Here is what they have as of today. An extraordinary effort that should soon become automated. You won't find these on LinkedIn! Click for individual Venn diagram similar to the Keystone Pipeline shown below.,
Phi Beta Iota: Now imagine this being done at every level of government from the municipality on up, across every policy domain, with whole systems analytics, true cost economics, and all trade-offs clearly visible. This is where we are going. Humanitarian technology and Open Source Everything (OSE) are going to empower the public in a manner no government or corporation can conceive or achieve.
Swarm Economy: Bitcoin represents a significant threat to the currency domination of the USA, which is the only thing propping up the nation’s status as a worldwide superpower. Following the USA’s defaulting on all its international loans on August 15, 1971, the US trade balance has been maintained using a combination of military threats and telling people to buy US dollars just to fund the ongoing consumption of the USA. Where other world currencies have failed to challenge the USD, and therefore this mechanism of maintaining US economic dominance, bitcoin may succeed.
EXTRACT
What would happen if the US were one day unable to continue its overspending? We would see a mighty crash of the global economy, but more importantly, the US would come down in a Soviet-style collapse, only much worse due to structural differences. (To understand these differences, consider the fact that public transport kept running through the Soviet collapse, and that most families were well-prepared for food shortages. In the US, you would instead have people stranded in suburbs with no fuel, food, or medicine – only lots of weapons and ammo. See Orlov’s collapse gap for more on this structural difference.)
Enter bitcoin, which can break the cycle of borrowing and overspending.
As we observed, the key reason that people are forced to buy US Dollars today is that it’s the international mechanism of exchange of value. If you want a gadgetoid from China or India, you need to first buy US dollars, and then exchange the US Dollars for the gadgetoid. But as we have seen, bitcoin far outshines the US Dollar in every aspect as a value token for international trade. Using bitcoin is cheaper, easier, and much much faster than today’s international systems for transfer of value.
Pretty much everybody I’ve spoken to who is involved in international trade would switch to a bitcoin-like system in a heartbeat if they were able to, venting years of built-up frustration with the legacy banking system (which uses the USD). If that happens, the US won’t be able to find buyers for its newly-printed money that keeps its economy propped up (and its military funded).
If the cycle of dollar lock-in breaks, the United States of America comes crashing down. Hard. It would seem inevitable at this point, and bitcoin may be the one mechanism that breaks the cycle.
Local Motors shares its innovations and lets customers be part of the car-building process, while keeping it local.
Last year, I spoke at Shanghai's Radical Design Week about the transformational design of business. I talked about car manufacturing and how, with state of the art 3D fabrication tools, a networked participatory culture and rapid innovation, the car company Local Motors claims to build cars five times faster at one hundred times less the capital cost of conventional manufacturers.
Local Motors is perhaps one of the most comprehensive examples of a revolutionary approach to the design, engineering, manufacturing, sales and marketing of cars. But don't worry if you are not in the automotive industry, the Local Motors story is one about the firms of the future.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Designing high performance organisations
Companies today can change their shape, capability and performance by rethinking and redesigning core processes. In the case of Local Motors, its factories (the Local Motors micro-factory was rated by Jalopnik as one of the world's top 10 most impressive car factories), R&D, sales, marketing and production represents a design system that is an industrial ecology, rather than a series of boxes and silos. Moreover it is much less costly to set up, run and maintain, which enables the company to invest its energies into high quality design and production.
An open networked innovation platform
Local Motors runs competitions to find innovations. For its first vehicle competition, 44,000 designs were submitted and 3,600 innovators shared their knowledge and insights. No one company can hire that many people and there was no cash prize. So, what inspired so many people to participate?
Through its open participatory platform called The Forge, Local Motors has collaborated in automotive innovation with DARPA, the US military research agency, co-designing and building a fully functional prototype of a combat support vehicle in three and a half months. Even large car manufacturers have turned to Local Motors, such as BMW, which is currently running an urban driving experience challenge.
So Local Motors becomes more than just a car manufacturing company – it's an automotive innovation platform and a true community. Local Motors attracts innovators because it is creating and releasing social and intellectual capital into a common pool. This open innovation platform is counter intuitive to many assumptions about how businesses are run, and how intellectual products are created and protected.
Please read, view, and feel free to edit, comment, add to the list of stream recommended readings and viewings (at the end of this page), or contact the stream coordinator (Ludwig Schuster) as appropriate.
Money, markets, and value are some of the core-categories of today's capitalist societies. They come with specific meanings, forms and interpretations which are reflected in and at the same time give shape to socio-economic and cultural contexts.
This stream shall deal with the question what happens if these specific forms are (deliberately) changed. Do we need money in an economy of the Commons? If yes, how would that money need to be designed and who should control it? If no, how could a demonitised society look like? And perhaps most importantly, how can the phase of transition be envisioned? In this stream light shall be shed on the different standpoints and the reasonings behind them in order to reach a more clear-cut view and to find some common route in this extremely wide and controversial, yet highly important field.
One of the things I have done over the last six months has involved identifying and observing hive mind constructs in the real world. This happened in the context of examining the publicly visible process of foreign policy making. I wrote thirty three posts that are at least tangentially related to this pursuit. Hive mind constructs will eventually win out over point source propaganda, but it won’t be pretty to watch.
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Links and short descriptions of various sequential endeavors and their findings
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CONCLUSION:
Monolithic corporate forces heavily invested in the status quo are wrestling with networked humans and finding they face a sort of memetic Devil’s Snare. Their struggles may seem to be momentarily successful, but they are only educating their opponent as to their strengths and weaknesses.
The concept of the corporation didn’t really take off until the Catholic church relaxed usury laws three centuries ago. Compound interest depends on exponential growth and humans have pretty much hit the wall in terms of what our environment will support. Any one of climate change or peak oil could undo the perception that we are all consumers living in a conglomeration of free markets. Those two have arrived pretty much simultaneous with a financial sector meltdown and we are entering a period where our society will wind down to the Earth’s solar maximum. A value system based on exponential growth will not survive a disproof by counter example, and Mother Nature responds to neither paper injunctions nor heartfelt supplications.
Some of those networked humans are starting to realize that they need not tear down the corporatocracy by hand and they are already thinking about how and what to preserve. What role does a hive mind play in this? What role can it play when electrical power is intermittent and the supply chains needed for electronic devices are interrupted?
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