Happy Friday Everyone 👋🏽

Welcome to another issue of Growth Imperatives, a curation of ideas I send every other week that asks how we can imagine the world differently.

This week, I wanted to share some articles about models—of thriving, of creating, of socializing. Models, be they economic or LLMs, affect how we see reality and the actions we take, so noticing and, if necessary, changing how they work can be a significant leverage point for creating the world we want.

In this issue

🕸️ Pluralistic Wealth
🤳🏽 Reference of a Reference
🐑 Social Plantations

🕸️ Pluralistic Wealth

Although this article discusses wealth-building models, I see in the design industry parallels with many of the issues the author describes: hero narratives, high competition, and hierarchies. Could a more pluralistic vision of ownership, like the one outlined in this article, help us shake off the upward accumulation of credit and the hyper-individual focus that are so rampant in our industry?

Our current wealth-building system is based on individualism and therefore elitism. We’re totally focused on this idea of competition, on “beating” the opponents and gaining leverage against others to “win”. Those who outrun their competitors “lead” the race and therefore become the “leaders”. Society envies those who “made it”, who, through gaining competitive advantage, made a fortune and can now enjoy status, power, and independence points that seem almost unreachable for the ordinary person who feels stuck in the daily rat race. ...

“The dominant narrative around leadership in many areas of the world centers individualism over solidarity. It suggests that there is one kind of leadership and that a single person—one who intervenes to solve a problem or envision a bold new reality—embodies it. This “hero narrative” shows up in all spheres of life—in the lone TV show detective, for example, and in memoirs that credit Apple’s success primarily to Steve Jobs’ vision and relentless drive. It’s in remembrances of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s work, which often leave out the stories of the people and activists who guided him and who took their own risks and actions toward greater justice. ...

In contrast, a wealth-building system based on community and therefore pluralism would look quite different: First of all, such a system would be designed to strengthen characteristics of cooperation, solidarity, justice and togetherness (or interdependence) as opposed to competition and “getting ahead”. And those who help the marginalized and cultivate a community spirit aren’t really becoming “leaders” but rather guardians or caretakers. ...

“Community Wealth Building (CWB) is an economic development model that transforms local economies based on communities having direct ownership and control of their assets. It challenges the failing economic development approaches […] and addresses wealth inequality at its core. It is a method for making local economies more just, equal, and socially and ecologically sustainable.” ...

What if, in addition to shifting from an “individual economy” to a “community economy”, we also reframed our definition of “community”? What if community included not only humans but also nature (or other ecological systems)? Because, let’s be real, what is a community without its forest, water, soil, plants, animals, mountains, etc.?

Read Community Economies: Reframing Wealth Building by Thomas Klaffke

🤳🏽 Reference of a Reference

Douglas Rushkoff breaks down the danger in thinking we'll recreate reality 1:1 in the digital realm. In truth, it'll always be a reference, not an original. But because of the large data sets involved, he explains why the best benefit of AI might be spotting the truth when we believe social constructions more than what's in front of our eyes.

[T]hese models can yield terrific answers, new ways of framing and seeing and understanding systems, of farming, or running societies…but they’re still abstracted and disconnected from reality. They can model a metropolis with a complexity closer to Sim City than a board game like Monopoly. But they’re still just models.

And we keep forgetting this. Every time computers move up a notch, or do something seemingly more complex, we begin to think “this time it really is going to do it.” The web seemed as complex as reality until the dotcom boom reminded us it was just a series of business plans. Then web 2.0 and social media were supposed to do it. Then ultra-fast trading, derivatives, and algorithms. Then it was the blockchain that would finally be able to record and instrumentalize every single aspect of reality. 

Today, it’s Artificial Intelligence. These Large Language Models. These are compositional techniques for rhetoric, yet many people think we’re creating life itself. We are not. We are really just creating another layer of abstraction: a way of mining all the rhetoric we’ve put out there and then synthesizing it into forms that simulate language without using any knowledge or thought. Real thinking is to an AI like waves are to a lattidue line. ...

The truly killer app for AI’s in our current civilization may be to serve as digital narcs. They can inform on each other, revealing when something supposedly real is just one of their fellow AI’s creations. But more importantly, they can help remind us when something is just a map, a model, a social construction rather than a given circumstance of nature. That’s the first big obstacle I’ve been harping about for the past year two - the thing standing in the way of our reaching coherence or functioning as a society. We are walking around mistaking too many things and institutions as given circumstances or conditions of nature that are really just social constructions. From the money in our pockets to the fact that we need a car to get to work or that we need to be employed at all or that we need to pay rent to some landlord in order to be allowed to sleep in an apartment.

When we’re born into such a world, of course we accept such conventions at face value. It’s how things are. But the trick to moving beyond them is to alienate ourselves from them, and recognize their inventedness so we can “program” them differently.

Read The Model Isn't the Territory, Either by Douglas Rushkoff

🐑 Social Plantations

The authors here make a great case for restoring the complexity that the internet has lost over the past couple of decades, comparing major platforms to plantations rather than ecosystems. Hyper-efficiency—such as having billions of people on the same website—can create bottlenecks for technical failure and cultural diversity alike. What would our experience of the internet be like if the model it referenced were a field of wildflowers rather than a manicured lawn?

In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state, they were simply a source of timber.

So-called “scientific forestry,” was that century’s growth hacking: it made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. ...

It was a disaster so bad that a new word, Waldsterben, or “forest death,” was minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare they were all but dead. The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered. ...

When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” ...

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within. ...

Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?

Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists know something just as important, too; how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it. ...

[O]ur internet took off because it was designed as a general-purpose network, built to connect anyone. Our internet was built to be complex and unbiddable, to do things we cannot yet imagine. When we interviewed Clark for rewilding project, he told us that “‘complex’ implies a system in which you have emergent behavior, a system in which you can’t model the outcomes. Your intuitions may be wrong. But a system that’s too simple means lost opportunities.” Or, as Daigle wrote in that 2019 policy brief, “simplicity is not always the best outcome.” Everything worthwhile we collectively make is complex or, honestly, messy. The cracks are where new people and ideas get in.

Read We Need To Rewild The Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading.

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