

Even more curiously, the modern theoretical sciences, mathematics and physics, the engines of the Enlightenment and Industrial Age, figured this out on their own without reference to “God,” or the “Gods,” or any divinity, mythic story, or Garden, or Serpent, as recently as the early twentieth century. In 1929, the young savant mathematician and logician, Kurt Gödel, who would become a best buddy of Albert Einstein at Princeton, shocked the scientific community with his “incompleteness theorems” which demonstrated that mathematics, science’s most essential and foundational logic, could neither prove nor disprove its own validity or consistency – in a nutshell, you couldn’t use math to “prove”…math!

Gödel’s logic followed from Werner Heisenberg’s famous “quantum uncertainty principle” which states that, in any “recursive self-referential system” – mathematics, physics, or information theory, as Alan Turing and Claude Shannon would later add, or Jacques Derrida’s critique of human language would intone in Western philosophy – the system can’t use its own logic to prove or measure the foundation of – its own logic! As George Gilder sums up the conundrum,

“…we can’t use photons or electrons to measure photons and electrons.”

George Gilder, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition, 2018, Kindle 113-116, Text 99-101.

This is most transparent when we try to think about language systems and the simple meaning or definition of any word – the meaning of any word is always …a beautiful, indefinite “plenitude” of reference to…other words…!

Now, if you’re building the Golden Gate Bridge or the Burj Khalifa, or Apollo, this all seems trivial – the bridge and Burj stand, Apollo flies, usually(?).  

But if you’re doing knowledge theory or trying to come up with the core principles of mathematics or physics, or information or language theory, the bedrock epistemological strategies of civilization, and in particular, our “modern” age, including Newton’s seminal Principia Mathematica and now A.I., it can’t be trivial.  

It’s as if Heisenberg and this parade of thought-leaders re-discovered and gave new life to the serpent in the Garden’s thought-grass. Science is not held back from pursuing its amazing discoveries and practical innovations, like the human genome or modern medicines or A.I. But it has lost its luster as the pre-eminent bedrock of apodictic truth value, or knowledge. Under our “civilized” noses, the Heisenbergs, Gödels, Turings, Shannons, or Derridas  restored the mystery and wildness of human knowledge.

Knowledge – how we do it, get it, “know” it, how it yields certainty, OR NOT(!), remains, alas, nonetheless, in spite of its shining and elegantly tangible achievements, as mysterious as Eve’s first taste of it. Science can build Golden Gates, or Burj Khalifa’s, or spaceships to Mars, or miracle genome-based pharmas, yet it can’t really be certain or fully explain how it “knows” or does all that!      

So to get a grip on this wildness, let’s look at everyday stuff and experience, at history.  

Why is Knowledge Value Wild? - Consequences & Externalities

So why can’t we keep a lid on knowledge? Why are humans always running to catch up with their innovations? How is it that Wozniak and Jobs, from their garage, can dream up personal computers and smartphones, but many of us are now lost, even “de-humanized,” in a new “social media” wilderness?

Knowledge, it seems, creates unpredictable, often unknowable consequences, or, the new catch-word, “externalities.” “External” simply means that a new idea or innovation likely carries “outside” or unknown costs, both good and bad. Smartphones connect us to each other, to culture, to music, art, literature, science – all positive externalities. But you can also learn bombmaking. Ukrainian soldiers are using Musk’s StarLink to coordinate battles. The cobalt in our EV and smartphone batteries is likely dug up by modern “cash-slaves” paid by Chinese middle-men in the Congo’s open-pit mines. All positive and negative externalities, same device.  

Or with 8 billion “logged in” and “on line,” we need lots and lots more energy and electricity. So the planet’s probably warmer – we assume that’s a negative externality. OK, but wait a minute! Warmer also means wetter and greener, it means the planet is  “greening(!),” so more food and less famine for the eight billion.

It’s even wilder! Recall how the 2016 Potsdam Institute study reports that our Anthropocene Age might actually be skipping the next ice age:

“…It is mind-boggling that humankind is able to interfere with a mechanism that shaped the world as we know it.”

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

Skipping an ice age? That’s wild! How would eight billion hungry humans survive a 100,000 year-long ice age, anyway? So is global warming a negative or positive externality? Both?

Wild Globalization is not saying that human caused climate change is good or bad – we’re saying it’s observably good and bad. We’re noticing how knowledge creates unknown consequences and costs. It’s wild!

But it’s always been wild – it’s our “hyper-nature”! Recall paleoanthropologist Beth Shapiro’s prescient observations about these positive-negative-externality-breathing human creatures:

“…Within the last 50,000 years, our ancestors hunted, polluted, and outcompeted hundreds of species to extinction. They turned wolves into Boston terriers…wild cabbage into broccoli and cauliflower…Some species survived their encounters with humans, but many did not, and all were transformed in some way.  …Our ancestors figured out how to break the rules…to work together to overrule chance…to help others…to determine their own evolutionary trajectories and those of the species with which they interacted…paleoanthropologists still don’t fully understand how this happened…[but] this is what it means to be human.”

Beth Shapiro, Life as We Made It

So we’re clever at breaking the rules and changing the game, but do we really know where it’s taking us? Do we control the consequences or externalities of our ideas and innovations?  

History gives us a hint:

·       Take human agriculture – folks, probably smart women, were just trying to innovate food security when they started cultivating grains and husbanding animals. Did they realize that agriculture would eventually settle people into cities, that larger social groups would bring amazing and creative synergies, but also urbanization, crowding and pandemics and famine when crops failed, or competition and, at the extreme, cruel warfare, when we couldn’t get along?

·       In just my generation’s lifetime, China’s 1958-62 Great Leap Forward may have claimed “good” intentions, but the ensuing agricultural catastrophe it triggered, coupled by poor weather, starved 20-50 million citizens to death.

·       Eli Whitney truly believed his labor reducing cotton “gin” would speed up the end of human slavery. But cotton production and labor demand exploded and slavery may have been extended by decades.

·       Recall how two Bell Lab physicists made one of history’s most important cosmic discoveries – evidence of the Big Bang’s “background radiation.” But they were really just cleaning bird poop off their radar! Only later, as an afterthought, a consequence, did they realize that the feedback “buzz” was actually the Big Bang’s remnant radiation, its afterglow!    

All these moves were made by economy, science, and governance innovations. With “good” intentions. But as we can see, ideas and innovations are launched into an unknown and unpredictable future. Taleb warns that “we need knowledge from the future itself to predict the future.” When we cook up ideas, they then carry us along for the ride. Human knowledge-value and its consequences are always ahead of the game, ahead of our ability to know or fully govern their impacts and costs. We’re always catching up.

Why is Knowledge Value Wild? – Knowledge Hides

Every “thing” in Shapiro’s observations, above, shows up as physical evolution – wolves and terriers, cabbage and kale – or in modern experience, cotton gins, famines, Big Bang noise.

But here’s the “thing.” We’re easily tricked by the tangible, touchable, seeable, physical world – the hardware. But it’s always human learning and knowledge – the software – that’s constantly exposed and learning to adjust and direct the physical world’s risks and opportunities.  It’s the hyper-physical, the hyper-natural human mind, living miraculously in brain synapses, DNA, on paper, and now digitally, that sneaks along, gathers more of itself, and radically changes the evolution game…and the rules!

All our cousins in the deep past had the same brain capacities and the same natural resources that we do. But they were starting further down the knowledge pecking order. They had to work their way “up” and “out,” they had to learn and accumulate all the knowledge value we take for granted today.

Just watch the “naked and afraid” shows to see how ridiculous and vulnerable modern humans are when we’re thrown into the “wild,” with no tech and no grocery stores…the no clothes thing is just to get our attention!

But here’s the catch. Knowledge-that-works-value, innovation, hides in the physical world that it changes and manipulates. We see and use the results, the products, but the knowledge, the ideas hide underneath and within the smartphone or rocket or grocery supply chain. Data >> information >> knowledge hide in the physical, just like the human body’s biological “information” hides in DNA and nerve synapses. 

Consider the microchip or “CPU,” central processing unit, that runs our smartphones, laptops, our cars. Pound for pound it’s probably the most valuable “thing” out there today. 

But as George Gilder observes, quoting the tech guru, Gordon Moore: 

“ “The silicon, oxygen and aluminum used in microchips are the three most abundant elements in the earth’s crust.” ” They are dirt cheap because they are dirt. Virtually all the value of the semiconductor and optical industries comes from the knowledge they embody, the learning accumulated over time.”

George Gilder, Life After Capitalism

The hardware chip is not the real “stuff.” The “stuff” to make the CPU, or the biochemical compounds that make your DNA, that’s not “it.” Even the electronic signal moving through the CPU, or the DNA’s neural transmissions, are not “it.” “It” is not physical, material. “It” is intangible, not just hard but impossible to touch. “It” is the data >> information >> knowledge chain. “It” is what theologians and philosophers have called for thousands of years the “Logos.” “It,” knowledge, is the essence of the Garden. It’s subtle mystery hides in the Garden – it is revealed by the Serpent, or Gödel’s theorems.

It is the human imagination’s play in knowledge-value-creation. It's Seth Lloyd’s account, above, of “information processing revolutions” through the history of creation. Albert Einstein thought “it” was a miracle.

Yet, curiously, lots of smart people have been fooled, bedazzled, by the “things” that knowledge value creates. Early modern economists like Adam Smith, who favored the “market,” and Karl Marx, who favored “labor and governance,” both focused more on the labor and capital that went into material production. They overlooked Joseph Schumpeter’s later notice of the “perennial gale” of new ideas and innovations that incessantly drive and disrupt and re-set human cultures. Smith and Marx were hard-pressed to explain the overwhelming creative power of the new, industrial  economy. Smith reached for the market’s mysterious “invisible hand,” and Marx admits in his seminal text, Kapital:

“…the whole mystery of the form of values lies hidden even in the most ‘elementary form’, and its analysis is our fundamental difficulty.”

Karl Marx, Das Kapital

Knowledge – the force that creates these amazing, transformative yet disruptive innovations – knowledge itself can’t be completely pinned down in its material or physical techs and gadgets and products. Smith and Marx both tried to explain economy in touchable terms, Marx even as a “hard” science. But it turns out that “invisible hands” or “elementary forms” could not account for the  Enlightenment’s and the Industrial Revolution’s black magic. 

Consequently, human knowledge value, how we measure it, how we transact it in markets, simply can’t be reduced or explained in physical terms in the same way we do physics or biology. It wasn’t industry or coal or oil or steel or mass-production labor or “capital” – all good/bad, creative/destructive, incredible/horrific, externalities – they didn’t lift human populations from one billion in 1804 to two billion by 1927 or six in 2000.  No, “it” was the meteoric advance – good and bad – of knowledge.

Why is Knowledge-Value Wild? – Knowledge defies measure

Science very cleverly measures the physical world  – atomic clocks measure time using the “resonant frequency” of atoms,” information is measured in “bits” or binary digits – “1/0” or “yes/no”. Mark Mills observes how:

“Sensors now measure down to ‘the bottom’ of nature…instruments can even listen to the motion of individual bacteria…”

Mark Mills, The Cloud Revolution

So you’d think the “value” of human productivity that drives modern civilization could be measured?  

Economists tried tracking “total factor productivity” by measuring:

1. Capital-Money, how much of it was invested in the economy over time;

2. Labor, or how many people were working in how many jobs; and

3. Innovation, how much did new techs change or improve production.

Capital and labor were hard-data, quantifiable. Innovation? Not so easy. Innovations are ideas, new ways of doing and making things, so innovations only show up as after-effects and improved efficiencies. Those sly and slinking externalities.

But here’s the trick – economists thought that if capital and labor could be measured quantitatively, then  tech innovation would simply be the “residual,” the extra, everything added to capital and labor.

Consider the progression of human artificial lighting tech. In 1750 B.C., olive oil lamps produced about seventeen lumen-hours per “BTU,” or “British Thermal Unit.” By the 1800s C.E., someone discovered whale oil was twice as efficient, so Sperm whales were in big trouble. Thankfully, kerosene (fossil fuel) and then electricity (fossil fuel coal) came along in the 1880s and saved the whales! Today, LEDs produce lighting in the tens of thousands of lumens per BTU. Good deal for the whales! Artificial lighting is now so cheap and plentiful that, alas, our urban nightglows now obscure the Milky Way.     

OK, so lumen hours per BTU tells us the “how much.” But not the “how.” That’s the innovation productivity question.

Robert Solow, a Nobel economist, decided to measure the capital and labor inputs in the U.S. economy from 1909 to 1949. The data showed that about twelve percent of productivity growth could be hard-measured by capital and labor, or “capital per worker.”  So innovation had to be what was leftover, the eighty-eight percent – it’s now known as the “Solow residual,” or what we’re calling the “knowledge innovation-value residual.” But that means that nearly all economic growth from 1909-1949 couldn’t be measured directly. It was there, like the smiling whales, but what made them smile? Economists realized that the Solow residual

“…was really a measure of our ignorance…”

Sachs & Larrain, Macroeconomics in the Global Economy

The answer is…it was knowledge-that-works, intelligent innovation, that advanced lighting technology! The smiling whales were delightful “ethics by accident” externalities!

And as artificial light advanced from olives to LEDs, capital and labor nearly vanished in the capital-labor-innovation equation of artificial lighting. Imagine if we were still growing olives or hunting whales to power our smartphones and EVs!   

And Marx’s “mystery of the value forms…?” – Voilà!  The mystery of the “value-forms” can be interpreted as…knowledge-value that works…but also that hides (Marx’s “mysteriously”) in the physical world!  It’s Eve’s, and Gödel’s, serpent in the grass…  

But, then, wait a second! If LEDs or Model T’s didn’t exist when people read by olive oil or walked everywhere, can we really pull a measuring stick from that world to measure or guess the “value” of an LED or Model T? “That” world had no “metric,” no way even to imagine, let alone measure, the LED’s, or the Model T’s, or the smartphone’s value. Those gadgets were “out there,” as Taleb says, “in the future…unknown…folks back then couldn’t know what they would know and discover…”

Human knowledge innovation is not just hard to measure. When the new gadget, like the smartphone, takes over, it overwhelms the existing measure or “metric” of “things” – cars for horses, digital for paper, atomic bombs for bows and arrows. The old way’s metric or standard disappears – so when Model T’s showed up in New York city, the 50,000 horses that provided transportation – and lots of stinking horse manure – were put to pasture. Urbanites were no longer breathing the dangerous, disease -ridden “manure dust,” or wading through the rainy season’s “manure mud.” But a new problem-externality appeared – internal combustion engine exhaust!

So try this. With an imaginary, pre-historic cousin, go out and walk, say, 500 miles – at three miles per hour, it would take the two of you walking 166 straight hours, or 7 days, no rest, day and night! Then invite your friend on an airplane ride at 30,000 feet while you both sit there and sip a martini – and fly that same 500 miles in an hour! What would your friend say? What could they say? How would their brain measure distance?

Knowledge-value, how we think and measure it, changes, and so measure itself metamorphoses, transforms.

Or imagine what the great American Apache warrior, Geronimo, was thinking, or feeling, when, having been born into a horse-world in 1829, he had his photo taken in a  top hat driving a “Locomobile Model C” with his warrior buddies in 1905 – and, by the way, where are the Great Plains’ sixty million bison in the photo? Where is modernity’s soul?

Why is Knowledge-Value Wild? Time & Freedom in the Garden of Eden

But if capital and labor fade to the background as the whale dives back into the depths, then something else, something marvelous, astonishing, emerges in place of our happy, submariner friend! Simply said, it’s the creation of “time,” and more miraculously, human freedom.

Humans have turned Eden’s punishment into a hyper-natural advantage!

It turns out that knowledge-value innovation can be measured, although still obliquely, by how much human work “time” it takes to pay for “things,” like the lighting, above.

Two practical, down-to-earth economists, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley, demystified Solow’s residual with a new measure, the “time prices of a basket of commodity products.” They asked, “How much time does the average earthly human need to pay for something – say, energy and food?” So they measured real stuff and compared that to how long people worked to pay for them. They tracked 1980-2020 prices for a basket of 50 products using  data from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Conference Board.

 The data showed that the same worktime to pay for the 50 commodities at 1980 prices (adjusted for inflation) bought over four times as much in 2020 – a 300 percent increase in what Tupy and Pooley called “personal resource abundance.” Flip the equation and, voilà(!), humans had 75 percent more time to do…something else! To produce more stuff, to learn, play, create, or, let’s think (?) – to pro-create! Yes! In that same 1980-2020 time-span, global population increased from 4.4 billion to nearly 8 billion, a 75 percent increase in just 40 years. Tupy & Pooley, Superabundance

And not just more people, but more people with more time, more…freedom! That’s really the story of the human trek from the deep savannah. “It” is Shapiro’s wild cabbage to cauliflower or olive oil to LEDs or sandals to Model T’s, as we began to direct the natural world, at first gradually but in our modern, scientific-industrial version, exponentially – smartphones, Cloud A.I., rockets to Mars, in just 250 years or 10 generations!

On the surface we may think our fancy EVs and jet planes, all our gadgets, make us more “advanced,” “civilized.” But then the whale leaps back above the waves! In fact, people, our things and way of life, as well as the natural world, may be more exposed, at greater risk, and so wilder than ever in civilization’s brief 10,000 jaunt out of the Garden or savannah.

Think 20^th century chaos, world wars, flu epidemics, famine, and now our 21^st century, trying to feed eight billion on our way to ten, bitter and primitive regional wars, the possibility, or likelihood that a lab-virus killed millions, and now massive waves of migrants on the move to Earth’s cities where environmental stress is most concentrated and intense.  

Tupy and Pooley summarize the plight of our wildly globalized, 21^st century  human condition. They’re noticing how, as we noted in Wild Demographics, global culture is just a whale’s eyeblink removed, maybe 500 generations, from our Garden cousins, how our clever knowledge creations and “progress” leave us constantly caught off guard:    

“…Our ancestors’ hunter-gatherer psychology prepared us to cope with a world of personal cooperation and exchange in small communities. It did not prepare us to cope with a world of impersonal cooperation and exchange among millions of people (a typical advanced economy) or billions of people (the global economy)…the complexity of the modern economy outran the ability of our stone-age minds to understand it. Yet it is that transition from personal simplicity to impersonal complexity that makes capitalism [WG: think “knowledge-value innovation”] so effective at producing great wealth. To complicate matters further, the extended marketplace of millions or billions of people enables enterprising individuals with value-creating ideas [WG: e.g., Ford, Gates, Jobs, Musk] to amass greater wealth than they would be able to amass in small communities. That wealth inequality rubs against our egalitarian predispositions and zero-sum thinking. Finally, our tribalism helps explain why we continue to resent other nations and suspect them of thriving at our expense even when we consent to trade with them.”
Superabundance, Marian Tupy & Gale Pooley

Tupy and Pooley’s “exchange” is the marketplace of both “intellectual” and “material” stuff we invent (or steal), that we make and buy and sell with each other. Notice how they cleverly mix in the impact of “scale” – what happens when our communities morph from close-knit tribes, to cities of millions or nations of billions. And they’re noticing how the asymmetric growth of knowledge-value creates the uneven distribution of knowledge-wealth – and power.  

Why is Knowledge Value Wild? – Virtue and Virtuality

All this cooks down to the most stunning, and really the wildest fact, about virtuous knowledge value over its wild globalization path – “virtuous” opens our senses to how the human mind/soul is itself “virtual.”

The human imagination is the secret of what makes us hyper-natural – able to invent, experiment, innovate, to change the very rules of the Garden’s game. We visualize, imagine, then signify, express…we virtualize…data and information and knowledge into multifarious languages and symbolic systems – Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s or Mozart’s music, Chagall’s or Monet’s art, Gödel’s mathematics, Heisenberg’s or Einstein’s or Hawking’s physics, Marie Curie’s or Crick’s and Watson’s chemistry, and now Alan Turing’s or Claude Shannon’s digitized, algorithmic “A.I.”  

But recall that Beethoven was nearly deaf when he wrote the 9^th Symphony’s “Ode to Joy” two hundred years ago– he “felt” the timpani’s rumble, and “listened” to its symphonic magic in his imagination! Yet as we’ve noticed, trying to grasp the virtual is like trying to hear the music in Beethoven’s imagination. 

Consequently, “A.I.” is really just the latest version of this human “virtual reality.” That’s because humans have always lived and breathed…for hundreds of thousands of years – in the virtual imagination. Recall from our Wild Demographics talk the magnificent 50,000 year old cave art that spelunkers are finding all over the globe?

The imagination is our edge, it’s our competitive advantage in the Garden’s or evolution’s game. It’s the fruit we carried out of the savannah, or Eden.

We’re doing it now, we’re visualizing, virtualizing, we’re imagining, wild globalization.

We re-create the “real” world, the world “out there,” into the human “E=MC2,” “energy equals mass times the speed of light squared,” world! We virtualize “the” world into a human “virtual” world, a new “real,” a hyper-natural world.

Our virtuous knowledge world is then vigorously tested, questioned – Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity continuously butts heads with Max Plank’s Quantum Theory, and the beat goes on! Science advances because, at its best, it’s one of the freest examples of theologian Bernard Lonergan’s “pure desire to know.”[i] And the deeper our knowledge, the wilder it gets!  

Virtuous, virtual knowledge imagines, signifies, communicates, manipulates, creates, destroys, and transforms the “world” – Hubble’s eye on the Universe, the human genome, the Manhattan team, A.I., the Taj Mahal, Mona Lisa or Beethoven’s 9^th. Or, as we’ll see next chapter, credit default swaps, collateralized mortgage obligations, flash-crashes, “great” financial crises, booms and busts!   

That’s it, that’s why and how we are different and dominating and dangerous. We re-create creation. And value. 

The human “imagination” is the wildest, boldest, the most brazenly powerful, the most hyper-natural of our human abilities.

But here’s the wildest catch.

As we conjure up and then build this incredible knowledge-bound world, we have to step back and notice how and where knowledge lives and works on us, how in fact, knowledge takes on a life and a force of its own that often, even routinely, reaches beyond our control. “A.I” is merely the latest, if perhaps the most awesome – because it’s knowledge! – example of wild knowledge that lives, that breathes algorithms, and so manipulates our lives, and transacts our economies, beyond our full or rational control. “Knowledge-value” and power take us along for the ride!

In our next talk we’ll turn to where virtual knowledge value lives and transacts – to markets-money-capital-finance. Applied economic knowledge-value lives in so-called “hard” markets, where the hundred’s, thousands, millions, and now billions of us buy-sell-transact, where deal-by-deal economic “value” is adjudicated, “hand-shaked,” yet only fleetingly, for the moment, until the next…deal! It’s where knowledge-value takes on a life of its own – to derivatives, to derivatives of derivatives, to logarithmic speculation, to trillion-dollar global companies larger and more powerful than most countries, or it’s where the serpent slyly slithers out of the knowledge-power shadows to expose massive and profligate government debt.  

Our question, “What the heck is going on?”, now turns to markets-money-capital-finance.

You’ll need more popcorn!

Watch on Youtube

[i] Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study in Human Understanding, Ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Fifth Edition, 1992, Kindle Edition, 7633- 7662.

Watch on Youtube

Introduction

Welcome back to the Wild Globalization Project. Today we’re into the Wild Economy, Part 2, The Knowledge Economy.

Hang on – it’s only getting wilder…!

Wild Economy, Part 1 asked, “How did this 19^th-21^st century global economy get going…?” We bushwhacked through 10,000 years of the agricultural economy, the Dark Ages, coming out in the Western Enlightenment, and its Industrial Revolutions.

In Part 2 we’re asking “How did the last 250 years – just 10 generations of maybe 10,000 Homo sapien generations that have ever lived – how did all this launch us into this new 21^st century “knowledge” version of global civilization?

Here’s our claim: “The global knowledge economy is evolutionary…and evolution is wild…!”

Global Civilization – a black box…a quantum entanglement…a wild “big wave!

The Wild Globalization Project is studying how civilization's life-world works like a "BLACK BOX" – modern physics calls this a “quantum entanglement.”

Imagine many rivers flowing, crashing, together: today’s wild economy river, but then a wild ecology…demographics… technology…then a governance…and a wild wealth river – all inter-, over-, and under-flowing the others, each with its source and power, yet at once a singular, entangled momentum that constantly tears down and builds up the life-world – what Joseph Schumpeter called “…the incessant gale of creative destruction.” We’re saying that it’s from these entanglements that the spontaneously emerging orders of life appear.”

But then…wait a minute…there goes our human again, and today she’s surfing a big wave on a surfboard…! Where  did she come from…?

She’s showing us how humans have not emerged “from the wild.” We are wild Homo sapien. The wild is happening right here and now, it’s carrying us but we’re also causing it! “Hyper-natural” humans have been globalizing the planet for 250,000 years.

To get here we’ve relied on two unique abilities:

First, we can think critically, we learn and solve problems, we gather and intelligently deploy KNOWLEDGE. OR NOT!  

Second, we can love and care for each other and the planet – humans make extraordinary sacrifices to protect their loved ones and planet Earth. OR NOT!  

The 21^st century continues to advance knowledge, now into artificial intelligence, “A.I.” Human evolution is the evolution of human knowledge. Human economy is about the advance of knowledge. But global civilization advances ahead of human control and therefore ahead of our ethical concerns and conscience. This advance has only accelerated since the Western Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

Intelligence and caring for one another and the planet are modernity’s great challenges.

Like the surfer’s “big wave,” Wild Globalization is wondering, “How the heck do we ride the 21^st century’s big waves?”

The Wild Information >> Knowledge >> Wisdom Economy – Where From…?

Here’s a quick recap of how our earlier talks got us here:

WILD ECOLOGY…

“Economy” and “Ecology” (both from the Greek word “oikos”) started 4.55 billion years ago…Earth’s energy “orders”…its big ice, mega-volcanoes, geomagnetic storms…the Universe’s “dark matter…” Homo sapien has been around for 5 seconds* of a 24 hour day.

Watch on Youtube

*250,000 Homo sapien-span years / 4,550,000,000 Earth-span years = 0.000055] X [(24 hours X 60 minutes X 60 seconds = 86,400 seconds)] = 4.75 seconds.

WILD DEMOGRAPHICS…

Hyper-natural humans, hanging on by the “skin of our teeth”…almost vanishing in the ice and fires…now eight billion of us and on our way to ten…gathering and learning …we are the “knowledge species” that survived and now thrives…

Watch Part 1 on Youtube

Watch Part 2 on Youtube

WILD TECHNOLOGY…

The “unconstrained human imagination”…atlatls to nuclear…hunter-gatherers to farmers to scientists and astronauts…Fogel’s “techno-physio-evolution”…

Watch on Youtube

WILD ECONOMY…

The progression through scarce resources >> learning & innovation >> excess production >> excess reserves >> “seed” capital >> entrepreneurs >> markets >> consumers. The Modern Age’s revolutions – Science, Industry, Digital, now Cloud A. I.

Watch on Youtube

Like every other creature in Earth’s ecology, Homo sapien started with “scarce resources.” We innovated, got smarter, taught our kids. We settled down, grew and raised food rather than gathering and chasing it. We kept a little extra, a “reserve,” some “seed”-capital. In just the last 80 generations (2000 years), some humans, working and innovating freely mobilized markets >> entrepreneurs >> consumers. Then, in just the last 10 generations (250 years), free-thinkers and clever innovators dreamt up modern science and technology, and – whoosh! – it was off to the Moon…and soon, Mars!

What screams out here is “free thinking…learning…KNOWLEDGE”! How to freely imagine and make and do new things. THINGS THAT WORK! Even, as Beth Shapiro reminded us in Wild Demographics, Part 1:

“…our ancestors figured out how to break the rules. They learned to work together to overrule chance, to help others rather than allow those less fit among them to die. They learned to fashion their surroundings…They learned to direct evolution—to determine both their own evolutionary trajectories and those of the species with which they interacted…while paleoanthropologists still don’t fully understand where or when or how this happened, this is how we became different…from every other species that lives or has ever lived on Earth. This is what it means to be human.”

Beth Shapiro, Life as We Made It

“Human economy” is the evolution of “knowledge.” Not just information…“knowledge.” But knowledge alone doesn’t advance civilization. That’s because knowledge can be used for the creative good, or for the most destructive and horrific evils.

No. Raw data and information, transformed into “knowledge,” requires, it begs, for “virtue,” for intelligent use.

Information is not Knowledge; Knowledge is not Wisdom; Wisdom – practical wisdom – whatever we mean by that, is the optimal expression of human economy. OR NOT!

This new “information >> knowledge age” is really the most recent version of Thomas Sowell’s “knowledge economy” – to paraphrase him, “…the only thing that differentiates us today from our pre-historic ancestors is our ability to use what we’ve learned, our knowledge, to exploit identical resources – our deep ancestors had the same marble and stone to build the Taj or Notre Dame  – but it was knowledge that built them. Knowledge advances human civilization…OR NOT!”

Thinking the Global Knowledge-Wisdom Economy

The Information >>> Knowledge >>> Wisdom Economy is “trial and error…and feed-back-looped,” from the get-go. Humans obsessively and passionately venture out, risk new things, get whomped on by saber-toothed tigers or stock market crashes, but then get up, re-think and get back at it. Knowledge learning might be visualized like this:

However, this new, 21st century knowledge, or “A.I.”, economy represents a quantum leap in human economic evolution.

Alvin and Heidi Toffler, in Revolutionary Wealth, describe ten factors to describe this emerging knowledge economy:

1. “Knowledge is non-rival”: unlike bananas or crude oil, knowledge is not scarce – using a Microsoft program doesn’t reduce its supply.

2. “Knowledge is intangible”: IBM learned from a bunch of Bill Gates hippies that computing was about the  “software” not the “hardware;” the Taj and Notre Dame were built with knowledge not stone.  

3. “Knowledge is non-linear”: Small discoveries can yield huge results – the Bell Labs astronomers were cleaning bird-poop off their radars when they discovered the Big Bang’s “cosmic background radiation.”

4. “Knowledge is relational”: knowledge only has meaning in relation to the accumulated “body” of all other knowledge.

5. “Knowledge mates with other knowledge”: so knowledge is promiscuous…it grows and multiplies.

6. “Knowledge can be compressed into signs and symbols”: the blueprints for the Taj or Notre Dame, or the  Space Shuttle’s 2.5 million parts, can be packed into a tiny micro-chip, or a human brain.

7. “Knowledge is more portable than any other product”: once converted to “zero and one codes” or  “language,” it can be distributed instantly to the person next door or 8 billion over the Internet.  

8. “Knowledge can be stored in smaller and smaller spaces”:  we can hold virtually all knowledge, operas and symphonies, artworks, literatures, scientific research, in our smartphoned hands.

9. “Knowledge can be explicit or implicit, expressed or not expressed”: There is no implicit truck or barrel of oil.  

10. “Knowledge is hard to bottle up. It spreads”: Knowledge, once discovered or revealed, can be replicated, copied. Now we’re even asking if “A.I. can think on its own?”

    
    Alvin & Heidi Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth

    ---

Louis-Vincent Gave, in A Roadmap for Troubling Times¸ sums up the shocking implications of Toffler’s vision here:  

“…wealth creation is, for the first time in history, the result of something which is in unlimited supply, and which has a marginal cost of zero. This puts into question the whole intellectual framework of economics…what’s the use of marginal analysis when the marginal cost is zero? The notion of markets is changing in front of our eyes [because] a market in which the supply is infinite is not a market. Neither the economists, nor the accountants, nor the analysts [GB: or the philosophers] have done enough work to understand the implications. What we do know is that the tools to manage a knowledge-based economy [GB: really, a global civilization”] will be profoundly different than those necessary to manage an industrial-based economy [GB: “…or any civilization in human history”]. It’s simply not about allocating scarcity anymore?”  

Louis-Vincent Gave, A Roadmap for Troubling Times, 2008

What they’re saying is that we’ve gone from an economy where knowledge  manages resources – like goats or crops or iron or steel or crude oil – to an economy where knowledge is the commodity – it’s now the goat or pig or barrel of oil!

Global Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Civilization

So caveat emptor – BUYER BEWARE! Knowledge and intelligence have always been the human way. But this is now a new ballgame that begs a re-look at how knowledge actually works in culture and civilization. So let’s add some wild globalization factors to the mix.

• Knowledge is learned – if Beth Shapiro is correct, then learning and acquiring knowledge is what it means to “be” human. A child can thrive if they get knowledge, OR NOT! And not just learn, re-learn over a lifetime – think how things have changed and how you’ve had to learn and re-learn things. Education, learning, and persistent questioning and re-learning, are the keys.

• Knowledge is cumulative – it’s been growing for thousands of years – Sir Isaac Newton said: “…I  was able to see because I stood on the shoulders of giants…”; but the risk here is that, if you don’t have knowledge, you can’t compete, and knowledge will run you over like a Mack truck. Civilization is built on knowledge and education, OR NOT! It can quickly decline and fail without it.

• Knowledge is all about feed-back! – it’s experimentation, observation, and constant re-thinking and correction. Apollo Moon flights were never exactly on course but were constantly self-correcting their flight using navigational feed-back.  Knowledge can be, must be, corrected, improved, fine-tuned, or eliminated if it doesn’t work. Governments can’t figure this out.

  

• Knowledge “creators” can change everything – Copernicus “re-set” the solar system; Einstein re-imagined energy; Hawking exposed “black holes” in the fabric of the universe;  Oppenheimer’s team gave us the atomic bomb.

• Knowledge is communal – Copernicus, Einstein, Hawking communicated and fed off the work of other thinkers; Oppenheimer’s team won the atomic race; knowledge lives in an education community. It can die there too – so how is America doing with K-12 education? 

  

• Knowledge advances ahead of our ability to anticipate, manage, and control its impacts – the  Manhattan Project built the atomic bomb, but global governments can’t manage it 75 years later.

• Knowledge spontaneously creates new orders but also tears down existing orders – steam engines destroyed sailmakers’ livelihoods; the smartphone is genius, but it’s morphing, even warping, the minds and souls of our children.

• Knowledge transforms itself as it advances – Human intelligence starts with “data…information,” turns it into usable “knowledge,” and then deploys it intelligently, virtuously, OR NOT!

• Knowledge makes modern human life risker, more vulnerable – can you make anything, grow or raise anything, that’s “supply-chained” to you from your grocery store?; hence, knowledge changes every day human nature as it advances.

• Knowledge is “evolutionary” – it’s constantly exposed to “wild globalization” feedback – >> ecology >> demographics >> technology >> economy >> governance >> wealth.

• Knowledge is built with “facts” and “data,” so it naturally fights with itself over what the data actually means – Michael Crichton says about science, “…if it’s consensus, it’s not science; if it’s science, it’s not consensus!”; Frederich Nietzsche, a century before Crichton, observed, “…there are no facts, only interpretations…”

  

• Knowledge and “ideas are peaceful, but history is violent” [as tank commander Don “Wardaddy” Collier warned in the movie, Fury] – the American Civil War claimed 600,000 lives, first fighting over the “union,” OR NOT! But after the Emancipation Proclamation, the 600,000 were the final signers of that Proclamation – and, as well, our Declaration of Independence’s promise that “all ‘humans’ are created equal.” Their blood sanctified the very “idea” of America.  

• Knowledge is a “Black Swan” – Nassim Nicolas Taleb reminds us that, “We do not know what we will know;” entering World War II, who predicted Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Steve Jobs and Apple unleashed finger-tip knowledge and social media, but could they have known how their marvelous smartphone would threaten our kids?

  

• Knowledge of the future is wild, it’s vulnerable to the  “butterfly effect” - to predict the future with mathematical accuracy, say,

  “the trajectory of a billiard ball at the ninth impact, you need to know the gravitational pull of the person standing by the pool table; to predict the 56^th impact, every single elementary particle in the universe needs to be included in your calculation.”
  Taleb, The Black Swan

• Knowledge “knows” and can show us its limits, its boundaries; it’s inherently “wise.” - But we have to listen.

• Knowledge has always “been there”: like every resource, knowledge has and is always potential, discoverable, available - like the Big Bang’s residual “cosmic radiation;” until it’s discovered, knowledge lives “in the “background” of human awareness.

• Knowledge spreads out unevenly – it creates unfairness, inequality: if knowledge is the core human resource, then the more, or less, you have it says how well-off you are or can be. Is it money and capital, or knowledge as capital, that actually creates social inequality? SpaceX’s StarLink may be changing that by connecting everyone to the knowledge world.

• Knowledge is incomplete without judgement, common sense, and practical application – Steve Jobs said:   “Aspirational knowledge without implementation is hallucination.” A.I. might be able to provide “practical application” but can it also provide “common sense,” or “judgement,” or “conscience?”

• Knowledge was “capital” before Marx’s “capitalism”; it still is: “seed” - grain was the first mortgage 3,000 years before money or capital. However, the real capital was not the seed, it was the knowledge of how to plant, grow, and harvest it that created value. A mountain of gold piled up in front of the Taj or Notre Dame didn’t build them – smart people built them.

  

• Knowledge is unconstrained – as the great 20^th century theologian and philosopher, Bernard Lonergan, observed, knowledge is “…the full set of answers to the full set of questions…” – this was also his definition of the “divine.” The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, calls this, “logos,” another word for “order.”

• SUMMARY: All of these factors add up to what human economy is. Together, they tell us why human economy is wild, unpredictable, and advancing ahead of our ability to control it or apply it with full care and concern. Knowledge is the big wave that has always carried Homo sapien, the knowing creature. The  knowledge economy is a quantum entanglement – it’s far more powerful and unpredictable than we can know. Human knowledge is nature’s “new natural” – a hyper-natural real. Human knowledge and discovery constantly breathe new opportunity but simultaneously new risk into civilization’s economies and ecologies. When it’s discovered, its impact is unconstrained until humans get it and hold it down, use it intelligently, wisely, OR NOT!  All of the above belay only a “sense” of what “knowing” and “knowledge” constitute – the power or potential of knowledge and ideas are best perceived by walking through the Taj Mahal or Notre Dame Cathedral, or viewing the Mona Lisa, listening to a Mozart or Ravi Shankar composition, observing the Voyager satellite leave the solar system, or tragically and horrifically, by visiting Auschwitz. The knowledge-wisdom economy undermines and defies full description or final definition, but instead remains, simply, WILD…and in the 21^st century A.I. economy, growing WILDER!

The Modern Age’s Wild, Roller-Coaster “Knowledge” Economy

If the human story is evolutionary, as we suggest, and if knowledge is our lifeblood, then how can we re-assess say, the last 250 years – the recent trek into “modernity?” And what might that mean for the 21st century going forward?

The Great Divergence and The Greater Convergence 

From roughly 1800-1990, what global economists call The Great Global Divergence, exploded civilization’s 10,000 year-old agriculture model (which had exploded the hunter-gatherer model). Half of humanity – the “Ancient” civilizations (China, India, Asia, Africa) – continued primarily growing food-stuffs for primarily subsistence-living populations. By 1800, the other half – Europe and America, and eventually Japan – had gotten an early jump on the science-innovation-industry “knowledge economy” – so, “mass-manufacturing,” “mass-marketing” all kinds of “stuff” to “supply-chained consumers.”

The Great Divergence’s opportunity set was shocking – from sails to steam to container ships to FEDEX and now SpaceX landing on barges in the ocean, from paper to digitization, from cowboys to astronauts, from subsistence poverty to an entirely new, and awesomely powerful, “middle class.” In just 200 years or eight generations!

But the Great Divergence’s risk set was more shocking – native peoples overrun by the West’s colonizing “manifest destinies” and disease, by industrial-scale global warfare and holocausts in the fight over physical resources, from living a harsh, subsistence country life to an even harsher city life plagued by disease and pollution, from agrarian economies to outrageous global “Opium Wars” driven by “freedom of commerce,” or from 60 million magnificent bison freely roaming America’s Great Plains to their casual slaughter for “sport” in the name of “frontier progress.”

But were the Europeans just wretched people? Slavery and atrocities appear in every human civilization. Would the Asians or the Africans, or the Incas, or Navajo, how would they have ridden the knowledge-tech-industry wave if they had gotten to “modernity” first? Or did the Europeans just bring it with massive, industrial scale and power? If knowledge is economy, can the wreckage of the old, agrarian civilizations be at least in part explained by the disparity of knowledge resources? Or, possibly, is humanity really just desperately riding and trying to hang on to this big “knowledge” wave? Are we rather never fully prepared to live it and manage it with care and concern? How do we play on this quantumly entangled field?

But then, hang on! Incredibly, the roller-coaster flipped again – the Great Divergence’s high-tech innovation exploded into The Greater Global Convergence. From roughly 1990-2020, the new Internet-connected tech economy discovered it could re-direct industry back to the ancient world, starting with China, to make all the gadgets, smartphones, T-shirts, pharma, etc., etc., etc.!

China was led by Deng Xiaoping, the Communist leader who had marched with Mao on the Long March, who Mao imprisoned, but who would survive to dine on Texas barbecue with U.S. president George W. Bush. Deng was a practical leader, a pragmatist – he’s famous for saying, “I don’t care if the cat is white or the cat is black if the cat can catch the mouse!” Deng was riding the big wave – he opened China’s workshops to modernity.

And it worked! China industrialized in thirty years – it had taken the West a hundred, or more. The Asian, agrarian-based side of the world leapt overnight from the family farm to modern cities.  

For better or worse the techno-industrial revolutions exploded populations and abundance, from 1 billion in 1800 to 6 billion by 2000 – imperfect, disrupting the planet’s ecologies, yet most every human was healthier, with more to eat, and living longer! Like it or not, it’s here. It’s Fogel’s big-wave, techno-physio-cultural evolution.

The Stealth Economy

It’s getting even wilder! The 21st century roller-coaster is unloading one million riders every week into Earth’s 10,000 cities, mostly in Asia, Africa, and South America. It’s made possible partly by the 3rd Agricultural Revolution’s bountiful fertilizers and machines. Half the world’s “workers” and street-entrepreneurs live in this new stealth economy. They are spontaneously creating an alternative, “informal” version of the global market economy – they’re moving and selling goods and services largely outside of government taxation and control, setting up informal and hyper-local neighborhood governances and infrastructures right next door and within modern cities. According to Robert Neuwirth, if this globalized stealth economy were measured as a single nation, it would be the world’s second largest economy.

[i] Robert Neuwirth, Stealth of Nations

[i] Neuwirth, Robert, Stealth of Nations – the Global Rise of the Informal Economy, New York, Pantheon, 2011; see also Neuwirth’s TED Talks YouTube:  https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_neuwirth_the_power_of_the_informal_economy?language=en

Robots…“A.I.”...The Roaring 21^st Century

And now the roller-coaster is flying into…the CLOUD!  – to “anytime/anywhere” artificial intelligence (“A.I.”).

The home of economic power used to be the skyscraper – New York City’s Empire State Building was the first. Today it’s Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, soaring 2,700 feet (829 meters). However, A.I.’s Cloud is making skyscrapers obsolete. The 21st century’s heart and brain is the modern datacenter. The Burj houses

“100,000 bio-processors (humans) while a datacenter houses 100-200,000 silicon processors. Both cost roughly the same to build, but the datacenter rents for five times as much per square foot as the skyscraper….one of the largest datacenters is in Reno, Nevada, U.S.A.”  
Mark Mills, The Cloud Revolution

Your smartphone lives in the Cloud’s datacenters. 

SUMMARY – What’s Next?

The takeaway here is that Homo sapien evolution, now exploding out of this innovating, scientific, and globalizing civilization, has always advanced ahead of itself, and ahead of our ability to practically manage and ethically respond to it. We underestimate this at great peril to ourselves, our children, and Earth’s lifeworld. Underestimating the wild economy is to under-live its unconstrained power.

So what’s next?

In Wild Capital & Finance we’ll explore what “capital” really ever was, and what it is now that “knowledge” is the primary economic resource. And we’ll see how tech and knowledge games have crept into the 21st century economy and defy the human players who believe they can “guide” or “govern” it all.

In Wild Governance we’ll dig into how government is riding the phenomenal wealth wave and has evolved into massive bureaucracies that resist or hide from feed-back loops. To pay for it all they’ve created entirely new, overblown investment asset classes, namely unpaid and unpayable debts. How does that work? OR NOT! We’ll observe how governance everywhere has gotten bigger, bigger, and how this can only be explained on an evolutionary scale. Governance, with all its stately buildings and monuments, is wilder than ever!

Finally, Wild Wealth in the 21^st Century will introduce us to the challenge of investing and deploying our hard-earned capital into this wild ecology >> demographic >> tech >> economy >> governance big wave. How can our lives and investments surf the wild global quantum entanglement wave with both intelligence and care?

Watch on Youtube

Stay tuned! And be careful – it’s wild and getting wilder out there

Watch the Video

Introduction

Welcome back to the Wild Globalization Project. Today we’re talking about the Wild Economy, Part 1.

We’re asking, “How does the 21st century global economy work…OR NOT? Eight-billion folks living in prosperity and poverty, side by side, and too many trapped in human trafficking and modern slavery. And now horrific wars in Europe and the Middle East threaten global peace and economy? It’s chaos. Yet, and here’s the challenge, human populations today are the largest but also healthiest, best fed, and longest living, EVER…how does that work?”

We’re told it’s a ‘globalization’ thing – supplied-chained, inter-dependent economies. But now with pandemics, shutdowns, financial collapses, things run by A.I. algorithms, not people. Where half the world’s workers live in ‘shadow,’ street-vendor economies, untaxed and unregulated by governments. Over a million people every week are flooding into our 10,000 cities, transforming economies and societies into…what? All while most citizens are failing to notice that our ‘peacetime’ governments are buried in debt, printing trillions to pay bills, and with massive, unpaid social welfare programs hanging in the near future? – How is all that working?

So, really, we’re asking, “What’s going on? What is this global economy thing and how does it work, OR NOT?” Here’s a clue: The global economy is evolutionary…and evolution is wild…!”

Provocative Statement

We’re asking if civilization's life-world might actually work like a "BLACK BOX," what modern physics calls a “quantum entanglement.” Where this wild economy river is crashing into a wild ecology, a wild demographics, a wild technology, a wild governance, and a wild wealth river – all inter-, over-, and under-flowing the others, each with its own source and power. Becoming a singular momentum that’s tearing down but then building up the life-world.

We’re asking if it’s from this “creative destruction” that the spontaneously emerging orders of life appear?.

But…wait a minute…there goes a human and she’s diving into it…riding a KAYAK…holding paddle!  Where did she come from…what’s she doing there…?

She’s showing us how humans have not emerged “from the wild.” We are wild Homo sapien. The wild is happening right here and now.  We’ve spread over and globalized the planet for 250,000 years. Our human “nature” has roots deeper than Wall Street or Main Street, or booming-busting economies. We live in the throes of this quantum entanglement of ecologies, demographics and cultures, technologies, economies, governances, and wealth.

To get here we’ve relied on two unique human abilities: Our critical thinking, OR NOT! And, our ability to love and care for each other and the planet, OR NOT! 

We’re wondering how our critical thinking or our conscience can let us think it all at once. How is this entanglement affecting the planet, changing it? But then, how are we getting kicked around by it?”

Finally, as Uri Levine suggests,

“We’re trying to fall in love with the problem.”
Uri Levine

We’re kayakers launching into the wild flows that incessantly break down but that then spontaneously build and create the orders of life on Earth.

What is the ‘Wild Economy’…?

“Economy” comes from the Greek word “oikos” for “house or dwelling place.” Economy is where we live. So it’s also the root for “ecology.” Economy and ecology are entangled in our speech and our imagination.  

Economy asks, “What is something worth…and how do we know that?”  Listen to this wild story from the Alaskan  Klondike.

“In Alaska, during the first gold rush, one winter was particularly rough and famine ensued. To survive, people only had sardine cans, and a lively market took place in this rare commodity. One fellow bought himself a can of sardines at an extraordinary price, but was surprised to find, upon opening the box, that the sardines were rotten. He went back to complain, but was told by the can’s previous owner: “but them’s weren’t eating sardines, them’s were trading sardines!”  
Louis-Vincent Gave, Too different for Comfort, 2013

Trading sardines in a winter famine reminds us how famine and pandemic have raged through human history:  in the common era, the Plagues of Justinian and the Black Death collapsed European populations by as much as 50%. Yet the Europe that survived ushered in the Enlightenment, the “European Miracle,” and the economic tidal wave of modern commerce, science, and technology that we’re riding today.  How did that happen?   

Economy entangles all of globalization’s momentums. Alvin Toffler notes that  

“A market...does not consist of the steel, shoes, or cotton, or canned food [like Klondike sardines] that flows through it....it is the structure through which goods and services are routed...it is not simply an economic structure...[but] a way of organizing people, a way of thinking, an ethos, and a shared set of expectations expectations [“eating” versus “trading sardines”...The market is thus as much a psychological structure as an economic reality. And its effects far transcend economics."
Alfin Toffler, The Third Wave, 1981 

Benoit Mandelbrot, an IBM practical scientist and one of the 20th century’s great thought-leaders, also researched cotton markets. He discovered that, like sardines, market prices follow a “rough and wild randomness.” He showed that rare events, or “fat tails” – like Covid pandemics or the 2009 global debt crisis – can violently warp and change the trajectory of human economies. Mandelbrot concluded,

"Finance is a black box covered by a veil…”
Benoit Mandelbrot, The (mis)Behavior of Markets, 2004 

“Sardines in a famine,” “ethos and expectations,” “wild randomness and black boxes…” How can we understand “economy?”  

“Scarce” Resources

Economy starts with “scarce resources.”

For thousands of years human survival has been a wild, “skin of our teeth,” game. Just 50,000 years ago only a few thousand of us had survived. And yet, here we are. 

Thomas Sowell notes that,  

“…economy is the study of scarce resources...what does scarce mean? It means that what everybody wants adds up to more than there is...The cavemen had the same natural resources  we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge we use today.”
Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics, 2015

Economy pays less attention to the raw quantities of resources and more to how we apply discovery and knowledge to create resource “orders.”

Take energy. As Peter Huber and Mark Mills note: 

"Starting from nothing 4 billion years ago, life somehow contrived to capture high-grade energy from here and there and used it to assemble more life…life, a very complex form of order, now covers the planet...About 8.000 years ago human societies began planting and breeding crops to capture solar energy... they used the energy mainly to breed more people, who planted more crops, and human energy consumption doubled every five to ten centuries...the more efficient we become at refining energy, the more we want to use it. …Demand for energy is as insatiable as demand for information, time, order, and life itself.” 
Peter Huber & Mark Mills,  The Bottomless Well, 2006

Innovation

Humans didn’t merely harness Earth’s resources – we changed the resource order. Nature gave us upright posture, skilled hands, and big brains. Our large brains needed lots more calories. So we learned to hunt in teams and we recruited wild wolves to help. We invented language. We lived in social groups. We used fire for protection and cooking. We invented tools and weapons for the hunt.

As we discovered in our Wild Ecology and Wild Demographics talks, humans didn’t grow “un-natural, we grew “hyper-natural” – we took Nature’s raw stuff and created new tools and tricks and “orders.”  

But here’s the rub. As we eked out a survival,

”We gradually exploded the wild momentum and power of the natural world.”

It would take us 250,000 years to get to one billion folks when modern industry breaks out in 1800, but then just 200 years to reach six billion at the beginning of the 21^st century.

Caring for all eight billion of us today will mean even more smarts and innovation, more food, shelter, but also smartphones, energy, etc. Human demand for stuff, for life, is wilder than ever!

There’s another rub to innovation. As we create new technologies, we displace or even destroy what’s already there. Humans first moved goods and people over water with boats powered by oars and paddles – like the kayak. But then we invented wind-powered sails. We replaced that with the propeller, powered by steam, then diesel, then nuclear. And now most people and lots of stuff move over the oceans in modern jet aircraft. From the paddle to the jet! And lots of people changing jobs along the way.

As Joseph Schumpeter describes human innovation,

“We are dealing with an evolutionary process. …the productive apparatus…incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one [and] creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”
Joseph Schumpeter, Can Capitalism Survive?, 1950 

Ah yes, and just what is “capital…?”

Excess production…reserves…credit…capital!

We measure economy by “gross domestic product” (monetary measure of goods and services). Today the global economy is about $85 trillion – with maybe another $15 trillion for the “informal,” street-vendor economy, and…who knows…maybe $3-5 trillion for the illicit global economy (money laundering, weapons, drugs, human trafficking).

So how did we get from zero to $100 trillion?  

FIRST – Humans managed scarce resources and produced excess reserves.

We killed more meat and gathered more stuff for reserves. Meat was cooked, smoked or dried, then stored. Early nomadic peoples used “cairns” to mark reserves of food and shelter.

Eventually, people settled the world’s great river valleys – the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, the Nile, and the Yellow Rivers. They started cultivating instead of just gathering food and they kept excess reserves for lean years. Excess production was an instinctive survival strategy that would eventually become a prosperity strategy. Today, we produce excess reserves of everything – from cheerios and potato chips to cars and smartphones.

“Economy” evolved from humans using intelligent innovation and excess production to survive rugged and unforgiving ecologies that provided only scarce or hidden resources.

We did what worked to survive.  

SECOND – CREDIT

Agricultural societies found it practical to arrange themselves under “governments.” Governments managed the excess grain reserves, both for emergencies during poor crop-years but they also started to lend “seed”-grain to aspiring farmers. The reserves were loaned on “credit” and often at the grave risk of bondage or enslavement if the loan was not repaid.

Credit systems and investment risk appear in the historical record long – 3,000 years – before money or “capital.” Or, rather, capital actually starts out as excess reserves – “seed”-grain is the beginning of “seed”-capital today. David Graeber notes that when Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mesopotamian cuneiform were finally translated,

“What these texts revealed was that credit systems…actually preceded the invention of coinage [money] by three thousand years.”
David Graeber, DEBT - The First 5000 Years, 2011

Credit is an example of hyper-natural innovation. With it productivity exploded into the magic of “compound” growth. As Albert Einstein observed, “…compound interest is the greatest force in the universe.” Credit transforms the emerging human evolutionary paradigm. Today it’s now the magic force, and the quantum risk, of the modern global economy.

THIRD – “CAPITAL”

So, originally, “capital” is the actual good or commodity itself – grain or seed-grain. Capital is the excess reserve that comes from the magic of innovation, production, and credit lending.

Because capital tracks its own wild, evolutionary course, we’ve created a Wild Capital and Wealth talk to dive into that…

Entrepreneurs…Consumers…Markets

The only thing left to add to the economy mix is…people!

First, people to organize the production and then get it out to markets – what we now call entrepreneurs.

Then add the folks who see the stuff, realize they can use it, and who then demand it – consumers! 

Innovating, then producing and then getting the clever ideas and gadgets out to the folks, creating markets, is the secret sauce of the modern economy.

Curiously, the Chinese developed many of modernization’s technologies – gunpowder (9^th century), the mechanical clock (8^th century), the compass (11^th century), and printing (7^th century). So why did the modern “economic miracle” happen in Europe and not China? As Mao himself admitted,  

"Our fathers were indeed wise. They invented printing, but not newspapers. They invented gunpowder, but used it only for fireworks. Finally, they invented the compass, but took care not to use it to discover America." 

Quoted by Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity -
Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World, 2010

So what was different in Europe? While the Asian economies were the largest up to @1800 CE, during the “Dark” or “Middle” Ages (@500-1500 CE) the Europeans were taking a different approach to economy and technology.

They fought bitter wars with one another, so they took the gunpowder, combined it with advanced metallurgy, and ended up with the world’s most powerful and frightening weaponry. They improved the printing press and produced newspapers and books that spread knowledge to more folks. They used clocks to organize urban life. They used Viking ship technologies to innovate a wind-powered and more seaworthy and reliable “round” ship that could carry more goods even in rough weather. They switched from oxen to horses by re-inventing the horse-collar. And partly because horses worked 50% faster than oxen, they produced food surpluses that allowed some farmers to get into buying and selling products in the growing markets – merchants. Roads were improved and horse-drawn wagons were re-invented by adding brakes and swivel front axles.

In finance, credit lending and the limited liability company expanded business and investment opportunities. Modern monetary systems expanded trade and commerce.

All these factors evolved Europe out of the restrictive feudal order and ushered in a new age of modern commerce.

 Finally, Enlightenment Europeans came to demand “knowledge markets” – by 1800 CE over 140 modern universities were operating in Europe.

So, while the universities systematized and communicated formal knowledge, entrepreneurs and markets deployed practical knowledge. It was knowledge that would power human economy into the modern age.

By the end of the Middle Ages, the Europeans economies were small and unnoticed compared to the larger, agricultural-based Asian economies. Yet over a thousand years, the scrappy Europeans had re-organized and evolved the economic, technology, and knowledge engines that would transform the new world looming on the horizon.

However, we should pause to ask, “What was the human condition before the modern age?” It simply can’t be overlooked that human existence prior to the modern era, was, for most folks, unimaginably dark and wretched. As economic historians Rosenberg and Birdzell observe:

“If we take the long view of human history…it is a story of almost unrelieved wretchedness. The typical human society has given only a small number of people a humane existence…while the great majority have lived in abysmal squalor. We are led to forget those who lived in the silence of poverty. The eras of misery have been mythologized and may even be remembered as golden ages of pastoral simplicity. They were not.

[Yet]…it became evident early in the nineteenth century that an unusually high proportion of people were becoming better fed, healthier, and more secure than in the ancient civilizations…that is, than at any other time in human history.”
Rosenberg & Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich, 2008

The Industrial Evolution(s)

In spite of pandemics, famines, or 30-year wars, the thousand-year run of European innovation, discovery, and knowledge dissemination changed not just their economy, but human economic possibility.

However, our Wild Globalization Project wonders if these industrial “revolutions” – Industry & Manufacturing (18^th – 19^th century), Technology (19^th – 20^th century), Digitization (late 20th), and now the A.I. Revolution – might these be better explained as “evolutions?”

So, reverse the order – How is A.I. conceivable without lightning fast digital “Cloud” computing, which is not possible without superabundant, cheap, electricity, which doesn’t happen without advanced and scaled industrial manufacturing? And none of it happens without lots of, and increasing, energy resources – coal, oil, natural gas, and alternatives.

Finally, it all moves by the evolutionary, trial and error, advance of knowledge.  This is why Sir Isaac Newton would humbly observe,

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Sir Isaac Newton, Letter from Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke

In his brilliant Unbound Prometheus, David Landes sets three principles that guided the new industry:

1) Manual labor was replaced by fast and precise machines;

2) The machines were powered by machines, tireless steam engines;

3) Finally, the machines used new, plentiful raw materials like iron-ore and coal.

He notes:   

“These improvements constitute the Industrial Revolution. They yielded an unprecedented increase in man’s productivity and, with it, a substantial rise in income per capita. Moreover, this rapid growth was self-sustaining…for the first time in history, both the economy and knowledge were growing fast enough to generate a continuing flow of investment and technological innovation…The Industrial Revolution thereby opened a new age of promise. It also transformed the balance of political power, within nations, between nations, and between civilizations; it revolutionized the social order; and as much changed man’s way of thinking as his way of doing.”
David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, 2003  

Robert William Fogel captures modernity’s population explosion (vertical graph) and what he calls this “techno-physio-cultural-economic” evolution (horizontal graph). It’s a classic “J”-curve, with each discovery and innovation building upon and setting the stage for the next. There’s simply nothing like it in all of human history.

Summary of Wild Economy, Part 1

The “European Miracle” has given history the most advanced version of the human economy model – “resources >>> innovation >>> excess production and reserves >>> markets-consumers >>> prosperity.” In two centuries it exploded our populations eight-fold, and most of us are healthier, living longer, and better fed.

 But inside this quantumly entangled civilization, human evolution has raced ahead of our understanding, our conscience, and our ability to manage our lives in its momentums. In every corner, our human future, our very human nature, is challenged.

In Wild Economy, Part II, we’ll try to sketch out the rough edges of those challenges. Here’s a quick peek:

• THE GREAT DIVERGENCE – The European miracle (1800-1980) creates the “Great Divergence.” Europe, America, and Japan dominate and displace the agricultural model and at the same time ravage most native cultures. The new economy may appear “logical…sensible…inevitable,” but its street history is brutal, violent…and wild!

• THE GREAT CONVERGENCE – But then the new economy makes a critical reversal (1980-2020) – it innovates the Internet and global communications networks and, voila(!), China, with Asia close behind, catch the West’s wave in just two generations.

• WILD LABOR ECONOMY – How has the modern labor economy changed the human soul and culture? What about “D.I.Y.” shadow economy labor – half the world’s workers? Or the artisanal miners that dig up the cobalt for our smartphones? Labor is wild!

• WILD CAPITAL – “Mega” companies more powerful than most nations. Small-companies and the stealth economy supply most of the new jobs. The bigs and smalls will live, possibly thrive, but will then all will be swallowed up by economic evolution’s “creative destruction” engine. Capital is wild!

• THE WILD KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY – Finally, it all boils down to knowledge. Every human economy has grown from knowledge – and the new global “knowledge economy” is the wildest yet!

 So stay tuned! And careful! It’s wild out there!

Watch the Video

This “Wild Economy, Part I” YouTube is one of a suite of “Wild Globalization” YouTubes. Go to www.substack.wildglobalization.com for transcripts or visit our web site at www.wildglobalization.com.

Watch the Video

Introduction

Welcome back to the Wild Globalization Project. Today we’re talking about Wild Culture & Civilization Part II.

In Part I we asked, “How do the flows of populations and peoples – their languages...beliefs…drive  our 21^st century globalizing civilization?”

Today we’re asking, “What do we think we mean by “culture,” or “civilization?”

Our sense here is that we to understand “globalization” we’ve got to tackle “civilization.”  

So, ask yourself:

• How did we get here? From a skin-of-our-teeth survival of ice ages, volcanic winters, horrific famines and pandemics, to “modern” civilization today?  

• What happens when the “get here” explodes, exponentially, from crude “flying machines” to space travel in just 65 years, or from Alan Turing’s Automatic Computing Engine (“ACE”) to Artificial Intelligence (“A.I.”) in just 75 years.[i]

• In spite of our successes aren’t we also disillusioned, living a strange 21st century angst, haunted by a darker side of this “civilization,” this “globalization?” It’s that angst in the gut of our prosperity that’s our concern, our care…and our Wild Globalization passion.

• So, “What’s going on…? How does the human world work…? How and why is it changing…? We’re wondering if human existence isn’t “evolutionary,” maybe even more evolutionary than ever…and if so, how…?

[i] Jack Copeland, 2012, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18419691; Simon Lavington, BBC, 2012, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18327261

Here are our provocative claims:

• FIRST: We’re wondering if the human life-world doesn’t work more like a "BLACK BOX," what science calls a “quantum entanglement.” Like a wild river – but really many rivers crashing and flowing in a singular momentum – An Ecology…Technology…Culture…Economy…Governance…a Wealth river. Wild flows that carve out canyons, tear things up, but then incessantly build and re-build the life-world.  

  • But…then…there’s that human again, and she’s diving into it…riding a KAYAK…!  She’s showing us how humans have not emerged “from the wild.” We are wild Homo sapien. The wild is happening right here and now.  We’ve spread over and globalized the planet for 250,000 years. We’re carried by, we live in, but we are also ourselves creating these wild entanglements.

    

• SECOND: To get here we’ve relied on two unique abilities: Our ability to learn and think critically, OR NOT!

• THIRD: Living in these entanglements of forces and energies, we are, by definition, forced to think it all at once.

• FOURTH: Because we’re living it in every moment of the day, it all races ahead of our critical thinking, our ethical response, and our common sense. How can we catch up with it? Or is it really more a case of, as Uri Levine suggests,

  “…falling in love with and learning to live the problem…”like the kayaker, riding the flows… ?”  
  Uri Levine

“Human…a brief history”…from the “wild”…to the wilder…

To understand globalization and civilization, we can look back at the human evolutionary story, from the wild past to the wilder present.

250,000 -75,000 years BCE (10,000  generations)…out of the wild…

Homo sapien emerges fleet afoot, with large brains and fine motor skills, already exploiting fire and making stone tools. They possess a seemingly unconstrained desire to survive, but they have a new way – survival by “learning and knowing.” We are the “knowledge” species that will walk and run out of the deep savannah to conquer our competitors and globalize the world.

                  In this period, humans began to adapt using what paleoanthropologists call “behavioral modernity,” a suite of complex cognitive and social behaviors unique in the natural world. Humans could think, anticipate, and plan ahead. Remarkably, they also began to express themselves in symbolic art, ornamentation, as well as music and dance. Large game hunting and social teamworking appear. Human “culture” emerges with advanced language, social learning, and social organization.[i]

[i] Korisettar, Ravi, and Petraglia, Michael D., edit., Early Human Behaviour in Global Context – The Rise and Diversity of the Lower Paleolithic Record, Routledge, 1998.

50-65,000 years BCE (2,000 generations ago) – from just a few…to “culture”…

Survival, however, was a wild and skin-of-our-teeth game.

The archaeological record is replete with what genetic biologists’ call “population bottlenecks.” As we saw in Part I, bottlenecks happen when a specie’s numbers decline sharply due to famine, disease, or genocide.  Our human lineage suffered several bottlenecks – @900,000 years ago human numbers may have declined to as few as 1,000 to 100,000 individuals,[i] and then another @50-65,000 years ago, just before Homo sapien emerged out of Africa.[ii] By then, all of our competitors – the Neanderthals, Homo habilis, Erectus, Heidelbergensis, the Denisovans – had vanished, many at our violent hand, and some – like the Neanderthals – surviving in our own DNA.

Homo sapiens had outlasted nature’s overwhelming odds by commanding an indominable and fierce will to survive. Humans had acquired a virtually unconstrained “will” and “power” carried by a new, hyper-natural evolutionary force of nature, a new way, the way of social learning and knowledge.

By the African breakout, “human culture” had fully emerged, long before formal “history” or “civilization.” Advanced thought, planning, and creativity – again, “behavioral modernity” – are evident in the fossil record. In 1994, spelunking archaeologists discovered France’s magnificent 30,000 year old Chauvet Cave paintings that rival the great modern artists. Cave paintings are turning up all over the world – the oldest an eerie red stenciled Neanderthal hand from Spain’s Maltravieso Cave 64,000 years old. [iii]

[i] Hu, Wangjie; et al. (31 August 2023). "Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition". Science. 381 (6661): 979–984. doi:10.1126/science.abq7487. Archived from the original on 1 September 2023. Retrieved 2 September 2023.

[ii] Henn, Cavalli-Sforza, Feldman, “The Great Human Expansion,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (“PNAS”), 10-17-2012, https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1212380109 .

[iii] Ten Oldest Known Cave Paintings in the World, Hestie Barnard Gerber, thearchiologist.org, 12-18-2022,

https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/ten-oldest-known-cave-paintings-in-the-world#:~:text=The%20world's%20oldest%20confirmed%20cave,caves%3A%20La%20Pasiega%20and%20Ardales.

“Sacred Value Orders”

Other, powerful motivations appear alongside intelligence and learning. Archaeology reveals how our ancestors were profoundly bonded to their social groups and to the Universe that surrounded them. In spite of their violent ways, they were “spiritual” beings. They lived under what we might call “sacred value orders.”

• “Sacred” because we know how, through mythic stories and rituals, they revered and lived “in” and “of” the natural world  – dependent on other animate life for resources. They celebrated the natural world, beneath the Sun, the Moon, the glistening night-sky. They bonded and banded together in blood and sacrosanct alliances. They honored their dead in sacred burial rituals. 

• “Value” because their lives were constantly directed by value-based survival decisions in the face of limited resources. “Value” had an obvious material or “economic” nature, but it also turned on their reverence for the natural world, as well as their “love” and “loyalty” for their clan and social alliances. 

• “Order” because we know that humans survived only by banding together for protection. Humans, in our most basic existential nature, all live in some order of “spiritual” cooperation – we can love one another, our family members, our clan. We bond in families, tribes and nations, we stick together. We live in the ever-present risk  of harm or death to ourselves and our loved ones.  “Spiritual” because we want our lives to carry some meaning or significance. We want to be connected to the vast and mysterious orders of life on Earth and the Universe.     

“Sacred value orders” are the uniquely human quantum entanglements that inter- and over- and under-flow and emerge spontaneously in every aspect of the human story. In global civilization today, many live inside formal traditions we call “religions” – Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Tao, Jain. These traditions transcend political orders. Then again, many moderns live spiritual lives outside formal traditions. Yet we all hold in our hearts and minds ultimate cares and concerns. We all make choices and decisions about the final value and meaning of our lives and the life of our communities. Those ultimate concerns and values lead to orders of family, society, even the greater global community.

Sacred value orders are blood and guts real. People fight and die for them.  Sacred value orders have evolved ingenious and powerful orders and instincts that empower amazing creativities but also terrifying destructiveness. Indeed, sacred value orders are stunning and beautiful – like Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral or India’s Taj Mahal  – yet they can be horrific and evil, like the Middle East’s “holy” war raging today.  

Nonetheless, by the end of the paleolithic or “stone age,” human cultures were advancing a new version of evolution radically different from any creatures who had ever lived on Earth. We had begun to intentionally seize, direct, and expand the creative and destructive cycles of life. Today, we don’t merely adapt, we change the game – we fly without wings, we’ve landed on the Moon, we dive the oceans deeper than whales, we’re toying with the very DNA of life, our modern agriculture has not only saved us from famine but exploded our numbers, and our space telescopes see into the belly of creation itself.

10,000 BCE (400 generations ago)… from hunters... to farmers… to “Civilization”…

By 10,000 BCE or 400 generations ago, paleoclimatologists tell us that the Earth’s climate shifted into the present “inter-glacial optimum.” Life got warmer. Easier. Less ice. More to eat. Optimums are 10-15,000 year pauses between ice ages. In North America the 10,000 foot deep Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated after carving out the Great Lakes. (see Wild Ecology)

Human populations began to diversify into “…far-flung networks of societies, spanning diverse ecologies, with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas moving between them in endlessly intricate ways.” Early population concentrations were likely not permanent cities but were more likely special sites where nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples gathered at propitious seasonal moments in less formal

“…confederacies [and where]…some kind of formal organization was put in charge of the care and maintenance of sacred places.”

David Graeber & David Wengrow

Settling… centralization… scale… and “CIVILIZATION”…

Human cultures began to hunt less and instead husband goats and pigs. They started to grow rather than just gather wild grains. Early agriculture emerges from roughly 12,000 to 5,000 BCE. Earth’s great river valleys –  Mesopotamia’s Tigris-Euphrates, Egypt’s  Nile, China’s Yellow, and India’s Ganges and Indus – were settled first.  

More people living in larger demographic arrangements transformed the human order. “Settling” would change human culture and, really, human nature. Urban social orders supported by centralized agriculture simply favors different human behaviors and personality types than those favored by hunters or gatherers in the field.  

Centralized, settled societies required greater social cooperation and organization. Specialized labor and markets appear. These new synergies favored people with better planning and organizational skills to manage centralized resources and govern populations.   

Modern historians like David Wootton refer to this transformation as the beginning of “civilization” and human “history:” 

“…the most important transformation in human history before the invention of science…took place comparatively recently, between 12,000 and 7,000 years ago…animals were domesticated, agriculture began, and stone tools began to be replaced by metal ones.  There have been roughly 600 generations since human beings first ceased to be hunter-gatherers…humans who have left written records behind them as opposed to humans who have left only artifacts behind them, has existed only for about…300 generations.  Add the word “great” in front of ‘grandparent’ 300 times: it will fill just over half a page of print.  This is the true length of human history…”

David Wootton, The Invention of Science, 2016

What’s hard to see in Wootton’s observation is the ominous explosion of civilization’s “velocity” and “scale” of change. We hadn’t just learned a bunch of data – we had learned how to learn.

With the synergies of agriculture and centralized planning, human civilization launches an entirely new and  accelerated version of evolution. Compared to “natural,” genetic based evolution, the human version can change things in just a few short generations. Or, as with modern inventions, like the smartphone or atomic bomb, overnight. “Hyper-evolution” was is on! If human emergence has tracked for say, 250,000 years, then Wootton’s 7,500 years of “history” comprises about 3% of that run – roughly the last 45 minutes of a 24 hour day. So from the Ag-revolution forward, the scale and speed of “civilization” accelerate – from scattered bands of competing hunter-gathers…to Homo sapien alone…from hundreds of thousands to eight billion…from Earth walking-running creatures to sky-flying and ocean-diving and Moon-walking/bouncing creatures.  

Urban population orders created new possibilities but also wild new risks – famine, pollution, and systemic disease. Satellite archaeology is  uncovering in the deeply forested America’s entire civilizations that apparently rose to marvelous complexity and size, and then simply vanished.

The recent 1959-61 Great Chinese Famine, that took 20-50 million, was triggered by climate, poor farm practices, and Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.”

Consider how, by the end of the 1800’s, “modern” New York City, with 3.5 million people needing transportation, was also populated – and polluted – by @170,000 horses. Manure dust clouds caused respiratory disease in the summer, while rainy season “rivers of horse manure” would seep into basements, attracting disease carrying rats and insects.[i] But then, as if out of nowhere, wild inventor-innovator-entrepreneurs like Henry Ford came along with…the Model T! Horses and manure vanished in a generation.

[i] “New York, manure and stairs: when horses were the cities’ nightmares,” Smart Water Magazine, 6-19-2019,   https://smartwatermagazine.com/blogs/agueda-garcia-de-durango/new-york-manure-and-stairs-when-horses-were-cities-nightmares

Think of civilizational-scale disease. Covid-19 killed 10-20 million out of 8 billion.[i] The Plagues of Justinian (541-549 CE) or the Black Death (1346-1353 CE) – routinely killed 30-50% of populations.     

In spite of these risks, complex “cultures” evolve into increasingly larger, more systematized, stratified and scaled social arrangements or what we call “civilizations.” Urbanization brings smart and creative people together synergistically but they also grow dependent on supply chains for daily resources. (see Wild Economy). More powerful and concentrated civilizations give rise to fierce competition for resources and wars are not uncommon. More powerful governance hierarchies are required to manage both external enemy threats and to manage internal resource demands. Elite ruling classes develop. Civilizations differentiate from cultures by establishing permanent “institutions” of governance.  

The “sacred value orders” also evolve into more formalized and sovereign “religious institutions” that support more complex social orders, but at the extreme deploy human slavery, profound class discrimination, and even morbid human sacrifice and unimaginable atrocities.

[i] National Library of Medicine, 4-15-2022; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8912932/

Moving through the centuries and millennia, these new “civilized” orders capture near absolute control over populations. Incredibly, Rome develops modern, sophisticated legal systems while at the same time tyrannizing Mediterranean peoples. At the  extreme, rulers like Caligula declare themselves “god” and Rome’s elite entertain themselves with the Colosseum’s horrors. In the Americas, “religious” child sacrifice is not uncommon.[i]

But then, at the end of the Iron Age radically new, revolutionary, “sacred value” leaders appear in the lives of Buddha and Jesus. They announce the possibility of new social and spiritual orders which favor individual agency, human freedom, and a “divine presence” available to everyone, values we take for granted, today. Their announcements presage a turn, a new horizon of possibility for human civilization.

QUICK SUMMARY: Civilization is a double-edged sword – like Roman law and Roman torture and crucifixion.  “Civilization” rings of civility, order, complexity, creativity and beauty, like Notre Dame or the Taj, yet its brilliance can foreshadow a wildly unconstrained path of destruction and evil, like the 20^th century’s Holocaust. Civilization is about “scale” – immense populations, accelerating velocities of change, in fact, a radically different, “hyper-natural” evolutionary momentum. It’s gaining  speed and complexity as it races ahead of our common sense, our conscience, and our ability to adapt. It’s wild. And, we think, getting wilder.          

[i] Carrasco, David, City of Sacrifice – The Aztec Empire and the role of Violence in Civilization, Boston, Beacon Press, 1999.

The Great Divergence… 1800-1990 (10 generations)… from Ag to A.I. …

Fast forward to the “Common Era,” roughly 500-1500 CE. Agriculture was still predominant.

Under the agricultural model, economic and political power were based on people farming and producing crops. Throughout the Middle Ages, half the global population lived in China and India and produced half the world’s economic output. Europe produced less than 10%. Most people (90%) lived agrarian, usually subsistence, lifestyles. Prosperity came and went with poor weather or crop yields. Famine was not uncommon.   

After the fall of Rome in the 4^th century CE, however, and partly due to its climate and geography, over the next 1000 years, Europeans would devise and develop new technologies – wind and water-power, advanced metallurgy, gunpowder and weaponry; agricultural methods like crop rotation, selective breeding, improved plough designs; better transportation including road systems and wagons, they switched from oxen to horses, and could move goods over water with more reliable “round” ships. By the 13^th-15^th centuries, productivity had increased and new “markets” appear. The 14^th century’s Black Death decimated labor markets but it hastened the decline of the stultified feudal system. Europe was poised.  (see Wild Economy I & II)

Things got really wild when Copernicus, Galileo, Da Vinci, or rectors and priests like Sir Isaac Newton (modern physics), Rev. Thomas Malthus (population theory), Rev. Edmund Cartwright (inventor of the power loom),  Rev. William Greenwell (invented modern archaeology)[i], or even a library janitor like James Croll (climate science) – all more or less independent, curious, “free agent investigators.” They would ignite the Scientific Revolution…Copernicus’ re-set our understanding of the universe and today Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets are pointed at Mars!

By the end of Middle Ages (@1500-1700 CE), Europeans were poised, over the next 200 years, or just 8-10 generations, to change the entire trajectory of global civilization.

The “Great Divergence” was on.

[i] Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile – Things that gain from disorder, New York:  Random House, 2012, 227-229.

From roughly 1800 to 1990, the emerging science and technology based economy transformed civilizational order and dominance. By 1900, Europe, the U.S., and Japan were producing @50% of global economic product – China and India less than 20%. China and India’s output hadn’t declined – instead, the West’s production had exploded, exponentially.  

We’re still living the industrial “revolutions” that have transformed global civilization:  Industry & Manufacturing (18^th – 19^th century), Technology (19^th – 20^th century), Digitization (late 20th), and now the 21^st century’s A.I. Revolution.

And it’s all been powered by energy – first wind and waterpower, then coal and steam, to oil and natural gas, and now at the margins, alternatives. Energy doesn’t just generate electricity or move things and people. Modern fertilizers and pesticides, for good and bad, have sparked the “Green…or Third Agricultural Revolution” that has at least for now eliminated systemic famine and grown global populations to 8 billion today.  

By the end of the 19^th - 20^th centuries, in just 8 generations, human civilization – and the planet itself – had been radically transformed. And disrupted. In the U.S., most everyone has moved off the farm – less than 5% farm today. And mobilized by industrialized agriculture, every week a million people are moving into cities worldwide.

So what are the takeaways here?

A minimal observation would notice that these technological and economic developments were gradual, incremental, and so more evolutionary than “world-beating” intentional. Europeans quietly scrapped and borrowed and improved existing techs – Chinese clocks, gunpowder, compasses, printing – and they also came up with some of their own, like the Viking round ship. Innovations started in modest workshops – like Gutenberg’s printing press or Newcomen’s and Watt’s steam engines – but then launched massive revolutions in knowledge and brute power. The Great Divergence snuck up on global civilization and then totally transformed its path. In America, when a boatload of Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, did anyone foresee that in just 250 years – 10 generations – the continent would be utterly overrun, cities rising over the plains, its heartland partitioned into quarter-section farms and laced with steel railroads? 

A maximal observation would notice that the West was first to advance modern technological civilization, but it often failed miserably to manage the awesome and essentially unconstrained powers these new techs and economies presented. We’ll never know how the ancient civilizations – the 5,000 year-old Chinese civilization – might have led, or misled, things differently. We do know that the scrappy, insolent Europeans, with their big canons and arrogant egos, moved into and over lands and markets and resources, routinely, often soullessly, overrunning native peoples and ecologies.

From these observations, however, can we conclude that the Europeans sat down and planned the whole thing? Their clever inventions and modern economics radically changed history. Yet these evolutionary changes devastated Europe’s peoples as well. Tens of millions would perish in its advance. Isn’t the takeaway here that Europeans didn’t direct it as much as it happened to them?

This “great divergence” of science, technology, and economy moved swiftly yet surreptitiously ahead of the human ethical response or rational control. It was evolutionary. No, the primary difference between humanity’s earlier atrocious attempts at “civilization” – on the one hand, great works of art and architecture, or Roman law, but on the other hand, back-shadowed by human slavery, child sacrifice, and genocide – no, the primary differentiator was that the Europeans had figured out how to “go bigger,” to leverage humanity’s unconstrained and hyper-natural powers and potential to industrial levels.

The takeaway here is that modern civilization is a new version of the wild  – industrial-scaled, exponentially growing, J-curved faster…and getting wilder.  

The Great Convergence… 1990 -2020 (1-2 generations)… Hyper-Globalization…

But then, it got even wilder. The European Miracle invited the rest of the world to its party.  

Rogue, independent, problem-solving thinkers like the brilliant Brit, Alan Turing, working desperately to stave off the 1940’s Nazi advance, dreamed up computers and “information technology.”

In just 1-2 generations, folks had evolved computers from Turing’s “Automatic Computing Engine” (“ACE”) to the 1960’s “ARPANET” (Advanced Research Project Agency Network) and finally to the “worldwide web,” the Internet highway of information and knowledge open to the public and industry.  

Yet even with all this technical evolution, few imagined the “Great Convergence” on the horizon.

By 2005, half of the developed world was connected. By 2021, 90% of the developed world and nearly 60% of the developing world was online.[i]

Modern economic historians, including Richard Baldwin, theorize that recent “modern” technological civilization has evolved in three phases :

Phase One: The “Great Divergence” (from 1800-1990) moved resources and products, first with steamships and railroads and then with massive container ships and finally aircraft, and all of it powered by plentiful energy; 

Phase Two: The “Great Convergence” (1990-2020) is launched by the Internet moving ideas and information between Western-based designers-entrepreneurs and Asian-based manual labor and production resources – in just 1-2 generations Asia moves through the modernization cycle;

Phase Three: Internet connected robotics and artificial intelligence (“A.I.”) (2020-present) are now moving people virtually – doctors in New York are performing robotically-aided surgeries remotely in…anywhere in the world. Richard Baldwin

The Great Divergence appears surreptitiously with a billion people on the planet, most working farms. The Great Convergence brings things back together. By the end of all the gains and losses 8 billion of us are living longer and with more to eat, than ever. Folks from 1800 wouldn’t recognize us today.

It’s wild.

[i]  "Measuring digital development: Facts and figures 2021". Telecommunication Development Bureau, International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Retrieved 16 November 2022

Summing Up: The Knowledge (…Wisdom…?”) Species

From hunter-gatherers, to “culture,” to “scaled” and “institutionalized” “civilization,” and in just 200-600 generations – a blink of the eye on most evolutionary maps. We “hyper-natural” humans are quick and smart. We are the “learning and knowledge creatures.”

Still, can we keep up with it all? We’re racing, racing, faster, but where, how? Is this angst in the pit of our stomachs telling us something?

We stick together, we’re social because, that way, we’ve always had a better shot at surviving. We can love and care for one each other, or not! History reminds us that the “not” is always there, lurking. Our desire to know and live is constrained only by some “divine reality” or our own will, or not!  

So are we then just the knowing species? Or can we be something more. Perhaps the “wisdom” species?

Wild humanity, all this wild talk and thinking and imagery, really boils down to whether we can be not just smart but also wise. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom.

We’ve hit upon the core theme of our Wild Globalization Project – knowledge, wisdom, and the wild future ahead. Stay tuned for coming attractions – Wild Economy, Wild Governance, Wild Wealth.

Watch the Video

Stay safe – it’s wild out there!

Watch the Video

Introduction

A Yosemite cave-fire and Milky Way Night Sky welcomes us back to our Wild Globalization Project. Today we’re talking about Wild Technology.

We’re asking, “How has the human race emerged from the fire and ice?” Where, as we learned in our Wild Demographics talk, just a few thousand humans survived a “demographic bottleneck” about 50,000 years ago. They somehow not only lasted, but lived on to be the fathers and mothers of all eight billion of us alive today. How did they do that? And how have we emerged to dominate the planet today?”

We and they survived and now thrive from our indominable will, and our unique ability to change nature, to come up with what we call here “hyper-natural” technologies. We became knowledge creatures. Humans, with our now elegant techs and tools, represent a new order of evolution.

So, “How does human tech shape our lives? How do invention and innovation transform us and planet Earth?”

We’re not just “techies” here. We’re also noticing how tech gets ahead of us, ahead of our common sense, our rational decision-making, and our ethical and moral sensibilities.

Take the smartphone. We hold the vast body of human knowledge – the arts…music…literature…science…religion…history – in our hands. We can see and talk with any other human on the planet who’s got one. But the same smart-phone seems like it’s also dumbing us down. Its social media is on us, it’s in our families, morphing our kids. In one generation, it’s created a new social order. The smartphone throws everything human, the good, the bad, and worse, the evil and ugly, back at us and we don’t know how to adjust. And now we learn that its batteries likely use cobalt scraped by hand by so-called “artisanal” miners – really, modern slaves – in the deep African Congo. Would any of us have got a cell phone if we had known that? But, then, how do we live without one now?

Tech is way ahead of us. It changes us before we know it. It’s ahead of our “better natures.” Tech is a double-edged sword.

So we’re taking on big questions. Like, “How does the world work, really? What’s going on?” We’re noticing that the human story is still evolutionary…and evolution is WILD!” We’re not out of the woods yet!

The WILD GLOBALIZATION PROJECT wonders if civilization's life-world doesn’t work more like a "BLACK BOX," what physicists call a “quantum entanglement.” Imagine a wild river, and then imagine many raging rivers over- and under- and inter-flowing together – a Wild Ecology River, a Wild Sex-Demographics River, a Wild Technology River, a Wild Economy River, then a Wild Wealth River, a Wild Governance River, and a Wild Culture River.

Each river is highly energetic, constantly changing, unstable, we can see it but it’s also working under the surface. Each momentum is difficult, if not impossible, to fully measure. We can guess what goes into the box, and we can observe, try to measure and respond to what comes out, but what happens inside that gives rise to the spontaneously emerging orders of life works more like this quantum entanglement – it advances ahead of our complete understanding, our common sense and rational governance, and most critically, our ethical response. It's...WILD!

But then, suddenly, a human launches into it and she’s riding a wild tech kayak and holding a wild tech paddle!

So where does Wild Globalization take us? What’s the endgame?

Here’s our “provocative statement:” “Humans have not emerged “from the wild.” We are wild Homo sapien. The wild is happening right here and now.

We’ve spread over the planet for 250,000 years. Our human “nature” has a history far deeper than smartphone intelligence and social media. We live in the throes of this quantum entanglement of ecologies, demographics and cultures, technologies, economies, governances, and wealth. To get here we’ve relied on two unique human abilities: Our critical thinking, OR NOT! And our ability to love and care for each other and the planet, OR NOT!  We’re trying to get at things from both inside and outside the box, and to somehow think it all at once. How is this entanglement affecting the planet, changing it? But then, how are we getting kicked around by it?”

Finally, we’re trying to stay sharply focused. It’s more about problems than answers. As tech entrepreneur, Uri Levine, suggests,

“We’re trying to fall in love with the problem…”

Uri Levine  

Like the kayaker, we’re launching into these wild flows that constantly breakdown and destroy, and yet, at the same time, that then spontaneously build and create the orders of life on Earth.”

From Ice and Fire…Technology and Innovation

“The only way to think about technology is in evolutionary terms.” - Joel Mokyr

Wild Globalization is itself a “wild” endeavor – maybe something like Thomas Edison’s electric light bulb.  Edison commented that,

“I haven’t failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” 

Didn’t Edison start with all sorts of nature’s wild ecology stuff? And then turn electricity into light? He invented…actually he finally stumbled upon…a hyper-natural device. That’s what humans do. And let’s give Edison credit for saving the whales because humans could stop burning whale oil for light! 

So, like Edison’s lightbulb, human technology appears in the paleo-record as a new emergent order of evolution. 

Surviving the deep ice and great volcanic fires, our proto-ancestors turned fire on itself long before – over a million years before – we were fully “human.” They used fire to protect themselves in the dark night, and they began to cook their food.

We survived then and thrive today because we are intelligent and innovative creatures. We are technological.

But what is “technology” and where did it come from? How can we think of tech in the human story? 

As we learned in Wild Sex and Demographics, our ancestors, over millions and thousands of years, started to do at least four things differently:  they walked upright (“bipedalism”) which evolved highly articulated hands with opposing-thumbs; our brains got much larger. The human physical body grew into a technologized being, able to think, gather knowledge, and make things. And with skilled hands and clever brains we developed team-working and communication that would lead us to advanced intelligence, language, and advanced culture.

Humans gradually imposed these evolutionary gains on the natural world. Advanced intelligence that first gathered knowledge, then saved it in language, and that turned that knowledge into sophisticated technologies, these are the phenomenal differentiators of Homo sapien. Humans are the wildest, most radical evolutionary ploy ever ventured by Nature herself. As Beth Shapiro describes us in her book, Life as We Made It:

“Within the last 50,000 years, our ancestors hunted, polluted, and outcompeted hundreds of species to extinction. They turned wolves into Boston terriers…and wild cabbage into kale, broccoli, cauliflower…Some species survived their encounters with humans, but many did not, and all were transformed in some way. Living things today are as we made them, shaped in part by the randomness of evolution and in part by less random human intent.”
Beth Shapiro, Life as We Made It, 2021

The Unconstrained Imagination

So we made things. Things made from Nature that changed Nature itself. Tools of the hunt and the kill and the fireside. 

Someone even came along and made the “atlatl.”

It’s just a stick. But “whittled,” shaped. Yet still…just a stick. Or not? It’s now, possibly, something different. It’s a tool. But the atlatl-stick is useless, itself, without the spear. Or the arm.

It’s now an “extension,” a kind of prosthesis – an add-on arm. It has no power, until, the hand and arm take hold of it. And then, voilà! The “atlatl-ed”-arm  is now a hyper-arm…!

The atlatl changes the human arm – but the arm itself has not changed. It’s still “natural.” Or is it? OK, alone, it’s the “same.” But with the atlatl and spear, not really. By taking hold of the atlatl, and the spear, the human arm now commands a radically new and synthetic power – it’s a “coming together” of Nature transformed by human ingenuity. Powerful because the atlatl-thrower can now stand far away from dangerous prey, or enemies, and the atlatl increases by 300% the spear’s velocity and lethality. The atlatl thrower is an entirely new evolutionary phenomenon. An innovation-order of evolution. 

So what’s “natural” or “un-natural” here? And what, if anything, do we gain by making the difference? OK, the whole game is different. We have the atlatl, lots more meat, and now everyone without the atlatl is running. Away. Quickly. Suddenly, we rule the neighborhood…at least for now – until the next big-small thing, the next atlatl-gadget, the next crossbow or canon or…atomic bomb…comes along… 

So we should wrestle with the “natural” question. That’s because technology gives us seemingly god-like powers over other creatures, over Nature, over our neighbors. God-like because technology is, more or less, unconstrained – we have to choose to control it. OR NOT! So the power of our tools and techs and weapons can make us, at least some of us, uneasy and uncomfortable “in our own skins.” Humans discover “conscience” as we confront the unconstrained ability of our intelligence and technologies to do good…or evil.   

History demonstrates how tech can change “civilized” humans into robot-like agents with an industrial capacity to mobilize modern evil. As Daniel Jonah Goldhagen tells us in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the 20^th century’s Nazi Third Reich mobilized “300,000 willing executioners.” That is, non-combatant, mostly middle-age “soldiers” – accountants, engineers, bakers, professors, musicians, doctors, lawyers – citizens of every vocation – in  an attempt to erase entire peoples and cultures (Daniel Jonah Goldhagen).

Here’s the conundrum: Whether we want to say that “Nature endowed us” with hyper-natural powers or, on the other hand, whether we say that humans fiendishly and unnaturally stole these powers from Nature – both might be plausible – the hard evolutionary fact is this: “…Here we are, with the atom bomb and the power to destroy creation many times over…So what do we do now…?”      

A more basic formulation of the problem might be this: 

Technology advances ahead of our ethical and common sense capacities to live with it, to manage it, to direct its best uses. That’s because tech, by definition, is designed to give us new-found and often untested powers to control or direct the natural world. Technology, brought into the world by an unrestrained human imagination, is itself unrestrained. The atlatl-ed mind has led us to the atomic cross-road where we have the power to destroy civilization and Earth as we know it. OR NOT!  

Nowhere is this more evident than in the 20^th century’s Manhattan Project, led by Robert Oppenheimer. The Project produced atom bombs that would extinguish in milliseconds nearly 200,000 Japanese lives in  Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet it’s rationally argued that the decision to use the weapon may have saved millions from the slaughter of an allied invasion. And it begs the further question: “What if the German Reich or Imperial Japan had gotten  the bomb ahead of the Americans?” We’ll never know. The debate speaks to the heart of our moral dilemma.  

Tech forces the human conscience to decide. Tech demands that the human ethical response restrain its power, OR NOT! As Oppenheimer himself later described the moment of the first Alamogordo test, quoting from the sacred Bhagavad Gita,

“ ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ ” – and he added, “I suppose we all thought that one way or another.”  
J. Robert Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer devoted the rest of his life to restraining atomic weapons.

Atomic technology shows us how the greatest technical challenge may not be innovation and invention. Rather, the challenge is how we work technology – whether the atom bomb or the cobalt in our lithium batteries – into the evolutionary moment in a pragmatic and caring way. Technology’s impact on our lives advances ahead of our ability to adjust to it.

Simply said, technology is wild.

Fogel’s Techno-Physio-Cultural Evolution

Nobel laureate Robert William Fogel formulated this wild entanglement of technology and civilization. He named it "techno-physio-cultural evolution." [GB1]  It’s a big deal and it’s taken over humanity in the last 250 years.

When humans get to growing and raising their food around 9,000 BCE, there’s maybe @10 million of us on the planet. In spite of more to eat, Fogel notes that populations don’t expand much, growing to just 500 million over the next 7,500 years. He notes,

“…It took four thousand years to go from the invention of the plow to figuring out how to hitch a plow up to a horse…but then it only took 65 years to go from the first flight of a heavier-than-air machine to landing on the moon…”
Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening, 2000.      

But are population numbers the only measure? In that span we see cities and urbanization begin. Irrigation and metallurgy appears. Then writing and mathematics. By the 7^th century Slavs and Germanic peoples had replaced crude wooden plows with the heavy iron plough, likely of Chinese origins, and tillable land expanded. Ancient Greece, Rome, China, and the Americas produce advanced civilizations. Brits and Europeans began to harness wind and water-power on a mass scale – England alone boasted over 6,500 water-powered mills by the 11^th century. Human populations survive horrific pandemics, including the 14^th century Black Death. Then the Europeans “discover” the Americas and trigger the beginning of modern globalization.  

But then human populations and technologies explode as the Second Ag Revolution and the Western Enlightenment moves over Britain and Europe by the 17^th century. Waves of new Ag-techs increase productivity  – the Norfolk crop rotation system, and the Dutch improve the Chinese plough again. National markets appear. Transportation modernizes – canals and roads connect farm to markets. Property rights and private land ownership increase efficiencies. The new Ag produces foodstuff bounties. Human numbers multiply, at first gradually but then exponentially, wildly.

More and easier food means some folks can get off the farm. More people are freed up to run governments and pursue commerce. When printing and publishing get moving in the 15^th century, curious folks start to research and experiment with the natural world. They communicate with other researchers and modern experimental science gains momentum. Others are free to solve problems which means innovating new gadgets, climaxing with James Watt’s steam engine that will power the new industrial age. The evolutionary rocket ship of practical and market deployed innovation launches what we now call “modernity.”

The modern age begins to generate entirely new opportunities – brilliant techs and new ways of doing things transform lives and lifestyles. But brilliance and brightness also cast shadows. As the pace and magnitude of change shifts life into a new gear based on research, innovation and knowledge, it also leaves some, even many, behind. Consequently by the 17^th-19^th centuries, Europe’s and Britain’s domestic productivities have surged wildly ahead of the great Chinese and Indian economies that remain primarily agricultural.  

So why did all this change get started in the West, in Britain and Europe? And how could it have sprung from the ‘Dark Ages?’ ”

Two possible takes:

First, the Dark Ages were made horrific by the terrible pandemics and famines that swept over Europe and Eurasia from the 6^th to 14^th centuries. Populations were decimated. Radical change became commonplace. Yet in spite of the demographic destruction, Europeans were building things like universities and great cathedrals  – over 143 universities stood by the end of the 18^th century.  And over six hundred cathedrals stand today – Notre Dame de Paris was completed in the 13^th century. 

Second, Europe’s culture was comprised of diverse peoples and languages that competed, often violently, with one another. They got on by gradually innovating – and sometimes “stealing” and improving on other’s inventions – new technologies: gunpowder for cannons, printing and publishing spread knowledge, clocks appeared to coordinate urban living, the compass improved navigation, better wagons and roads brought goods to markets, and as we noted above, wind and water-powered techs had spread prolifically. During these Middle Ages, the Europeans had also got to trading goods in markets and making techs available for more and more folks

In fact many of the key techs had come from China centuries before. But Chinese governance had kept the  innovations away from their peoples and markets. Diedre McCloskey, in her book, Bourgeois Dignity, gives Chairman Mao’s reflective account of how Europe got way ahead of, or China way behind, everyone else:

"Our fathers were indeed wise. They invented printing, but not newspapers. They invented gunpowder, but used it only for fireworks. Finally, they invented the compass, but took care not to use it to discover America."

Diedre McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity, 2010.  

So tech is not just about clever gadgets. It’s about markets and getting the new techs out to the folks.

Yes, markets! Bitter controversy raises its head when we talk about “markets.” Or “capitalism!” But so-called “capitalism” appears to be inevitable and evolutionary in the practical historical record. Mao eluded to this and his buddy, Deng Xiaoping, finally opened China to globalizing markets in the late 20^th century.

Deng was a practical leader, a “pragmatist.” He’s famous for saying, “I don’t care if the cat is white or the cat is black, if the cat can catch the mouse!” Deng was merely acknowledging that capitalism and markets have emerged in the evolutionary order because they most dynamically unleash the wild energies of new technologies, what Joseph Schumpeter called the “incessant gale of creative destruction.” Joseh Schumpeter It’s just no surprise that when so-called “free market commerce” gets moving it exposes all the good and evil that have beset wild humanity forever – greed and prosperity, the powerful and the weak, more people but ecosystems at risk, elegant gadgets but lots of folks left behind. Capitalism and “free” markets are as wild as anything human.

Summary

This is the rocket we’re riding. It’s Nature’s new wild human pace of change.

In 1999, John Chambers, whose Cisco Systems help build the Internet, observed:

“The internet will change everything. The industrial Revolution brought together people with machines in factories…the Internet Revolution will bring together people with knowledge and information…it will have as much impact on society as the Industrial Revolution. It will promote globalization at an incredible pace. But instead of happening over a hundred years, like the Industrial Revolution, it will happen over seven years.”

John Chambers, 1999

Does anyone remember what life was like before the Internet?

To tie this together, Wild Tech wonders if or how the new “artificial intelligence” tech, or “A.I.,” can have a moral compass, a conscience. If our thesis is on point, that human civilization lives in this  quantum entanglement, how does AI “live” that? Can A.I. care?  

Human intelligence and conscience, we suggest, are unconstrained and so we are uneasy with ourselves. We live a native, wild angst in our hearts and souls. This uneasiness has grown exponentially with the rise of modern technology.

Tech is wild. It’s way ahead of us. Civilization’s and globalization’s technologies emerged from the wilderness. They continue to create their own wilderness.

Watch the Video

So, this “Wild Technology” YouTube video is one of a suite of “Wild Globalization” YouTube videos. Visit  www.substack.wildglobalization.com for transcripts or our website at www.wildglobalization.com.

Watch the Video

Introduction

Welcome back to the Wild Globalization Project. Today we’re talking about Wild Sex, Demographic… and Culture.

We’re asking, “How are human demographics wild?” (We threw “sex” in there to get your attention.) So, really, “How do the flows of populations and peoples – their languages... beliefs…their ways – drive  our 21^st century globalizing civilization? In the big picture, we’re asking, “What’s going on? …How does the world work?" “We are saying that history is evolutionary…and evolution is wild!”

To recall, the WILD GLOBALIZATION PROJECT is wondering if civilization's life-world might not work more like a "BLACK BOX," what modern physics calls a “quantum entanglement.” So, think of rush hour commuters moving in and out or around a modern global city every day – say London’s or New York’s one million commuters, or the 25 million who ride New Delhi’s metro – see their faces, their manners and dress, or listen to them chat about their lives and family, their dreams and fears. If you could see or imagine all those scenes and folks, all at once, what would be your sense, your impression of this human “race?”

So we’re interested in how the human race flows like a wild confluence of rivers – today that means 7,000 indigenous peoples and languages, 195 nations, ten thousand cities, and now eight billion of us roaming the Earth.

For example, look back at the 20^th century. It opened with the promise of a new global prosperity, with burgeoning populations and exciting techs – automobiles, electricity, continental railroads, and telephones. But then “something happened” – the century collapsed into global chaos, warfare, pandemic, and tragically, genocide and environmental destruction – 70-100 million lost in warfare, 50 million in the 1918 global flu pandemic.

But then the century’s second half seemed to pivot. In spite of nuclear and cold war threats, a re-globalizing order brought a “rising tide” of foodstuff abundance, the eradication of many diseases, more nations working together – trading, engaged in global commerce, and building new economic alliances. The Cold War ended. Yet  the century’s second half also witnessed millions lost to warfare and wild governance “cultural revolutions” and “leaps forward.” The 20^th century was really a see-saw battle between creation (new techs, new economies, more people) and destruction (extreme geo-political-economic breakdowns, famine, warfare).  

So here’s our “provocative statement:”

“Humans have not emerged “from the wild.” We are wild Homo sapien. The wild is happening right here and now. We’ve spread over the planet for 250,000 years. Our human “nature” has a history far deeper than smartphone intelligence and social media. We live in the throes of this quantum entanglement of ecologies, demographics and cultures, technologies, economies,  governances, and wealth.

To get here we’ve relied on two unique human abilities: First, our ability for social learning and critical thinking, OR NOT! Secondly, our ability to love and care for each other and the planet, OR NOT!

We’re trying to get at things from both inside and outside the “box,” and to somehow think it all at once. How are these entanglements affecting the planet, changing it? And how are we getting kicked around by them?

Finally, we’re observing how globalization and civilization race ahead of our critical thinking, our ethical response, and our common sense. We live in their flows but we also create many of their momentums, momentums that constantly build up, and at the same time, that can breakdown and destroy the orders of life on Earth.”

So today we’re asking, “What’s going on with wild human demographics and cultures in this 21^st century?” “What can we, or should we, do about it?”

Finally, we’re keen on, as Uri Levine suggests, “…falling in love with the problem…” rather than getting quick answers. Uri Levine  Our Wild Globalization discussion even takes it a step further to say: “…If you’re not paying attention to the problem, living it, even falling in love with the problem, you are part of the problem.”

What is Wild Sex and Demographics?

Wild Demographics: Sex, Violence…and “Hyper-natural” Human Evolution

“SEX…violence……the “human wave” – demographics studies the flow and birth-rates of populations over time.  So we can ask, “How are human demographics evolutionary?”

“Sex” seems obvious…or not! When American GIs came home from WWII they had babies, 80 million “baby boomers.” As economist and demographer, Harry Dent, observes:

“When 80 million baby boomers – 10,000 a day – started buying starter homes in the 1970s, housing prices skyrocketed at twice the rate of inflation. Birth charts tell us decades in advance when new generations of consumers will move through predictable spending cycles.  …If you remember nothing else, remember this:  sex drives our economy – and that’s precisely why economists have never figured it out, and probably never will! 

 Harry Dent, The Roaring 2000s, 1998 

And "violence" runs wild in the human story. As the American evolutionary biologist, Beth Shapiro, describes it:

By 700,000 years ago, lineages belonging to the genus Homo were distributed from Africa across Europe and Asia.…Today, every Homo lineage apart from our own is extinct…our ancestors killed off all the others in Africa, left Africa for Europe where they killed off the Neanderthals, and then spread across the rest of the world killing off whatever remnant populations of non-sapien humans they encountered. …Within the last 50,000 years, our ancestors hunted, polluted, and outcompeted hundreds of species to extinction. They turned wolves into Boston terriers… and wild cabbage into kale, broccoli, cauliflower…Some species survived their encounters with humans, but many did not, and all were transformed in some way. Living things today are as we made them, shaped in part by the randomness of evolution and in part by less random human intent.”

Beth Shapiro, Life as We Made It, 2021

Globalizing civilization has emerged from “wild” human demographics. To survive, humans innovated scarce resources and began to change our world. Through trial, much error and failure, and what we now call “social learning,” humans survived and then thrived by accumulating and building on collective knowledge over 250,000 years and ten thousand generations. Humans became knowledge creatures. They were naturally curious and clever.

But they were also driven, often in desperation, by an indominable will to live. So they invented a new and different order of life. Humans represent the spontaneous emergence of a new order of evolution itself. Let me say that again: “Humans are a new order of evolution.” Their new ways sped up the pace of evolution. But this human version wasn’t “un”-natural. It was endowed by Nature herself. We became “hyper”-natural – nature on steroids. 

To survive, humans did at least four things differently:  First, they started to walk and run upright (“bipedalism”); Second, with their hands free, they evolved opposing thumbs and digital motor skills; Third, their brains grew larger (“encephalization”); Finally, with these new capabilities they developed survival-driven team-working and language.  Knowledge-gathering intelligence expressed in language are the phenomenal differentiators of Homo sapien, and the wildest, most radical evolutionary ploy ever ventured by Nature herself. 

We survived, in part, by spreading over the planet. Humans are “globalizers” – we’ve taken over the planet, at least for now.

Planet Earth, however, can strike back. Recall the “demographic bottleneck” mentioned a minute ago: the genome data tells us that humans emerged from just a few thousand individuals about 50,000 years ago. Some ecological event or series of events triggered a devastating population loss. Most everyone disappeared. We all live today because of those few survivors.

The bottleneck instructs how human populations, like the dinosaurs, are always at risk to Nature’s wild ecology, to climate, volcanoes, to solar storms or meteors. The Toba super-volcano eruption @74,000 years ago ejected as much as 190 cubic miles or 800 cubic kilometers of sulfuric ash into Earth’s atmosphere causing a global winter. Habitats would have been threatened or destroyed. The 1815 Tambora eruption triggered famines and typhus pandemics In Ireland and Europe. Our 21st century Earth is not quiet – America’s Yellowstone threatens today. And because we’ve become entangled in global supply-chains, we may be at wilder risk than we can know.

Human population flows are wild…and we’ll see in a moment how populations are as wild, or wilder, than ever.

Wild 21^st Century Demographics: Cities, Child Labor, System “D”

Millions moving to cities…

In the 21^st century, human civilization and demographics have gotten wilder, even dicey and dangerous. We are seeing war break out like volcanic eruptions – Afghanistan, Yemen, Ukraine, and now Israel. We see “Great Financial Crises” (bank failures, hyper-inflation, out-0f-control government debt), and now energy chaos, and global pandemics.

And then, urbanization…cities. Most of us take urban life for granted – 80% of Americans live in cities when just a hundred years ago only 15% of us lived in cities. And in just two more decades, around 2050, it’s expected that 75 percent of the entire global population will dwell in cities.

It’s gets wilder.  Every week over one million people are moving into cities, mostly in China, India, Southeast Asia, and Africa. China is building 300 cities. In 2006 the planet crossed the 50% threshold, with more than half of the world’s peoples now living in cities. (Geoffrey West, Scale)

So why are cities and urbanization so important?

Physicist, Geoffrey West, of the Santa Fe Institute, sums it up like this:

“Cities are the crucible of civilization…urbanization has been expanding at an exponential rate in the last 200 years…Cities impact on the environment, health, pollution, disease, finance, economies, energy -- they're all problems that are confronted by having cities…the tsunami of problems and sustainability questions we are facing are actually a reflection of the exponential increase in urbanization across the planet.”

Geoffrey West, Ted Talks

Cities can look like this – so Nairobi, Africa, at night… and then they can look like Nairobi’s Kibera migrant neighborhood. In fact, two different civilizations. Side by side.

Cities are at the heart of global economics and culture.

The Stealth Economy - System “D”

In this century, global cities and global labor move hand in glove. And they’re both wilder than ever.

So today half of the 21^st century global economy is, as Robert Neuwirth observes:

“…the l’economie de la débrouillardise…or, sweetened for street use, ‘Systeme D.’ This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy…It used to be that System D was small – a handful of market women selling a handful of shriveled carrots to earn a handful of pennies.  It was the economy of desperation.  But as trade has expanded and globalized, System D has scaled up too.  Today, System D is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)…concluded that half the workers of the world – close to 1.8 billion people – were working in System D:  off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes.”

Robert Neuwirth, The Stealth of Nations

So why are these millions migrating to cities? The System D economy is an emerging and spontaneous version of modern urban civilization – it captures the same perils above – disease, pollution, energy demands. But for its travelers it also represents a new destination of risk and opportunity, freedom and possibility, and the chance to make things happen. Geoffrey West formula adds that, “…cities are also the vacuums and the magnets that have sucked up creative people, creating ideas, innovation, wealth…” And instead of happening over 150 years and maybe six generations, like it did in Europe and America, it’s happening in just 50 years and one or two generations.

In a nutshell, folks are seeking “wealth…prosperity…” They represent the omnipresent, emerging, grass roots global economy. Proctor and Gamble reports that most of their new market share comes from their ability to penetrate the micro-kiosks and street businesses of System D. And as System D folks gather in urban centers, they can also be seen spontaneously creating local mini-governances, micro-businesses, and neighborhood infrastructures for streets, water, sanitation. And as we’ll explore in Wild Governance, they’re trying very hard to avoid “big” formal government control and taxation. Half the world’s workers live here. Watch our Wild Economy and Wild Governance YouTubes for more on this.   

21^st Century Demographic Reversal

Finally, wild human populations may astonish us even more because the “too many people” problem is now morphing into “too many old and not enough young people.” It’s called a “demographic reversal” and it’s caused by  negative birthrates.

Still, by 2050 the global population is projected to reach 10 billion.  However, as the graph here shows the Global population is actually aging – notice the lower three white bars, age 0-14. They’re shrinking. A “normal” population pyramid would look more like the age 35-44 and then up.

This is a big deal. Birthrates have been negative in Europe and Japan for some time. They’re tending lower in the U.S. China’s birthrate may have gone negative 10 years ago – the most recent census over-counted its population by as many 100 million people.

What’s causing this, and why is it a problem? The answer is urbanization – when one million people move off farms and into cities every week they simply don’t need, or want, as many kids. There won’t be enough young people to pay taxes and take care of their aging parents and grandparents.

It’s a big deal for the global economy as well. The recent 1990-2020 “hyper-globalization” was mobilized by the plentiful and low cost labor supply in countries like China. That’s changing. Quickly.

So the 21st century faces a two-pronged demographic challenge: First, the total population will continue to grow. But at the same time there won’t be as many young workers for labor markets. As Goodhart and Pradhan observe in their book, The Great Demographic Reversal,

The danger facing the global economy is precisely that the economies that have dominated global growth are facing the biggest demographic challenges. And that means even if the world as a whole still faces substantial population growth going forward, the economies that shaped global growth for the last 35 years are the ones which bear the brunt of the demographic headwinds.”

Charles Goodhart & Manoj Pradhan, The Great Demographic Reversal

So 21^st century demographics are advancing ahead of our governance, common sense, and our ethical response. Moving and hiding in and between the planet’s cities we find human trafficking and child labor on a global scale. The International Labour Organization estimates that the 21^st century global economy captures as many as 160 million children in its labor mills, half in hazardous work. International Labour Organization  System D may try to stay outside formal governance, but it’s integrated into the high-tech, high-complexity economy anyway – in 2021 75% of the cobalt in our smartphones or EV batteries was sourced from “artisanal,” slave-like open-pit mines in Africa’s Democratic Republic of Congo.  

Summary

Quick summary: populations live in crisis.

And yet, at least for now, humans are prospering. Some facts:

• From 1950 to 2020 the population-weighted average global income per person rose from $4,158 to $16,904 or +307%.

• From 1960-2017 average global life expectancy rose from 52.6 years 72.4 years; in China, from 44 to 76 years; in India from 41 to 69 years; sub-Saharan Africa from 40 to 61 years.

• Between 1990 and 2018, global infant mortality fell 55%; in Africa, 51%; in China 91%.

• From 1961 to 2017, the average per day food supply per person rose from 2,000 to nearly 3000 calories, or +38%; in China +126%; in India +25%. 
  
  Superabundance, Marian Tupy & Gale Pooley

So listen on to our Wild Culture YouTube – it’s the second half of our Wild Sex-Demographics-Culture talk. And it tells the story of how wild populations, all starting from the small band of humans 50,000 years ago, now span the globe, life in the hearts and souls of 7,000 indigenous peoples and languages, in 195 nations, ten thousand cities, and now eight billion of us roaming the Earth.

Watch the Video

That’s it for now…take care – it’s wild out there!

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Introduction

Welcome back to the Wild Globalization Project. Today we’re talking about Wild Ecology.

We’re asking, “How is the ecology wild?” “How might the bounties, and the risks, of the Earth’s ecology drive human civilization? How do humans fit in? So, really, we’re asking, “What’s going on? …How does the world work?"

Our WILD GLOBALIZATION PROJECT is wondering if civilization's life-world might in fact work like a "BLACK BOX." In modern physics this is called a “quantum entanglement.”

Imagine a wild river, but then imagine several divergent rivers crashing and flowing together – An Ecology River… …A Sex-Demographics-Culture River…a Technology River…an Economy River…then a Governance River.  Each has its own origin and force. Each is carving out canyons, destroying and then building the world back up again. All are wildly inter-, over- and under-flowing, at once, in a total, surging momentum.

Rivers are a Wild Ecology story. They reveal the Earth’s watery bounties, and her risks. Humans have taken these bounties and changed the natural world – according to the World Wildlife Fund, only a third of the Earth’s rivers today are “free-flowing.”  World Wildlife Fund  Why is that? It turns out that humans like to eat. And since agriculture began 8-9,000 years ago, human numbers have grown from just two million to eight billion. And we’re healthier and have more to eat than ever. So we need lots of water to grow lots more food. Water gets dammed up and diverted in every way possible. Here in Colorado, 80% of our precious water goes to agriculture.

Wild, free-flowing rivers are powerful and magnificent. But this human quantum entanglement is even wilder…and flowing more freely. The wildest river in the 21^st century may be the sacred Jordan River that runs through the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic Holy Lands – wild because, as we speak, it again marks the flashpoint of ancient religious hatreds, bitter fighting, unspeakable atrocities, and the risk of global war. In our quantum entangled world, the Jordan is no longer just a river.

But then, to add to your daydream by the river…wait a minute…there goes a human, steaking by…and…she’s riding…a…KAYAK! Where did she come from…or the kayak…or the paddle?

So where does that leave us? What do we have to work with?

We’re observing that humans have evolved from the natural world by virtue of two more or less unconstrained, unique abilities.

First, we can be smart…OR NOT!  Nature has given us – and we’ve worked at it – the ability to think and alter the world around us – someone did come up with the kayak and the paddle! We bundle these abilities under “Science.”

Second, we can love and care for each other and the planet…OR NOT! Humans have the capacity to do good or evil for humanity and planet Earth – we bundle these abilities under our “spirituality,” or, for many, our “faith or religious traditions.”

So we’re asking big questions, questions that probe our intelligence and our conscience. Like, “What is globalization? What do we mean by these “rivers,” these “flows”? – Ecology? Sex-Demographics-Culture? Tech? Economy? Governance? “How can humanity and the Earth survive in this 21^st century?” “What’s going on?” And, “What can we, or should we, do about it?”

Wild Globalization doesn’t claim to have simple answers…or any answers at all! As tech entrepreneur, Uri Levine, suggests, we’re just trying to “…fall in love with the problem.” Uri Levine  We’re trying to come up with conversations – OK, maybe some healthy arm-wrestling – that might lead us to, let’s just say, better critical thinking.

Our “provocative statement” is this: “Humans have not just emerged “from the wild.” We are wild Homo sapien, and we’ve spread ourselves over the planet for 250,000 years. The wild is happening right here and now.

We’re living this quantum entangled set of momentums. To get to the 21^st century, we’ve relied on our critical thinking, but really our persistent re-thinking. Our project is trying to live it and think it from inside and outside the “box.” From  different angles and takes: Ecology…Culture…Tech…Economy…Governance. And somehow think it all at once. How is this  entanglement affecting the planet, changing it? But then, how are we getting kicked around by it? Like the kayaker, we’re launching into these wild, entangled flows of energy that constantly create and build, and at the same time that breakdown and destroy, the orders of life on Earth.”

This Wild Ecology YouTube video is part of a suite of several “Wild Globalization” talks. Click the link below to watch the video now.

Watch the Video

What is Wild Ecology?

“Ideas are peaceful. History is violent.”

Tank Commander Don “Wardaddy” Collier, in the 2014 movie, Fury

Our globalizing life-world lives in a “wild,” and violent, ecology.

Blue, watery, planet Earth, glistening, resilient in her Solar System - Milky Way Galaxy - Universal dark home, is carried by uneven momentums of an original “Big Bang” event.

"Warriors sang their "brave song" Hóka hé! This life will not last forever...Take courage, the Earth is all that lasts...!"

Oglala Native War Cry

We still live in the Big Bang’s “hidden” energy  that sounds like a quiet “hiss” on radar. This leftover energy was discovered serendipitously in 1965 by two Bell Lab astronomers when they were cleaning bird poop from their radars – as Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan describes it,

“It took a while for them to figure out that what they were hearing was the trace vibrations of the birth of the universe, the cosmic microwave background radiation (“CMB”).”

Nassim Nicolas Taleb

So where do humans, Homo sapiens, fit in?  If Earth’s 4.5 billion year history were imagined in a 365 day year, then we’ve been around for about 250-500,000 years, or roughly an hour. We’re barely a blip on the geologic clock:

The Wild Globalization Project considers Wild Ecology from deep and original “big orders” which make, or can break, life on Earth: Energy Orders; Big Climate, Super-Volcanoes, and Dark Matter.  

Earth’s Energy Orders

Mark Mills and Peter Huber tell the story of “energy orders”: 

“Starting from nothing 4 billion years ago, life somehow contrived to capture high-grade energy from here and there and used it to assemble more life — so successfully, in fact, that life, a very complex form of order, now covers the planet. A second chain reaction of increasing order got started with the dawn of agriculture, about eight thousand years ago. Human societies began selectively planting and breeding crops to capture solar energy systematically, and they used the expanding supplies of energy mainly to breed more people, who planted more crops. Humanity’s total energy consumption doubled about every five to ten centuries, in step with the (slowly) rising population.”

Huber & Mills

Energy is a big story. To understand Earth’s 4-5 billion year stream of life we have to think beyond raw energy itself and talk about energy ordering, or the capture and organizing of energy concentrations. We actually live in an energy oasis that continues to gather energy.

So what is “energy order?” In 2003 total U.S. raw energy consumption (oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, wood) was equal to @100 thermal “quads” – a quad is one quadrillion British Thermal Units or “BTUs. However, only 6 quads actually achieved “highly ordered” status that could power our lives and devices – the other 94% was consumed in finding and getting the energy to us – so the “ordering” of energy itself.

 21^st Century Homo sapiens have climbed to the apex of the Earth’s energy and food supply chains. But that also means we’re almost totally dependent on those supply-chains. We survive and thrive, or not, in an energy-food-chain that works like this:

Earth’s vegetation gathers the Sun’s energy >>>

Herbivores eat plants and capture @10% of plant-energy >>>

                    Humans live on mostly the herbivores and vegetables >>>

                              Apex humans convert food energy into intelligent “knowledge.”
Or not!

Thomas Sowell, the brilliant American economist, sums it up when he observes that,

“The cave peoples had the same natural resources at their disposal that we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge we use today.”

Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, 1996

Knowledge of energy order, then, is the key. Modern physics’ First Law of Thermodynamics makes clear that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be “transferred,” as in the transfer of heat or temperature between systems. Energy can also be reserved, as in the bonds between the hydrogen and carbon atoms of the hydrocarbon molecule. When the atomic bonds are disturbed and broken, heat (energy) is released.  

The Hubble and Webb space telescopes are watching the ebb and flow and creation of the Universe, virtually from the Big Bang. But they’re really watching the flow of energy. And if the First Law is correct, there’s really no more energy available today than at the beginning of the Universe. We’ve just figured out how to exploit Nature’s order of energy resources.

Energy order and efficiency usually improve over time. Modern passenger aircraft are three times more efficient than earlier models. But here’s a catch. More efficiency means lower cost so more folks can fly around. Better aircraft haveincreasedenergy demand.  Our smartphones and laptops are far more efficient than earlier versions. Still, as Mark Mills reminds us, “The global information infrastructure…which didn’t exist just decades ago…now uses twice as much electricity as the entire country of Japan…” Mark Mills, The Cloud Revolution, 2021

So human energy demand is increasing. In 1990, 70% of people had electricity. Today, and with 3 billion more of us running around, 87% have it. Amazing! But nearly a billion folks are still waiting for it.

And human energy ordering can always improve – we’re still getting 3 times as much energy from burning wood as we are from the new wind and solar techs.

 The bottom line is this: Since the Industrial Revolution began in the 1800’s, the order and size of civilization has exploded. Exponentially. From a billion to 8 billion people on the planet. All demanding energy. The secret sauce of it all is that we’ve mobilized high-energy technologies into globalizing markets. We can’t overlook how it’s all powered by the incessant human demand for energy.

As the futurist thought-leader, Alfin Toffler, reminds us,

“The precondition of any civilization, old or new, is energy.”
Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, 1980 

“Big” Climate

Ice…Optimums…Wild Climatology…Solar Storms…

So let’s talk about ‘Big Climate.”

James Croll, who lived from 1821-1890, was a 19^th century insurance agent, hotel manager, and then museum janitor at Glasgow’s Andersonian University in Scotland.

Croll was also a self-educated scientist who thought about “big climate.” He noticed three changes, or “oscillations,” in the Earth’s movement as it orbits the Sun. First, Earth’s elliptical orbit oscillates in roughly 100,000 cycles. Second, Earth’s axis spin or “precession” oscillates in @21-26,000 year cycles. Finally, the Earth’s tilt varies in 41,000 year cycles. Croll thought that these cycles triggered significant variations in how the Sun’s energy is absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere, variations that can cause “big climate” swings, indeed, thousands of year swings, including ice ages. Croll’s theory was finally verified in 1976 by the Serbian scientist, Milutin Milanković and today scientists study the Milankovitch Cycles:

“Big” climate has changed wildly over time. The study of climate may be even wilder.

Meteorologists track roughly 150-200 years of weather-data. They are especially concerned about the industrial age’s warming “greenhouse effect” caused by carbon dioxide (C02) emissions into the atmosphere as humans burn coal, oil, and natural gas. If you’ve skied Colorado the past 50 years you just know it’s warmer.

And then there’s climate science’s other data-set, paleoclimatology, or “old climate.” Paleo-climatologists study prehistoric climate – data from thousands, even millions of years ago. Data that tracks the Milankovitch Cycles. And the ice ages. From a wider angle view, they’re reminding us of the remarkable fact that all of human civilization’s 10,000 year climb out of the stone ages has happened during an “interglacial climate optimum,” so the 10-15,000 year periods between ice ages when Earth’s climate warms up and the ice pulls back.

Ice ages have been around for at least two, but maybe even 40 million years. And, as a 2016 Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research describes them,

“Like no other force on the planet, ice ages have shaped the global environment and thereby determined the development of human civilization.” 

Just 20,000 years ago, the 10,000 foot deep Laurentide Ice Shelf covered Canada and carved out the Great Lakes. How would 8 billion humans survive, or grow enough crops, under a new ice age?

But wait a minute – it may be getting even wilder! That same Potsdam study suggests that together both Nature along with humans burning stuff may allow the Earth to skip the next ice age: They speculate that

“Even without human climate change we would expect the beginning of a new ice age no earlier than in 50,000 years from now… However… relatively moderate additional human-caused CO2-emissions are already sufficient to postpone the next ice age for another 50,000 years [so] we are basically skipping a whole glacial cycle…It is mind-boggling that humankind is able to interfere with a mechanism that shaped the world as we know it.”
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

Wild “big” climate, indeed!

And, it turns out, C02, carbon dioxide, may not be all bad. CO2 helps us grow lots more food. As we noticed above, humans need lots more food. Craig Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change reminds us how thousands of laboratory and field studies demonstrate that higher levels of CO2 significantly improve crop production:

“As the CO2 concentration of the air continues to rise in the future, this positive externality of enhanced crop production will benefit society in the years, decades and even centuries to come.”
Craig Idso, The Positive Externalites of Carbon Dioxide, 2013

Healthier plants need less water so it’s good for our wild rivers. Bottom line: C02 may warms things up…but it also appears to grow more food with less water.  

To be clear, we’re not taking sides here.  It’s clear that climate is a big deal, especially as human emotions and politics get mixed in. But we’re wondering if folks are reading all the data-sets?  

The climate sciences, it turns out, cover a wide and growing range of subdisciplines. Climate science is really a quantum entanglement of data and competing knowledge. No single scientist or study has it figured out. Robert Carter, the Australian paleo-climatologist, cites at least one hundred climate change subdisciplines and he observes that, after a lifetime of distinguished labor in the field, he can claim expertise in no more than two or three. (Robert Carter).

For perspective, look at John Garrett’s one million year snapshot of Hominid evolution.

Civilization emerges in the Holocene warm period, the vertical green blip in the lower right. The chart’s top, green half tracks the one hundred century run from agriculture to industrialization and our 21^st century. But also notice the wild temperature changes on the bottom graph, which tracks the last million years. It’s wild climate, wild climate optimums, and wild human evolution – from ice and fire and goats to atomic energy and smartphones in just 10,000 years.

But wait! There’s also the Sun’s “big” climate to consider. We’re all excited about solar energy. But the Sun is crazy wild. Consider the 1859 Carrington “geomagnetic storm” of solar radiation that rained over the Earth and was so powerful it took down electric and telegraph services.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:X-class_flare_Aug._9,_2011.ogv Attribution: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A Carrington event in today’s complex, micro-processed world would destroy satellites, communication and power grids everywhere – so your car, your smartphone, your laptop could all be toast! Bill Murtagh, director of the Space Weather Prediction Center here in  Boulder, Colorado, admitted that

“a Carrington level event could be catastrophic for Earth…and we’ll not even get a long enough warning to prepare ourselves.”
HT Tech, 08-31-2022

“Big” Fire - Volcanism

Next, consider volcanoes and especially super-volcanoes that randomly dot Earth’s landscape, hide under her oceans, and violently threaten life on Earth. The 1980 Mt. St. Helens event was the largest in U.S. history, but on the Volcanic Explosivity Index it’s just a fraction of Pinatubo (10X greater in 1991) or Tambora (100X greater in 1815) or  America’s Yellowstone (1000X 640,000 years ago) (Matt Volz, AP).

Yes, Yellowstone, the largest known volcano on the planet, just up the road from here.[GB1]   It’s at least 2-3 million years old, so humans have lived through its violent eruptions.   

What’s a super-volcano eruption like? A super-volcano event ejects cubic miles of volcanic materials like sulfuric gases into the atmosphere. This can then cause “volcanic winters” which trigger loss of habitats and the sudden disruption of food supply chains. Famines to be concise. The 1815 Tambora event may have taken as many as 100,000 Irish and 200,000 Europeans from famine and the ensuing typhus pandemic.  

The simple Wild Ecology fact is that 21^st century humans, living in our global food and energy supply chains, and now dependent on fragile technologies – remain at far wilder risk than we may realize.

Wild Darkness

Finally, energy, climate and fire are just what we see in the visible light spectrum. Apparently, darkness and “dark matter” make up everything else.

The Apollo missions revealed stunning images of the Earth from space. What do we see? Most will notice blue, watery Earth suspended in "space." But consider the more elusive "background” – the vast, really unimaginable reach of the universe itself. The darkness hiding in plain sight.

The wildest fact of all may be that, apparently, that’s where most of the Universe’s stuff, its “matter,” lives. Vera Rubin, the brilliant 20^th century American astrophysicist, devoted a good part of her career convincing her colleagues that “dark” matter probably makes up most of the physical universe:

“Astronomers thought they were studying the Universe…and now we learn we are just studying the 5% or 10% that is luminous.”

Vera Rubin, Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters, 1996

Wild Ecology Takeaways

So what are our Wild Ecology takeaways?

It appears that the wild universe hides in a “dark fullness.” Wild Ecology’s ice ages and solar storms also hide in Earth’s history, and super-volcanoes hide beneath our feet.

Forces are hiding in other times and spaces of the Wild Globalization landscape. Our YouTube talks that follow track Wild Culture’s “demographic reversal,” and after America’s 9/11 and now Israel’s October 7^th we must talk about global human culture’s “wild religions.” We’ll also track Wild Technology’s 2001 Space Odessey’s “Hal, the A.I. guy.” We’ll dive into Wild Economy’s “stealth or shadow economy” where half the world works outside of government controls. Finally, we’ll take on Wild Governance’s massive public debt crisis that’s also hiding in plain sight – trillions of U.S. dollars, Japanese yen, Chinese yuan, and Euro’s that represent promises global governments have no idea how to pay.  

As we try to fall in love with the problem we wonder, “How can humanity, or really us “folks” on the street, living in this wildness, have a conscience or an ethical compass?”

Green energy appears elegant, surely “cleaner” than fossil fuels. But we’re learning that

“…a single 1,000 pound EV battery requires digging up 500,000 pounds of raw materials.”
Mark Mills, If you Want 'Renewable Energy,' Get Ready to Dig, 2019 

Or Siddharth Kara tells us how our lithium-battery-powered culture uses cobalt that’s mostly dug up by the hands of slave-like “artisanal” miners in crude, open-pit mines of the African Congo (Siddharth Kara).

How is that ecological, or ethical? Do these “facts” make us uneasy? Would we have gotten a smartphone if we’d known that? But, then, how do we live without our smartphones now?  

We’ll track how wildly innovating and “hyper-natural” humans have pushed the natural world into wonderful but also horrific realities – atomic energy but also atomic bombs, marvelous creations of music and art – but our same human race has also produced genocide, holocausts, and ecological disasters. How do we square that?

The startling insight here is that our seemingly clever, scientific, and globalizing civilization races ahead of our common sense, our critical thinking, and our rational governance. And tragically, ahead of our ethical response.

So here’s an early takeaway: We underestimate the unconstrained force of this wildness at our own, and the Earth’s, risk. Humans have not just emerged “from the wild.” We are wild Homo sapien. The wild is happening right here and now. We’re living this quantum entangled set of momentums. We’re asking how it is affecting the planet, changing it, and how are we getting kicked around by it? Like the kayaker, we’re launching into these wild, entangled flows of energy that constantly create and build, and at the same time that breakdown and destroy, the orders of life on Earth. Hang on!”

Watch the Video

If we’ve peaked your interest, or your passion, or your angst, this “Wild Ecology” YouTube is just the second in a suite of several introductory “Wild Globalization” YouTubes. Go to www.substack.wildglobalization.com for transcripts or to our web site at www.wildglobalization.com.

Wild Ecology… Wild Sex, Demographics & Culture… Wild Technology… Wild Economy… Wild Governance… Wild 21^st Century Wealth.

Our Provocative Statement

Welcome to the Wild Globalization Project! So, What is “globalization? How does it drive and shape civilization? “What’s going on? …How does the world work?"

The 20th century opened with the promise of prosperity and fantastic new technologies – the automobile, electricity, continental railroads, and telephones – it then collapsed into chaos, warfare, pandemic, genocide, holocausts, environmental destruction – 70 million lost in global wars, 50 million in the 1918 global flu pandemic.

But the second 50 years, in spite of nuclear and cold war threats, seemed to bring a new, re-globalizing order, a “rising tide” of wealth over poverty, foodstuff abundance, and even more amazing technologies.

Today, in our 21st century, wealth and populations are exploding – a hundred trillion of gross domestic product (and that’s just what we can count) and EIGHT BILLION folks on the planet.

But the wealth is uneven, often unfairly distributed, and people are on the move in wild migrations. Humans threaten…and we are threatened…by the Earth’s wild ecology. In spite of all that, the 21st century’s global human family is the largest and measurably the healthiest, best nourished, and most prosperous in history.

But then we wonder: “Is the 21st century again collapsing into global conflicts, economic meltdowns, supply-chain chaos, energy crises, and now pandemics and new global wars? Do we find ourselves disillusioned, living a new “angst? “Does at least part of our anxiety come from an uncertainty, or a fear, about how the global human community will get along, work together?” OR NOT!” As I speak, Western Civilization’s holy land is again on fire and we’re staring down the throat of global war.

So what is this “globalization” thing? Or is it now a de-globalizing or a re-globalizing thing?  Which way are we headed – to the first or second half, or both, of the 20^th century’s outcomes?  “What’s going on…how does the world work?”

Global business network, iStock 959802730 2-28-22

Our WILD GLOBALIZATION PROJECT is wondering if civilization's life-world might in fact work like a "BLACK BOX." In modern physics this is called a “quantum entanglement.”

Imagine a wild river, but then imagine several divergent rivers crashing and flowing together – An Ecology River… …A Sex-Demographics-Culture River…a Technology River…an Economy River…and a Governance River…and a Wealth River. Each has its own origin and force. Each is carving out canyons, destroying and then building the world back up again. All are wildly inter-, over- and under-flowing, at once, in a total, surging momentum.

But then…oh wait a minute! Maybe the wildest thing of all is…whoosh! – there goes a human and she’s holding a paddle and she’s riding …a KAYAK!

So we’re riding this flow, hanging on, trying to stay afloat. It’s carrying us, but we’re really just riding “it!”

What’s happening is a superbly complex and changing phenomenon…we’re part of the force…but we’re also just along for the ride! It’s from this flow, this quantum entanglement of forces, that the spontaneously emerging orders of life are both created…and destroyed. The great Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter, called this the “perennial gale of creative destruction.” Joseph Schumpeter

Look at Covid-19. The pandemic was first a Wild Ecology event – but did it come from nature or was it a Wild Technology “gain of function” virus that humans created? Whatever, Covid shows us how humans respond to and can radically change the natural world – we could have lost 50 million like the 1918 Flu… but we didn’t! Instead, literally overnight, in 24 hours, and as soon as they had the virus’ genetic code, scientists came up with a “genome-based vaccine,” or at least we called it a vaccine. Both events, the virus if it was “gain of function,” and the genome-vaccine, were NOT un-natural, we’re going to talk about how they were “hyper-natural” human creations – like the kayaker with the paddle! That’s just what we do! And wherever it came from, authorities at first hid the virus from us. Why was that? The pandemic became a Wild Governance geo-political football. The virus raced ahead of the vaccine but Wild Economy’s big pharma got paid billions by taxpayers and grew fat anyway. Sweden put kids back in school with no risk, while Wild Culture American kids were locked up and probably lost at least a year of their freedom and education. Economies were shut down, trillions of dollars were printed, and Wild Finance inflation exploded. Serious ethical blunders took more lives. Our supply-chained, Wild Global markets were exposed. As smart as we think we are, we really didn’t know what to do. Millions were lost; we survived. But the order of civil society has changed. Covid was a global quantum entanglement event.

The pandemic shows us how the entangled orders of life race ahead of our common sense, our critical thinking, and our rational governance. And tragically, ahead of our moral and ethical response.

This global quantum entanglement is “WILD!”

And that leaves us with…what? What do we have to work with?

We assess that humans have evolved from the natural world by virtue of two more or less unconstrained, unique abilities.

First, we can be smart…OR NOT!  Nature has given us – and we’ve worked at it – the ability to think and alter the natural world – someone did come up with the kayak and the paddle! We bundle these abilities under “Science and Technology.”

Second, we can love and care for each other and the planet…OR NOT! Humans have the capacity to do good or evil for humanity and planet Earth – we bundle these abilities under our “spirituality,” or, for many, our “faith or religious traditions.”

So we’re asking big questions, questions that probe our intelligence and our conscience. Like, “What is globalization? What do we mean by these “rivers,” these “flows”? – Ecology? Sex-Demographics-Culture? Tech? Economy? Governance, Wealth? “How can humanity and the Earth survive in this 21^st century?” “What’s going on, and what can we, or should we, do about it?”

Wild Globalization is not claiming to have simple answers…or even any answers at all! As tech entrepreneur, Uri Levine, suggests, we’re just trying to “…fall in love with the problem.” Uri Levine. We’re trying to come up with conversations, indeed, civil conversations – OK, maybe some healthy arm-wrestling – that might lead us to, let’s just say, better critical thinking.

So maybe we’re trying to change the state of “play” of how we live together, how we come to grips with things, how we care for each other and this Earth-home.

We’re watching how the 21^st century is racing ahead of our intelligence – our “common sense” – our “ethical response” – and our “conscience.” Right now we have hot wars in Europe and the Middle East, and another cold war in Asia. The nuclear arms race is hot again. We’re even staring down “Hal” the artificial intelligence, or “A.I. guy,” from 2001 Space Odyssey.

Here’s our “provocative statement:

“Humans have not just emerged from the wild. We are wild Homo sapien, and we’ve spread ourselves over the planet for 250,000 years. The wild is happening right here and now. To get here we’ve relied on our critical thinking but really, more vitally, our tenacious re-thinking, of this quantum entanglement. So we’re trying to see it from inside and outside the “box.” From divergent takes: ecology…culture…tech…economy…governance…wealth. And somehow think it all at once. How is this entanglement affecting the planet, changing it? But then, how are we getting kicked around by it? Like the kayaker, we’re launching into these wild, entangled flows of energy that constantly create and build, and at the same time that breakdown and destroy, the orders of life on Earth.”

Here’s a preview of our Wild Globalization suite of YouTube videos and, by the way, because the “order” is wild, they can be viewed in our sequence:
Ecology >> Sex-Demographices-Culture >> Tech >> Economy >> Governance >> Wealth…
or in any order you choose. It’s wild, after all, and you choose the order!

WILD ECOLOGY: Wild Energy, Climate, the Wild Sun, the Earths’ Fire, and Dark Matter

We’re still at the very beginning of learning how Earth, the Solar System, and the Universe work. Wild Ecology tries to re-set the conversation by first looking at the “order” of energy. Ecology also includes climate, so we try to take in both the 150 year weather or meteorological perspective, but also the thousands and millions’ of years paleo-climatological perspectives…for example, the ice ages – or not! Climate includes the Earth living in the Sun’s climate, or its “solar weather.” Then there’s the Earth’s great mega-volcanoes. Finally our quick survey considers the  implications of the Universe’s “dark matter.” Ecology, we will see, is wild…and we’ll come to see how civilization is more vulnerable than ever to the wild Earth, a wild Solar System, and a wild Universe!

WILD SEX-DEMOGRAPHICS-CULTURE: Cities and Urbanization, the “Great Demographic Reversal,” Religions…Science…Culture

We’re just beginning of learn how sex, or population flows, drive human culture? Did you know that over one million people every week are moving into cities – it’s the greatest demographic shift in human history. And when we move to cities we don’t need, or want, as many kids. This is the “great demographic reversal” and it is completely  reshaping 21^st century civilizations and ecologies.

Or you might also be shocked to learn how all of humanity – all 195 countries, 7,000 indigenous peoples and languages, ten thousand cities, all of us, came from the genomes of just a few thousand survivors of a “demographic bottleneck” that struck about 50,000 years ago. So all 8 billion of us from just a few thousand – that’s a lot of sex for 50,000 years!  

None of this can really be understood, though, without diving into why we don’t get along, why we fight viciously and ferociously over land or money, or, even worse, over “Gods” or “truths.” Why can’t we get along? And what can we do about it, or not?

It boils down to what we can call “human culture.” On the one hand, it’s about our more or less unconstrained powers to create and make stuff, to innovate magical but also horrific tools and devices, so it’s about “Science and Technology.” But maybe even more it’s about the human instinct to “believe,” in gods, religions, ideas, or ideologies.

Human culture is about magnificent art, music, love and care for ourselves and our planet. But in the same moment, we can hate and destroy things, people, the planet. We’re wild and maybe we need to figure it out, or not!

Sex, demographics and culture are wild!

WILD TECH…a new order of Evolution…

Our Wild Technology YouTube tracks how we humans survive because we adjust, we adapt, we even change nature. We innovate. We’ll consider how humans represent a new order of evolution.

Technology, though, when you think about it, moves wildly ahead of our ability to manage its impact on our lives or the planet. And tech’s impact is accelerating. Listen to the American Nobel economist, Robert William Fogel: “…it took four thousand years to go from the invention of the plow to figuring out how to hitch a plow up to a horse… just 65 years to go from the first flight in a heavier-than-air machine to landing a man on the moon…”  Kling and Schultz

Technology, it seems, is a double-edged sword. Consider atomic energy…then consider atomic weapons. Unleashing the atom’s power says everything about the wild promise and yet the wild horror of human technology racing ahead of human culture. We’re still struggling to live with the atom.

It’s the wildest tech and our wildest challenge.

WILD GLOBAL ECONOMY…Wild Labor…The Stealth Economy…Wild Finance…the Great Financial Crisis…

Hang on for our Wild Economy YouTube.

Learn how global labor is wild – robots, digitization, but even wilder, workers competing head’s up around the globe. Millions of jobs created…and destroyed…every year, as the human community globalizes, but are we now “de-“ or “re-globalizing?” Get a glimpse of half the world working in the “stealth” or “shadow” economy – 1.8 billion folks. A stealth economy that likely dug up the cobalt in our smartphone’s batteries by “workers laboring in slave-like conditions in open-pit mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” Terry Gross

So, would you have gotten a smartphone if you knew about these miners? But then, can you get along now without your smartphone?

We’ll also re-visit, and surprise you with our take on the 2008-2009 Great Financial Crisis, another “global quantum entanglement” that changed the economic order. Wild banking, wild lending, wild governance, and wild consumers exposed what is really just our everyday economy – and it’s even wilder today!

The Wild Economy rivers are really wild!

WILD GOVERNANCE…Democracy…Totalitarianism…Big Data…and Wild Debt…

By the time you get to Our Wild Governance YouTube may not be surprised to learn how all of the stuff above – the 21^st century’s cities, environment, its wild technologies, wild money and markets, or the new fights over lands and gods, are moving way ahead of human governance. We’ll see how our head-strong governments are getting pushed out of the public square by the global mega-tech companies that manage culture with algorithms!

Wild Governance considers how both “democracies” – like the U.S., Europe, Japan or India – but then also “totalitarian” governments – so China, Russia, or Iran and North Korea – have been driven by their own wild ambitions, but also by demanding citizens, all 8 billion of us. And now they’re all now massively “BIG!” – and governing over bewildered, overtaxed, often over-regulated and now big-tech monitored citizens in the street.

Finally, as all national governances try to keep up with globalization, demographic reversals, and their own inane errancies, they are ridiculously entangled in quantum debt. The U.S. Government owes $33 trillion, and counting – and that’s before the $50-100 trillion in unpaid bills for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The U.S. Debt Clock  Debt is a global crisis – China, Japan, and Europe are also buried. And with Baby Boomers retiring around the globe, how will governments keep all their promises?  

The Wild Governance rivers are flowing in all of globalization’s quantum entanglements. 

WILD WEALTH…Tracking…Bushwhacking Your Wealth in the 21^st Century…

So what do you do with your wealth, or your future wealth, in this wild civilization? Our Wild Wealth talk will try to bushwhack the concrete and steel canyons, but also the emerging digital flows that move in micro-seconds with A.I. in the driver’s seat, or not!

We’ll consider how 21^st century wealth might be more about protecting what you’ve earned and got in hand than about building more. 

And then, once you’ve got it, what do you do with it? Do you want to get it, or some of it, to your kids or grandkids? Or maybe you want to get it out to others, to humanity, or to protect the Earth.

21^st century wealth is wild…it’s about tracking known trails but, at propitious moments, it might also be about “bushwhacking” new, uncharted trails.    

SUMMARY

So, to gather it all in, Wild Globalization tries to track and bushwhack what we’re calling this global quantum entanglement.

So, to gather it all in, Wild Globalization tries to track and bushwhack what we’re calling this global quantum entanglement.

We’re observing how human intelligence and conscience are more or less free and unconstrained. That freedom makes the human experience uneasy with itself. Our freedom is wrapped in the entanglement’s anxiety and angst, and that angst moves and changes at the pace of modern life. And yet the 21^st century’s prosperity continues to emerge, to surprise. It’s precarious, fragile, but powerful and profound. Maybe in spite of itself.

So we’re really asking: “If the entanglement is racing ahead of our practical strategies and our ethical responses, how does that change the way we think about it or try to make it work? How can we live with it? How can governances, and really every citizen on the street, adjust our game plans? How can we be more pragmatic or  practical? If we come up with possible solutions, can we keep the ones that work and move on from the ones that don’t?  Can we fall in love with the problem and work from there? “What’s our game?”

So if we’ve peaked your interest, or your angst, listen on! You can also go to www.substack.wildglobalization.com for transcripts, or our web site, www.wildglobalization.com.

That’s it for now…take care – it’s wild out there!

Watch the Video

Welcome to the first episode of "Wild Globalization," where we embark on a thought-provoking journey to understand the concept of globalization and its impact on our world. In this episode, titled "The Quantum Entanglement of Globalization," we delve into the myriad ways in which various global forces – from wild ecology and technology to economy, governance, and culture – intertwine to shape the course of human civilization. Discover how these forces are not just interconnected but also often at odds, creating a complex and ever-changing global landscape. We'll explore historical events, current trends, and future projections, all through the lens of this 'quantum entanglement.' Join us as we navigate the wild rapids of globalization, pondering the critical questions: What is globalization in the 21st century? How does it affect us, and what can we do about it? Tune in for an enlightening exploration of the entangled, unpredictable, yet fascinating world of Wild Globalization.

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