No Straight Lines, argues that we have reached the nadir of the adaptive range of our industrialised world. Now faced with an unsustainable trilemma of social, organisational and economic complexity, we have entered an era in which the rules we have previously organised our lives around no longer apply. Leaving us with both a design problem and a design challenge which we must urgently solve. By describing an entirely new way for true social, economic and organisational innovation to happen, No Straight Lines presents a revolutionary logic and an inspiring plea for a more human-centric world.

That quote has always resonated with me. As it leads to the question, what makes work worthwhile? And how do we define work? This thought cropped this morning reading an article that Per Håkansson had flipped over to me. It was Douglas Rushkoff musing on the mantra of jobs, jobs, jobs Are Jobs Obsolete? – yes he agrees we all want to be doing useful things – but the jobs our current politicians describe he feels are built on a dying age, an industrial age. Perhaps he suggests we could envision a far better way of filling our time…

This sort of work isn’t so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another — all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.

Its a great big idea and some I guess are already doing that. The big issue is also that jobs have come to define us as people. “What do you do?” is the line of interrogation that goes when first meeting someone perhaps for the first time. Brain surgeon or bank robber? Work and identity become hugely important.

In a post entitled Modern Life is Rubbish I refer to the work of Richard Sennett,

In, The Corrosion of Character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism. Richard Sennett describes how the sense of hopelessness, and isolation, deconstructs our character in the workplace, with ultimate tragic consequences. For Sennett, “character” is defined as the capacity to construct and keep commitments – not just in marriage, but also in friendships, communities, and workplaces – and the ability to provide continuous, coherent narratives of personal experience. In Sennett’s view, the “unfettered capitalism” that describes our recent history in labour markets, work schedules, institutions, and technology – renders “character” impossible. Contemporary capitalism demolishes the social and cultural foundations of “character,” and upholds instead the punishing ideal of incessant change.

Rushkoff concludes, “for the time being, as we contend with what appears to be a global economic slowdown by destroying food and demolishing homes, we might want to stop thinking about jobs as the main aspect of our lives that we want to save. They may be a means, but they are not the ends”.

The nature of work and identity appear in the forthcoming book No Straight Lines: making sense of our non-linear world

WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo.

Wikipedia writes

In this episode Curtis tracks the effects of Ayn Rand‘s ideas on American financial markets, particularly via the influence on Alan Greenspan. Ayn Rand was born in Russia and moved to America in 1928 and worked for Cecil B. DeMille, where she got some of the plot for what became The Fountainhead from this period. Later she moved to New York, and set up a reading group called The Collective where they considered her work. On advice from a friend, Greenspan (then a logical positivist) joined The Collective.

When published, although critically savaged, Rand’s Objectivist ideas were popular and came to heavily infiltrate California, particularly Silicon Valley. The computer utopian belief (Californian Ideology) that computer networks could measure, control and self-stabilise societies, without hierarchical political control, and that people could become ‘Randian heroes’, only working for their own happiness, became more widespread.

The programme concludes that, indeed the ideology has not led to people being Randian heroes but in fact trapped them into a rigid system of control from which they are unable to escape.

This sounds like a fascinating proposition, and its interesting as there is no doubt in my mind that there is a dawning realisation now of that growing complexity, especially when we see whole systems strain under the pressure of a complex world. As they were designed and built for a different world that was less complex. For example this post (The democratisation of financial capital) explores the issues of what is happening to the financial system currently. There is also something we are developing which you might call a Human Operating System, where networked communication media is the ‘connective tissue’ of society. In fact non-linear networks offer us new ways to make and create things.

I am also interested in how we deal now with uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity, as we are going to need some sort of navigational guide to get us from here to there. How do we design for a complex world? Here is a brief introduction.

This was synchronous because Intersections was exactly about the same thing – but within a different context, how design thinking can come to the aid of social innovation and also the commercial world, resulting in business transformation by exploring emerging trends in technology and design. The summit also turned its gaze to, sustainable design and the environment, as well as social design and collaborative practices. Because it is when two unlikes come together in close adjacency, creating an edge and an intersection real creativity happens.

I met some great people. I second Michael Thompson in congratulationing Andrea on becoming Associate Director of the Academy for Innovation and Research (AIR) and Head of the Centre for Sustainable Design at the University College Falmouth starting on 11th April, and the great job Andrea Siodmok and her team had done.

There was for me, a palpable sense that people genuinely wanted to make and create a better world, and I also think that the two days expamded peoples idea of what design is and could be – whilst still retaining the origins of what motivates design and craft – to create new forms and give them to the world as a civilizing force.

My presentation ended up becoming highly emotive as in the Q&A I discussed the extreme frustration I felt trying to educate my intelligent but dyslexic son in the state education system, with a very engaged audience. Here is my presentation for those that asked for it. #intersect

From simple to complex to complicated

We know that, where we once thought our future to be certain, the only certainty we now face is uncertainty. The question is then how to deal with uncertainty?

Now is the time when we need a way of evaluating of what comes next, when we face a world having gone in a very short period of time from seemingly simple, to complicated to, complex, and, chaotic. Chaotic complexity is concussive, it disorientating effects surround us, resulting often in more fundamentalist worldview reflexes and perspectives that are dangerously corrosive And yet, this world seems to be if anything, accelerating. At this very moment, great debates are raging, the spanners are in the works defined by 911 (we now talk about asymmetrical warfare), the near collapse of the world banking system (and its asymmetrical impact on every single one of us), and the fever pitched exchanges going on all levels of society in every country on this planet over wikileaks and its asymmetrical deep impact. Bruce Sterling writes a great post in Underpaid Genius These are defining ideological battles exploding and imploding at the same time and they arrived in a single decade. Importantly, these dilemmas are highly interlinked and interdependent, consequently a one-size-fits-all command and control approach just wont do. Simply put, there are no longer simple problems, what we face are complex dilemmas.

We are in part renegotiating a whole plethora of power relationships and of course this happens in unexpected and sometimes unwanted ways.

Naughton makes 4 keys points… [1] The first confrontation between the old order and a non-linear world, [2] The lying of political elites to electorates, [3] This is a wake up call  [4] The entropic decline of our political systems. He also says this,

Like most people, I’ve only read a fraction of what’s been published by WikiLeaks, but one thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they comprehensively expose the way political elites in Western democracies have been lying to their electorates.

And,

What WikiLeaks is exposing is the way our democratic system has been hollowed out. Governments and Western political elites have been shown to be incompetent (New Labour and Bush Jnr in not regulating the financial sector; all governments in the area of climate change), corrupt (Fianna Fail in Ireland, Berlusconi in Italy; all governments in relation to the arms trade) or recklessy militaristic (Bush Jnr in Iraq) and yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted in a really effective way, their reaction is to try to silence the messenger — as Noam Chomsky pointed out.

Why is it a battle for middle earth, or indeed all earth? Because I believe that we as a humanity are beginning, as I argue in my my forthcoming book No Straight Lines: making sense of a non linear world, to renegotiate the power relationships of how we work, trade, live, govern, educate ourselves. We are at the toxic tail-end of our industrial society, the literacy that accompanies the web, the ability to engage in the world in a different way means we, as a society, begin to ask bigger questions about that society.

For example Douglas Rushkoff points out that,

But like literacy, the open source ethos and process are hard if not impossible to control once they have been unleashed. Once people are invited to participate in say, the coding of a software programe, the begin to question just how much of the rest of our world is open for discussion, formerly esoteric subjects such as Urban Design or Monetary Policy become much more central as the public comes to recognise the power of these planning spcialities to establish rules through which society actually comes into existence… we become more conscious consequently, and more aware or how our day-to-day decisions can be better aligned with larger issues.

This leads to the idea that a Gestalt Switch has been triggered, in No Straight Lines, I write,

I wonder whether we are once again after a period of time taking matters into our own hands. I ask this question as John Keane in The Life and Death of Democracy refers to Charles Malik[1], who was renowned as someone who profoundly believed in the principles of human rights. How do we, asked Malik gain the rights of humanity on a global scale? Indeed, Malik believed that if humanity felt that the various institutions of governance failed us we would take matters into our own hands – and we did. Yet in many ways, that was still confined to regions and countries. Is it possible this time around that through communications connectivity the scope changes perspective? “This new galaxy of media has no historical precedent,” says Keane. It is: “a new world system of overlapping and interlinked media devices that integrate texts, sounds and images and enable communication to take place through multiple user points, in chosen time, either real or delayed, within modularized and ultimately global networks that are affordable and accessible to many hundreds of millions of people scattered across the globe”[2].

I sense the possibility of history in the making. In today’s world the powerful are often “feeling the ‘pinch’ of the powerless”. Politics as a consequence has become viral, even visceral, which implies that traditional frameworks of governance have become somewhat outdated, and consequently ineffectual. Therefore Keane concludes, in the age of networked communications, combined with organisations that are constantly monitoring the motives and actions of various powerful parties, “combine into something of a Gestalt switch” which makes us think differently about how we perceive power and who wields it.

As Frantz Fanon once famously said, “A people will only be free when the control their own communications”. I am not for a free-for-all anarchist existence – but I do think we are forcing a conversation about trust, power and control; who has it, and how it is wielded now and in the future.

[1] Keane, p.733

[2] Keane, p.738

Here is the presentation that I gave.