 Hi, I'm Terry Mikulski, story-threading again, this time the session with Doug Rashkoff and Christian Mobila, which you can see here in my brain. Christian is one of the organizers of Unfinished. He is also a photographer, founder of the Eidos Foundation, and that's his Twitter account over there, and then Doug, I've actually known for a long time. Doug is a friend, and as you can see, has been really busy in the world. He is a fan of Marshall McLuhan, he teaches at the Institute, at the ITP, at NYU, and he's a so prolific a writer that I have a separate thought for Doug's books. Look, that is a lot of books to have published in one lifetime. In the book, Present Shock, he actually mentions me and my brain, which is a fun self-referential little loop here, and when my wife read the page and a half that he had in his book about me, she learned a lot about me, which I thought was really, really nice. So back to this session with Doug and Christian. They went a lot of places, but they really focused a lot on social media and technologies effects on society, and this whole idea that the tech companies are in an arms race against human consciousness. How do we deal with this? This has something to do with Facebook and all other social media kind of eating our brains, Instagram's effects on young women, other things like that, but there was also this broader conversation about civilization. Civilizations always end. The kids today aren't worse, they're different and there was this interesting piece that I think is a recurring theme also, and this is a recurring theme in kind of many many conversations I'm involved in, which is we seem to be stuck between socialism and capitalism, and we don't know whether either of them works. This basically, I kind of generalize, I've got an active thought in my brain called the only alternatives to capitalism are communism or socialism, and they both failed, which is a false dichotomy or false dilemma. This is basically a way of setting up the questions so that the only viable alternative is capitalism, so we better suck up and stick with capitalism. You may also be aware of the acronym TINA, which is there is no alternative to the neoliberal agenda, made famous by Margaret Thatcher, Thatcherism, Neoliberalism, and a whole bunch of other things like that. So for me, this is a false dichotomy, and when I head into this question, I wind up trying to figure out how are we going to renegotiate the social contract? Where are we heading? And the system is actually quite broken. I think that the current system is not serving us very well, and one of the big questions is how will we actually get some place really functional? So one of the places where I hold this thinking is in what is the next societal stack? And in fact, I have the thought, what are our next two stacks? And here I'm borrowing the notion from software of solution stacks. Some of you have heard of the lamp stack, which means Linux Apache. Here we go, the lamp stack just so you can see it explicitly. This is the Wikipedia page for the lamp stack. The lamp stack is a programming stack that says you have Linux as the operating system, Apache as the web server, MySQL as the database, and then one of the P languages, Perl, Python, PHP as a programming language. And when you see an ad for a full stack developer, they mean somebody who's capable of dealing with all of these different layers, which work nicely together to build all different kinds of websites and web services. OK, so if you'll forgive the technology metaphor, I'm trying to figure out, I think that the social contract is up for involuntary renegotiation right now. Occupy the Gilesh John, the Arab Spring, Kasserolassos in South America, Trump, the Trump apocalypse. All these things for me are evidence that the social contract is being renegotiated because people are fed up. They see a worse future for their kids than for themselves. And so at the social level, our current contract in the West is voting and democracy, which is becoming illiberal democracy. In fact, I can go to today's stacks. I can go to today's societal stack and I've connected to all these things. So neoclassical economics, free markets, neoliberalism, the Washington consensus. I've got a whole thought, the conservative capitalist point of view that says that scarcity is value. Possessive individualism works great. Tax cuts create jobs and sort of trying to get people to the American dream, which has kind of turned out to be a destructive kind of model for how to work. So one of my active questions is what is the next societal stack? Where are we going? And there's lots of interesting territory here. There are new forms of governance. People are working with cryptocurrencies. We are all over the place with theories and ideas and experiments about what the next societal stack is. And then under that, metaphorically, I'm also asking what is the next organizational stack? Because the old corporation and nonprofit world is melting as well. For starters, C corporations in the US are fully for-profit corporations. There's a lot of inroads being made by B corporations or for-benefit corporations. A whole series of alternative corporate ownership. I list here more exotic forms of organization, including a whole variety of different co-op models. But a friend of mine is building something he calls fair shares commons. There are lots and lots of experiments here. But I think we're moving into a new world where we're going to 50 years from now, maybe less, we're going to have these two new stacks that may have bled into each other. They may not be separate. Nation states that are sort of the societal stack may blend into the crypto economy, and we may have something less than that. Anyway, this is a long digression, but it's a really juicy topic for me. It's a place where I've done a lot of thinking. I'm not an expert. I'm just an amateur on all these things. I'm kind of a dilettante who has this tool that he can store things in that he can store articles in. So here's an article called The Mutualist Economy and New Deal for Ownership. And this is a link to the article. And it was written by Yoko Fagan and Nils Gilman. Nils Gilman is doing a lot of really interesting work in these territories. So let's go to him. He used to work at Monitor and GBN. He's a fan of deviant globalization. He's a historian. You see what I'm doing here. So now let's go back to. I have to backtrack a little bit here. Here is a link back to our conversation with Doug and Christian. So they also talked about how we're afraid to have conflict. And there are a whole bunch of things that I can I can go into there, which I'll sort of wave a hand toward because I think this story thread piece has gone long enough for right now. But for instance, political correctness, the battle against political correctness and wokeness, people's reticence to have arguments, people's excitement to have arguments and the fact that a bunch of parties in the world have figured out that if you scream and shout, you get attention, if nothing else. There's a whole bunch of really interesting things around that. Finally, at the very beginning of the session, I think it's Doug who quotes Osho saying, if you do sex right, you only needed to do it once a year, which I'm not sure sounds like wisdom, but I think it was said tongue in cheek. Again, Jerry McCall's your story threading for Unfinished, really excited about where the sessions are going. And I think you'll start to see more and more that Emma and I are going to weave the different stories into each other. So look for that as we go forward.