My argument is that better much better does not necessarily cost the earth.

Its is about a new literacy and logic in how we make stuff. This is a key part of the No Straight Lines Story.

Some interesting key points highlighted over at the p2p Foundation

1. Designed and manufactured a 4-passenger street-legal car that gets 100 mpg
2. The car was constructed using off-the-shelf parts
3. The car is entirely modular in design
4. They innovated a new process for carbon-fiber body construction that costs 1/360th the traditional process
5. You can pre-order cars now for less than $29,000
6. This is not just a one-off prototype. Currently they are manufacturing one car per week (yes, that’s the low volume manufacturing retail price). They are targeting a future price of under $20,000.
7. With no capital investment
8. Though accept donations
9. Everything is done through volunteers

Also read:

• The No Straight Lines challenge: be realistic imagine the impossible
• 6 challenges for a non-linear world
• The NEXT Silicon Valley is not a place it’s a platform
• LEGO CUUSOO – the WHAT’S NEXT for business in a non-linear world
• Patients Know Best: a new literacy for healthcare

Marcin Jakubowski tells us how. In many ways this story is very much part of the story of No Straight Lines that I have been researching, evolving and developing over the last 7 years. You can find out more about No Straight Lines here and pre-register for the free browser book, or indeed lets us know if there are other formats of the project you are interested in.

Marcin’s story is at a very human level, but it also asks big questions about ‘WHAT NEXT’ looks like, economically and, organisationally. His story is about questing for a more sustainable and enduring world, something that Gabriel Branby also talked about.

Marcin asks the What If? question, but he is one of a growing band of people, and these questions are pushing harder and currently deeper into the consciousness of our everyday lives. and I think Marcin is a trailblazer but he is also connecting up to and creating an entirely new eco-system, a ‘human operating system‘ that wants to get stuff done in very different ways.

As Tony Judt argued in Ill Fares the Land, why is it that we struggle to imagine a different world to the one we currently have, when that world could be built upon a philosophy of a more humane sense of the world we live in?

In fact the question is: Is online piracy and ubiquitous free content killing our culture? I believe we must always be open to divergent and different perspectives of the world. We must be prepared to see the world from anothers’ perspective. I do think this is at times a good question to ask.

Morozov writes: Levine’s call to arms – “it’s time to ask, seriously, whether the culture business as we know it can survive the digital age”

But then one has to ask the question for example is Fox News culture? meaningful culture, worthwhile culture. Rupert Mordoch famously said he would make Sky News in the UK more like Fox if he had his way. Just have a read about the delightful Roger Ailes that runs Fox. The mainstream media that presents information as truth that plays a key and important role in shaping the debate about our world, has been found wanting. Is this system worth preserving?

But I persisted with the review – some good points raised. However,

In a chapter subtitled “How the internet could kill Mad Men”, Levine frets about the future of cable television, seemingly unaware of the fact that, back in the 1960s, American broadcast networks did their best to wipe out the nascent cable industry, which survived only thanks to a ruling by the US supreme court. Had the judges followed Levine’s conservative logic, a more fitting subtitle would be “How the networks aborted the parents of Mad Men”.

And how many times have incumbents fought bitterly and viciously to stop others. The telegraph versus the telephone for example. Morozov goes on…

Are new technologies really that much of a threat to the culture industry? Google TV – one of the projects Levine lists among the greatest threats to cable television – seems dead on arrival; at the moment, product returns outnumber sales. According to a recent survey by BookStats, in 2011 the publishing industry earned nearly 6% more revenue than in 2008, while selling 4% more books – in part, thanks to ebooks. The global march of streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify has made piracy less appealing.

None of this excites Levine, who complains that the internet has not encouraged innovation. “Like TV, the internet is only as good as what’s on,” he writes. Statements like this underscore the danger of setting internet policy based on the interests of the content industry alone. For those in this group, the internet is merely TV on steroids – its impact on the Arab spring, economic and human development and the future of learning be damned.

I arrived at the conclusion that Levine is representative of a certain form of market fundamentalism – and this fundamentalism is dangerous. Born out of not understanding, not wanting to understand. An arrogance about what is “culture” and who has the right to create it. He sees markets not as cultural but purely economic, he sees people only as consumers. Culture in his view, and people that he represents, see “culture” as a means to extract money from people. Simple. As the economist John Kay wrote,

“Capitalists are capitalism’s worst enemy, and particularly the market fundamentalist tendency which has been in the ascendant for the last 20 years”

For me, and Morozov saves it for last, is that in “Levines opinion James Murdoch was a saviour of Journalism.” The same James Murdoch who may have perjured himself, who along with his father owned a newspaper that in its quest for monetary gain, hacked into the voice mails of dead children, to get “the edge” on their rivals in the tabloid newspaper wars. If that is what Levine thinks is culture, then God help us all.

WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo.

The presentation dealt with this idea: That mobile communications does not have to be a tactical endeavor, it can be a deep strategic one enabling companies to run leaner, to reach audiences in new and novel ways, to redefine a company organizationally, and create new markets with new revenues. In ‘creating assets and access in the intention economy’ I challenged our thinking in how mobile communications plays the key role in this rapidly evolving story.

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.

Existing models of crowd behaviour  treat moving masses of humanity as though they were fluids. This works, up to a point. But it often fails to predict the changes that happen as a crowd’s density increases and its movement becomes chaotic.

Apparently marching soldiers will automatically break step on a suspension bridge – and over the last 5 years or so I have been fascinated by all sorts of participatory cultures – here is a selection of posts that explores such a fascinating and increasingly important area of investigation

Which business, which industry, which NGO or political organization, democratic or otherwise has not been touched by the impact of our most recent communications revolution? In a breath it seems, businesses defined by their socialness, community, and peer to peer interactivity have erupted in complete violation of the orthodoxy of traditional business, and how that business is made: controlled access to stuff, to information. This is the Gestalt Switch –  today people are using communication technologies to get what they want and need from each other rather than through existing organisations and institutions. Why? Because those institutions have been recognised as being unable to deliver on their promise to society. Because they abuse their position of power, because they lose sight of why they were there in the first place.

So why is access to financial capital any different? In No Straight Lines: making sense of a non-linear world, I make the case and argument that as our world has become increasingly unfair, to the point whereby that unfairness is highly corrosive, people will take action, political action, dramatic action, action with consequences. It is no accident that today, communications tools are being wielded as powerful agents of political change. As much as everything ‘digital’ has affected our world, the point is we are in a social revolution not a technological one. And, as much as we have seen profound change in certain areas of society, the owners of monetary power (banks, venture capital, financing) have seemingly been unaffected by the disruptive energy of a non-linear world until now, other than by their own doing. But what the banking crisis demonstrated is how dysfunctional finance and money markets have become, not only in venture funding and lending but in pensions, the managers of which know they will never be able to properly pay back to society.

So at either end of people’ lives; the creation of jobs and then a happy retirement, the system which should support that has failed. Its not failing, its failed. So where do the new entrepreneurial companies that create the new jobs come from? How will we finance our retirement? We need novel ways to make this all happen.

In the same way that Martin Luther used Gutenberg’s printing press to reform the church, organisations such as GrowVC, or Profounder or Kiva or Zopa, or Kickstarter, to name but a few, are also part of this challenge to financial hierarchies and their positions of power that now serve themselves rather than society at large. And this process is starting to accelerate, (see the Startup Exemption Petition)

Disruption does not ask permission

So disruption does not ask permission, and it never comes from the centre, the future of investing and the kickstarting of innovation requires radical new ways of funding and this will have a significant impact on society. This innovation will flatten  powerhouses of financial capital and if the idea proves as exciting as the ideas explored and brought to life in the writings and pamphlets that led to the French Revolution, then that idea will spread. As Tony Judt wrote in, Ill Fares the Land, (review)

By the time the revolution broke out, this new language of politics was in place, and in so doing discredited everything that had gone before it.

And once you have stormed the Bastille, you don’t go back to your day job. Who is an entrepreneur? Who is an investor? Who has the right to be either? Such perspectives are as skewed as the myopia of those that whinge about professionals and amateurs, and how the internet has destroyed culture. The question to that is who owns culture and who makes it? What we are seeing is a decoupling from the belief systems that have defined our world for generations.

In this process of the democratisation of venture funding, and the creation of a new innovation eco-system (to accelerate deal flow, that creates more companies and that creates more jobs), it has been reported back to me that some American’s believe this could be the re-invention of the American Dream. And Ross Dawson suggests, that a significant shift in capitalism could be coming. As head of vision at Grow Venture Community (GrowVC), I have watched these developments with great interest. I think, in the same way that micro loans work in many countries, rather than pointing to such financing models as ‘only for the really poor’, there is a more fundamental dynamic at work here, that participatory human systems when connected by the connective tissue of communications media can do some extraordinary things. It also I think breaks down the false barriers between who can and who cannot engage in wealth and value creation. This false distinction has corrupted many in their greed, consequently hurting society per se. As John Kay wrote, “Capitalists, are capitalism’s worst enemy – and particularly the market fundamentalist tendency which has been in the ascendant for the last 20 years”. And yet many in the finance and banking world cannot accept even though they were bailed out by states around the world paying millions in bonus’s is fair. In the same way Ann-Marie suggested the starving in the streets of Paris ‘eat cake’, the financial institutions has become detached from understanding their role in the wider society (read here for a selection of posts that explores these issues). So change is gonna come,

Ross believes,

While we supposedly live in a capitalist society, the potential is for new and more open structures to create far better use of capital than we have today. A more fluid form capitalism could transform business and how individuals create value.

The Wall Street Journal,

Federal securities regulators are weighing demands to make it easier for fast-growing companies to use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to raise money by tapping thousands of investors for very small amounts of shares. The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at adapting its rules to encourage Internet-age techniques for small companies raising capital. The issue is part of a wider review by the agency into whether to ease decades-old constraints on share issues by closely held companies.

The use of “crowd-funding” techniques has spread in recent years from artists looking to fund creative works to entrepreneurs trying to expand their firms. In a typical example, a company looking to raise $100,000 would use an Internet site to invite investors to buy as much as $100 of shares each.

If all goes well, small companies can raise cash relatively cheaply, while investors get a stake in an innovative business with limited downside risk. The SEC is now considering calls to relax its rules to make it easier for companies to use crowd-funding without having to undergo the full panoply of disclosure and other legal requirements required by the securities laws for share issues.