Download COMPUTING OUR WAY TO PARADISE?

COMPUTING OUR WAY TO
PARADISE?
CHAPTER 9
Redefining Reality,
Transforming Values
Ekaterina Pulatova
If efforts to protect the planet and its peoples
from environmental harm are to be effective,
they will have to follow that shift in power. . .
downstream to the ideologies, symbols,
relationships and practices that drive
consumption.
(Conca, 2001, 55)
ICTs might just offer the model and opportunity
to realize this goal
Here’s the opportunity: if ICTs can be used as a
tool to shape unsustainable behavior, why
could they not be used just as effectively as a
tool to shape more sustainable behavior?
FORGING AHEAD
Problem of the large centrally controlled and
managed energy and electrical grids:
Vulnerability
Solution:
Distributed electrical networks
FORGING AHEAD
Better situation analysis – understanding the
big picture
The importance of a distributed structure and
the role ICT’s can perform in such structure for
providing a more sustainable future
FORGING AHEAD
A distributed democratic organic structure
would nurture:
• Superior resiliency
• Flexibility
• Security
• Equality and long-term sustainability
• Balancing demand and supply right down to
the smallest devices
FORGING AHEAD
Using ICTs, such a network could
• function autonomously
• smoothing and lowering peaks across regions and
throughout the day
• shifting power
• matching supply and demand
• shutting off and turning on power where and when
necessary
• distributing production
• constantly reevaluating and assessing system states and
trends
• automatically reorienting the system as required
FORGING AHEAD
Jeremy Rifkin believes the confluence of new energy and communications
frameworks have been accompanied by decisive transformations in
human history.
First industrial revolution
Merging of steam power with printing, leading to increased
literacy
Second industrial revolution
The result of merging oil and the telegraph, started the economic
powers, that have generated incredible global wealth and
distribution networks
FORGING AHEAD
The third industrial revolution
Using the distributional democratic potential of the
Internet as an analogy, Rifkin and others envision a
distributed, democratic energy grid.
ICT only offer a potential to democratically redistribute
social wealth and restructure society
THE FOUNDATION
The shift to sustainability will come when the current conceptualizations of the
smart grid allegiance shift from growth to degrowth—toward more
sustainable consumption
Frederick Soddy suggested five important policy prescriptions:
• abandon the gold standard
• let international exchange rates float
• use federal surpluses and deficits as macroeconomic policy
tools that could counter cyclical trends
• establish bureaus of economic statistics (including a consumer
price index) in order to facilitate this effort
• money cannot be created by private institutions at will in an
exponential and continuously expanding manner
THE FOUNDATION
ENERGY BECOMES NEW CURRENCY
• Our well-being and social framework will be linked
with the real world—no longer guided by bits and
bytes that represent mere numbers on a globally
connected network of abstract money-creating
systems.
• Our economy will be linked to the fundamental
needs of the planet and the social structures that we
nurture and create.
TRANSFORMATIONS
Our challenge:
We have been attempting to splice a new merging
phenomenon, the significance of which nobody can
yet fully appreciate or begin to understand its full
implications onto an old, industrial-era set of
instructions, structures, processes, expectations,
lifestyles, and values.
What we need to do for sustainable
consumption?
We have to stop thinking about ICTs and globalization
as new tools to be applied in the old way, for global
economic growth. We must now open up our minds
and be the future we can be, the emergent global
phenomenon that unites humans everywhere with
their environment and each other in a global
currency compatible with ecological and social
systems to propel our species toward sustainable
consumption.
What we need to do for sustainable
consumption?
• we must transform the social framework upon
which society is constructed to one of
degrowth from one of growth
• Using ICTs, continental electrical grids could
share electricity as simply as ICTs share
information over the Internet today
• We need not only create sustainable
consumption, we also need to hold it
Reality
• New currency – energy
• New currency is electronic currency
For example PayPal, digital cash and currency, e-wallets
• We now need a new social contract to replace the
old, disintegrating past
• ICTs are an available and critical tool that can now
forge the foundation to enable, construct, and align
values with ecological and social realities
Reality
• It is essential to stop thinking of ICTs as an extension of the
twentieth century industrial era to be grafted onto the old
global growth economy.
• The power of ICTs in the anachronistic structures we have are
rapidly catching up to us in surprising and unintended ways.
• The emerging supra-organism we have created through ICTs
must be recognized for the culturally disruptive and
marvelously empowering opportunity it is.
• We need to take those sparks and forge a new reality that
accommodates the physical realities of our world and the
ecosystems that enable life to exist on this planet.