The Web vs. The State

The current crisis is more about the state than about the financial system and the web has the potential to became the infrastructure, the foundation for the upcoming systems replacing state and capitalism.

The Mastermind

He managed somehow to stay unknown for English readers however it is one of Germany’s brightest minds. He was consulting for the biggest companies of the world from Mitsubishi to Coca Cola, as an academician he was the leader of the Trend Research Institute of Germany (Institut for Trendforchung). Yes he is Gerd Gerken

I could list a nice bio for Gerken, unbelievable and unseen before, but the most important is that all of his metatrend predictions done in 1990 for today are simply true. I was reading his book

Trends for the year 2000

printed in 1990 (ISBN 963 05 6446 7) and it was like reading today the Wall Street Journal or Newsweek or the Guardian for politics and Hacker News for web development.

His book is about the metatrends ruling the business world in the information age, explaining what really ecologism means, how it will become the foundation for the information economy, about the new media and marketing as we know today, and more.

The book is so amazing you feel like in a time warp: you read today about an extraordinary company doing something revolutionary using a nice trick — and you find the same trick as a trend in Gerken’s book written 20 years ago, but more founded and put in a global context.

The Case

The most important idea I’ve got from his book was the very foundation of capitalism: almost everything produced costs more resources than the value of the created product.

Just think about a bottle of a mineral water: the original resource is the water, which has almost no value; then it comes the bottle, the packaging, the production & marketing costs which are consuming more and more resources … and finally, if we look at the bottle sitting in the kitchen table we see lots of resources exhausted for such a simple thing.

Or in other words the capitalism is built on a mechanism which consumes more than it produces exhausting the available resources. It’s balance is always negative regarding the input for creating something vs. the value created.

The Modern State

You don’t have to be a Chomsky to see the modern state, the democracy is the religion and the canon for capitalism, the tool assuring the expansion of the markets and the capital. Filtering through Gerken’s lenses the modern state is in the same way lavish and wasteful like capitalism.

The crisis of today is not just about the financial system but about the concept of the modern state, about how we are living, producing and consuming. If you go out and buy some food in a mall the litter bin will be fuller than your fridge.

The Web As The Modern State

I think and hope the web will be the new state.

You’ll be more netizen like citizen, you’ll donate more for what you think worth it than paying taxes, you’ll vote on what affects you directly than on politicians who you don’t know and who don’t care about you.

Once you’ll take control over your spending there will be no more politics spending on your behalf, there will be no advertising increasing the prices of the products you buy, you won’t help the brands anymore and the media will be you not politics and wasteful economics.

The Web vs. The State

Article meta

People

Donald Knuth

John Horton Conway

Stanislaw Lem

Bertrand Russell

John C Lilly

Gerd Gerken

Valentin F Turchin

Paul Virilio

Craig J Venter

Adam Curtis

Bela Hamvas

Steve Yegge

Arthur Rimbaud

Hasan Elahi

John Dos Passos

Dostoevsky

Albert Laszlo Barabasi

Julian Assange

Stephen Hawking

Lyudmila Ulitskaya

Nikita Mikhalkov

Dimitri Verhults

Alexander Brody

Samuel Butler

Aleksandr Kuprin

Jorge Luis Borges

Charles Bukowski