Redrawing the Human Development Thesis for the 21st Century — with Indy Johar

Podcast Notes

In this Boundaryless Conversation we speak with Indy Johar, architect and co-founder of Project 00 and most recently Dark Matter Labs (see his full bio here: https://about.me/indy.johar).

Indy is really a great thinker when it comes to going beyond “corner shop” size social transformation initiatives to explore the next generation of institutions — living at the edge between public, open and private.

We explore what he thinks will happen to organising, institution-building and human potential, as we move beyond an information age towards an era where building capabilities for anti-fragile institutions is key.

Find out more about Indy and his work:

• MeAbout Indy Johar, https://about.me/indy.johar
• Dark Matter Labs and its distributed team: https://darkmatterlabs.org/Team
• Dark Matter Labs collaboration with EIT Climate-KIC on Longtermism and Trees as infrastructure: i. Reorienting mindsets towards long-term thinking and acting: https://darkmatterlabs.org/Longtermism-Reorienm series of Longtermism, https://medium.com/futures-in-long-termism/futures-in-long-termism-95f64710f9b2
• “Letters from Amsterdam” on how Dark Matter Labs are organised: https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/amsterdam-2019-2020-letter-to-our-future-dbd67a035ffe
• Indy Johar, “Good work is the answer…”: https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/there-is-nothing-wrong-with-the-consumer-society-as-an-idea-3c408b17ce

Other Mentions and References:

• John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis — Introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY
• Danny Dorling, Slowdown (2020): The End of the Great Acceleration — and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B086LK5KSL/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Key insights

1. Bureaucratic failures in the Industrial and Information ages have been driven by near-zero transaction costs, where autonomous technological development have taken over human-led managerial processes, leaving existing governance models with no capacity to “govern complexity”. We can spot such a pattern in the autonomous fractional trading algorithms that have substantially prevented shareholders from expressing their thoughtful control on investment choices.

2. We need a new human development thesis and institution-building mechanisms, which depart from the failure we’ve seen in the past decades and which gives us the capabilities to deal with risk, the capabilities to be creative, the capabilities to be emotionally intelligent, the capabilities to be collaborative, the capabilities to learn — we need to move from the Information Age towards a Sense-Making Age, providing reflective spaces for humans to engage in deliberative dialogues.

3. The political landscape is going to see tension between dissent and consent. In our current macroeconomic thesis focussed around a labour market, we have created precariousness that uses dissent as an operating and power-shaping tool. Instead, politics able to create multitudes of conversations can evolve towards building consent as the core operational engine. The latter will allow us to start conceiving models that are unbounded — going beyond in- and out-groups — and could be part of a new macroeconomic thesis around non-competitive, unbounded commoning. Distributed ledgers and various other technologies are opening up a frame of allowing for local global accountability in a radically transparent way, in an unbounded way.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.