Human society itself is undergoing a phase change. Society’s material aspect has now developed to where natural limits of both form and scale are crimping further expansion. Over the last few hundred years mankind has explored and uncovered so many of the material world’s physical secrets, while pushing use of the planet’s physical endowments toward resource and environmental limits, that it is hard to imagine equally transformative such discoveries ahead. But society’s web of interpersonal connections via long distance communications and travel, its systems of rights, laws and interpersonal conventions, and its organizational structure of bureaucratic and governance institutions, are all now in many cases liquefying, reforming and undergoing great change with no end in sight. Old institutions and networks of connection among people are dissolving and being replaced by new ones often reoriented in directions diametrically opposite to how they were structured previously.
Since the beginning of the industrial age less than 250 years ago, humankind has built out its material foundation, and we can hardly expect the next few hundred years to be as transformative in this regard. From astrophysics to materials science, from genetics to manufacturing, our collective understanding and mastery of our material surroundings has by now advanced so far and so quickly that further progress becomes increasingly difficult and marginal. Our economic activity is flooding the planet with automobiles, household appliances and consumer goods. Our homes and workplaces are climate controlled and isolated from nature’s vagaries. We have collapsed physical distances with transportation and telecommunications technologies. For richer middle class people around the world, every conceivable material need is catered to, including fantasy artificial realities for our leisure enjoyment. Living standards are quickly rising in China, India and elsewhere throughout the world, bumping up against the planet’s natural resources and carrying capacity limitations. Material development in the sense of our deepening collective technological and scientific understanding is also approaching natural limits. How much better can consumer goods get? Admittedly there will always be refinements. Certainly there is more to learn and apply with respect to the material world, most obviously in the fields of medicine, energy conservation, materials recycling, natural resource management and environmental sustainability, to say nothing of aesthetic design, but future achievements are unlikely to change the material foundation of how we live as dramatically as have the accumulated accomplishments since the industrial age began.[1] Someday, we may gain control over global warming, our climate and the weather, but humanity, at least in the richer parts of the world – and a good portion of the developing world is catching up quickly – is approaching the natural bounds of material living standards, both in terms of serving human material needs and in terms of the earth’s carrying capacity.
One might object that material wealth is not yet spread widely enough, but income and wealth distribution are largely governance and relational issues. One could point to humanity’s seemingly insatiable appetite for extravagance and consumerism as evidence of humanity’s limitless demand for material growth, but such consumption frequently addresses needs for status or a sense of identity and belonging, attributes of society’s relational structure, without appreciably raising quality of life. Products may become better engineered, lighter, more compact, and with more features, but often these improvements reflect the embedding of technology and information within the world of materiality, rather than any advance in our mastery over materiality itself. Many people would prefer bigger houses or offices, but again, this is a relational commodity insofar as space is limited only in cities and other congested or otherwise desirable locations. In rural areas space is inexpensive, but it lacks access to services, a relational attribute.[2] While humanity’s material aspect is approaching its full developmental potential, the systems and patterns that connect and structure all the parts of global society are currently in process of dramatic flux and transformation. We see such transformations all around us and at every level because information technologies penetrate nearly everywhere. It is impossible to fully describe the breadth and depth of the information age structural transformations, but in the remainder of this section and the following four sections I note some salient manifestations apparent from various perspectives. In the remainder of this section I mention a few studies and indications suggesting that society’s values could radically turn away from consumerism toward a post-consumerist ethic with more emphasis on connectedness and relatedness.
The Changing Structure of Capitalism
The structure of capitalism itself is rapidly changing. Industrial economies evolved into service economies as the information age unfolded in the 1950’s and 1960’s, shifting jobs and emphasis diametrically from making things to servicing relationships. Even manufacturing came to cloak itself in layers of services: sales, advertising, public relations, and marketing, to say nothing of legal and accounting services. Products have become desirable for their branding and status appeal, i.e. relational attributes, and indeed the manufacturing and marketing of desires, playing off human alienation, insecurities, and pursuit of status, has become an essential dimension of modern capitalism. The major service industries, advertising, marketing, financial and legal services, have grown into significant sectors of the economy and work upon societal structure itself.
Capital is evolving. The social investment movement, which first emerged as a significant force with the boycott of South African apartheid in the 1960’s, and has been growing ever since, evidences an awakening of capitalists and perhaps capital itself to its spiritual role and responsibilities. Individual stakeholders are demanding that business leaders and shareholders take responsibility for the full range of a company’s effects on not just consumers, but also employees, suppliers, the local community, and the natural environment. Capital is the fuel that enables entrepreneurship to proceed and it therefore lies at the forefront of economic progress. Through capital, new ideas are brought to reality.
Notes to self:
Capital can serve any of several masters: profit, consumers, stakeholders broadly, societal progress.
Markets versus hierarchies, and hierarchies as information systems.
Corporate structure is changing. Companies are globalizing, merging and integrating horizontally and vertically, and their ownership is concentrating. Public/private corporations are introducing a new model in China. Small new businesses are bubbling up. Corporate control is decentralizing, and hierarchies are flattening. These are diametric reorientations.
[1] In the early 1800’s, not long after the transformative political events that marked modern society’s birth in the late 1700’s with the American and French Revolutions, humanity invented and embraced cotton gins, steam engines, steamboats and railways.
[2] [LATER: Consolidation and shift from US to China as the central engine of global growth?]