The Global Economy: A Matter of Perspective

We are at a crossroads where the current modern age is coming to an end and a transition towards something else is being painfully born, paraphrasing the former Czech president Vaclav Havel. Our current economic system has failed to deliver, ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers’, on the contrary, it has brought depression; burnout and suicide as widespread phenomenon in today’s industrialised societies. To keep the world economies growing means that global consumers are devouring the Earth’s resources at a pace that is faster than the capacity of the planet to regenerate them, using the equivalent to 1.5 planets in a year3. According to recent studies, If we continue with the current trend, there will be catastrophic and foreseeable consequences, such as the collapse of civilisation. Some of the reasons behind this collapse the study (H.A.N.D.Y.) gives are, unsustainable resource exploitation and the increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Futures, 2018

The special issue "Futures of Society: The Interactions Revolution" reflects upon the increased fluidity required for self-organising processes in today's world. Digital technologies are transforming our social systems through their deep mutual braiding. New relationships and forms of communication are emerging between systems and their environments and among their constitutive actors. Today organizations and social systems demand an increased fluidity and agility to respond to environmental, social, and economic pressures. In this Special Issue, fluidity and agility are requirements focused on the future. It investigates challenges for organizational and social systems that are shaping today with a view to the future. The interactions revolution offers space for digital technologies and transdisciplinary conceptual frameworks, such as Stafford Beer´s Viable System Model, to disclose self-organised structural forms that are more likely to respond quicker to environmental, social, and economic changes. This interactions revolution is enabled by the contributions of large numbers of distributed actors, crowdsourcing innovative transformations, such as Wikipedia, Open Source Software, Blockchain and others. The challenge we address here is more than bottom-up self-organisation but also, and most significantly, guided self-organisation to speed up learning processes. The related problem solving requires of both. Which interaction strategies can increase response capacity and help making sense of an often overwhelmingly complex surrounding? These are aspects related to Ross Ashby´s requisite variety, which is a thread relating most of the contributions to this issue. Which interactive strategies can help organisations to achieve desirable outcomes and maintain dynamic stability with their environments? What will their futures look like? The term variety is used extensively in this special issue. Ashby proposed it as the number of possible states of a situation. We know that for even simple situations such as a black box with eight inputs and 1 output, each with only two possible states (0,1), the number of possible states of this black box is 2 256 , a huge number. Proliferation of possible states is what is behind the digital revolution; binary numbers are behind the scope of digitalization. The challenge is regulating the possible states of our social situations to keep them within a set of desirable states. What is behind this proliferation is the possible interactions among the relatively small number of constituent parts of a situation over time. We have to learn to manage these interactions to keep them under control; this is at the core of the INTERACTIONS REVOLUTION. Ashby's law of requisite variety tells us that this is only possible if the regulator can generate 'directly' or 'indirectly' at least the same number of possible states as the situation generates. Since individually we have a very limited capacity to generate variety, it is necessary to find ways to amplify it, perhaps with technology enabled interactions, and also at the same time to attenuate it. Often we do this by restricting people's capacity to generate variety, which is at the core of the hierarchical forms of regulation that are discussed in this special issue. Directly or indirectly all the contributions to this issue share this construct; they offer instances of variety management. Current technological developments allow proliferation of data, in ways which were unthinkable until recently. The challenge now is containing this variety through variety containing strategies managing interactions. This is the challenge of the interactions revolution for the future. The authors' contributions, driven by the above considerations, are offered in what follows, clustered in four themes: society, technology and interactions; human aspects of interactions; nature and social organisation; and the future. 1.1. Alexandre Perez Casares. The brain of the future and the viability of democratic governance: the role of artificial intelligence, cognitive machines, and viable systems Perez Cazares's contribution makes apparent the increasing influence of big data, algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) in societies and organisations today. It helps to increase our appreciation of the role of cognitive machines in today's world. The author argues for the need to improve organisation structures to harness complexity and avoid decision makers being overwhelmed by data. The future is in the emergence of a collective brain for public governance: a distributed brain of the social system. He argues that if

Globalizations, 2008

The original call for papers for the 'Trading Morsels' conference asked authors to address the social and environmental consequences of the globalization of agriculture by focusing on an important traded commodity and a major geographical link in that commodity's trade. During the course of the conference itself, and in subsequent discussions, we learned that the globalization of agriculture is a complicated story that does not always or easily lend itself to a commodity chain approach. Perhaps this is not surprising. Social systems are almost always more complicated than our models suggest. The important question is whether the complexity matters. And in this case we believe not only that the complexity matters but that it is the defining characteristic and most policy relevant feature of the global food trade. The complex ways in which commodities move around the globe, the drop-off points, the hands that plant, harvest, buy, touch, and transform each commodity, and the profits skimmed and value extracted along the way, have provided rich sites for empirical study, puzzles for social and political theorists, and challenges for global, national, and regional policymakers. The richness of the sites, the puzzles, and the challenges become most apparent when global or international institutions have attempted to control one aspect of a global system, for example commodity trade and WTO agreements, only to be buffeted or resisted by elements of a separate, similarly global system, e.g., transnational civil society efforts to advocate on behalf of the environment or workers' rights. Other challenges and puzzles emerge when local institutions attempt to manage the production or consumption of internationally traded commodities only to be stunned by the response from other parts of the globe or subverted by actors or institutions within their own locality. Thus, a picture of complexity and local dynamics emerges along two dimensions-the extent of interactions between different global exchange systems of money, things, people, and ideas and the varied institutional landscape within localities that influence and are shaped by varied connections to different global systems.

2012

Curating After The Global, LUMA/BARD/MIT, 2019

Technology is increasingly shaping our social structures and is becoming a driving force in altering human biology. Besides, human activities already proved to have a significant impact on the Earth system which in turn generates complex feedback loops between social and ecological systems. Furthermore, since our species evolved relatively fast from small groups of hunter-gatherers to large and technology-intensive urban agglomerations, it is not a surprise that the major institutions of human society are no longer fit to cope with the present complexity. In this note we draw foundational parallelisms between neurophysiological systems and ICT-enabled social systems, discussing how frameworks rooted in biology and physics could provide heuristic value in the design of evolutionary systems relevant to politics and economics. In this regard we highlight how the governance of emerging technology (i.e. nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science), and the one of climate change both presently confront us with a number of connected challenges. In particular: historically high level of inequality; the coexistence of growing multipolar cultural systems in an unprecedentedly connected world; the unlikely reaching of the institutional agreements required to deviate abnormal trajectories of development. We argue that wise general solutions to such interrelated issues should embed the deep understanding of how to elicit mutual incentives in the socioeconomic subsystems of Earth system in order to jointly concur to a global utility function (e.g. avoiding the reach of planetary boundaries and widespread social unrest). We leave some open questions on how techno-social systems can effectively learn and adapt with respect to our understanding of geopolitical complexity.

Perspectives from Transnational Research

As a result of the emergence of global communicative connectivity the world has become more integrated than ever before. Movements of people, exchange of commodities, ideas and values have contributed to the increasing integration of the world as a whole and the fact that the world can not be thought of as a conglomerate of separate entities as it was before. Related to these observations, studying world society is a great challenge facing social scientists today, because the notion itself reinforces a perspective which understands the world as a single, comprehensive texture: World society encompasses the totality of social relationships linking the inhabitants of the Earth. Similar views of such a vision are suggested by notions such as dependencia (Andre Gunder Frank 1969), world system (Wallerstein 1974), global village (McLuhan 1968; McLuhan/Powers 1992), or world culture (Meyer 2005). Moreover, John Urry introduced the concept of global complexity, taking the "global" as a complex perspective for analysing social processes (Urry 2002). Ulrich Beck (2006) has developed the notion of cosmopolitanism in a context of growing worldwide accessible reference systems. A critical standpoint in regard to Urry's and Beck's approaches is expressed by Eleonore Kofman (2005), who has criticised these views on cosmopolitanism as too narrow in scope. According to her, they are directed towards politically and economically privileged groups, leaving aside considerations about others. She also criticises the optimistic view of cosmopolitans, arguing that independent cosmopolitan individuals or networks can also be perceived as a threat in the eyes of representatives of the nation-state. Finally, an approach to synchronic meanings of worldwide phenomena is offered by historians like Osterhammel and Petersson (2003), who have analysed the world society from a diachronic perspective. This general shifting perspective brings a number of new challenges for social science research which necessitate rethinking the notion of society in more fundamental ways. In social sciences, but also in popular UIIderstanding, society usually refers to boUIIded, territorially localised entities, especially to those con

International Affairs, 2020

blood and brains showcase how non-human objects have the capacity to exceed the human meanings, designs or purposes they express or serve. Part III, 'Must we persist to continue?', assumes a more theoretical character, as Grove explores alternative forms of life beyond the Eurocene. This is in no way a catalogue of policy proposals, but rather an attempt at cultivating an ethos of responsiveness towards that which escapes, exceeds and defies Eurocene hegemony. Drawing on theorists such as William Connolly, Gilles Deleuze and Donna Haraway, Grove attempts to decentre the narrow focus on humanity and instead orient the social sciences towards the world in its multiplicity: 'It is time to think like the Earthlings we are' (p. 278). Savage ecology is not an easy read. Grove draws on an expansive archive, engages with an abundance of theoretical interlocutors and sets forth bold claims with far-reaching implications. Frequently, he is not interested in proving his assertions but instead seeks to thoroughly rethink core assumptions in IR, going where such speculative investigation leads him. To Grove, 'scholarship requires intervention, not proof ' (p. 15). Whether they agree with this radically anti-positivist position or not, I am convinced that the book will prove a rich, challenging and thoughtprovoking encounter for graduate students and scholars interested in geopolitics, new materialism, critical war studies and international political theory.

By Our System I mean the interac2ons between the mul2ple human and natural systems that make up our world, and the flows and accumula2ons they generate.