Thanks. Skimming the book again, I get back to my usual foci of system boundaries, system environments, and transition pathways between system state A and system state B. In this case, the top of mind question then becomes, in which systemic container does the ESP design discussion make the most sense?
My first observation on this is that considerable matter/energy remains tied up in the interlocking systems of Capital-Nation-State as described by Kojin Karatani. However, there are entropic limits to that âBorromean Knotâ (Karataniâs term) as pointed out by Peter Pogany, Nate Hagens, and many others. Pogany, in particular noted the global political-economic system is prone to periodic entropic breakdown and rearrangements. Retrospectively, for Pogany those breakdown phases were French Revolution-Napoleon and WWI-WWII. Pogany passed in 2014, but its hard not to see him as prescient about the implications of MAGA for current global disorder. In Poganyâs terms, thatâs clearly a global phase transition (Pogany: âchaotic transitionâ) to whatever comes next. To me, ESP architecting makes sense as a design study for what might come next. (After various combatants spend enough billions of dollars on munitions deconstructing current global infrastructure and exhaust themselves). In US terms, Iâm working on post-Trumpian reconstruction. Of course, serious implementations at scale will need to wait for current political storms to break. By analogy, the Bretton Woods conference took place in 1944, but implementation could not proceed till after 1945.
OK, so after the Persian Gulf is well and truly wrecked, after NATO is fully dismantled, and after Europe embraces German rearmament as a good thing, what sort of world might emerge next? Probably multi-polar. To call MAGA the kernel of new world âsystemâ is a horrible parody on the very notion of âsystemâ. The global brain needs to be more than the contents of one quasi-dictatorial head. My best guess is the global brain will involve a distributed network of regional political-economic power centers. Karatani (based on Kant) as well as Pogany and others theorize about what that might look like.
There is currently a pragmatic global discussion about currency of account. I seriously doubt any given nation-state, not the US, not China, not any others, is going to have free reign to issue fiat money that the world in general takes seriously. Right now we are in a breakdown phase for the post-WWII dollar regime, but the next thing is not really here yet, so hedge with gold, yuan, yen, bitcoin, whatever. Certainly, no sane nation would limit itself to US dollar mechanisms for settlement of account. The design of a future, multi-polar, transnational settlement of account is what is seriously on the table.
What Pogany points out very clearly is that world-systems, when they coalesce, need bio-energetic foundations. Bretton Woods was built on petrol, just as the 19th century British Empire ran on coal. Whatever ESP might become, we need to attend to what will fuel the real economy it means to represent. Here is where I think environment stops being external to economics. âValueâ is going to need to reflect environmental inputs. Thatâs a big discussion - bigger than just this post - but I wanted to at least set the stage for my future contributions. Definition of liquidity, credit, tokens, ledgers, etc. will need some kind of matter/energy dimension to be more than just a crypto-supported update to current systems like QuickBooks.
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